Low Down

Although not all serial killers are sex murderers, a significantly great proportion are. The very act of cutting, dismembering, binding, torturing, and/or killing is often more important to the sex murderer than the actual sex act. This somewhat differentiates a sexual murderer from a “rapist-killer” who as an afterthought murders his victim to prevent her from reporting him to the police. The psychological dynamic is entirely different, and the sexual killer is more predisposed to repeat his crimes in a serial pattern. Until the mid-eighteenth century, sex crime of any kind was virtually unknown, or at least largely unreported. One reason for this is the proposition that sex crime is a “leisure activity” requiring available time to develop and dwell on sexual fantasies and the freedom to act upon them. Prior to the industrial age the majority of people were just too busy to be fantasizing about sex. Most were desperately trying to feed themselves and survive various life-threateni...

Iraq is situated in the land that the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia, meaning land between the rivers. The name refers to the Tigris and the Euphrates, two large rivers in Iraq. This location became what many have called the “cradle of civilization.” On this site in about 4000 B.C. arose the world’s first civilization, called Sumer, long before the development of other famous ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Greece, and Rome.   Sumerians are credited with such early human achievements as the invention of writing, the plow, and the wheel. The famous Sumerian city of Ur arose in southern Mesopotamia and became one of the most prosperous Sumerian cities. In about 2340 B.C., however, the Sumerian civilization collapsed after clashes with other peoples who migrated to the Arabian Peninsula.   The modern country of Iraq was not created until the twentieth century, when the outbreak of World War I caused Britain to invade areas around Basra and Baghdad. The British...

Learning strategies is the term applied to the various behaviors or techniques we use to learn. Some are consciously employed, and others are automatic. As mentioned above, most learning styles are expressed by observable learning strategy behaviors. In a nutshell, learning strategies are: 1.   things we do; 2.   relatively easy to change; 3.   different, depending on our learning styles; 4.   effective or not effective for specific situations; and 5.   frequently under some level of conscious control. Some learning strategies will be specific to each of the four skills. The receptive skills of reading and listening can share certain strategies, as can the productive skills of speaking and writing. Let’s look at some concrete examples of learning styles in each of these areas: 1.   Comprehension/receptive strategies can include such things as using 2.   Background knowledge, analyzing word parts, using context, asking for help, using a dictionary, and ...

How many serial homicides take place? Almost every month somewhere in the world a new case of serial homicide is reported by the police, and except for Antarctica, no continent has been spared.   From Alaska to New Zealand, from South Africa to China, cases of serial murder appear to be on the increase—slowly in the Third World, and alarmingly rapidly in the industrialized nations. Anybody could be a potential victim of a serial killer— absolutely anybody: man, woman, child, old, rich, poor, obscure, or famous—nothing makes one immune from being a potential victim.   Before going further here, however, we should make one thing clear: “Strangers” means that the investigation determined definitively that the victim did not know the killer. This includes not only random victims of serial killers, but also, for example, store clerks shot dead by strangers in the course of a robbery. “Persons unknown” on the other hand, means precisely that—investigators simply did not know whether...