http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/12617959.htm
Posted on Sun, Sep. 11, 2005
Psychopathy, pedophilia may be caused by genetic factors
Minds of sexually deviant may not be 'normal,' social elements may also exist
By Matt Crenson
AP National Writer
For months, anyone could follow the epic struggle in the mind of Joseph Edward Duncan III - live, on the Internet.
''It is a battle between me and my demons,'' Duncan wrote in his Web log on April 24. ''I'm afraid, very afraid. If they win then a lot of people will be badly hurt.''
Three weeks later the demons won, authorities say.
The toll? Three members of an Idaho family bludgeoned to death. Two children dragged to a remote part of Montana, where both were sexually molested and the 9-year-old boy was murdered.
Brain abnormalities: It's hard to conceive a heart black enough to commit such evil acts. But researchers are beginning to understand how another organ, the brain, can conjure the demons that haunt Duncan and other violent sexual predators.
Many, perhaps most, dangerous sexual predators appear to possess one or more brain abnormalities that predispose them to their extreme criminal behavior. Those defects can be caused by traumatic childhood experiences, genetics or events that happen as a person's brain develops in the womb before birth.
Freudians might find the seeds of Duncan's behavior in his youth - a lonely childhood, a domineering mother, his parents' tumultuous relationship.
An unhappy upbringing certainly increases a boy's chances of growing up to be a violent sex offender. But if an unhappy childhood were all it took to create a sadistic pedophile, every town in America would live under perpetual Amber Alert.
Growing up: Long before the carnage at the Groene home in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Duncan had unleashed his demons on the world. In 1980, at the age of 17, he earned a 20-year prison sentence for raping and torturing a 14-year-old boy at gunpoint. After his arrest for that crime, he told authorities that he had raped 13 boys by the time he was 16. And authorities now believe that while free on parole in 1997, Duncan kidnapped, raped and murdered a 10-year-old boy in Southern California.
He moved to Fargo, N.D., in 2000.
Right and wrong: Psychopathy is a personality disorder that afflicts a tiny fraction of the general public, but about 25 percent of the prison population. Psychopaths are impulsive and self-centered, with little capacity for guilt, fear or remorse. They take great pleasure in manipulating and exploiting other people to get what they want and tend to live disorganized, nomadic lives on society's fringes.
''Psychopaths do know right from wrong, they can tell you right from wrong. They just don't care,'' said Kent A. Kiehl, a psychiatrist at the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center in Hartford, Conn.
Kiehl's research suggests that psychopaths have abnormalities in the paralimbic system, a far-flung network of brain structures associated with emotion and emotional memories.
People with brain damage in one component of the paralimbic system, the orbitofrontral cortex, often behave impulsively and selfishly. When epilepsy causes damage to the anterior temporal lobe - another element of the system - the result can be inappropriate sexual behavior, problems maintaining personal relationships and a lack of empathy.
Brain activities: Experiments indicate that psychopaths have decreased brain activity in all of those regions. Now Kiehl and his colleagues want to know why.
''Most likely, as with most disorders, there's multiple pathways,'' Kiehl said.
For example, abuse or stress during childhood could affect how the paralimbic system develops. Brain damage due to a head injury might induce psychopathic behavior.
The role of genes: But genes almost certainly play a role. A recent study of 7-year-olds by British researchers found that if one in a pair of twins has psychopathic tendencies - especially, a callous and unemotional personality - the other is more likely to share those qualities, as long as the two are identical rather than fraternal.
Evolution's factor: Some psychologists believe that psychopathy is not so much a disease as an evolutionary artifact. During the millennia of human history before there were criminal justice systems and written records, they say, a small number of psychopaths could lie, cheat and steal their way to success.
In a 1995 paper, the late sociobiologist Linda Mealey argued that evolution created two types of psychopath. The first is purely genetic, born without the capacity for normal human emotion.
The other type of psychopathy is also genetic. But it is only produced in the kind of stressful or chaotic social environment where following the rules does a person no good.
For example, a child who grew up in an abusive clan might produce high levels of cortisol - a stress hormone. The majority of people might have genes for psychopathic behavior that are turned on only in a cortisol-rich brain.
If Duncan ever did have a chance to become a well-balanced individual, he lost it early. Court records indicate that his family moved constantly because of his father's military career. His parents fought incessantly and he rarely, if ever, made friends. He was often teased by his peers. By his own admission, Duncan committed his first sexual assault at the age of 12. The victim was a 5-year-old boy.
A pedophile's mind: How could Duncan have developed his deviant sexual attraction at such a young age?
Like psychopathy, pedophilia appears to originate in a number of ways. But just as the various elements of psychopathy all appear to relate to the paralimbic system, the various paths to pedophilia all seem to pass through a particular part of the brain.
Located just above the ears, the temporal lobe is involved in face and object recognition, musical ability, personality and sexual behavior. If epilepsy or some other condition causes damage to the temporal lobe, a person can become sexually attracted to inappropriate stimuli, even inanimate objects.
Working with several colleagues, Galynker has performed brain scans on 22 pedophiles and found that they had below-normal activity in the temporal lobe. Other studies have found a similar pattern. And medical journals describe rare cases of men who began molesting children when tumors invaded the same part of their brains; when the tumors were removed, their pedophilia subsided.
''There's something different about the brains of pedophiles,'' said Vernon L. Quinsey, a psychologist at Queen's University in Canada. ''But what exactly it is, it's hard to say so far.''
But Quinsey believes it is more likely the tendency toward pedophilia arises even before birth. Some researchers have proposed that male homosexuality can result if the mother's immune system attacks her son's cells in utero, disrupting the process that gradually differentiates male from female brains.
''We think that some similar mechanism might also relate to pedophilia,'' Quinsey said.
Quinsey proposes that pedophiles have the part of the apparatus that codes for robustness and youth - but they lack the requirement for sexual maturity. So they focus their sexual energies on children.
Quinsey's hypothesis is beyond the ability of current science to test. But whatever it is about their brains that attracts pedophiles to children, it is clear they have no choice in the matter, said Fred S. Berlin, founder of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins University.
Finding middle ground: That leaves society with a difficult question - how to handle someone who will never be truly ''cured'' of his deviance?
In his Internet diary, Duncan railed against sex offender registration laws and complained about police officers checking up on him at his apartment.
Yet sex offender laws gave Duncan enough privacy, freedom and anonymity to go to Idaho three months later with rape and murder on his mind.
Even a Washington state law that allows for the indefinite commitment of sex offenders after they have served their prison terms failed to contain Duncan. Before releasing him from prison in 2000, the state considered holding him for treatment under the law. But because Duncan had been convicted of only one offense before going to prison for virtually all of his adult life, there was no way to demonstrate legally that he couldn't control himself in public - he had never really had a chance to live there
