Re: What causes people to sexually assault?.. WARNING:Contains posts that are trigger
Sometimes it can be mental issues that cause people to sexually assault others but sometimes it is just because they are evil and psychopathic.
I don't follow. Are you saying that some people are born evil, and those with mental issues develop that way from being abused by evil people?
Anyway, regarding the process of recovery - Personally, I don't believe the main purpose of scientific study on criminals should even be about "curing" the individual criminals themselves. It's a nice thought, but it is not our responsibility as a society to reform criminals. It
is our responsibility to improve the conditions of our current society by providing care for children, better education, and teaching adults to be better parents.
That's why studying criminals is important. Criminals are human, after all - unless you believe they're possessed by demons.. but I'll assume there are no religious nuts on this board, so everyone here can probably agree that psychology is the solution. If we fully understand
why and
how rapists and serial killers developed their thinking, we'll be better able to make the necessary changes in our social environments to substantially lower the amount of criminals bred from each new generation of children. The same people who demand "justice" by sentencing criminals to death, are in fact practicing injustice on the long-term.
For every mentally sick person we kill, we're also killing all potential information that could've been gathered from any scientists studying the person. The less information we gather, the longer it will take for scientists to form theories, test them through research, and develop new social ideas and programs (that must be accepted by politicians and majority of our population) that will begin to effectively destroy the social sicknesses at their sources. This is assuming that the mentally ill become that way due largely to their childhood & adolescent environments (obviously, this is what I believe) and that better parenting and education will therefore be saving many thousands and millions of lives.
Again, punishment is traditionally used in behavioral conditioning, but how is a life sentence or a death sentence 'teaching' the criminal? The crime has already been commited at that point, the victims are dead in the ground... and destroying more lives not only does nothing to bring back the lives of the innocent, it does nothing to prevent new criminals from surfacing and killing more innocents. When someone 'snaps' mentally and turns to a life of crime, they're not thinking rationally at that point - consequences are meaningless at that point, they're
sick in the head.. meaning, they're not scared to commit brutal acts of violence.
Rational people are scared to commit crimes because of punishment though: Children may learn to stop stealing cds from the music store after being placed in juvenile detention centers over night, but publicizing the death of serial killers by the electric chair does nothing to 'scare' children into becoming non-aggressive, moral beings if their environments are destructive. For one thing, society doesn't really
need to drill that message into our heads in the first place - healthy humans are not going to mindlessly kill eachother in the way that we may occasionally be tempted to steal money or drive while intoxicated, for example. Notice I say "healthy" humans though - that's the point, our society needs to improve the mental health of our population rather than simply pick out the mentally unhealthy and make examples of them. We already tried that back in the middle ages with guillotines, hangings, and burnings, and those didn't work out so well.
