Charismatic Leaders of Destructive Religious Cults: An Examination into the Unidentified Culprits of Sexual Homicide
dc.contributor.author | Bishop, Brianna Nicole | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2021-01-29T00:24:53Z | |
dc.date.available | 2021-01-29T00:24:53Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2020-05 | |
dc.description | a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Forensic Psychology | en_US |
dc.description.abstract | Empirical research on destructive religious cults is severely limited, specifically with regard to the existence of a possible universal motivation for cultic violence. The widespread acceptance of individualized motivations for cultic violence (e.g., Manson’s Helter Skelter philosophy), however, negates the existence of striking similarities between characteristics — both offense and offender — of cultic violence and sexual homicide. The current study, in an attempt to examine the motivational implications of such striking similarities, utilized archival data to investigate the presence of 16 commonly-identified characteristics of sexual homicide within a singular case study — Charles Manson and the Manson Family. Results indicated that Charles Manson exhibited all of the commonly-identified offender characteristics of sexual homicide, while the Manson Family (and, the resultant Tate/LaBianca murders) exhibited 93.7 percent of the commonly-identified offense characteristics of sexual homicide. These findings suggest that the Tate/LaBianca murders were the product of Manson’s sexually-related fantasies, as well as the willingness of the Manson Family to execute these fantasies by proxy. Despite the limited generalizability of these findings — as a result of a limited sample size, as well as the use of strictly secondary sources (i.e., biographies) —, Charles Manson emphasizes the possibility that cultic violence exhibits an underlying sexual motivation; further research should, therefore, continue to examine this possibility within additional destructive religious cults (e.g., Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple). | en_US |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12087/56 | |
dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
dc.subject | Criminology | en_US |
dc.title | Charismatic Leaders of Destructive Religious Cults: An Examination into the Unidentified Culprits of Sexual Homicide | en_US |
dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
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