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A 12 year old child murdered another 12 year old in Vanda, just North of Helsingfors. Why?
“One 12-year-old sixth grade pupil died and two others were injured after being shot by a classmate at the Viertola school in Vantaa on Tuesday morning.Link till source.
The two injured pupils were hospitalised with serious injuries.
Police said they had apprehended a suspect who was also a 12-year-old pupil at the school. The suspected shooter fled the scene on foot and was caught by officers in the northern Helsinki neighbourhood of Siltamäki”.
Every normal person was shocked by the news of the shooting.
The scientific questions are:
- how prevalent is this kind of behavior?
- Why does this occur?
It was a bit hard to find data for Finland, but when those data are revealed, they will be included in the article.
Until then, a Study from the US may give some clues; the prevalence of homicide by children in the US was 1.2 per one million, that is 74 perpetrators per year. 90% were boys and 13% age 11-12 (Hemenway and Solnick, 2017).
Transferring that model to Finland means that one can expect one case per year, but the expected prevalence for the age group 11-12 is 0.13 ~ unlikely.
Ergo. This is a very rare event.
Why did the murder occur?
The general explanation for the event is lack of emotional and social adjustment.
At 2 years of age, children are at peak violence. Thereafter, they adjust emotionally and socially (Pinker, 2005).
Children's emotional adjustment and cognitive development is very intense during the first 4-5 years of living (Baumrind, 1966; Gopnik, 2016 ; Hart och Risley, 1995). Between 5 - 12 years of age, social adjustment is intense (Österberg, 2004).
And there's a father effect on children's emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development (MacRay, 2021; Rolle et al. 2019; Sethna, 2017; Vieno et al. 2009, 2014; Österberg, 2004).
The opposite to emotional and social adjustment is antisocial behavior (Calkins och Keane, 2009; Moffitt et al. 2001), e.g., the shooting in Vanda, Finland.
When children become five years old, a common pattern is that the relationship between the father and the mother is resolved in approximately 50 % of the cases.
The explanation for this is a hormonal change within women; when our ancestors lived on the Savannah, and children became more independent, it meant that a mother could focus on the next off-spring, or something else - like gathering (our ancestors lived as hunters and gatherers för ~1.8 million years).
But a common pattern in our modern society is that mothers in about 30% cases act to take sole control of the child. This behavior is explained by something called relational aggressiveness (psychological domestic violence) (Crick och Grotpeter, 1995; Hyde, 2005), which is explained by Borderline Personality Disorder (Ruffalo, 2024; Zalewski et al. 2014), which in turn is explained by Complex childhood trauma. The latter may have been transferred to the boy.
Sadly, in the 1950s, a new principle was applied in Swedish courts, and likely also in Finnish ditto; it's called Mater certa semper est - presumption of motherhood (PoM; at least we know who the mother is). PoM is applied in 75% in Sweden and the US custodial trials (Harman and Biringen, 2016; Elfver-Lindström, 1999 (see Österberg, 2004); Schiratzki, 2008; Österberg, 2004), and likely in Finland.
In April 2022, an officer at the Helsingfors Police department said that women's relational aggressiveness was one of their biggest problems. That was reiterated by another police officer in 2024.
In May 2022, a director from the Ministry of education and culture said that many Finnish children fail reading compression and numeracy. The latter is fundamental for instrumental and epistemic rational thinking. Now, remember, cognitive development is dependent of emotional adjustment, and that there's a father effect.
During spring of 2022, a mother murdered her son at a place provided by the social service for women with mental challenges.
In the neighboring town of Borgå, a mother tried to beat her five year old son to death. She continued to beat the child even though the police entered the apartment. She was known by the social service (they called the police).
During spring of 2023, a 4 year old died in the mothers house-hold, by violence from her new boyfriend by choice.
In November 2023, at a conference about Children's rights, Finland's child commissary, Elina Pekkarinen, reported that psychological and lethal violence against young kids has increased. The host for the conference interjected, saying that 40 % of Finnish school children are affected.
Ergo. The event was unlikely, and the most likely explanation of the event is that the boy was raised by the mother only, due to her being granted sole custody by personell at Helsingfors or Vanda court. And like the other case: that she was known by the social service.
Also read. In Sweden, a mother memory hacked her son. The implication: he murdered his eight month pregnant girlfriend (Mail Online).
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