Is it weird of me?

Post Reply New Topic

That in cases of especially heinous crimes, such as cases of serial murder, I tend to feel more sorry for the killer than I do for his/her victims?

I feel sorry for them because they have never really known love. Also, I think that none of them really have a choice as to how they are, they were simply born that way, or made that way over time. I do feel bad for the victims too of course, but I don't really think about them as much for some reason, because I know that everyone is gonna feel sorry for the victims.

I'm also a bit cynical about the fact that many victims, understandably but still, want nothing but revenge, and cynical because humanity itself is kind of a cruel species, so why would the victims' families be that much different? Isn't the typical human not THAT much different from a serial killer when it comes down to it? I mean the people who participate in genocide are not monsters for the most part; they are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Don't get me wrong, I hate violence and cruelty of all kinds. I am a pacifist and I condemn serial killing as much as I condemn war and the death penalty. But I can't really feel that righteously hateful towards serial killers because I, and almost everyone in Western society, indirectly supports murder, slavery, rape, pollution and other evil things via our consumerism. I end up ... just feeling sorry for them, because their very existence is tragic. Serial killers are the product of the general lovelessness and exclusivity of the human species.

I don't sympathise with serial killers. Then again, I don't have massive amounts of sympathy for the victims of murders or their families. I do care a little bit, but nowhere near as much as other people seem to. I find the whole reaction that people have to things like the Bulger killers and Baby P incomprehensible. It's always worse when a child is killed, to most people - but to me, the fact that it was a kid doesn't make much difference. I always feel weird for this and I put it down to being on the autism spectrum. I don't mourn death in general to the same extent as other people. This is not a popular trait to have when growing up around the Irish Catholic community in England.

I sympathize with certain killers more than their victims. Such as "school shootings" I was the kid in the position of the gun a long time ago. Of course I never brought a gun to school, but my point is this that when you don't have anywhere to go. When no one listens to you, the students continue to isolate and tease you. The principal and the people in position of authority will not listen to you, you become very frustrated. You have no recourse and sometimes you take out that recourse in a sitaution where you do. I feel and completely understand why someone would bring a gun to school. I absolutely understand and sympathize a lot of the time with the school shooter when they discover that he was heavily bullied and isolated. That isn't good for anyone's psychi.

Many of us are inclined to sympathize with the underdog when it comes to conflict. It offends our sense of fairness when one person is subjected to the overwhelming force of another.

Accused criminals are very subject to an ongoing dehumanization. Their liberty is constrained, they are deprived of privacy, they lose some ability to withhold consent to physical interference and medical examination. And as our political Zeitgeist gathers more and more momentum behind notions of ever harsher treatment of criminals, there is little, if any, recourse.

There is a middle ground, however. It is entirely possible to take positions on the criminal justice system that favour prevention and rehabilitation, in which the exercise of brute force is not merely a last resort, but acknowledged as a failure of better methods.