Psychology of Terrorism - National Criminal Justice Reference Service

him to disengage from the organization.- As far as I can tell, however, there is no formal “oathing” ceremony involved in becoming amember.- Young men approached to become etarras typically resist joining for a very long time before theycast their lot with the organization. Virtually every case study reports that the young man resistedthe first invitations to join, sometimes for as long as 18 months or two years, before finally decidingto become a member. The reasons for delay vary from case to case. Great majority of the membersof ETA continue to live at home. Being a member of ETA is time consuming, to be sure; and manymembers report having little time left over for the demands of their personal lives once they join.- There are, in general, three kinds of activities that occupy the time and energy of members of ETA.The first involves what we might call consciousness raising. The second general type of activityengaged in by ETA members has to do with support services for the armed comandos of theorganization. The third kind of activity undertaken by ETA members is, of course, armed assaults onpersons or property, with the intention either to kill or injure people, to kidnap them for subsequentransoms, or to seize money, weapons, automobiles, or other needed resources. My feeling is thatfewer than half of the ETA members actually engage in violent actions of this sort. But they are theones that give the organization its special insurgent character, as well as attract all the attention.- ETA comandos were given orders to conduct armed attacks about once every eight months- Abouthalf the attacks were conducted in the home town of members of the assault comando- For activeetarras, however, the principal source of support seems to me to be the small circle of friends, jobassociates, and other ETA members who cluster together for mutual psychological support andassistance.-Most of the etarras about whom I have such personal data fell into one of two categories. Many hadno real lasting relationships with women-There were others, however, who solved the problemessentially by courting and marrying women who likewise had committed themselves torevolutionary struggle.-That these were not especially happy men but they continued the struggle out of a combination offactors that blends both positive and negative reinforcements. On the positive side, they receivedsolid support from their close friends and from their spouses (if they were married).-They had also learned to lower their expectation. There are, however, negative forces at work thatdiscourage etarras from leaving the organization, no matter how depressed they may become.-There is, simply put, a fear of reprisals- the simple fact of the matter is that men usually spendrather brief periods of time as ETA members.- I would estimate that the average length of time that an etarras spends as an active member of theorganization would be less than three years.- Obviously, a number of them are killed. Many,probably the majority, are caught and sentenced to long prison terms. And of course, there are thosecountless etarras in insignificant support roles who simply blend back into the environment afterthey “retire” from the organization. For some young Basques, ETA is a crucial end point in theirlives, the determinative factor that gives meaning and purpose to an otherwise disorderly and ratherpointless frustration.40. Clayton C. J., Barlow S. H., & Baliff-Spanville B. (1998). Principles of group violence with a focus onterrorism . H. V. Hall, & L. C. Witaker (Ed), Collective violence: Effective strategies for assessingand interviewing in fatal group and institutional aggression (pp. 277-312). CRC Press.Call Number: Editor's Annotation: In this chapter, the authors present a compendium ofpsychological principles that contribute to understanding group violence, followed by a discussion ofterrorism as an example of group violence. The authors then propose a general model of motivationfor participating in group violence and summarize the processes that contribute to the developmentof such motivation.-The Contribution of Group: Processes to Violence- Long ago, Gustave Lebon (1896) argued thatcrowds of people may act as entities unto themselves, as if the whole were controlled by oneirrational mind with primitive motivations, with members of the crowd losing their individual senseof responsibility. Festinger, Pepitone, and Newcomb (as reported in Forsyth, 1994, p. 442) coinedthe term “deindividuation” to describe how individuals become “so submerged in the group that theyno longer stand out as individuals.” Zimbardo (1969) continued the research and developed aprocess model that noted that lowered threshold of normally restrained behavior is brought about by