The studies' findings demonstrate a clear point: Witnessing brutality to animals desensitizes young people and makes them prone to aggression for life.
JANE DALTON: ‘The links between early cruelty to animals and later violent and aggressive crime have been documented for decades, and suspected by some for even longer. But now academic research has uncovered wider chilling evidence of the psychological effect on children of witnessing cruelty to animals, and prompted widespread efforts to step in and halt those at risk of escalating the trauma by acting it out against both animals and people.
In the first university study of the subject, researchers from Teesside University talked to teenagers in Romania, finding that nearly nine in 10 – a staggering 86.3 per cent – thought it was “normal” to see homeless animals being abused or killed. The teenagers were also found to be more likely than youngsters in Germany, a control group, to later self-harm or have suicidal tendencies. As children, nearly all of those questioned had witnessed street animals being caught in a noose, poisoned or hanged…
In the UK, Ministry of Justice figures last year showed that 13 convicted murderers, 22 child rapists and 99 people guilty of child cruelty had also been convicted or cautioned for animal cruelty offences over the previous decade. Hundreds of sex offenders and people convicted of violently attacking others were also found to be guilty of animal abuse. And in 2002 an Australian study concluded: “Animal abuse was a better predictor of sex assault than previous convictions for murder, arson or firearms offences.”
Malcolm Plant, the author of a peer-reviewed paper on the subject, Making the Link, says that put together, Romania’s street dog culling, violence rates and the study’s findings demonstrate a clear point: witnessing brutality to animals desensitises young people and makes them prone to aggression for life. “It’s highly likely that an animal abuser will also be abusing humans. We found not only have most animal abusers been exposed to violence and abuse, but that this has resulted in reduced empathy and a normalisation of aggression,” he says’. SOURCE…
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