At the bottom of the terrorism in its suicidal form is an individual who does not value his life as much as his cause. In other words such person's self esteem is low.
Now it is a well known fact that the children from broken families have a low estimation of their worth unless there are other factors to bolster their self image.
The prevalence of would be suicide bombers or the number of those willing to fight for a cause at great personal risk, in the Muslim and especially the Arab world makes me wonder if there is a link between the familial structure in those societies and the propensity of under valuing their lives in those populations.
It is norm in the Arab world for men to take more than one wife simultaneously and have children from them. I would suspect that the children brought up in such families would have considerably less attention from their fathers than may be necessary for the modern times.
It is also prevalent in these societies to award the women a lesser status and hence the children who are left with their mothers due to the fathers having multiple wives (or being dead) face the double jeopardy in terms of forming the image of their relationship with the outside world: fathers absent and they are left with lesser beings namely their mothers. In my opinion this should clearly leave a child brought up in such environment with a view that his life is not the foremost thing in the world and accordingly the notion that he will put his self-interest above all will be lost upon him.
Such children should be more susceptible to take grave risks for causes which they would consider more worthy than themselves.
Accordingly, all things being equal, societies with polygamy and lesser rights for women, are more prone to answer the call of duty through most self-endangering means than the societies in which monogamy is prevalent and women have more rights.
The evidence of this theory can also be seen in Afghanistan.
Therefore, a long term aspect of more humane and worthy societies, should be to encourage monogamy and/or more and equal rights for women. Failing these, single mothers or fathers should be given a star status in the societies so that the children have a higher sense of their self and hence are less keen to be reckless with their lives.
