Psychopathy is defined as a constellation of affective, interpersonal, and behavioral characteristics including impulsivity, irresponsibility, shallow emotions, lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse, pathological lying, and persistent violation of social norms and expectations. Excessive violence has been shown to be related to adolescent homicides, suggesting an unambivalent need to maximize injuries or a tendency to show off to peers. About one-third of homicides committed by adolescents are carried out by two or more perpetrators. The motive "robbery" was high suggesting that among adolescent homicide offenders acts of instrumental violence are more frequent.
Sixty-four percent of the adolescents were intoxicated by alcohol and 21% were under the influence of drugs at the time of the killing however, as many as 32% of the offenders were considered not to suffer from a mental illness or substance abuse. Īccording to a recent study on Finnish homicidal adolescents, approximately 50% were diagnosed as having a conduct disorder or a personality disorder, while 7% of these offenders suffered from schizophrenia.
As many as 92% of the young homicidal offenders are boys. Approximately 9% of homicides each year are committed by individuals aged less than 20 years. The rates per capita have for decades been about double the rate of the most of the other West European democracies and triple the rate of the other Nordic countries. The annual number of police-reported homicides has varied between 100 and 155 during the last ten years. In 2006, the total rate per 100,000 inhabitants of homicidal crimes reported to the police was 2.6 in a population of 5.3 million. Recognizing their characteristics, especially in life course development, would facilitate effective prevention and intervention efforts.Īmong Western European nations, Finland has an exceptionally high rate of homicide. Homicidal adolescents with psychopathy-like personality character form a special subgroup among other homicidal youngsters. The adults, however, showed more both affective and interpersonal features of psychopathy. Homicidal boys behaved as antisocially as the homicidal adults. They also more often had parental criminal history as well as homicide history of parents or near relatives than the group scoring low on the PCL-R. These boys significantly more often had a crime history before the index homicide, more frequently used excessive violence during the index homicide, more rarely lived with both parents until 16 years of age, had more institutional or foster home placements in childhood, had more school difficulties, more often had received special education, and, more often had contact with mental health services prior to age 18 years than boys scoring low on the PCL-R. One in five homicidal male adolescents met criteria for psychopathic personality using a PCL-R total score of 26 or higher. The adolescent group was divided into two subgroups according to PCL-R total scores. Adults scored significantly higher on factor 1 (interpersonal/affective) and facets 1 (interpersonal) and 2 (affective). No significant differences existed between the adolescents and adults in PCL-R total scores, factor 2 (social deviance) scores, or in facets 3 (lifestyle) and 4 (antisocial). Offence and offender characteristics were collected from the files and a file-based assessment of psychopathic traits was performed using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) by trained raters. A random sample of 57 adult male homicide offenders was selected as a comparison group.
Methodsįorensic psychiatric examination reports and crime reports of all 15 to19- year- old male Finnish offenders who had been subjected to a forensic psychiatric examination and convicted for a homicide during 1995–2004 were collected (n = 57). A further aim was to investigate associations between psychopathic traits and offender and offence characteristics in adolescent homicides.
The aim of the study was to evaluate psychopathy-like personality traits in a nationwide consecutive sample of adolescent male homicide offenders and to compare the findings with those of a randomly sampled adult male homicide offender group.
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