ENCYCLOPEDIA II

SERIAL AND MASS MURDERERS[1]

Elliott Leyton, PhD

Department of Anthropology

Memorial University of Newfoundland

(In Lester Kurtz (ed), The Encyclopedia of Violence, (three volumes)

New York: Academic Press, 1999)

OUTLINE:

I. THE FIELD OF STUDY

II. DEFINITION OF SUBJECT

III. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

A. Multiple and Single Murder Compared

B. Typologies of Serial & Mass Murder

C. Psychobiological Perspectives

D. Psychiatric/Psychological Perspectives

E. Feminist Perspectives

F. Social Perspectives

IV. TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED EXPLANATION

V. FREQUENCY OF MULTIPLE MURDER

A. Statistical Outline of Mass Murder

B. Statistical Outline of Serial Murder

VI. IMPACT ON SOCIETY OF MULTIPLE MURDER

VII. MULTIPLE MURDER AND JUSTICE

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GLOSSARY.

Homicide; Moral Panic; Misogyny; Patriarchy; Recidivism

I. THE FIELD OF STUDY.

Few phenomena better illustrate the yawning chasm between popular and scholarly interests than that of serial and mass murder; and few subjects have so captured the public imagination yet been so systematically ignored by academics. This neglect appears to be a consequence of several points of view: on the one hand, there are those who regard the study of such "sensational" criminal behavior as ultimately serving the interests of conservative "law-and-order" political pressure groups; and on the other hand, some regard the subject as too vulgar, even pornographic, for legitimate scholarly examination.

In fact, it was only in the aftermath of what has come to be called the great serial killer panic of the early 1980s that academics began to treat multiple murder as a social phenomenon worthy of separate analysis. After that, a series of books and articles appeared in rapid succession (for e.g., Levin & Fox 1985; Leyton 1986; Cameron and Frazer 1987), and created an entirely new field of enquiry. Despite the recent attention, however, it remains what Egger (1990) called "an elusive phenomenon": the most basic definitions are hardly agreed upon, and a truly reliable comparative international and historical data base has yet to be constructed (a problem that is universal in the study of violence). Typical work in the field still either concentrates in microscopic detail on a small number of cases, deriving tentative but sometimes unwarranted conclusions from this unrepresentative sample; or it consists of a myriad of unanalyzed cases haphazardly collected in an "encyclopedia"; or, more rarely, discusses general patterns based on data of varying degrees of reliability. Typically too, scholars argue narrowly to advance their own specialties and theoretical prejudices - sociology, biopsychology, or feminism, for example - and make minimal reference to each other's insights.

As with many of the subjects covered in this encyclopedia of violence, the paucity of useful data radically narrows the descriptive and analytic possibilities open to the researcher: non-police researchers usually find it difficult or impossible to obtain the necessary official permission to interview individual offenders, and useful statistical data must be constructed and tabulated afresh for each new enquiry. These flaws are compounded by the fact that because virtually all descriptive and statistical data are from modern industrial nations, we know almost nothing about the phenomenon in the developing world. Given these limitations, the purpose of this entry is to outline what insights have so far been offered; to begin the integration of some of these primary insights; and to suggest directions for future research.

II. DEFINITION OF SUBJECT

"Murder" refers to the unlawful killing of another human being. In both academic and police usage, the two forms of multiple murder usually refer to the slaughter of three or more persons, most often with "a common motive, method, and/or type of victim" (Lunde 1979: 47). Serial murder refers to killings spread over time, often with a sexual component, as in the notorious Theodore Bundy case. Mass murder refers to killings that take place all at once, as in the case of the 'McDonald's Massacre' in California, for motives that are as likely to be personal as political (as they were in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City).

Both these terms are essentially descriptive, not analytic, and they are simply used to distinguish between the various forms of multiple murder. Extravagant claims have occasionally been advanced regarding the invention and the development of these terms, but they have in fact been drawn from common parlance and have been in use in one form or another throughout much of this century. Mass murder has been largely ignored by analysts, perhaps because the perpetrator is usually dead at the end of his spree and impossible to interview. Thus the detection of the identity, and the ultimate capture of a mass killer is rarely difficult, provoking the comment from one senior police investigator that "mass murderers are a social problem, not a police problem." As for serial murder, the concept - "if not the exact term" - has been in use throughout the century, even if "systematic descriptions and analyses" did not begin until the 1980s (Jenkins 1994: 8). In fact, there is now a substantial body of research and publication on serial killers.

Although many commentators give slightly varying definitions, they all refer to the same statistically rare and particular form of multiple homicide - often, but by no means always, of strangers. Such killings usually appear to be motiveless and senseless, but on closer examination are usually found to have a warped logic of their own. Most commentators prefer simply to limit the definition to a minimum number of victims, usually three or four, sometimes five, without reference to motive.

III. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

A. Multiple and Single Murder Compared

Several fundamental characteristics distinguish serial and mass murder from conventional single murder. One is the social relationship between killer and victim. In the majority of homicides, there is some form of relationship prior to the event - family, acquaintances, associates or lovers. Although historically significant, the murder of strangers is relatively rare in most modern societies. In one famous study of homicide in 1958 in Philadelphia, for example, only 12.2 per cent of the killings were between strangers (Wolfgang 1975: 207); although that figure has risen considerably in recent years in the U.S. In multiple murder, however, except in the obvious case of familicides, the victims are more likely to be relative or complete strangers.

A second difference is that the perpetrators of single murder tend to be overwhelmingly drawn from the least successful strata of society (see Leyton 1996) - under-educated, chronically unemployed, living on state benefits, and with chronic drug and/or alcohol problems. Palmer (1972: 40) was one of many to note that it is "the poor, the uneducated, those without legitimate opportunities, [who] respond to their institutionalized oppression with outward explosions of aggression." On the other hand, multiple murderers are drawn from a greater range of social niches, and seem less likely to be from the ranks of the truly oppressed. Indeed, they are often gainfully employed, and, sometimes have reasonable expectations of conventional futures. Their problem is more likely to be internal: as Bolitho observed a half century ago, multiple murderers "very commonly construct for themselves a life-romance, a personal myth in which they are the maltreated hero," and which allows them to engage in a fantasy of "social war, in which his hand is against society" (1926: 7-8, 274).

What follows is a review of the primary perspectives that have so far been brought to bear on multiple murder. Note that each theoretical tradition narrowly operates on the working assumption that its variables are the primary - or only - causes of the phenomenon. Note also that while other types of multiple murderers - say, for example, assassins (see "Political Assassinations") - are assumed to be adequately explained by their degree of political commitment, this is thought to be an insufficient explanation for serial and mass murderers.

B. Typologies of Serial and Mass Murder

Many scholars believe that categorizing the varieties of a phenomenon - the construction of types, or typologies - is the necessary first step towards understanding it.

1. Mass Murder

Levin and Fox's initial work in 1985 distinguished three types of mass murder on the basis of the killers' motivations, goals, and self-justifications: these included family slayings, murders for profit or expediency, and sexual serial killing. However, in their more recent work (Levin and Fox 1996), they followed what had become general practice and treated serial killings as a separate phenomenon. In order to avoid the previous classificatory confusion between the killers' motives and the victim-offender relationships, their revised typology focuses purely on motivation.

They now distinguish four motives, then compare them with the relationships between victims and offenders, the forethought given to the killings, and the "state of mind of the perpetrator". They agree with most current commentators that the motive behind the majority of mass killings is revenge - "either against specific individuals, particular categories or groups of individuals or society at large." The largest single category of these revenge massacres includes husbands who murder their estranged wives and children; and alienated employees who avenge themselves on their boss or fellow employees. In the 1986 murder of 14 postal employees in Oklahoma by a disgruntled fellow worker, for example, Levin and Fox argue that the killer was "in a sense trying 'to kill the post office', much like the estranged husband/father might attempt 'to kill the family'". The victims in such massacres are not randomly selected: they are chosen because they are members of a category of person - racial, familial, economic, or communal - who the killer feels are responsible for his unhappiness. "He seeks to get even, not with specific people whom he knows, but with anyone who fits his single criterion for hate" (Levin and Fox 1996: 65).

Nevertheless, some mass murders are motivated by what Levin and Fox call a form of "love", wherein a depressed father massacres his family to spare them the suffering that life entails. Finally, some mass murders are motivated purely by profit, as when a family is murdered for an inheritance; or in a gangland operation, as in the robbery and execution of 13 guests at the Wah Mee Club in Seattle in 1983 (Levin and Fox 1996: 67-68).

2. Serial Murder

Holmes and De Burger (1988) based their typology on 110 cases. Drawing on ideas that had emerged from the FBI Academy (see, for example, Hazelwood and Douglas 1980; Ressler et al 1986), they developed their typology of the "dominant motives" of serial murderers. They first distinguished serial murder from the two other traditionally accepted types of what they call "criminal multicide" - mass murder, in which "several people, in the same general area, at the same time, are slain by a lone assailant"; and spree murder, in which "several victims are murdered, typically over a period of hours or weeks, by a relatively reckless, impulsive killer" (1988: 47).

Holmes and De Burger reject purely "social" explanations: for them, poverty, poor neighbourhoods, unstable families and a subculture of violence cannot be the cause of serial murder since few who are exposed to such social stresses become serial killers. Because few serial murderers are thought to be from the most disenfranchised strata of society, they conclude that the explanation for the behavior must lie elsewhere - in psychological factors, i.e., "in the psyche of the killer" (1988: 48, 50). Their categories include the "Visionary Type", whose killings are "committed in response to 'voices' or 'visions' that demand that a person or category of persons be destroyed"; the Mission-Oriented Type who typically decides to "go on a 'mission' to rid the world of a category of people" he has defined as beneath contempt (for e.g., prostitutes); the Hedonistic Type who is killing for thrills, seeking only "pleasure or a sense of well-being". Moreover, they have devised three sub-categories of the hedonistic type: the thrill seeking killers who "derive pleasure directly from the murder event"; the creature comforts killers who kill, for example, to find "the perfect lover, or the good life;" and the lust murderer, to whom "sexual arousal and gratification" are central. Their final major category is the Power/Control-Oriented Type, whose primary satisfaction comes from his complete domination over the life and death of the victim (1988: 56-59).

Gresswell and Hollin (1994) have criticized these typologies on three levels. First, the categories' lack of mutual exclusivity makes it difficult to distinguish visionary from missionary types except on the basis of the former's alleged insanity. Second, the categories are not exhaustive: for example, they do not include contract killers because their motivation is financial and is therefore deemed "extrinsic". On the other hand, the categories do include killing for insurance, or to eliminate the witness to a sexual assault, which are also extrinsically motivated. Finally, the categories are insensitive to "interactions between the killer, the victims, and the environment", and do not account for killers whose motivations may change over time (for example, from killing to mutilation, or to ensuring extensive coverage in the media). Gresswell and Hollin conclude with a call for typologies that are sufficiently flexible to accommodate "both psychological and environmental variables, and which also recognize that there is a process to multiple murder" (1994: 5).

C. Psychobiological Perspectives

The psychobiological tradition assumes that the causes of human behaviour, normal and pathological, are rooted in human biology. In the realm of criminal behavior, it has its origins in the work of the 19th Century Italian criminalist, Lombroso, and in the more modern work by the Gluecks (1956) that studied the relationship between body type, temperament and criminality.

Several primary paths can be discerned in contemporary research. Evolutionary psychology has had nothing to say about multiple murder per se, but it has postulated a general adaptive evolutionary advantage for male aggression. The work underlines the fact that most homicide worldwide is between males, and emphasizes the survival value of male aggression. Archer (1995: 249), for example, writes that the characteristic behaviour of young human males, including "the willingness to accept a challenge, to take risks, and sexual jealousy" are just those confrontational qualities that can lead to a homicide. A willingness to kill was not necessarily an evolutionary advantage, but these qualities were adaptive because they were instrumental "in obtaining status and resources and keeping exclusive sexual access to a partner". This argument seems plausible, but recent primate studies cast doubt on the reproductive advantages of male aggressivity, and suggest not only that Alpha males are not the most aggressive ones, but also that highly aggressive males tend to be expelled from the group.

Another major tradition looks to specific biological/chemical/neurological incapacities - operating alone or synergetically - as a possible explanation. One illustration was the XYY chromosome research that Fox criticized for "premature speculation and, consequently, much confusion": in fact, upon closer examination, only 3% of incarcerated populations were found to have the extra Y chromosome, and these actually "displayed, in their criminal behavour, less violence against persons than did control patients." To date, XYY has only be decisively correlated with non-aggressive characteristics - mild retardation, tallness, and resistance to corrective training (Fox 1971: 63-65).

There are also many scattered and inconclusive case studies. Kraus, for example, studied a 45-year-old serial killer's medical history and found a paralyzed leg, a skull fracture and concussion, a 'military' injury suffered in Vietnam, a psychological test diagnostic of antisocial personality disorder, and elevated levels of urinary kryptopyrroles. This combination of "genetic, biochemical, neurological and psychiatric impairments," Kraus thought, could "at least partially explain the 'actual inner workings' of this serial killer" (Kraus 1995: 24). While this may be true in this case, there is no evidence that such factors are present in other killers.

While few scientific researchers would argue that biological differences solely account for murder, some biological factors are being looked at as "vulnerability factors" which might well contribute to an increased susceptibility to violent behaviour. Especially suggestive at this time is recent research on testosterone and serotonin. M. Leyton (pers comm) notes that in animal studies, reduced serotonin neurotransmission increases aggression "and decreased the behaviorally inhibiting effects of novelty and punishment", while elevated serotonin levels produce the opposite. Very preliminary work in humans has produced provocative results, finding indices of low serotonin function "in the majority of subjects with a history of impulsive violent behavior" (cf. Leyton et al 1997: 17), as well as in the majority of depressed patients who have attempted suicide. Still, as one researcher remarked, "the circumstantial evidence may be considerable, but the smoking gun has yet to be found."

D. Psychiatric/Psychological Perspectives

The assumption in this field is that the origins of behavior lie in the internal psychological make-up of each individual, although authorities differ on whether this constitution is learned or inherited (the ancient, and so-far quite unresolved, nature/nurture debate).

The benchmark in psychiatric studies of multiple murder remains Lunde's classic Murder and Madness, first published in 1975. Lunde concluded that unlike single murders who may kill strangers or those with whom they have relationships, the victims of multiple murderers are more likely to be slightly known to the killer. Moreover, such multiple killers "are almost always insane"; and their insanity takes the form of selecting as victims those who have "certain attributes which torment him." The victims themselves "are unaware of their psychological or symbolic significance to the killer", which may include the killer's belief that they send telepathic messages to him (Lunde 1979: 48).

Lunde hypothesizes that the insanity of these multiple killers takes two primary forms. One is a hostile paranoid schizophrenia, the causes of which lie in a combination of "genetic, metabolic, and psychological" factors, and the symptoms of which include hallucinations, "delusions of grandiosity or persecution, [and] bizarre religious ideas." The other is sexual sadism, in which the killer only achieves sexual fulfilment through "torture and/or killing and mutilation." The origins of sexual sadism, he believes, lie in the fusion in early childhood of "sexual and violent aggressive impulses." Unlike schizophrenia, which is treatable, the development of sexual sadism is likely to be derailed only by intervention during childhood (Lunde 1979: 48-56).

Mainstream psychiatry continues to produce useful case studies of individual killers. Abrahamsen's study of one killer, David Berkowitz, develops the theme that the "Son of Sam" was the victim of a "death wish" which he turned "directly against others" by killing, and "indirectly against himself" by ensuring that he would be captured and punished. Abrahamsen thought the killer's rage had developed after discovering that he had been rejected by his natural parents and put out for adoption: his vengeful killing spree, according to the psychiatrist, was "rooted in his fantasies about killing his mother and half sister" (Abrahamsen 1985: 201, 205). Such work is interesting and important, but tells us nothing about why only a handful of adoptees should react with such violence.

In the years since all this pioneering work, however, the psychiatric and psychological sciences have largely shifted their attention away from the essentially legal category of 'insanity'. This move has been accompanied by an increasing awareness among professionals that, as Gaylin was one of the first to remark: "Most of us are aware how trivial, ephemeral, descriptive, and meaningless are psychiatric diagnoses" (Gaylin 1983: 249). Perhaps the most widely accepted contemporary concept is that of psychopathy (sometimes called sociopathy, or antisocial personality disorder), which describes a remorseless and unfeeling personality that cannot respond to the humanity in other people. Hare and his colleagues, among others, have written extensively of the "common core of attributes" of psychopathy. These include "pathological lying", "impulsivity", "a lack of remorse, guilt and shame; [and an] inability to experience empathy or concern for others", or even to establish affectionate relationships (Hare n.d.: 95-96).

Giannangelo's 1996 volume, The Psychopathology of Serial Murder, tries to strike a balanced perspective in the application of textbook psychiatric notions of pathology to serial murderers. While he concedes that "labels" such as antisocial and psychopath may be relevant to these killers, and that symptoms such as dissociation and post-traumatic stress are often seen in them, he suggests that a history of "physical, sexual, or mental abuse" is perhaps the most important trait shared by "most" serial killers. As a result of their abusive childhoods, serial killers have developed "a pervasive lost sense of self and intimacy, an inadequacy of identity, [and] a feeling of no control." These deficits manifest themselves in what may be "the ultimate act of control", the murder of many people (Giannangelo 1996: 19). Giannangelo's explanation tries to resolve the nature/nurture debate by dealing with both biological and environmental pressures. While maintaining that the abusive histories of serial killers constitute the "extreme psychological trauma" that is the environmental trigger, it would not be expressed as serial killing without a "biological ingredient that makes the mix an explosive one." His "serial killer diagnosis", then, sees a person who will commit predatory murders as having congenital or trauma-induced physiological anomalies, a personal life history of severe abuse, an early display of antisocial and/or criminal behavior, evidence of pervasive sexual deviance, and a tendency to live in a state of fantasy (1996: 48, 53).

If the concept of psychopathy is now widely used in criminal psychiatry and psychology, it has several flaws which have been extensively criticized. Although it accurately describes many of the behavioural characteristics associated with multiple murderers, it does not explain why many who have these qualities do not kill. Indeed, psychiatrist J. Reid Meloy has written that such a diagnosis is "too descriptive, inclusive, criminally based, and socioeconomically skewed to be of much clinical or research use" (1988: 6). In a similar critical vein, psychologist David Canter considers psychopath and sociopath to be "curious terms that imply a medical, pathogenic origin yet in fact describe someone for whom no obvious organic or psychotic diagnosis can be made". Therefore, he argues, the terms are "more an admission of ignorance than an effective description" of a medical condition (Canter 1994: 263). Egger concludes that if the notion of psychopathy has proved to be a most useful label and category, its inability to predict whether a victim will be a remorseless killer or a corporate executive merely reminds us "that we in fact don't know why these people act as they do" (Egger 1998: 28).

Yet it is David Canter's Criminal Shadows that linked the "secret" inner life of serial killers to their remorseless, psychopathological, use and abuse of other people. He observes that the majority of such killers are relatively unaggressive in day-to-day life, and that their outbursts of criminal violence are only a part of their life story. Focusing on the "discernible structure" of the killer's inner life, Canter examines the use of internal narratives, or autobiographical stories people "tell" themselves in the construction of their identities. All human beings half-consciously develop a story of their lives - "drawn from the culture and society in which we live" - with the self as the central character responding to a variety of situations. The narrative of the average person is a largely "public story of successes and failures", of family, friends and career. A serial killer has also developed a story of his life, but in his personal narrative all other characters are assigned a subsidiary role as consumable objects, not persons. Canter concludes that such offenders lack the ability "to create private dramas in which others share centre-stage"; and this in turn makes it impossible for them to feel empathy for others. If we are all the central characters in our own dramas, the personal narratives of violent offenders distort the "themes of intimacy and appropriate use of power", deny empathy and self-respect, and portray others as less than human. Thus their victims can become mere "objects of anger or desire, vehicles to satisfy the perpetrator, possessions that are jealously guarded, targets for him to act upon". Such a life story denies the fundamental qualities of a healthy personality in a civil society - the ability to feel compassion for others while maintaining a sense of self-respect (1994: 205, 232, 240-241, 285).

E. Feminist Issues & Perspectives

A basic assumption of radical feminist thought is that far from being a perversion of the male sexual impulse, rape and sexual murder can most accurately be seen as the essence of male sexuality and male culture. This is entirely compatible with beliefs that modern gender relations constitute a form of the oppressive patriarchal "war against women", and that serial murder is merely the control of women through their organized international execution. In the most influential feminist text on the subject to date, Cameron and Frazer review previous scientific attempts to explain such sex murder. They believe that the murderer has always been inaccurately portrayed by male science as somehow defective, as "deviant from male sexuality" - as biologically or psychologically deficient, or warped by a violent culture. In fact, they argue, there is a second discourse in our civilization; a sustained cultural statement in which the killer "is a hero, at the centre of literary and philosophical celebration". Revelations of feminist thought in the preceding decades have made it apparent that male violence is the "law of misogyny": indeed, some radical feminists claim unilaterally that regardless of whether the victims of a sex murderer are female or male, the one thing they all share is that the killer is always male. Thus they argue that in any patriarchal society, women are mere objects to be consumed by men, used by men for their "self-affirmation" and the fullest expression of their masculinity. Moreover, "it is under the banner of masculinity that all the main themes of sexual killing come together: misogyny, transcendence, sadistic sexuality, the basic ingredients of the lust to kill." In this view, then, the rape and murder of women becomes the natural, not deformed, path through which men transcend their narrow identities and liberate themselves from the constraints of conventional life (Cameron and Frazer 1987: 166-168).

However, Hickey's extensive 1991 data base suggested that if the motivation of serial killers (for e.g., sexual gratification) is ignored, and analysis focused simply on the number of victims - three or more - then fully 17% of serial killers are female. He does not argue that serial killer Jane Toppan's motives were in any way typical when she claimed that her ambition was to "have killed more people - more helpless people - than any man or woman who has ever killed." Indeed, he found that the motives of female serial killers seemed more likely to involve material or social gain (as with women who serially murder their children, husbands, or tenants to collect their life insurance) than to satisfy an obviously perverted sexuality. While a quarter of the female offenders in his sample killed only members of their families, those who killed strangers preyed primarily on the most vulnerable - patients in hospitals and nursing homes, or young boys and girls. Still, he notes that in these cases "we cannot [always] be sure that money was actually the primary motive". In addition, he records the consistent increase in the number of female offenders, particularly since 1970. Not only did Hickey make it clear that serial killing is not exclusively a male crime against women, but he also stated that a very substantial minority of the victims were men: while more than one third of male serial killers preyed exclusively on women, just under one half killed both males and females, and a fifth killed only males (Hickey 1991: 107, 124, 56, 111-112, 107, 143).

In his 1994 volume on the social construction of serial homicide, Jenkins criticizes the radical feminist theory that serial murder is both "the ultimate manifestation" of male sexual abuse of women and "a powerful weapon in the political suppression of women". He notes that such a belief "places the blame for the offense firmly on masculine characteristics" and "the structure of a male-dominated society", thereby transforming the fear of serial murder into an "ideological weapon" against patriarchal society. Moreover, he argues that the feminist analysis of serial murder is based on "questionable assumptions", not the least of which is that serial killers are invariably men preying on women: "cases involving women offenders were all but ignored". Cameron and Frazer's bald statement that there has never been a female equivalent of the Yorkshire Ripper must therefore "be examined critically in light of the undoubted existence of numerous women through history who have murdered repeatedly" (Jenkins 1994: 139, 143-144, 150-151).

Jenkins adds that in order to maximize their political and emotional impact, hard-line radical "feminists have stuck to the original grossly inflated and long-discredited [U.S.] Department of Justice estimates of the number of serial killers and victims," when in fact women "are by far the least likely segment of the population to fall victim to homicide." Indeed, in contemporary America, black men have a 1 in 21 life chance of falling victim to homicide, the chances for black women are 1 in 104, while white men have a 1 in 131 chance, and white women only 1 in 369. However, Jenkins judiciously concludes, if the radical feminist analysis is lacking in "scholarly merit", the theories have been a significant rhetorical device for sensitizing the population to the injustices inflicted upon women, and in emphasizing that women have sustained terrible abuse, comparable in every way to that inflicted on other "relatively powerless groups" (1994: 156-157).

Julie Cluff and her colleagues (1997) honour feminist theory for its illumination of society's demeaning "objectification of individuals" and "the glorification and normalization of violence within patriarchy". Nevertheless, while maintaining that feminist analysis has enormous potential for enriching our understanding of serial murder, Cluff et al also criticize the narrowness of much feminist theorizing - most especially in its insistence that only males can be serial killers, and in utterly "ignoring issues of class and race". They also express concern about the consistent use of "narrow definitional criteria" and an unfortunate "emphasis on ideology and sensationalism." In their review of the literature, they laud feminist theory for pointing "the analysis of serial murder in an important direction," but state that it has been entirely self-limiting for feminists narrowly to study only male sexual predators and dismiss even "the possibility that women could be serial killers". They conclude that these "shortcomings demand an expansion and improvement of feminist analysis to account for the diversity in serial murderers and their differing modus operandi;" suggest this should begin with the serious study of the female serial killer (1997: 293, 305-306).

Candice Skrapec pursued a central issue when she questioned the common assumption that the motivations of male and female serial killers must be quite different. Her 1996 essay, which expanded on the implications of Hickey's data, reminded us that since a significant minority of serial killers are female, a deformed sexuality might not be entirely a masculine preserve. She notes that psychiatry has often been insensitive to "the subtle emotional dynamics" that can be associated with female sexuality: thus if male perversions "tend to be more overtly sexual," female sexual perversions "are manifestly more subtle, involving symbolic acts centred on emotional dramas of abandonment, separation and loss." Yet, she adds significantly, "these differences serve to mask the more substantive underlying similarities between male and female multiple murderers", and she calls for a sustained and delicate exploration of the similiarities and differences in the sexuality of the two genders (1996: 176).

F. Social Perspectives

The primary and recurring theme remains the vexing and unresolved question of causation. What could cause a person to take the life of a number of innocent human beings, often people of whom he has neither prior knowledge nor personal hatred? What are the social forces that might determine, underlie, or shape the production of such a remorseless killer? Do certain types of cultures or specific historical epochs incubate or encourage such violence?

1. Mass Murderers

Mass killers have still received little attention in the literature. Leyton's 1986 volume postulated that although mass and serial killers are quite different, they are similar in some important ways - especially in that their acts are personalized social protest, and they are neither politically revolutionary nor mentally deranged. Arguing from an extremely limited sample, he speculated that mass killers were much more likely than serial killers to come from relatively stable middle-class family backgrounds. Moreover, rather than using their killings as a catapault to international celebrity (as so many serial killers do), the majority wished to avenge themselves in one sustained burst, and then die, "knowing that the social statement that is their killings will give them a form of immortality." The origins of their vengeful fantasy, Leyton thought, lay in their early and intense recognition of the impossibility of bettering their social condition - their jobs, their status, their persona. Starkweather experienced poverty and stigmatization throughout his brief life; Essex did not feel it until he left the warmth of his family and community for the racist embrace of the Navy: regardless, their confrontation with the social abyss rendered their lives unbearable. Compulsively, they chose to die in an explosion of violence directed at the group they felt oppressed, threatened, or excluded them. Thus in the McDonald's massacre, Huberty murdered the Hispanics he thought had usurped his social position - "society's had their chance," he told his wife; Starkweather murdered the middle classes whom he felt despised him as the garbageman who had himself been transmuted into 'garbage'; and Essex murdered whites who humiliated and unmanned him. Yet they made their final commitment to the killings not for others, but for themselves; not for lofty ideology, but seemingly because they could not come to terms with the "lowly" status offered them by society - as garbageman, as apartment security guard, and as repairman of vending machines (1986: 189-190).

A decade later, Levin and Fox refined these matters, and include the more common familicides into their definition of mass murder. Thus episodes such as the McDonald's massacre of complete strangers by definition become the exception to the rule. While concurring that "a majority of mass killers have clear-cut motives - such as profit or revenge," they insist that for the majority of such killings, the "victims are specially chosen," not just unfortunate individuals caught in "the wrong place at the wrong time." Levin and Fox construct a sequence of factors that contribute to the development of a mass murderer. Predisposers are long-established traits of the developing killer's personality and history, especially a depressive cast of mind, "failures at work, [the] military and [at] home", a "diminishing ability to cope" with life, and a chronic "tendency to blame others for problems" and disappointments. Precipitants are "short-term and acute triggers," i.e., catalysts provoking the actual decision to kill and die, such as sudden unemployment or the ending of a marriage. Facilitators are circumstances "which increase the likelihood of a violent outburst," including the "social or psychological isolation" of the killer, and "access to [a] weapon of mass destruction." Thus the emerging mass killer is typically a middle aged man whose life has been steeped in a deep sense of frustration, failure and disappointment. The aggression generated by that lifelong frustration is turned outward if he has the kind of mentality that sees himself as the victim, and blames others for his own problems (1996: 69-71).

Levin and Fox also argue, perhaps less convincingly, that the over-representation of males in mass murder is due to "the fact that men are more likely to suffer the kind of catastrophic losses" which are the precipitants to mass murder: after a marital breakup, for example, it is the male who is more likely to be "ousted from the family home." Additionally, because men are likely than women to assess their own worth narrowly in terms of occupational status and income, they are more likely to suffer profoundly when they suddenly lose their jobs (1996: 72). These are provocative ideas and deserve further study alongside an assessment of male culture's apparent devotion to aggressivity.

2. Serial Murderers

If there is little material on mass killers, there is a rapidly expanding literature on serial murder. Levin and Fox opened the debate in 1985 with a critique of what they called "the psychiatric mistake": they argued that while psychiatric case studies often made for "engrossing reading", such analyses were bedeviled by unwarranted generalizations, and their validity was restricted to an unrepresentative handful of cases. Moreover, psychiatric diagnoses, with their emphasis on troubled childhoods, tended towards lists of symptoms - such as bed-wetting, fire-setting, and cruelty to animals - rather than explanatory discussions of cause (1985: 24, 26-27, 31).

Instead, quoting one serial rapist who maintained that "the rape wasn't really the important part, it was the dominance", Levin and Fox argue that the pleasure given the serial killer by his murders comes from the "absolute control" he exercises over his victims. The individuals who come to serial murder feel rejected, abused and marginalized, and the intense frustration so engendered leads to various forms of aggressive behaviour - designed to cure their feeling of impotence through "controlling, manipulating, or eliminating" others. Moreover, such personalities "have failed to internalize a moral code for the treatment of others": thus they are not victims of mental illness, not participants in another reality, but remorseless men "incapable of experiencing normal amounts of love and empathy" (1985: 60-61, 63-64).

Leyton (1986) developed a political, cultural, and historical overview. He argued that multiple murders aim at more than just the gratification of base appetites, but rather a kind of deformed campaign against the political order - "deformed", since its protest is not on behalf of others, only themselves; because their anguish is trivial, not profound; and since they punish the innocent, not the guilty. Like African witches, the serial killer reverses all social values to make "a demonstration to the authorities" (as one killer put it) in a manner that he thinks will force them to consider his legitimacy. Leyton's cultural argument is that modern civilization is one which both dehumanizes people and legitimizes violence as an acceptable, even praiseworthy, response to frustration. Moreover, through mass media and other pornography of violence, the civilization offers the killer advertising proclaiming the "joy" of sadism, and allows the killer to "grasp the 'manly' identity of pirate and avenger" (1986: 261, 28). Leyton also offered an historical argument, speculating that killers in each epoch were being drawn from the most "threatened" social class - the aristocracy in the pre-industrial era after their thousand-year feudal reign was challenged by a newly rebellious peasantry; the new middle classes created by the industrial revolution, insecure and rigid in their new-found roles, punishing the prostitutes and itinerants whose existence seemed to challenge their own legitimacy; and, in the modern era, the discontented ranks of the working class, who preyed on the middle class figures who had usurped their social position.

In The Aesthetics of Murder, Joel Black mounted an ambitious attempt to trace the connection between serial killers' treatment in literature and film and the manner in which the killers conceive and perceive their own actions. In this elegant study of the mirrors that reflect life and art, Black dwelt on the fact that "the most spectacular displays by the mass media are scenes of violence," and speculated on why art is "able to provide such cogent and compelling models for sociopathic behavior." He added the fundamental cultural question of why fictional creations are "able to engage impressionable and even critically sophisticated readers and viewers in a way that real-life human beings cannot?" (Black 1991: ix-x)

Also in 1991, Hickey fielded what he called a trauma-control model: here he argued what is now widely accepted - that regardless of predisposing biological, psychological or social factors, an individual who will become a serial killer is invariably the product of severe childhood trauma. These trauma include "unstable home life, death of parents, divorce, corporal punishments, sexual abuse" and other wounding events. Thus the rejected child "feels a deep sense of anxiety, mistrust and confusion when psychologically or physically abused by an adult". Millions of people are exposed to such trauma, and learn to handle rejection constructively and non-aggressively. Those who will be serial killers, however, have never learned to cope with these trauma; and some begin destructively to act out their rage - against animals or objects, "or assaulting a spouse, a friend, or a relative." This aggression is an effort on the part of the destabilized child/adolescent to regain the internal equilibrium that has been taken away from him "by people in authority"; and Hickey speculates that this may be the process of becoming a "psychopath" (1991: 65-67).

Curiously, the purely sexual component of serial murder has been relatively neglected - usually described, but rarely examined. Skrapec observes that the previous scholarly emphasis on the motivating factors of power and control have led to something resembling the "total sublimation of sex" in the literature; and she reminds us that serial killing is about sex as much as it is about murder. She distinguishes between the "expressive" quality of the murders (most especially the "rage" evident in the savage nature of the killing), and the "instrumentality" of murder for sexual pleasure or financial gain, and the way the two qualities can reinforce each other. When a killer preys on prostitutes, who may be symbols "of something that arouses tremendous hatred (or conflict) within him," then he acts out his desire to "punish or destroy them." If the initial reward of sexual pleasure from the killing may be subordinate to the hatred that drove him to kill, "he did, nonetheless, experience the arousal," and this flush of sexual pleasure may be a primary factor in any repetition of such murders - since the killing both relieved his hatred and was sexually gratifying. Moreover, Skrapec sees the ability of the killer to "objectify" the victim as not only a testament to the "power of the offender's emotions" but also an obvious marker of his pathological inability to feel empathy: if it is impossible to "put oneself in the emotional position of an object," then the serial killer is psychologically and morally "immune to his murders", as indeed he so often appears to be (1996: 175, 173).

In "Ideological Homicide," R.S. Ratner offers an interpretation of serial murder that brings us closer to an understanding of the social origins of psychopathy. Ratner notes that historical periods of economic instability - either rising or declining affluence - are also usually times when cultural controls begin to crumble; and he observes that the two waves of multiple murder in the U.S. (1910-1930, and 1970-1996) were also periods of "massive economic destabilization". During such periods of social upheaval, of sudden hardship or affluence, "cultural codes harmonizing class goals and individual aspirations are no longer efficiently transmitted through weakened family units." Vulnerable individuals then become more likely to seek solutions to their predicaments through a vindictive "individual fantasy" that is "bereft of scruples." Ratner's hypothesized socio-economic path for the formation of serial killers is as follows:

1. Economic destabilization and cultural collapse increase the tension that results from social inequality;

2. This tends to destabilize all interpersonal relations, especially for the children of "dysfunctioning families, who suffer flagrant abuse and neglect."

3. This abuse "is partially eroticized by the child as the only available means of rationalizing maltreatment and maintaining some form of necessary emotional contact."

4. Because the abuse and pain cannot be comprehended by the victim, they must be "anaesthetized" if the pain is to be reduced: but the resulting "deadening of emotion" is precisely what produces sociopathy in the child.

5. Even when the pain is deadened and compartmentalized, inevitably it will later be expressed: "Scripted eroticized violence" becomes the means for fulfilling these fantasies, in the course of which the powerlessness of the child is "symbolically neutralized and avenged." In an orgy of serial murder, Ratner concludes, victims are ritually captured, possessed, defiled, and disposed of, affording the killer "brief vengeance against the rejecting family/society" (1996: 125-127).

If Ratner's assumption is correct and these serial killers do indeed come from savagely abusive families (and this assumption is shared by other specialists, including Ressler et al 1988), then it still leaves unresolved the question of why some victims of abuse react by committing their own atrocities while others resolve their rage in alternative ways - such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or the excesses of religious or political fundamentalism.

IV. TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED EXPLANATION

In his magisterial work, Europe and the People Without History, Eric Wolf remarked that the primary intellectual achievement of the 20th Century was also its greatest weakness. Science divided human behaviour and experience into manageable "bits" such as history, biology, economy, psychology, society, and so on; but then, lost in these arbitrary distinctions, made no comparable attempt to reassemble what had been so artificially dismembered. Indeed, we are only at the beginning of our understanding of human behaviour - healthy or otherwise; and a true and deepened comprehension of pathological aggression is unlikely to emerge until the insights from each discipline are integrated in a meaningful and balanced way.

The basic dilemmas remain unchanged: the social sciences have charted the cultural and structural pressures that ultimately create pathological behavior; yet they are unable to explain why the majority of people exposed to these social pressures do not kill. The psychological sciences have dissected a part of the psychological and biological vulnerability to aggressive behavior in any individual; yet they are unable to explain why there are such massive differences between societies (and genders, and social classes) in the likelihood that its most vulnerable individuals will commit murder. Everywhere in the world, physical violence is overwhelmingly a male domain; yet feminist analysis is not yet able to explicate the cause of the differences between men and women. Certain biological factors may well prove to be necessary to produce psychopaths, but they cannot do it alone without encouragement in one form or another from the environment.

One of the most intriguing possibilities at the moment is the proper integration of the levels of understanding offered by the various academic disciplines. Thus the social and economic forces that create so many violent and 'dysfunctional' families could soon be brought together with the psychological mechanisms which severely abused children develop to cope with their obliteration. These socio-economic and psychological factors would, in cases of individuals with biological/chemical deficits that mitigate against impulse control, create individuals 'programmed' to revel in the display of vengeful savagery. If this is true, Skrapec may have over-stated her conclusion that individuals each take quite different paths to become serial killers, that some are biologically or psychologically disposed to their crimes, while others "are impelled by circumstance." Nevertheless, she is certainly correct that such behaviour appears to be part of the human condition and is "not, therefore, readily accessible by summary enquiry" (Skrapec 1996: 175).

V. FREQUENCY OF MULTIPLE MURDER

No one can yet confidently state how many multiple murderers there have been. It seems clear that such murderers exist in varying proportions in most, if not all, countries. Reported cases are especially concentrated in the United States, but some American commentators insist that this merely reflects America's large population and much higher homicide rates. Despite a decade of serious research, no firm conclusions have yet been reached; nor is there much consensus among scholars about even the most general patterns, since the absence of any authoritative agency collecting reliable international information means each writer has access to different - but inevitably flawed - data.

A. Statistical Outline of Mass Murder

In their 1996 article, Levin and Fox laid the foundation for the quantitative study of mass murder. They note that mass murder has received considerably less attention from both scholars and journalists than has serial killing, perhaps because of its less sensational character. They were able to examine 329 such massacres (defined as having four or more victims) that had occurred in the United States between 1976 and 1989: perpetrated by more than 400 offenders, the murderers claimed almost 1500 victims. The data revealed that an average of two mass murders took place every month in the U.S., producing an annual total of over 100 victims. To Levin and Fox, this suggested that mass murder, "although hardly of epidemic proportions, is not the rare occurrence that it is sometimes assumed to be."

They found no evidence of any recent increase in the rates of these offences, and noted that unlike single-victim crimes which are quintessentially urban, "mass murders do not tend to cluster in large cities." The most striking differences are regional ones, they found: the southern states, known for their high overall murder rates, "witness very few mass killings;" while states with high transient populations - especially Texas, Florida, Alaska and California - "have had more than their share."

Unlike serial killers, who generally avoid the use of firearms - perhaps because they are too impersonal - mass killers prefer the firearm, presumably for its obvious ability to kill the largest number in the shortest possible time. Because Levin and Fox include familicides (which constitute nearly 40 per cent of massacres) in their classification of mass murder, they find that the majority of mass murderers do not "attack strangers who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time." The incorporation of familicides also explains the relative youth and high proportion of females among the victims because the statistically "typical mass killing involves the breadwinner of the household who wipes out the whole family - his wife and his children" (1996: 58-63).

B. Statistical Outline of Serial Murder

There are so many imponderables in the collection of statistics on serial murder that Egger's earlier comments still apply: the actual extent and prevalence of serial murder "is as yet unknown" (1990: 29). In their first book, Levin and Fox (1985: 186) initially thought commentators might even have "grossly underestimated" the number of multiple murderers active in the US, and they speculated that "many of the more than five thousand unsolved homicides in the nation" each year might be the work of "a few very effective killers". In a similar vein, Leyton referred to the "remarkable increase" in multiple murder since the mid-1960s; Holmes and De Burger estimated that between 3,500 and 5,000 people might be murdered each year in the US by serial killers; and Hickey, whose data showed that between 1795 and 1988, 34 women and 169 men in the U.S. were responsible for approximately two thousand homicides, noted a "ten-fold increase in the number of cases during the past 20 years in comparison to the previous 174 years" and suggested that "35-100 may be active in a given year" (1991: 75, 18-19).

Jenkins argument is more complex: he found only twenty-five officially recognized cases of serial murder in England and Wales in the period 1880-1990 - a time when the U.S. produced a minimum of six or seven hundred such killers. Moreover, serial murder was "common" between 1919 and the 1940s in other industrialized nations such as France and Germany. While there are now more known cases of serial killing in England and Wales than in the past, "the increase has been gradual and the 1980s produced about the same number of cases [as] the 1940s or 1960s." Serial murder in the U.S. takes a similar cyclical pattern, and its history falls into three periods: a rather high rate until 1940, when there were at least 24 "extreme" serial killers who killed a minimum of ten; "a time of relative tranquility in the mid century;" and a renewed "murder wave" that has continued from the mid-1960s to the present. Thus the increase of serial killing since 1965 was not "a wholly new phenomenon," but merely "a return to earlier historical patterns" (1994: 40, 49, 33).

Jenkins argues further that the widely promulgated idea of American "uniqueness" may be exaggerated. The number of US serial killers may seem relatively high because its overall homicide rate is so much higher than other developed nations (ten times higher, for e.g., than England and Wales), when in the US as in England, the proportion of all murders that are serial murders hovers around one per cent. Moreover, the tighter libel laws in England and Wales make it impossible to attribute additional suspected murders to killers who have "only" been convicted of two or three: they would not therefore show up as serial killers in most data bases, which usually stipulate a minimum of four or five victims. In addition, British police are less likely than their American counterparts to publicize sensational murders. Indeed, Jenkins believes it is even conceivable that with all these factors considered, the nations of the old British Commonwealth could have a proportionately "higher incidence of serial murder" than the U.S. (1994: 42).

Canter et al's 1996 paper, "Are Serial Killers Special?" contains the preliminary results of the most ambitious international survey to date, one that elicited 3,532 serial killers from over 30 countries between 1860 and the present. Their figures show a real increase in the fourth quarter of the Twentieth Century, but "this increase directly reflects the growth in the number of homicides overall in that period," and they conclude that the worldwide pattern is "a by-product of an increasingly violent society." The bulk (2,617) of these killers come from the USA, and they concur with Hickey's findings that "the great majority of US serial killers have come into being in the last 25 years." Canter and his colleagues identified 164 serial killers in the UK since 1860, 144 in France and 165 in Germany: all four countries showed a recent increase, and they estimate that as many as five killers are "active" each year in Britain, France and Germany (1996: 22, 24, 25). This conflicts with Greswell and Hollin's review, which finds "little empirical support" for the idea of such a dramatic post-war increase in Britain (1994: 6).

In the light of all this contradictory and tentative information, we can only echo Egger's conclusion that scholarship has so far provided "no decisive answers". Our data are weak, and quite unsupported by reliable official statistics at any national - let alone international - level. However, Egger adds ominously that murder by unknowns or strangers continues to increase in the U.S.: the proportion of killings that take place within the intimate circle of the family (a proportion that is always high in nations with low frequencies of homicide) has fallen in the high-homicide U.S. from 31% in 1965 to only 12% in 1992 (1998: 59-60). The real quandary remains, as Kiger cautioned in 1990, that until we have developed a truly reliable international data base, we not only "will be unable to develop informed typologies, theories and policy decisions," but we also "run the risk of creating a social problem, the magnitude of which may be greatly exaggerated" (Kiger 1990: 36)

VI. IMPACT ON SOCIETY

In our civilization, the serial killer has assumed the symbolic mantle once worn by "monsters, demons, ghouls, vampires, werewolves and zombies" (Hickey 1991: 20): they occupy the same central position in our nightmares; and their role appears to be to embody, display and define all evil. In Sole Survivor, Leyton reminded us of the impact such acts can have; and how any such killings reverberates through the entire society. Indeed, any murder destroys far more than one person: it damages the spirit of the parents of the victim, the grandparents, siblings, lovers and friends. Moreover, the fear it generates "erodes the social fabric, transforms public life from the joyous communal experience it might be to a savage zero-sum encounter; and demeans the humanity of all" (1991: 235).

Multiple murder also has many political ramifications, far beyond its routine use by politicians to generate hostility towards criminals to strengthen conservative law-and-order political platforms. In the 1980s, serial killing became the basis for a widespread "moral panic", when an inappropriate amount (given their rarity) of deep-rooted anxiety was focused upon them. In Britain and America, unfounded beliefs became entrenched that there were now so many serial killers that they had become a significant threat to women and children. In fact, in the climate of fear generated by the issue, serial killers became part of many political struggles, as well as "weapons in the rhetoric of sexual politics" (Jenkins 1992: 48, 51). Indeed, the fear of serial killers was used by a variety of professional, social and ideological groups pursuing their own quite separate political agendas - police forces such as the FBI which saw it as a means to increase their visibility, funding and power; radical African-American activists "who viewed it as part of systematic racial exploitation"; radical feminists who interpreted serial femicide as "a component of the larger problem of violence against women; children's rights activists concerned with missing and exploited children; as well as religious and other advocates of a ritual murder threat" (Jenkins 1994: 212).

Ratner is especially critical of the exploitative role often taken by the media, and wondered to what extent "media depictions of women as available sex objects encourage serial killers to believe that women exist solely in order to gratify their bizarre fantasies?" He is concerned that the media's glorification of serial killers endlessly rehearses "the confusion between normal and pathological currents in mass culture". Moreover, Ratner argues that it is an error to dismiss "as mere commercialism" items such as serial killer trading cards, which he feels intensify "the association of serial murder with youthful recreation" and subtly encourage similar acts. He emphasizes that the significance of serial murder should not be in providing the media with further opportunities for degrading, titillating and frightening the public: rather, the phenomenon should force modern society into a merciless self-examination. In doing so, he urges us to pay special attention to the modern family (an institution now "ill-suited to our social structure" and too disposed to the creation of pathology), and mount a "dispassionate analysis of the cause of split families, the scale of domestic violence and the effects of abuse and neglect" (1996: 128-129).

VII. MULTIPLE MURDER AND JUSTICE

There is a widespread anxiety that notorious multiple murderers might one day be released from prison. This fear is fanned by the fact that in many jurisdictions - in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere - the law requires that all convicted murderers automatically be at least considered for parole after serving a specified period of time in prison. Thus each time this usually perfunctory and legally-mandated process is to be performed with notorious killers - say, with Myra Hindley in Britain, with Charles Manson in the U.S., or with Clifford Olson in Canada - there is almost universal media and public hysteria that these killers might actually be paroled.

However, the facts do not justify this concern. It is true that Mary Bell who, as a pre-adolescent, murdered two small boys in England, was released and given a new identity after serving several decades in prison. Inexplicably, so was Denis Lortie - who murdered several people in Quebec's government buildings - after serving less than a decade. Caril Fugate, who was convicted of being an accomplice at the age of 14 to Charles Starkweather's murderous rampage across Nebraska, was paroled after 18 years in prison (Starkweather was executed).

Yet these are rare exceptions. Despite public fears, multiple murderers do not normally receive parole. It is true that single murderers are usually released, and so many of them should be since their recidivism rate is very low (well below one per cent in Canada). However, most courts implicitly recognize that multiple murderers have built their entire identities on the basis of their killings; and that consequently they are a continuing threat to society. Most politicians understand that to release such killers would be to corrode all sense of popular justice, as well as irrevocably weaken their own chances of re-election. According to Levin and Fox, most U.S. states specifically prohibit the release of serial and mass murderers, and employ either the death sentence or life imprisonment without parole to deal with such cases (1985: 194-195). In Hickey's U.S. sample of 157 male serial killers, one-fifth had been executed, another 14% were awaiting execution, a few had committed suicide or been killed in prison, and the remainder will be incarcerated for the rest of their lives (1991: 154-155).

GLOSSARY

Homicide is the killing of another human being: a homicide is considered a "murder" when there are no exonerating circumstances to the killing, such as 'self defence'.

Moral Panic refers to the inappropriate public hysteria generated by media focus on a specific fear, such as 'ritual murder'.

Misogyny, i.e., the fear and hatred of women, is a fundamental principle of radical feminist analysis of the male ideology 'justifying' the oppression of women.

Patriarchy refers to the structure of male-dominated societies that permits the oppression and control of women in male-dominated societies.

Recidivism refers to the likelihood that an offender, once released from prison, will repeat the offence.

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