1995-05-21: The Roots of Deviant Behavior (audio incomplete)

Vol. III, No. XXV

Transcription:

Steckler (MWC)
Dow Bryant (VPI)
Intro
With Good Reason
Vol. III, No. XXI
The Roots of Deviant Behavior
Does American popular culture promote criminal deviant behavior?
I'm Carolyn Elliott, next on With Good Reason, a look at deviance
from the files of the FBI to computer bulletin boards to talk_
shows.
Background
The Dictionary defines deviance simply as behavior outside the
norm -- social gaffs like eating with the wrong fork or wearing
tennis shoes with a tuxedo would qualify. But the term deviant
tends to evoke more nefarious images of frightening criminals
like doctor Joseph Mengele; whose insidious experiments mutilated
countless Nazi prisoners. Or cult leader Charles Manson whose
ritual murders left chilling images on TV audiences. Or cannibal
Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed young men and then Cannibalized them
later.
The Behavioral Sciences Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA,
is the premiere facility in the U.S. for identifying and catching
violent deviants. Tempy Barbru reports on the resources and man
hours required to evaluate just one narrow aspect of the many
faces of criminal deviant behavior.
~ ~~
Barbru
Kenneth Lanning sits in a government issue steel grey chair, his
desk piled with papers, books, phone messages. The walls of his
office are covered with awards and citations for a distinguished
twenty-five year career as a special agent who deals with an
aspect of human behavior many of us would rather ignore: child
sexual exploitation. Lanning works with the FBI academy at
Quantico in the behavioral sciences unit. He spends much of his
day pouring over family case studies and conducting interviews to
assist in frontline investigations of deviant behavior. Any
sexual behavior directed toward a child that is outside the norm
and against the law would fall under his review.
Lanning
The majority of child molester cases that I see involve what
I call the situational molester. These are individuals
who do not have a true sexual preference for children, but
sexually interact with them based on a variety of
situational dynamics, and they are therefore not what I
would consider to be true pedophiles. The other type, the
smaller category, the true pedophile, or as I call them
preferential child molesters, they seem to be smaller in
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numbers, however their behavior is more persistent and long
term and compulsive and therefore they may, although they're
smaller in number they may in fact molest as many children
as the larger number of situational molesters simply because
these are the individuals who in a lifetime may molest a
hundred, two-hundred, three-hundred children.
Barbru
The four major characteristics of the preferential child
molester, or pedophile, are long term persistent patterns of
behavior. Children as preferred sexual objects, well developed
techniques in obtaining victims, and sexual fantasies focusing on
children. Indicators alone mean little, of course. It is only
through accumulated and constant forms of behavior that patterns
emerge. And Lanning says publicized cases seem to increase the
awareness of deviant behavior. Behavior which is occurring more
frequently within the family structure.
Lanning
Most people who sexually abuse children are family members.
Fathers, step-fathers, grandfathers, uncles, older brothers,
and in some cases mothers, step-mothers, and grandmothers
and so on.
Barbru
That's disturbing, isn't it?
Lanning
Yeah, it's disturbing but I also think, I mean it's all
disturbing, but it's somewhat understandable because what
the family setting does is allow you to have the opportunity
and the access. You have the privacy of the family and
therefore this gives the offender an opportunity to coerce
and manipulate the child for their purposes.
Barbru
Kenneth Lanning is a professional, and his clinical description
of deviant behavior may sound cold and calculating, but it is a
preservation for someone who believes in the dignity of each
human being. Every case stays with him, some more than others.
Then there are those situations that leave haunting memories.
Lanning
One case that probably affected me as much as any case was a
case in which a father was involved in sexually abusing his
six year old daughter and his ten year old son was taking
the pictures of it as they were engaged in sexual activity.
And what was particularly bothersome about it is when you
looked at the pictures, they were slightly out of focus and
the reason they were out of focus is because the little
boy's hands were trembling as he took these pictures.
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Barbru
Lanning's efforts helped provide a profile for the FBI's
frontline investigative jurisdiction in areas of child
pornography and interstate traffic, or moving kids across state
lines for sexual purposes. Crime on a government setting or
Indian reservation and kidnappings. But even within those
categories, Lanning says it's hard to tell whether or not the
numbers of individuals involved in sexually deviant behaviors are
on the rise in this country.
Lanning
I would say that America is probably at the forefront of
admitting that we have this problem. And you know, we kind
of talk about it, we don't like to talk about it but we've
kind of talked about it and admitted it there and we kind of
deal with it. In many other countries this is still an
unspoken kind of taboo that is not openly discussed so it is
hard to know how much of it goes on. I believe that certain
aspects of it, proportionately speaking, have always been
going on, but there may be other aspects of it that may in
fact be increasing due to drugs, stress, unemployment, and
factors like that.
Barbru
Lanning feels that even though the numbers may suggests an
increase in certain levels of behavior, we must as a society
strike a balance between paranoia and denial. He suggests there
are those who live in a naive world, thinking that this sort of
thing is never going to happen. And there are other people who
over react and feel there's a deviant around every corner, that
they can never leave their children alone. Can we curb this kind
of behavior?
Lanning
I don't know if we can totally stop it. I guess the honest
answer, maybe the sad answer is no, we can probably not
totally stop it. I think there are things that we can do to
certainly minimize it. There are things that individuals
can do to minimize the risk that your child will be
victimized, but I suppose if we look at the history of
mankind, since this has probably been always going on for as
long as mankind has been around, it's probably never going
to totally stop.
Barbru
Reporting from Quantico, Virginia for With Good Reason, this is
Ternpy Barbru.
1 t/\J,;ridge
With me in the studio now is Clifton Dow Bryant, founder of The
\\e'{ t Journal of Deviant Behavior. Dr. Bryant is a sociologist at
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Virginia Tech and has studied a range of deviant behaviors from
computer sex to political corruption to sexual harassment. Also,
Dr. Debra Steckler is here. She's a psychology professor at Mary
Washington College, and an expert on media influence on.
Interview
Elliott
Dr. Steckler, is there an age where the deviant behaviors
that we are concerned about, the violence, sexual abuse, -.is
there an age where that behavior first shows up?
Steckler
It depends on who you talk to. Some people say yes, some
people say no. Certainly anti-social tendencies, the tendency to
not consider how your behavior will affect other people seems to
be identifiable in early adolescence. And some people talk about
something called the "homicidal triangle" which is a collection
of three behaviors: arson, cruelty to animals, and bedwetting
which some people think indicates that that person may engage in
violent and homicidal behavior as an adult.
Elliott
What causes.the inclination?
Steckler
To behave in violent ways?
Elliott
To behave in very seriously deviant ways.
Steckler
The kind of environment they grow up in and from that
environment what they see as options for their life. If a person
sees that there are legitimate options, that they can grow up and
get the good life by following the social norms, they're not
going to engage in deviant behavior. But if they don't see those
as possible options, if they think that the only way that they
can get recognition and status and be an important person is to
behave in a deviant way, this is the kind of situation I think
that is going to influence a person to behave in violent and
deviant ways.
Bryant
Some violence such as violence toward children is also
situational. For example, in an earlier time when a young mother
had a child that cried all night because it had colic, you get on
the phone and you call grandmother or mother and say, "Gee, what
to we do with this child, it's crying all night?". And they gave
you advice on how to solve the problem. Today, unless you read
Dr. Spock you don't know what to do. And for those who don't
read Dr. Spock at some point they can't take it anymore so they
then start slapping the child or something to make it calm down
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and maybe this escalates into extreme violence or murder. In
some cases the culture itself provides ways of solving the
problem. So that for example among the Eskimos if they had a
dispute with somebody else, culture permitted them to solve the
problem by going out into the middle of the village and singing
dirty songs at each other. And that's the way they solved their
disputes, they do not resort to violence. If social change comes
along and makes some of these solutions inappropriate, there may
be a lag before the culture comes along with a proper way of _
handling it, and that's where the deviance comes in.
Where you find the least deviance is in folk societies where
there has been very little change, because the old ways work very
well. This is why the Chinese have an old saying, "A curse, may
you live in interesting times", which would be times of change.
We have simply seen a lot of change in this country over the past
fifty years and it is that change that has put us into a
situation where our culture is not in all instances providing the
correct and appropriate way to solve all problems.
Elliott
Well you've answered, I think, what a big question is, is
why can one of the wealthiest and most successful and most
technologically innovative countries have such a high rate of
violence and deviant behaviors.
Steckler
There are so many options that people feel overwhelmed.
Bryant
Kind of a sensory overload sort of a thing.
Elliott
You wrote, Professor Bryant, that deviants are often quick
to take advantage of new technology and we've seen several
incidents of rather disturbing things going on across the
internet computer lines.
Bryant
Crime and violence and deviance is often a function of
opportunity structure. Now we know that almost every
technological advance or device that's come along has helped us
in many ways but the downside is that has also in many cases
provided a means of enhancing the opportunity structure for crime
and deviance. The prostitutes in Vegas today have beepers and so
you can "beep" a prostitute and she'll get the beep and can
immediately go to the room where it is. The computer people are
just now beginning to recognize the opportunity structure that
goes with the computer for various kinds of deviance. Such as,
you can disguise yourself, what do they call it, "gender
bending", so that maybe a person who is forty-five and homosexual
may be able to pass themselves off as a fifteen year old so that
they can get into a conversation with another adolescent
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somewhere and possibly lure them into a personal meeting where
they would then be opportune to try to talk them into some sexual
activity or to otherwise harm them. If you have unusual sexual
inclinations you can probably identify other people through the
computer, through the bulletin boards who share your persuasions
and ...
Elliott
Does that tend to promote the activity, is it providing a
kind of reinforcement to know that there are other people like
you out there and does it make these people think, "Well, I'm not
the only one, so maybe this is okay."?
Steckler
I don't know so much that this sort of behavior on a
computer is going to generalize to actual behavior. I think tAat
the computer lends itself to this sort of deviance or whatever
you want to call it because you are pretty anonymous and you feel
that you can get away with things that you perhaps ordinarily
would not be able to get away with.
Elliott
Well you see bulletin boards on there for advertisements,
for young children, and there were two men in Virginia, arrested
in Chesterfield County, I guess it was maybe in 1988, 1989,
something like that. They were trying to find a twelve year old
boy to molest and kill over the computer lines and they got
caught.
Steckler
Right.
Elliott
But would they have pursued something like that if they
hadn't had this technology to use?
Steckler
Oh yeah, I think so. And I think that those are atypical
cases. I would venture to guess that the majority of people who
get into these groups where they read other people's sexual
fantasies and write out their own are not going to carry those
out. I think what you've described is a very sort of atypical
situation and yeah, these people would have done that regardless.
Elliott
Well you both seem to be indicating that you don't think
that new technology is causing deviant behavior. But for anyone
who watches the talk shows and the topics they cover which
include "kids who kill their parents", various types of sexual
acts, rape, interviews with people who've had relations with
their relatives, this kind of thing. It would certainly appear
that deviant behavior is on the rise in this country. Is that
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true or is it just being better reported?
Steckler
I think that is part of the problem that the media pays so
much attention to this because it does make good news and
captures the interest of the public and people are definitely
interested in hearing about it.
Bryant
Well, maybe the intensity of it is.new and there are
certainly some new and novel dimensions of crime and violence and
deviance today. I think what's happening is that we vicariously
involve ourselves in these kinds of things and say to ourselves
and say "there before the grace of God go I".
Elliott
Well let me ask you, there are some people who feel that
what's going on in the talk shows is actually influencing
behavior, that it's actually causing people to go out and do
things that they wouldn't normally do. And Professor Steckler, I
know that one of your fields of expertise is adolescent behavior.
Is this confusing for a teenager to see all of this stuff that
they've learned is wrong on television, but at the same time
realizing that if they are engaged in that kind of behavior they
might get to be on television?
Steckler
I don't know that you could say it's confusing. I don't
think that the average typical adolescent is going to watch
something like that on a talk show and get the idea from the talk
show to go out and engage in that kind of behavior. There may be
something to what you say about getting attention, and certainly,
like I said, a person who has a tendency to behave in those sorts
of ways to begin with, that might be another good reason for a
person to engage in that sort of behavior.
Elliott
And you actually were involved in a study that indicated
that in order for someone to go to a very gory film, they have
certain personality characteristics in the first place.
Steckler
Right. That's been a question that has been around for a
long time. What happens first, the violent media or the more
aggressive type of personality that seeks out that kind of media.
And that's what we did look at. We looked at a particular aspect
of personality called sensation seeking which just means that a
person is more prone to seek out excitement and adventure. And
it did seem that people who were higher in sensation seeking,
people who were more prone to look for excitement, did prefer
violent films and sexual films.
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Elliott
Is it the same kind of person or are they two different
personalities, the violent and the sexual, are they separate?
Steckler
No, no, same sort of person. Same personality
characteristics. Well, at least that's what we got. It would be
interesting to follow this up and try to get more specific and
see if you could tease out any potential differences between_
people but we didn't get that specific in our study.
Bryant
I tend to agree. I think that for most people watching
these kinds of things that they're not going to be influenced by
the fact that they're watching murders or something of this sort
but for the person who has the predisposition it may be that some
degree of inspiration comes from that. Anybody is capable of
anything. There was an English psychologist by the name of
Havaloc Ellis who one time said, "The seed of atrocity is within
us all". So anybody could, given certain circumstances, do
terrible things.
Elliott
Well we seem to be seeing an increase in violence, at least
in cities. And Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York wrote
a paper recently claiming that in America, we are "defining
deviancy down". In other words, there is so much so called
"deviant behavior" that we as a society have decided to accept
it. He gives us an example, the St. Valentine's day massacre in
the 1920's, there were four gangsters that shot down seven
gangsters and it was a legendary moment, but it happens in cities
all the time.
Bryant
That many people are killed on a regular basis in some
cities.
Elliott
Exactly.
Steckler
I think that, to some extent we are becoming desensitized to
violence. We do hear about it so often, from the news, from the
newspaper, on t.v., in movies that, I don't know that people
accept it as a normal typical thing. But you're right, it's not
so shocking as it was say back in the twenties and thirties and
fifties and so forth.
Bryant
You mentioned the media and things of this sort. I'm old
enough to remember back when the first use of obscenity came
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along in the movies. In a movie called "The Moon is Blue", the
word "virgin" was used and "pregnant" was used. These were words
that prior to that time had never been used in a movie because it
was considered to be almost obscene, certainly objectionable to
people of normal background would be offended by this kind of
thing. Today of course, gee on television, not to mention
movies, we use obscenities with great regularity and think
nothing of it.
Elliott
One thing that has been very controversial is that high
schools are giving condoms to teenagers. And some high schools
in the inner city are actually giving norplant to teenagers. Is
that defining deviancy down?
Steckler
I think with contraception you have the same sort of
situation as with media violence. Making condoms or norplant
available to adolescents is typicly not going to cause them to
run out and have sex if they weren't planning to in the first
place. Adolescents don't seek ...
Elliott
Do studies support that?
Steckler
I'm sure you could find somebody to disagree with me, but
yes, very many studies that I have seen do support that. And
typicly, adolescents don't seek contraception until after they've
been sexually active anyway.
Elliott
Well let's take a step back and take a look at exactly what
deviant behavior is. I think that the deviant behavior that's in
the news is very atrocious deviant behavior, but that's not
really the whole gamut of it, is it?
Bryant
No, the concept in sociology simply refers to the notion of
the violation of some norm. And that could be something like not
exhibiting proper table manners. Eating your peas with your
spoon rather than your fork.
Elliott
So being normal is a learned behavior?
Bryant
Yes. Yes, I would say being, well normal is a value loaded
word. Compliance with the norm is learned. You have to learn
table manners and how to wear clothing and how to, everyday
civility, these are all things that you have to learn. You are
not born with this. There's also the concept that you could call
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the social construction of reality, which means that you can
perceive things in such a way that you construct a distorted view
of reality. So you could just as easily create a situation. In
wartime we talk about taking souvenirs. But the souvenir may
involve the family heirloom of the family from which you're
taking it. And they might not want to let it go. But you might
have to knock them in the head with the rifle butt to get the
cuckoo clock but you came home with the souvenir. So in that
sense you've simply reconstructed so to speak. You have
artificially created your own reality and that which is.
Elliott
And deviant behavior can be positive, I mean I would assume
that Jesus Christ and Ghandi and Martin Luther King would all
have been considered deviants in their time.
Steckler
And high I.Q.'s. Super athletes. Sure.
Bryant
Sure. This is why some females particularly, and males too,
may try to act less able than they are intellectually. A girl
might feel like if she is "too smart" so to speak, then she might
be as popular and the same might be true with a boy who would
say, "Gee, I don't want people to know how smart I am, then they
would think I was a bookworm" or something. So they could
pretend to be less able.
Elliott
I think that was a Mantel Williams show as a matter of fact,
girls who act dumb for their boyfriends. I've got it right here.
Steckler
Still goes on, oh yeah.
Elliott
Women who play dumb for men, yeah. You wrote a book called
Deviant Behavior focused on the workplace.
Bryant
Yes.
Elliott
And some of the behaviors you suggested were literally
stealing pens and stealing paperclips. Either one of you, what
determines how you go from just a minor deviant behavior along
the spectrum to something much larger?
Bryant
The people who steal the paperclips may simply say, "Well
that comes with the job, it comes with the territory. Everybody
is doing it, they expect us to do it". You know, kind of like,
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"They expect us to steal some samples". That's quite different
from somebody coming in and conunitting violence. This would be
an act of considerable frustration. One of my theories has
always been that frustration and violence is the function of the
inability to articulate one's position. In short, if you can't
do it verbally, then you've got to act it out. You know the
British are among the most articulate people, they are not prone
to violence.
Elliott
And you're saying that's because they can communicate
better?
Bryant
The British in their parliament cut each other to ribbons
everyday in their debates. If you can do it verbally, then you
don't need to stab 'em. Do you remember the play, "The Man Who
Came to Dinner"? And there was this very articulate gentleman in
there and he said something to the effect like, "The very fact of
you knowing me has enriched your miserable life far beyond your
feeble capacity to ever repay me". Okay, now the whole play is
made up of this man who just slices everybody else up because
he's so good with words. But the person who is not capable of
doing that, when they reach a point of frustration, then the only
way to deal with it is to act it out.
Elliott
Are there certain work places that lend themselves to that
kind of frustration, that feeling of not being able to
conununicate, not being able to interact and not being able to
deal with difficult or frustrating situations?
Steckler
I think one of the classic examples is the U.S. Post Office.
Very structured, employers always looking over the employees
shoulder. Keeping tabs of their every movement. But you know
getting back just for a minute to the other question, one of the
classic signs that workplace violence is going to occur is
repeated threats. And no one has really picked up on t.hem.
Elliott
The military is very, very structured, certainly in the way
that the post office is. Why don't we see the same kind of
violence in the military, another highly structured situation.
Steckler
I think that the military has, oh there are more
ramifications of deviant behavior, they have, there are worse
consequences. In the post office you're reprimanded, maybe you
get fired, maybe you get demoted.
Bryant
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But it should not be overlooked that in some cases people
who experience great frustration in the military also turn to
violence of the same variety. In Vietnam there were some 500
recorded instances of "fragging". Fragging was where somebody
would throw a fragmentation grenade into the hooch where an
officer or some hated non-com was sleeping and kill them. And in
some cases whole outfits would take up a collection to get rid of
the platoon leader because they didn't like him. And so they'd
say, "Whoever kills him first gets the money".
Steckler
Of course in the military, especially in a wartime
situation, you have a ready scapegoat, the enemy that you can
take a lot of frustration out on, too.
Bryant
I've been re-reading the story about Calley in the My Lai
massacre, and it's patently obvious that these people had reached
a point where they tended to see all Vietnamese as the enemies.
Men, women, children, it didn't make any difference because they
would be taking fire from these peasant villages and they had
lost a lot of their buddies and so forth so when the time came to
go into a village, they really didn't see the difference between
these civilians and the enemy, they were all enemies. This was
their social construction of reality. And they killed them and
then stopped for a lunch break .
. Elliott
Is that what happens to someone like Colin Ferguson on the
railroad train in New York who gunned down six people or killed
six people. The post office worker that goes into the post
office, the person that goes into McDonald's, are they seeing
everyone in that area as an enemy?
Steckler
The person say who walks into a McDonald's, someone who is
not really employed there, I'm not really, I'd have to think
about that a little bit more. But certainly a person who walks
into their place of employment or their former place of
employment is viewing the situation in an "us/them" sort of
perspective. You know, me against them.
Bryant
The thing you've got to remember about deviant behavior and
crime, the vast majority of people, of ordinary people, live
ordinary lives and they don't do terrible things. I think we
should not let ourselves become unduly concerned about the end of
civilization as we know it. As the French have a way of saying,
things are hopeless, but not serious.
Elliott
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Debra Steckler of Mary Washington College, Clifton Bryant
from Virginia Tech, thank you so much for joining me on With Good
Reason.
Steckler
Thank you.
Bryant
Thank you.
Otrl'R.0
This is With Good Reason.
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