The moral challenge faced by the passion killer, Katz found, is "to escape a situation that is otherwise inexorably humiliating." Rather than accept this humiliation, the killer engages in "righteous slaughter," which the killer interprets as participating in some higher form of good. Adolescents who engage in shoplifting and petty vandalism engage in a melodrama in which "getting away with it" demonstrates personal competence in the face of persistent feelings of incompetence. Adolescents who engage in urban gang violence generally come from poor families who have recently arrived from rural areas and who therefore are humbled by the rational environment of the city and are deferential to the people who inhabit it. In response to this moral challenge, these adolescents are deliberately irrational in their own actions and arrogantly dominating in relation to other people. They thereby create a "territory for themselves in the city, both in geographic and in moral terms. Those who persistently engage in robbery must become "hard men" who take total control of the immediate situation by being willing to back their intentions violently and remorsely. Robbery therefore transcends the total lack of control these robbers experience in the rest of their lives--that is, they experience their lives as completely out of control or as controlled by the "system.” Finally, cold-blooded killers have a pervasive sense of having been defiled by conventional members of society, who for years have treated them as pariahs and outcasts. In their minds, these killers finally exact vengeance for this defilement by “senselessly' killing some of those conventional members of society.