JEDDAH: Crimes within families, including killings of the kin as well as rapes, are on the rise in the Kingdom, according to a report published in a local publication.

Crimes that would take place in a decade now occur on weekly and daily basis, it said and sought the attention of the authorities to check the rising graph of such crimes.

The report quotes experts who stressed the need to study these crimes that "occur behind closed doors" and hence often go unnoticed as against other social crimes that otherwise get wide publicity.

Studies should be carried out to get to the root cause of the problem as also to suggest ways to check them, the experts said.

Scholars believe that apart from drugs that might be a major contributing factor to such random crimes in recent times, there could be financial and economic factors as well as the accompanying psychological pressures that played a key and influential role in these crimes. There are still others who believe that social problems or dysfunctional personalities of the attacker may push them on to take revenge and kill family members.

Abdullah Al-Wayli, a specialist in criminal psychology, was quoted as saying to a local publication: “Many factors stand behind such crimes, including the personal, psychological and social characteristics.” He explained that psychological factors can be divided into two categories: mental and nervous, and both affect the behavior of the individual and have either a direct or indirect impact on people. “These factors foster deviated behaviors in the individual such as drug abuse, causing them to commit significant disturbances within his environment and society,” he added.

He said that such deviated behavioral characteristics within each individual cause can include audio and visual hallucinations, and illusions that prompt them to kill or commit suicide. He noted also that the social behavioral factor is very important: “The person might not be an addict or mentally ill, but his sense of oppression and repression, cruelty, or even excessive indulgence by family members can produce deviant behaviors within them, driving the individual to commit a premeditated crime.”

He said we now experience what is known as the ‘generation gap’ in terms of this issue.

“In the past, educating children depended on using cruelty and denying them the treats and luxuries of life. Nowadays, the exact opposite is happening: Unlimited indulgence and pampering, which produce a very unstable personality within the child.”

He said that all the above-mentioned factors produce a fertile environment for the committing of crimes, of which he said that the ugliest of all is the killing of a son, a mother, a daughter or a father.

“Such crimes are a shock to the whole community,” he asserted.