To understand the violent criminal, says Richard E Tremblay, imagine a 2-year-old boy doing the things that make the terrible twos terrible — grabbing, kicking, pushing, punching, biting.
Now imagine him doing all this with the body and resources of an 18-year-old.
You have just pictured both a perfectly normal toddler and a typical violent criminal as Dr Tremblay, a developmental psychologist at University College Dublin in Ireland, sees them — the toddler as a creature who reflexively uses physical aggression to get what he wants; the criminal as the rare person who has never learned to do otherwise.
In other words, dangerous criminals don’t turn violent. They just stay that way.
These findings have been replicated in multiple large studies by several researchers on several continents — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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