Chapter Three
Becky and Other Students Discuss Hitler, Psychopaths Again, Prison Courses, Attempts to Prevent Crime, and Other Things

The day after the students had had the long conversation about psychopaths and topics like anger management and the effects of abuse, they met up again and had another long conversation.

The Students Discuss Hitler, and Whether Politicians can Sometimes Get Support for Reasons That Have More to do with Feel-Good Emotions Than Logic

One said, "I read the beginning of Hitler's book Mein Kampf a while ago. I wanted to find out a bit about his background, to see if I could get any clues about why he turned out the way he did. Not that his background could ever be an excuse for what he did; but I was just curious.

"His book says his parents both died when he was a teenager, so he had no choice but to give up plans of going to university and training to be an architect, which is what he'd wanted to do, I think; and he had to leave home and try to make a living in the city, doing jobs that were so poorly paid that he often had to choose between doing arty stuff like buying books to read and going to the opera - which he loved, for some strange reason, - and having enough food to eat. But he said that taught him some valuable lessons about what it's like to be poor and struggle to make a living."

One student quipped, "Valuable? In what way, I wonder. They can't have made him more caring. I'm sure there were a whole lot more people struggling to make a living after he started a world war and a lot of people got bombed!"

The one who'd been talking before said, "Well, yeah. I don't know if he really thought about the possible consequences of his actions before he started the war, like that a lot of his own people might get bombed. You'd have thought he would have done really, given how many years he was planning it, but still! Maybe he was massively over-confident about his forces being able to wipe out all opposition before that could ever happen, and he only cared about his own people, I don't know.

"Anyway, in his book, he said that one problem at the time when he was trying to make a living was that a lot of people, including him, could only get casual work, so they kept being made unemployed, so they kept suffering more hardship; and when they did get a job, they were often worried about how soon it would be before they were thrown out of work again.

"He said he found out that it was often the case that people came in from the countryside, hoping to get better-paid work than they'd had working on farms, and they often found work, but they could often be suddenly thrown out of work, which would be especially bad in winter because they could be evicted if they couldn't pay their rent, so they'd be out in the freezing cold. And some of them had to resort to selling their possessions to feed themselves. I don't think there was much of a welfare state in those days, at least where he lived.

"But he said the more people lost their jobs, the more they'd get resigned to it and apathetic about bothering to make efforts to get work; so although they started out being really hard-working, hoping to make it in life, they eventually stopped caring much.

"But he said when a good pay-day came round, all the deprivation would have made them so desperate to have a good time and drown their sorrows that they'd often blow a lot of their money in the pub on the first night, more and more of it over time as they got more and more desperate for good times. Some men would at least make sure they'd have enough left over so their wives and children could enjoy life for a couple of days before they all went hungry for a while; but other men would blow all their money and then go home, and often get into big arguments with their wives, who were upset that they didn't have enough money left to feed their children for the next week; and often the arguments would result in them beating their wives up badly. I was surprised, because he really seemed to care about the violence that was going on.

"He said the root cause of the problems was the way the system worked, and that people who cared about social well-being ought to try to change it.

"I thought it was strange, because he seemed to care about these people, and he seemed to be intelligent in the way he tried to analyse the reasons why they started behaving the way they did, which was completely the opposite of what seems to have been the mindless insane bigotry that made him decide certain groups of people were morally degenerate and the enemies of Germany and needed to die. I thought, 'How could he be so thoughtful when he was trying to analyse why some people turn out the way they do, but just have a mindless bigotry towards other people that makes him think of them as enemies that need to be got rid of, instead of being just as thoughtful about the reasons why some of them turned out the way they did, or whether they really deserved to be hated?' You know, if you're capable of being that thoughtful, I'd have thought you'd be just as thoughtful about everything.

"He said he first got his anti-Jewish ideas from reading anti-Jewish newspapers in Vienna. But you'd have thought an intelligent person would have wondered how true what he was reading really was, instead of just coming to believe it with a passion! He said he didn't want to believe it at first and was disgusted by the views being presented; but over time he became convinced they were right. He didn't give a good reason why.

"But in the same chapter where he wrote about the men who couldn't get enough work lapsing into drunkenness and often violence, he wrote that he became more and more aware of how Jews seemed to be responsible for most of the trashy plays and art around, or at least there always seemed to be at least one Jew featuring in them, - the book gives the impression that quite a lot of the art and the plays were quite sexually explicit. So he came to think of Jews as a plague on society.

"But there was no analysis at all of why the ones involved in that kind of thing might have got to be that way, or thoughts about the percentage of them who were involved in it, as opposed to the percentage who weren't, and compared to the percentage of non-Jews who were involved in it, - you know, like if it was possible that only a tiny proportion of Jews wrote plays like that, and that most of the people who were involved in them weren't Jews. At least, there was no analysis of it in the few chapters I read; and if there was any later on, it obviously can't have been very good, because it can't have been persuasive enough to convince him his arguments were garbage. And I don't know if he explained in his book why several Jews writing and acting in sexually explicit plays would justify killing masses of Jewish men, women, children and babies.

"Maybe Hitler was more concerned about the men who kept being made unemployed because he lived among them and knew what it was like, so he could identify with them; but you'd still have thought that examining one process of moral degeneration would make him more likely to investigate other ones in the same way. And why would he think killing lots of people was less immoral than turning out sleazy plays and pictures? I don't really understand that. Actually, I think he did say a lot worse slanderous things about Jews later on in his book; but I can't imagine he could really have believed them, so what his real motives were for doing what he did, I don't know."

One student said, "Like you said, maybe the reason Hitler cared about really poor people who struggled to get work was because he knew what that was like, since he'd been through hardships like that himself. But maybe he didn't really care all that much about those people, but wrote as if he did, because he wanted to create an image of himself as someone who cared about ordinary people, so it would help him win support. Not that he would have really seemed caring if people had really thought about it, because I think I remember hearing that he wrote in his book about invading other countries to clear more space for Germans to live in, which would have had to mean putting the people he supposedly cared about in harm's way by sending them to war, or making them risk the possible consequences of him starting it!

"I Heard that a lot of extremist organisations do things that improve the lives of people in their communities, but it's often likely to be because they're hoping to get more supporters that way, and that they're hoping other people will accept them more because of the way they're benefiting them, rather than being because they really care about them.

"And another thing I heard someone say was that some people who seem to get all enthusiastic about one political party and like to publicise things that make another one look bad don't necessarily do it because they care all that deeply about what the other one's doing, but because getting behind one and getting worked up with feelings against the other one puts them on a bit of a high, making their day go with a bit more of a buzz because they get an adrenaline boost from it, so it's like support for sports teams - I think people enjoy that because it's something that can give them an adrenaline boost and make them feel more alive and energetic. You know, it probably gives a lot of people a bit of excitement in what might otherwise be a boring life, especially when their team wins and that means they can triumphantly gloat about it to people who support the losing team, or take pride in thinking their team's better than them.

"Or maybe it's sometimes that they build up feelings of resentment and other bad feelings about things that are going wrong in their lives, and letting them out by jeering and feeling hateful about opposing teams makes them feel calmer in the end, because it's a way of letting off steam.

"Well, that's probably often part of it anyway. And another part is probably the camaraderie they get from being with lots of other people all getting excited for their team to win.

"I think it can be like that at political rallies, where people all cheer for the politician who's speaking, and get all worked up against people he's criticising; maybe it's like a spectator sport that they can get a good adrenaline boost from that puts them on a bit of a high. And supporting those politicians might give them a purpose in life too, and people often need that to be happy.

"So at Hitler's rallies, where I think he was working people up with hatred against the Jews and maybe other groups of people, it might not be that people already felt a real genuine hatred against those people, but that they loved having a group to hate because it was like a sport, putting them on a bit of an adrenaline high, and also it meant they could get their bad feelings out of their systems by directing them against a group of people they were being encouraged to hate. I don't know about that though.

"But I wonder if that's the reason some people like making racist comments - because they get a bit of an adrenaline boost from stirring things up a bit and hating people.

"Mind you, with Hitler's rallies, and with the rallies of other so-called 'strong men' in politics, like some other dictators, I think part of it might be that if the country's in a mess, a strong man who promises to make people's lives better and rescue them from the mess the country's in, and seems to have reassuring solutions to things or seems to know who to blame for the mess, is going to seem very attractive to people who are really hoping for a better life.

"Maybe one reason Hitler did things that did improve things for a lot of people in Germany at first, like things that created more jobs for people, wasn't because he really cared about them, but because he knew it would get him a lot more support."

Another one of the students said, "Hang on! If Hitler ever mentioned going to war at his rallies, anyone who thought that was going to make their lives better must have been a real ignorant clod! Maybe he didn't talk about invading places in them, I don't know. But as well as that, it's hard to imagine people getting anywhere near as enthusiastic about politics as they would about a sports team! It's like imagining people getting enthusiastic about a tortoise walking across their garden or something! What kind of person could get excited about something as dreary as politics?"

Another one of the group said, "I don't know about your assumption that tortoises will always be boring; I wouldn't be surprised if there are tortoise racing events where people cheer on their own tortoise, and people take bets on which one will win. I'm sure I've heard about snail racing, where that kind of thing happens. Anyway, anyone who thinks politics is dreary probably isn't especially affiliated with one party or another, so when they hear someone from one party criticise another party, they're more likely to think, 'Oh stop with the petty point scoring and say something useful if you actually can' than, 'Yes, yes, yes, go for it!', like one of their avid supporters might.

"Anyway, whatever it was, Hitler must have done something to get the crowds going, judging by what I've heard about how much he was cheered at his rallies."

A Student Tells the Rest About Interviews That Were Done With People in Extremist Groups About Their Motives

One of the students said, "I came across an article the other day by a woman who'd actually interviewed some white supremacists in America, as well as some Islamic extremists, to ask them what their motivations for believing and doing what they did were, and things like that. It turned out that their motivations were actually quite similar. People in both groups said they liked being in the groups partly because it gave them a sense of belonging and purpose in life, with goals to work towards that gave them a feeling that their lives had meaning, as well as feeling as if they had a sense of status by being who they were, like being respected by others in their group, and having people to oppose who they could feel superior to, which boosted their egos; so it made them feel happier than they did before. And they felt a satisfying sense of righteousness by feeling as if they were fighting for a good cause. The interviewer said the groups actually needed each other to exist, so they could feel as if there was something to fight for.

"I don't suppose those can have been the only reasons they joined though. And Quite a few of them might have had personality disorders like narcissism, which gives people a craving to be admired, and a massive sense of self-importance that makes them feel as if they're special, so a cause that feels special to them might appeal to them; and they get really annoyed with people who don't think they are special. Mind you, you'd have thought people like that would align themselves with causes where more people might admire them for what they do! But then, if they like violence, they wouldn't want to get their sense of purpose in life from, say, the Salvation Army!"

The Students Tell Stories They've Heard About People With Prejudices Being Influenced to Change Their Views

One of the group said, "I heard about a black man who joined a band that played country music, which I think is mostly enjoyed by some white people in parts of America. The band played a gig in a pub one day, and it turned out that one of their fans there was the leader of a Ku Klux Klan group, who told this black man he liked the music. They got chatting a bit. A while later, the black man decided he'd like to write a book about what motivates people to join organisations like the Ku Klux Klan, I think, and he asked this man if he'd mind being interviewed for it. He agreed, and it turned out they had more in common with each other than they'd thought, and got on surprisingly well. This Ku Klux Klan man started inviting him to their meetings, and he went because he wanted to find out more about the men there for his book; and over time, as they got to know each other better, the white supremacist man's views changed, till he eventually decided to leave the Ku Klux Klan."

The students thought that was interesting.

Then one said, "That reminds me of something I heard, about a man who served in the army in Israel, and one of his duties was to patrol Gaza, especially when there was a short war on between Gaza and Israel one time. One thing he and some of his army buddies used to do was to barge in unannounced into the homes of some of the residents there to search their houses, interrupting them while they were just doing things like eating their dinners; and they would order them around, even when they didn't have any good cause to suspect them of doing something bad. One day they were going round the streets, and they ordered some teenagers to leave the area, for some reason I can't remember now; and one refused, so this man hit him and made him leave.

"When the man went back home, his mum was really relieved to see him still alive, and she said her and her Palestinian housemaid, who had a son living in Gaza, had been spending time together during the war talking and crying over wondering whether their sons were both still safe. She asked her son if he'd like to meet the maid's family, and he agreed, and her family invited him to dinner, where they ate the same kind of thing the people in Gaza had often been eating when he used to barge unannounced into their homes.

"The family was just chatting in a friendly way over dinner, and he realised it must often have been the same in the families he'd interrupted while they were eating. So he realised they were just ordinary people, and that he was more like them than he'd thought. Then he began to feel guilty about the things he'd done in Gaza, and he ended up campaigning for peace, lecturing people on his experiences. But the Israeli government and some people in the army didn't like it, and he got into trouble with them. I can't remember what happened in the end, but they thought he was a traitor to their cause.

"And a while ago I heard a Palestinian teacher talking on the radio, who said he'd needed medical treatment in Israel, and he was touched by how kind some of the Israeli nurses were, and it changed his view of Israelis so he didn't feel so hostile towards them any more; and he started thinking about how good it would be if there was peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and started teaching about how that would be a good thing, and even took some of his Palestinian students to visit Auschwitz, to increase their understanding of why people in Israel feel as strongly as they do about how they need a homeland of their own, since some Palestinians think Israel ought to belong to the Palestinians instead and the Jews shouldn't be in Israel.

"But some other Palestinians didn't like what this teacher was doing, and called him a traitor. I think he even received death threats by men who thought he ought to give up doing things that made him seem sympathetic to Jews. So he came to think that the real division isn't between Israelis and Palestinians, but between people who want peace between them and people who don't."

One of the group said, "There would probably be a lot less war in the world if governments really wanted less of it, and tried to negotiate more and get to know people on the other side better."

A Student Wonders if Something Creative Could Have Stopped Hitler, and Talks About Child and Adult Psychopaths and What Might Change Their Behaviour

The student who'd been talking about what Hitler wrote in his book before said, "I've been wondering whether there might have been just a possibility that it would have stopped Hitler wanting to start wars if our government had invited him over here not long after they started believing he was intending to, and talked to him about his theories about why he thought some men were turning to domestic violence, and tried to get him to imagine what a hero he'd seem to be if instead of starting wars, he decided to try to make Germany a model country for the world to admire and follow, by doing his best to turn it into a society where domestic violence didn't exist. If they emphasised how much he'd be admired and go down in history as a hero if he succeeded, and be a role model for other countries' leaders to follow, I wonder if it would have been appealing to him.

"I mean, you know, even if he didn't care as much about the issues as he seemed to, if psychopaths have big egos, it might have appealed to his pride. But then, I suppose if he was just trying to create an image of himself as caring, maybe it wouldn't have had a chance of working.

"I did hear that psychopaths are much more likely to change their behaviour if they think it's in their own interests to do that than they are if people try to appeal to their sense of fairness, and try to get them to think of things from the point of view of their victims so they'll care about them more.

"I read about someone who said a friend of hers worked on the border between America and Mexico for a little while, with families who were trying to leave Mexico and start a new life in America; and the American government had this horrible policy at the time of separating children from their parents while it was decided which of the families were going to be allowed to stay in America, for some reason; and the friend said she was upset one day because there was a woman who gave birth, and immediately the baby was born, a guard took it away and said it had to be separated from her and put with the children. The friend tried to persuade the guard to change his mind, but he wouldn't. I don't know if he was a bit psychopathic, or if he just took his duties very literally and thought it was more than his job was worth to disobey his orders to separate adults from children!

"But it made me wonder if it would make a difference in situations like that if instead of trying to appeal to people's sense of fairness and compassion, which they might not actually have much of, so it might not have much chance of working, people point out the benefits to them or the system of doing what they'd like them to. Maybe the guard would have changed his mind and let the baby stay with the mother if the woman working there who got upset had tried something like saying, 'If you separate the baby from the mother, it's going to cost the American government more, because someone's going to need to be paid money for some time to look after and feed the baby, and milk formula's going to need to be bought specially, and the cost's going to mount up over time, while if you leave the baby with the mother, she's got a free food source she can feed the baby from, - you know, her breasts; and no one else will need to be paid to look after and feed the baby, since she'll be doing that for free.'

"I don't know if the person who saw the mother and baby being separated did try anything like that; and I don't know if it would have worked if she had; but it might have been worth a try, to see if it worked better than trying to convince the guard it wasn't fair, pleading with him to be kind, and that kind of thing.

"And I heard something really horrible about how some migrants who were trying to get into America were put in cells together where they weren't given enough water to drink, and told that if they wanted water, they could drink it from the toilet. You just don't expect that kind of thing to happen in a modern country that you expect to be civilised, do you!

"But I wonder if someone who saw that would be able to change the minds of the guards who were telling them to do that if instead of trying to appeal to their pity or kindness, which they might not have if they're hardened biggots, like I reckon they'd probably have to be to make people do things like that, they tried to convince them that it was in their own interests and the interests of the people they were working for to give the people enough water, saying it would be best to do that because if they got ill from drinking toilet water, they might end up having to be treated in hospital at the expense of the state, taking up beds that might otherwise be available for people they cared about who might turn out to need them; and if the media found out, the story might cause a scandal that made the government look bad because of their harsh policy towards migrants, and if the government then wanted to make themselves look better, they might dismiss the guards responsible from their jobs and get more humane ones so they could tell the media that something had been done about the problem.

"If someone wanted to try that kind of tactic, it would probably be better if they tried to say that kind of thing in a matter-of-fact voice, as if they were just talking calmly about the possibilities, since if they sounded upset or alarmist, it might be easier for a guard to just dismiss them as a hysterical idiot trying to use scare tactics on them or something. I mean, it still might not be possible to persuade them; but it might be worth a try.

"And I've heard that in prison, psychopaths are more likely to be persuaded not to commit crimes when they get out if people there try to get them to think a lot about how much nicer it would be for them to stay on the outside than it would be to come back to prison, than they are if they try to turn them into better people.

"Well, it's not just as simple as telling them that. And I don't know what percentage of them it would work for. But I read about how techniques are being tried with some psychopathic teenagers that are based on that idea, and some people are even wondering whether spending time trying to train them to behave better in certain ways could even change their brain wiring a bit to make it more like most people's, since their brains are still developing, so there might be more possibility that their brains will change than adults' brains would. I don't know how much hope there is for that. But I read about a training facility that's been reporting good results. I'll tell you more about it in a minute.

"Some people who are brought up in really abusive situations turn into psychopaths, or they could be called sociopaths; but it seems some people are born psychopathic because of faults in the way their brains are wired, and it doesn't matter how good their homes are, they'll still be psychopathic. I think there are actually genes that can be inherited that make that more likely to happen. I don't know what other reasons there are.

"But I heard that some children can start developing psychopathic or abusive tendencies from an early age as well because they've been physically abused in such a way that their brains were damaged, sometimes the parts that give people the ability to develop a conscience and control their impulses. And growing up in a violent bullying environment contributes to their behaviour. But some psychopathic children come from good homes, so the problem with them is likely to do with the way their brains have always been wired.

"Some psychologists don't see a distinction between psychopaths and sociopaths; but I think others classify them a bit differently, thinking of sociopaths as people who are like psychopaths, but they can form close bonds with friends and family, so their crimes are often against people they don't know that well; but psychopaths will commit crimes against anyone if they feel like it, but can be more charming than sociopaths, so they're more likely to fool people into believing they're nice. And psychopaths are more likely than sociopaths to plan their crimes, rather than just acting on impulse.

"I read that some experts think they can detect psychopathy in children when they're as young as three or four, like for reasons such as them not being bothered when other kids are upset, and not changing their ways when they're punished. Mind you, I would have thought all kids of that age are like that to some extent.

"Anyway, I've read that people with psychopathic brains have smaller amygdalas than most people do - the amygdala being part of the brain that activates emotions, like the ones that might make you feel bad if something you did harmed someone, so you wouldn't want to do it again, or else you wouldn't want to do it in the first place because the thought of doing it made you feel bad. Something like that. I don't suppose people have either got big ones or small ones; maybe they vary in size quite a bit, and that's one thing that means it varies as to how much of a conscience a person has. Well, there are probably quite a few other things that make the difference too. I don't know that much about this stuff.

"But I read that as well as having a smaller amygdala than most people, psychopaths have an over-active reward system in their brains, which means that when they do something they enjoy, even if it's harming someone, they'll get more pleasure out of it than most people would, so they'll want to do it some more.

"Anyway, about this training scheme for psychopathic teenagers I mentioned: I read that some psychologists had the idea that it might be possible to change the behaviour of psychopathic teenagers if the reward systems in their brains can be trained to feel rewarded by behaving well. They must have been pretty confident about the idea, because they set up a kind of juvenile dettention centre, and then asked other ones to send them their most troublesome boys. At first, they realised the boys were so troublesome they wondered if they'd bitten off more than they could chew. But they actually made a success of it. Some boys were rated really highly on the psychopathic scale when they got there, but in the years after they were released, they didn't get into nearly as much trouble with the police as they probably would have done if they hadn't been treated.

"The treatment was all centred around giving rewards for good behaviour. When the boys were nasty, they were punished for a short time, but not for long, since it's been found that punishment doesn't influence psychopaths to change. It seems they were locked in their cells a lot of the time, but they could earn points for behaving well, and when they'd got enough, they could get privileges. Even little ones influenced the boys to behave better so they could get them, like being given basketball cards, sweets, or pizza on Saturdays. The kinds of rewards they were given were things a lot of people's brains instantly feel pleasure at being given. The better they behaved, the more privileges and treats they could get, and they would get bigger ones the longer they behaved well for, such as being able to play video games and so on. If they did something wrong like hit someone, they would lose points; but they could soon get them back again if they behaved well.

"The psychologists were trying to retrain their instincts to make them want to behave well in the future in the hope of getting rewarded for it in some way, such as getting work promotions if they worked well and didn't cause trouble for fellow employees as adults.

"Some of the boys came from abusive homes and dangerous neighbourhoods, where they'd become violent in the first place as a means of self-defence, and then got more violent over time. But some of the boys came from good homes, and it seems psychopathy was just wired into their brains from birth because of some genetic defect or something. One like that who was featured in the article I read had done all kinds of nasty things when he was little, like killing his sister's hamster, setting fire to things, slashing the tyres on his parents' car, swinging their cat around by the tail and hurling it against the wall, and other things. When he was first moved to the psychologists' detention centre, he would be abusive to the staff and smear urine and faeces around his cell and do other things like that, but they were trained not to react strongly to anything; and after a while, that calmed him down and he got in with the program.

"After he was released from the place a few years later, he got in trouble with the law a few times, once assaulting a police officer, and slapping his wife around a bit, but she said he never seriously beat her up; and he even started his own funeral business. The psychologists at the detention centre said that was actually a good outcome for someone like him, who might have become a serial killer if he hadn't been treated; he scored almost as high on the psychopathy scale as it's possible to be when he'd first gone there.

"A lot of the boys who were released from the place still committed crimes, but a fair fewer did than boys who'd been in other juvenile detention centres where they hadn't had that kind of treatment; and a lot of their crimes were less serious than those of the boys who'd been in other juvenile detention centres, including that they didn't commit any murders, when several of the other boys did.

"The article featured a little girl as well who'd tried to strangle her little sister and baby brother when she was only six, and had said she'd like to kill everyone in her family, and that she was practising all kinds of murder techniques on her stuffed animal toys, and had written a little book of ways to hurt people, even though she came from a good home. She would hurt her little sisters and brothers, and smile when they cried. She'd been adopted when she was two because her mother couldn't cope after losing her job and becoming homeless; but the authorities couldn't find any evidence of abuse.

"She was put in a residential home eventually, where there was a system of rewards for good behaviour like there was at this juvenile detention centre for boys, and she got regular therapy. Over about a couple of years, they did begin to see improvements in her behaviour, such as actually trying to comfort a friend when she wouldn't have cared before. But they thought she'd always be prone to psychopathic behaviour to some extent.

"She was diagnosed with having 'conduct disorder with callous and unemotional traits', which is a diagnosis children are sometimes given when they're in danger of growing up to be psychopaths. The diagnosis includes things like being aggressive and cruel, and lacking empathy, and not having remorse for bad behaviour, and seeming indifferent to punishment. The article said that four out of five children with that diagnosis grow up to be normal adults, but that it's quite possible that the earlier the behaviour manifests itself and the worse it is, the more likely they'll grow up to be psychopaths. It said that 'warm and responsive' parenting can make a difference to the way people turn out; but children like that will often do such bad things that their parents can actually become 'terrified' of them. It must be hard to be warm towards them when they're doing upsetting and scary things.

"Still, it's good that ways are being found of changing the behaviour of children like that. Before, a lot of psychologists had just thought psychopathy was untreatable; and it might be that that still seems true with adults whose brains have developed fully. There's just a hope that in children and teenagers, doing things that change their behaviour will actually be able to rewire their brains enough that by the time they've developed fully, they'll be different enough from the way they were before that they won't commit crimes that are as serious as the ones they would likely have committed if they hadn't been treated.

"I think there are other kinds of treatment programmes that are being tried with teenagers who have psychopathic tendencies too, but I'm not sure if any have been successful, since I don't know much about them."

After a little while, the conversation turned light-hearted, as one student said, "Imagine if there was something about a cyclone on the news one day, and you thought it said 'psycho', so it sounded to you as if it said, 'A psycho has devastated a whole swathe of land in Australia, knocking down trees and power lines, tearing roofs off houses, disrupting transport, and killing a number of sheep and cattle.'

"You'd think, 'Wow, that's some psycho!'"

They giggled.

A Student Tells the Others About Things That Have Been Tried to Stop Psychopaths and Other Criminals Committing Crimes

The discussion didn't stay light-hearted for long though. One student said, "I heard about some things that have been tried that it was hoped would put psychopaths off committing crimes. Some were found to work better than others.

"I heard about an experiment in a prison where the criminals were given group therapy, where they were all encouraged to tell the others about the bad things that had happened to them while they were growing up, because of some belief that it would help them come to terms with their traumatic pasts, I think, maybe partly because they might have got sympathy from the others; and the idea was that then they might feel like committing crime less or something. The reasons for it weren't really explained.

"I think the organisers said it did actually help quite a few of the prisoners re-offend a bit less; but they said it did the opposite to the psychopaths - it just gave them more information about what kinds of things upset people; and that just gave them more ideas for things to do to people that would have a traumatic effect on them, because knowing how much they would upset them made them feel good.

"I know of something that's often tried with criminals that I think can work with some of them, but probably wouldn't work with psychopaths, and that's restorative justice, where victims of crime are taken into prisons to meet up with the criminals who committed the crimes against them, so they can tell them about exactly what impact their crimes had on them, so as to bring it home to them what they're really doing to people, in the hope that once they've realised that, they'll be put off committing more crime.

"I heard about one woman who got her laptop computer stolen, and there were lots of photos on it of her daughter who'd since died, so they were precious photos, and she didn't have copies of them. The burglar who stole it had sold the laptop for way less than it was worth. The woman was taken to meet him, and after she'd finished telling him just how it had affected her, he was really upset, after he'd at first thought stealing and selling it was no big deal.

"But like I said, restorative justice probably wouldn't work with psychopaths, since they wouldn't care about people's feelings. I've heard that there are other techniques that can encourage them to change their ways a bit though, like that one about helping them get into the way of thinking that it's actually in their interests not to commit crime and do other things that cause problems for people, because that way, they avoid bad consequences for themselves, such as having to spend years in prison if they get caught. I don't know how effective that technique really is though, because when a psychopath gets really tempted to commit a crime or do some other nasty thing, they might think the rewards of doing it will far outweigh the risk that they'll suffer bad consequences for it, so the thought of them won't stop them.

"Anyway, alongside being taught it's in their best interests to behave decently, psychopaths can be taught to recognise the earliest signs that emotions are getting stirred up in them that'll give them urges to do things they might regret later because they have bad consequences for them, say if they have an urge to be violent to someone, and if they let it get stronger, they'll likely do something violent to them, but then later they might get arrested and put in prison for it, or else the person they've been violent to might try to get revenge on them, or something like that. They can be taught to try to soothe emotions like that as soon as they recognise the first signs of them, and then to try and think of better ways of solving the problems that are causing them. Actually, people who aren't classified as psychopaths can get value out of being taught that technique too; and actually, it might work a lot better for them, because they might care about the impact their actions have on other people more than psychopaths will.

"But I've heard that that kind of therapy has been tried with teenagers who are showing psychopathic tendencies and getting into crime, and it's shown some promise. I'm not sure how well it works with older psychopaths, but it seems to me that it might at least be worth being tried with them too. But I've heard that it can work best with teenagers, because their brains aren't fully developed yet, which means they can be rewired more easily than adults' brains can, which means the teenagers can find it easier to change their ways. I'm not sure how much of an effect there really is with that though.

"It might take more effort for psychopaths to soothe emotions like anger and temptation than it would for most people, partly because emotions like that might often be even stronger in psychopaths than they are for most people, because of that thing where brain scans of psychopaths have shown more connections than normal between the part of the brain that makes people feel good when they do things they enjoy and the part that helps us make decisions, which might mean it's more tempting for them to decide to do the things they enjoy, like hurting other people, than it would be for most people, because the part of their brains that tempts people to do things influences the part that makes decisions more than most people's would.

"I reckon everyone must get temptations to do things we shouldn't do; and if they're strong enough in us, just imagine how strong they must be in psychopaths; so it must take quite a bit of effort for them not to give in to them.

"I mean, imagine if we got jobs, and one month, we found out we'd been paid double what we were supposed to be paid. Maybe we'd immediately get a feeling of greed, and we'd enjoy it, because we'd be thinking about how nice it would be to use the money for something we wanted; and that would tempt us to keep it and not say anything to the employer about their mistake. But then it's possible that we might think that was a bad attitude because it would be dishonest, and that we might be asked to pay it back one day anyway, and we'd know that might be inconvenient for us, because what if we didn't have much money at the time when the mistake was discovered and we were asked to pay the money back.

"You can imagine how strong the temptation to keep it would be for us though, because of the feeling of greed that might come over us at first; so just imagine how much more tempting it might be for a psychopath to keep it!

"But I think this therapy that's about showing them it's really in their best interests to live better lives tries to teach them to think of those feelings as signs that they might do something that might be enjoyable at the time but might mean they might have to suffer bad consequences later. You know, one example of a thing that might be brought up is that if they start getting all enthusiastic about the idea of going out and trying to deceive some young woman they see in a bar into believing they're really interested in her and interested in a relationship with her in the hope of seducing her, so as to have a few hours of fun, after which they intend to just dump her, they can be taught that the urge to do that might cause problems for them if they follow it through, because for one thing, if it results in a pregnancy and the young woman has the baby, they might have to pay maintenance money for nearly two decades!

"Or committing a crime might be fun, but if they get caught, they won't enjoy their time in prison. That kind of thing. I don't know how well trying to persuade them of things like that works though, although it might at least work better than nothing, although a lot of people would probably say locking them up and throwing away the key's the real best way of stopping them re-offending, although of course they could still commit offences against other people in prison.

"But anyway, teaching psychopaths that it's in their own best interests not to commit crimes and so on might be the best hope at the moment of encouraging them to change."

The Topic of Rehabilitation Courses in Prisons That Don't Seem to Work Well Comes Up

Another student said, "Maybe. A lot of them probably never change though. But Techniques like that might have more chance of working than some things do. I heard about two men who committed this horrible murder, and they'd both been in prison before for murder and been on courses there to supposedly help rehabilitate them, like victim awareness courses that were meant to help them understand the feelings of victims better in the hope that they'd feel for victims more so they'd be less likely to want to hurt people in future, and anger management courses. One had been on loads of them. But it didn't stop them wanting to gruesomely murder people. Some offenders will probably be well aware of just what they're putting their victims through, but they just won't care; or it might even make them more enthusiastic to hurt them, whether they're psychopaths or just nasty.

"I heard that there are problems with some rehabilitation courses in prisons, and that some people who go on them are actually more likely to commit crimes afterwards than they were before, partly because if they learn more about the emotions people can often feel when they're attacked, it can make them feel as if they'll have even more power over them when they attack them than they felt as if they had before, since they'll know more about exactly what they're putting them through, and they like having the power to do that. And if they're taught to think more about the possible drawbacks to themselves of committing crimes, like the consequences of being caught, and how to control their impulses so as not to do bad things on the spur of the moment but to reflect more about what they'd like to do before deciding whether to do it, it can just help them plan their crimes better so they're likely to be even more successful, and so they're less likely to suffer bad consequences as a result of them.

"I heard a rapist being interviewed on the radio, who said he did some of these rehabilitation courses, but he didn't find them helpful at all. He said the course leaders asked everyone to go into great detail about what they'd done, as if to publicly shame them, but it meant they ended up thinking about committing sex offences all the time because of the amount people had been talking about them, when it would have been more helpful if they'd been taught how to take their lives in new directions, by being educated more about reading and writing and so on, and taught new skills that might help them get jobs when they got out, - not that I'd fancy employing anyone who'd ever been a rapist! But maybe courses would be better if they focused on the kinds of things that might be incentives not to commit crimes in future, instead of going into great detail about what people have done in the past.

"Maybe some courses do that so criminals can be challenged when they try to convince everyone that what they did didn't really matter much, and things like that, like I think a lot of criminals like rapists do; but a lot of criminals will likely know full well how much their victims were hurt by what they did, and that their victims can't really be blamed for what they did, but they just won't care; they'll just be lying about not realising the impact they had on them to make themselves look better.

"Maybe there's some value in challenging the deceit they use to try to convince themselves and other people their crimes didn't matter. But getting them to go into detail about them might not be such a good idea. Maybe it's done so any faulty reasoning they use when they're talking about them can be challenged, such as if they say they couldn't help themselves because their victims were all dressed in revealing clothes so they must have known they were tempting them or something. But common justifications for abuse could be challenged without each individual having to go into detail about their crimes.

"Mind you, having said that, one of the main reasons for rehabilitation courses in prisons not working when they don't could well be because a lot of the people on them don't actually want to change, but they're just going on them because they think it'll look better when they come up for parole, or just for the companionship or something. And then when they still commit crime when they get out of prison, maybe some of them use the excuse that their rehabilitation courses didn't work."

The Conversation Becomes Fairly Amusing for a Little While

One student said, "This stuff's depressing! I wonder what it would take to stop all criminals committing crime. A cull, perhaps, although the death penalty doesn't stop murders being committed, so maybe culling criminals wouldn't stop crime.

"Actually, I heard a comedian, Mark Steel, joking about the idea of having the death penalty as a deterrent on the radio, imagining a conversation between two judges where they were saying the system was too soft on crime, and one saying they ought to bring back the death penalty like they have in America because that would stop murders, and the other one asking if there were still murders in America, and the first one saying, 'Well, a few, but that's because they're too soft.' Then the other one says, 'Yes. They should cut off their heads, like they do in Saudi Arabia.' The first one asks who gets beheaded there, and the other one says, 'Well, murderers.' The first one says, 'Oh, so they still have those then?', and the other one says, 'Well, yes, but that's because they're too soft. They ought to hang, draw and quarter people like they did in the old days.' The first one asks who that happened to, and the other one says, 'Um, well, OK, it was murderers. But that's because they were too soft. Some of those hanging, drawing and quartering places were like holiday camps, with televisions and everything!'"

Another student said, "I was on a forum where a man who I'll call Mr Cretinous started a thread where he asked if we thought some terrorists who were being tried for bombing an island that's popular with Australian tourists ought to be executed. I thought he was asking for a serious answer, which turns out to have been mistaken.

"But since I didn't realise that till afterwards, I said it was a decision that would have to be thought about carefully because there were pros and cons, and the possible risks of each one would have to be assessed to determine how serious it was, so the decision could be based on whether the pros or the cons had the most risks and the most serious ones. For instance I said that executing them might make a lot of other terrorists angry and thirsty for revenge, or it might mean the executed terrorists were thought of as martyrs by other terrorists who might celebrate them as heroes and encourage new recruits to be like them. But if they were put in prison, they might spend all their time in there radicalising other people who might get out and commit other terrorist acts.

"I said people who had some expertise in judging the likelihood of each thing happening should be the ones to make the decision.

"Instead of accepting my answer, Mr Cretinous declared that it proved that I was too cowardly to make decisions, fearful of the possible consequences. He said he used to be like that, but he'd matured, and now he wanted to help me do the same, so I'd be more mentally healthy and better-equipped to face the world, and we could walk off into the sunset together. Or something.

"He said much later that he'd said that because he'd wanted to cut me down to size because he thought I was arrogant. I suspect he really just objected to the way I won arguments with him. But it's a bit creepy to pretend you care about someone when you're really trying to 'cut them down to size'.

"Anyway, it didn't work. It just turned into another big argument, where I had to mock him to get some entertainment out of what would otherwise have been a drag.

"I said, 'You know, it's funny how you put people into boxes, metaphorically - as if you're thinking, "Hey, this person's refusing to state an opinion one way or the other on whether terrorists should be executed. That means I can say with absolute certainty that they're like I used to be - trembling in fear of decision-making. It also means they must have ..." (takes a deep breath) ... "a serious anxiety problem due to fear of being wrong, mild depression, moderate chronic fatigue syndrome, rickets, an in-growing toenail, a sedentary lifestyle that's contributing to them becoming obese, a terror of dark corners in other people's houses, and mice in their kitchen."'

"He got on my nerves so much in the end I put him on ignore. But he was certain I'd over-ride the ignore feature to read what he said regardless, because he was somehow convinced I wouldn't be able to resist reading his globs of supposed wisdom. He was wrong. But someone quoted something he said to me, saying he couldn't believe I'd put Cretinous on ignore since I was so fond of him. So I read it. It was some stupid lie about me. I think Cretinous had previously said he thought it was useful to lie sometimes, like to manipulate people. He could also be pretty insulting; but the thing he said about me that got quoted was in a thread where someone asked for another member, who I'll call Mischief-Maker, to be banned, and Mr Cretinous heartily agreed that he should be, as if he thought he was a paragon of virtue who would never insult anyone himself, so he was just appalled by this man's behaviour.

"Anyway, I said to the forum member who quoted what he said to me, 'You old Rascal! Thank you for quoting that post from Mr Cretinous. Rather amusing, isn't it, since it's a bold-faced lie, coming almost directly after I quoted someone else as saying Mr Cretinous is a liar who thinks lies are good. It's as if Cretinous thinks they're so good that he even wanted to demonstrate how good he thinks they are by lying once again. But he doesn't seem to have had the intelligence to realise that that lying insult just made him look like a silly hypocrite, since it's worse than the things Mischief-Maker says, and posted right in the very thread where he paraded his supposed virtue by calling for him to be banned.'

"There was another time when Mr Cretinous distorted the truth about something that had happened on the board, and I said, 'Oh no, what do I spy here, struggling in the mud, all twisted and torn? I do believe it is ... the truth! Mr Cretinous has disrespected it, mangled it, and flung it out in the cold to shiver on the ground! The poor thing! He's mercilessly twisted it into at least ten different forms.'"

The students grinned.

The Subject Turns to the Reasons Why Some People Can't Read and Write, and Schools Where Children Don't Get a Good Education

Then the conversation got serious again, as the one who'd been talking before the humour started said, "It would be good if criminals devoted their time to insulting people like that on Internet forums instead of committing crime. Still, since a lot of them can't even read and write, I don't suppose there's even a minute chance of that happening, sadly.

"I wondered how much of a problem prisoners not knowing how to read and write really is, so I looked it up. And it seems that nearly half of people in prison have difficulties with reading and writing, with a lot of them having so much difficulty it's hard for them to read things they need to read in everyday life, like letters from their families, and complicated government forms that people need to fill in to get benefits, with quite a lot of the ones who have those problems not being able to read and write at all.

"So it does seem that more education courses would be a good thing, since it might help people get jobs when they leave prison, and I think a lot of people are less likely to re-offend if they get decent jobs, probably partly since they won't want to jeopardise them, and also they've got less time to commit crime because they're working, and they've got more hope that they can make it in life without getting their money from crime, and maybe because they can get more of an ego boost from being thought of as respectable than they were thought of as being before.

"I don't know why so many prisoners have difficulties with reading and writing, although I actually heard that it's thought that there are millions of people in the country who aren't all that good at them. I remember reading that there are quite a few small areas of the country where the problem's quite a bit worse than it is in other parts. I think they're deprived areas. It might be partly that people who can't read well will often find it harder to get jobs, so they might often end up having to live in poorer areas more often than people who get good jobs will. But I think there are other reasons too, such as deprived areas probably having more schools that aren't very good than richer areas do, partly because a lot of good teachers won't want to work in schools that already have bad reputations, like a lot of the ones in those areas do, and they won't want to live in neighbourhoods with a high crime rate, so they'll be more attracted to the schools in nicer areas.

"And classes in schools in neighbourhoods like that can be a lot more likely to be disruptive than classes in schools in nicer areas, especially if they aren't being taught well, or if a lot of kids there are finding it hard to learn or just don't want to learn for other reasons, such as that they're distracted by worrying about things that are going on at home, or because there's a culture among the pupils in their school or in their own families that discourages learning, with people who want to learn being sneered at by other kids, which might partly happen because a lot of their parents don't see the value in education, maybe because they weren't good at learning themselves, so they got fed up of it and didn't see the point in it. But it seems that some people who just mess around in lessons and don't see the point of education start to value it more and wish they had more when they've grown up. So some prisoners might be a whole lot more willing to learn than they were when they were at school.

"I actually read a post on a forum once by someone who said he went to schools in an inner city area of America, where most pupils were black like him or Hispanic, where the standards were low, like they are in a lot of inner city schools, I think, and he said that he studied harder than a lot of the kids did and got grades in his exams that were much better than most people's there, and the teachers praised him as if he was a genius, only for him to discover later that his grades were just considered to be average by people from other areas of the country.

"He said teachers had low expectations of the students there, so they didn't push them to succeed, but that wasn't really the reason why they didn't. He said he blamed a toxic culture in the black communities in those areas that actually glamorised the gangster lifestyle, so children didn't see the point in studying, because a lot of them thought that the way to really make it in life would be if they were making a lot of money by stealing things and selling drugs, as well as thinking it would be nice to get high on them; and they thought the thing to do was to fight the system, instead of using it to try to get a good education so they could get good jobs later; so they were disrespectful to teachers and would mess around in class, and get aggressive and accuse the teachers of just being racist if they put pressure on them to work. And there were lots of fights in the corridors.

"He said a lot of the kids didn't believe they were capable of succeeding much at school anyway, so they didn't see the point in trying; so then they didn't succeed, which made them believe they couldn't even more. And then when they weren't in school, they were getting into criminal activities.

"He said some people from outside the area thought the main reason they weren't succeeding at school was because they didn't have the advantages of the latest modern technology because not enough money was being spent on their schools; but he said the real reason they weren't given the latest technology was because they would have just vandalised or stolen it, which is what happened with the computers they did have.

"I read that between a third and a half of prisoners in this country were expelled from school. That might have a lot to do with the reason why quite a few of them can't read that well - because they didn't get that good of an education, maybe before they got expelled as well as afterwards! Maybe a lot of them grew up thinking education wasn't worthwhile or interesting, so they were always disruptive in class. Or maybe if some of them started off being interested, some of the kids around them made them think it wasn't worthwhile, so they stopped bothering with it."

Another student said, "I wonder if part of the problem is that kids from backgrounds that make it more likely they'll go to schools like the ones you've been talking about have often got really low expectations of themselves, like not even being able to imagine that they could realistically get respectable jobs where they could earn decent money, so they just assume crime's the only way they'll be able to get rich, especially if hardly anyone in their communities is making decent money, and a lot of people there are making money from crime.

"You know, maybe people often just assume that their experiences of life are the way life's always going to be. You know, I suppose, why would you assume your life's going to turn out a lot differently from anyone else's around you, if you don't know of anyone else's that did. I've heard that role models can be important, - you know, like if kids from backgrounds like that can spend a lot of time around people from their backgrounds who did actually go on to get respectable careers and succeed at life and be law-abiding, so they begin to imagine it's possible for them to do that too.

"And maybe if they get a lot of encouraging messages about how it's possible to get good careers if they study hard, that really encourage them to dream about making it in life and develop some good skills, and that make them believe they're capable of it, right from when they're very young, before they get too influenced by people who are into criminal activity around them, and by people who aren't making much of a living, if any, who don't see any other future for themselves, or who don't see why they should bother working if the welfare state gives them money, it would give them more motivation to try and succeed. I don't know, because the experiences and opinions of people around you can be a powerful influence on you; but it might at least help a bit if all the kids around them are getting the same messages, and if they go to schools where they're getting them from all the adults, and where bad behaviour isn't tolerated, but at the same time everyone's encouraged to do better. It's just an idea anyway."

One student said, "I'm not sure how well that would work, since I think a lot of students who go to schools like that have had members of their families injured or killed, or know other people who have been, like in gang warfare, so they get to think that what they really need is to get to be more violent than attackers, to try to protect themselves against it happening to them, or to put people off being violent towards them, or to get revenge on anyone else who attacks someone they like.

"And messages about how kids can grow up to get good careers probably won't be that persuasive to kids in really poor families whose parents struggle to make enough money even to feed them well, at least if they're devoting some of their finances to other things that improve their quality of life, like alcohol to take the edge off their feelings of discontent or something; the kids will probably think, 'How could I go to college and get a really good education when that takes money, and my family hasn't got much?' There would need to be ways they could do it anyway, and they'd need to be told about them, and encouraged that they could work for them. Mind you, maybe your ideas would still help quite a bit, especially in combination with other things."

Becky Tells a Story About a School Bully Who Was Influenced to Change his Behaviour

Becky said, "It would help as well if schools were really good at dealing with bullying, and doing their best to change the minds of bullies so they didn't want to bully any more, so the kids they were bullying could devote themselves to learning better, and the bullies might settle down to doing that more too.

"I once read a book about anti-bullying strategies in schools. I can't remember much of what it said now, but I think it was written by someone who used to be a school counsellor, and one thing that stuck in my mind was that he said there was this boy who used to hit other pupils quite a few times a week, and tease them about their appearance, and steal things they thought of as precious from them, sometimes breaking them, and sometimes keeping them, or pretending to find them at the end of the day. He didn't seem to have a conscience at all. He never seemed at all sorry for what he'd done, and used to give excuses for his behaviour like that teachers were just picking on him because they didn't like him, or that the kids he was bullying or stealing from had hit or stolen from him first, when that wasn't true, or that he didn't really hit them but he'd just had his hands up when other kids fell and hit them, or that other kids shoved him into the kids he was accused of hitting. He could lie really convincingly. And he kept doing it time after time.

"Whenever his parents were told about what he'd done, or if the boy was punished in any way for it, they'd side with him and have a real go at his teachers for supposedly picking on him.

"His behaviour improved quite a bit after one day when he was taken to the principal's office after he kicked a boy in the stomach in full view of the teacher and quite a few other pupils, and the counsellor was there and asked him what he'd done. At first, he said things they knew weren't true. The first time the counsellor asked him what he'd done, he said he'd done nothing. The counsellor asked again, and he said the boy he'd kicked had shoved him first. The counsellor said he could tell him about what the other boy had done later, but for now, he wanted to know what he himself had done. The boy said other pupils had pushed the boy into him. The counsellor just continued to ask the question about what he'd done, as calmly as he had before, and the answers kept changing a bit, till the boy said things like, 'His stomach hit my foot', and, 'I fell and my foot hit his stomach'. The next time, he just answered, 'My foot hit his stomach'. The counsellor kept on just asking the question, and eventually, the boy sighed and said, 'I kicked him'.

"The counsellor phoned his parents and told him to admit to kicking the boy to them.

"His behaviour improved after he'd been made to own up to being responsible for his actions like that. He still bullied other pupils, but not as often, and not as badly. He was a bit more honest about what he'd done, although he still often blamed others for it. He started complaining about being victimised by other pupils, and his claims were investigated. Sometimes they were found to be likely true, so those other pupils were disciplined. But sometimes he was likely just blaming them when he'd provoked them.

"The school had other anti-bullying strategies they probably sometimes used with him, like discussing in detail with bullies why they'd done what they'd done and how they could stop it, as well as more usual ones like punishments. And in the detentions they were given for bullying, the kids didn't just do extra schoolwork or that kind of thing, but they sat with a supervisor, writing about the reasons why they bullied people, and thinking about what they could do instead to get the same kind of fun or other benefits they got from bullying.

"The school staff told the boy's parents when other boys' accusations against him had turned out to be false as well as when they were true, and told them when he was doing well in his lessons, and when he'd behaved well, and when he'd been honest about things he'd done and used self-control so as not to be as aggressive as he used to be. They still refused to meet with the counsellor or anyone else to discuss ways of changing his behaviour for the better though.

"A couple of years later, the boy was playing a board game with four other boys in the counsellor's office. The counsellor turned his back on them for a minute to answer the phone, and suddenly heard one of the other boys screaming the bully's name. When he put the phone down, he asked the bully what he'd done, and the bully said he hadn't done anything.

"Then the counsellor asked one of the other boys what the bully had done, and he said one boy had been taking a long time to have his go in the game, and the bully had put his hand over the boy's and slammed it down on one of the pieces.

"The counsellor asked the bully what he'd done again, and he admitted it. The counsellor asked him what was wrong with doing that, and at first he answered that he'd get in trouble for it. The counsellor agreed that he would, but asked him if there was anything else wrong with it. He said it might have hurt the boy. The counsellor asked him if it really had, and the boy asked how he was supposed to know that. The counsellor asked him to tell him whether he thought it had.

"Then the boy did something that surprised the counsellor. He put one of his hands over one of the pieces on the board, and then slammed his other hand down on it. He yelled, 'Ow!' after a pause, he said quietly, 'It did hurt him'.

"The counsellor and the boys realised it was a big step for the bully to have done that, and the counsellor praised him for his honesty.

"The boy's aggression decreased even more after that. He only got aggressive with people a few times the next year, and all those times were during arguments. And he used words to try to resolve conflicts a lot more rather than violence, and put up with frustration better. And he stopped reporting that other boys were victimising him. Maybe he wasn't provoking them as much any more."