Criminal justice specialists call for new approach to identify emerging type of murderer with no prior convictions

The rise of “0 to 100” killers who go from watching torture, mutilation and beheading videos in their bedrooms to committing murder suggests there could be a link between extreme violence online and in real life, experts have said.

Criminal justice experts advocated a new approach, inspired by counter-terrorism, to identify an emerging type of murderer with no prior convictions, after cases such as Nicholas Prosper, who killed his mother and siblings and planned a primary school massacre.

Jonathan Hall, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said there was a “new threat cohort” combining terrorists who were radicalised online and those who had “gone down a rabbit hole and into a dark world”.

He said: “There are quite a lot of similarities: they are isolated loners, boys rather than girls; the internet is obviously central; quite a high proportion have neurodivergence.

  • @[email protected]English
    12•2 days ago

    Yeah, but the people who do go on to do that shit, would be the most likely to seek it out, and history shows people still would do those crimes without online video.

    And a non zero were given treatment because those videos leave a trail and some get caught.

    The answer to this stuff is rarely simple, and the actual findings are often counterintuitive.

    Basically:

    We have no idea until we study, and we can’t really ethically study this. We’d have to force a control group of impressionable kids to watch those videos.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 day ago

      I think I get what you are saying, but also, I’m not sure my point got across entirely. The article and headline use this “from 0 to 100” verbiage to imply a rapid acceleration from being at rest (as in, 0mph) to suddenly moving at a very high velocity (100mph). And that is relating people who watch snuff films to the at-rest part of the analogy, no effort spent, just coasting along… a default state, if you will. And, of course, the real wacko ones that end up just happening to take it a bit too far are the ones that just suddenly find themselves going 100mph, having obviously had to expend a great deal of energy in pursuit of that sudden delta-v.

      I’m saying, on that kind of a scale, the people that would never even consider the existence of smut and, upon hearing about it, would be far too revolted to want to have to see it, has a velocity so far in the negative that it’s probably worth considering setting the 0 in the scale to the people who are all the way on the smut-is-gross-and-also-a-red-flag end of the dichotomy on this issue? That’s got to make more sense than setting 0 at “they watch that nasty shit but don’t, like, act on it” as the 0-point, doesn’t it?