The next stage on the pathway to violence is planning and preparing the eventual action. At this point, alarming behaviour begins to evolve into high-risk behaviour, which becomes increasingly difficult to stop from this stage. The ideas crystallise: the individual investigates how others carried out similar plans, and sets out a timetable.
Whether alarming behaviour evolves into high-risk behaviour and an individual begins planning actions depends on the protective and risk factors in that person’s life. These factors can indicate the extent to which an individual is likely to display high-risk behaviour.
There is a greater risk if someone has few protective factors and many risk factors personally and in his social network. Neither can a sharp dividing line be discerned when alarming behaviour actually turns into risky behaviour. Click on the image to the right to see an overview of frequent protective and risk factors.
From later interrogations, the manifesto and Breivik’s online activities we know that between 2006 and 2008, three to five years before the attacks, he started planning his actions. In this article you can read about this phase in the course of Breivik’s pathway to violence in more detail. The video below shows a brief summary of this process: