rates of physical violence resulting in death, per 100,000 inhabitants by country in 2004.
Men are overwhelmingly the aggressors in certain categories of crime such as domestic violence, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape. Women are mostly the victims in these categories. It is estimated that 25% of women are victims of violence at some point in their lifetimes.
Youth and violence
Official crime statistics reveal high rates of offense among young people. These offenses include rape, assault, and theft. About 34 percent of all offenders arrested for criminal offenses in 2006 were under the age of twenty-one (Federal Bureau of Investigations 2007b). Rising crime rates are often directly related to the moral breakdown among young people and vandalism, school truancy, and drug use, which illustrates societies increasing permissiveness. The mass murder at Columbine High School is an example of how moral outrage can deflect attention from larger issues.
Recommendations for clinicians making a diagnosis of Marital Relational Disorder should include the assessment of actual or "potential" male violence as regularly as they assess the potential for suicide in depressed patients. Further, "clinicians should not relax their vigilance after a battered wife leaves her husband, because some data suggest that the period immediately following a marital separation is the period of greatest risk for the women. Many men will stalk and batter their wives in an effort to get them to return or punish them for leaving. Initial assessments of the potential for violence in a marriage can be supplemented by standardized interviews and questionnaires, which have been reliable and valid aids in exploring marital violence more systematically."
The authors can conclude with what they call "very recent information" The most urgent clinical priority is the protection of the wife because she is the one most frequently at risk, and clinicians must be aware that supporting assertiveness by a battered wife may lead to more beatings or even death.
It is also important to this topic to understand the paradoxical effects of some sedative drugs. Serious complications can occur in conjunction with the use of sedatives creating the opposite effect as to that intended. Malcolm Lader at the Institute of Psychiatry in London estimates the incidence of these adverse reactions at about 5%, even in short-term use of the drugs. The paradoxical reactions may consist of depression, with or without suicidal tendencies, phobias, aggressiveness, violent behavior and symptoms sometimes misdiagnosed as psychosis.
Law
One of the main functions of
law is to regulate violence.
Sociologist Max Weber stated that the state claims, for better or worse, a monopoly on violence practiced within the confines of a specific territory. Law enforcement is the main means of regulating nonmilitary violence in society. Governments regulate the use of violence through legal systems governing individuals and political authorities, including the police and military. Civil societies authorize some amount of violence, exercised through the police power, to maintain the status quo and enforce laws.
However, German political theorist Hannah Arendt noted: "Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate ... Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions the use of violence in self-defence, because the danger is not only clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is immediate". In the 20th century in acts of democide governments may have killed more than 260 million of their own people through police brutality, execution, , slave labor camps, and sometimes through intentional famine.
Violent acts that are not carried out by the military or police and that are not in self-defence are usually classified as crimes, although not all crimes are violent crimes. Damage to property is classified as violent crime in some jurisdictions but not in all.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation classifies violence resulting in homicide into criminal homicide and justifiable homicide (e.g. self defense).
War
War is a state of prolonged violent large-scale conflict involving two or more groups of people, usually under the auspices of government. War is fought as a means of resolving territorial and other conflicts, as
war of aggression to conquer territory or loot resources, in national
self-defense, or to suppress attempts of part of the nation to
secede from it.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the lethality of modern warfare has steadily grown. World War I casualties were over 40 million and World War II casualties were over 70 million.
Nevertheless, some hold the actual deaths from war have decreased compared to past centuries. In War Before Civilization, Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois, calculates that 87% of tribal societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65% of them were fighting continuously. The attrition rate of numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize endemic warfare, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare. Stephen Pinker agrees, writing that “in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.”
Jared Diamond in his award-winning books, Guns, Germs and Steel and The Third Chimpanzee provides sociological and anthropological evidence for the rise of large scale warfare as a result of advances in technology and city-states. The rise of agriculture provided a significant increase in the number of individuals that a region could sustain over hunter-gatherer societies, allowing for development of specialized classes such as soldiers, or weapons manufacturers. On the other hand, tribal conflicts in hunter-gatherer societies tend to result in wholesale slaughter of the opposition (other than perhaps females of child-bearing years) instead of territorial conquest or slavery, presumably as hunter-gatherer numbers could not sustain empire-building.
Religious and political ideology
. On the left, two peasant women are assaulting a
Jew with pitchfork and broom. On the right, a man wearing spectacles, tails, and a six-button waistcoat, "perhaps a pharmacist or a schoolteacher," holds another Jew by the throat and is about to club him with a truncheon.
A contemporary engraving by Johann Michael Voltz.]]
Religious and political ideologies have been the cause of interpersonal violence throughout history. Ideologues often falsely accuse others of violence, such as the ancient
blood libel against Jews, the
medieval accusations of casting
witchcraft spells against women, caricatures of black men as “violent brutes” that helped excuse the late 19th century
Jim Crow laws in the United States, and modern accusations of
satanic ritual abuse against day care center owners and others.
Both supporters and opponents of the 21st century War on Terrorism regard it largely as an ideological and religious war.
Vittorio Bufacchi describes two different modern concepts of violence, one the “minimalist conception” of violence as an intentional act of excessive or destructive force, the other the “comprehensive conception” which includes violations of rights, including a long list of human needs.
Anti-capitalists assert that capitalism is violent. They believe private property, trade, interest and profit survive only because police violence defends them and that capitalist economies need war to expand. They may use the term "structural violence" to describe the systematic ways in which a given social structure or institution kills people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic needs, for example the deaths caused by diseases because of lack of medicine. Free market supporters argue that it is violently enforced state laws intervening in markets - state capitalism - which cause many of the problems anti-capitalists attribute to structural violence.
Frantz Fanon critiqued the violence of colonialism and wrote about the counter violence of the "colonized victims."
Throughout history, most religions and individuals like Mahatma Gandhi have preached that humans are capable of eliminating individual violence and organizing societies through purely nonviolent means. Gandhi himself once wrote: “A society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy.” Modern political ideologies which espouse similar views include pacifist varieties of voluntarism, mutualism, anarchism and libertarianism.
Health and prevention
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines violence as "Injury inflicted by deliberate means", which includes assault, as well as "legal intervention, and self-harm". The
World Health Organization (
“WHO”) in its first
World Report on Violence and Health defined violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation."
WHO estimates that each year around 1.6 million lives are lost worldwide due to violence. It is among the leading causes of death for people ages 15–44, especially of males.
Recent estimates for murders per year in various countries include: 55,000 murders in Brazil, 25,000 murders in Colombia, 20,000 murders in South Africa, 15,000 murders in Mexico, 14,000 murders in the United States, 11,000 murders in Venezuela, 8,000 murders in Russia, 6,000 murders in El Salvador, 1,600 murders in Jamaica, 1000 murders in France, 500 murders in Canada, and 200 murders in Chile.
Violence in the media
Classification & nomenclature
Abuse
Child abuse
Domestic violence
Psychological abuse
Cyber-bullying
Sexual abuse
Structural violence
Symbolic violence
School bullying
See also
Aggression
Aggressiveness
Anarchism and violence
Consensual violence
Genetics and violence
Meekness
Response based therapy
Terrorism
Violence against women
Violent crime
War crime
War
References
Sources
Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence
Arno Gruen psychoanalyst who has written extensively on the origins of violence
Flannery, D.J., Vazsonyi, A.T.& Waldman, I.D. (Eds.) (2007). The Cambridge handbook of violent behavior and aggression. Cambridge University Press, NY.
Nazaretyan, A.P. (2007). Violence and Non-Violence at Different Stages of World History: A view from the hypothesis of techno-humanitarian balance. In: History & Mathematics. Moscow: KomKniga/URSS. P.127-148. ISBN 9785484010011.
Malesevic, S. The Sociology of War and Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gad Barzilai.(2003). Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472113151.
External links
International Handbook of violence research
International Journal of Conflict and Violence (scientific journal / open access)
Information on James W. Prescott's work
1986 Seville Statement on Violence
Introduction and Updated Information on the Seville Statement on Violence
The Meanings of Violence and the Violence of Meanings Intercultural discussions on violence
Text of Dom Helder Camara's classic 1971 "Spiral of Violence"
Institute for interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence
Historical Violence Database
American Psychological Association's Violence Prevention Office
Category:Crime
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