In 1968, 11 year-old Mary Bell walked into a Newcastle courtroom and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter for the slayings of two toddler boys (Fraser & Alderson, 2001). Martin Brown (4) and Brian Howe (3) were strangled to death all because Bell wanted to do so for the sole pleasure and excitement associated with killing (Seamark & Sims, 2009). Bell’s early life certainly paved way for her atrocities a short few years later. Reports from family members and witnesses claimed to have seen Bell’s mother giving her sleeping pills disguised as sweets, in the hopes of getting rid of the child (Sereny, 1998). At the ripe age of 3, Bell was forced into sexual acts with other men by her own mother (Sereny, 1998). These traumatic events was compounded …show more content…
To do so, it must be point to examine Bell’s childhood and all she had to endure. While there is no justification for the death of Brian Howe and Martin Brown, there might be an explanation as to why Bell did what she did. The trauma that Mary Bell endured in early childhood is perhaps the key to providing an answer to the why of the case. Trauma history is universal in children populations suffering from CD (Greenwald, 2002). Trauma is a key characteristic in the etiology of CD, especially when examined with features like lack of empathy, impulsivity, and anger (Greenwald, 2002). Having to be repeatedly subjected to neglect by her own mother it would not be hard to reconcile why Bell grew to be so angry. It certainly did not help that the attention she was given by her mother was as negative as it can get – she was only paid attention to when her mother wanted to use her for the gratification of other men. The sexual abuse Bell suffered at the hands of her caregiver falls in line with research in which this kind of abuse is significantly correlated with CD symptoms (Podurski, et al., 2014).Of the risk factors associated with CD, Bell’s development of the disorder was seemingly associated with the trauma model of disorder. However, within the negative childhood environment, there were other factors embedded that contributed to the overall trauma experience. Bell’s mother showed a severe lack of good parenting skills, most notably maltreatment. Which led to disruption between any positive parent-child interactions (Mash & Wolfe, 2016). The aggression shown by strangling and then describing it with fondness is typical of a child that was physically abused by their parent. The link between abuse and aggression lies in the child’s inability to process social information properly (Mash & Wolfe, 2016). Bell’s
On June 9th, 1959, a 14 year old boy named Steven Truscott was seen giving 12 year old Lynne Harper a ride on his bike, not knowing that he would be accused and found guilty of sexually assaulting and strangling her to death. For the next 50 years he would seek justice for being wrongfully imprisoned and finally get it. Steven Truscott was a popular and athletic teenage boy who lived with both his parents and his three siblings in the Ontario town of Clinton. Lynne Harper was a girl who also lived with both of her parents as well as her younger brother, whose life ended shortly.
The Birmingham paper of Wednesday morning, December 5, contained headlines that would have been enough to capture anyone’s attention. On December 4, the body of a nicely-dressed girl around the age of eight or nine years old was found floating in the lake in the Birmingham suburbs known as East Lake. Her body was found by two teenage boys by the names of John Keith and Ben Cluberson who were innocently playing in a boat. The Jefferson County Coroner conducted an initial exam and determined that the cause of her death to be murder. Unable to identify the little girl, they placed her body for viewing in hopes someone would recognize her. Just a few days later, the local butchers identified her as being May Hawes, the oldest daughter of Richard and Emma Hawes.
Just recently, a middle-ages man has been captured by the local police. Harris County Sheriff’s Office, Thomas Gilliland reported to the Houston Chronicle, ‘…that the relationship between Conley and the victims — who ranged in age from 6 to 50 — remains unclear.’ After the discovery, deputies applied capital murder to the bodies of six-children—ages 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, and 13. A David R. Conley was allegedly involved in an upset with the deputies that ended after the accused killer was persuaded to give in to the demands of the Harris County authorities. On a tip, deputies entered the residence to confront the abusive killing. However, according to sources—at a news conference Sunday afternoon—Chief Deputy Rim Cannon announce that the degree of
On October 20, 2002, an eight-year-old boy revealed that a man had persuaded him and had taken him away to an old house and tried to sodomize him. The day after, the child’s mother saw a man similar to what the boy had described as his assailant. Exactly when the mother asked in the matter of whether this was the assailant, he responded that it was. Police were requested, and the man, Ricardo Rachell, was arrested.
June 20th, 2001, Andrea Yates, one by one, drowned her five children and laid their lifeless corpses side by side on her bed. She then called her emergency services, as well as her husband, telling them that they needed to come to her home. As she walked out of her home, still dripping wet with the bathwater, she was arrested. By killing her children, she believed that she was ‘saving them’. Her reasoning behind this was that the devil was after
She is cute, fresh, perky, and flirtatious while she is also steady, attentive, sharp, and patient. These are the characteristics of Mary Anne Bell, the girlfriend of Mark Fossie in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. This book is a collection of short stories about the experience of United States soldiers in the Vietnam War. One thing that the men carry into Vietnam is innocence, but for the ones who survive, this is not something that they carry home. The ninth chapter of the book, titled “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” embodies this loss of innocence through the story of Mary Anne Bell told by Rat Kiley, a medic in Tim O’Brien’s company. While at first it seems that this chapter serves as an amusing relief to the darkness and death of the war stories, this chapter about Mary Anne actually reveals her as a symbol of the arrogance the Americans feel, but quickly forget, during their service in Vietnam.
Born in the south of Louisiana, and then raised for the rest of her life down here in the Bay Area. My grandma, Patricia Wright, gave me the opportunity to interview her about life and the up bringing as a black child, black teen and a black woman in her era. With my research I went through some of the sources from in class discussions,but happen to relate more with other scholarly sources. I was able to get deep and discuss how it was for her socially, economically, politically, and culturally where she lived.
" On July 29, 1994, seven year old Megan Kanka, from Hamilton Township, New Jersey, was walking home after playing at a friends house. She had almost reached her front door when Jesse Timmendequas, 33, a landscaper who had lived across the street for a year invited her over to pet his new puppy ( Richard 1 )." " When Megan followed him inside, he led her to an upstairs bedroom, strangled her unconscious with his belt, raped her and then asphyxiated her to death with a plastic bag. Timmendequas then placed Megan’s body in a tool box, drove it in his pick-up truck to a near-by soccer field and dumped her body in some bushes ( Jerome 1 )." This, and the tragic murder of Amanda Wengert, was how the name was developed. But in my paper I did not discuss the murder and raping of Amanda Wengert.
Howe (2010) states “The majority of parents who maltreat their children have problems metalizing their children’s psychological condition. Their own histories tend to be ones of rejection, abuse, neglect, trauma and loss. Never having been fully recognized as an independent, complex psychological being themselves, they have problems relating to their children as complex, separate psychological beings” (pg. 336).
Traumatized children show outcomes of negative physical and mental health once entering adulthood. DeJong talks about the different types of stress. In this section of the article, the author describes the difference between positive stress, tolerable stress, and toxic stress. DeJong describes tolerable stress as having supportive relationships, whereas he describes toxic stress as having a lack of supportive relationships. The author states that experiencing toxic stress in early in childhood could lead to child traumatic stress. According to DeJong, “Child traumatic stress is the physical and emotional responses of a child to events that threaten the life or physical integrity of the child or of someone critically important to the child” (205). Traumatic stress occurs in response to a single traumatic event or reoccurring traumatic events. The author states traumatic stress could lead to toxic stress if it makes changes to the way the body reacts to it. As the article continues, the author begins to describe the effects of toxic stress in multiple body systems. DeJong describes the effects of toxic stress on the social/ behavioral system, the brain and neuroendocrine system, and the molecular and genetic levels. The tone of these sections of the article is very informal. The author did a great job of providing an explanation of the consequences of domestic violence exposure to children, as well as
A local 13-year-old girl had identified Dail as the man who came through her window one night and held a knife to her throat as he raped her. Dail had no idea that he could be arrested because he didn’t even know what the police were talking about. With no prior record, Dail was released on bond until March 1989. Dail refused a plea bargain to plead no contest to allude lecivious act, which would have given him three years of probation, because he knew he
Another sign was the fact that she would abuse the family pets whenever no one else was around. As a result of Jessica’s behavior, it was hard for the services to find a foster home to put her in that was willing to keep her for a long period of time. Jessica’s behavior certainly showed signs of prior abuse based on the violent treatment that she showed towards the animals. I believe that Jessica reacted this way because of the abuse that she dealt with at home, and she felt that it was hard to trust others including the ones who were trying to love her. According to prior modules, I have learned that the cycle of violence begins with the abuse of children at an early age. Dr. Perry states that “children are not resilient, children are malleable” in which is describes that children that are abused has an effect on their brain development which causes them be violent themselves, such as in this case, although he also states that most children who are abused or neglected do not become violent. As stated in Module 6, “the child’s behavior represents an adaptation to the environment (an environment of violence). The child is exercising survival options in relationship to the violence and / or neglect that the child has experienced.” In spite of
Child abuse is a term impacted by copious multidimensional and interactive factors that relate to its origins and effects upon a child's developing capacities and which may act as a catalyst to broader, longer-term implications for adulthood. Such maltreatment may be of a sexual, physical, emotional or neglectful nature, each form holding a proportion of shared and abuse-specific psychological considerations (Mash & Wolfe, 2005). Certainly in terms of the effects / impairments of abuse, developmental factors have been identified across all classifications of child abuse, leading to a comparably greater risk of emotional / mental health problems in adult life within the general population
Throughout the ages, media and society have been concerned over children. Instead of youth as folk devils, children nowadays serve as the victims of folk devils (Critcher, 2002, p.532). With these trigger events popping up, stereotypes are gradually formed. In recent British history, Paedophile had become one of the most terrifying folk-devils (Jenkins, 1992, p.99). Paedophile behaviour is a moral panic one legal case and the panic is generally fuelled by the sensationalism of media in
We never know what is going through a child’s mind when being a witness of abuse, especially when they are young. When a child grows up at such horrid environment, they're view in life changes automatically making them believe that this is the way of life. As these abused children get older, they do not know how to control what they feel in the inside and end up expressing it by taking their anger out on others, simply because that’s what they have “learned” in life”. “Abused children cannot express emotions safely. As a result, the emotions get stuffed down, coming out in unexpected ways. Adult survivors of child abuse can struggle with unexplained anxiety, depression, or anger” (Child Abuse and Neglect 1).however, though, the child does not evolve into a negative environment by being abused, the path that could also lead to a young child’s mind into negativity would be witnessing any kind of abuse within the house.