Psychology professor David Canter on motives for terrorism
- April 30, 2007 2:07 PM |
- By Your Voice
CBC.ca welcomed David Canter, a professor of psychology at the University of Liverpool, on Thurs., May 3, 2007, to answer your questions on terrorism and the motives of the extremists who commit terrorist acts.
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- Download the audio of the interview (Runs 22:00)
Prof. Canter is the director of the Centre for Investigative Psychology and was host of the Faces in Terrorism conference that took place in Liverpool, U.K., last week. He is best known as a pioneer in scientific criminal profiling, and has also done research on people who commit acts of terror.
"We now know that terrorists, even suicide bombers, are not mad, or psychopaths, or brainwashed. So there is a real challenge to find out what makes them tick," he said.
The conference April 25 and 26 looked into the psychology of terrorist acts, including kidnappings and cyberterrorism, terrorism's links to organized crime and whether the actions of Islamist extremists are truly rooted in Islam.
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Comments (7)
As with many crimes in general, one approach suggested as a means of eliminating extremist actions is essentially to give them decent jobs. Economic development is often offered as solution to poverty, despair and the influence of radical groups on poor and often illiterate populations with the general idea being that if someone has a dependable job, a family and a future they should be far less likely to risk losing them.
Does this mesh with your research and is it a viable general approach to the issue?
Prof. Canter:
It's certainly relevant to certain sub-groups. For instance, in areas like the Occupied Territories, in Palestine, there are lots of indications that people suffer daily harassment, that they don't have jobs and they don't see any way out, and that those individuals because of those experiences are prepared to kill themselves in a way of helping their community.
But there are plenty of other individuals who are not part some deprived or degraded situation, and this is certainly true of the 9/11 bombers, of the 7/7 bombers in the United Kingdom and of the bombers in Spain. They all came out of reasonably economically sound, reasonably well-established family backgrounds. In fact, many of them, interestingly, are getting involved in these activities despite their family. Their family tries desperately to stop them getting caught up in these activities.
Could Mr. Canter elaborate on why it is felt that the terrorist persona is not "brainwashed" or otherwise pre-programmed?
Is it not similar to what happened with the "Hitler Youth" during WW II, where a whole generation was programmed with the same mindset (and hatred, or enemy)?
Prof. Canter:
There are differences from the Hitler Youth, and again we have to be careful not to talk about all terrorists in exactly the same way.
[My] comments about the nature of terrorists do come from a growing number of studies where people who have been captured and have been convicted for terrorist acts have been interviewed and studied by psychologists.
In fact, I have a close colleague at the moment who's interviewing people in India who have been convicted of some really horrific bomb blasts and other terrorist activities. By talking to them, it's possible to establish that they're certainly not wild-eyed madmen in the conventional or popular sense of what you might expect of a medieval assassin. They are people who can argue very logically and very coherently.
For instance, one of the individuals that we interviewed in prison, he's managed to set up quite a tidy little business that enabled him to get enough money to pay for this daughter's wedding from the deals he did in prison. So, this is a person who's not a really bizarre individual. This is somebody who can deal with other and have a lot of very effective social interactions.
They're not mentally disturbed and they often don't seem to have even the type of psychopathic personality that you will mind sometimes in the very violent men who commit a lot of assaults or murders in the prison population.
Clearly, people do think, then, that they must be brainwashed. Brainwashing is a strange notion. It owes more to fiction and to oversimplification than it does to what really happens in daily life.
The initial ideas of brainwashing related back particularly to the Korean War, where people were put in solitary confinement and they were insulted and beaten. They were put in a situation where they really didn't know if they were coming or going and whether they would ever survive. As part of that process they were given to believe that if they behaved in a particular way they would be more likely to survive. So, they were changed by these very dramatic experiences.
That's not what's happened to the young men who've been involved in a lot of the terrorist atrocities in Europe and the United States over the last few years. These are people who have found their way into terrorist activities.
Why is it that most terrorists seem to be attacking innocent people? if I had a motive and the hatred to commit such an act I would make sure I got the source of my anger and not average everyday people!
Prof. Canter:
The sub-group of terrorists who do attack innocent people are remarkably similar to the recent spree-killing shooting in Virginia. It's a generalized anger and annoyance with a group that represents to them the target that they feel demeaned by, insulted by or that they want to have some impact upon.
So, they don't see these individuals as innocent. They see them as representative of the enemy in some very general sense.
I think it is very important to realize – and we've found this in our interviews with terrorists – that they have a very cut-and-dried way of seeing the world. There are the people that they regard as part of their group and then absolutely everybody else is some external out-group that they feel legitimate to attack, and they don't understand the subtleties and complexities of society and that's why they can kill people, without any remorse, who have really not played any role at all in the problems these terrorists see themselves suffering.
Unfortunately throughout the past few thousand years we have been fighting each other under the disguise of fulling our religious duty. It is disgusting to think that we have not learned from our mistakes.
Power, money and influence have really been the backers of conflict.
My question is what do the Islamic fundamentalists feel they can achieve if they win? Power? Money? Influence?
Prof. Canter:
I think first of all we have to be very alert to the fact that there are plenty of people involved in terrorist activity who don't buy into Islamic belief systems. There's no particularly strong and inevitable relationship between Islam and terrorism. It's very important that we all understand that and that we don't assume that terrorist equals being a Muslim. That's not the link at all.
There are sub-groups, always have been, who will hijack a set of ideas. I always like the quote, "Who can't blame ideas on the people who hold them." Just because a certain group of very violent, nasty individuals claim that they are doing this in the name of religion doesn't actually necessarily mean that we have to blame religion.
There are Hindu sub-groups, there are Christian and Jewish sub-groups. There have been violent Buddhist sub-groups, and there are plenty of sub-groups that are atheists who will all take their ideals and their ideology as their explanation for why they want to commit violent crimes.
It appears that terrorism might attract frustrated males who seek some kind of notiarity. Is there a particular demographic which is associated with terrorism? Is it like crime, in that most of it is committed by young males? Are single men more involved than married men?
Prof. Canter:
That's certainly true for some sub-groups. It is interesting that an awful lot of terrorists are, indeed, young men. In fact, it's a generalization you can make that most of the trouble in the world is caused by young men.
This seems to be a stage in life – particularly late teens, early 20s – where individuals are trying to seek out their identity. They're trying to understand what sort of person they are and what significance they are going to be in the world. Often, these individuals, for a while anyway, go through a period where they see commitment to some sort of ideal as a way of giving meaning or identity to their lives. And it's this search for an ideal that makes them vulnerable to people offering them up these extreme, radical solutions.
It's worth pointing out that not all terrorists come out of religious fanatical sorts of groups. There's a whole strand of terrorists that actually emerges out of organized crime. These are individuals who are involved in all sorts of criminal activity and they decide that embracing some sort of notional ideology will give them more significance in the criminal community and may even give them more opportunities for crime than just sticking with the organized criminal groups they've been associated with in the past. So, they're an intriguing group, as well, who are actually hijacking the rhetoric, the vocabulary of terrorism in order to continue what they're doing just as criminals.
I do not mean to sound trite but there are always many tacit assumptions surrounding this topic so it may be helpful if you could define what or who a terrorist is exactly. I for one, find it a quite difficult thing to determine as the lines are so often blurred in almost every modern conflict but if we are to discuss their psychology then we have to know who we are talking about and what characteristics bind them together.
Prof. Canter:
That's a very good question. There are whole books devoted to trying to get that type of clarity, and I think it's very important to realize at the starting point that there are many different sorts of individuals, and many different sorts of situations that fall loosely under the heading of terrorism.
Broadly speaking, these are individuals who are trying to use acts of violence for political ends. The distinction from other sorts of criminal activity is that the terrorists are not trying to achieve some immediate personally or financial goal as part of their terrorist activity. What they are trying to do is have an influence over some broader political or social process.
They may well commit crimes to support their terrorist activity. They may rob banks in order to get money to buy weapons with, but when they're doing that they're straight forward criminals. But when they're then trying to impose their will on people through their acts of violence that's when we start calling them terrorists.
"Terrorist" and "terrorism" have become the usual refrains when describing the world's security problems since 9/11. My question is, is it appropriate to continue using these terms to define the actions and motives of peoples in different parts of the globe in often very different contexts?
Prof. Canter:
I think he's quite right. We have to very careful how we use these terms. In fact, many years ago I did some studies of these groups and they were called urban guerrillas. There was the idea that you had guerrillas in the countryside, these Maoist insurgents. These then came into the city and we referred to them as urban guerrillas. Over the years, this term has dropped out of use and people started using the term terrorist.
Like all these words, it starts becoming a very vague and general one. It's just anybody who causes terror and causes concern and anxiety. And that's necessarily particularly helpful. What we're trying to focus on are those groups who are using acts of violence for ideological and political ends.