Violence entails inflicting emotional, psychological, sexual, physical and/or material damage. It involves the exercise of force or constraint perpetrated by individuals, on their own behalf or for a collective or state-sanctioned purpose. Research on violence includes its definition, its psychological impact, its origins, its collective expressions, its cultural meanings and its relevance to law.
Definitions of violence range widely. We usually associate violence and its use with individually motivated action, although a great deal of violence is committed by individuals on behalf of others. The violence of institutions, such as within prison, or that of state-sanctioned agencies, such as the use of deadly force by police, are examples of the use of violence by the state for the constraint of its citizens. Too few definitions characterize negligent or reckless driving, or negligent deaths at work as violence, yet these actions may involve intentional disregard for the safety of others. The violence arising from war or actions of civil insurgency have dramatic impacts on the psychological and physical well-being of countless people.
Developing and developed countries often cite the lower incidence of violence as a barometer of democracy and freedom. Yet countries, such as Bosnia, previously characterized as peaceful, sometimes erupt into brutality and violence. Nationalism, cultural intolerance and fundamentalism continue to fuel political conflicts and violence. Questions linger about collective violence: under what conditions does violence serve as an agent of control or an agent of resistance to particular sets of beliefs?
Criminal violence, and the fear of it, has a particular niche within discourses of and about civility, especially within countries largely considered peaceable. Violence in such places is considered to be the actions of errant or unsocialized individuals. At the same time, such jurisdictions are characterized as safe, although research suggests that there is a great deal of violence—defined by individual acts of threat and assault—which occur in so-called peaceable societies. Physical and sexual assault of girls and women, for example, are commonplace in many societies.
In ‘developed’ countries, people themselves largely manage violence on their own. In effect, most violence is decriminalized, either because recipients fail to report it to authorities, such as the police, in the first place, or because they refuse to co-operate with the justice system when they or others do report. The context within which violence occurs influences how individuals define and respond to violence. Crime surveys consistently show that incidents of violence are reported far less frequently than other forms of crime. Truer data about the incidence of violence can be found in crime surveys rather than police statistics, which suggests that violent crime constitutes approximately 6 per cent of all reported serious crime.
Gender-specific differences in the nature and rate of violence and victimization are especially important in understanding violence. Generally speaking, men are the overwhelming perpetrators and recipients of violence and are as likely to be assaulted and killed by acquaintances as they are by strangers. Women encounter physical and sexual violence most often in and around their own homes, and their assailants are typically intimates, former intimates and other acquaintances. However, both women and men cite stranger violence as that which they fear the most. Research consistently shows that the fear of violence restricts women’s lives much more than men’s, and that women report higher levels of fear of violence than do men, despite the much higher official statistics indicating men’s experiences of violence.
Whether physical or psychological, the harm felt by the recipient of violence varies, as does the long-term impact on his or her everyday life. A recent experience of violence, or its threat, may have significant effects, altering an individual’s routines and personal lifestyle or it may have little noticeable influence on daily life. Studies of post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance, often explore the impact of violence upon individuals’ lives.
Typically, in law and in popular culture, the focus for explaining violence is on the behaviour of specific, criminally defined offenders. Debates continue about how to account for the violence of individuals. Biological explanations suggest that violence is rooted in hormonal imbalances, low intelligence, or brain injury. Psychology provides another route to interpretations of acts of violence. Low self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy, and depression are found among the explanations given for those who commit violence. Evolutionary psychology, too, provides a framework for explaining violence, such as the analysis of homicide by Daly and Wilson (1988). These researchers suggest that competition, status and control over reproductivity provide men with strong legacies within which contemporary, individually committed violence should be placed.
Sociological explanations, such as those which examine the links with economic deprivation, gang involvement, dominant social groups and use of violence in the informal economy, provide descriptions of the context within which violence occurs, but fail to predict which individuals within those environments will commit violence. Analysis of structural vulnerability, such as, for example, the violence towards women by men, racial attacks, and homophobic violence, displays the use of violence to maintain dominance. Violence which is specifically targeted against particular groups or individuals because of their beliefs, their skin colour, their gender, their sexuality, or their social class works to remind those more vulnerable that they will be constrained by those structurally advantaged. Violence does succeed in achieving dominance through force. But violence may also be a sign of resistance as well. The violence of civil insurgents demonstrates the use of violence for this purpose.
Naming actions as violence or resistance to oppression demonstrates how explanations of violence are subjective. Resistance to violence can be on an individual basis, as in situations where battered women kill their assailants, or they can be on a collective basis, as in armed insurgencies against state regimes. Public debates, as well as criminal trial defences, revolve around the use, meaning and consequences of violent actions. Often the subjective meanings of violence, and the social and political contexts within which violence arises, are contested and contestable. The meanings of violence are socially constructed.
Violence continues to fascinate people, as the proliferation of violence on television, the cinema, in books and in the news attests. The effects of viewing violence is hotly contested among researchers. Debates continue about how much of this type of violence we should be viewing on our televisions each evening. We are now able to witness the brutality and violence that others commit, in living colour. How this affects viewers, whether and how actual experiences of violence affect individuals future behaviour, and how violence prevention can increase the quality of life of many people are crucial debates for social scientists.
Elizabeth A.Stanko
Brunel University
Reference
Daly, M. and Wilson, M. (1988) Homicide, New York.
Further reading
Dobash, R.E. and Dobash, R.P. (1992) Women, Violence and Social Change, London.
Newburn, T. and Stanko, E.A. (1994) Just Boys Doing Business, London.
