Vol. 7, No. 3, 2001 Page 5 
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Vol. 7, No. 3, 2001 Page 5 |
"People are going to say, if you've been abused as a child, if you've been deprived, if your
environment's been so shocking, then inevitably that's going to have consequences in the way
that you impact on your environment and on other people. But it's just not enough. It's an
inadequate answer. If you look at areas of deprivation in the world, if you look at Third World
countries, if you look at children who've got nothing, who've been abused, they don't turn
automatically into psychopaths. This is something that is innate to the child, which the child is
born with — not, I would stress, directly inherited. It's not that if your dad's a psychopath then
you're a psychopath but it's much more to do with a combination of genes working together or
not working properly together that creates a predisposition for this."
Martin Smedley, a specialist in
caring for seriously disturbed
children, cited on Equinox,
Channel 4 (Britain),
December 7, 2000