Week Four e Exercise (Aileen Wuornos) PDF

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Week Four eExercise

Saturday, October 12, 2019

The Aileen Wuornos Case Introduction to Criminology! Address this case from a criminological perspective and discuss the basis for potential crime causality factors inherent with this case. Psychological/psychiatric, biological or was it a combination of different theories? Was free will involved? Did she suffer from mental illness to the extent that the mens rea associated with the case was lacking? Was she a psychopath?

On Monday, Feb 10 1992 Time Magazine printed an article with the heading “Damsel of Death”; this was in reference to “the first female serial killer” to be prosecuted in American history, Aileen Wuornos. Since early stages Wuornos had a very difficult life. The subject was a born from a marriage of a 14-year old girl, Diane Wuornos. The mother filed for divorce two months before the child was even born and the father, Leo Pittman, who was also considered a psychopath and was incarcerated in a mental institution, later committed suicide awaiting trial in a case of child molestation. It is important to keep a note of the fact that the father was a diagnosed schizophrenic. When Aileen was 4, her mother abandoned her and her elder brother who was 5 at that time. The maternal grandparents took responsibility of these children and legally adopted them, however that turned out to be a mess as well. Aileen claimed that her grandfather was an abusive character as well. He was an alcoholic and allegedly sexually assaulted young Aileen. All these factors came into play and by the age of 11, the subject was trading food, cigarettes and drugs for sexual activities. She was raped by a friend of his grandfather at the age of 14 resulting in a pregnancy. The child was born while Wuornos was residing in a place for unwed mothers and was given for adoption. At the age of 15, Aileen dropped out of school as her grandmother died and her grandfather forced her out of the house. Left alone in the cruel world, Wuornos took to prostitution to make a living. Aileen started having trouble with law enforcement agencies since the young age of 18. Later on the subject would go on to commit horrendous crimes and was convicted for murdering seven men from 1989 to 1990.! In order to try to explain the causality factors of this case, we will have to consider all this information and combine different theories to make sense of it. While the psychological and psychiatric circumstances are obviously evident by studying the history of the criminal’s early stages of life, the genes that she carried were not the best either. Considering the history of the family, the biological theory is also definitely a factor to consider to understand causality and put things in context. So the gist of it all would be that Aileen Wuornos was effected not only by psychological but also 1

Week Four eExercise

Saturday, October 12, 2019

biological factors that caused her to turn to a criminal path of life. However, despite living among harsh conditions and being subject to far much worse abuse, there are people who do not turn to a life a criminality. So keeping in mind the neoclassical theory of crime causation, free will is definitely also a factor to be considered.

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