How an idyllic island retreat became Lord of the Flies redux

 
Where summer dreams turned to nightmares:
A TV cameraman in front of the Zilvermeeuw ("Herring Gull")
youth hotel on the Dutch island of Ameland
(Source: Die Welt)

IT LOOKS AS IF William Golding of Lord of the Flies fame was an optimist - his old school choirboys needed a couple of weeks to be transformed into a tribe of degenerate savages. What happens when you send a group of poorly-supervised Internet Age teenagers to a North Sea island and let them fend for themselves? A youth club from the German town of Osnabrück found out earlier this month. While the investigation into the ensuing crime will take weeks, the wounds will likely last a lifetime.

It should have been a wonderful experience. This year, the Municipal Sports League of the western German town of Osnabrück decided once more to hold its summer camp on the Dutch North Sea island of Ameland, a tradition dating back to 1968. 170 young people of both genders, aged between eight and sixteen, would stay at a converted farm there from June 25 to 8 July, playing sports, riding in horse-drawn carts, and soaking up the sun at the beach. Sixty young camp supervisors aged between eighteen and twenty-five would ensure that everyone had a good time. 

According to the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung yesterday, on a number of occasions during the camp a gang of boys aged between thirteen and sixteen broke into one of the forty-bed dormitory rooms and attacked a group of thirteen year-old boys as they slept. The attackers pulled several victims out of their bunks and dragged them into the center of the room, where they proceeded to sodomize them with Coke bottles, broomsticks, and their bare hands. The rest of the boys in the room were only spared a similar fate because “they clung desperately to their beds, escaped down fire ladders, or offered considerable resistance,” an Osnabrück youth protection officer told journalists.  

 
The lighthouse at Hollum on Ameland
(Source: wiki)

How could such a thing happen? According to the camp’s organiser, Dieter Neuhaus, who has been accompanying youth groups to the island since 1973 and who only heard about the attack when an outraged mother called him up after the group’s return to Osnabrück, the summer camp “apparently went totally off the rails and got out of hand.” Neuhaus admitted that he knew some of the children had begged the supervisors to protect them from the older kids during the two weeks and even cited specific sado-masochistic practices they had been subjected to, but he stated that the camp staff was “totally overextended and did nothing.” Heinz Hilgers, president of Germany’s child protection league, suspects that the attack occurred “because many of the volunteer took a vacation rather than attend to their responsibilities.” Some of the staff may be charged with failure to render assistance. Neuhaus has since resigned from all his positions. 

This assault has provoked outrage in Osnabrück, with the mayor and all major institutions demanding a full investigation – an understandable reaction in a society that has been rocked by back-to-back sex abuse scandals, ranging from the Catholic and Protestant churches to secular schools and youth facilities like the town’s Sport League. 

Most of all, people want to know who could do such a thing. So far, it appears that the alleged perpetrators were not a group of inner-city brutes or hardened reform school kids. Instead, the suspects all come from “orderly family backgrounds” and had appeared entirely “normal.” The only curious thing about them is that they were actually too old for the camp, which is designed for children up to age fourteen, and were only allowed to participate after their parents told the staff “how much they had enjoyed the camp in the past.” The organization’s staff is, by its own account, “speechless” and “amazed that such a thing could be possible.” If found guilty of aggravated assault and rape, the eleven suspects face prison sentences of between six months and several years. Three of them have already made a full confession to the police. 

 
A North Sea paradise:
The beach at Buren on Ameland
(Source: wiki)

And yet, several of them had already bragged online about the “fisting” they had given the young boys. So what drove them to commit such acts? In an interview with the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, Wolfgang Bergmann, Germany’s best-known family therapist, stated:

Perpetrators generally have one, more frequently two particularly aggressive, particularly cynical “leaders of the pack” who enjoy a high degree of respect among youths of their own age, who can spread fear and tend to incite the others to degrading activities. It is notable here that this is not merely an issue of inflicting pain, but rather of degrading the victims’ personalities. Juvenile sexual dynamics appear to discharge in this way. At the same time, we can observe a hostility towards sexual drives that is then experienced in an obscene and sadistic manner with the victims. Such psycho-sexual events are highly complex. 

But were the events on Ameland really the fault of the depraved “leaders of the pack” or is there something much more sinister at work here? The events on Ameland, and the climate of impunity in which they occurred, recall not only Golding’s Lord of the Flies and the equally horrific (and still unfolding) Catholic sex abuse scandal, but also the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment that situationist psychologist Philip Zimbardo undertook back in 1971. In this experiment, Zimbardo selected two dozen “ordinary” young men in the Bay Area and had them play the role of prison guards with a group of other young men playing the role of prisoners. He had planned to run the experiment for two weeks, but had to end it after a mere six days when the sadism got entirely out of control.

In a remarkable essay called You Can’t Be a Sweet Cucumber in a Pickle Barrel, Zimbardo says that “For years I've been interested in a fundamental question concerning what I call the psychology of evil: Why is it that good people do evil deeds?” The standard answer, he says, is that evil deeds are the fault of “a few bad apples.”

The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that’s the wrong analysis. It’s not the bad apples, it’s the bad barrels that corrupt good people.

 
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo
(Source: psichi.org)

I’ve been teaching bright college students for nearly fifty years, and it’s hard to get them to appreciate the situationist’s analysis of evil, prejudice, or any kind of pathological behavior because our whole society is so wedded to the dispositional perspective: Good people do good deeds, and bad people do bad deeds. It’s part of our institutional thinking. It’s what psychiatry is all about. It’s what medicine is all about. It’s what the legal system is all about. And it’s what religious systems are all about. We put good inside of people, and we put bad inside of people. It’s so ingrained in the way we think, but the situationist’s perspective says that although that may sometimes be true, we need to acknowledge that there can be powerful, yet subtle social forces in given settings that have potentially transformative power over us.

How likely is it that you would do it? “Oh no, I'm not that kind of person,” they say. Well, the majority of guards in my study did brutal things. If you were a guard what would you do? “I would be a good guard,” they answer. It’s partly a self-serving bias. We want to believe we are good, we are different, we are better, or we are superior. But this body of social-psychological research … shows that the majority of good, ordinary, normal people can be easily seduced, tempted, or initiated into behaving in ways that they say they never would. In thirty minutes we got them stepping across that line.

Zimbardo’s research provided much of the inspiration behind Christopher Browning’s 1992 classic Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, and Zimbardo himself testified in a court martial relating to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Baghdad.

No doubt we will learn much more about the background to the Ameland case in the coming weeks and months. But perhaps we already know why these bullies attacked defenceless younger children: because they could.