Anthropologist and author Elliott Leyton on the Virginia Tech shootings
- April 20, 2007 3:27 PM |
- By Your Voice
On Monday, April 23, CBC.ca welcomed Prof. Elliott Leyton to answer your questions on mass murder and the Virginia Tech shootings.
- Download the audio of the interview (Runs 19:46)
Leyton is an anthropologist specializing in serial homicide. He has written or edited 11 books, including Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer and Sole Survivor: Children Who Murder their Families.
Leyton has been on the faculty of Queen's University of Belfast, the University of Toronto, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Warsaw in Poland, and Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he is currently professor emeritus of anthropology. He has lectured on homicide at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police College in Ottawa, the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va. and the National Police College in Poland.
A documentary on his work, The Man Who Studies Murder, aired on CBC's The Nature of Things in 2004.
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Comments (3)
Is 'mass murder' a recent happening in the history of humans? For how long have these happenings been recorded? If there is an increase in the number how do you explain this?
Prof. Leyton:
This numbers business gets very dodgy.
We have very good records starting from the middle of the 19th century, and they get better and better. Multiple murder - for recreational purposes, that is very personal purposes, rather than the kind of mass murder that is routinely waged by armies and governments and the nobility - this kind of personal thing has been going on for a very long time. It began to increase slowly and subtly, at the beginning of the 19th century, and continued to increase right up to our time.
I had originally thought it was a leap forward, a huge quantum leap in numbers after the Second World War, but that's only because I was writing the first book in the world on the phenomenon, and had access to much poorer data than later commentators had. I looks like, while there has been an increase, it's been a slow and gradual climb with a few blips, rather than a catastrophic jump.
It's common knowledge that religious belief is a powerful motivator for violence, and some of the greatest wars and genocides were fought on religious grounds. Nevertheless, religious people often say that atheism has been a larger force for violence in the world, citing Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and others as being prime examples. Do you see religious faith as a motivator for some of these crimes, and do you see non-belief as any sort of a motivator for violence?
Dr. Leyton:
That's an interesting question. I hadn't thought of it for a long time.
It is very rare to have anything resembling a gentle, spiritual religious belief among any of these kinds of people, and that's exactly what you'd expect, because a pleasant and invigorating spirituality is a form of love and that's not an emotion that these people feel.
You might find occasionally very extremist versions of fundamentalist religions among them, or at least believed by them or proclaimed by them, but that kind of fundamentalism is a form of hate, typically.
What is it about North America that makes serial killings and mass murders of the Virginia Tech type (as opposed to genocide, for example) so much more prevalent than elsewhere?
Dr. Leyton:
These kinds of killings occur everywhere. We've two or three big ones, horrible ones, in Germany in the last few years, and several in France. So, it's by no means unknown. There was a couple of horrible mass killings in England, plus the Scottish ones. It's not unique to us.
I think the most balanced and fair perspective is that provided by Philip Jenkins, a criminologist in the States, who said that as a rule, the mass and serial killing rate is one per cent of the murder rate. So, if you have a very high homicide rate, like the United States does, it's unparalleled in the developed, Western world, then you would expect a similarly inflated number of serial and mass killings. Whereas, European and Canadian murder rates, in general, are very low, and we have comparably low numbers of serial and mass killers.
The only interesting thing about the Canadian [mass killings] is that the three higher-educational mass murders have all taken place in Quebec, all taken place in Montreal, and all have been perpetrated by immigrants or the children of immigrants. I wondered about what that meant. It may mean nothing because it's such a statistically small sample, but it certainly interested me.