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Burgess et al. / SEXUAL HOMICIDE could act violently and kill with impunity. Of the 36, 10 murdered as juve- niles, thus realizing that they had the power over life. MOTIVATIONAL MODEL OF SEXUAL HOMICIDES To illustrate our hypothesis of the various factors that influenced the 36 sexual murderers to kill, we present a motivational model for understanding sexually oriented murder and sadistic violence. In addition to the data we collected, the interviews with the murderers serve as a basis for this model. The murderers' early development of an active, aggressive fantasy life (day- dreams) combined with later sexual reinforcement (compulsive masturba- tion) and increasing detachment from social rules of conduct (social isolation) provide a framework that reinforces his subsequent violent behavior. The model has five interacting components emphasizing interrelation- ships among (1) the murderer's ineffective social environment, (2) child and adolescent formative events, (3) patterned responses to these events, (4) resul- tant actions toward others, and (5) the killer's reactions, via a mental "feed- back filter," to his murderous acts (see Figure 1).. (1) Ineffective Social Environment It is often suggested by child and family theorists that the structure and quality of family and social interaction, especially in the way the child perceives family members and their interaction with him and with each other, are important factors in a child's development. For children growing up, the quality of their attachments to parents and to other members of the family is most important in how these children later as adults relate to and value other members of society. Essentially, these early life attachments (sometimes called "bonding") translate into a blueprint of how the child will perceive situations outside of the family. Thus one of the primary functions of family life is to develop a child who has a positive bonding with his social environment. In our population of murderers, this social bonding fails or becomes narrow and selective. Caretakers either ignore, rationalize, or normalize various behaviors in the developing boy or, through their own problems (e.g., criminal behavior or substance abuse), support the child's developing distortions and projections("I was framed'). People significant to the boy do not provide nurture and protection; rather, they impose adult expectations on the boy ("Boys should be strong and take care of themselves"). Adults are nonprotective and nonintervening on behalf of the boy. The boy may be punished for a specific antisocial act but the social restriction does not regis ter in an experiential and cognitive way; that is, the boy is reprimanded or brought to court but he normalizes the behavior as, "All boys get into 49