Indian Journal of Health and Wellbeing

Ameen Abdulla ¹, Baby Shari ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Psychology, University of Calicut, Kerala, IN

Abstract

Crime has been taking place since time immemorial. The most common definition about "Criminal Behaviour" is that it portrays any behaviour that goes against or violates law, whether the offender is caught or not. Likewise a criminal is an individual who commits an act that violates the strict rules and regulations of the society, thereby harming or not harming another individual, property and so on intentionally or unintentionally. The various causes that lead to a crime to take place are neurological deformities, genetic trait, situational factors, and uncomfortable bad experiences undergone in childhood such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, and emotional abuse and so on. These are nothing but various forms of child abuse that violate a child's right to live a happy life. All the victims may not experience in the same way. It is usually seen that majority of these individuals take along these experiences to their adulthood in a complex manner. Sexual abuse is studied in depth in the present study. This paper attempts to find out whether these nightmare experiences make the victim become an offender himself. On conducting regular semi structured interviews with prisoners housed in various prisons of Kerala, mainly focusing on rape offenders, paedophiles and child abusers the investigators were able to see that most of the offenders had gone through sexual abuse in their childhood, being un-intervened and that had changed their lives drastically. Most of the offenders kept coming back for the same type of offense, time and again. Some psychological factors like rejection sensitivity and attachment patterns are identified as intervening variables. The details are discussed in the paper.

Keywords

Criminal, Child Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Attachment Pattern, Rejection Sensitivity.

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Ameen Abdulla ¹, Baby Shari ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Psychology, University of Calicut, Calicut, IN

Abstract

Terrorism is a word that has long been associated with heinous and ruthless acts. The psychological causes of terrorism have been the topic of interest to researchers since the 1970's when they began trying to create psychological profiles of terrorists. Their task has been very strong and enduring battle, since most terrorists are not available for psychological testing. People, who found, drive or lead a group forward intellectually or strategically are likely to be different than those that follow Studies report that many experience mild stress reactions and many develop clniically significant psychological problems.The psychology of aterrorist consists of terrorist motivation. Many join terrorist outfits out of boredom and desire to have an action packed adventure. Motivation plays an important role in making terrorists do various acts of ruthlessness. A psychopath cannot be a terrorist as they are unreliable, cannot be controlled and their actions are personal. Terrorists are fanatics as they are cool, logical planning individuals whose rewards are not merely financial but ideological and political. Suicide terrorists have a self destruction ideology which makes them highly dangerous. There are various psychological factors that are needed for conformity of a person to be a terrorist. According to Bandura (1990), there are four techniques that are used by terrorist outfits to separate themselves from the mainstream society. In most terrorist groups women are recruited in a highly sophisticated manner as women tend to more coolin tense situations. Lochte considered female terrorists to be stronger,dedicated and more ruthless in their work assigned to them Thepapertheoreticallywilldoa psychological analysis of terrorist behavior and how far psychological influences are being done to bring up a terrorist and also to utilize in their acts to the public.

Keywords

Terrorism, Psychological Influences.

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