THE question of human evil has been troubling some of our leading psychiatrists this week. They are debating whether it exists and how we might measure it. But the idea of evil also has a strange sexual allure for some women, to judge from the adulation being received by 16-year-old Luke Mitchell, serving 20 years for butchering his 14-year-old girlfriend Jodi Jones.
Mitchell has been bombarded with sexually explicit letters from teenage fans, and schoolgirls have been photographed swapping pictures of the teenage killer outside the court where he was found guilty.
And Mitchell is hardly the only murderous male to receive such attentions: Ian Huntley regularly receives marriage proposals, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, gets scores of letters from female admirers who, apart from their correspondence habits, seem perfectly ordinary.
Evil is a fretful subject for mind doctors, given that it is not a diagnosis but a judgment based on morality and theology. Greater insight into evil has been provided by the body of evidence linking neurological abnormality with extreme criminality.
But, as the psychiatrist Dr Sean Spence outlined in his lecture Cruel and Unusual at the Royal Institution this week, it also complicates matters no end. For if evil crimes are associated with specific faults in brain structure, should those who possess them, but who have not yet committed a crime, be detained just in case? The new Mental Health Bill suggests they should. But a recent analysis concludes that to prevent one violent act over a year, six potential perpetrators would need to be incarcerated. In trying to prevent evil like this, society imposes evil, and probably with no great social benefit.
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For perpetrators of extraordinary evil look remarkably normal in psychiatric terms. Never was this more tellingly shown than in the last programme of Laurence Rees’s compelling BBC series on Auschwitz this week, which showed the ordinary, unprepossessing men who gassed thousands each day but returned to the bosom of their families at night as if they’d just finished a shift at a car factory.
Perhaps in hoping to find causes for evil, such as abuse during childhood or neurological deficit, we are trying to disguise a truth about human beings: that the potential for evil lives within all of us.
Last week an American psychiatrist called on his profession to recognise evil when assessing violent offenders. “We know from experience who these people are and how they behave and it’s time to give them their proper appellation,” said Dr Michael Stone of Columbia University.
He has already developed a 22-level hierarchy of evil behaviour derived from studies of 500 perpetrators of breathtakingly awful acts of violence. His “evil-ometer” follows the publication of a “depravity scale” by another US psychiatrist which rates horror using a points system.
Weight on your mind
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WOMEN and men use different strategies to detect if they are overweight. While equal numbers of each sex told an NOP poll for the cholesterol charity Heart UK that they rely on the bathroom scales, more women than men use the “favourite clothing” test — a pair of jeans or a top that, if they can squeeze into it, means they’re in top trim. Men simply stand before the mirror and pull a Tarzan pose. Both strategies offer more chance of joy than coldly scientific scales — so long as you breathe in.
Simon Crompton is away