How Can Evolutionary Analysis Help To

D. The Application Stage

1. How Can Evolutionary Analysis Help To

a. How It Can Help

Behavioral models attempt to explain the incidence of certain behaviors. Because the primary purpose of a legal system is to regulate human activity-by discouraging some behaviors and encouraging others-the legal system can ultimately be no more effective than the behavioral models on which its regimes depend.

Indeed, the first of four important applications of evolutionary analysis involves improving these models by: 1) integrating the proximate and ultimate causes of behavior; 2) identifying relationships between the behavior and previously unidentified environmental factors; 3) helping to define with more precision those previously identified environmental factors already associated with the behavior; and 4) generating predictions about how various associated environmental factors may interact.

First, by integrating proximate and ultimate causes of behavior, evolutionary analysis encourages a more holistic and accurate understanding of the origins of human behavior. It adds historical dimension, and facilitates a deeper appreciation of the complex and dynamic interaction of genetic and environmental factors that affect the behaviors law seeks to regulate. Evolutionary analysis prompts us to anticipate that natural selection will have left humans today with behavioral predispositions that tended to increase individual inclusive fitness in ancestral times. Consequently, it enables us also to anticipate that these evolved predispositions will now be generally more widespread in current populations than would be various con- temporaneously existing alternative predispositions that had less beneficial effects, on average, on individual reproductive success.

This insight will often reveal opportunities to improve prevailing theoretical models, and thus those aspects of law that base remedial policies upon them.

For example, evolutionary analysis provides both a broader and more subtle understanding of adult-infant relations, which in turn lets us see child abuse in a larger context. It makes plain that parental

NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW

care, and the subjective motivational states that prompt it, evolved as part of an evolutionarily adaptive reproductive strategy. In humans, as in other animals employing parental care, we expect the majority of parents to exhibit an evolved discriminative parental solicitude, in the form of generally adaptive emotional predispositions (such as, in humans, feelings of parental love) that tend to bias a parent's re- sources toward genetic offspring at the expense of non-offspring, and toward those children likely to contribute most to parental inclusive fitness. We know, of course, that such predispositions will not auto- matically cause any particular behavior in any individual person, because a wide variety of highly significant and additional factors (such as religion, thoughtful analyses of distributive fairness, and the like) also mediate human motivations. But, to the extent that what we call child abuse can be seen as something of an inverse of parental solicitude, and to the extent that behavioral predispositions will by definition affect behavior on the margin, evolutionary analysis suggests that diminished solicitude will correlate positively, in a society of millions, with increased abuse and neglect-even with infanticide.

Evolutionary analysis therefore exposes as anachronistically naive the prevalent theoretical assumption, underlying many social and legal efforts to reduce child abuse, that "normal" parents will treat each of their own children with roughly equal love and care. It suggests that our normative preference for that to be the case has heavily influenced our supposition of "normality"-causing us perhaps to assume that normal adults will exhibit the emotional responses we wish they would.

Second, because many adaptive behavioral predispositions are highly context-specific, evolutionary analysis will often identify new connections between specific proximate environmental factors (let us call these "associated environmental factors") and law-relevant behavior. That is, by enabling us to recognize that certain associated environmental factors will have created selective pressures that in the past favored the evolution of certain behavioral predispositions, evolutionary analysis provides the legal system with new or better predictors of the kinds and confluences of environmental stimuli most likely to result in behaviors relevant to the legal system, and enables it to make some judgment as to the relative strength of their influence.

For example, evolutionary analysis suggests that parental solicitude toward children will vary according to the available amount of parental investment, to observable characteristics predictive of each child's probable contribution to parental inclusive fitness, and to the

1228 [Vol. 75

likelihood that parental investment would earn higher fitness returns if invested elsewhere. It thus suggests that the likelihood of infanticide will therefore also vary as a function of specific parental demographic characteristics, such as sex, age, marital and economic status, genetic relationship to a child, and the like. For instance, it suggests that substitute parents, such as stepparents, will be far more likely per capita to abuse a child than will be natural parents, because the conditions that most easily invoke extraordinary parental solicitude are absent.

Third, evolutionary analysis will enable us to restate with greater precision those connections between environmental factors and behavior of which we may already be aware. For example, we have long known that young mothers are more likely to abuse a child than older mothers. But evolutionary analysis more specifically suggests that, given a population of millions, and where all else is equal, we may expect that the risk a mother will do so will decline rather smoothly across her reproductive years, as a function of the proportion of her remaining reproductive years to her total reproductive years.

Fourth, evolutionary analysis will help us make more accurate predictions than we could otherwise when all else is not equal-as when humans confront combinations of various environmental factors. For example, it suggests that the kinds of "stressors" that traditional social science has identified will be relevant to child abuse in proportion to how significantly the presence of those stressors would have affected human reproductive success not in current envi- ronments, but in ancestral ones. The likelihood that a behavioral predisposition will in fact manifest itself will then be partly a function

of the number of such stressors that cumulate.

b. Aren't Statistics Alone Enough?

If it is true, for example, that a stepparent is statistically more likely to abuse a child than a natural parent, one might wonder whether we need evolutionary analysis at all. In other cases, as in this one, the descriptive data alone may appear sufficient. Statistics do not compile themselves, however; they are a function of the way we organize and collect data. Those processes, in turn, often reflect pre- suppositions that may be wrong and that may unintendedly obscure law-relevant behavioral patterns. For example, and in hindsight quite surprisingly, before evolutionary psychologists predicted that stepparents are more likely to abuse, no one bothered to collect data in a systematic way that differentiated stepparents from natural parents,

NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW

an obvious prerequisite to analysis of victimization rates and relative risk.³⁵ Indeed, commentators have recently observed that many who had studied child abuse for decades never thought to rigorously scru- tinize the kinship variable.³³⁶

Such blindspots are not easily remedied. Although evolutionary psychologists studying child abuse called upon official agencies, par- ticularly census bureaus, "to recognize the importance of the distinction between natural and substitute parenthood" more than a decade ago,³³⁷most studies and reporting procedures that today cap- ture information regarding a perpetrator's relationship to an abused child continue to collapse "stepparents" into the definition of

"parents." To cite but a few surprising examples:

* The United States Department of Health and Human Serv- ices, in a 1995 report on child abuse, defines "parent" as "the birth mother/father, adoptive mother/father, or step- mother/father of a child."^{3 38}

" When the Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect published the Child Death Review Team Report for 1994, part of that report, concerning "Child Homicides by Par- ents/Caretakers in Los Angeles County," included thirteen Tables and ten Figures of data sorted according to such things as gender of victim, age of victim, ethnicity of victim, types of injury, month of year, reasons for prior Child Pro- tective Services involvement (if any), and the age, sex, and ethnicity of the parent or other caretaker. And yet all of

335. See Daly & Wilson, Risk of Maltreatment, supra note 298, at 221-25; Daly & Wil- son, Stepparenthood, supra note 308, at 128-29. Some prior, general studies of child abuse had remarked on the number of child abuse victims in stepfamily homes. See, e.g., DAVID

G. GIL, VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN: PHYSICAL CHILD ABUSE IN THE UNITED

STATES 117, 140 (1970). But for many years child abuse statistics were quite crude, pro- viding little useful demographic data about characterisitcs of children or parents. See Richard J. Gelles, Violence Towards Children in the United States, 48 AM. J. OF OR- THOPSYCHIATRY 580,580 (1978). Moreover, before 1983 no one in either Canada or the United States had any accurate sense or data regarding how many children actually lived with stepparents-an obvious prerequisite for any rate-based analysis. See Daly & Wil- son, Child Abuse Risk and Household Composition, supra note 294, at 11.

336. See RANDOLPH M. NESSE & GEORGE C. WILLIAMS, WHY WE GET SICK: THE NEW SCIENCE OF DARWINIAN MEDICINE 223 (1994).

337. Daly & Wilson, Child Abuse and Other Risks, supra note 288, at 209.

338. NATIONAL CTR. ON CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT, U.S. DEP'T. OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVS., CHILD MALTREATMENT 1993: REPORTS FROM THE STATES TO THE NATIONAL CENTER ON CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT glossary B-5 (1995) [hereinafter REPORTS FROM THE STATES]. "Perpetrators" are divided into seven categories:

1) parents; 2) other relatives; 3) foster parents; 4) facility staff; 5) child care providers;

6) non-caretakers; and 7) unknown. See id. at item 15, at 3-12.

[Vol. 75 1230

these data lumped genetic parents, stepparents, substitute parents, and other caretakers together.^{3 9} Indeed, the

"Relationship of Perpetrators" Table made no distinction between mothers and stepmothers, or fathers and stepfathers. ³

* The 1996 report of the Bureau of Justice Statistics on Child Victimizers: Violent Offenders and Their Victims includes stepchildren in the definition of "Own Child" when describ- ing victim-offender relationships."⁴

Because we cannot see what we do not look for, it is unsurprising that such reports typically conclude, without more particularity, that

"[p]arents account for 77 percent of perpetrators."^{3 42}In contrast, an evolutionary analysis' prediction of risk factors such as stepparentage can facilitate the collection of relevant data. The analysis tells us where to look, what to look for, and how to slice the data in ways that may further the pursuit of legal ends.

c. Won't Evolutionary Analysis Often Simply Confirm Common Intuitions?

Evolutionary analysis sometimes will help to explain things people already believe. For example, many undoubtedly believe, even absent evolutionary analysis, that a child will be at greater risk of abuse by a stepparent than by a parent.³ Yet explanations matter.

We routinely suppose that unexplained intuitions (such as those

339. See Los ANGELES COUNTY INTER-AGENCY COUNCIL ON CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT (ICAN), ICAN, CHILD DEATH REviEW TEAM REPORT FOR 1994, at 15-34.

340. See id. at tbl.12. Moreover, a suggested model "Child Fatality Review Team Comprehensive Data Set" requires only that investigators specify, for each person com- monly involved in the deceased's life and for each suspected perpetrator, only a

"relationship to deceased." ANDERSON & WELLS, supra note 139, app. C at 6, 10.

Nothing in the model data set or its instructions suggests that investigators should identify stepparents as anything other than parents. See id. Curiously, the proposed "Minimal Data Set," purporting to be a streamlined version, encourages differentiating stepparent caretakers from genetic parent caretakers, but again requires no such identification with respect to suspected perpetrators. See id. item 31, app. B, at 3.

341. See BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, U.S. DEP'T OF JUSTICE, CHILD VIC- TIMIZERS: VIOLENT OFFENDERS AND THEIR VICTIMS 10 tbl.13 (1996). This leads to such undifferentiated conclusions as: "Nearly a third of those serving time in State pris- ons for violence against children had victimized their own child or a stepchild." Id. at iii (emphasis added).

342. REPORTS FROM THE STATES, supra note 338, §2.4, at 2-12.

343. "Cruel stepparent stories are a cross-cultural universal." Gelles & Harrop, supra note 126, at 78; accord Daly & Wilson, Risk of Maltreatment, supra note 298, at 215-16 (discussing popular, mythological, and cross-cultural perceptions of stepparents); Daly &

Wilson, Stepparenthood, supra note 308, at 121-22 (same); Gelles & Harrop, supra note 126, at 78 (same) (citing M.R. COX, CINDERELLA: 345 VARIANTS (1892); S. THOMPSON, MOTIF-INDEX OF FOLK LITERATURE (1955)).

NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW

about stepparents) lack any basis in fact, and then design legal strategies that ignore them or are designed to counteract them. That supposition may often be correct. Nevertheless, evolutionary analysis will sometimes suggest clear causal relationships underlying observable correlations that we suspected, but could not explain, as in the case of stepparental child abuse.44 That should, in turn, suggest reevaluation of policies presupposing the absence of explanation, such as those that may be designed to treat parents and stepparents alike. While there may of course be independent reasons for law to give no effect to a perceived behavioral pattern, such as the increased

risk of stepparental abuse, evolutionary analysis will often at least make clear that doing so may hinder law's ability to interrupt that pattern.

2. How Can Evolutionary Analysis Help To Generate New Legal Strategies?

Because behavioral models are the foundation of effective legal policies, they limit the number and nature of the possible regulatory interventions from among which policymakers choose. Deficient models yield poor options and poor results. In the second of four applications of evolutionary analysis, then, policymakers equipped with more refined models of the causes of law-relevant behaviors may de- velop new ways to address them.

A legal system informed by evolutionary analysis might more precisely target, regulate, or otherwise control the existence of, or access to, newly identified associated environmental factors. If environmental factor x increases the likelihood that people in a given society will exhibit behavior y, then one strategy law may pursue to reduce y is to reduce the prevalence of x. Legal systems already do this, but to the extent evolutionary analysis identifies new links between such factors and law-relevant behaviors it reveals new avenues for channeling behavior in fashions consistent with pre-articulated social and legal goals.-" A legal system informed by evolutionary analysis might also design programs that take account of evolved mo-

344. Cf. Browne, Sex and Temperament, supra note 3, at 977-84 (demonstrating how sex differences in behavior may contribute to differential representation among certain kinds of jobs).

345. It is extremely important to recognize that the contribution of evolutionary analysis, in this regard, is fully and functionally compatible with the purposes of the traditional social science theories, which likewise focus their attentions on environmental stimuli.

Members of traditional social science disciplines should therefore find evolutionary analysis threatening only if they claim a monopoly on useful analytical techniques.

[Vol. 75 1232

tivational links between environmental stimuli and behavior by nar- rowly tailoring legal regimes to interrupt or weaken them. This could involve invoking the panoply of tools available to society, such as social or educational programs targeted at those most likely to experience the stimuli, incentive programs, or refocused deterrence initiatives.

For example, prevailing child abuse policies built on theories un- supplemented by an evolutionary foundation rely on the "critical theoretical assumption [that] [c]hild abuse is a learned behavior that can be conceptualized in social learning terms.""⁶ As long as one as- sumes this-that the origins of child abuse lie exclusively in learned behavior-regulatory efforts will over-rely on "learning opportunities,^"^{' '}⁴and overestimate the likelihood of their effectiveness. Thus today, for instance, such social and legal campaigns to eradicate child abuse focus on such things as:

* post-act state interventions, such as termination of parental rights or criminal prosecution;

* developing strong positive habits of child rearing through successful and rewarding parent-child interaction at an early stage of development;

" improving the parent's abilities to cope with stress through exposure to a mental health support system;

* developing the child's adaptive behaviors that will contribute to his or her emotional and psychological adjustment;

* competency enhancement (through parent education programs);

* public awareness campaigns (through information services);

* programs for high-risk groups during periods of transition and stress (such as family support programs);

* child management training;

* parent education and support groups;

* stress management classes;

* community outreach or educational programs; and

* group or individual training.m

346. WOLFE, supra note 118, at 125; cf Jeffrey A. Kelly, Treating the Child Abuser, in CHILDREN AT RISK, supra note 112, at 269, 269-71 (discussing approaches based on social-interactional conceptual models).

347. See WOLFE, supra note 118, at 125.

348. For discussion of such campaigns see, for example, SETH C. KALICHMAN, MANDATED REPORTING OF SUSPECTED CHILD ABUSE: ETHICS, LAW, AND POLICY 145-66 (1993); WOLFE, supra note 118, at 125-33; Ammerman & Hersen, Research in Child Abuse and Neglect, supra note 112, at 3, 16; Maxine R. Newman & John R. Lutzker,

NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW

These efforts, while certainly constructive, are not as effective as they might be. Recognizing the effects of evolution on the incidence of child abuse and neglect can expand and reorient our view of ap- propriate interventions. For example, those studies that attribute the special difficulties stepfamilies encounter to "role confusion" lead to arguments that "[s]trengthening the role of the ambiguous stepparent" would eliminate stresses, reduce child abuse, and "provide more protection for children," ⁹and that "institutionalized standards for conduct in reconstituted families are likely to emerge" as divorce and remarriage become more common.³" In contrast, an evolutionary analysis suggests that stepparents may be finding their roles less satis- fying and more conflictual than natural parents not simply because they do not know what they are supposed to do, but rather because they do not want to do what they feel obliged to do.⁵' It suggests that

"when people are called upon to fill parental roles toward unrelated children, we may anticipate an elevated risk of lapses of parental solicitude.³⁵² By expecting stepparents to feel less solicitous of unrelated children, policies can focus less on teaching stepparents how to "be" stepparents, and more on encouraging stepparents to expect, overcome, or compensate for statistically probable disinclina- tions.

If policymakers wanted to do something aggressive about stepparental child abuse, a whole new set of possibilities unfurl.

Choosing advisable policies from among possible policies demands caution, however, because there are more ways to make a situation worse than there are to make it better. Viable alternatives will generally include pre-act strategies (rather than, for example, trial- related post-act strategies)-because evolutionary analysis can tell us very little about why a single individual acted as he did, even though it can tell us a great deal about patterns likely to emerge in large so- cieties. But if we momentarily suspend our evaluative judgments, for example, possibilities for new legal and social strategies might theo- retically include:

modifying Child Protective Services report prioritization procedures to weigh stepparenthood more heavily;

Prevention Programs, in CHILDREN AT RISK, supra note 112, at 225,228.

349. See Mason & Simon, supra note 326, at 467, 482; see also Giles-Sims, supra note 326, at 117 (explaining that lack of institutionalized stepparent roles leads to family stress).

350. Giles-Sims, supra note 326, at 127.

351. See Daly & Wilson, Risk of Maltreatment, supra note 298, at 220.

352. Daly & Wilson, Child Abuse and Other Risks, supra note 288, at 197.

1234 [Vol. 75

Dalam dokumen EIN NLINE (Halaman 112-127)