- Position1 of 3›
- Serial killers are human
- Argument1 of 2›
Serial killers' pasts cause people to empathize with them
Serial killers often have bad pasts or childhoods. Because they have had hard lives, people feel sorry for them.
The argument
This argument accounts for public fascination with serial killers by pointing to what is usually found when their histories are examined. Serial killers are, on this view, formed from a bad past rather than simply born monstrous, and childhood abuse is one main reason why they become criminals. A 2005 study conducted on 50 serial killers found that 50% of the individuals had suffered psychological abuse and 36% physical abuse. The point of those figures is their scale: mistreatment appears not as an occasional detail in a few biographies but as a pattern across a substantial share of the group. Abuse is not the only recurring feature. Serial killers are usually outcasts as well, people positioned outside the ordinary social arrangements that most children grow up inside. Ted Bundy did not have good social skills when he was younger and did not have friends — an isolation that preceded anything he later did. Taken with the abuse, this sketches a childhood in which the usual sources of attachment and restraint were absent or actively harmful. The effect of knowing this is what the argument is really about. Once a history of this kind is visible, the person at the centre of it becomes legible in familiar terms: someone to whom things were done before they did anything themselves. Because their bad past helps explain how they became criminals, people extend sympathy toward them — not approval of the crimes, but recognition of a trajectory that can be followed. That recognition is a form of empathy, and empathy is only possible toward someone understood as a person rather than an aberration. The fascination therefore rests on the fact that serial killers are human.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Although childhood trauma has caused future criminal behavior, it’s not an excuse. Unfortunately, in 2018 alone, 678,000 children were reportedly abused in the United States. But that doesn’t mean that they’ll become serial killers or criminals. Therefore, there's more than a bad past that makes someone a criminal.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] Childhood abuse doesn’t cause someone to become a serial killer. It takes a lot more to make someone a serial killer.