Serial killers are born or are made
Serial Killers: Are born or are made? The issue about serial killers has always been a controversial one because it is really hard to understand their horrific crimes, but at the same time it is one of the most interesting for the investigators because of the question it raises: it is the society who make them or is it that they are born predestined to do such horrible acts? ... But first of all I am going to introduce what a serial killer is and what differentiates him from a normal criminal. One of the points that differentiate them is the fact that their crimes are really extreme and bizarre, almost impossible to understand; but there are some other characteristics that are used to classify a killer as a serial killer: first they have three or more victims with a period of time between them. ... The killer controls the victim in a sadistic way to satisfy his own desires, which leads us to the idea that the reasons for the murder are not material (burglary etc…) but psychological, to this idea it must be added that the victim must have a kind of symbolic meaning for the killer (if they kill women it is that they have a kind of trauma with women and so on…), the victims are normally from the most vulnerable social status, such as vagrants, prostitutes…(Steven Egger ‘the killers among us’ quoted in ‘what makes serial killers tick’ by Shirley Lynn Scott). One typical example of a serial killer is David Berkowitz, who killed 7 or 8 women in a period of time within more less 3 years, his victims did not know him and they had a symbolic meaning for him because of his sexual traumas he became a women hater. What I intend to do in this essay is to try to decide which factor is the most important in the case of serial killers: the social factor or the genetic factor. ... Firstly, some people think that it is society the one to blame; even some of the serial killers blame their acts on their parents because these killers suffered physical or psychological abuses during their childhood.