Violence

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures

Bandy X. Lee

• Editorial: Wiley-Blackwell
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119240709
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Criminology

A comprehensive overview of the integrative study of violence

Violence continues to be one of the most urgent global public health problems that contemporary society faces. Suicides and homicides are increasing at an alarming rate, particularly in younger age groups and lower-income countries. Historically, the study of violence has been fragmented across disparate fields of study with little cross-disciplinary collaboration, thus creating a roadblock to decoding the underlying processes that give rise to violence and hindering efforts in research and prevention. Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures assembles and organizes current information into one comprehensive volume, introducing students to the multiple sectors, disciplines, and practices that collectively comprise the study of violence.

This innovative textbook presents a unified perspective that integrates the sociological, biological, politico-economic, structural, and environmental underpinnings of violence. Each chapter examines a distinct point of learning, beginning with an overview of the content and concluding with discussion questions and an analytical summary. The chapters focus on key domains of research encouraging interdisciplinary investigation and helping students to develop critical analytical skills and form their own conclusions.

• Fills a significant gap in the field by providing a coherent text that consolidates information on the multiple aspects of violence
• Examines current legal, medical, public health, and policy approaches to violence prevention and their application within a global context
• Illustrates how similar causes of violence may have dissimilar manifestations
• Presents a multidisciplinary examination of the symptoms and underlying processes of violence
• Offers a thorough yet accessible learning framework to undergraduate and graduate students without prior knowledge of the study of violence

More than just an accumulation of facts and data, this essential text offers a broad introduction to a thinking process that can produce rigorous scholarship across disciplines and lead to a deeper understanding of violence in its many forms.

Overview
Part I General Framework

1
Introduction

A Brief Introduction

Both were remembering. Thinking of Hector, killer of men,

Priam wept, abased at the feet of Achilles.

But Achilles wept, now for this father.

Now for Patroclus. And their sobs resounded through the house.

—Homer, Iliad (Eighth century BCE)

Human history is mired in violence. Tracing its origins would mean going back to the beginnings of humanity. Being one of the most familiar phenomena around us, hardly any society, community, or individual is immune to its influence. Yet it is also one of the most unfathomable. Even a single instance can be overwhelming—be it homicide, suicide, legal violence in the name of “justice,” warfare that devastates a society, terrorism that turns our worldview upside down, or systematic injustices that become a silent killer we call “structural violence.” Yet we do not experience one episode at a time but over 3,800 violent deaths per day—1.4 million a year—worldwide. Of these, more than half (56%) are the result of suicide, one‐third (33%) are from injuries caused by another person, and slightly more than one‐tenth (11%) are due to war or some other form of collective violence (World Health Organization [WHO], 2017). Many millions more suffer from nonfatal injuries, non‐injury health consequences, and less visible forms of psychological and social trauma. For every death, there are dozens of hospitalizations, hundreds of emergency room visits, and thousands of clinic appointments (WHO, 2008). Medical technology buffers us from bigger numbers, as a large proportion of wounds that would have been fatal in the past no longer are (MacKenzie et al., 2006; Monkkonen, 2001). The true tragedy is therefore greater than what our imagination can grasp.

For the most vulnerable populations—women, children, and the elderly—nonfatal forms of violence are more frequent and consequential, and its devastating effects reverberate through generations as a major health, human rights, and human development problem. Not yet calculated, furthermore, are the diverted energies for human creativity and civilization. Ninety percent of violent deaths occur in low‐ and middle‐income countries, which draw our attention to the extreme deprivation of certain regions, while alerting us also to the dangers of high economic disparities. More subtle are the effects of concentrated poverty, low education, harsh and inconsistent parenting, and violence‐promoting social norms that impede thriving in general.

We need not, however, be fatalistic about violence: as much as it is human‐generated, it has human solutions. It is understandable and preventable. To this end, this text is intended to be as comprehensive as possible, bringing together the scholarship on violence that has largely been confined in academic silos until now. We live in an era when violence has reached, perhaps for the first time in history, a level of magnitude and sophistication that is astonishingly close to being incompatible with humanity's ability to continue surviving on earth. Yet, our awareness of the gravity of violence has also grown. If we combine the knowledge we have gained about it in many fields of study, we may attain a level of understanding that equips us with the ability to deal with the problem in new and creative ways. There may be no more urgent task for humankind than to figure out, above all, how to think about violence (Gilligan, 1996), which in turn will direct us in how to understand violence. Understanding brings clarity, and clarity is power—capable of bringing solutions to problems the way light illumines darkness.

This introductory chapter lays the groundwork, first by developing a broader definition for violence and then by proposing a model that can anchor all the multiple, disparate perspectives that arise from an interdisciplinary study. Along the way, it will delineate how different forms of violence are closely interrelated; help us to recognize that our violent potential changes according to the consciousness we bring to it; and outline a comprehensive course for integrating all research. Our goal is to learn how to think about violence in a ways that suit the complex, human nature of human beings. The comprehensive understanding we aim for will require theory, evidence, and storytelling, the last of which the student can expect to encounter in the form of case scenarios and vignettes.

Defining Violence

Violence is vast and varied, and before studying its parts, it is important to have a clear perspective of the whole. The study of violence suffered from a lack of uniform definition for a long time, which hampered measurement, characterization, and even identification. Having no agreed‐upon definition can make a field fragmented and chaotic. In pursuing clarity, however, a definition can become too narrow or fixed. An ideal definition would therefore be clear but also be flexible and hold up over time as well as across different domains.

Much confusion ended when the WHO published its landmark World Report on Violence and Health (Krug et al., 2002). Assembling all available evidence up to that point, it defined violence as:

the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation

(Krug et al., 2002, p. 5).

This new concept of violence has revolutionized our thinking about violence and has shaped approaches to the topic ever since. This sequence is worth mentioning for understanding the history and trajectory of the field and therefore how best to formulate a future course.

Some of the innovations are as follows. First, the definition emphasizes intentionality, thereby emphasizing process over outcome. Second, it includes not only physical force but also power, widening its scope to include important types of violence that may be hidden but are far more destructive, such as the violence of deprivation or unequal sharing of resources. Third, it states that the intentional act may be threatened or actual, clarifying that the focus should be less on the overt act, which may be incidental, than on the psychological state.

The inclusion of psychological harm, maldevelopment, and deprivation allows for consideration of some of the worst forms of abuse: psychological abuse, rejection, and neglect, which are less visible but may be more enduring than physical abuse (Hildyard & Wolfe, 2002). It has also made clear that sexual violence is not merely violent sexual behavior but primarily a manifestation of violence and domination (Bastick, Grimm, & Kunz, 2007). Whether violence is direct or indirect came to matter less, although intentionality matters: human‐generated events are clearly more traumatic than natural calamities (Galea, Nandi, & Vlahov, 2005; Norris et al., 2002). Sociocultural influences play a large role in human behavior and are capable of creating epidemics of individual violence (Lee, Wexler, & Gilligan, 2014).

A broad definition of violence has many advantages. It allows for recognition of the full scope of the phenomenon, which can help prevent neglect of the topic when, for example, a familiar form recedes from view. A common danger of a narrow definition is mistaking the “decline” in one form for an overall decline, when expression may have merely shifted from one type of violence to another (e.g., from interstate wars to low‐intensity civil conflict, or from murder epidemics to widespread suicides). Another danger is assuming that different types of violence are unrelated or neglecting to consider large areas because of different labels, when different types can also clearly rise and fall together (e.g., suicides and homicides, or homicides and collective violence) or combine in ways that elucidate larger patterns (Lee et al., 2014). Whether a general tendency for violence directs against the self, another, or a group depends on complex factors, and hence considering all forms together would be the first step to a clearer understanding.

A comprehensive definition helps with this. A consensus needs to develop on how properly to measure and compare concepts across fields of study while such scholarship should adapt to growing bodies of research and shape future inquiry. Where violence begins and where it ends—whether it includes psychological injury, verbal abuse, rape, property damage, or accidents—are questions we have answered through careful examination of research evidence. We now know, for example, that verbal aggression can be just as traumatizing as physical violence; that sexual assault is about dominating and overpowering, not about sexuality; and that harming a person has distinct motivations exceeding those of property damage, unless the latter is to threaten or to intimidate. We also know that accidents due to general recklessness or neglect share risk factors and similar characteristics as violence, even if we do not yet categorize them as violence.

Redefining Violence

We propose a slightly expanded definition, not because of any defect in the WHO definition but because of its strength: it has allowed research to advance widely and rapidly, and therefore may require updating. For example, we know far more about structural violence, so called because it refers to the avoidable limitations society places on groups of people through structures that prevent them from meeting their basic needs (Gilligan, 1999). It is the most lethal form of violence and calls for foremost consideration in any definition. Structural violence may at first seem a misnomer, for it concerns structures that are relatively stable and contrasts sharply with the dramatic manifestations of behavioral violence; however, it is a product of human decisions and ultimately has effects similar to those of individual violence (Morgan et al., 2014). Market globalization, furthermore, has given rise to a more rapid flux in existing stru...