VIOLENCE

The term violence is used to describe animal and human behavior that threatens to cause or causes severe harm to a target. Most animal studies emphasize variations in aggression and use the concept of extreme aggression (rather than violence) to denote the most serious and injurious behavior. In studying human behavior, violence and aggression are frequently used as synonyms, with violence marked by an extra degree of excessiveness. In some cases, the choice of the term "aggression" or "violence" is a matter or preference or convention. For example, aggression is most commonly used to describe young children's behavior while such behavior in adolescents is called youth violence. Violence tends to be the preferred term for describing classes of behavior or phenomenon (e.g., domestic violence, media violence, sports violence) without specific reference to the degree of severity involved.

Different authorities have been extremely variable in their willingness to include a range of actions under the heading of violence. Indeed, there has been much controversy about the term and just what actions should be covered. Some have offered more limited definitions based on constraints such as intentionality, legality, and nature of targets. Each limitation provides a more specific definition with associated advantages and disadvantages. For instance, many definitions of both aggression and violence specify that harm be intentional. Accidentally causing serious injury generally is not considered an act of violence in both common discourse and legal proceedings. However, specifying intentionality poses measurement challenges because violence can no longer be judged by merely observing a behavior; rather, the mental state of the person must be assessed or inferred.

Limiting the definition of violence to "illegal behaviors" that cause harm or injury is consistent with legal guidelines. Such a definition is useful from a policy and control perspective because it covers actions generally considered as violent, including forcible rape, armed robbery, aggravated assault, gang violence, and homicide. A problem with this definition is that the same behavior may be judged illegal or legitimate depending on specific cultural and historical conditions. From this perspective, a behavior would only be considered violent if there were official sanctions against it.

Some definitions of violence include only behavior that is designed to harm others (or animate beings). This focus emphasizes the antisocial and immoral nature of violence as an act against others and society. It is consistent with most contemporary criminal definitions of violence. However, it excludes the self as a target of harm and injury, which is inconsistent with public health definitions of violence that generally include harm to self. Other definitions construe the target even more broadly, extending it to include inanimate objects (e.g., destruction of property).

Classification

Violence is not one behavioral pattern but several. The multifaceted and complex nature of violence has led to a number of proposed guidelines and classification schemes for studying its component parts. Behavioral scientists have worked to develop classifications by grouping together meaningful categories of violence that share common characteristics related to etiology and function. One approach has been to classify violence according to the underlying motivation of the aggressor. A frequently used distinction is between hostile and instrumental motivation. In hostile violence, the major goal is to inflict harm or injury. In other words, hurting is an end in itself. In instrumental violence, actions may cause harm but are not motivated by the desire to cause harm per se. Rather, they are motivated by goals such as taking resources from others. In both cases, this distinction depends on the individual's intent, not on the act itself.

Although not conceptually clean, this distinction has proved useful. Certain types of violence such as armed robbery, murder-for-hire, and terrorism generally are well planned, goal-directed, instrumental actions. Offenders are acting to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs. Many prominent models of criminal behavior emphasize the rational choice component of crime (e.g., Cornish and Clarke). This type of planned behavior is distinguished from more impulsive and hostile violent actions often characterized by loss of control, irrationality, and rage. Such impulsive violent behaviors are frequently labeled emotional violence and are linked with emotions such as anger and fear. Biological models of violence have identified distinct neural patterns that characterize each type of violence. For example, the "low-arousal" aggressor more likely to commit instrumental violence is underreactive and responds sluggishly to stressors. In contrast, the "high-arousal" aggressor who is more prone to hostile violence tends to be hypervigiliant and easily frustrated (Niehoff).

Another distinction between classes of violence that bears some similarity to the hostile/instrumental classification is the difference between defensive and offensive violence. This distinction has been fundamental to animal studies of aggression, with defensive and offensive aggression linked to stimulation of different areas of the brain. In humans, instrumental aggression is roughly analogous to predatory aggression although it is limited to intraspecies behavior. In other words, when humans kill animals for food it is generally not considered offensive violence in the same sense as killing a rival gang member. Similarly, emotional or hostile aggression in humans could be considered the analogue of defensive aggression in response to a threat or perceived threat. Studies of children have found differences in propensity for proactive aggression and reactive aggression, although some children score high on both types of aggression (Dodge and Coie). This work provides some empirical support for distinguishing between offensive violence that is unprovoked and defensive violence that is a reaction to another's provocation.

Clearly, different classification schemes serve different purposes. In everyday usage, violence is often divided into distinct classes based on criteria useful for description, dialogue, and public policy. Violence can be grouped into categories based on variables such as the agents of violence (e.g., gangs, youth, collective groups), the victims of violence (e.g., women, children, minority groups), the relationship between aggressor and victim (e.g., interpersonal, nonrelated), perceived causality (e.g., psychopathological, situational, learned), and type of harm (e.g., physical, psychological, sexual). These criteria are frequently combined to examine particular forms of violence, such as psychological abuse of women in intimate relationships, youth sexual violence, instrumental collective violence, and so on.

Some efforts have focused on developing classification systems that can guide prevention, intervention, and control efforts. Tolan and Guerra describe four types of youth violence: situational, relationship, predatory, and psychopathological. This is not an exclusive classification proposed to cover all types of violence, but rather provides some conceptual organization for structuring efforts to prevent or reduce violence. Each distinct type of violence is associated with different causal mechanisms and warrants a different type of intervention. For example, relationship violence is influenced more by anger and conflict than predatory acts of violence such as armed robbery of a stranger. Consequently, biochemical interventions that block anger arousal or conflict-resolution training programs that teach anger management skills may have some influence on relationship violence but much less influence on predatory violence.

The causes of violence

As historical and cross-cultural records demonstrate, our evolutionary history is laced with examples of violence. Indeed, paleontological data reveal a rather continuous stream of human violence dating back thousands of years. It is clear that violence is not restricted to early historical periods or particular cultural groups. Despite recent concerns in the United States and elsewhere over spiraling violence rates, available data suggest that there is actually less violence now than in ancient times. From an evolutionary perspective, human violence may represent a context-sensitive solution to particular problems of social living that may ebb and flow in accordance with changing conditions. In reviewing these adaptive functions, Buss and Shackelford describe seven problems for which violence may have evolved as a solution: (1) co-opting the resources of others; (2) defending against attack; (3) inflicting costs on same-sex rivals; (4) negotiating status and power hierarchies; (5) deterring rivals from future aggression; (6) deterring males from sexual infidelity; and (7) reducing resources expended on genetically unrelated children.

Against a backdrop of adaptive violence, there are still many other factors that play a role in the ontogeny of violence and help explain variations in violence across individuals and social groups. In most cases, a number of different factors converge to increase the likelihood of violent behavior. These factors can be divided into roughly three groups: (1) innate factors; (2) socialization factors; and (3) situational factors.

Innate factors. Early efforts to unveil differences between violent and nonviolent individuals began with attempts to assign precise neural locations to a range of behaviors including violence. Known as phrenology, this approach assigned high priority to the innate and presumably defective aspects of individual makeup. The idea that behaviors are linked to physical characteristics also drove some of the first criminological efforts to understand the etiology of violence. Perhaps the most well-known work is that of nineteenth-century Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, who popularized the notion that violent individuals possessed distinct physical features indicative of primitive or inferior development, known as atavisms.

A concern over physical features gave way to the far more powerful influence of genetics. Although there was much resistance toward biology-as-destiny approaches, more and more geneticists were taking over the reigns of biology. However, much of the early writing on the genetic underpinnings of violence failed to pinpoint the precise causal mechanisms. The lack of a genetic road map did not unravel efforts to search for the innate determinants of aggression. Support for the idea that aggression was hard-wired from birth came from a number of different encampments.

Beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, ethologists saw aggression and violence as a response to the call of internal mechanisms or instincts. This emphasis found good company in the Freudian psychoanalysts. They saw aggression as derived from an inborn tendency to destroy. Like all instincts, it builds up over time and must ultimately be discharged in either acceptable or unacceptable ways. This pressure is made worse by frustration. The idea that aggression and violence are linked to frustration had a significant impact on the field and was followed by models emphasizing the frustration-aggression connection (Dollard et al.). Although still grounded in a drive model of behavior, this work also provided evidence that violence can be learned. Still, innate drive theories persisted and were later popularized by the writings of Konrad Lorenz. According to Lorenz, aggression was not simply a response to an instinct but was itself an innate driving force, notable for both its spontaneity and centrality to species preservation.

But drive theories found themselves caught up in an empty vessel. There was little evidence to indicate that aggressive energy builds up until it is released. Further, while the notion of drive or instinct may have some descriptive utility, it offered little in the way of specifying the precise internal mechanisms that underlie violence and ran the risk of engendering a pessimistic attitude about prevention. Fortunately, scientific advances in understanding neuranatomy, brain chemistry, and genetic transmission allowed for increasingly greater precision in understanding the biology of violence, leading us farther from the notion of violence as inevitable instinct. The role of key areas of the brain in regulating emotion and behavior is now well established. Violence has also been associated with some kinds of brain damage from birth trauma, tumors, or head injury. However, rather than acting alone, the biological and social environments seem to exert reciprocal influences.

For example, threat perceptions involve neurotransmitters that partially determine an individual's sensitivity to environmental stimuli—some more reactive, others less so. But environmental exposure to violence, danger, or abuse during the early years can quickly overload the brain's alarm system, creating adolescents who are hypervigilant to stress and overreact to environmental cues (Pynoos, Steinberg, and Ornitz). Hypervigilance to threats may also explain some of the inconclusive findings linking testosterone and aggression. It appears that testosterone is linked to specific types of aggression, notably the tendency to "fight back" in a more defensive or reactive fashion related to heightened threat perception rather than the tendency to start fights or engage in offensive aggression (Olweus, Mattson, and Low).

Socialization factors. Not only does the social environment serve as a trigger for biological development, it also provides a context for learning appropriate behaviors. Whatever propensity for violence is written on an individual's biological birth certificate, it is clearly molded and shaped through interactions with others. There is a sizable body of evidence showing that early socialization across multiple contexts accounts for much of the individual differences in later violent behavior.

Different mechanisms have been implicated in the learning of violence. Early theories stressed the importance of reinforcement. A young child wants a toy, but his playmate will not relinquish it. The boy pushes and grabs the toy and the playmate relents. Aggression works. If followed by reinforcement, both mild aggression and serious violence are likely to increase. Such reinforcement is not limited to tangible objects; it can include outcomes such as attention, status, and advantageous positioning in the peer status hierarchy, similar to some of the adaptive functions of aggression discussed previously.

In addition to the role of reinforcement, early formulations of social learning theory emphasized the role of observational learning (Bandura). Individuals who see others use and obtain rewards for violence, especially others whom they admire, are more likely to imitate them and behave violently under similar circumstances. As a psychological mechanism, modeling can also explain variation in violence levels across different social groups and cultures. As violence becomes more legitimate in a social group, it is more likely that members will conform to these emerging group norms. Some observers have described a "code of violence" that characterizes the behavior of many inner-city males. Status is associated with willingness to use violence, and children emulate the toughness and violence of older male role models.

Much of the concern about the links between exposure to media to violence and aggression derives from social learning theory. Research with children has clearly demonstrated a correlation with exposure to media violence and aggressive behavior. Children who watch more violent movies and television are more likely to engage in similar behaviors both as children and adults. Long-term exposure to media violence fosters later violence through several mechanisms. In addition to teaching aggressive attitudes and behaviors, it also seems to desensitize viewers to violence, making it more acceptable. People who watch a lot of televised violence also show exaggerated fears of violence, perhaps making them more hypervigilant and susceptible to reactive outbursts.

The media is but one socialization context that can promote the learning of violence. Research has shown that both parents and peers can be a powerful force in shaping children's behavior. Lack of attention to children's behavior and inconsistent parental discipline and monitoring of activities have been consistently related to the development of aggressive and violent behavior patterns. Extremely harsh and abusive parenting has also been linked to later aggression. Stated simply, "violence begets violence." Equally important is the failure of positive encouragement for prosocial and nonviolent behaviors. Many parents ignore children's efforts at solving conflicts peacefully or managing frustration. Oversights such as these may inadvertently teach children that aggressive acts alone are worthy of notice.

Peers also exert an influence from an early age, but seem to become most important during adolescence. Perhaps one of the most robust findings in the delinquency literature is that anti-social and violent peers tend to gravitate toward one another. Delinquents associate with each other and this association stimulates greater delinquency. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the actions of gangs. Not only is violent behavior accepted, it is required. Members must be "jumped in" via violent victimization; the same procedure is followed for those who want to leave the gang.

The environment also operates to influence the learning of violence. Some studies of environmental influences have focused on the effects of poverty and disadvantage. Poverty itself does not cause violence. Rather, being poor affects one's life experiences in several ways conducive to violence. Individuals living in poor neighborhoods have few resources and supports for healthy development and are more likely to experience multiple stressors. In some neighborhoods, there are few legitimate routes to financial success and social status, which may also engender feelings of relative deprivation in contrast to middle-class society. Those who have little also have little to lose. Thus, low social and economic status may contribute to heightened risk-taking behavior, an idea that finds some support in psychological studies showing that artificially lowering an individual's self-esteem gives rise to higher levels of risky or rule-breaking behavior.

In urban settings, poverty often produces situational factors, such as overcrowding, that are linked to violence. Indeed, the highest rates of violence typically are found among the urban poor (Dahlberg). Drive-by shootings and random violence have come to characterize some of the most distressed, inner-city communities. As violence increases and neighborhoods become more dangerous, the use of force may be seen as normal and even necessary for self-protection. A subculture of violence can emerge wherein violence is legitimized as an acceptable behavior within certain groups. The idea that degree of violence is related to the prevailing social norms about its acceptability can also shed light on cross-cultural differences. Countries where violence is considered non-normative such as Japan have low homicide rates; countries where violence has become almost a way of life such as El Salvador and Guatemala have homicide rates over one hundred times higher (Buvinic, Morrison, and Shifter).

These different contextual factors can serve as a training ground for violence via their influence on children's learning. However, beyond a focus on how individuals learn violent behavior through socialization, recent efforts have highlighted the importance of cognitive processes that help shape and control behavior—what might be called the software of the brain. Studies have shown that more aggressive and violent individuals have different ways of processing information and thinking about social situations. They tend to interpret ambiguous cues as hostile, think of fewer nonviolent options, and believe that aggression is more acceptable (Crick and Dodge). Once these cognitions crystallize during socialization, they are more resistant to change.

Situational factors. Both innate factors and socialization experiences mold an individual's propensity to violence. But this is not the whole story. It appears that situational catalysts can also lead to violence and increase the seriousness of such behavior. Almost any aversive situation can provoke violence. Frustrating situations are linked to heightened aggression, although frustration does not always produce aggression and is certainly not the only instigating mechanism. Other aversive experiences such as pain, foul odors, smoke, loud noises, crowding, and heat portend heightened aggressiveness, even when such behavior cannot reduce or eliminate the aversive stimulation (Berkowitz).

The influence of pain on violent behavior has been widely studied. Pain-instigated aggression is often cited as one of the clearest examples of aversively generated aggression. Further, the likelihood of overt aggression increases as the pain becomes greater and the ability to avoid it decreases. However, it is not necessarily the pain, per se, that causes aggression. Indeed, investigations of people suffering from intense pain have documented higher levels of anger and hostility and speculate that subsequent aggression may be due to the agitated negative affect that accompanies pain rather than the pain itself. Along these lines, any type of aversive experience that results in heightened negative affect should increase the likelihood of subsequent aggression.

Alcohol has also been shown to promote violence. In studies of alcohol and domestic violence, alcohol use typically is implicated in more than half of all incidents. Similarly, both homicide victims and perpetrators are likely to have elevated blood alcohol levels. Although a relation has been established, the precise mechanisms by which alcohol increases violence are unclear. It is likely that these effects are related to its impact on how an individual evaluates social situations and decides on an appropriate response. For example, some alcohol-violence studies suggest that ingestion of alcohol makes normal social interactions extremely difficult, heightening the likelihood of a range of inappropriate responses including violence.

Situational cues that suggest violence are also likely to increase violence by priming violencerelated thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Street fights engender more violence because they cue violent responses in observers. The presence of guns can also make violence more likely to occur when they are associated with an aggressive meaning and positive outcomes. For instance, the presence of a hunting rifle will not promote hostile and violent behavior in those who disapprove of aggression toward others. It is not just the weapon but the meaning and anticipated consequences of its use that promote violence. Even the picture of a gun or weapon in a room can increase the chance of an aggressive act. This effect is of particular concern because guns make violence more deadly. For example, the rise in murders of juveniles in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s was entirely firearm-related. Firearms are now the leading cause of death among children and youth in many places (Snyder and Sickmund).

Even nonviolent individuals can turn violent when they are part of a violent crowd. Group violence seems to make individuals feel less personally responsible for their behavior, acting in ways they would never do alone. Violence becomes an act of the group with no one person being held responsible. In some groups, violence emerges as a necessary strategy for defense against enemies—as seen in gang warfare, terrorist organizations, and political violence. At the other end of the spectrum, isolation also breeds violence. Different mechanisms to account for the influence of isolation have been proposed. These range from psychological changes akin to delusions of grandeur to disturbances in the balance of neurochemical pathways critical to the control of emotional and stressful responses.

Prevention and control of violence

Although history attests to the ubiquitousness of violence, it is also true that individuals have available and use a wide array of inhibitory or alternate behavioral strategies. Although aggression and violence may be ever present, they are not inevitable. The longevity of a social group, society, or nation hinges, in part, on the peaceful resolution of conflicts and other social problems. Escalating or unacceptably high rates of violence can serve as a call to action to mobilize the forces of prevention and control.

Just as there is no single cause of violence, there is no single solution. Rather, different types of violence are associated with different causal processes and warrant different responses. A reasoned approach to prevention and control hinges on sorting out these multiple influences as they impact the developing individual over time and across contexts. The control of violence requires a confluence of synchronized efforts that address innate, socialization, and situational contributions to violence, for all individuals as well as for those who display more extreme problems.

New research on the biology of violence provides a credible starting point that looks at individual development as it both influences and is influenced by the environment. If this development proceeds on a course that minimizes violent behavior, it results in a nervous system that is in tune with the demands of the outside world, is able to integrate emotional and representational data, and is not hypersensitive to perceived threat. Environmental factors that compromise this development, such as exposure to lead, head trauma, and abuse provide a viable beginning for prevention. The fact that brain development occurs at a rapid pace during the first years of life suggests that these factors must be addressed at an early age. Not only should efforts focus on prevention of trauma, but healthy developmental supports are needed. Healthy Start and Nurse—Home Visitation programs are examples of programs that can address these issues.

To the extent that violent actions are learned, a range of prevention and control responses can interrupt this learning process. First in line are strategies to reduce the perceived or actual positive consequences of violence. These may involve changing peer group and parent norms, providing nonviolent and positive means to achieve desired goals such as status and money, and training parents and other socialization agents to reward cooperative and prosocial behaviors. Under some conditions, punishment can also reduce aggression. A child who is sent to his room after hitting his brother should be less likely to hit his brother the next day. A child who is severely spanked for hitting his brother may suppress his aggression in the days to come while also learning that violence is a good way to solve problems. Prison is unfortunately one of the best schools for violence known to society. Inmates are held in isolation, under crowded conditions, socializing only with other violent or antisocial peers, with treatment for accompanying mental health or addiction problems the exception rather than the rule. Prisons also come into play far too late in the game, when brain patterns and cognitions are well formed.

Another prevention prescription would focus on reducing the myriad of opportunities to model violent acts as a result of a continuous exposure to glorified violence in television, movies, and video games, as well as "sports" activities such as extreme fighting. Observing violence can increase individual attitudes and beliefs that such behavior is acceptable. In addition to reducing such modeling opportunities, research suggests that cognitive-behavioral interventions can also shift thinking patterns toward more reflective and less automatically aggressive thoughts.

The notion that human violence is innate or inevitable precludes effective prevention and control. In contrast, if we understand violence as an optional strategy that can be increased or decreased through a variety of mechanisms, opportunities for prevention and control abound. Individuals are biologically and socially capable of peaceful coexistence—a clear and powerful antidote to violence.

Nancy G. Guerra

Lyndee Knox

See also Crime Causation: Biological Theories; Crime Causation: Psychological Theories; Crime Causation: Sociological Theories; Delinquent and Criminal Subcultures; Domestic Violence; Guns, Regulation of; Homicide: Behavioral Aspects; Mass Media and Crime; Prediction of Crime and Recidivism; Prisons: Problems and Prospects; Stalking; Terrorism; War and Violent Crime.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bandura, A. Aggression: A Social Learning Approach. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

Berkowitz, L. "On the Determinants and Regulation of Impulsive Aggression." In Aggression: Biological, Developmental, and Social Perspectives. Edited by S. Feshbach and J. Zagrodzka. New York: Plenum Press, 1997. Pages 187–211.

Buss, D. M., and Shackelford, T. K. "Human Aggression in Evolutionary Psychological Perspective." Clinical Psychology Review 17 (1997): 605–619.

Buvinic, M.; Morrison, A.; and Shifter, M. Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Framework for Action. Technical report. New York: Inter-American Development Bank, 1999.

Cornish, D. B., and Clarke, R. V. The Reasoning Criminal: Rational Choice Perspective on Offending. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986.

Crick, N. R., and Dodge, K. A. "A Review and Reformulation of Social Information-processing Mechanisms in Children's Social Adjustment." Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994): 74–101.

Dahlberg, L. "Youth Violence in the United States: Major Trends, Risk Factors, and Prevention Approaches." American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14 (1998): 259–272.

Dodge, K. A., and Coie, J. D. "Social-Information Processing Factors in Reactive and Proactive Aggression in Children's Peer Groups." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (1987): 1146–1158.

Dollard, J.; Doob, L. W.; Miller, N. E.; Mowrer, O. H.; and Sears, R. R. Frustration and Aggression. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1939.

Lorenz, K. On Aggression. New York: MJF Books, 1963.

Niehoff, D. The Biology of Violence. New York: Free Press, 1999.

Olweus, D.; Mattson, A.; and Low, H. "Circulating Testosterone Levels and Aggression in Adolescent Males: A Causal Analysis." Psychosomatic Medicine 50 (1988): 261–272.

Pynoos, R.; Steinberg, A. M.; and Ornitz, E. M. "Issues in the Developmental Neuro-Biology of Traumatic Stress." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 821 (1997): 176–193.

Snyder, H., and Sickmund, M. Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 1999 National Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 1999.

Tolan, P. H., and Guerra, N. G. What Works in Reducing Adolescent Violence. Boulder, Colo.: Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, 1994.

Violence

WAR, THE STATE, AND COERCION

EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE

COMMUNAL AND ETHNIC CONFLICT

COLLECTIVE INJURY AND TERRORISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Though violence has been characterized as the use of force by and against one or more social subjects with the intention to inflict bodily harm, the study of violent processes over the past three decades has broadened the concept by underscoring its varying forms, which emerge from the struggle for power between modern states, elites and subalterns, and recently formed communities. Interstate war, discourse and the coercive apparatuses of the state, epistemic violence, ethnic conflict, collective recovery, and terrorism represent intellectual signposts in the scholarship on violence, although they emerge from different trajectories of inquiry that do not belong to a single genealogical tradition or discipline.

WAR, THE STATE, AND COERCION

Violence is identified as an effect of competitive war-making in early modern Europe, which produced a bureaucratic apparatus that could secure the material and human resources required for managing warfare. Such bureaucratic apparatuses would form the institutional skeleton of modern national states from the seventeenth century onward (Tilly 1990). The link between war, the state, and violence is reflected in Max Weber’s remark that a striking feature of the modern state is, ideally, its “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” and, therefore, its ability to sanction the use of force (Gerth and Mills 1946, p. 78). However, this is not to say that modern states only seek to stem forms of unsanctioned violence, especially those that appear to threaten its authority. Michel Foucault’s inquiries (1963, 1966, 1975) reveal that modern welfare states also strive to redefine, regulate, and channel the use of force in order to achieve social order. This insight marked a watershed in the study of violence and shifted the focus of research on the phenomenon from interstate war to the subtle manners in which coercion and the “measured” use of force are deployed by state agencies in order to shape the social identities of individuals.

Foucault’s studies of institutions of criminal punishment and rehabilitation, schools and hospitals, and the spaces of economic production underscore the discourses that organize these institutions, in order to socially produce docile subjects whose utility would, ostensibly, advance societal welfare and maintain order. Competing legal, penal, medical, and academic disciplines converge to define, discursively, what forms of violence are criminal, why they are socially immoral or harmful, and how their perpetrators should be punished or rehabilitated. Far from remaining ideological platitudes that are applicable only to those labeled as “criminals” or “insane,” these social meanings of deviance are authoritative because they are articulated as categories of objective knowledge, and they become a metric by which to measure—and curb— our own deviant and violent tendencies. Foucault not only demonstrates how social control is achieved from above, he also reveals the political utility of microdimensions of violence, which enable the reproduction of a predictable social order by conditioning individuals to coerce themselves through conformity to institutionally sanctioned categories of “normal behavior.”

Ironically, the very institutional apparatuses and discourses that seek to discipline subjects can also be the source from which to innovate new strategies for resisting violent and coercive regimes. Studies of collective violence associated with popular revolution in western Europe, for example, reveal that tactics employed by protesters borrowed heavily from the police forces’ own methods of employing violence to suppress collective protest. Similarly, these investigations also point to the manner in which episodes of collective violence directed against monarchical power were morally legitimated by perpetrators through the appropriation and redeployment of political concepts like popular sovereignty. Anthropologists, historians, and sociologists attentive to the discursive dimensions of collective movements enrich the meaning of the concept of violence by tracing the manner in which knowledge, as a means of exercising social power, can animate and constrain collective forms of resistance that employ the use of force.

EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE

Inquiries into the creation of social order under European colonization identify epistemic forms of violence that radically essentialized social identities and dismantled previously existing social solidarities. This body of literature marks a departure from a previous form of anthropological study that accepted the “traditional culture” of non-Western societies as an essentially differentiating feature and one that necessitated methods of exhaustive description as a form of analysis. Anthropologists and historians interrogating the cultural objects of “tradition” demonstrate that in the name of crafting effective procedures of political rule, colonial administrators set about to objectify “native traditions.” Such a project involved the production of systematized bodies of objectified knowledge that documented the “cultures and traditions” of colonial subjects; rather than learning about their dynamism, the European project reduced their complexity and then enabled their ossification (Cohn, 1987, 1996; Dirks, 1987, 2001; Chatterjee, 1986, 1993). Working with Orientalist assumptions about “the traditional East,” these bodies of knowledge taxonomically classified categories and practices of social identity in new and singular relationships with Western notions of religion, ethnicity, or clan. Importantly, the concept of violence in this domain of research is considered a historical process that involved supplanting the previously existing “fuzzy” character of social identity, which was shaped by numerous sources of competitive influence, with rigid conceptions of identity (Kaviraj 1992, p. 20).

Having epistemologically fixed such “traditions” as the primary source of native identity, colonial rulers applied these taxonomies to form key state undertakings spanning law and policing, education, urban planning, the fine arts, and census-taking operations. State projects aimed to stabilize the colonial state’s task of maintaining social order, creating the conditions for profitable and taxable economic production, while representing—ostensibly—only a latent imposition on the social and cultural practices of colonial subjects. In fact, these brutal processes of colonial rule would engender more violent social transformations and political conflicts.

COMMUNAL AND ETHNIC CONFLICT

Institutionalizing such rigid conceptions of identity in the state’s operations created the conditions for political forms of violence by sharpening—and rendering incommensurable—the perceived cultural differences between novel “traditional” communities that consequently began to form. This was especially palpable in the context of emerging native leaders who were able to cultivate new supportive constituencies, in terms of their imagined traditional commonalities, and call for the state to arbitrate when conflicts with rival communities arose. As historians of colonial Asia and Africa demonstrate, despite the state’s quest to maintain social order, communal and “tribal” conflict became a bloody and conspicuously recurring phenomena in this era.

The emergence of competing traditional communities became a mobilizational resource—and source of tension—when native elites began to organize collective resistance to colonialism. Such communities were rallied behind the call for national sovereignty through movements of cultural nationalism. For native elites, political independence was a corresponding entitlement of these traditional communities who now aspired to the status of nationhood. Of course, such cultural forms of nationalism were riddled with tensions, often manifesting in violent internal conflict. Though statehood was eventually achieved for most colonies, the process was often characterized by territorial partition, bitter campaigns of violence, and the unprecedented displacement of people (as in the case of India and Pakistan). In other instances, the hollowness of constitutional arrangements based on “multiculturalism” was exposed when domestic politics spiraled into intense ethnic violence or agonistic competition over political and economic resources. Such violence emerges historically out of—and through—the commission of epistemic forms of violence.

COLLECTIVE INJURY AND TERRORISM

The study of violence associated with contemporary episodes of ethnic cleansing and genocide has revealed much about the dynamics of collective recovery. Scholars in this subfield have shown how testimonies relating to experiences with violence are often shaped by an implicit requirement that frayed ethnic or national solidarities be restored. Testimonials are burdened with the tasks of reestablishing familial-communal honor, identifying perpetrators, and securing state resources for communal rehabilitation. Strikingly, the analysis of collective memory and recovery points to the difficulty of articulating pain as an experience and how the depth of it is necessarily reduced when it is articulated as a collective and social form of suffering (Das 1997).

The theme of collective injury is also salient to discussions of more recent forms of violence associated with terrorist groups, particularly those movements that seem to be morally organized by a religious ethos. Scholars have shown that the moral justifications employed by such movements draw upon earlier forms of cultural nationalism that challenged foreign occupation and imperialism, as well as “heretical” regimes and moral “waywardness.” Many current-day militant movements draw their moral authority from religious reform movements from the colonial era that placed an emphasis on the correct observance of religious rituals. The Taliban, for example, trace their genealogy to the Deoband movement in late-colonial-era India, which initiated and institutionalized the madrassa -based study of Islamic law and the upholding of Muslim ritual practices (dress, morality, and regular prayer) as a means to achieve a virtuous way of life.

Tellingly, the focus of such religious reform movements was transformed during the Cold War period when “insurgents” were recruited, trained, and armed by alliances of Western states and their clients to fight “communism.” Militant and globally dispersed movements that turn noncombatants into targets of political violence are the products of proxy wars that were waged between the superpowers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

In summary, the study of culture and ideology has transformed the meanings of violence by shifting away from an emphasis on interstate war and physical harm to an exploration of the more insidious ways in which highly regulated forms of violence and coercion—presented as socially productive methods of reform and development—are sanctioned by the state in order to govern the actions of individuals. Examinations of the formation of discourses, as loci in which social power is exercised through claims to disciplinary knowledge and truth, reveal how epistemic forms of violence reduce the complexity of social identity and, in the colonial sphere, artificially classify non-Western societies as premodern. Ironically, the history of nationalist and political movements from the end of European colonial rule through the Cold War and afterward is marked by forms of communal and ethnic conflict that reinforce the social and political salience of tradition. Terrorism—and the predominantly Orientalist public debate surrounding it—is a contemporary example of the ways in which religion and politics can come to be mutually dependent and, moreover, of how many of the most dynamic cultural and logistical strategies that organize violence rest outside the domain of the state.

SEE ALSO Anticolonial Movements; Colonialism; Decolonization; Foucault, Michel; Genocide; Orientalism; Terrorism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brass, Paul R. 2003. The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chatterjee, Partha. 2004. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Das, Veena. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Das, Veena. 1997. Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain. In Social Suffering, eds. A. Kleinman, Veena Das, and M. M. Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Das, Veena. 1998. Official Narratives, Rumour, and the Social Production of Hate. Social Identities 4: 109–130.

Das, Veena, et al., eds. 2001. Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1971. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books. (Originally published as Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966.)

Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. (Originally published as Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963.)

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books. (Originally published as Surveiller et punir. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.)

Gerth, H. H., and Mills, C. Wright, eds. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kaviraj, Sudipto. 1992. The Imaginary Institution of India. In Subaltern Studies, vol. VII. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2004. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon.

Metcalf, Barbara. 2004. Piety, Persuasion, and Politics: Deoband’s Model of Social Activism. In The Empire and the Crescent: Global Implications for a New American Century, ed. Aftab Ahmad Malik, 156–147. Bristol, U.K.: Amal Press.

Pandey, Gyanendra. 1990. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Pandey, Gyanendra. 2001. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India. Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Scott, David. 1999. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Sewell, William H., Jr. 1996. Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille. Theory and Society 25 (6): 841–881.

Tambiah, Stanley. 1996. Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tilly, Charles. 1990. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Cambridge, U.K.: Blackwell.

Tilly, Charles, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly. 1975. The Rebellious Century, 1830–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press.

Warren, Kay B. 1993. The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Nations. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Arafaat A. Valiani

VIOLENCE

VIOLENCE. Human history has been marked and marred by violence; the United States has proved to be no exception. Violent conflict between Native Americans and settlers and immigrants flared soon after the English colonization of Virginia in 1607 and lasted nearly three centuries until the defeat of the Lakotas at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890. In the numerous wars fought, both sides engaged in massacres. Six massacres stand out for the numbers slaughtered: 400 Pequot Indians in Rhode Island (1637); 300 Sioux at Wounded Knee; some 200 at Wyot in Humboldt Bay, California (1860); 200 Cheyennes at Sand Creek, Colorado (1864); 173 Blackfeet on the Marias River in Montana (1870); and 103 Cheyennes on the Washita River in Oklahoma (1868).

Similar to white-Indian racial violence were the black uprisings; the first was in Virginia in 1691 followed by significant revolts in New York City in 1712 and 1741. By far, the greatest number of these rebellions was in the South—the most notable of which was led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831.

Blacks as Targets

Following the Civil War, former slaves were killed in great numbers in riots by whites in New Orleans and Memphis (1866), and in Colfax, Louisiana (1873). Most devastating of all were lynchings—the hanging of persons (usually black men) by mobs. Primarily a southern phenomenon, lynchings occurred from the 1880s well into the twentieth century. At its peak from 1889 to 1918, lynching was responsible for the execution of 2,460 African Americans in the South.

As more blacks fled the South for great cities in the North and West, urban violence became the rule. Riots in East St. Louis (1917), Chicago (1919), and Detroit (1943), primarily targeted black neighborhoods. During the 1960s, residents of black ghettos rioted in the Watts

area of Los Angeles (1965); Newark and Detroit (1967); and Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, and Kansas City in 1968. The 1968 riots were in reaction to the assassination of black leader Martin Luther King Jr. (see King, Martin Luther, Assassination). The 1992 riot in Los Angeles saw members of other minority groups joining African Americans in the greatest urban riot (54 deaths) of the twentieth century (see Los Angeles Riots). Over a century before, the New York City antidraft riot of 1863, one of the biggest urban riots in American history, was motivated to a significant degree by racial prejudice against blacks (see Draft Riots). This riot found lower-class whites violently protesting the newly imposed draft of men into the Union army. Rioting New Yorkers killed more than 110 people, most of them black.

Farmer and Frontier Violence

Racial minorities were not the only aggrieved Americans to resort to violence. Among the most chronically discontented were the white farmers, who over 260 years engaged in uprisings such as Bacon's Rebellion (Virginia, 1676), the Anti-Rent movement (New York, 1700s and 1800s), Shays's Rebellion (Massachusetts, 1784–1786), the Whiskey Rebellion (Pennsylvania, 1794), the Mussel Slough Incident (California, 1878–1882), the Kentucky Night Riders (early twentieth century), and the Farm Holiday movement in the Midwest (1930s).

Frontier whites were at the center of a distinctive type of American violence: vigilantism—taking the law into their own hands. Beginning with the South Carolina "Regulators" (1767–1769), vigilantism gradually spread westward, reaching the Pacific Coast where, in 1856, the powerful San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, with between 6,000 and 8,000 members, became the largest such movement in American history. Although Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa had strong vigilante groups, the strongest groups were to be found in the West, especially in California, Texas, and Montana. Between 1767 and 1904, more than 300 vigilante movements sprung up in the United States, taking at least 729 lives. Their targets and victims were overwhelmingly lawless white members of turbulent pioneer communities.

Labor Violence

Oppressive labor conditions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently precipitated violence. In 1877, railroad employees spontaneously and violently rebelled from coast to coast. Strikes by workers and lockouts by management often led to tragedy as in the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which clashes between workers and Pinkerton guards hired by the Carnegie Steel Company led to the deaths of sixteen, and in the unsuccessful strike of miners against a Rockefeller-controlled coal company near Ludlow, Colorado, in 1913–1914. The Ludlow strike and management's response led to the death by suffocation of thirteen women and children in April 1914. Members of union families had taken underground refuge from antilabor militia in a deep dugout that came to be known as the "Black Hole of Ludlow" (see Ludlow Massacre).

Industrial violence between capitalists and their employees declined greatly after the labor reforms initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" in the 1930s. New Deal reforms in the interest of hard-pressed farmers also brought to an end some agrarian violence.

Assassinations, Mass Murder, and Riots

Assassination of those who hold public office is the apex of political violence. U.S. presidents have been unusually vulnerable to assassination: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and John F. Kennedy (1963). Ronald Reagan was badly wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt. Also felled by an assassin's bullet was the great nonviolent civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., shot in Memphis in 1968.

The greatest episode of mass killing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries actually took place outside the United States. The combination of mass suicide and murder ordered by the California cult leader, Jim Jones, in 1978 took his own life as well as the lives of 912 (including many children) of his followers at the cult's compound in Guyana, South America (see Jonestown Massacre).

The portrayal of violence changed enormously in the second half of the twentieth century with television news coverage and entertainment. TV coverage of the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles showed the anarchy and destruction of that massive riot. In 1991, repeated replays on television of the video recording of the police beating a black motorist, Rodney King, were followed a year later by live TV coverage of the multiracial looting and burning of far-flung areas of Los Angeles in anger over a suburban jury's acquittal of the police who beat King.

Television's most riveting broadcast of violence was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963. Two days later, live TV caught Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused Kennedy assassin. The Kennedy assassination was the tragic introduction to one of the most violent decades in U.S. history—a decade graphically portrayed on TV.

Terror

Beginning in 1993, horrific acts of terrorism were perpetrated, starting with a great explosion at the World Trade Center, New York City. In 1995 antigovernment terrorist Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168. Few thought that the Oklahoma City horror could be exceeded, but on 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon in Virginia took at least 3,063 lives (see 9/11 Attack). The television images of two of the hijacked airliners being deliberately flown into the twin towers of New York City's World Trade Center, which collapsed in less than two hours, traumatized the nation. Americans were reminded of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. While the emotional impact of Pearl Harbor on the public was huge, the stunning visual impact of the televised destruction of the World Trade Center had an immeasurably greater and more immediate effect.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ayers, Edward L. Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Brown, Richard Maxwell. No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Clarke, James W. American Assassins: The Darker Side of American Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York, Random House, 2002.

Gilje, Paul A. Rioting in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Gottesman, Ronald, and Richard M. Brown, eds. Violence in America: An Encyclopedia. 3 vols. New York, Scribners, 1999.

Hofstadter, Richard, and Michael Wallace, eds. American Violence: A Documentary History. New York: Knopf, 1970.

Richard M.Brown

See alsoAssassinations and Political Violence, Other ; Assassinations, Presidential ; Crime ; Indian Removal ; Indian Warfare ; Insurrections, Domestic ; Riots ; Serial Killings ; Slave Insurrections ; andarticles on individual massacres, riots, and other violent incidents.

VIOLENCE AND COMPETITION

An American Mirror

Sports in the United States has always served to reflect the best and worst the culture has to offer. The big-money wheeling and dealing of professional sports and the increased professionalization of amateur athletics since the end of World War II were, after all, reflective of an American society that was maturing in its new role as a political and economic world power. During the 1970s, however, the image of Americans mirrored by their participation in and obsession with sports was far from pretty—indeed, had never before been more disturbing. The frightening rise of violence at all levels of American sport during the decade seemed to be not only tolerated but also embraced.

Institutionalized Violence

The country's failed military intervention in Vietnam; domestic social ills, such as the decay of America's cities and the sharp increase in crime; and a loss of faith in the American government brought on by the Watergate scandal contributed to an atmosphere of cynicism. American institutions of business, family, and government were being questioned and attacked—and in the institution of American sport, in the way in which Americans played and competed, could be seen the ugliness of the social transformation. Fan violence poured out of the stands and onto the field. In major professional sports the acceptance of the "enforcer"—or designated thug—by athletes, fans, and sportswriters meant the birth and celebration of the sports antihero: the guy willing to break the game's rules and codes of behavior in order to win. By the mid 1970s many social critics and those sports fans horrified by the spectacle of institutionalized violence began questioning the value of "anything-goes" competition to a healthy American culture.

Bullies

By 1974 professional hockey's Philadelphia Flyers and the image of their Broad Street Bullies dominated the sport, and key Bullies enforcer Dave ("the Hammer") Schultz—a defenseman with little skating or stick-handling ability who possessed a devastating uppercut—had a cult following among hockey fans. To catch up with the pugilistic Flyers and an emerging trend in hockey, other once-lousy teams such as the Pittsburgh Penguins made desperate trades late in the 1973-1974 season to replace players who had speed and finesse with intimidators and brawlers. Star scorers soon became the frequent victims of unprovoked attacks by the enforcers, who were usually much larger. Hockey commissioner Clarence Campbell publicly decried the violence and the disturbing new "era of brawling…and intimidation" that the Flyers had inaugurated. Privately, however, Campbell recognized the encouraging economics of Broad Street Bullies hockey, as the Flyers were not only Philly's hottest ticket but had also become a boon to box-office sales when on the road. "What really bothers Campbell," Sports Illustrated reported in its 3 June 1974 issue, "is the game-delaying sweater pulling and the like …'I'm not concerned when two guys fight,' Campbell says. 'I'm only concerned when they won't stop fighting.' "

THE RULES OF THE KNIFE FIGHT

Two incidents in the violent domain of professional sports during the 1970s proved too brutal even for bloodthirsty fans. Kermit Washington of the Los Angeles Lakers had a reputation to maintain after he was featured in the October 1977 Sports Illustrated article "The Enforcers," which noted his intimidating style of play. On 9 December in a game between the Lakers and the Houston Rockets, a fight broke out, with Washington in the middle of the melee. When mild-mannered Houston team captain Rudy Tomjonovich rushed in to break it up, he was met with a right hand that would have done a heavyweight boxing champion proud. Tomjonovich's injury, his subsequent lawsuit against Washington stated, included fractures of the nose, jaw, and skull; facial lacerations and a brain concussion; loss of blood and leakage of spinal fluid from the brain cavity. His injuries required surgery, and Tomjonovich was unable to play the rest of the season, Washington explained that the blow "was an honest, unfortunate mistake." Nonetheless, the league suspended him for sixty days and fined him $10,000 (twice the fine it had levied the week before against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who broke his hand hitting Milwaukee Bucks center Kent Benson).

Defensive back Jack Tatum of the NFL Oakland Raiders was named to the 1976 list of the ten meanest players in football. In a game with the New England Patriots he proved his claim to the honor. On 12 August 1978 Oakland was being embarrassed by the play of twenty-six-year-old wide receiver Darryl Stingley. He had caught two successive passes for forty yards, and the Patriots were threatening to score. On the last play of his career, Stingley ran a crossing route in which he went straight down the field and then cut across the middle. As the pass was delivered to him at Oakland's twelve-yard line and Stingley was concentrating on the ball, Tatum rushed in from the blind side and delivered a blow that brought Oakland fans to their feet with appreciation. Stingley hit the ground and stayed there, the fourth and fifth vertebrae in his neck fractured and his spinal cord damaged. He was permanently paralyzed—with a brutal tackle that was legal, by the rules of football. "You hate to see anybody get hurt," Tatum explained, "but I was just doing my job."

Source:

Robert C. Yeager, Seasons of Shame: The New Violence in Sports (New York; McGraw-Hill, 1979).

Brawl Game

Baseball, the country's other major non-contact sport, had had its share of bench-clearing brawls during its history, and intimidation had certainly always been a significant part of the game as pitchers were taught to throw the high-and-inside fastball to shake a batter's confidence. By middecade, however, baseball reporters were taking note of an alarmingly violent trend taking place in the bleachers. Baseball fans bore a close resemblance to Europe's soccer hooligans as one rowdy bleacher incident after another was reported. Tencent-beer night on 4 June 1974 in Cleveland's Stadium turned into a riot when rowdy fans jumped onto the outfield and assaulted Texas Ranger right fielder Jeff Burroughs. Many other incidents in which ballplayers on the field were being physically attacked by the fans made it clear that professional athletes were no longer held in the same regard that they once were by fans. Just as the 1970s were a time during which professional sports entered into its modern era, so too was it a time when fans came to judge athletes as big-money businessmen with more loyalty to the dollar than to a team or town. The 1974 article in Sports Illustrated "Take Me Out to the Brawl Game" summed up the dilemma of fan cynicism and the violence it bred: "The ball park was once a place to escape the pressures and violence of life outside. Now, it seems, there is no escape."

Assessments

In 1970 self-described "Super Hippie" Dave Smith held what he called the World's Peace Pentathlon—swimming, parachuting, running, skydiving, and trail-biking—in order to make "a six-hour statement on the absurdity of competition." At the end of the decade books such as Robert C. Yeager's Seasons of Shame: The New Violence in Sports (1979) and Don Atyeo's Blood & Guts: Violence in Sports (1979) were attacking the attitudes among athletes and coaches and the blood lust among fans that seemed to stem from mis-guided notions of competition. The controversy over the role filled by competitive sports in American society had been partly fueled by President Gerald Ford's 1974 article, "In Defense of the Competitive Urge," which ran in Sports Illustrated. Asserting that the "competitive urge is deep-rooted in the American character," Ford questioned the intestinal fortitude of the new generation of Americans—those who would question the value of competition—and wondered if they were merely "adjusting to the times" or if they had been "spoiled by them." Further arguing that "There is much to be said for Ping-Pong diplomacy," Ford summarized the importance of competitive sports to the well-being of an entire nation: "a sports triumph can be as uplifting to a nation's spirit as, well, a battlefield victory."

VIOLENT CRIME CONTROL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ACT OF 1994

Of all of the crime bills passed at the federal level in the history of the United States, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was arguably the most far-reaching and comprehensive. Costing $30 billion, and taking up over 1,100 pages, the Violent Crime Control Act covered a mind-boggling variety of areas, ranging from an assault-weapons ban to money for midnight basketball programs. The net result was a bill whose effects the nation was feeling ten years later—a bill whose proponents gave it credit for the sharp drop in crime throughout the 1990s, and whose critics dismissed it as an unprecedented federal boondoggle.

Background of the Violent Crime Control Act

The Violent Crime Control Act was passed amid a strong public concern about crime in the early 1990s. Polls had indicated that the American public placed crime at or near the top of the list when asked to name their civic concerns. A large rise in violent crime over a 30-year period—over 500 percent, according to one study, contributed to the public's desire to see something done about the crime rate.

Congress passed four omnibus federal crime bills between 1984 and 1990 in response to this crime wave. Nevertheless, crime continued to rise, and the public's perception was that the federal government was not doing enough to stop crime. However, conservatives and liberals disagreed on the best way to address problem of criminal violence.

Conservatives favored seeing violent criminals serve more of their sentences, and increased money for prison building. They also favored curbing the right of habeas corpus for death row inmates, and increasing the ability of police to process criminal suspects by reforming exclusionary rules. They also favored so-called three strikes laws, requiring long prison sentences for three-time felons.

Liberals wanted to see more money directed toward social programs that would help to prevent criminal behavior. They favored increased gun control. They wanted to see a stop to racially discriminatory laws, and wanted to make sure that minorities were not treated unfairly by the criminal justice system.

The election of President bill clinton in 1992, which for the first time since 1980 meant that the White House and the Congress would be controlled by the same party, increased the chances of meaningful crime legislation. Clinton, who was trying to push through a health care plan that was perceived as liberal, wanted an issue where he could take a conservative approach, and anti-crime legislation seemed like a promising area. In addition, both the Congress and the White House noted the 1993 off-year elections, which many candidates won using strong anti-crime themes.

The stage was set for a comprehensive anticrime bill to pass. Despite the interest of both parties in passing the legislation, it still ended up having a difficult road. Among the problems were the attempts of some liberal representatives to introduce a "Racial Justice Act" which would have allowed death row inmates, at the state and federal level, to challenge their death sentences if statistics suggested that the race of either defendants or victims had affected past death-sentencing decisions in the jurisdiction where the crime was committed. This provision was strongly opposed by Republicans and other conservative Democrats and ended up being dropped from the final bill. A proposed assault weapons ban was also controversial.

Eventually, however, both the House and the Senate were able to pass a bill, and President Clinton signed it into law on Sept. 13, 1994.

Provisions of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act provided $30.2 billion over six years for crime control and related social programs—the most money ever allotted in a federal crime bill. State and local law enforcement would receive $10.8 billion of this; $9.9 billion was earmarked for prisons, and $6.9 billion was earmarked for crime prevention.

The largest portion of this funding went to community policing. The bill created an $8.8 billion program to add 100,000 police officers nationwide for police patrols. In addition, the bill allotted $2.6 billion for the federal bureau of investigation (FBI), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and Border Patrol. $245 million was given to rural anti-crime efforts, and $150 million to help implement new laws requiring up to a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases

The act gave $1.6 billion to fight violence against women, including money to train and add police, prosecutors and judges; money for victims' services and advocates, and money for rape-education and community-prevention programs.

Perhaps because the bill was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president, social programs were given a big priority. These programs included $567 million for after-school, weekend, and summer "safe haven" programs for youth; $243 million for in-school programs providing positive activities and alternatives to crime and drug abuse; and $377 million to be used for anti-gang programs, midnight sports leagues, boys and girls clubs, and other projects. There was also $1 billion for drug-court programs and substance-abuse treatment for non-violent offenders.

The most controversial provision of the act was non-monetary: the assault-weapons ban. It called for a 10-year ban on the manufacture, transfer, or possession of 19 semi-automatic assault weapons. Certain kinds of revolving-cylinder shotguns, semi-automatic rifles, semi-automatic pistols, and ammunition magazines were also banned. The act also outlawed the ownership of handguns by juveniles.

Less controversially, the bill established a three-strikes law that mandated life in prison for a third serious violent-felony conviction or a violent-felony conviction that follows a serious violent felony and a serious drug conviction under federal law. The crime bill also created 60 new federal crimes that call for the death penalty, including murder of federal judges; murder of federal law enforcement officers; murder of high-level members of the executive branch; murder of a member of Congress; kidnapping that results in death, and fatal violence committed in international airports.

Finally, on the subject of prisons, the bill allocated $9.9 billion, including $7.9 billion to build state prisons for violent offenders, and $1.8 billion to states for jailing criminal illegal immigrants.

Effect of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

When President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control Act, he called it the "toughest and smartest crime bill in our history." The bill also came under fierce criticism, though. The left objected to the extra spending, and the left lamented the bill's failure to address racial issues and the addition of the three-strikes law.

When the Republicans won control of Congress in 1995, there were threats of wholesale revisions to the law, but these threats were never carried out, and most of the provisions of the law were able to take effect. What the bill actually accomplished was debatable, although proponents, including the president, noted the precipitous drop in violent crime throughout the 1990s, and they gave the crime bill credit for at least some of this improvement.

further readings

Clinton, William Jefferson. 1995. "Remarks on Signing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994." University of Dayton Law Review 20 (winter).

McCollum, Bill. 1995. "The Struggle for Effective Anti-Crime Legislation—An Analysis of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994." University of Dayton Law Review 20 (winter).

Violence

The use of unjustified physical force with the intention to injure or damage.

The high incidence of violence in the United States is of great concern to citizens, lawmakers, and law enforcement agencies alike. Between 1960 and 1991, violent crime in the U.S. rose over 370 percent, and over 600,000 Americans are victimized by handgun crimes annually. Violent acts committed by juveniles are of particular concern: the number of American adolescents arrested for homicide has increased by 85 percent between 1987 and 1991, and more juveniles are committing serious crimes at younger ages than ever before. Young African American males are particularly at risk for becoming either perpetrators or victims of violent crime. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has identified homicide as the leading cause of death for this demographic group, estimating that one in every 28 black males born in 1987 is likely to be murdered. For white males born in 1987, the ratio is one in 205.

The threat of violence is particularly disturbing because of new variants—including carjackings, drive-by shootings, and workplace killings—that threaten Americans in places or situations formerly considered safe. The CDC has declared workplace violence an epidemic, with the number of homicides in the workplace tripling in the last ten years. Workplace violence may be divided into two types: external and internal. External workplace violence is committed by persons unfamiliar with the employer and employees, occurring at random or as an attempt at making a symbolic statement to society at large. Internal workplace violence is generally committed by an individual involved in either a troubled spousal or personal relationship with a coworker, or as an attempt to seek revenge against an employer, usually for being released from employment. The rising percentage of layoffs, downsizing, and impersonal management styles in many American corporations have been linked to the increase in workplace violence, nearly one-fourth of which end in the perpetrator's suicide.

One type of violence that has received increased attention in recent years is domestic violence, a crime for which statistics are difficult to compile because it is so heavily underreported—only about one in 270 incidents are thought to be reported to authorities. Estimates of the percentage of women who have been physically abused by a spouse or partner range from 20 percent to as high as 50 percent. According to the FBI, a woman is beaten every 18 seconds in the United States, and almost one-third of American females murdered in 1992 were killed by their husbands or boyfriends. Battering is experienced by women of all ages, races, ethnic groups, and social classes. A chronic pattern of ongoing physical violence and verbal abuse may produce a variant of post-traumatic stress disorder referred to as Battered Woman Syndrome, in which the victim experiences depression , guilt , passivity, fear , and low self-esteem .

Various explanations have been offered for the high prevalence of violence in the United States, which is by far the most violent nation in the industrialized world. Among the most prominent has been the argument that violence depicted in the mass media—including television, movies, rock and rap music videos, and video games—have contributed to the rise in violence in society. Quantitative studies have found that prime time television programs average 10 violent acts per hour, while children's cartoons average 32 acts of violence per hour. On-screen deaths in feature films such as Robocop and Die Hard range from 80 to 264. It has also been argued that experiencing violence vicariously in these forms is not a significant determinant of violent behavior and that it may even have a beneficial cathartic effect. However, experimental studies have found correlations between the viewing of violence and increased interpersonal aggression , both in childhood and, later, in adolescence . Viewing violence can elicit aggressive

behavior through modeling , increasing the viewer's arousal, desensitizing viewers to violence, reducing restraints on aggressive behavior, and distorting views about conflict resolution .

Other causal factors that have been linked to violence include the prevalence of gangs , the introduction of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s, the increase in single-parent families, and the lack of tighter restrictions on gun ownership. In addition, scientists have found a possible link between violence and heredity : studies have shown that males born with an extra Y chromosome (type XYY) are more likely than normal to be inmates of prisons or mental hospitals . The significance of these findings has been disputed, however, as XYY males in the general population are not more violent than other males. The effects of a genetic predisposition are also tempered by interaction with a variety of environmental factors. Of the men who are genetically predisposed to violence, only a minority will actually commit acts of aggression.

There are a number of more credible predictors of individual violence, most of them psychological. The most reliable indicator is a history of violence: each time a person commits a violent act, the probability that he or she will commit more violent acts increases. Psychoses, including schizophrenia , major affective disorders, and paranoid states are also closely linked to violence, as is erotomania, or romantic obsession. This condition involves an idealized romantic love (often for someone, such as a celebrity, with whom one has no personal relationship) that becomes a fixation . Such actions as unsolicited letters and phone calls, and stalking eventually lead to violence, either out of revenge for being rejected or so that the object of the fixation may not become involved with anyone else.

Depression is also associated with violence, often in the form of suicide. Two personality disorders related to violence—particularly in the workplace—are antisocial personality disorder ("sociopaths") and borderline personality disorder (characterized by instability and lack of boundaries in interpersonal relationships). Chemical dependence can lead to violence by interfering with the ability to distinguish right from wrong, removing social inhibitions, and inducing paranoia and/or aggression. Other possible indicators of violence include neurological impairment, an excessive interest in weapons, a high level of frustration with one's environment , and the pathological blaming of others for one's problems.

In recent years, a public health approach to violence has been widely advocated. This orientation stresses out-reach to those segments of the population among whom violence is most prevalent in an attempt to alter attitudes and behaviors that contribute to it, and to teach the skills necessary for the nonviolent resolution of conflicts. Teenagers, in particular, as well as their parents, are targeted in these efforts, especially in areas with high crime rates. This approach has been criticized by those who believe that violence should be dealt with by addressing its underlying structural causes—including poverty, racial discrimination, and unemployment—through direct socioeconomic intervention.

Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

Norman Abrams

The bills that eventually became the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (VCCLEA) were originally proposed as amendments to the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. The VCCLEA is directly linked to its historical predecessor, the 1968 legislation that was the first in a series of omnibus legislative packages whose provisions were aimed at street and violent crime. With the 1968 enactment, President Lyndon Johnson moved the subject of violent local crime onto the front burner of national politics, where it has remained ever since. In the intervening thirty-five years Congress enacted a number of lengthy legislative packages, each containing a potpourri of provisions dealing with crime, law enforcement, and crime prevention subjects. Between 1984 and 1990, for example, four such omnibus bills were enacted; the VCCLEA continued that tradition.

Described by President Bill Clinton as "the toughest, largest and smartest federal attack on crime in the history of...[the country]," the VCCLEA contained both provisions supported by liberals and attacked by conservatives (e.g., gun control) and provisions where the liberal-conservative perspectives were reversed (e.g. death penalty). It also contained provisions dealing with such varied subjects as violence against women, drug courts, marketing scams that victimized the elderly, crimes against children, and criminal street gangs. Among its most controversial and/or widely noted provisions were those establishing a ban on assault weapons; a federal mandatory life term three-strikes law; a federal grant program to fund more police at the local level and to help build more prisons; and additions to the Federal Rules of Evidence dealing with the admissibility of evidence in sexual assault and child molestation cases.

The congressional and lobbying infighting that preceded the final enactment of the act was classic in its Byzantine complexity. During the first President George Bush's administration, different versions of a comprehensive bill were passed by the two Houses of Congress, but died because of their inability to bridge the liberal-conservative divide on some key issues, such as habeas corpus and exclusionary rule reform. Early in his administration, President Clinton set forth the elements of a crime bill he would support, including a ban on assault weapons, federal grants for more police, and habeas corpus reform. Putting more police on the street at the local level became the centerpiece of his anticrime program.

Later, after a series of notorious violent crimes in different parts of the country, the State of Washington enacted a three strikes-mandatory life provision, and soon other states began introducing similar legislation. Three strikes, which had originally been a Republican proposal, was soon endorsed by the President and added to his priorities for the Violent Crime bill.

The House version of the crime bill also contained a "Racial Justice Act" which would have allowed individuals sentenced to death to challenge their sentence based on a statistical showing that race had affected the imposition of death sentences in the jurisdiction. Strongly supported by the Congressional Black Caucus and Democrats and opposed with equal fervor by Republicans who believed it would effectively block the use of the death penalty, it was dropped in conference. Similarly, habeas corpus reform did not make it into the final bill.

The most hotly contested issue in this legislation, however, involved the ban on assault weapons. Because the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee was a strong opponent of gun control, the Senate initially became the main arena for including an assault weapons ban in the crime bill. Eventually, compromise provisions were crafted. The conference bill (the product of a second conference) was almost immediately approved by a close vote in the House. After a short-lived Republican filibuster in the Senate was broken by a cloture vote, the crime bill was approved and subsequently signed into law by President Clinton on September 13, 1994.

The main elements of the assault weapons provisions were a listing of named banned weapons, a ban on copies of the listed banned weapons, a ban on weapons that fell within a definition containing specific criteria, and a ban on large capacity ammunition magazines. The legislation also contained a ten-year sunset provision and a listing of 670 hunting and sport weapons exempted from the prohibition.

EFFECT OF THE LEGISLATION

What has been the effect of the VCCLEA? Has it had an impact on crime? Through grants made under its COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) program the act had as one of its goals putting 100,000 additional police on the streets during a five year period through hiring and redeployment. Reportedly, the total number of sworn officers grew during that period by about 87,000, but historic rates of growth might have significantly increased the number of officers, possibly by an almost similar number, so it is difficult to determine how much difference the program made.

Other grant programs have also been implemented: For example, by the year 2000, the Justice Department made grants of more than $700 million through its Violence Against Women office, to support programs for computer tracking, mandatory training for police, and the creation of community coalitions. In 1998 the General Accounting Office did a study to determine the impact of the grant program in support of "truth-in-sentencing" (TIS) laws that provided incentive grants to states with laws requiring violent offenders to serve at least 85 percent of their imposed sentences. A survey showed that twenty-seven states had TIS laws; in twelve of these states, the availability of the federal grant was not a factor contributing to the enactment of the TIS law and in eleven other states, it was only a partial factor; only in four states was the cause-effect relationship clear.

The provisions banning assault weapons had some impact but also proved fairly easy for gun manufacturers to evade. In the year 2002 for example, the person charged as the Washington D.C. area sniper, John Allen Muhammad, allegedly used an assault weapon the manufacturer had modified by removing two military-type components, thus escaping the ban.

Five years and more after enactment of the legislation, President Clinton still viewed the VCCLEA as "landmark legislation...[that] put thousands of new police officers into America's communities,...[gave] crime victims a greater voice in the criminal justice process...and protected women and children from violence and abuse in their homes and communities..." Further, it "helped reduce the violent crime rate in the United States to its lowest level in nearly a quarter century." The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 undoubtedly did some of these things and more, and did have some impact on the crime rate; precisely how much is indeterminable.

VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS

Media Coverage

Perhaps more than any other educational issue in the 1990s, the subject of violence in schools made news. A rash of gun violence in seemingly "safe" suburban schools around the country indicated that violence was not just an urban problem. Lobbyists for and against gun control entered into heated debates about the cause of the problem. Hollywood, video games, parents, schools, and lack of religion all were blamed. In a mad search for the solution, few analysts could agree on the root of the problem. For the first time since the early 1970s, violence was seen as one of the major problems in schools according to the annual Gallup poll taken on public attitudes toward the public schools. It topped the list in 1998.

Recurring Pattern

For years, isolated incidents of killings, shootings, stabbings, and other school violence saddened the country, but were acknowledged more as random acts of evil that were symptomatic of the plight of poor schools or sometimes the result of a single deranged mind. It wasn't until a pattern of mass shootings occurred around the country in the late 1990s that attention was focused on the problem as a national concern. How could these monstrous events happen? Was no one aware of the intentions of these shooters? How could they get their hands on these weapons of destruction? What was their motivation?

Who's to Blame?

Robert J. Dole, Republican candidate for the presidency during the 1996 elections, accused the entertainment industry of "bombarding our children with destructive messages of casual violence and even more casual sex." Dole stated in a 1995 speech, "A line has been crossed, not just of taste, but of human dignity and decency … every time sexual violence is given a catchy tune, when teen suicide is set to an appealing beat, when Hollywood's dream factories turn out nightmares of depravity." Dole cited two popular films, Natural Born Killers (1994) and True Romance (1993), that had depicted extreme violence. He also singled out the rappers Ice-T, Geto Boys, and 2 Live Crew as well as the heavy-metal band Cannibal Corpse as contributors to the glorification of violence. In response, Oliver Stone, the director of Natural Born Killers, said that it was "the height of hypocrisy for Senator Dole, who wants to repeal the [1994] assault weapons ban, to blame Hollywood for the violence in our society." Michael Fuchs, the chairman of Time Warner Music Group, said that offensive lyrics by his company's recording artists were "the price you pay for freedom of expression." Hilary Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, claimed that violent messages in recordings weren't the problem. Asserting that millions of people hear a record without committing acts of violence, she claims the issue is "what happens when troubling music connects with troubled minds."

Warped Perceptions

President Bill Clinton in his weekly radio address 23 May 1998 blamed a culture that "desensitizes" children to violence for the recent rash of school shootings. Clinton said that youths' exposure to violence in movies, on television, and in video games warped their perceptions. He called on Congress to pass a proposed juvenile crime bill that would ban juveniles convicted of violent offenses from purchasing firearms for the rest of their lives. Gun-control advocates called for stricter curbs on the sale and use of firearms. One proposed law would require trigger locks to be installed on guns. Opponents of such measures argued that penalties should focus on people who committed crime with guns.

Statistics

According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998, violence among American teenagers declined between 1991 and 1997. The study showed broad declines in several categories of violent activity. Some 18 percent of high school students reported carrying a weapon--defined as a gun, knife or club—within the past thirty days, down from 26 percent in 1991.

Source

Facts on File, volumes 56, 57, 58 (New York: Facts on File, 1996, 1997, 1998).

violence Woven into the fabric of most societies, violence exists in many forms and at multiple levels. Whether physical, verbal, sexual, or psychological, whether inflicted by individuals, groups, institutions, or nations, violence threatens the body in numerous and complex ways.

At the microlevel, personal violence — acts of aggression or force performed by individuals — may be directed at inanimate objects, animals, one's self, or other bodies. Although some forms of interpersonal violence, such as injuries on the sports field or shootings in self-defence, are culturally sanctioned, the more serious forms, like homicide, rape, and aggravated assault, are usually criminalized. To understand why individuals commit violence, criminologists and psychologists often focus on the individual's personality type, family background, and possible physiological abnormalities. Sometimes, however, personal manifestations of violence are linked to broader social structures. As numerous feminist scholars have argued, domestic or family violence must be understood in terms of patriarchal family structures, which have traditionally given men the right to control and discipline their wives and children.

True forms of collective violence result when individuals engage in violent activities at a group or institutional level. Like personal violence, incidents of group violence such as riots, revolutions, and gang warfare are typically viewed as local events, tied to a specific cause or geographical region. Nevertheless, group violence possesses its own unique dynamics and is generally more destructive than personal violence. Sociologists and psychologists have observed that individual members participating in group violence frequently feel less responsibility for their activities and are willing to commit greater atrocities because they are acting in the name of a higher cause, be it religion, political beliefs, or loyalty to an ethnic group or nation. This process of deindividualization is fostered by the military to mobilize individuals for war and other forms of mass destruction like genocide. In war, not only are soldiers made to feel like cogs in a larger military machine, who ‘just follow orders’, but enemies are regularly dehumanized through propaganda, allowing for brutal massacres and torture rarely seen in personal, peacetime acts of violence.

Institutional violence — violence that serves or results from institutional objectives — can take extreme forms, like concentration camps or murders committed by totalitarian governments, or it can be part of a socially accepted economic system or religious organization's goals. Various slave systems have, for example, utilized physical, sexual, and emotional violence to deprive slaves of their humanity, while the Catholic Church employed violence in its Crusades, witch burnings, and inquisitions to neutralize perceived threats to its institutional boundaries. As modern industrial work environments like asbestos plants and coal mines demonstrate, however, institutional violence can also be subtle, resulting from acts of omission or deception rather than force.

At the macrolevel, advances in military and media technology have made violence (and the threat of it) global. Not only can we annihilate the entire planet through nuclear weapons, but we can transmit, via satellite, war and other public spectacles of violence into homes all over the globe.

Christina Jarvis

VIOLENCE COMMISSION

VIOLENCE COMMISSION. After the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order creating the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Its mandate was to explain the forces that were creating a more violent society and make recommendations for reducing the level of violence. Johns Hopkins president emeritus Milton S. Eisenhower chaired the commission, and federal judge A. Leon Higginbotham served as vice-chair. Other members included the longshoreman and libertarian philosopher Eric Hoffer, Terrence Cardinal Cooke, then archbishop of the New York archdiocese, and U.S. House majority whip Hale Boggs. The commission heard testimony from two hundred experts and collected and analyzed data. The final report was transmitted to President Richard Nixon on 10 December 1969. Titled To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquillity, it argued that the growing violence was a symptom of enduring social and economic inequality, and that the only long-term answer to controlling violence in a democratic society was to rebuild the cities and provide jobs and educational opportunity for the poor. The commission recommended a $20 billion increase in spending for work and social service programs, as well as a recommitment to a full-employment economy. It also recommended handgun control legislation and highlighted the connection between television and real-life violence. The commission's liberal recommendations were ignored by the administration of Richard Nixon. The commission's work, however, influenced a generation of liberal criminologists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

United States. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquillity: Final Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969.

Richard M.Flanagan

See alsoAssassinations and Political Violence, Other ; Crime ; Riots .

Violence. An aspect of human behaviour often bound up with emotions (especially anger), which religions cannot ignore—and often express. Opinion is divided as to where violence should be located along the nature—nurture spectrum. Those favouring natural processes or psychodynamic theory hold that religious activities reduce violence if they function cathartically, but increase violence if they result in frustration. An additional consideration is that religions often put ‘violence’—if that is what it is—to religious ends, examples here being sacrifice, head-hunting, many male rites of initiation, and the justification of war (just war) on religious grounds.

Violence

What Is Violence?

Why Do People Behave Violently?

How Is Violence Treated and Prevented?

Resources

Violence is the use of physical force to injure people or property. Violence may cause physical pain to those who experience it directly, as well as emotional distress to those who either experience or witness it. Individuals, families, schools, workplaces, communities, society, and the environment all are harmed by violence.

KEYWORDS

for searching the Internet and other reference sources

Abuse

Hate crimes

Hatred

Prevention

Self-regulation

Social modeling

What Is Violence?

Violence is a social and health problem for all who experience and witness it. Violence takes many forms, including:

• Family violence, often referred to as domestic abuse, child abuse, child maltreatment, spouse abuse, and wife battering
• Peer group violence, which includes workplace violence, school violence, gang violence, and bullying*

  * bullying

  is when a person repeatedly intimidates or acts aggressively toward those with less power or ability to defend themselves.

• Sexual violence, which includes rape*, date rape, marital rape, intimate partner abuse, and child sexual abuse

  * rape

  is when a person forces another person to have sexual intercourse. or engage in other unwanted sexual activities.

• Abuse of power, which includes mistreatment of children, students, elders, people with disabilities, and others who are smaller or less powerful than the abuser
• Community violence, which includes assaults, fights, shootings, homicides, and most forms of peer violence
• Hate crimes and hate speech, which target victims based on gender, age, race, ethnicity, religious belief, or sexual orientation
• Media violence, shown on television, in film, and in video games.

Why Do People Behave Violently?

Research indicates that violent behavior may have many different causes, some of which are inborn but most of which are learned from experiencing or witnessing violent behavior by others, particularly those who are role models.

Genetics

Chromosomes carry genetic messages from parents to offspring, and there is some research that suggests that, in some cases, aggressiveness may be inherited.

Brain injury

Injury to the front parts of the brain may remove some personal control over anger and aggression.

What Is Wrong with Media Violence?

Research shows that media violence can lead to real violence in multiple ways. The U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health both have reported that watching television violence is an important predictor of aggressive behavior. Children’s cartoons and music videos in particular often portray violence. American children see about 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence on television by age 18. In nearly 75 percent of those cases, punishment is not shown to be a consequence of violent behavior.

Perhaps potentially even more serious is the link between violence and some interactive video games. During violent video games, the player identifies with the point of view of the aggressor and practices violent thoughts, feelings, and actions. For some people, with enough reinforcement, violent behaviors can become accessible or even automatic if and when the player later encounters conflict in real life.

Antisocial personality disorder

People with antisocial personality disorder often behave violently even as children. They may disregard their own safety and the safety of others. People with this disorder do not seem to understand that violence harms other people, and they do not seem to have a conscience that tells them right from wrong. The terms sociopath and psychopath sometimes are used to describe people with antisocial personality disorder.

Alcohol and substance abuse

Drinking and drugs often play a role in violence. For some, these substaneces interfere with otherwise good judgement or behavior. Some people try to use alcohol or drugs to treat their feelings of anger or depression, but instead feel worse. Violence toward others—or towards themselves—can result.

Desensitization

Constantly viewing violence at home, in communities, or on television can lead people to believe that violence is a normal part of life. People who are surrounded by violence may reach a point where they no longer notice violent events or remember that peaceful behavior is a possibility.

Learned helplessness

People who resign themselves to the belief that violence is an inevitable part of their lives may give up trying to avoid or escape that violence. They may become passive and unable to create safety for themselves or their families. Battered wives who remain at home with battering husbands, for example, may believe that trying to escape violence is hopeless.

Social modeling

Children learn by observation and by imitation. Children who observe their home, school, or media role models behaving in violent ways may come to believe that turning angry feelings into angry actions is acceptable behavior, or even the most effective way to solve problems. Such children may never learn peaceful behaviors or cooperative ways to solve problems.

Parents who model abusive behavior at home can create a cycle of violence, teaching children to grow up to be abusive adults. The importance of positive role models and the dangers of negative role models should not be underestimated.

Learning the boundaries between anger (emotion) and violence (physical force) is an important developmental task for all people and all cultures. It is possible to have angry feelings without turning those feelings into angry actions or violent behaviors. Expressing anger in a nonviolent way can be healthy. However, parents, adult mentors, media, and community leaders first must model nonviolent conflict-resolution skills for young people to learn them.

Social Modeling And Self-Regulation

Social psychologist Albert Bandura has been studying social modeling, observational learning, aggression, and self-regulation since the 1970s. Bandura’s theories indicate that role models (social modeling) can influence people toward creativity or toward violence. If children observe violent behavior at home, in school, or on television, they may come to believe that turning angry feelings into angry actions is acceptable behavior. When these children become angry themselves, they will display the behaviors they have observed, and they even may create new angry behaviors that go beyond what they have learned from their models.

Another important aspect of Bandura’s research focuses on self-direction and self-efficacy, or people’s beliefs about their own abilities to influence and affect the world around them. If children observe adults failing to control their own angry feelings or violent behaviors, or if they observe violent behavior going unpunished, they may come to believe that peaceful behaviors cannot succeed or are not worthwhile activities. They may lose their motivation to learn cooperative problem-solving skills, or they may quit before they achieve success in using these skills.

How Is Violence Treated and Prevented?

People who experience or witness violence should react immediately. Police and violence hotlines should be called in an emergency. People who have been injured should be taken to a clinic or hospital emergency room for treatment. When an immediate crisis has ended, a family doctor or school counselor or member of the clergy should be contacted for counseling and referrals. Shelters and child protection agencies can help battered women and children. Counseling can help batterers and their families to learn better behaviors for managing stress, conflict, and anger. Therapists can help people with post-traumatic stress disorder* achieve emotional recovery from the aftermath of violence.

* post-traumatic stress disorder

is a mental disorder in which people who have survived a terrifying event relive their terror in nightmares, memories, and feelings of fear. It is severe enough to interfere with everyday living and can occur after a natural disaster, military combat, rape, mugging, or other violence.

Students and faculty gather for a memorial on the one-year anniversary of the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. On April 20, 1999, two students killed 12 classmates and one teacher before taking their own lives. Reuters Newmedia Inc./Corbis

Those who commit violent acts or have violent or angry feelings need to receive treatment. Emotional problems, drug and alcohol abuse, and other conditions which make a person more violence-prone need to be dealt with. The social forces that prevent violence—family, friends, and the community—need to take positive steps to make violence less likely and to increase safety.

Physical violence is never an acceptable form of behavior. Everyone has choices. Becoming aware of the problems, deciding not to follow violent patterns, and making a commitment to learn new ways of relating are the keys to change. It is never too late to change the pattern of violence in families, communities, or society.

See also

Abuse

Antisocial Personality Disorder

Bullying

Conduct Disorder

Emotions

Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Personality

Personality Disorders

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Rape

Resources

Organizations

Nemours Center for Children’s Health Media, Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, 1600 Rockland Road, Wilmington, DE 19803. This organization is dedicated to issues of children’s health and produces the KidsHealth website. Its website has articles about violence. http://www.KidsHealth.org

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This government agency posts fact sheets at its website covering youth violence, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, and violence in the workplace. http://www.cdc.gov

vi·o·lence / ˈvī(ə)ləns/ • n. behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something. ∎  strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force: the violence of her own feelings. ∎  Law the unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the exhibition of such force. PHRASES: do violence to damage or adversely affect.

Violence

SeeChild Abuse: Physical Abuse and Neglect; Child Abuse: Psychological Maltreatment; Child Abuse: Sexual Abuse; Elder Abuse; Infanticide; Interparental Violence—Effects on Children; Rape; Spouse Abuse: Prevalence; Spouse Abuse: Theoretical Explanations; War/Political Violence

violence n.behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.

Violence. See Aggression and Violence.

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