Kerala human sacrifice case & why India should start taking paraphilia more seriously

The horrific human sacrifice case from State of Kerala in India last week has shook the entire nation, where a man along with a married couple lured two victims and brutally killed them in the name of superstitious or occult beliefs. More grisly details emerged when the Police shared that there is a possibility that private body parts of these victims were cooked and consumed by the perpetrators.

This incident brought up the horrid memories of 2005 Nithari Killings of children in Noida,Uttar Pradesh and the Jeffrey Dahmer case of ’91 in the United States which were equally horrifying and gruesome. India as a society is not stranger to human sacrifice crimes as there have been over a 100 cases all over the country since 2014. These cases demand attention not just from the legal point of view, but also from the mental health perspective. While it is difficult for common people to understand why such crimes occur, but there is a better explanation by psychologists on this topic which they call it as ‘Paraphalia’.

“Paraphilia (previously known as sexual perversion and sexual deviation) is the experience of intense sexual arousal to atypical objects, situations, fantasies, behaviors, or individuals. It has also been defined as sexual interest in anything other than a consenting human partner.”

Wikipedia

This has also reignited the debate among psychology experts if this behavior of these criminals is because of the ‘Nature or Nurture’, meaning whether it is the result of a defined defect inside the human brain or because of the psychosocial effects and the effects of the surrounding on that person while growing up, which would include childhood abuse in most cases. As research is still going on in this area, experts believe that it is very difficult to ascribe such behavior to a fixed number of factors. Netflix’s ‘Inside Criminal Mind’ documentary explains how experts have succeeded in identifying certain common traits among these criminals i.e., how they identify and hunt for victims, their constant need for being in control, even at the cost of killing or immobilizing their victims violently, but human brain is a such a complex machine that these findings are not enough to help mental health experts in finding a long lasting solution.

Is it just another crime or is it a sickness that needs to be cured?

Jeffrey Dahmer who had killed 17 Men and boys in cold blood, had confessed outright upon arrest. His confession of crimes was initially interpreted as mental sickness and a need for medical attention, even his lawyers had argued that he did all this because he was insane. But his plea was dismissed in the US as his behavior did not fit into the legal definition of ‘Insanity’. Since his demeanor during his trials was that of a very calm person, no one would suspect that this was an insane person. The brutal acts that he carried out on his victims like immobilizing them by drugging, dismembering, cannibalism and even performing sexual acts on the dead body(necrophilia) look very similar to the acts committed by the accused in the Kerala Case or the Nithari Case too. Does this mean that these criminals fit into one watertight group of psychopaths? Well, there is no conclusive answer for this as per the experts due to lack of research.

Addressing the gaps in Law enforcement & Mental Health

Since the Kerala case is not just a case of criminals relying on superstitions, occult practices but also of criminals with extreme deviant behavior, it has to be looked into holistically. Currently there is no nationwide law in India that addresses this problem (however certain States have enacted strict laws to deal with such cases, but they do not take mental issues into consideration). There is also a gap in the way law is applied in these cases, lets take for example the accused in this case named ‘Mohammed Shafi’ who was arrested in 2020 because he had sexually assaulted a senior citizen causing injury in private parts, he was out on bail since 2021. Could this incident have prevented by confining him on the basis of his past crime?

Taking example of Jeffery Dahmer again in the US, there was an incident when one of his victims whom he had drugged and drilled a hole in the skull had almost escaped. People in that neighborhood who were mostly African Americans tried to alert the Police multiple times, but the response of the Police was callous towards them and this resulted in Dahmer continuing to murder more people. This was a time when the racial tensions were high in the US and the Police hardly had any sensitization training towards handling homosexual crimes. The same kind of callousness was seen initially in the Nithari case too. Does this mean, that we need a broad range of revised Police Reforms as well?

Well, the answer is not easy to find and requires a lot of innovation on both aspects: Legal and Mental Health. We can take a leaf out of ‘Sexually Violent Predator Laws’ drafted by various US States on indefinite civil confinement of a certain class of sex criminals who can pose a serious danger to the society.

There is also a group of psychology experts who advocate that such deviant minded criminals should be studied more when they are under confinement, as it might help in uncovering more details. This however will not go down well with Human Rights Framework within many countries or it might even be termed unethical.

Having said all this it would be very difficult to see this through as it would require a great deal of legal creativity and Political willpower. One can only hope that the premier psychology research institutes like AIIMS, AMU, Manipal University or even DIPR(Defence) can lend their expertise into this and address the problem not only from legal but also from mental health perspective.