| 英文摘要 |
The aims of this study are to clarify the definitional issues pertaining to indiscriminate murder and to analyze prevalence and risk factors of such crime. A specially designed questionnaire was distributed to a control group (n=98) who were over age 20 without any court conviction and recruited from internet advertisement and four offender groups (n=209) from nationwide prisons. The valid response rate was 91% for the offender group and 98% for the control group. The offender group was comprised of indiscriminate (5%), stranger (28%), domestic (30%) and acquaintance (37%) murderers. We estimated that the prevalence rate of indiscriminate murder is about 0.04 per100,000 residents in Taiwan. Other findings are, first, compared with the control group, indiscriminate murderers had much lower empathy, failed to form intimate relationships and with high school dropout rates, there were no significant differences among the five groups on self-esteem, violent attitudes, cynicism, high risk family, psychiatry illness history, anger, depression, substance abuse, unemployment, juvenile/adult prior convictions. Second, among the four murderer subgroups there are no statistically significant differences in the rates of psychological factors such as self-esteem, violent attitudes, cynicism, high risk family factor and psychiatric illness history. However, the indiscriminate murder subgroup has significantly higher antisocial tendency than domestic murder subgroup, and higher loneliness and social alienation than stranger murder subgroup. Our analysis suggests that there is no significant association between indiscriminate murder and mental illness, substance use and prior conviction. The indiscriminate murder subgroup lacked capabilities to build up proper intimate, school and social relationships, and have been isolated psychologically and somehow turned their backs on the world. Nonetheless, to argue it the other way around, perhaps the situation is created by society’s making them socially invisible by leaving them out of social connections. |
