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The psychology of extreme violence, genocide and
massacre
Promotional Memo : Available 2007 from
Praeger Press: New York By Don Dutton
“ As long as one believes that the evil man wears horns, one will not discover an evil man”. – Eric Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, p. 574.
In The psychology of extreme violence, genocide and massacre, forensic psychologist Donald Dutton uses a new approach to understanding violent behavior. He uses the intellectual tools of forensic psychology applied to historical war records as “forensic case materials” to generate insights into a perpetrator’s motivation from his pattern of actions. He uses this perspective, which he calls forensic ethology, to understand war and mob violence from the perspective of the individual soldier. The results are astounding: church goers in a Georgia lynch mob were more violent than prisoners in any prison riot from US history. Pol Pot declares anyone wearing glasses or with an education of grade seven or up as “an enemy of the people”, and condemns them to extermination. Soldiers rape and mutilate victims in ways that would be ascribed to a deranged sexual psychopath in civilian settings.
Mankind in general is the most violent and sadistic animal on the planet. Human violence and cruelty far exceed that of any other animal. Sadistic behavior is witnessed only in our closest relative, the chimpanzee, with whom we share a highly developed nervous system. Men describe their own violence defensively and project it onto others: extreme violence is described as “animalistic” or attributed to “barbarians”. In fact the barbarism of “civilized men” in Rome or Nazi Germany far exceeded the violence of animals any time, anywhere. As American settlers moved West, they routinely tortured wolves to death but we are fond of saying homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man); in fact, man was a man to wolves (homo lupini homo est) -- far more vicious than any wolf. .What does this tell us about the origins of violence in mankind? One of the key observations of the book is that mankind has to acknowledge its own violence potential before we can begin to correct it. We have to acknowledge our own viciousness.
Dutton also examines military rape from this forensic perspective and concludes that sociobiological theories of conquerors’ “spreading their genetic contribution to the conquered tribe” are contradicted by the generic targets of rape (any and all women for the invading Russian army in Germany in 1945), the form of rape (ranging from indiscriminant to selective under different circumstances) and the tendency of many soldiers who rape to kill their victims afterwards (as during the rape of Chinese women in Nanking by the Japanese army).
Religious and political ideology has been the main impetus for social violence over the last millennium beginning with St. Augustine’s sophistry allowing Crusaders to believe in the “Holy War” - that they were killing for Christ and would still go to Heaven. Dutton examines the seeming paradoxes of suicide bombings and kamikaze flights, concluding that the strongest motive in the human organism is the religiously-influenced belief that one will re-unite with loved ones in perpetuity. From the Crusades to Islamic suicide bombers, it is belief in “attachment in perpetuity” that drives the violence; the symbolic belief in perpetual contact with loved ones after we have “shuffled off this mortal coil”.
By applying forensic analysis to extreme violence, Dutton generates new perspectives on the causes of violence and the human condition itself. He argues that the “group mind” observed in mob psychology may have a neurological basis in an inherited brain-behavior system that once had survival value to hunters - the Pain- Blood-Death complex represented our acquired associations of another’s pain and blood with our own survival. Any “toxic situation” (violent and life-threatening intergroup conflict) can unleash this complex and produce extreme violence in persons with a non-violent history. Historical accounts show that the majority of soldiers act violently in toxic situations - to the point of savagely killing other men, brutally raping women and disemboweling infants and children. The enemy is portrayed as a virus that will spread unless all are exterminated.
This view of the enemy as toxin drives genocides and massacres. Typically, only a small group of soldiers resists becoming involved in the perpetration. There seem to be individual differences in the rapidity with which humans overcome their initial aversion to killing, but the vast majority of us are capable of committing horrific violence under the right circumstances.
Students of aggression and professionals with an interest in violence will get a fresh look at a central human problem. Some wonder why we have not made contact with other interplanetary life forms by now. So much has been spent on sending and receiving messages to outer space. Dutton suggests that they may all be dead, as higher intelligence appears related to extreme and eventually self-destructive violence.
Table of Contents for The Psychology of Extreme Violence
Preface
Historical background of massacre- the crusades and the concept of “holy war” to rationalize violence.
20th century genocides: genocide as focused extinction of a people
Genocide: Armenia, the Holomodor, Cambodia , Rwanda– the Killing Fields Bosnia
The Holocaust
Massacres – The Rape of Nanking , My Lai, El Mozote, Sand Creek
Lynchings : Sam Hose and Claude Neal
Prison riots : Attica, New Mexico State Penitentiary
Societal transitions to extreme violence
Individual transitions to extreme violence
Rape, serial killers and the forensic psychology of war
Individual differences in susceptibility to transition
Conclusion
Postscript: final summation
“Dutton’s analysis of domestic violence research and discourse is comprehensive, refreshing, and enlightened. He has gathered the latest work from multiple disciplines to create a volume that will surely be a cornerstone of a radical, distinctly feminist rethinking of domestic violence practice.”
Linda G. Mills, NYU professor of social work, law and public policy, and author of Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse
Rethinking Domestic Violence is the third in a series of books by Donald Dutton critically reviewing research in the area of intimate partner violence (IPV). The research crosses disciplinary lines, including social and clinical psychology, sociology, psychiatry, affective neuropsychology, criminology, and criminal justice research. Since the area of IPV is so heavily politicized, Dutton tries to steer through conflicting claims by assessing the best research methodology. As a result, he comes to some very new conclusions.
These conclusions include the finding that IPV is better predicted by psychological rather than social-structural factors, particularly in cultures where there is relative gender equality. Dutton argues that personality disorders in either gender account for better data on IPV. His findings also contradict earlier views among researchers and policy, makers that IPV is essentially perpetrated by males in all societies. Numerous studies are reviewed in arriving at these conclusions, many of which employ new and superior methodologies than were available previously.
After twenty years of viewing IPV as generated by gender and focusing on a punitive “law and order” approach, Dutton argues that this approach must be more varied and flexible. Treatment providers1 criminal justice system personnel, lawyers, and researchers have indicated the need for a new View of the problem — one less Invested in gender politics and more open to collaborative views and interdisciplinary insights. Dutton’s rethinking of the fundamentals of IPV is essential reading for psychologists, policy makers, and those dealing with the sociology of social science, the relationship of psychology to law, and explanations of adverse behaviour.
Donald G. Dutton teaches in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. He has written extensively on the subject of domestic violence. (Back)