Crime is inevitable among all cultures and communities around the world. Criminals violate the law for several different reasons. Some do it out of desperation; for instance, stealing food to survive, while others seek attention to achieve a sense of superiority. Every human behavior is triggered by a psychological goal. Criminals act on thoughts in order to achieve their psychological goals. Some may say this is rash decision making while others have a complete difference in opinion. In recent news, a man by the name of Ariel Castro had been arrested and charged with the rape and kidnapping of three young girls for over a decade. Castro, 52, allegedly imprisoned and sexually abused these three women in a padlocked house in Cleveland, Ohio. Amanda Berry, now 27, Gina Dejesus, now 23, and Michelle Knight, now 32, vanished near their homes just years apart from one another. It wasn’t until a decade later that a neighbor helped rescue the girls from a nearby home. The neighbor, Charles Ramsey, claimed he heard screaming, while eating lunch, and ran to the scene. When he got to the house, he saw a young woman trying to escape, yelling for help. He tried opening the door, but could barely fit his hand through, and thereby, kicked the door in. Amanda Berry came running out with her 6 year old daughter and asked Ramsey to call the 911. Moments later, police showed up to house, helping rescue the other two women. All three women claimed to have been kidnapped, raped and abused by Castro. They said Castro held them captive and chained in the basement at first, and were randomly rewarded with trips to the bathroom and occasional showers. Knight even claimed she had been raped and forced to miscarriage, by being starved and punched in the stomach numerous times. Castro was taken in custody right away, where he was faced with charges and still awaits the decision of death penalty. His two brothers were also taken into custody, but were released due to insufficient evidence of involvement. (NY Times) After hearing the news of this discovery, many questions arose by the girls’ family members, friends and people all over the country. One of the biggest questions of all was, “ Why did Castro perform such serious actions?” In an article written by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, rape is considered to stem from a male’s strong sex drive and the urge to reproduce.
As Darwin made clear, individual organisms merely serve as the instruments of evolution. Men today find young women attractive because during human evolutionary history the males who preferred prepubescent girls or women too old to conceive were out reproduced by the males who were drawn to females of high reproductive potential…That is why, as the anthropologist Donald Symons of the University of California, Santa Barbra, has observed, people everywhere understand sex as, ‘”something females have but males want.”’ (Palmer 33)
So is that why Castro sought out younger women? He must have had some incentive when choosing his young victims. But if this were the case, then why did he force the women to miscarry? The article also states that rape can be viewed as a third kind of sexual strategy. In this instance, it is one more way for a male to gain access to a female. Men resort to rape when they are socially alienated and excluded and are unable to receive attention from women due to lack of looks, wealth, status and confidence. Due to this, they prey on women who are alone and unprotected as a way to get physical control. (Palmer 33) It is evident that Castro was looking to gain some type of control when he decided to captivate Berry, Dejesus and Knight against their will ten years ago. Raping them enhanced his satisfaction by giving him not only power, but complete physical, mental and emotional control, which was something he had not experienced before. However, the article continues to state that, “ Rapists seldom engage in gratuitous violence; instead, they usually limit
