| Violence, unfortunately, has been proven to be a very effective way to garner respect in certain segments of society. There are groups/gangs of marginalized and disenfranchised youth who are searching for identity and respect and they find it by perpetrating violent acts against the citizens of their respective communities and against themselves. Homicide is the ultimate act that earns high regard and forms an identity in gangs. It also serves as an organizing function as it encourages loyalty, protects the group, and protects the individual.;Stress tolerance and control variables from the Structural Summary of the Rorschach, Meloy and Gacono aggressive indices, Kwawer's Primitive Modes of Relating Categories, Cooper and Arnow Rorschach Defense Scales, and the Mutuality of Autonomy Scales will be evaluated and integrated for the purpose of understanding the personality structure, object relatedness, and defenses of the participants. Information from attachment theory, neurobiology, epigenetics, and cultural issues will be used to provide a foundation to support the idea that murder may be committed by someone who may be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder but not be pathological. The results support this distinction.;This is a Rorschach study of three African-American teen gang members, two males and one female, who have attempted murder, committed murder, and in two of the cases, committed more than one murder. The murders were carried out under the auspices of the gang and each one of the participants in this study, at that point in time, were "hard core" gang bangers and considered themselves to be "soldiers" at war with their "enemy." For this reason and in an effort to understand the disproportionately high homicide rate among young African-American male gang members living in urban communities, it is important to understand the etiology of this violence as it is contextualized in American chattel slavery, racism, poverty, dehumanization, internalized oppression, marginalization, and self hate. In the aforementioned contexts, it is also important to examine the level of violence that African-American females are now perpetrating against rival female gang members and how the lethality of their behaviors is now rivaling that of Black male gang members. |
