DUBOIS – A Penn State DuBois professor has earned some international recognition for original research into the minds of suicide bombers.
Byeong Chul “Ben” Park, an associate professor of human development and family studies, has conducted research leading toward understanding the logic of suicide bombers in Palestinian and other Islamic cultures. Now his research will be printed as a chapter in the book, “A Global Perspective on Problems of Identity Development and Suicide in Indigenous Minority Youth,” published by Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates. A paper Park presented on the same topic in Bellagio, Italy, soon will be published in the “Transcultural Psychiatry,” a special issue devoted to suicidal risk of indigenous peoples.
“The nagging problem of the research is the scarcity of the data,” Park said. “A lot of speculation and moral judgment exist out there, but there is a distinct lack of empirical facts.”
To establish a baseline comparison, Park first studied self-immolators — those who committed suicide voluntarily for a greater political or social cause, including the shocking action in the 1960s by Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire to make a political statement against the South Vietnamese regime. Such suicidal acts committed by students and laborers have been prevalent in South Korea since the 1970s. Park has obtained letters, diaries and suicide notes left by these self-immolators, analyzing them and comparing them with video statements recorded by suicide bombers. He found numerous similarities, as well as differences.
“They are from the fringe. These are average folks whose lives are relatively unsuccessful because of disruptions caused by societal and political turmoil,” Park said. “Many also have friends or family members who have been imprisoned or killed.”
Both the act of self-immolation and suicide attacks are forms of politically inspired suicides committed as a means to convey a symbolic message and to urge others to action, Park wrote. The purpose is to stimulate political change by reaching and influencing, directly and indirectly, a powerful adversary, he said.
Park noted the differences are that the suicide bombers are, on the average, younger than self-immolators, (25 for self-immolators, and 22 for suicide bombers.) But the critical difference, Park noted, is that the actions of self-immolators claim only their own lives, while in cases of suicide attacks, the intent is to kill numerous others — innocent civilians or agents of those in power, as an extraordinary weapon of war, whereas self-immolators are rendered an “extreme form of protest.”
Further, Park’s studies show, that although the assumption is made that suicide attackers are motivated by people in power that are considered part of an evil system, few of the suicide bombers studied were political or religious leaders. The self-immolators, however, share some of the same normative code as the people in power, Park wrote.
Park reviewed suicide notes and video testimonials to identify patterns in behavior.
“The messages these suicides intend to send vary, and are usually aimed to diverse groups. However, the majority of the intended message is left for families and for the members of the collectivity they identify with,” Park wrote.
“Some people believe that mentally, they are sick, but I dispute that in my research. Their lives are affected by disruptions that this political conflict creates,” Park said. “My conclusion is that they have developmental problems caused by a disruption in their socio-cultural setting.”
Park commits that the study enhances the understanding of politically motivated suicide and the need to explore ways to prevent youth suicide that involve individual intent on killing for some collective political cause. The study also has been recognized as a means to understand better the linkage between developmental problems and the individual act of politically motivated self-destruction.