Peter Vronsky diskuterar den frågan i sin bok
Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers From the Stone Age to the Present och då särskilt i kapitel 14
Diabolus in Cultura: Serial-Killing Rape Culture “Sweats,” the “Greatest Generation,” and Their Sons of Cain”.
Han lanserar där teorin att det beror på andra världskriget och dess efterföljande påverkan på hela det amerikanska samhället: traumatiserade soldater, en alltmer sadistisk populärkultur etc
Några utdrag:
Citat:
As I strove to figure out what diabolus in cultura could possibly trigger and inspire the epidemic increase of serial killing in the US starting in the 1970s, it dawned on me: we were looking into the wrong time period for the triggers!
If the psychopathology of evolving serial killers is shaped and formed when they are children, but they first kill when they are around twenty-eight years old, then the historical triggers we are seeking need to be backed up chronologically some twenty to twenty-five years, to when those killers were growing up, not when they began killing as adults.
[...]
There is an enormous glut of serial killers who grew up either during World War II or in the first fifteen baby boom years following the war. The list is densely clustered with notorious serial killers born and raised in the postwar years who, increasingly near the average age of twenty-eight, began to kill for the first time between the 1970s and 1990s, at the height of the “golden age.”
They all lived in the wake of a receding shock wave of humanity’s biggest, most viciously primitive and most lethal war ever fought.
While most of us acknowledge that World War II was a war like no other and that it fundamentally changed our world, to this day we have not completely grasped the entire nature of that war and how American combatants experienced it. Our vision of how we fought that war, its history as told to us, is still fossilized in propagandistic necessities of the time, regarding how we defined ourselves—as a righteous democracy—and how we defined the enemy—as evil totalitarian states—and how that kind of enemy was going to be fought and defeated by us. To paraphrase Mark Seltzer’s comment, “The Western was really about serial killing all along,” I suggest that war in general is also really about serial killing all along, in the most primitive and savage way. And World War II arguably was humanity’s largest orgy of state serial killing since the Great Witch Hunt.
Citat:
I found on record no World War II combat veteran who returned home to become a serial killer. The reality of death in war probably preempted any “fantasy” veterans may have nurtured previously as civilians. It was their sons and grandsons who became the serial killers in the 1960s to 1990s.
Citat:
I suspect that the veteran fathers bringing up the sons in the 1940s and 1950s who became serial killers were not only traumatized by the war more than we realize, but also by the social catastrophe of the Great Depression that preceded it. The Depression destroyed a generation of male breadwinners and devastated families for decades to follow. No doubt some of the fathers of “golden age” serial killers never went overseas into combat, or did not even serve in the military. But they all lived through the Dirty Thirties, which broke the pride and spine of that generation of men and their families.
Not all veterans returned from the war disturbed and traumatized, but many more than we acknowledge did indeed come home alienated and damaged and in no state to raise healthy and productive sons. This hidden surge of war-traumatized fathers, either in unbearably conflicted relationships with their children or emotionally and physically withdrawn or unavailable to them, spawned that surge of serial-killing sons. There were enough degraded men after the Great Depression and those few of the most traumatized from the more than a million who saw combat, to afterwards have easily fathered the 2,065 “golden age” serial killers from the 1950s to the 1990s. The numbers are not wildly out of proportion.
The FBI’s Sexual Homicide study of the “golden age” serial killers from that generation of sons revealed that only 57 percent of serial killers had both parents at birth, and 47 percent had their father leave before age twelve. A mother as the dominant parent was reported in 66 percent of the cases, and a negative relationship with the father or male parental figure was reported by 72 percent of the convicted sex killers. The FBI study also indicated that 50 percent of the offenders had parents with criminal pasts and 53 percent came from families with psychiatric histories.
My hypothesis is that a broken generation of men either raised or abandoned a dysfunctional generation of boys who would emerge as epidemic serial killers—the sons of Cain.
Citat:
Popular culture that emerged in the wake of the Great Depression and the war had a part to play as well. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that from the 1940s to the 1970s, a large segment of mainstream popular entertainment focused on the abduction, restraint, torture and rape of women. That too inspired, or as the FBI would say, facilitated, a generation of budding serial killers and the fantasies that kept them up at night.
As the 1950s dawned, the sick sons of the sick fathers, along with some of the men who never went to war but remained home and fantasized about it, began to stir in the chemistry of their puberty. They fingered their knives and knotted ropes as they browsed the semen-sticky pages of their drugstore pulp magazines, with thousands of bound and prostrate women subjected to fantasy rape and torture. In this cultural ecology of repetitive visual cuing and masturbatory conditioning of their angry fantasies of revenge, they were in a state of mimetic compulsion, humming like a tuning fork, in harmony with the world of disorder and chaos that began descending on them by the mid-1960s.
