In December of last year, Michelle Kehoe slit the throats of her two sons, ages seven and two, and driving her car into an icy river to cover the crime. She was rescued from the river, along with her two boys (the younger of which died from his wounds) by four men who jumped into the cold water. The rescuers are only now finding out that the mother, Michelle, was the one who hurt her children. More details can be found here.
The important point that I wanted to highlight here was a statement made by Laurie Levenson of of Loyola Law School in California. She was commenting on the stable annual statistic that shows at least half of all children murdered in the US are killed by their own parent. Her statement was this:
"The natural defense to anticipate is insanity because why would a mother kill her own child?" Levenson asked. "It certainly can be insanity, but it's not always the case. Perfectly sane people can do horrible things and they do, every day."It's much easier to think that bad things happen because of some material defect in the brain, some sort of behavioral abnormality that cannot be controlled by those who suffer it. In reality, people do awful things all the time simple because they can, not because they cannot.
The reason I'm blogging about this is because, in actuality, it is statements like Ms. Levenson' that give me hope for the state of humanity. Evil isn't something that sneaks and creeps along and takes over people to commit horrible deeds. People choose to do horrible things. Which means that they can choose to do good things, too.
I guess the hard part is figuring out how to make it easier to choose to do right than to choose to do wrong. And I guess that's why we have psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. To figure out why people do bad things, why they do good things, and how we can help them choose the latter.
