Cage H - The Hehrend College Collegian ■ Thursday, April 16. IWX Brain scans suggest some are bom with violent tendencies By Rob Stein=(c) 1998. The Wash ington Post An engineer in his forties, de scribed as friendly and outgoing by neighbors, Hies into a rage in the midst of a family argument and brutally beats his wife and 13-month-old daughter to death with a champagne bottle he has just emptied. A grocery store robber armed with a sawed-off shotgun shoots an employee who happens to walk in unexpectedly, A 21-year-old man, who has a “quick temper" but is well-liked by his neighbors, goes back to the auto parts store from which he'd been fired and kills, execution-style, three of his former co-workers. Sociologists, psychiatrists, crimi nologists and others have long struggled to understand what makes some people turn violent. Childhood abuse clearly can be a major factor in predisposing someone to violence as an adult. But researchers have won dered whether some people are born with the tendency. And a new study suggests some are. In the first study of its kind, neu roscientists used the latest high-tech imaging technology literally to peer inside the minds of killers to try to determine whether their brains differ in some fundamental way. “For a long time, we seemed to know that antisocial groups may be characterized by some kind of brain dysfunction. But the measure of brain dysfunction was indirect,” said Andrian Raine, a clinical neuroscien tist at the University of Southern Cali fornia in Los Angeles who led the study. "This is the first, the largest, and the most comprehensive brain imaging study on seriously violent crime to date.” They found evidence that some people are born with brains that may make them prone to violence, perhaps because the part of their brains in volved in creating a sense of "con Attacks on children throw Hanoi By David Lamb=(c) 1998, Los Ange les Times HANOI. Vietnam For the past two weeks, a mysterious young man has sped through this capital's streets, cut ting the faces and hands of children passing on motor scooters driven by their parents. Though none of the 14 attacks, apparently done with a razor, has re sulted in serious injury, Hanoi has been thrown into panic. Not for years has a single subject so dominated conversa tion and front-page media attention and not since the war has violence so altered the lives of so many. "This kind of thing has never hap pened in Hanoi before," said a televi sion cameraman. "Never. It’s unimag inable. In New York, yes, this could happen. In Hanoi, no.” Fearful of more attacks, parents arc keeping children home, reducing school attendance by 25 percent in some cases. They are rushing out to buy helmets gear Vietnam’s 5 million motor scooter users virtually never wear to protect youngsters’ faces; in the past week, the price of a locally made helmet has doubled to the equiva lent of $5. Security guards have been posted at gates of many schools and students who still ride to school on the back of parents’ scooters are apt to ar rive wrapped in towels and dressed in thick winter jackets to ward off pos sible razor attacks. Some children travel the streets with baskets over their heads. At Chu Van An school, Vice Di rector Dinh Viet Hung canceled after school tutoring for 100 students. Par ents, he said, wanted their children home early to avoid “face cutting.” The entire Hanoi police force has been mobilized and Chief Pham Chuyen has urged local people’s com mittees to help find the attacker but not to employ vigilante justice if they do. While street life appears unaf fected, except for those with children, residents here say that not since the American Christmas bombing in 1972 has Hanoi known such fear; not since French colonial days, when some sup- science" is dysfunctional, Raine said. Raine and his colleagues identi fied 38 murderers, including the three described above, and reviewed court records, attorney interviews, medical and psychological records and news paper articles to determine which had suffered trauma during their child “For a long time, we seemed to know that antisocial groups may be characterized by some kind of brain dysfunction But the measure of brain dysfunction was indirect,” Andrian Raine, a clinical neuroscientist at the University of Southern California hood, including physical or.sexual abuse, severe neglect, extreme pov erty, severe family conflict and paren tal divorce. Of the murderers, 12 had suffered significant abuse or depriva tion. The remaining 26, including the three described above, experienced minimal abuse or none at all. The researchers then used positron emission tomography (PET), a technique that can measure activity of various parts of the brain, to com pare those who had suffered trauma as children with those who had not, and with a group of people who had not committed any violent acts. Compared with the subjects who had suffered abuse and with nonvio lent people, the 26 murderers from comparatively benign backgrounds averaged 5.7 percent less activity in a part of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex. More significant, they showed an average of 14.2 per cent less activity in a part of the me dial prefrontal cortex known as the orbitofrontal cortex, on the right into panic ported France and some Ho Chi Minh, have residents had to wonder whether passersby were friend or foe. But if Hanoi’s response is as re markable as the attacks themselves, there is reason. This metropolis of 3 million has minuscule crime rate . With few exceptions, the streets are safe at any time, even for a lone pedestrian; senseless, random violence particu larly involving children in a society that cherishes its young is unheard of. Something else, too, may account for Hanoi’s stunned reaction. These razor attacks come at a time of: —lncreasing drug use, with 2,552 such arrests nationwide in the first three months of 1998. —An upsurge in youths racing motorbikes through nighttime city streets; 23 bikes were confiscated by Hanoi police in one incident. —Rising divorces, with almost 50,000 a year in Hanoi alone. —A growing number of prosti tutes estimated at 52,(XK) in the na tion and a small (8,000) but grow ing group of HIV-positive young people. In a country where half the popu lation wasn’t bom when the last Ameri cans fled Saigon in 1975, many see these “social evils" as a warning that the discipline of Vietnam’s war years is breaking down. Some think that the nation's newly liberalized economy is creating a class of wayward, undirected youth with too much money and free time. And rather than dismissing the at tacks as the work of a sick individual, the Vietnamese media have offered a myriad of theories. Some reports sug gest the attacker is addled by a new drug whose users are mesmerized by blood; others say he has AIDS and is using poisoned razors to seek revenge against society. Still others say the as saults are a marketing gimmick by hel met sellers to drive up the price of their goods. Police have made little headway in their investigation, other than iden tifying the attacker as a dark-haired man, 20 to 25 years old. He drives a Vina Suzuki motor scooter. The 14 vic tims have been between ages 4 and 13. World and Nation hemisphere. Head injuries or mental illness could not explain the differ- The medial prefrontal cortex, lo cated just behind the forehead, has been shown in animal research to be involved in inhibiting the limbic sys tem, a region located much deeper inside the brain that produces aggres sive behavior. "The prefrontal cortex is a bit like an emergency brake on a car. It's like the emergency brake on the deeper areas of the brain that are involved in aggressive feelings,” Raine said. Animal research also has shown that the right orbitofrontal cortex, which is just above the right eye, is involved in fear conditioning the subconscious association between antisocial behavior and punishment that in humans is thought to be key to developing a sense of “conscience.” "When you train a dog, you pun ish it every time it does something wrong. That's how they learn to fol low social rules,” Raine said. “A con science is really just a set of condi tioned responses.” The deficit revealed in the study may leave individuals with “an emo tionally blunted personality lacking in conscience development," Raine and his colleagues wrote in reporting their findings last week in the journal Neu ropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, and Behavioral Neurology. The research could help explain why some people who had not suf fered traumatic childhoods still be come violent. "People always suspect that it was those with the adverse childhood experiences who were the ones with brain dysfunction. We found it was the ones with the benign home backgrounds who showed the dysfunction." Raine said in a tele phone interview. "Coming from a deprived back ground, the reasons for your violence may be the child sexual abuse or pov erty or whatever,” he said. But "if you are a v iolent offender, and you have a States try to rein in tribal gaming boom By Edward Walsh=(c) 1998, The Washington Post It is a new and remarkably suc cessful business that has created hun dreds of jobs and provided economic benefits to some of California’s most disadvantaged citizens. But unless there is a break in a longtime impasse, federal authorities, acting at the behest of state officials, may soon move to close it down. The business is casino gambling, which has been operating illegally in the view of California officials since the early 1990 s on about 40 of the state's Indian reservations. In March, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson signed an agreement regulating Indian run casinos with one tribe near San Diego and is demanding that the state’s other tribes accept similar arrange ments or risk losing their gambling ventures. Wilson called the agreement, for mally known as a compact, a "groundbreaking” achievement, but many California tribes are resisting the terms, which include a limit on the number and type of slot machines al lowed in tribal casinos. “It is a direct infringement on our sovereignty,” said Daniel Tucker, chairman of the Cali fomia-Nevada Indian Gaming Associa- The California showdown is the latest and most dramatic skirmish be tween state and tribal governments over the size, shape and future of In dian gaming. The disputes have been going on since 1988 when Congress, responding to a Supreme Court ruling that states could not regulate gambling operations on Indian reservations, en acted a law that attempted to reassert some regulatory authority. It required states to negotiate com pacts with tribes within their borders on the terms under which legal gam bling would be allowed. It also required the states to let Native American tribes conduct any type of gambling activity that was not prohibited by state law. Since then, the stakes have grown dramatically. From a few scattered and isolated reservation bingo halls, Indian gaming, which generated $570 million in revenue in 1990, has become an es timated $7 billion a year industry. Ac cording to the National Indian Gam relatively normal home background, it s more likely that biological factors like brain dysfunction, explanation for your violent behav ior," he said. "There are a lot of parents out there who, despite all of their best ef forts, their children go off the rails and they commit violent offenses. And the parents feel desperately guilty and there’s a lot of soul searching “What did I do wrong?' ” he said. “The fact that there is an identifiable biological disposition suggests it's not how the child was raised. It’s that they had a biological dysfunction, com bined with a situation, that led to the violence." Raine cautioned that human be havior is extremely complicated and tends to be influenced by a complex and often subtle interaction of social and biological factors. "There are a lot of factors in volved in crime. Brain function is just one of those," he said. “But by un derstanding the brain function, we will be in a much better position to understand the complete causes of violent behavior." Other researchers praised Rainc’s study. “I think it’s original work that’s quite important," said Jan Volavka, a professor of psychiatry at New York University. But some said that while Raine’s research is interesting, they were highly skeptical that brain dysfunc tion alone could predispose someone to violence. "By and large our findings sug gest that neurologic impairment alone does not cause violence because most neurologically impaired people are not violent," said Dorothy O. Lewis, who studies violence at New York University and Yale University. "It impairs judgment and increases emo tionality and a tendency to lash out. But if you raise a child who has brain dysfunction in a reasonably sup portive household, that person will learn to handle that volatility." ing Commission, which regulates the casinos and other tribal gambling ven tures, 188 tribes out of a total of 558 federally recognized tribes operate 285 gambling facilities in 28 states. There is no question that the gam bling has been good for Native Ameri cans, particularly those like the Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut who have reservations near major population centers and have opened the kind of large, glitzy casinos that a few years ago were confined to Las Vegas or Atlantic City. Most of the money produced in the casinos has been in vested in schools, health clinics and other reservation improvements, mak ing gambling “the most successful eco nomic development tool of this cen tury" for Indian tribes, said Alan Fedman, director of enforcement for the National Indian Gaming Commis- But growing competition and, as in California, hardening state attitudes have put new pressure on the Indian gaming industry. “For the most part, it’s been a shot in the arm," said Tadd M. Johnson, a member of the Bois Forte Band of Minnesota Chippewa and chairman of the Indian gaming commission. “But if you talk to tribes, they're very dubi ous about the future of gaming. They say everything else has been taken from us, and this is a phase we’re go ing to go through." In 1996, the Supreme Court gave states an important victory in their re lations with Indian tribes. Under the 1988 law, state governments were re quired to negotiate with tribes in “good faith" in order to reach a compact or risk being sued by the tribes in federal court. But in a 5 to 4 decision, the high court ruled that Congress exceeded its authority when it gave tribes the right to sue states in gambling disputes. Since the 1996 ruling, the num ber of compacts that have been suc cessfully negotiated between Indian tribes and state governments has dwindled. Johnson told the National Gambling Impact Study Commission in March that only 14 tribal-state com pacts were approved in 1996 and 1997. “ States are taking a harder line since Seminole (Tribe of Florida v. Florida ),” the name of the Supreme Court case that led to the rpling, said RAND study calls high school’s condom program a success --y Thomas H. Maugh II—(c) 1998, Los Angeles Times LOS ANGELES A free condom program at a Los Angeles County high school has increased sexual safety without any corresponding in crease in sexual activity, according to a new study being reported Tuesday by researchers at the RAND Corp. The percentage of sexually expe rienced males using a condom each time they had intercourse rose by a third, from 37 percent to 50 percent, at the unnamed high school, accord ing to a report in the journal Family Planning Perspectives. But, rebutting the fears of con dom distribution critics, the study found that the number of males and females who had ever had sex re mained constant at 55 percent and 46 percent, respectively. “This is just one study in one school district... but it is very encour aging,” said Dr. Mark A. Schuster, a senior researcher at Santa Monica based RAND and a pediatrician at UCLA. A study in New York recently obtained similar results, he noted. “It looks like these programs really can have the desired effect.” Response to the study was tepid, at best, however. Condom distribution “ceased to be controversial a couple of months after we started doing it,” said Shel Erlich, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Unified School District. A condom distribution program was begun in 1992 in high schools in the school district and in the nearby Cul ver City and Santa Monica districts. Although neither the school nor the school district were named, the study was conducted in a 2,500-stu dent high school “that serves a racially and socioeconomically diverse com munity in Los Angeles County,” the an Interior Department official who closely follows the Indian gaming in- There are also signs that state gov ernments, watching the unexpected success of tribal gambling, are begin ning to go after a larger slice of the pie. Under federal law, states may not tax Indian gaming revenue, although tribes generally pay a fee for government ser- in 1993 Connecticut set a prece dent when it signed a compact with the Mashantucket Pequots requiring the tribe to share 25 percent of its revenue from slot machines with the state in return for a monopoly on slot ma chines. Last year the New Mexico state legislature, over tribal objections, re quired a 16 percent share of revenue in new gaming compacts. Wisconsin is one of the first states to begin negotiations to extend gam ing compacts that were originally signed in the early 1990 s and has made clear that it will demand a huge in crease in the size of payments from the tribes. Under the existing compacts, Wisconsin’s 11 tribes have paid the state $350,000 a year from their casino ventures, an amount state officials ex pect to soar to more than $25 million a year under the new compacts. “People feel it’s very unfair for the tribes not to be on the same playing field as normal businesses are in Wis consin,” said Mark Bugher, the state’s secretary of administration. “By and large, people here in Wisconsin sup port the concept of the tribes paying the state something in exchange for the privilege of enjoying a monopolistic status.” Bugher added that other states “are watching very carefully what is happening in Wisconsin.” Meanwhile, growing competition from the spread of gambling through out the country a phenomenon fu eled in part by the success of Indian gaming is becoming more of a fac tor for the tribes. Michigan’s Indian tribes will soon lose their monopoly on casino gambling in that state when three new casjnos open in downtown Detroit. In California, Wilson, an opponent of legalized gambling, and the state’s Indian tribes have been at odds over the issue for years. States, however, are report stated. In the program, which began in April 1992, plastic packets contain ing two condoms were placed in bas kets in four classrooms and outside the nurse’s office. Students did not need permission to take them, and no counseling was required. A sign re quested a quarter for each packet, but few students left any money. Between 1,800 and 2,000 packets were taken each month. Schuster and his colleagues con ducted an anonymous survey of the students about their sexual practices before the distribution began and one year after it started. Parental consent was required for the students to fill out the forms, and more than 40 per cent did not complete the second form because of lack of such consent. The study found almost no in crease in condom use among experi enced female students and a one-third increase among experienced males. But the results were more encourag ing among the sexually naive. The percentage of males who re ported using a condom at first inter course grew from 46 percent to 56 percent, while for those who had only recently initiated intercourse, the number rose from 65 percent to 80 percent. And among those who re ported that they planned to use condoms when they had sex for the first time, the number rose from 62 percent to 90 percent among males and from 73 percent to 94 percent among females. “There was a very large percent age of the students who had gotten condoms, opened them up and put them on their fingers,” Schuster said. “If they engage in sex in the future, they are more likely to use them, and more likely to use them right, because they are more familiar with them.” not empowered to act against Indian tribes sovereign nations under U.S. law and federal authorities have withheld enforcement action against the tribal casinos while hoping for a negotiated settlement. But that changed in March when Wilson announced agreement on a gambling compact with the Pala Band of Mission Indians, which does not operate a casino, and U.S. attorneys in California threatened enforcement ac tion next month against tribes that con tinue to run casinos without a compact with the state. Under the “model com pact,” no Indian tribe could operate more than 975 video gaming devices. To circumvent California’s constitu tional ban on Las Vegas-style casino gambling, a new type of video device, based on the state lottery, is being de veloped to replace existing video slot machines. And in an attempt to force tribes with casinos to share some of their profits with other tribes that are not in the gambling business, the compact would allocate 199 of the new type machines to every tribe in the state. Those that did not want to operate a casino could then rent their allotment to the tribes that do have casinos, earn ing as much as $1 million a year. To many tribal leaders, the Cali fornia compact is an attack on their political sovereignty. “The Pala band has a right to negotiate what it thinks is good for it,” said Tim Wapato, ex ecutive director of the National Indian Gaming Association, a trade group composed of tribes that operate casi nos. “What isn’t right is for California to say each tribe can only have 199 machines and each tribe is held to the language of the Pala agreement. ... If somebody tried to do that with the 50 states, the governors would be up in arms, saying you can’t dictate to us how we’re going to run our gaming operations.” California officials retort that the model compact is a way to allow tribes to continue in the gaming business but within the confines of state law, which is what the 1988 federal legislation authorized. “These tribes should never have been operating without a compact in the first place,” said Daniel Kolkey, Wilson’s counsel. “They never had the right to do what they’re doing."
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