Well, if they're children born to tyrants and they become worse than them it is usually because they do not know anything else. So having known nothing else, having never had an example of something else, having no examples of compassionate actions, no good examples, then it's almost like they are babies who have been brought into the world into a bit of a hell realm. They didn't even have the opportunity to learn to act in a different way, so they didn't have any options. These types of children will often have to meet someone else, teachers, or other human beings, who will be able to see through their particular external personality, see the causes of it, and have enough ability to try to bring them out of it.
This is also going back to one the teachings of the Buddha about being born to particular parents, how it is very good Kamma to be born to good parents. So if one's Kamma is that we are born to negative types of parents, it is our bad Kamma fruiting at that time because parents are particularly important in our development of human beings. It's their role to teach us virtue, to teach us what love and compassion is. When teaching, sometimes I've noticed that people who really want to try develop their minds, but had a unhealthy start with immoral or abusive parents, they'd like to be able to know what compassion is but it's very difficult for them because they've never been shown it.
So knowing nothing else, they have to find new role models, and often we have to take on the role of being mentors to them and show them different people who act in different ways. It can take some time for them to learn how to develop these types of non-harming actions. Often they don't trust anybody. Often they're always on the alert about someone trying to take advantage of them, and it's very difficult. So if we actually see that these children didn't have a good start and don't know anything else, then actually we can begin to have compassion for these types of people.
I happened to be in the United States when the sniper attacks in Washington D.C. were happening, and we were going up and down the highway where they were killing people. In the end, when they caught the people doing it, it turned out that one was a young man who had been influenced in very bad ways when he was young, so that he wasn't able to identify other human beings as human beings. When we think about these people in this way, we can have compassion for them, understanding the difficulties of growing up without any positive role models.