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criminals and is based on causal rather than correlational evidence is the violent-socialization theory of the American criminologist Lonnie Athens. Using the method of universals formulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, which identifies cause and effect retrospectively (and therefore always provisionally) by discovering the unique attributes of an exemplary population, Athens interviewed incarcerated violent criminals and isolated from their narratives the minimum sequence of violent social experiences that they all had in common, a sequence that he found to be missing or incomplete in people with experience of violence who had not committed serious violent acts.
    Athens did not study violent officials. Some violent officials (notably police) are self-selected and come to their profession already experienced with violence, as many of the Einsatzgruppen did. For those officials who acquire their violent skills in official training, there are clear parallels between their training experiences and the four-stage developmental process that Athens identified in the backgrounds of violent criminals. Since violence, official or private, is learned through violent experience, such parallels are to be expected and should not be surprising. If Athens’s violent socialization model is correct, however, there should also be significant differences between the formal programs of training of violent officials and the informal violent socialization process, because violent criminals use violence in situations where violent officials are constrained. Such differences do emerge on analysis, and Athens’s theory explains them. None of the other theories of violence development passes this crucial test.
    The violent socialization process, Athens found, divides into four stages, which he calls (1) brutalization; (2) belligerency; (3) violent performances; (4) virulency. The stages are sequential: each stage has to be fully experienced before the subject advances to the next one, a process that can occur cataclysmically in a short period of time or across a period of years. Brutalization is inflicted on novices and is thus involuntary, but passage through the three later stages results from decisions the subject makes. So people become violent by choice, not by chance. Their choices may be constrained by their circumstances, but they are never the only possible choices available. (Many people brutalized in childhood, for example, do not become violent adults. They make other choices that lead to nonviolent outcomes.) And once a subject has completed violent socialization and has become dangerously violent, Athens found, each act of violence he perpetrates is a further deliberate choice, not merely an automatic reaction or a loss of control. Which means that people who use violence against other people choose to do so and are therefore responsible for their acts. That violence is a choice rather than a compulsion or a release is taken for granted in the military and among police; the concept has been obscured where private violence is concerned simply because such violence has become deviant in modern civilized society, relatively uncommon and unfamiliar. Criminal law, however, drawing on centuries of common experience, is founded on the presumption that violent acts are deliberate.
    Distinctions such as these are important for assessing the responsibility of Einsatzgruppen personnel for the atrocities they committed.
    Brutalization, the first stage of violent socialization, Athens found to consist of three distinct but related significant experiences that might occur in any order and at differing times and places: (a) violent subjugation (an authority figure from one of the novice’s primary groups uses violence or the threat of violence to force the novice to submit to his authority by showing obedience and respect); (b) personal horrification (the novice witnesses people close to him undergoing violent subjugation); (c) violent