Playing with Fire

Rural and urban residents accustomed to seeing fire engines racing with sirens wailing and lights flashing are unaware of the problem of juvenile-set fires. Firesetting behaviours among children and adolescents are serious and have associated with it, serious individual and societal costs. Every year, several thousand children and adolescents aged 14 years and younger in the United States alone are injured or killed. Firesetting, pyromania and arson are topics that have existed in the literature since Sigmund Freud explained firesetting through his psychoanalytic model. Helen Yarnell's studies during the 1940s and 1950s were the first, however, to focus on the behaviour of youth firesetting. Her study in 1940 found that over 70% of adult incarcerated arsonists and institutionalised pyromaniacs had firesetting histories beginning in their childhood. She also introduced the concept of the ego triad: firesetting, enuresis and cruelty to animals as predictors of violence. The psychoanalytic view of firesetting continued to pervade the juvenile firesetting research through the 1970s. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a shift occurred in the study of juvenile firesetting and also in the number of studies being conducted on the topic. Researchers began to analyse juvenile firesetting from multiple perspectives of a child's life. The social learning and dynamic-behavioural models developed by these researchers gave clinicians a more thorough framework for understanding children who set fires and assessment tools to use in diagnosis and treatment planning. In this book, we discuss recent research on firesetting in childhood and adolescence.