How anger fuels violent crime in youth
Anger is evoked from being harmed or having a goal blocked; those who experience severe, chronic challenges and trauma tend to experience more anger. If channelled into productive activities — such as addressing injustices through whistleblowing, activism and legal action — anger can fuel extremely positive changes in society.
Results from a recently published study by criminal justice scholar Caitlin Cavanagh and I showed that justice-involved youth who reported experiencing more anger in the preceding few months were more likely to be currently violent. However, they were not at greater risk of reoffending within two years (violently or non-violently).
This is contrary to findings from other researchers that employed shorter follow-up recidivism periods (those who reoffended within one year or less). This could mean that general anger is related to short-term violence and offending, but is not linked to long-term conduct problems.
However, we did find that specific features of anger may be important for long-term criminality in youth.
Each episode of anger can be thought of as a wave, which includes a rise and fall.
The rise refers to how rapidly anger emerges after a challenge; someone with a short fuse can make others feel like they need to walk on eggshells as not to set them off. The fall refers to how long someone stays angry.
Long, stewing anger can intensify feelings and foster fantasies of violence, which would explain why prolonged anger has been tied to serious offences.
For example, male parolees with violent histories experience prolonged anger, but not shorter fuses, when compared to a community sample. In our study, we found that youth who had a history of violent offences who also reported prolonged anger were twice as likely to reoffend.
On the other hand, we found that having a short fuse is related to continuing a pattern of non-violent offending in youth. Poor self-regulation is related to quick tempers in children and impulse control improves as youth age. Less serious, non-violent youth offenders also tend to stop offending by early adulthood. Therefore, these persistent short fuse, non-violent youth may eventually stop offending as they get older.
So, there may be two youth anger profiles that are about twice as likely to reoffend: prolonged anger, serious offenders and short-fuse, nonviolent offenders.
The first represents a brooding youth capable of violence who also tends to engage in non-violent offences (like stealing). The second represents an easily angered youth who tends to act on their emotions with little forethought — but may grow out of it.
Knowing how youth are feeling and what causes those feelings is necessary for effectively managing anger. Once youth understand their anger, they can work on strategies that avoid triggering it, how to de-escalate it and how to address maladaptive thought processes like, “everyone is out to get me.”
These strategies can be very effective; a meta-analysis showed that completing a cognitive behavioural therapy anger management program — which focuses on reducing the frequency, fuse, duration and intensity of anger — resulted in 42 per cent lower risk of reoffending, and 56 per cent lower risk of violently reoffending.
One strategy that common sense tells us should work, but actually doesn’t, is physically releasing anger, that is, catharsis. It’s true that aggressively acting out anger can lead to immediate reductions in arousal, but it is also known to increase later aggression.
There is plenty we still don’t understand about how anger influences behaviour, but luckily, there are effective strategies available to help manage it when it becomes a problem.