Serial Killers: Nature Or Nurture?

Nature vs Nurture is often a big topic of debate for people. This is the idea that people are either born a certain way, or shaped by their environment. It is seen as a debate in many cases, but one specifically, is the topic of child killers; kids who before they became adults did the unimaginable and killed another person. There are many different examples of this happening, and there are many different cases on weather it is nature or nurture. However, Two examples of this are Mary Bell, and Daniel Bartlem. In certain children killer cases there will be rulings saying that they had certain psychological problems, but not in all. The question is then raised, where these kids born this way? Or have they been made to act out this way

Through the court case they did say how she was brought up in such a rough environment, which clearly would have an awful effect on any young girl. The thought of being sexually assaulted at such a young age of eleven or younger also played a role towards the nurture debate. Also the fact that her mother had tried to kill her and was never home definitely didn’t give her any exact person to look up to. At a young age, children are so impressionable, so going through things like this could clearly make her act out and do unjust actions. Although the nature side of this debate shows that through the trial, Mary was clearly showing signs of psychopathy, which is a mental/psychological disorder that she would have been born with. So now back to the question if she was born or created to be this way. Well, considering she lives a normal life now, she got married, had children and is now a grandmother, she seems to be doing well. So our thoughts are that she was created to be this way. She was neglected from birth by her mother and her father wasn’t around, so she was never taught right from wrong. If anything, Mary learned based off her mother's actions, which were inappropriate and wrong. Not that being neglected means a child should act out by killing someone, but maybe she was jealous of the attention that they received from their parents, or maybe it was her way of

Through documentation there has been no showings of any psychological issues that Daniel has. Although undocumented does not mean that they don’t exist. We do believe he had to have something wrong with him in this sense. Personally we feel that the mother was oblivious to all the things her child was doing. We understand that no parent wants to think their kid has any sort of issues but, being fourteen years old and going to the bathroom in your bedroom, and also stealing your mother's underwear is not something many people would call “normal”. The papers that he wrote should have been clear signs that something was off. Daniel killed his mother and had no issue lying about it, and going off the next day talking to people like nothing happened showing no emotion to the fact that he had just killed his mother. That isn’t something a person would normally be able to do. Sources told us his background, how he had a nice family, his mother was around and he even had a step dad who cared about him and tried to tell the mother that there was something off about him. This we feel was mostly nature. No matter who his mother would have been, no matter what environment he grew up in, we feel that he would have ended up being like this and killing someone. Although we do know and understand that there may be no documented evidence, we feel something was definitely psychologically off. (Source used for