Pyromania vs revenge – why do people light fires?

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

News archive: Victorians are being urged to stay indoors. The state is bracing for its worst fire conditions ever.
Sana Qadar: February 7th, 2009.
News archive: Heatwave prepares to go out with a bang.
Sana Qadar: It's an incredibly hot, dry and windy day in Victoria.
Sana Qadar: And in the town of Churchill in the Latrobe Valley, a bushfire sparks. This bushfire is one of 400 fires that will rip through the state that day on what will soon be dubbed the Black Saturday bushfires, collectively considered one of Australia's worst bushfire disasters. But in this particular fire, the Churchill fire, 36,000 hectares of land are destroyed, 150 homes razed and 10 people are killed. Then, days after the event itself...
News archive: The 39 year old man is charged with arson.
Sana Qadar: A local man named Brendan Sokaluk is charged with arson, causing death.
News archive: The Crown argued he was a cunning liar who created a web of deceit as to why he was in the area.
Sana Qadar: And three years later, in 2012, Brendan Sokaluk is found guilty of deliberately lighting a bushfire that killed 10 people on Black Saturday. He was sentenced to 17 years and nine months in jail.
News archive: In the end, the jury decided Sokoluk was an arsonist intent on wreaking havoc on one of the worst days in Victoria's history.
Sana Qadar: It's a story that gives some small insight into just how devastating arson can be. And arson is the topic of today's episode of Criminal Psychology, our special four part series on All in the Mind. So we want to know what drives someone to light fires like this?
Dr Paul Read: It's a very small subsection of arsonists who actually get caught. And that skews our understanding of who they are and what their motivations are.
Sana Qadar: What is pyromania and does it drive people to arson?
Dr Nichola Tyler: So the thinking from Freud was that people would be aroused to fire because they would have repressed sexual urges and would want to extinguish the fire to release those repressed sexual urges.
Sana Qadar: And what does it take to track an arsonist down?
Richard Woods: One of the key opportunities for an investigator is to find the ignition source.
Sana Qadar: I'm Sana Qadar. This is Criminal Psychology on All in the Mind.
Sana Qadar: Do you want to tell me what you had for breakfast just so I can hear how you sound?
Dr Paul Read: Actually, I think I've had two coffees and a cigarette.
Sana Qadar: Oh, that's a hell of a breakfast. What are you, a model in the 90s? (both laugh)
Sana Qadar: This is Dr. Paul Read. He's not a 90s supermodel, but he is a climate criminologist.
Dr Paul Read: Worked with Monash and Melbourne universities, working with police and firefighting services to identify risk of arson.
Sana Qadar: He also formerly co-directed the National Centre for Research in Bushfire and Arson, which no longer exists. But he says there are about 60,000 fires in Australia every year.
Dr Paul Read: Of which up to 85% have human origins.
Sana Qadar: Some of that could be accidental, but Paul argues anywhere between 13 and 50% of those are deliberately lit. It's worth flagging, though, that these figures are a matter of significant dispute. It's hard to know for sure, and there's actually been a lot of debate in recent years about the extent to which arson is behind various bushfires in Australia. Some researchers put that figure much lower. Either way, what is clear is that fires that are deliberately lit can and do cause enormous damage to property and bushland. And they endanger lives.
Dr Paul Read: But we can't necessarily always call them arson because that's a legal term that is delivered by a judge after the fact.
Dr Nichola Tyler: And while there's some variation across jurisdictions internationally, it typically refers to the destruction of property using fire, whether that's intentionally or with reckless disregard.
Sana Qadar: This is Dr. Nichola Tyler, an arson researcher and senior lecturer in forensic psychology at Swinburne University of Technology. And one case we can safely refer to as arson is the case involving Brendan Sokaluk, because he was convicted. And so if you had to, like, draw the exact kind of profile of your typical arsonist, how much does does Brendan match that?
Dr Paul Read: He fits it to a T in terms of those who get caught.
Sana Qadar: Before we get into Brendan's story, here is what we know about the general profile of a person who sets fires. And just note, our understanding of these people is skewed because most people never get caught or convicted of arson. And so what we know is based on those who do come to the attention of police or mental health services. And so what we know is that usually they're male, usually they're young.
Dr Nichola Tyler: So you know, 35 down. They often have difficult backgrounds. Experiences of abuse, neglect, bullying, these sort of adverse childhood backgrounds, financial disadvantage.
Sana Qadar: And they haven't usually had the easiest run with school or work.
Dr Nichola Tyler: They often exit school early. They have difficulties with employment.
Sana Qadar: And the final thing I'll mention for now is they're often also involved in other antisocial behaviors.
Dr Nichola Tyler: They're not just setting fires.
Dr Paul Read: People that we catch are typically described as versatile criminals. Who have a history of violence, drug addiction.
Dr Nichola Tyler: Now, none of this means to say that there are not women who set fires and older people who set fires. That absolutely is. But these are kind of the broad trends that we see.
Sana Qadar: And so to come back to Brendan Sokaluk and how he fit into the profile of a typical arsonist that gets caught. He was actually a bit older when he was caught. He was 39. But there had long been suspicion that he might have been lighting fires during his brief time as a volunteer firefighter with the CFA, the country fire authority in Victoria. Because he'd turn up at fires he couldn't have possibly known about. He did a similar thing on Black Saturday as well, turning up at a property to help put out spot fires.
Dr Paul Read: So there is this long history of him turning up and heroically appearing to do the right thing.
Sana Qadar: Brendan hadn't lasted long at the CFA before being dismissed. And he'd had trouble holding down other jobs as well. As a child, he was viciously bullied. And then as an adult after Black Saturday,
Dr Paul Read: he was later diagnosed with autism and low intellectual ability.
Sana Qadar: That's not always the case with arsonists, but it can be. Now, I could go on, but that covers off a little bit about profile, both in general and in Brendan Sokaluk's case. What can be harder to tease apart is motivation. Why someone sets fires. In Brendan's case, the judge in his trial found he had intended to start the Churchill fire on Black Saturday. But the judge also said he didn't believe that Sokaluk meant to kill anyone. For his part, Sokaluk claimed the Churchill fire was an accident caused by ash from his cigarette.
Dr Paul Read: To this day, I've always been a little cautious with Brendan. And I'm not certain that he intended to create nearly as much damage as he did. It could be his old modus operandi of wanting to turn up at the last minute and save the day, combined with a deep fascination with fire. And I'm still not certain whether there was true malice involved.
Sana Qadar: So if we leave Brendan to the side, what do we know about what motivates people to set fires more broadly?
Dr Nichola Tyler: So people set fires for a variety of different reasons.
Sana Qadar: Forensic psychologist Dr. Nichola Tyler again.
Dr Nichola Tyler: But there are some commonly reported motivations that have come through in the research literature. So one of the most common reasons for fire setting broadly is things such as anger or revenge. So wanting to express that frustration or anger or get back at another person. Using fire as part of antisocial criminal activity more broadly. So to things like to cover up another crime, to get rid of the evidence. That's another common reason cited. Or to send a powerful message to communicate that you're distressed or that you need help in one way. Or if things are not going well in your life, using that as a way of expressing those feelings as a coping mechanism.
Sana Qadar: In some ways, these motivations feel to me anyways, straightforward or understandable. Like I can wrap my head around revenge or crime or a cry for help without condoning the fire setting, of course. What's stranger in a way is when people light fires without these kind of obvious drivers at play. And there is a group of people like this.
Dr Nichola Tyler: There's also a small proportion of people who set fires because they have an interest or fascination with fire itself. So seeing the colours or feeling the heat or watching the fire.
Sana Qadar: Now, to be clear, this is a much smaller group of people.
Dr Nichola Tyler: And I think it's also important to remember that none of these motivations are mutually exclusive.
Sana Qadar: But we're going to focus on this smaller group for a moment because, well, first of all, we are a psychology podcast. So this is of interest. And also, this is where you get into the conversation about pyromania.
Dr Nichola Tyler: So people who might experience excitement or emotional arousal or arousal setting a fire, these might be people who have a strong interest in fire. And you can have a strong interest in fire, but not be somebody who meets the diagnostic criteria for pyromania. I think that's really important because pyromania is actually very sort of restrictive diagnostic criteria. So very few people meet that.
Sana Qadar: So you're saying the people who have a fascination in fire, that's a smaller number compared to the ones who do it for crime or revenge or whatever. And then even smaller is the people who have pyromania. Is that correct?
Dr Nichola Tyler: Yes, absolutely. So pyromania is sort of, if you look at research studies, between zero and three percent typically of what we're talking about.
Sana Qadar: Of the population or the convicted people?
Dr Nichola Tyler: Samples of people who set fires. So we're talking very, very small numbers of people who actually end up with a diagnosis of pyromania. But there will be more people that where fire interest may be implicated.
Sana Qadar: That's fascinating that people who have been diagnosed with pyromania are such a small portion of those convicted of arson because I feel like pyromania is the label we slap on these people quite often. Like that's the label that has the public imagination. Do you have any thoughts on why that is?
Dr Nichola Tyler: I think part of that is we use that term quite colloquially. So I think it is more front and center of people's minds. And I think very often people can't understand why somebody might set a fire. And so this idea of somebody having a really strong interest or fascination in fire is sometimes perhaps an easy explanation for us to kind of make sense of something that is quite difficult for us to make sense of.
Sana Qadar: So that begs the question, what exactly is pyromania? And I don't know about you, but my background knowledge and assumption before we started putting this episode together was that pyromania was in certain cases related to sexual arousal.
Dr Paul Read: The idea of the psychosexual pyromania, dancing around the fire in the moonlight with an erection.
Sana Qadar: That's quite the picture.
Dr Paul Read: It's terrifying.
Sana Qadar: This idea partly originates in the 1900s with a man who's behind so many strange ideas about repressed sexual desire, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.
Dr Nichola Tyler: Yeah, so the thinking from Freud was that people would be aroused to fire because they would have repressed sexual urges and would want to extinguish the fire to release those repressed sexual urges.
Sana Qadar: Freud wrote these ideas down in his 1932 paper called The Acquisition of Power Over Fire. But it turns out this whole idea that pyromania is related to sexual arousal is a myth.
Dr Nichola Tyler: In fact, research that's been conducted shows that there's basically no link between the two. So some studies have done physiological measures to look at sexual arousal. That's where predominantly research has gone in the fire setting field. So people very, very rarely, if ever, set fires because they have a sexual interest in fire.
Dr Paul Read: That has not had as much evidence to support it in subsequent years.
Sana Qadar: So if pyromania isn't related to sexual arousal, that brings me back to the question of what is it? Because it is a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Dr Nichola Tyler: Pyromania is primarily concerned with engagement in repeated setting of fires as a result of the person having a very intense fascination or interest in setting the fire or the destruction it caused or the aftermath of the fire. And they're setting those fires as a way to experience either intense physiological arousal.
Sana Qadar: As in excitement or an adrenaline rush. Again, not sexual arousal.
Dr Nichola Tyler: Or to experience tension release associated with that interest in fire.
Sana Qadar: And is it like a compulsion?
Dr Nichola Tyler: So it's considered an impulse control disorder. So there is a level of, I suppose, experiencing that as an urge to set a fire. And you know, you have problems with self-regulation.
Sana Qadar: But even if you do meet that intense arousal criteria, Nicholas says there are a whole bunch of exclusionary criteria with a diagnosis. Meaning if your fire setting is better explained with motivations like revenge or anger or protest or...
Dr Nichola Tyler: In the context of delusions by intellectual disability and by the presence of conduct problems, then that wouldn't lead to meeting the criteria for pyromania. So you can see with all these exclusions, it actually means that we're talking about a very specific type of person who might have very specific needs and interests in fire.
Sana Qadar: And so do we know if there's any difference in what motivates people to light bushfires versus other kinds of fires? Because obviously bushfires are what are really scary to think about here in Australia.
Dr Nichola Tyler: I say we know little about fire setting. We know even less about deliberate bushfires. There's only a handful of studies looking at deliberate bushfires that have been published from all from Australia. We do see things such as people who have an interest in fire represented in there. People who might be angry. People who might be wanting to receive some sort of recognition, but misplaced recognition. But that hero concept, I suppose, wanting to sort of save the day and it goes wrong. I think the tricky thing with all fires, but particularly bushfires, is that a lot of people don't intend to cause a big bushfire. They don't intend to cause lots and lots of harm. And it gets big very, very quickly. So there is a disconnection, I suppose, between the intent and the outcome.
Sana Qadar: This is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. Today, understanding some of the motivations behind arson. This is part two of our four part series, Criminal Psychology. So one of the biggest issues hampering our understanding of arson is that, as we mentioned, in many cases, no one is ever caught or convicted. And most of the research that's been done to date has focused on people who have been detected. That leaves the motivations and characteristics of people who light fires without ever getting caught a mystery. But one person who knows a thing or two about catching arsonists is fire investigator Richard Woods.
Richard Woods: The investigator needs to basically piece together what has happened to this fire, even though you're looking at a blackened landscape, having the ability to then interpret what we call fire pattern indicators, which allows the investigator to basically re-piece together the movement of the fire back to where it started.
Sana Qadar: Richard is a former police officer, now a fire investigator, and he's the director of a consultancy company called Wildfire Investigations and Analysis.
Richard Woods: What it really relies on is many, many years of watching fires and interpreting the way they behave under different conditions. Because when you look at a wildfire and a bushfire or grass fire, as we call them here in Australia, you know, these fires burn under very different conditions. They're subject to wind, they're subject to fuel loads, the amount of grass, the amount of bush, the amount of leaf litter that's on the surface fuel there. And then the topography itself also impacts. So a fire will burn faster up a slope than it will burn down slope. And so an investigator needs to take all these things into account, work through the fire scene. And use their experience to actually piece this whole thing together and bring it back to a point.
Sana Qadar: Richard says the precise nature of that piecing together can vary from case to case.
Richard Woods: I worked on a case in northern Alberta in Canada. I was called up by the Forest Service in Alberta to go and assist them. They had a serial arsonist who'd been lighting a number of fires in and around a small town up in northern Alberta. And the fire agency, the volunteer fire department in the town was basically run off their feet. They really didn't know where to go. And there was this numerous fires that have been lit over a number of years. Not particularly damaging, not causing massive areas as a result. But one of the aspects of it was it was the local town was essentially terrified because they were continually getting those fires. So I attended a number of scenes with the fire service up there. I was working one fire scene and we'd found the origin on the side of the roadway. And lo and behold the arsonist drove through our fire scene. And I managed to capture him on our camera systems. And that helped convict him at the end of the day. You know a guy who was essentially lighting all these fires and then posting his outcomes on social media. But obviously not admitting to it at the time. But the fact that we were able to identify this person really helped with the local community and managed to solve this problem which had plagued them for many, many years.
Sana Qadar: In that case, Richard and his colleagues got lucky. Investigations don't always end so neatly. And so for any case, there are a set of principles that investigators follow and they involve keeping an open mind.
Richard Woods: Obviously when an investigator goes out to a fire scene and they're not looking at blaming it as an arson fire. The training that we reinforce is to make sure that the investigator turns up and looks at all the aspects of all the evidence and then narrows down that information that they can interpret from the scene, from witnesses and everyone else. And then tie that in together and then come up with a finding. And very often, you know, one of the key opportunities for an investigator is to find the ignition source. And that's why this scene examination is so important. So our investigators can find a device that an arsonist has used to enable them to get away from the scene. And that's where it can really add weight to the whole cause analysis process. What it really boils down to is having that open mind when they do go to a scene.
Sana Qadar: And tapping into local knowledge is an important part of the process because Richard says one of the biggest challenges with a bushfire, as opposed to like a structural fire, is the ability of an arsonist to blend into the landscape as a bushwalker or biker, for example.
Richard Woods: People in a local area backing onto a reserve know or have a feel for who comes and goes in those areas. And very often they can form a great source of information in relation to, say, people that have been seen in the area prior to a fire first being observed. And we've had a few of those cases in Australia where the key information came from the local residents who saw someone go into a reserve, come back out the next minute the smoke appeared. So it falls back to that issue of the old neighbourhood watch attitude of very often there can be the missing link of information.
Sana Qadar: This was how police zeroed in on Brendan Sokaluk during their investigation into the Churchill fire on Black Saturday. And while no one person saw him light the fire that day, police say there were 160 witnesses that had something to do with his movements that day. And then when you link all those together, it formed a very strong circumstantial case. For investigators like Richard, though, the process can become especially difficult when the person you're trying to catch is on your own team.
Richard Woods: Very often, you know, you'll have people who will join a fire service because they are interested in fire. Now, they may not have lit a fire in their life, but they go into a fire service. And commonly what will happen, they'll go through a lot of training and they'll get a good appreciation of what the role is. And in some circumstances, they won't get fires. They won't. Their agency, you know, their patch that they look after, they won't get a fire to go and attend to. And so I guess it's a bit of a letdown in some people's minds of, well, I thought I was going to be going to fires every second day. And they don't have that appreciation, if you like, of all their hard work, of doing all their training. And a firefighter might think, well, in that case, I'll go and light a fire and create an opportunity for our fire service, our fire unit to turn out to it. And one of the key aspects of, particularly in a small rural community brigade, is they might suddenly get a spike in fires that is unprecedented. And investigators can drill down into that information and not wanting to give too much away. But very often we will identify the firefighter arson very early in the piece.
Sana Qadar: Richard says often it's firefighters keeping an eye on new recruits that helps to pick up something unusual.
Richard Woods: And I mean, we've had individual cases in Australia where younger males have joined the service and might be considered a bit of a loner, unsuccessful employment history and the like. They join a fire service and they can see an opportunity to perhaps be more recognised in their community. So lighting a fire and then providing key advice as to where the location is and always being turning up at the station can also be a bit of a red flag to the organisation's hierarchy to perhaps take a closer look at these individuals. So there's a number of different aspects. And that's why it's so key important to have both fire service and law enforcement agencies, police, arson squads and the like, working so close together on all aspects of wildfire arson.
Sana Qadar: Now, so far, we've primarily focused on adults who set fires and for chronic fire setters, whether they have pyromania or not, the behaviour can start in childhood. So what do we know about kids who set fires? Well, research on kids is unfortunately scarce, but a few recent studies do point to some common characteristics among these children. One Japanese study, which looked at kids who visited a psychiatric hospital over eight years, picked up 64 who'd engaged in fireplay or arson, as the paper describes it. More than half those kids had ADHD, which makes sense because ADHD can mess with your impulse control, though it doesn't mean you will set fires, of course. These kids were also more likely to show antisocial behaviours, things like shoplifting or theft, damaging property or violence. And that backs up other studies which also make a similar finding. And the final thing to say about that study is they also found that boys were more likely to have set fires than girls. Now, another study published recently looked at almost 2000 children and adolescents who got referred to an intervention program run by New Zealand's fire service between 2009 and 2019. It was for kids who had been found to have deliberately lit a fire, and they found a few common patterns among those in the study. The kids and adolescents typically had hyperactivity problems, family dysfunction and behavioural problems. And so these can act as red flags that someone could be at risk of setting fires again in the future. The good news is most kids who play with fire, who set fires, will grow out of it.
Dr Paul Read: See, there's a thing called the age crime curve where every single crime peaks between the age of 15 and 22, including arson. What that means is that the great majority will stop.
Dr Nichola Tyler: So we know that there's often a peak in people engaging in antisocial behaviour during adolescence because people are testing boundaries and engaging increased risk taking. And most of those people kind of sort of peter off and they mature out of that behaviour.
Sana Qadar: But if you're listening to this and thinking, hang on, I know a kid in my life who's starting to play with fire and you're worried, Nichola says the first step you can take is to contact your local fire service.
Dr Nichola Tyler: Most fire and rescue services across Australia and also the world more broadly offer youth fire setting education programmes to teach young people about the dangers of fire and the consequences of fire and to help reduce that interest. Because, you know, often young people are experimenting or curious. It's not about getting a young person into trouble, but actually working with them to reduce the likelihood of harm coming to them. So I'd encourage them to get in contact with their local fire and rescue service as a starting point.
Sana Qadar: But Paul says the problem is the kids who probably need help the most are probably the least likely to get it.
Dr Paul Read: And the reason is that those children who are lighting fires are typically neglected. And so the parents themselves are not engaged. In fact, the parents are kind of part of the problem.
Sana Qadar: Right.
Dr Paul Read: So, yeah, I think any parent who actually cares about their child is not going to end up with a little arsonist living in the household.
Sana Qadar: And that goes back to what Nicola said at the beginning, that people who engage in fire setting and other antisocial behaviours tend to have difficult upbringings.
Dr Nichola Tyler: There are often experiences of abuse, neglect, bullying, these sort of adverse childhood backgrounds.
Sana Qadar: So as with so many crimes, arson is as much a social problem as anything else. And you throw in climate change and rising temperatures and you have a very dangerous situation.
Dr Nichola Tyler: It's really difficult to provide statistics specifically for Australia that's reason, but what we do see internationally in the US, for example, we see over 200,000 deliberate fires set off every year, resulting in over a billion dollars worth of property damage. In the UK, we see around 70,000 deliberately set fires. And the figures are quite similar when you look across countries across the world. They only fluctuate based on population. And these harms don't include things like the environmental damage. What is the psychological harm to first responders and community members? So we can kind of say that a lot of these kind of costs underestimate the real scale of the problem.
Sana Qadar: That is All in the mind for this week. Next week, episode three of our series Criminal Psychology, we'll explore theft and kleptomania. And we're going to hear from someone who's been diagnosed with kleptomania.
Clip from next week's episode: I felt like I was being pulled towards the object and I had to take it. And yeah, it's really difficult to explain it because it's just really an urge and it's not, I don't really think about it too much. Yeah.
Sana Qadar: That's next week on Criminal Psychology on All in the Mind. For this week, thank you to climate criminologist Dr. Paul Read, senior lecturer in forensic psychology at Swinburne University of Technology, Dr. Nichola Tyler and fire investigator Richard Woods. Thanks also to producer Rose Kerr, senior producer James Bullen and sound engineer Emrys Cronin. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time.