Hegemonic Masculinity and Violence in Patriarchal Cultures

• The chapter explores violence, violent crime, and state violence.

Introduction

• On April 18, 2020, Gabriel Wortman, impersonating a police officer, committed a mass killing in Nova Scotia, resulting in 22 deaths across 16 locations in Canada's deadliest mass killing by a single individual.
• The incident raises questions about the causes and motivations behind such acts of violence.
• Acts of destructive violence persist and violence continues to be a difficult problem to address in society.
• Violence is related to social control, warfare, and crime.
• Discussions on violence evoke issues of security, embodiment culture, and power because violence is intimately connected with the body, pain, and vulnerability.
• Violence occurs in human social life, but scholars disagree on how best to explain or control it.
• Violence has been assigned to criminology and deviance domains even though it extends beyond criminality.
• Violence has been normalized through social interactions and media representations.
• Violence can be physical, emotional, direct, indirect, political, domestic, collective, symbolic, or self-inflicted.
• Violence is a way to control others using destructive force, or an expression of insecurity, weakness, and powerlessness.
• Violence is a contradictory phenomenon; it can be destructive yet also be a thrilling component of competitive sports, or video games.
• Uncertainties and contradictions about violence arise when people judge violence as morally wrong, yet regularly engage in psychological violence and aggression.
• Some people who oppose violence still consume media that portrays it.
• Scholarly literature on violence views that it is a complex phenomenon.

Defining Violence

• Violence is commonly used but not easily defined.
• Physical violence is the use of force causing harm, death, or destruction, like rape, murder, or warfare.
• Mental or psychological harm can be a form of violence.
• Violence can be understood as something that violates, with its root word being violation.
• Defining violence is complicated because it is common for the word violence to be used metaphorically.
• Violence is an activity directed by humans, primarily as a way to control others.
• Violence can have no apparent purpose, referred to as senseless.
• Discussions about violence commonly refer to universalist claims about inherent destructive impulses.
• Violence should be understood as emerging from conscious human will and individual determination rather than a mere instinct.
• How violence is defined depends on the disciplinary framework and the type of violence being defined.
• Narrow definitions of violence include intentional threats or actual physical harm.
• Narrow definitions of violence include unwanted physical interference causing a range of effects from shock to death.
• Broad definitions of violence include the use of physical force or power against another person, oneself, or a group resulting in injury, death, or deprivation.
• Structural or institutional violence occurs when it is socially built-in, leading to unequal power and life chances.

Types of Violence

• Violence can be short and episodic or massive and organized.
• Violence can be passionate and angry or impersonal.
• Violence is complex, taking different forms and is woven into social life.
• Research on violence attempts to classify it into categories.
• Microsocial violence involves physical assaults, violations, etc. between individuals and small groups such as murder, bullying, rape, domestic/partner abuse, child/elder abuse, self-inflicted bodily damage, and suicide.
• Macrosocial violence involves conflicts occurring on a larger scale by organized groups, including social protest violence, political violence, genocide, terrorism, militarized warfare, and large-scale bombings with weapons of mass destruction.
• Media violence includes depictions of violent acts, physical destruction, gun violence, victimization, and militaristic violence in various forms of entertainment and media.
• Criminal violence: Violent acts that violate criminal law like homicide, physical assault, sexual assault/rape, robbery, car-jacking, property destruction, and home invasion.
• Criminal violence involves the unauthorized use of lethal force intended to inflict deadly harm through acts including weaponized violence, arson, and other lethal actions resulting in injury, damage, or death.
• Political violence: The use of violent force, such as revolutionary action or terrorism, by individuals or groups seeking political change that serves their interests.
• Political violence can be carried out against state authorities, institutions, private property, and those deemed "enemies of the cause".
• It may involve murder, kidnapping, or property damage.
• State violence: The use of violent force by government authorities and their agents against citizens or foreigners deemed “enemies of the state".
• State Violence can include police brutality, extra-judicial killings, imprisonment of political opponents/journalists, or unlawful detainment.
• State Violence can describe state engagement in unlawful wars of aggression, war crimes, state-sponsored genocide, and indiscriminate use of weaponry targeting civilian populations.
• Violence is not straightforward to explain or define.
• Perspectives range from biological determinism to sociocultural influences.
• Humans have the natural propensity for both violence/conflict and peacefulness/cooperation; multifactorial perspectives are best.

Theories of Violence

• It is often asked where violence comes from, violence is not a thing in itself with a single origin.
• Violence is part of complex social relations with multiple causes, motivations, and contexts.
• Violence is socially organized, emerging from social relations that lead to violent outcomes.
• Sigmund Freud theorized that violence comes from an innate death drive, though he later recanted this view.
• Modern theories reflect specific disciplines. Biologists emphasize physiological, hormonal, or biochemical factors. Psychologists focus on emotional, cognitive, and social learning processes. Sociologists emphasize social circumstances.

Violence as an Instrumental Force

• Violence is used as a technique to achieve a desired goal through coercion.
• Violence is used to compel behavior into submission in criminal violence, domestic violence, and state violence.

Social Thrill Violence

• Social thrill violence is engaging in violence for fun, excitement, and the thrill of recklessness.
• Committing crimes by youths with no external reward exemplifies reckless thrill.

Violence as Aggression

• Violence is distinct from aggression.
• Aggression is a hostile emotional response with anger/impulsive rage, used as a threat to inflict violence.
• Aggression is correlated with criminal behavior.
• Persistent childhood aggression, if uncorrected, predicts adolescent delinquency and adult violent behavior.
• Criminal violence among persistent offenders results from low impulse control or low self-control.
• The frustration-aggression hypothesis states that some individuals fail to develop healthy coping strategies, expressing frustration through aggression.
• Catharsis suggests recreational avenues for releasing anger and aggression reduce the capacity for actual aggression against others.
• Studies suggest that aggression is legitimized and becomes easier to carry out, it does not reduce hostility.
• Frustration leading to aggression is a factor, but does not fully explain the range of violent crimes requiring planning and coordination.

Two General Parameters of Violent Crime: The Individual and Culture

• Crime is almost synonymous with violence in public perception.
• Violent crime produces the greatest emotional response and sense of injustice.
• Violent crimes provoke public fears, with destructive effects that are immediate and visible and victimization clear.
• Violent killers gain notoriety, and some choose new names to glamorize themselves.
• Research on violent crime examines characteristics of individual offenders and cultural norms.
• Neurological and biochemical deficits can begin at conception and continue throughout life that often evident in criminals.
• Biological causes may predispose individuals to violent behavior even though there is no violence gene (soft determinism).
• Factors such as prenatal exposure to toxins, brain injury, toxicity damage, or genetic defects can hinder control of aggressive impulses.
• Persistent childhood aggression that appears in early childhood and uncorrected is often related to adult criminal violence.
• Some adolescence-limited offenders engage in violence and/or interpersonal aggression during adolescence but abandon such behaviors as adults.
• Cultural norms that influence and encourage patterns of criminal behavior:
  • Individual membership in subcultures of violence influence criminal behavior, where members internalize the norms and values of the group, as well as learn the behaviors and skills ("tricks of the trade") and use violence to execute criminal objectives and maintain group solidarity.Subcultures of violence are more intense in groups with the highest rates of homicide.
  • Cultures with a strong sense of honor, reputation, pride, and respect influence criminal behavious, where actual or perceived threats to one's personal, family, or group honor is met with violent retaliations. The "culture of honour" is evident in urban criminal gangs.
  • Patriarchal culture of hypermasculinity or machismo that is a dominant cultural norm among men contributes to criminal beaviour. Masculinity within patriarchal cultures is defined by toughness, brawn, and aggression.

The Range of Violent Crimes

• Homicide and Assault
  • Homicide is the preeminent type of violent crime.
  • Homicide in Canada includes murder and manslaughter, each with classifications. Murder is classified as deliberate and intentional; manslaughter refers to unintentional death through reckless disregard.
  • Assault, unwanted force without consent, is the prevalent type of physical violence.
  • Statistics indicate most homicide victims and perpetrators are male.
• Domestic Violence
  • The homicide/assault problem remains a fundamental challenge worldwide.
  • Violence types include family violence, domestic violence, partner violence/abuse, and child/elder abuse.
  • One fifth of violent crime occurs during/at the end of a long-term relationship between two people.
  • One in four women will experience this violence in their adult lives.
  • Reported rates rose for family violence against youth, partners, and seniors in 2019.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated hardships, leading to increased intimate partner violence.
  • Statistics show women experience a higher risk when it comes to domestic violence.
• Violence against Children
  • Violence against women and children are public health issues of global importance.
  • Global data show that one in every three women will experience physical or sexual abuse in their lifetime.
  • Family violence is complicated, no single factor can accurately predict when it will happen.
• Female Infanticide and Feticide
  • Violence against children extends to murdering female newborn infants/fetuses.
  • Gender-selective infanticide is a cultural practice in extreme patriarchal cultures.
• Violence against Women
  • Violence against women is recurrent and takes many forms, some patriarchal cultures generating highly misogynistic action.
  • The deliberate murder of females because of their gender is termed femicide
  • The situation of gender violence in Central America remained dire as of 2017.
  • Canada is no exception to femicidal violence, as illustrated by the Montreal Massacre and a case with Robert Pickton.
• Gun Violence
  • Firearms are directly involved in numerous types of violent crime.
  • gun ownership affects crime in various ways.
  • Possession and use of guns have violence-reducing and violence-increasing effects.
  • There are differing perspectives on the availability of legal gun ownership and gun violence as it relates due to both deterrence and self defense and accidents that occur.
  • Some argue ample international research that suggests the availability of guns increases the risk of lethal violence.
  • Criminals who possess and use handguns commit crime in places where are heavily restricted and have an advantage over unarmed victims.

Hate Crime Violence

• Hate crimes are in which the offender is motivated by a characteristic of the victim that identifies the victim as a member of a group towards which the offender feels some animosity.
• Crimes are considered malice-directed against both victim and the group they represent.
• The Criminal Code makes it a crime to advocate or promote genocide and/or inciting hatred.
• Hate crime activity has not always been prohibited in Canada.
• They are related to hate and criminal violence.
• Hate crimes stem from racism and other prejudicial discrimination.
• Hate-crime laws shift the focus of prosecution onto perpetrator bias.

Terrorist Violence

• Terrorism is a destructive type of violence with global impacts.
• Terrorism definition: The illegitimate use of violence by fringe groups operating outside of conventional political processes to achieve a political or revolutionary goal.
• One aspect that distinguishes terrorism from other violence types is goal.
• Official responses substantially modified policies and social life in the 21st century.
• Anti-terror measures implemented have created a post-9/11 era of hypersecurity.
• Terrorist violence is a strategy among political and religious revolutionaries.
• Conceptions of terrorism exist, including that of the "lone wolf" terrorist.
• In 2017, an estimated 26,445 people worldwide died from terrorism.
• In certain countries, it becomes impossible to establish a civil society.

Violence and Crime Committed by the State

• Throughout history, political/state leaders committed serious crimes, from corruption to war crimes/mass atrocities.
• State crimes occur, are less frequently featured in media/ named "the crime of all crimes".
• Mainstream criminology limits itself with a biased focus on street crime, thus helping to maintain said mystification.
• Critical criminology examines crimes by state actors and governmental authorities to reveal the unjust abuse of power by state officials questions the legitimacy of state authority.
• Examining State-sponsored Mass Atrocities, Human Rights Abuses, and political Violence
• Political crime and wrongdoing occur in nations where political officials attempt to secure or retain power by engaging in rule-breaking conduct involving "dirty tricks”

The Violence of War and Genocide

• Warfare represents the highest form of violence.
• Atrocities, acts of injustice, and criminal activities increase substantially during war.
• In the 20th century and into the present, 220 million people have perished in warfare, and 170 million were killed by their government.
• Violence includes acts of genocide, massacres, mass kidnappings, and other crimes.
• Some of the worst armed conflicts are perpetrated by states against citizens, as the conduct of warfare is rarely followed by states engaged in military action.

Controlling State Crime

• Political state is paradoxical, where the civil state maintains order and the authoritarian state uses force for repression.

Explore the link between hegemonic masculinity, violence, and cultural perceptions within patriarchal societies. The lesson examines how media portrayals of violent male figures and status elevation rituals perpetuate definitions of masculinity rooted in toughness and aggression. It also addresses how violence serves specific functions in society and the implications of broadening its definition.