Killing for a Scooter: How the Erosion of Attachment Is Driving Youth Violence

As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with a background in forensic psychology, working across different European contexts, I have watched a pattern emerge that is becoming difficult to deny: children killing other children, for reasons that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago.

In Romania, the country where I was born and lived for the first part of my life, three adolescents (two aged 15 and one aged 13) allegedly killed another teenager; press reporting, citing investigators and prosecutors, has linked the case to alleged envy involving his electric scooter and an ATV.

This is not an isolated incident.  Colleagues from other European countries describe similarly disturbing cases. On paper, the continent looks safer: overall homicide rates are lower than in the 1990s and early 2000s (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2020). Yet those broad statistics conceal something important happening at the level of development and subjectivity. In my consulting room, in supervision groups, in multidisciplinary meetings, what is emerging is not simply “more crime” but a qualitative shift in how some young people relate to themselves, to others, and to the social world.

From a psychoanalytic and developmental perspective, what we are seeing looks less like a spike in “badness” and more like a crisis in attachment and containment.

A Generation Losing Secure Attachment

What I’m observing clinically is echoed in attachment research. Longitudinal work tracking adult attachment patterns among American college students between 1988 and 2011 showed a significant decline in secure attachment and a marked rise in insecure, particularly dismissing, patterns. Fraley and colleagues found that secure attachment dropped by several percentage points during this period, while dismissing attachment almost doubled.

Follow-up analyses across more recent cohorts suggest that this is not a transient fluctuation but a continuing trend, with the probability of reporting an insecure (again, especially dismissing) attachment style increasing over time, even when controlling for demographic variables (Chopik et al., 2017). These are not European community samples and we must be cautious about over-generalising. But they do point to a population-level shift in how young adults describe their bonds and expectations of intimacy.

Clinically, dismissing attachment is characterised by emotional distancing, a defensive ideal of self-reliance and a tendency to downplay or suppress vulnerability (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007). People organised around this pattern often struggle to experience others as fully “real” subjects. Relationships are easily treated as instrumental: something one uses, manages, or evacuates, rather than an encounter with another mind. In its more extreme forms, this can overlap phenomenologically with traits we would associate with psychopathy or callous-unemotional presentations: chronic emotional detachment, shallow guilt, a readiness to use others as means to an end (Frick and Viding, 2009).

If close to one in five young adults in some samples now show dismissing patterns, and that proportion is rising, it is reasonable to ask what this means culturally. What kind of social world develops when a significant minority of young people find it difficult to form and sustain genuine emotional connection?

The Erosion of the Holding Environment

These attachment trajectories have not developed in a vacuum. Over the past forty years, we have seen a profound transformation in how European societies are organised economically and socially. Stable, long-term employment has given way to short-term contracts, zero-hour arrangements and gig work. Public services and community institutions that once provided additional layers of support - youth clubs, community centres, libraries, accessible mental health services - have been steadily weakened or privatised. Extended families have scattered geographically as people move repeatedly for work. Neighbourhoods where adults knew each other’s children and maintained informal networks of care have become rarer.

From an attachment perspective, this matters profoundly. Secure attachment is not produced only in the dyad of mother and infant; it is held within a wider “holding environment” (Winnicott, 1965). Extended kin living nearby, neighbours who know and watch out for one another’s children, stable employment that allows parents to be present, local institutions that provide additional caring adults, all of these scaffold the parents’ capacity to be “good enough”. When such structures fray, parents are left carrying an impossible burden.

Today many parents are more isolated, more precarious economically and more exhausted than before. They are asked to provide warm, attuned, reflective care while working long hours, navigating insecure contracts and managing their own untreated trauma and anxiety. Economic pressure means both parents often work full-time with little flexibility, childcare is expensive and unstable, and the informal supports that previous generations relied upon: grandparents nearby, trusted neighbours, youth workers with time to build relationships, have largely disappeared.

It is unsurprising that parenting sometimes slides either into harshness or into over-indulgence born of guilt and fatigue. Research links inconsistent boundaries and indulgent parenting with increases in narcissistic traits (Brummelman et al., 2015), while parental warmth, which protects against both externalising and internalising problems, is harder to sustain under chronic stress (Raby et al., 2015).

The Intergenerational Compound Effect

Attachment is transmitted across generations. Meta-analytic and longitudinal work has consistently shown strong associations between a caregiver’s attachment organisation and that of their child, partly mediated by the caregiver’s capacity to mentalise, to think about the child’s mind (van IJzendoorn, 1995; Slade, 2005). Multi-generational research suggests a dose-dependent effect: the likelihood of a child becoming securely attached is lowest when both parents and grandparents were themselves insecure (Madigan et al., 2016).

Put simply, the young adults who developed insecure or dismissing patterns in the 1990s and 2000s are now parenting. Many of them do so with immense effort and love. But where caregivers themselves have struggled with emotional regulation, dissociation, or chronic detachment, the task of providing reliably attuned care becomes vastly more difficult. Their children are then exposed to even more atomised and screen-mediated environments than their parents knew.

From a forensic lens, this is crucial. A child growing up with caregivers who cannot reliably bear or process their distress learns early that intense feeling must be expelled: into the body, into action or into others. Violence can become, in Bion’s terms, a way of evacuating unprocessed beta-elements (Bion, 1962). When this is coupled with social fragmentation and consumerism, the conditions ripen for antisocial enactments that look chillingly empty of relational meaning.

Screens, Empathy and the Loss of a Real Other

Onto this already fragile developmental landscape, we have placed the smartphone. The first cohort raised from early childhood with permanent access to networked screens (those born roughly between 2007 and 2010) are now moving through adolescence. Many of them also passed through critical sensitive periods during the COVID-19 pandemic, with school closures and long spells of physical isolation.

Empathy does not develop from psychoeducation about “feelings”; it emerges through thousands of embodied encounters where a child sees their own impact on another face, another body, another mind (Fonagy et al., 2002). They cry, and someone’s expression changes; they hit, and see pain; they repair, and experience relief. This loop of action, response and mentalisation is what gradually builds an internal sense that others are real subjects, not just objects.

When much of a child’s primary social experience is mediated through screens, aspects of this loop are weakened. Online, others become images, avatars, handles. Violence is consumed repeatedly in games and videos, but the body is absent (the smell of fear, the tremor). I want to be careful here: the research on screens and empathy development is still evolving, and there is legitimate debate about mechanisms and magnitude of effects. What I can say from clinical work is that for some young people, this seems to flatten the sense of consequence. The capacity to hold another person as a separate subject with an inner world, which is the psychological basis of ethical restraint, risks becoming stunted (Turkle, 2011; Crone and Konijn, 2018).

Materialistic Murder: When Objects Replace Subjects

Returning to the Romanian case - the killing of a peer for his electric scooter and ATV - there is something psychologically specific about this form of violence. This is not an impulsive fight gone wrong, nor a desperate act in the context of starvation or immediate survival.

These young people killed from envy and acquisitiveness in a consumer culture. When I try to make sense of cases like this, I find myself thinking about what must be absent internally for such an act to become possible. It suggests a psychic organisation in which personal worth is experienced as almost entirely derived from objects: phones, clothes, vehicles, rather than internal qualities or relationships. Other people are perceived chiefly as obstacles or mirrors in a competitive marketplace of status. Internal moral structures are too weak or fragmented to inhibit acting on violent impulse when a desired object is at stake.

When I ask young people involved in violence about the person they hurt, I sometimes encounter not defiance but a kind of blank incomprehension, genuine bewilderment that another person’s pain should register as meaningful. The victim’s subjectivity, their feelings, their terror, the impact on their family: these simply fail to appear as emotionally real.

This looks like dismissing attachment and defensive deactivation taken to an extreme, colliding with a consumerist ideology in which “having” replaces “being” (Fromm, 1976). When the only stable sense of self comes from what one owns, and relationships have never reliably confirmed one’s reality, the leap from envy to violent appropriation can start to feel perversely rational.

What This Means for Intervention

For those of us working clinically, this situation is sobering. In individual or group therapy we can, and do, offer something reparative: a relationship in which feelings can be thought about rather than acted; a space where another mind takes you seriously as a subject. Over time (years), some patients do develop more secure internal structures, greater capacity for empathy, reflective functioning and self-regulation (Levy et al., 2006).

But we are also treating the symptoms of a wider structural breakdown. A massive, population-level shift in attachment patterns will not be reversed by better parenting advice or a few more therapy slots. The conditions that support secure attachment are political and economic as much as they are psychological.

If we are serious about preventing the kind of youth violence described here, we need economic arrangements that allow parents to be physically and emotionally present with their children, rather than permanently exhausted and preoccupied with survival. We need rebuilt local infrastructures - safe public spaces, youth services, community organisations - that give children contact with multiple caring adults and shared norms. We need policies that treat loneliness and social isolation as critical public health issues, not individual failures. We need cultural narratives that offer sources of meaning beyond consumption and performance. And we need thoughtful regulation and cultural containment around digital technologies, particularly for younger children, to protect key developmental windows.

These are not “soft” matters. From a forensic perspective, they are preventive interventions at the level where violence is incubated.

I recognise this is calling for something genuinely difficult: not better implementation of existing policies, but a partial reversal of forty years of economic and social organisation. That requires political will and collective struggle, not just clinical insight. But I think we need to name this honestly. Without addressing the material and social conditions that make secure attachment possible, we will continue to see more cases like the one in Romania and other countries in Europe and the UK, and we will continue to be horrified while changing nothing fundamental.

A Call to Witness Rather Than to Blame

I am writing this not because I have neat solutions, but because I think it is important that we name what we are witnessing. The children killing other children in Europe today are not monsters, nor are they simply “born psychopaths”. They are the leading edge of a developmental crisis that has been unfolding for decades, as changes in economy and culture have eroded our collective capacity to provide secure attachment and containment.

The attachment data suggest that secure bonds are becoming less common, while dismissing and other insecure patterns rise. Intergenerational research tells us that these patterns compound across generations. The cases of teenagers killing for consumer goods show us what happens when attachment failures, social isolation, digitally mediated unreality and aggressive materialism intersect. There are, of course, other factors at work - rising inequality creating more desperate material conditions, changing drug markets, shifts in how criminal organisations operate. These don’t contradict the psychological mechanisms I’ve described; they layer onto them, creating the conditions in which vulnerable young people become recruitable into violence.

We do not yet see this fully reflected in headline crime statistics, which makes it easier to minimise or dismiss. But clinicians, teachers, social workers, probation officers - the people actually sitting with these young people - are encountering their inner worlds every day. What many of us hear and feel in those rooms should worry us.

The question, to my mind, is no longer whether there is a crisis in attachment and empathy. The more urgent question is what we are collectively prepared to change in order to address it. Individual therapy will continue to matter deeply for those who find their way to us. Yet unless we also commit to rebuilding the social, economic and cultural conditions that allow children to grow into people capable of recognising and caring about others as subjects, we will see more cases that horrify us.

Imagine a fifteen-year-old who has a secure relationship with at least one parent who is not chronically exhausted or terrified of losing their job. Who grows up in a neighbourhood where adults know each other’s names and children play outside without fear. Who attends a school with enough funding for small class sizes and a youth worker who has time to notice when something is wrong. Who has access to sports, music, art, places to be seen and valued for something other than what they own. Who encounters screens gradually, with adults helping them make sense of what they see, rather than being raised by algorithms designed to maximise engagement at any cost.

That young person is not guaranteed to be free of violence or cruelty. But the psychic soil is different. The internal resources for recognising another person as real, for bearing difficult feelings without expelling them into action, for experiencing guilt and making repair, these have somewhere to grow.

That future is not inevitable. But avoiding the alternative requires looking unflinchingly at what we have created, and then, together, building something different.

Simina

References:

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