Breivik’s mom wished him dead
Woman ‘sexualized’ child, report says
MALMO, SWEDEN Anders Behring Breivik’s mother “sexualized” her four-year-old son and often told him she wished he were dead, according to child psychologist reports in a book on the Norwegian mass murderer.
The reports also show that his mother became preoccupied with fears that he would assault someone.
“She saw him as an adult violent person, though he was only a small boy,” said Aage Borchgrevink, author of A Norwegian Tragedy. “She was afraid that he would assault people.”
The psychologist reports show that Wenche Behring already felt that her son was “aggressive, hyperactive and clingy” when she was breastfeeding him. By the time he was four, she “sexualized” him, hit him, and frequently told him that she wished he were dead.
“The mother and Anders slept in the same bed at night with very close bodily contact,” psychologists from Norway’s centre for child and youth psychiatry ( SSBU) reported after Breivik and his mother spent several weeks there in 1983.
The family’s neighbours had become worried about her inappropriate sexual behaviour.
“During the police investigation, the neighbours also said they had been shocked by the mother’s sexualized language,” Borchgrevink writes. “There was a lot of fighting in the apartment and they remembered sexual activity taking place while the children were in there.”
The report described Behring as “a woman with an extremely difficult upbringing, borderline personality structure and an allencompassing, if only partially visible, depression” who “projects her primitive aggressive and sexual fantasies on to him (Breivik).”
The psychologists reported that she would frequently tell her son that she wished he would die. “She shifts very quickly between speaking to him with a sugary voice and openly expressing a death wish,” they wrote.
Borchgrevink has faced criticism in Norway for his decision to publish excerpts from the reports, with some accusing him of violating the privacy of Behring, who was admitted to a psychiatric ward the day after her son killed 77 people in his bomb and gun rampage in July 2011.
Behring was excused from testifying in the trial on health grounds.
After Breivik’s father, Jens Breivik, lost a child custody case, social workers recommended that the boy still be removed from his mother to prevent “more severe psychopathology” from developing, but were ignored.