A Disturbed Child, an Irritating Victim, a Weapon: Deadly Mix

In one classic study of 26 killings by children, each case was found to contain four necessary elements: a disturbed, impulsive child; a victim who serves as an irritant; absence of a supervisory person who could have intervened, and a lethal weapon at hand.

All four were in place on the March day when Detective Sgt. Fred Foan was summoned to a well-to-do neighborhood near Creve Coeur, Mo., to investigate the fatal shooting of a 10-year-old boy.

There was no mystery about the culprit--an 11-year-old girl who had called the police and reported that when the young neighbor with whom she had been playing balked at her order to leave her yard, she had taken a pistol from her parents’ bedroom, aimed and fired.

‘Personality Change’

According to Foan, the girl “had sort of a personality change. She went inside and came out with a handgun. She knew full well it was a real gun. I’m sure the victim thought it was a play gun, but she knew it wasn’t.”

Foan said the girl “stood a short distance from him, probably six to eight feet, so close you can hardly miss. She grabbed the gun with a two-hand hold, then pulled the trigger.”

“Other than her first spontaneous statement to the first officer on the scene, we couldn’t talk to her. You have to treat juveniles differently, which is very hard to deal with. You can only question them with a parent and a juvenile officer present.”

In this case, he said, the girl’s father would not allow her to talk to police, and she was taken to the juvenile detention center. Foan canvassed the neighborhood, piecing together a picture of “a tomboyish, very aggressive, totally undisciplined kid,” he said.

Behavior Problems

“The day before, she had been banned from the little boy’s house for unladylike behavior. She was a big girl for her age and apparently she beat the hell out of him the day before. She also had behavior problems in school.”

At the time of the shooting, Foan said, the girl’s mother was in the hospital for surgery and her father was at work. “The father was not in charge of the family. There was a bad atmosphere--he was not in control.”

During the two hours Foan spent in their house, “she ran into her room, closed the door and had a tantrum.”

The child’s parents were “good people but not good parents,” Foan said. “Her mother did all kinds of volunteer work, but she was never around.”

Predictors of Behavior

Parental attitudes and child-rearing practices may be one of the more reliable predictors of seriously aggressive behavior in children.

Daniel Scheinfeld of Chicago’s Institute for Juvenile Research studied parenting practices of mothers whose children emerged from urban ghettos to become high achievers, despite disadvantaged beginnings.

These mothers emphasized “cooperation, consideration and sharing responsibilities” in rearing their children, Scheinfeld found. Mothers of low achievers, on the other hand, stressed “controlling the child’s behavior.”

Rather than preparing their youngsters to face life’s challenges, Scheinfeld discovered, the unsuccessful set of mothers concentrated on trying to keep their children out of trouble. In the process, they often undermined their children’s confidence.

Correlation Found

Researchers have found a correlation between social disadvantage and poor parenting skills, according to Elliott Currie, a former Yale University criminologist, because “it is virtually a truism that parents’ repertoires of child-rearing techniques tend to narrow as you go down the income scale.”

That is because “parents trapped in jobs that require rote conformity and discourage initiative” are far less apt to encourage independence and initiative in their children, he explains.

If some adults are more skillful parents than others, it is also true that some children are harder to rear than others.

In cases of child abuse, for example, it is rare for all children in a family to be mistreated. One child usually is singled out, researchers have found. Sometimes the same child, given several sets of foster parents, continues to be abused by all of them.

Behavior Patterns

“Clearly a child who is selectively and repeatedly abused in relatively independent settings must show particular characteristics or behavior patterns that make him or her a likely target for abuse,” said Ronald Slaby, an associate professor of education at Harvard University.

“As the abuse continues, the child’s tendency to exhibit problem behaviors may increase, thereby attracting further abuse and perpetuating an escalating cycle of problem behavior and abusive treatment.”

Gerald Patterson, research director of the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene, an expert on childhood aggression, has identified such patterns of behavior, patterns that lead not only to disruptions within families but also to rejection by parents and other children, failure in school and low self-esteem that tend to keep children trapped in these cycles.

Three-Step Process

Patterson describes a three-step process--”attack-counterattack-positive outcome”--that can occur in such families hundreds of times a day. It begins with the child refusing to comply with the parents’ wishes. The parent backs down, thereby rewarding the child and reinforcing the pattern.

When it comes to discipline, Patterson said, parents of problem children threaten, nag, scold, bluster and natter, but they seldom follow through on their threats. In thwarting their parents, the children hone their skills of coercion. Their tantrums, whining and yelling become a “substitute social skill.”

Over time, Patterson said, “such children also show a regular progression from learning to be non-compliant to learning to be physically assaultive. As other family members acquire these same skills, coercive chains become longer.”

Non-compliance--the inability to follow basic social rules--”is thought to be the first step in a progression leading to extreme forms of antisocial behavior,” Patterson said.

Intensifies in School

The pattern intensifies when the children enter school. Having never been taught to follow their parents’ rules, the youngsters find it equally hard to comply with rules of the classroom. Teachers are unable to teach them much.

They also fail to learn the critical lessons that normal children learn from friendships with other children--empathy, reciprocity and cooperation. The self-esteem that depends upon benign parental involvement fails to develop.

“People living in these families are aggressive, angry people. The parents are turned off, the peers are turned off and the child has a poor self-image as well,” Patterson said.

“Perhaps it is curious that a process with such a myriad of effects and outcomes can be initiated by something as ordinary as the level of the parents’ family-management skills. That, however, is what . . . these studies indicate.

Inherently Banal

“What is being mismanaged is something as inherently banal as family coercive exchanges. What leads to things getting out of hand may be a relatively simple affair, whereas the process itself, once initiated, may be the stuff of which novels are made.”

In the case of the 11-year-old Missouri girl who shot her neighbor, police ultimately charged her with homicide. “There were a lot of eyebrows raised over that,” Foan said. “But it wasn’t a case of a kid saying, ‘Gee, it was a real gun. I didn’t know that.’ There wasn’t much sympathy for her.”

But, he adds, “nothing will happen to her. They put her and her family in counseling. The only thing they can do is to keep her in their jurisdiction until she turns 21. I would like to think she will be under juvenile control up to that age.”

“But they will keep it a secret. We don’t know what’s happening.”

On a Little Island

Foan believes that “the system is overprotective of these kids. I think of juveniles as being on a little island, in a little castle with a moat around it. And the kid inside is saying, ‘I’ve got my own little rules. Don’t deal with me.’ ”

Most states have a minimum age, usually around 7, at which children can be held criminally responsible. Below that age, a child’s mental maturity is considered insufficient to aid in a legal defense.

But, said one prosecutor, the minimum age is unhelpful to attorneys grappling with the question, “Do we have kids who are just small criminals? Or are they children?”

In Massachusetts’ Middlesex County, the question falls to Jane Tewksbury, who heads the juvenile justice unit of the district attorney’s office.

‘This Is the Law’

“I’m a prosecutor,” she said. “My approach is going to be fairly objective: This is the law, this kid broke it, we’re going to prosecute the case, adjudicate the delinquent, and then let’s decide what to do with him.”

The more serious the case, “the more likely as a prosecutor I will be to recommend they be punished.”

“I think my vote is that the Legislature has determined in its wisdom who are kids and who are not. Even if they’re locked up for the public safety, it should not be in a little prison. In little prisons, people sit in cells and don’t get any services. I can’t see much sense in taking a 12-year-old kid who has stabbed somebody and throwing him in a cell. He’s sure not going to come out any better at 18.”

In Massachusetts, a state with a model system of sorts, there are only about 140 long-term beds for juveniles, and an equal number of short-term beds for youthful offenders being held on bail.

Counseling, Recreation

“None are locked up in any facility that can accommodate more than 18 kids. By and large, these locked facilities are very small, staff-intensive places. In the long-term ones, kids go to school, have group, individual and family counseling, recreation. All the things they would get on the outside. Maybe when he gets out, at 14, 16 or 18, somebody will have reached him.”

The majority of juvenile offenders are placed in residential institutions, group homes or foster homes. Others are sent back to their own homes under some form of probation.

Tewksbury said that in cases involving youths 14 and older, prosecutors can ask that they be transferred to adult court. “The judge makes the final decision, but we exercise that power cautiously,” she said.

Danger to Society

Essex County, Mass., Dist. Atty. Kevin Burke said young offenders must be weighed against the danger posed to society. Exceptional cases involving very young, disturbed children “tend to be treated with a lot of care and concern,” Burke said. “It’s the kid who is constantly in trouble, who gets lost and not treated, the status offender--those are more of a problem.”

No prosecutor, he said, relishes the idea of a long prison term for a youngster, even though the verdict is deserved.

The questions are tougher in states that lack amply staffed programs for juvenile offenders, where more children wind up in adult jails.

“Frequently, each one of these cases becomes a situation in which people fly by the seat of their pants,” said Dr. Eli Newberger, director of family development study at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Courts Poorly Staffed

“We need to educate the professional community and the public in the subject of childhood aggression. One problem is that the courts are chronically underfunded and poorly staffed. They don’t have the wherewithal to address the needs of these children and their families. They have never been given the resources they need to tend sufficiently well to these problems.”

Newberger sees a growing national trend to condone punishment of children, which has made the task tougher.

The trend to criminalize childhood offenses stems from a variety of social ills, in Newberger’s view. Often, he said, it is “the most politically viable response to shortened resources available for mental health consultation and treatment.”

Newberger said the answer rests partly with improving adults’ understanding of normal childhood development. “There are only a very few people in law enforcement who are so naive as to regard young children as criminals.”

Full Evaluations

Newberger advocates full medical and psychological evaluations for all children alleged to have committed violent offenses “to document neurological disturbance, hyperactivity, deep and emotional reasons for aggression, their relationships to their families and other peer and institutional connections.”

Many psychological evaluations performed on juvenile offenders, when they are done at all, are woefully inadequate, said Elissa Benedek, director of research and training at the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ann Arbor, Mich. The center, an agency of the Michigan Department of Mental Health, evaluates patients from throughout the state to assess the role mental illness plays in criminal behavior.

It is the only center of its kind in the nation.

Benedek said numerous interviews--never just one--should be conducted. “The first couple of interviews should be used for developing rapport. These children are very frightened. There’s been a loss of control. They’ve been put in an adult jail or a juvenile facility, either of which can be very scary.

Immature Notions

“A lot of kids think that if they keep quiet, nothing is going to happen. They have very immature notions of the criminal justice system,” she said.

“The exam has to be done over time. You can’t just see them for an hour. And in many cases, the psychologists who are available to do it may not be child psychologists. They may not have any kind of training in the legal system. You need all those things--and that’s a rare bird.”

Ideally, said Patterson, antisocial children should be placed in halfway houses where they can be closely supervised while continuing to go to school. Meanwhile, clinicians can train his parents or foster parents on ways of coping with his behavior, while enabling the child to remain in the community.

“Unfortunately,” he added, “there have been no well-controlled studies to tell me how well that would work. But I do know that it couldn’t be worse than the results of follow-up studies on the effects of institutionalization--and it would be less expensive.”

No Program in Florida

Florida “has no publicly run residential program for children,” said Steve Levine, chief of the juvenile division in the Dade County Public Defender’s Office in Miami and a member of the American Bar Assn.’s Juvenile Justice Committee.

“Only the most seriously disturbed--maybe a handful of kids--would qualify for treatment. Those are the kids who probably have no hope. Kids with hope who would benefit from a residential program of psychiatric treatment get absolutely nothing.”

Dade County does have a special fund for meeting the cost of placing children in private facilities. Currently, Levine said, there is a waiting list of 95 youngsters. “Most will turn 18 long before they get anywhere near the treatment they need. When that happens,” he said, “they will no longer qualify.”

Spend Lives in Prison

As a result, Levine said, “Very young kids are spending their lives in prison when clearly a number of things could have been done.

“These are little children, even when you get up in the 15- to 16-year-old range. They are definitely treatable, and it’s a lot cheaper to treat them than to incarcerate them. And unless we’re prepared to incarcerate them for the rest of their lives, they are going to get out one day.

“They are going to come back after time in jail without treatment, and they’ll be a far more serious danger to the community.