Psychological Factors Influencing Violent Criminal Offenses in Bangladesh

Abstract

Violent criminal offense is a big threat to peaceful human world and its adverse impact may encompass physical injury to death, mental health suffering, financial expenditure to carry out judicial procedures, social instability and fear, and so on. There are many risk factors which may lead to develop a criminal offender and to maintain the criminal behavior. The factors can be seen from different perspectives which are biological, social, and psychological and so on. Critics in existing theories and diversified context issue indicate further study of the violent behavior. In Bangladesh, there is a gap in empirical evidences about the cause‟s especially psychological factors. In this context, grounded theory approach of qualitative research design was suitable to be used to explore the contributing psychological factors of violent criminal offenses and to understand the interrelation of these factors. In-depth interview was conducted with nine offenders in a prison of Bangladesh who confessed to committing violent crime by their own hands. Violent behaviors included grievous hurt and murder along with some other crimes such as kidnapping, carrying firearm and so on. Purposive and snowball techniques were used to find the respondents according to inclusion criteria. Interview transcript was the sources of data which derived from the interview notes of the researcher. Data collection process was carried out by following theoretical sampling. A computer based software; Nvivo-10 was used for data analysis where open, axial and selective coding stages followed to explore the psychological factors of violent criminal behavior. A total of seven broad themes were indentified which are poor sense of love and affection, inadequate learning and moral judgment, Maladaptive personality factors, perceived survival threat, ambiguous meaning of life, poor cognitive abilities and skills, and influence of emotional drives. Under seven broad themes, a list of 19 themes were identified in which all the themes were associated with 44 specific psychological factors. Violent offense is preventable. Thus it is essential and necessary to understand psychological factors influence violent behavior which required the study of human being who actually commits the violence. Therefore, these findings of the study may contribute to the knowledge development of psychology, criminology, sociology and law field; and to take preventive actions at individual and institutional level in Bangladesh.