Understanding violent crime: expert Q&A
Dylann Roof, 21, has been charged with nine counts of murder in this week’s mass shooting in Charleston, SC. Roof is accused of opening fire after he attended a prayer meeting at a historic African-American church Wednesday night. WebMD talked to several experts about how to make sense of the tragedy and what motivates violent behavior.
Jamie Howard, PhD, is a clinical psychologist who studies trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder at the Child Mind Institute in New York City.
John Dovidio, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Yale University. He specializes in social psychology, helping behavior, prejudice and discrimination, non-verbal communication, racism and stereotyping.
Q. What causes somebody to snap like this?
Howard: We don’t know that he snapped. This could have been planned for quite some time. He sat there for an hour with them (before opening fire), so it’s unclear that he snapped or if it was a purposeful action based on this belief system that he had.
Dovidio: People develop inclinations over time, and then specific events — it could be stress in somebody’s life or something that makes people feel threatened — then sort of release negative feelings that people have developed over the years.
Q. What typically leads up to an event like this?
Dovidio: It’s like a dam breaking. A lot of things build up, pressure builds up. You can’t predict it exactly. People who feel they’ve lost control in their life have a basic need to reassert control, and violence is one ultimate way of exerting control over other people. A number of things can allow the dam to break, and once the dam breaks a little bit, it’s a very powerful, violent and destructive result.
Q. How can we understand this type of violence?
Dovidio: Here’s a person who basically planned what he was going to do. In some ways it was impulsive, but it wasn’t impulsive. He specifically picked a target that would be of high symbolic value. He specifically spent time with people before the attack. He clearly thought about ways of getting away. In a lot of hate groups, they present the target group as being less than human. So I think that this was a person that had many things leading up to this that would help him select this as a target group, to at least get respect from the people that he wanted respect from.
Q. Based on what you’ve heard so far about the shooting, what do you make of the psychological state of the 21-year-old accused shooter, Dylann Roof?
Howard: Our actions stem directly from our thoughts and feelings. He clearly had some delusional thoughts. He was (reportedly) saying things like ‘You are raping our women and taking over the country,’ which is not reality based. That’s a delusional thought that caused him to feel a great deal of anger and hatred, and his actions stem from those delusional beliefs and the corresponding hatred that goes with that.
Dovidio: A lot of the negative feeling and beliefs that people have going into it dehumanize members of the other groups. And thinking about others as humans tends to inhibit us from acting on any kind of negative impulse. So what’s really distinctive in this case is the idea that he sat down with these people and interacted with these people. Usually that interaction helps you understand the humanity. And in this case, it was almost more sadistic in terms of rehearsing what he was going to do, rather than having the typical case of inhibiting violent behavior.
I would anticipate that he had intentions of doing it going into it and that he was in fact using that time with them to sort of build up the confidence, the antipathy, the anger, the disgust that would allow him to go ahead with such an action.
Q. Can racism turn to violence? How does that work?
Dovidio: People who are racist in a way that they see a group as less than human and develop strong negative feelings of contempt towards the group basically are predisposed to do something bad. It’s those feelings and those beliefs that really provide the foundation for negative action. And typically in daily life, there are a lot of things that inhibit that.
We have a lot of feelings that we never act on. We have a whole bunch of constraints. Some of them are internal or we believe we want to do the right thing, and some of them are external or we believe if we do the wrong thing, we’ll be punished. But if in fact you convince yourself that a group deserves negative treatment and that that’s the right thing to do, you lose those individual inhibitions.
Q. How do we help ourselves heal after events like this?
Dovidio: I think one of the most threatening things is when bad things happen in a way that seems random because that’s kind of one of the things that terrorizes people. Coming to understand why this happened is probably one of the most therapeutic things that we all can do. To understand what can make somebody do this, to understand what are the forces that shape evil around us. Understanding doesn’t mean we can control something, but it gives us the illusion that we might be able to do something in the future that would prevent these things from happening. I think the most important thing for people generally is to get as much information (as they can) to understand why something like this could happen.
Another thing is the idea of sharing a loss and sharing a tragedy together — people of all backgrounds. That’s a way of beginning to bring the groups together. Clearly one of his goals was to bring blacks and whites apart.
Non-action would be seen as allowing something like this to happen, so I think it’s important that people make very active and visible attempts as connecting with the community. When we share that loss, we empathize with one another, and come together to support one another visibly.
Q. How do we explain things like this to our kids? Should we try to explain it?
Howard: We definitely should. We’re inundated with it right now … It’s all over the news. They’re going to see it.
We want parents and trusted adults like teachers to be able to talk about this with kids and we want to explain the information in developmentally appropriate terms. Some of that’s common sense. Some of that is knowing your audience.
Young children don’t really understand permanence, right? They don’t really understand that death is forever. For them, you want to say something very simple like: “He believed something that was wrong. He did something that was bad and he broke the law and he needs to be punished for that.”
For teenagers and kids who are capable of more abstract reasoning, you can talk about how it is that someone came to have such a delusional belief system, how it is that someone came to have hatred for a group of people in such a profoundly unwarranted and hateful way and how can we prevent people from having thoughts and feelings towards groups of people. It opens up a conversation for teenagers who are capable of this kind of thing to talk about racism and responsibility and grief.
Q. Is there a way to prevent events like this from happening?
Dovidio: In situations like this, there’s an intergroup fissure between blacks and whites. So the only way you can overcome that is for the communities and individuals to show the kind of support, outrage and empathy that won’t allow an event like this to achieve its goal.
Racism is a problem that we all have to face. It becomes important for people to admit that this was a bad event. Be reassuring about the future and about people in general, but also empower children to make connections to express themselves and show support, and in the future, to learn from something like this. – Web MD