Since we are on the subject of family, childhood, etc. here are some more quotes from Robert Ressler's book, Whoever Fights Monsters:
p.82
"let me state unequivocally that there is no such thing as the person who at age thirty-five suddenly changes from being perfectly normal and erupts into totally evil, disruptive, murderous behavior. The behaviors that are precursors to murder have been present and developing in that person's life for a long, long time - since childhood.
...
"though the homes seemed to outward appearances to be normal, they were in fact dysfunctional. Half of our subjects had mental illness in their immediate family. Half had parents who had been involved in criminal activities. Nearly 70 percent had a familial history of alcohol or drug abuse. All the murderers - every single one - were subjected to serious emotional abuse during their childhoods. And all of them developed into what psychiatrists label as sexually dysfunctional adults, unable to sustain a mature, consensual relationship with another adult.
"From birth to age six or seven, studies have shown, the most important adult figure in a child's life is the mother, and it is in this time period that the child learns what love is. Relationships between our subjects and their mothers were uniformly cool, distant, unloving, neglectful. There was very little touching, emotional warmth, or training in the ways in which normal human beings cherish one another and demonstrate their affection and interdependence. These children were deprived of something more important than money - love. They ended up paying for that deprivation during the remainder of their lives, and society suffered, too, because their crimes removed many people from the world and their assaultive behavior left alive equally as many victims who remain permanently scarred.
"The abuse that the children endured was both physical and mental. Society has understood somewhat that physical abuse is a precursor to violence, but the emotional component may be as important. One woman propped her infant son in a card-board box in front of the television set, and left for work; later, she'd put him in a playpen, toss in some food, and let the TV set be the baby-sitter until she came home again. A second man reported to us that he had been confined to his room during his childhood evenings; when he wandered into the living room at such times, he was shooed away and told that evening was the time when his mother and father wanted to be alone together; he grew up believing he was an unwanted boarder in his own home.
"These children grew up in an environment in which their own actions were ignored, and in which there were no limits set on their behavior. It is part of the task of parenting to teach children what is right and wrong; these were the children who managed to grow up without being taught that poking something into a puppy's eye is harmful and should not be done, or that destroying property is against the rules. The task of the first half-dozen years of life is socialization, of teaching children to understand that they live in a world that encompasses other people as well as themselves, and that proper interaction with other people is essential. The children who grow up to murder never truly comprehend the world in other than egocentric terms, because their teachers - principally their mothers - do not train them properly in the important matter."
