Understanding Violence

Elizabeth Kande L. Englander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351537933
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What impels human beings to harm others -- family members or strangers? And how can these impulses and actions be prevented or controlled? Heightened public awareness of, and concern about, what is widely perceived as a recent explosion of violence -- on a spectrum from domestic abuse to street crime -- has motivated behavioral and social scientists to cast new light on old questions. Many hypotheses have been offered. This volume sorts, structures, and evaluates them.The author draws on contemporary research and theory in varied fields--sociology, clinical psychology, psychiatry, social work, neuropsychology, behavioral genetics, child development, and education--to present a uniquely balanced, integrated, and readable summary of what we currently know about the causes and effects of violence. Throughout, she emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing among different types of violent behavior and of realizing that nature and nurture interact in human development. Controversial issues such as physical punishment and violent television programming receive special attention making this volume an important resource for all those concerned with violent offenders and their victims -- and for their students and trainees.In this third edition of Understanding Violence, author Elizabeth Kandel Englander draws on contemporary research and theory in varied fields to present a uniquely balanced, integrated, and readable summary of what we currently know about the causes and effects of violence, particularly its effect on children. The goal of this textbook is to give a critical review of the most relevant and important areas of research on street and family violence, examining why it is that people become violent. Between 1994 and 2004 the United States benefited from a dramatic decline in rates of violent crime. However, as the economy has weakened in recent years and tougher times have returned, the crime rate has shown signs of a modest

Chapter 1

Introduction:
The Problem of Violence

In a study [hall] today, I sat and watched and listened as a kid was mercilessly ripped apart by a group of other kids. The study teacher was nowhere to be found for most of the study; that was problem number one. Problem number two was my completely [sic] failure to stick up for the kid in any way whatsoever. Problem number three was this teacher passively participating in the bullying once he came back from wherever-he-was. Passive or not, it was all a shameful sight.

—High school student, Massachusetts, 2005

A schoolboy who took his own life in January left a note expressing his despair in having no friends. Classmates made fun of him everyday [sic] because he could not pronounce words properly due a speech impediment. A female elementary school student who suffered from bullying and physical violence hanged herself at home in April. She said in a note that she did not want to go to school and hated everything in the world, because school gangs cursed her and physically abused her.

—Hyo-sik, 2005

In the world of 2006, political violence sometimes seems to overshadow interpersonal violence. The war in Iraq, and its recurrent car bombs and body counts; security risks and drills; violent riots at the World Trade Organization; and political roil all seem to dominate our consciousness.

Yet interpersonal violence itself is far from gone. Violent crime, long on the wane in the United States, is making something of a comeback. Youth violence, especially school violence and bullying among children, has emerged as a major focus for educators, psychologists, and human service workers everywhere. Political violence may be threatening for adults, but the children in America 2006 are embroiled in their own battle fronts. It is this type of violence, how it happens, and what causes it, that is the focus of this book.

In 1651, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote with despair that most human beings had “No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes, 1651, The Leviathan, chap. xviii). This is a grim view of life, and not one that most of us in the First World at the beginning of the 21st century share. Modern life holds many pleasures, and today the 17th-century world of Hobbes is as foreign to us as living on the moon. But for all our progress, social problems have remained intractably embedded in our society. One in particular affects all human beings, from the First World to the Third. Violence is a behavior in human beings with little or no equal. Present in the caves, tens of thousands of years ago, it has survived every human society’s attempt to eradicate it, including the efforts of the most “advanced” civilization on earth. Despite its burdensome costs and its almost unique ability to promote the most acute human misery, violence among human beings persists; we have not been able to remedy this most basic of human disorders.

Of course, not all violence is the same. In general, violence is aggressive behavior with the intent to cause harm (physical or psychological). The word intent is central; physical or psychological harm that occurs by accident, in the absence of intent, is not violence. Even the U.S. legal system recognizes the critical role that intent plays. If you deliberately plot to kill someone on purpose, and then succeed in killing them, you will be charged with murder, a crime that will often imprison you for life or even sentence you to execution. On the other hand, if you kill someone by accident, you would typically be charged with manslaughter, a less serious offense that, in some cases, does not even warrant imprisonment.

The understanding that all violence isn’t the same encompasses the issue of motivation, not just intent. Certainly, human beings are not the only animals who are violent—almost any animal, including insects, can deliberately inflict harm. The difference between human aggression and the aggression of other animals seems to lie in motivation. Any animal, including humans, can engage in instrumental aggression (aggression that has as its purpose the achievement of a separate goal), but only humans engage in hostile aggression (aggression that is performed for the purpose of harming the victim). For example, hitting a woman over the head in order to steal her purse is instrumental aggression. The motive is not ultimately to harm but to gain the purse. The extent of her injuries may affect the charges with which the offender is ultimately charged, but psychologically it does not affect the motivation for the violence. Of course, one always hopes for no, or at most minor, injuries, but even if a victim is ultimately killed for the purpose of getting her purse, the motivation remains instrumental.

This distinction may seem heartless, but in terms of understanding what causes violence it is important. An instrumental motive shouldn’t, and doesn’t, imply that it is insignificant if the consequences of violence are damaging or lethal. It’s always horrible if a purse-snatching victim dies. Nevertheless, it’s important to understand if the motive was instrumental or hostile, because hostile aggression appears to involve significantly different causes and risk factors. In general, hostile aggression more closely fits our definition of violence: It is performed for the purpose of harming (physically or psychologically) another person. Human beings and other animals differ in their use of hostile versus instrumental aggression: Whereas human beings engage in both types of aggression, other animals primarily, if not exclusively, engage in instrumental aggression. They may use threats of violence to psychologically intimidate a competitor, but these threats are made for an instrumental purpose: to gain what the competitor is also seeking (as in competition for a mate; Bandura, 1989).

Anthony Mawson (1999) proposed a newer, third type of violence: what might be called impulsive or stimulus-seekingviolence. He pointed out that a violent offender does not always wish, or intend, to harm his victim. Rather, much violence is impulsive and/or the offender maybe seeking intense sensory stimulation. This theory is consistent with two major areas of research. The first area has found that some violent offenders are indeed impulsive stimulus-seekers, that is, individuals who constantly crave dangerous and risky situations because of chronic nervous system underarousal. Second, many violent crimes are committed while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, which are behaviors also common among those who are impulsively seeking intense stimulation (Mueller, Wilczynski, Moore, Fusilier, & Trahant, 2001 ). A new study did indeed find that some violent offenders do appear to be impulsive people with extremely quick, hot tempers who become violent in response to minor problems that would not provoke most people.

Family violence is hostile aggression between people who are intimately involved with each other. By traditional definition, this has meant those who are married or related to one another, but in current practice the term refers to all those who are intimately involved, including, for example, couples who are cohabiting or dating (Straus & Gelles, 1990; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). There is no universal agreement about what the term family violence means. For example, the terms family violence and domestic violence are sometimes seen as synonymous with wife beating, although spouse abuse is actually only one type of family violence. Other types are child abuse, dating violence, incest or child sexual abuse, marital and date rape, and elder abuse.

Until the end of the 20th century, the causes of violent behavior were not widely studied. Shared social values constrained aggressive behavior in public; domestic abuse was concealed as a private family problem. Today, however, violence is among the most pressing problems with which behavioral experts must cope. It is clear that violence is neither so rare nor so private as it once was, or was popularly supposed to be. One survey of children in a Boston-area health clinic, for example, found that 1 in 10 had, by age 6, witnessed a knifing or a shooting; half of these shootings and three quarters of the knifings had been witnessed by the children in their own homes (D. Cohen, 1992). In addition, whereas violence was once seen as a problem exclusively found in poor, inner-city regions of the United States, during the latter half of the 1990s it has emerged in a large variety of middle-class, suburban areas, particularly in the case of school shootings (Associated Press & Seattle Times Staff, 1998).

The increasing significance of violence can be seen in a cost analysis of the problem. Even when one ignores the cost to the victim in suffering and pain, and the emotional cost to family relationships, substantial financial costs can be identified as follows:

1. Medical expenses to victims.

2. Lost productivity due to injuries.

3. Expenditures for mental health services.

4. Expenditures for police, social services, and investigations.

5. Financial support of victims (e.g., through public assistance, battered women’s shelters, etc.)

6. Expenditures for prosecution and/or incarceration of the offenders.

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to estimate all these costs exactly. However, the figures we do know precisely are staggering enough. For example, 15 years ago the U.S. federal and state prison systems alone spent $11.5 billion—an average of about $15,603 per inmate (Greenfeld, 1992). Americans spent $22 billion a year in 1994 on maintaining and building prisons; by 1998, that figure had jumped to $29 billion (Koppel, 1998). Popular media have estimated that crime in the United States costs hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, estimated that in 1992, $94 billion was spent for civil and criminal justice by federal, state, and local governments combined. This report points out that this constitutes a staggering 59% increase over 1987 (Expenditure and Employment Statistics, 1992). For every resident, the three levels of government together spent $368. By 2002, that same report estimated that the cost of crime in the United States had risen to $105 billon (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003). The National Crime Victimization Survey of 1992 found that crime victims lost a staggering $17.6 billion, which included property and cash losses, wage losses, and medical expenses (Klaus, 1994). More than two thirds of personal crimes involve an economic loss to the victim, as do almost one in four violent crimes (Klaus, 1994). Rape, robbery, and assault alone cost victims almost $1.5 billion in 1992 (Klaus, 1994). Approximately 8% of all victims counted in 1992 lost time from work as the result of a violent crime (Klaus, 1994). Statistics such as these do not typically include costs such as long-term medical costs, psychological counseling, decreased productivity at work, higher insurance premiums, or moving costs. Additionally, as large as these numbers are, they do not represent the total cost of violent crime, because not all violent crime is detected.

The secrecy that surrounds most cases of family violence makes them particularly difficult to detect, which means that most of the statistics cited here probably do not include domestic violence and are thus likely to be underestimates. It is in fact probable that most violence is domestic in nature. Although it is suspected that most violence does occur between intimates, such as spouses, this hypothesis does not make it any easier to estimate the hidden costs of such abuse. For example, it is not known how many women stay home from work each day to hide or recover from injuries caused by abusive spouses. Because most cases of family violence are never reported to the authorities, we have no way of knowing how many women call in sick to work when in fact they have been injured by a spouse or partner. Similarly, how can we estimate the costs of mental health services? Presumably, some violence and abuse is revealed to mental health service workers and not to law enforcement authorities, but we cannot tell what proportion of these services goes to victims and/or abusive families. However, some estimates do help to clarify the costs of family violence.

For example, the cost of family homicide in 1984 alone was estimated to be $1.7 billion (Straus & Gelles, 1986). The cost of domestic violence against women appeared to be at least $5.8 billion in 2003. These costs included both direct medical care ($4.1 billion) and indirect costs such as lost productivity at work ($1.8 billion; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2003). We know that severely battered women average almost twice as many days in bed as other women (Straus & Gelles, 1990). Three times as many battered women as nonbattered women reported being in “poor” health during a 1985 survey of Americans (Straus & Gelles, 1990). Battered women appear to have higher rates of all types of illnesses, including depression, headaches, and suicidal thoughts. It is interesting that abusers may also suffer from higher rates of psychosomatic illnesses, depression, and other problems requiring costly medical intervention (see chap. 13). And of course, none of these problems takes into account the additional cost of psychological intervention aimed at eliminating the violent behavior to begin with (e.g., marriage counseling). Finally, there is another cost to domestic violence that is frequently overlooked: There appears to be a relationship between being abused and reliance on taxpayer-supported welfare for financial support. In general, “past and current victims of domestic violence are over-represented in the welfare population. The majority of welfare recipients have experienced domestic abuse in their adult lives, and a high percentage are currently abused” (Raphael & Tolman, 1997, p. 20).

Abused children have higher rates of all types of social and medical problems, such as difficulty in making friends, learning problems, or aggressive behavior (Straus & Gelles, 1990). How can we possibly estimate the costs associated with a child who might have succeeded in school but failed because of victimization? Finally, it is well known that abused children are more likely to be arrested (Spatz Widom, 1989a), which costs police, judicial, prison, and social services resources. Although each of these costs are ultimately borne by taxpayers, most of us have only recently become aware of the scope and seriousness of violent behavior in society. Experts in a variety of fields have, however, been trying for years to understand why human beings become, on occasion, violent with each other. Psychologists, sociologists, biologists, and criminologists have all been studying human violence from different perspectives, and each group has a valuable contribution to make.

Sometimes, a multiperspective approach seems tiresome and irrelevant to readers who can often “see” the causes of violence quite easily. Gain seems to be the motive in cases of instrumental aggression; there are other obvious motives in cases of hostile aggression. For example, when you read in the newspaper about a young man who kills another man in a gunfight for no apparent reason, the story will often describe the perpetrator as having been the victim of abuse, a broken family, or poverty. What else do you need to know? The answer to the question of why this young man is violent seems self-evident: All the reader has to do is consider his early deprivation. If he had been born into wealth and privilege, if he had been raised in a loving, nurturing, nonviolent environment, we all feel sure that he would not have so easily committed murder. In fact, our analysis may be correct.

But consider, for a moment, the possibility that this perpetrator has a brother. Perhaps this brother is not violent; perhaps there are other siblings who are not violent. Yet all the offspring in this family shared a psychosocially impoverished and troubled childhood. Why was this one man so vulnerable, when his siblings managed to stay out of trouble? Many individuals are exposed to early stress or neglect, even to violent abuse, yet most of them do not grow up to become violent themselves (Spatz Widom, 1989b). There are individual differences in vulnerability; in other words, factors other than the young man’s environment must be at work. To the student who asks why, when a history of victimization is so clearly important as a precursor of violence, it is necessary even to study other factors, I reply that no one factor, no matter how compelling, can completely explain why some individuals are violent and others are not. It is clear that a person’s situation is vitally important in understanding his or her violent behavior. But there are always reasons why one individual was influenced by a situation when others were not.¹ In chapter 6, I develop a model of violent behavior that attempts to account for a variety of influences in assessing the potential of an individual for violence.

The first step in understanding risk for violence must be understanding where and when violence occurs. We are coming to realize that by far the most common type of violent behavior may occur not on the street but in the family (Cervi, 1991; Hotaling, Straus, & Lincoln, 1989; Kandel-Englander, 1992; Pittman & Handy, 1964; Shields, McCall, & Hanneke, 1988; Str...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Problem of Violence
• PART I: GENERAL ISSUES
• PART II: SPECIAL ISSUES
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index