Biological mother stepfather suspected of killing 10-year-old boy What do you think of their false public help?

This false public request for help is like an arrow shot, the suspect seems to be farther and farther away from the incident itself, safer and safer, and easier to reach a certain goal, but in fact, what he does not realize is that the arrow is about to hit the bullseye

Zhang Moumou, a 10-year-old boy in Linyu County, Yuncheng, Shanxi Province, disappeared 20 days after his body was found in his stepfather's village cemetery. According to the police report, the criminal suspects Xie Moumou and Wang Moumou have been arrested by the police, and the case is under investigation. According to multiple sources, the above two suspects are the boy's biological mother and stepfather. What is even more bizarre is that Xie Moumou once reported to the Linyu County Public Security Bureau to request a search.

Is it planned murder?

On the one hand, looking for the child's biological mother and stepfather, but on the other hand, they have become criminal suspects, which is really infuriating and surprising, how did the case happen? What is the motive for the crime? Even deeper problems such as family, emotional entanglements, contradictions and accumulation of negative emotions suddenly emerged. The discussion of the case may calm down as it is detected, but these deeper reflections will always bring people to think.

Judging from the media reports: parents divorced, children sentenced to mothers, stepfathers were not good to him, suspected violent tendencies were serious, and contact with biological father and grandmother was artificially restricted. If we look back at the criminal cases involving children in recent years, many of them have reorganized families to harm children, and there are certain commonalities in the motives behind them, which can be discussed and analyzed from the perspective of criminal psychology.

Local villagers informed that it was the boy's birth mother and stepfather who buried the child in the village cemetery. Although the relevant information has not been officially confirmed, it can be used as a general reference for analysis. From the perspective of the disposal of the victim's body, it is difficult to directly reverse the inference of whether the victim's act is murder, and in terms of the burial site alone, they have carried out a planned treatment of the victim's body, and their motivation is to prevent anyone from finding out that the child is dead, so they will choose a very rare place to dump the body - the village grave, which is relatively rare.

Is it planned murder? First of all, the available information shows that the stepfather showed violent tendencies in the previous marriage relationship, and everyone beat him, whether it was parents or children, relatives, which may be a direct reason for his previous divorce; Secondly, the child's growth environment and the mother's changes. Some villagers said that the murdered boy's birth mother used to be very good, but since joining a drum band, she has changed, impetuous and a little greedy for money. If true, then for children, the living environment has undoubtedly changed a lot, living with the mother and stepfather, and the mother has new feelings and changes. It is more likely that the stepfather beat the child due to emotions or certain stimuli, and the birth mother did not stop it, resulting in the child's death under the violent treatment of the stepfather.

How can one's own biological child die at the hands of his biological father or mother? In similar cases, this is basically the core question, and it is better to understand this issue in the context of the contradiction between the original family and the reconstituted family involved in this case. First of all, there are contradictions or frictions between the original family and the reorganized family, which are based on the long-term bad social interaction between the two parties who dissolve the marriage relationship, even if the relationship is broken, as long as the social interaction exists, the friction exists. In this state, the core of social interaction is generally the child, and the child is likely to be understood not only as a child, but as a starting point that may cause infinite trouble. Secondly, there is a very important cognitive problem in reorganized families - adults' cognition of children. The reorganized family lacks understanding of non-their own children, and it is difficult to form emotional links, which largely dilutes the "child" attribute that needs care and companionship, and prematurely becomes a "person who is not related to himself". This, combined with the troubles generated by poor social interactions, can lead to fundamental changes in attitudes, such as indifference, impatience, and even violence.

Behind the false public solicitation of help

After the child disappeared, the biological mother and stepfather searched for them in many ways, posted videos on the Internet, and cried with search notices that they could not find the child. This kind of public help for help in cases is a focus of criminal psychology research, and the core issues involved are the identification and psychological causes of lies in public. If we look at a number of cases with significant social impact in recent years, we will find that many of them have the behavior of criminal suspects openly asking for help, and the emotions expressed when they publicly seek help seem to be very real, does this extremely contradictory performance that is in great contrast to the state that ordinary criminals try to hide, do it mean a histrionic personality disorder?

In fact, most of the false public requests for help in such cases are made in a passive state. In this case, the birth mother and stepfather may have seen that everyone was helping to find the child, so they began to follow up and use other means to further seek public help, thereby reducing their own risk. At this level, this behavior can be understood as a tool behavior under the psychology of seeking benefits and avoiding harm.

In this case and other cases in which suspects or perpetrators falsely and publicly seek help, basically do not give clear results for the personality disorder of these people, one thing to note is that the determination of personality disorder is relatively strict, requires a long period of time and meets several conditions at the same time. Therefore, under strict standards, there is a certain difficulty. But the absence of a personality disorder does not mean that there are no characteristics of a personality disorder. Some characteristics of several different disorders appear in a mentally unhealthy person at the same time, such as the performance state of the child's biological mother and stepfather, which can be seen in the deformed desire for self-expression, asking for help in public, constantly crying, carefully monitoring the child, and showing concern with others that the child is actively looking for it.

This false public request for help is like an arrow shot, the suspect seems to be farther and farther away from the incident itself, safer and safer, and easier to reach a certain goal, but in fact, what he does not realize is that the arrow is about to hit the bullseye.

Special Commentator of Chengdu Business Daily - Red Star News Zhang Wei (Deputy Dean, Institute of Legal Psychology, Guangzhou Business University)