Aileen Carol Wuornos was a violent, female serial murderer. On February 29th, 1956, she was born Aileen Carol Pittman in Rochester, Michigan. Aileen was executed by lethal injection on October 9th, 2002, in Starke, Florida as punishment for her violent crimes. Aileen had a very troublesome childhood. Her father was a convicted sex offender who spent time in mental health hospitals, and was serving time in prison, ultimately committing suicide, and her mother, abandoned Wuornos and her brother at a young age, leaving them to live with their grandparents at the age of four (Jenkins, 2024). Wuornos' psychosocial trauma continued in her grandparents' home - raised in an environment with an alcoholic grandmother and a violent and neglectful grandfather. Wuornos also experienced sexual trauma at the hands of her grandfather, engaged in incestuous behaviors with her brother and became pregnant at the age of 14. After becoming pregnant, she spent time in a home for unwed mothers, dropped out of school and became a prostitute (AETN UK, n.d.). The type of crimes presented in the scenario of Aileen Wuornos are violent crimes and other common offenses. In the mid 1970's, Wuornos engaged in hitchhiking and prostitution for monetary gain and was arrested for assault and disorderly conduct. She eventually married a man named Lewis Fell in 1976, but soon after a bar fight resulted in her arrest, Fell filed for an annulment. Leading into the 1980's, Wuornos also committed other common crimes of forgery, theft, armed robbery, possession of a firearm, and assault. She met a woman in 1986 named Tyria Moore who was brought into Wuornos' criminal cycle. The two became romantically involved and Wuornos' crimes became more violent in 1989 leading into the 1990's. She was responsible for the murder of 7 middle-aged men along highways in Florida (AETN UK, n.d.). Motivation for Wuornos' crimes was survival and can be explained from a learning perspective. The learning perspective suggests that human beings learn behaviors and beliefs from their social
environment. Sutherland's Differential Social Theory demonstrates that criminal behavior is learned through social interactions and Bandura's Social Learning Theory suggests that an individual develops their thoughts, perceptions, expectancies, competencies, and values from watching other people in their social environments. Over time, accumulation of multiple risk factors and insufficient protective factors leads to criminal activity and anti-social behaviors in children and adolescents (Bartol, 2020). It is important to note that exposure to risk factors did not guarantee anti-social behaviors for Wuornos but did increase the likelihood of developing behaviors. The above two theories mentioned and exposure to multiple risk factors can explain the motivation behind Wuornos' crimes, learning violent behavioral tendencies. During her childhood and into the adolescent stage of development, Wuornos had been exposed to a life of crime with no end in sight as a means of survival. Learning to navigate life through an unstable and neglectful environment, this was what she knew, and it likely paved the way to a life of prostitution for monetary support, graduating