The officers approached him on the TransMilenio platform with practiced efficiency, their movements rehearsed by repetition rather than urgency. The accusation required no elaboration. A missing phone, a hand where it should not have been, a familiar public crime unfolding in a familiar place. Commuters glanced briefly, then looked away, reassured that the story had revealed itself fully. Theft, after all, offers moral clarity. It draws a clean line and tells society exactly when violence begins.

The young man stood still as his pockets were searched. Silence surrounded him, dense and unremarkable. Silence had accompanied him long before that platform, long before the uniformed presence and the murmurs of the crowd. No one asked how he arrived there, what had shaped the reflexes now mistaken for intent, or what losses preceded the act that seemed so self-explanatory. The visible crime appeared conclusive, yet it was only the final surface of a process already in motion.

Before the Crime Had a Name

He arrived in Bogotá as a teenager from Venezuela, not propelled by ambition but pushed by collapse. Scarcity did more than empty shelves and darken streets. It eroded predictability, safety, and the quiet dignity that allows a young person to imagine continuity. Leaving did not extinguish fear. It relocated it.

In Colombia, the city absorbed him without hostility and without recognition. Work surfaced briefly, vanished suddenly, and rarely provided enough stability to anchor his days. Hunger returned, accompanied by a deeper sense of deprivation that food alone could not alleviate. Emotional needs received no reply. Over time, invisibility stopped feeling temporary and began to feel permanent.

Psychologically, prolonged emotional absence alters the way reality is navigated. When pain remains unacknowledged, it does not dissolve. It reorganizes behavior. Survival gradually eclipses reflection. In such conditions, violence rarely announces itself with spectacle. It develops quietly, disguised as adaptation.

When the Body Learns What the Mind Cannot

He did not describe his first theft as a decision. He described it as movement. The TransMilenio offered proximity, anonymity, and speed. Bodies pressed together, attention scattered, accountability diffused. His body learned the rhythm quickly. Scan. Approach. Reach. Release. Hunger sharpened perception. Fear accelerated timing. Thought arrived only afterward, trailing behind the act like an afterimage.

This pattern reflects what trauma research consistently documents. Under chronic stress and deprivation, emotional regulation weakens, and the nervous system assumes control. Action replaces language. Behavior carries what emotion cannot articulate (Ford & Courtois, 2014). In that state, theft does not feel aggressive. It feels functional. It feels necessary.

When Survival Becomes Identity

What begins as adaptation often hardens into identity. Over time, he stopped noticing when his gaze searched for vulnerability. His hands moved instinctively. Stillness felt unsafe. Theft offered structure in a life fractured by displacement and instability. It provided predictability where none existed.

Yet each act carried a quiet cost. After the adrenaline receded, exhaustion settled in. He returned to his room restless, disconnected, and vaguely ashamed, though the feeling resisted naming. Emotional intelligence research shows that when individuals lack the capacity to recognize and regulate internal states, impulsive behavior escalates while inner coherence deteriorates (Brackett, Rivers, & Salovey, 2011). What sustained his body slowly fractured his sense of self.

The Pause That Changed Nothing and Everything

The interruption arrived without warning. One morning, crowded onto the TransMilenio, his body prepared itself as usual. A woman stood beside him, her purse partially open, the familiar geometry of opportunity taking shape. His hand rose, then stopped.

A child nearby watched him without suspicion or fear. The gaze lasted only seconds, yet it disrupted the sequence. Awareness entered where reflex normally ruled. He noticed his breathing, shallow and uneven. He noticed fatigue that extended beyond hunger. In that pause, the act lost its inevitability.

He withdrew his hand. No one reacted. No one noticed. The absence of action felt heavier than any theft he had committed. Emotional awareness had interrupted impulse, a mechanism central to behavioral regulation and restraint (Brackett et al., 2011). Silence followed, not the suffocating silence of neglect, but the reflective silence of recognition.

When Identity Begins to Shift

That moment did not redeem him. It unsettled him. The behavior no longer aligned with the person he sensed himself becoming. Theft had lost its function, even if the need remained. This internal mismatch produced discomfort punishment never had.

Research on desistance consistently shows that lasting change begins when behavior no longer fits emerging identity. People stop offending when they can no longer reconcile the act with who they believe they are becoming (Paternoster & Bushway, 2021). Fear of consequences may interrupt behavior briefly, but identity reorganization sustains restraint.

Speaking From Detention

I met him months later in a youth detention center in Bogotá. He did not minimize the harm he caused. He did not dramatize his suffering. He spoke carefully, choosing words as if testing their weight.

He described that moment on the bus as the first time he realized he could pause. Responsibility became possible only after awareness emerged. Trauma research supports this sequence, showing that accountability stabilizes once emotional regulation begins to recover (Ford & Courtois, 2014). Demanding responsibility before that point often deepens defensiveness rather than change.

Conclusion: Redrawing the Beginning

The arrest on the platform remains the easiest moment to identify. A hand moved. A phone disappeared. Harm followed, and consequences arrived on schedule. The scene offers resolution, a clear point where violence can be located and named. Yet what appears to be the beginning is only the moment when violence becomes visible enough to confront.

Long before that platform, violence had already been unfolding quietly. It took shape in silence, in deprivation endured without witness, in the slow accumulation of emotional neglect that teaches the body to respond before the mind can reflect. Seen through this lens, crime does not appear excusable, but it becomes intelligible. When pain has no language, behavior carries its weight. When awareness enters, even briefly, violence begins to lose its certainty.

Reparation rarely begins where society expects it to. It does not start with punishment alone or with judgments delivered after the fact. It begins in the willingness to look earlier, to listen longer, and to understand the psychological conditions that allow violence to form, and the fragile moments that allow it to end.

References

Brackett, M. A., Rivers, S. E., & Salovey, P. (2011). Emotional intelligence: Implications for personal, social, academic, and workplace success. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5(1), 88–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00334.x

Ford, J. D., & Courtois, C. A. (2014). Complex PTSD, affect dysregulation, and borderline personality disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 1, Article 9. https://doi.org/10.1186/2051-6673-1-9

Paternoster, R., & Bushway, S. D. (2021). Desistance from offending in the twenty-first century. Annual Review of Criminology, 4, 311–334.