Understanding Violence: Concepts and Perspectives

• Chapter focuses on violence, violent crime, and state violence.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the wide range of actions, behaviors, and conduct that may constitute violence.
• Explore how violence is deployed as a basic form of social control.
• Examine different definitions and theories of violence, revealing that violence is a complex and contested concept.
• Understand general parameters that frame the criminological understanding of violent crime.
• Learn how the political state has perpetrated some of the worst forms of violence in human history, including genocide, war crimes, and mass atrocities.

Introduction

• On April 18, 2020, in Nova Scotia, Gabriel Wortman, impersonating a police officer, committed a campaign of violence, including arson and the shooting deaths of 22 people in 16 locations.
• The event was the deadliest act of mass killing perpetrated by a single individual in Canadian history.
• Scholars consider the question of violence a profound and important one; it raises issues about human nature, culture, and power.
• Violence is fundamentally related to issues involving social control, warfare, and crime.
• Violence is intimately interconnected with the body, pain, and vulnerability, and its discussion evokes fundamental issues of security, embodiment culture, and power.
• Violence is endemic to human social life, yet there is little consensus among scholars about how to explain or control it.
• Most scholars relegate violence to the domain of criminology and deviance, even though it takes many forms beyond criminality.
• Violence is normalized and woven into everyday life through adversarial social interactions and sensationalized representations in entertainment and news media.
• Violence can be physical, emotional, direct, indirect, political, domestic, collective, symbolic, or even self-inflicted.
• Violence can be understood as an expression of controlling others through destructive force, or as an expression of insecurity, weakness, and powerlessness.
• Common sense understanding of violence is that it is the force behind physical destruction inflicted on bodies or property.
• Understanding violence is confusing because it is a contradictory phenomenon because it is destructive, but also a component of competitive sports, action movies, crime dramas, and video games.
• People tend to claim that violence is morally wrong, yet regularly engage in acts of psychological violence and aggression in their interactions with others.
• Those against violence will consume entertainment that features excessive violence.
• Scholarly literature reveals that violence is a complex phenomenon that spans disciplines.

Defining Violence

• Violence is complex, multifaceted, and best understood from a multivariate perspective.
• The chapter offers an overview of various definitions of violence, types of criminal violence, and the forms of violence perpetrated by the political state.
• Violence represents a couple of problems in that it can be terrible fun, and it looks useful.
• Though commonly used, the term violence is not easily defined when closely examined.
• Physical violence involves using physical force to cause harm, death, or destruction, as in rape, murder, or warfare.
• Some mental or psychological harm is severe enough to be called violence as well.
• Violence can be broadly understood as something that violates, especially since the root word of violence is violation.
• Violence effects are coercive and disruptive morally as well as physically.
• Defining violence is complicated because the word violence is commonly used metaphorically.
• Sociologically, violence is an activity directed by humans primarily as a way of exercising repressive social control over them.
• Violence is the most extreme form of attempt to control others.
• Violence is a type of instrumental action employed as a strategy to control others, with the aim of getting them to submit to the will of the violator.
• Violent action sometimes has no clear purpose or intent, in which case it is referred to as senseless violence.
• Violence understood as an action emerging from conscious human will and individual determination is not mere instinctual aggression endemic to all humans.
• How violence is defined in scholarly work depends largely on the disciplinary framework of the definer and on the type of violence being defined.

Narrow Definitions of Violence

• "Behavior by persons against persons that intentionally threatens, attempts, or inflicts physical harm" is based on psychosocial research on aggressive behaviors.
• "The unwanted physical interference by groups and/or individuals with the bodies of others, which results in effects ranging from shock, bruises, scratches, swelling, or headaches to broken bones, heart attack, loss of limbs, or even death."

Broad Definitions of Violence

• "Violence is the threatened or actual use of physical force or power against another person, against oneself, or against a group or community that either results in, or has a high likelihood of resulting in, injury, death, or deprivation."
• Structural or institutional violence occurs when "violence is built into the [social] structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances."

Types of Violence

• Violence is short and episodic as a slap in the face, or massive and organized as a war.
• Violence is passionate and angry as a quarrel, or callous and impersonal as the bureaucratic administration of gas chambers.
• Research on violence is organized around a variety of categories in the attempt to classify it. For analytic purposes, violence can be divided into the following:
• Microsocial violence: Physical assaults, violations, and conflicts between individuals and within small groups, including murder, bullying, rape, sexual assault, domestic violence or intimate partner abuse, child abuse, elder abuse, self-inflicted physical bodily damage, and suicide.
• Macrosocial violence: Conflicts on a larger scale by organized collectivities of people or states, including social protest violence, political violence, genocide, terrorism, militarized warfare, and large-scale bombings with weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapon attacks.
• Media violence: Depiction of violent acts, physical destruction, gun violence, victimization, and other lethal actions on television, in movies, and in other forms of entertainment such as video games, competitive sports numerous internet sites, and social media which is called militainment.
• Criminal violence: Criminal acts are violent by their nature and are also violations of criminal law, including homicide, physical assault, sexual assault/rape, robbery, car-jacking, destruction of property, and home invasion.
• This type of violence also includes the unauthorized use of lethal force with the intent to inflict deadly or potentially deadly harm against another person through destructive acts including weaponized violence, arson, and other forms of lethal action that result in injury, damage, or death.
• Political violence: The use of violent force, such as non-peaceful revolutionary action or terrorism, by individuals and groups to achieve political change that serves their own interests, as well as by state authorities and those deemed "enemies of the cause" as part of political protest. such violence may involve murder, kidnapping, or property damage.
• State violence: The use of violent force by government authorities against citizens or foreigners deemed "enemies of the state," including police brutality, extra-judicial killings, imprisonment of political opponents and journalists, or unlawful detainment, as well as state engagement in unlawful and unjust wars of aggression, including foreign invasion, war crimes, state-sponsored genocide, and the indiscriminate use of weaponry that target civilian populations.
• Many professional researchers have differing and conflicting conceptions of violence.
• Mainstream thinkers often subscribe to biological determinist views, arguing that the capacity for violence in humans emerges from evolutionary forces. Violent behavior is reinforced by sociocultural influences.
• Humans have the natural propensity for violence and conflict, and have the potential for peacefulness and cooperation.
• Perspectives that take into consideration both human behavior and nature are best understood from a multifactorial perspective, which considers cultural, individual/psychological, and biological factors.

Theories of Violence

• Researchers studying violence often ask where violence comes from, assuming that understanding the origins of violence will help control or stop it.
• The more one explores violence, the more one realizes it is complex and has multiple causes, motivations, and contexts. Violence is socially organized.
• Violence often emerges from social relations that lead to violent outcomes.
• Early researchers like Sigmund Freud tried to identify the singular root causes of violence in humans, suggesting that violence and human destructiveness result from an innate death drive.
• Modern theories concerning the origins and causes of violence are often reflective of a particular discipline of thought.
• A biologist may emphasize physiological, hormonal, or biochemical factors; a psychologist would identify emotional and cognitive factors, as well as social learning processes, or traumatic personal experience; a sociologist would emphasize social circumstances, life changes, and affiliations.

Violence as an Instrumental Force

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

Social Thrill Violence

• Violence is engaging in violence for the sake of fun, excitement, and the recklessness.
• This explains violent crime as the commission of crimes by youths who engage in criminality for which there is no external reward except for the thrill of the act itself, a type of reckless thrill referred to as transgression.

Violence as Aggression

• While often used interchangeably, violence and aggression are distinct.
• Aggression is a hostile emotional response characterized by anger and impulsive rage, often used as a threat to inflict violence.
• Aggression is highly correlated with criminal behavior.
• Uncorrected, persistent patterns of childhood aggression are a strong predictor of adolescent delinquency and violent behavior in adulthood.
• Individuals whose temperaments are characterized by an inability to control aggressive impulses often find themselves socially isolated and in conflict with law enforcement.
• Criminal violence among persistent offenders has been theorized to result from low impulse control or low self-control.
• This explanation can be understood as an extension of the frustration-aggression hypothesis, which proposes that some individuals fail to develop healthy coping strategies for dealing with stressful situations, and their frustration is then expressed through displays of aggression.
• A dubious concept mentioned in relation to aggression is catharsis: the idea that if a person has an alternative avenue for releasing pent-up anger and aggression, it will reduce their overall capacity for expressing actual aggression against others.
• The weight of evidence does not support the catharsis hypothesis because aggression is legitimized, and it becomes easier to carry out such assaults.
• Frustration leading to aggression is a factor in some violent crimes, it does not fully explain the vast range of violent crimes because of careful planning, coordination, and execution needed by perpetrator.

Two General Parameters of Violent Crime: The Individual and Culture

• In public perception, crime is almost synonymous with violence. Violent crime produces the greatest emotional response, as well as the strongest sense of injustice.
• Violent crimes tend to provoke public fears and panics more than other types of crime.
• Violent killers gain notoriety and may choose new names to glamorize their identity.

Characteristics of the Individual Offender

• Neurological and biochemical deficits are often evident in "the making of criminals [as] a sequential process that begins at conception and continues throughout the rest of life course."
• Soft determinism, including the potential for malformation of Brian components due to prenatal exposure.
• There is no gene for violence, however biological causes may act a factors that predispose certain indicidual to violent behavior
• Brain injury, toxicity damage, or genetic defects can lead to a severely hampered ability to control aggressive impulses.
• Low self-control, anger, and violence in certain social situations make encounters with the criminal justice system more likely.
• Persistent patterns of childhood aggression that appear in early childhood and fail to be corrected with age and socialization correlate with adult criminal violence.
• It seems that some individuals who engage in excessive violence and/or interpersonal aggression during adolescence may abandon such behaviors as they become adults because such behaviors conflict with goals that social conformity would achieve.

Cultural Norms that Directly Influence and Encourage Patterns of Criminal Behaviour

• Individual membership in subcultures of violence involves internalizing the norms and values of the group, as well as learning the behaviors and skills, including the use of violence to execute criminal objectives and maintain group solidarity.
• Cultures characterized by a strong sense of honor, reputation, pride, and respect meet threats with retaliations; “culture of honour" is evident in urban criminal gangs and cultures of Italy, Greece, and Turkey.
• Broader patriarchal culture of hypermasculinity or machismo prevails as a dominant cultural norm reflected in stereotypically violent media representations of male identity. Masculinity is defined by identity based on toughness, brawn, aggression, brutality, and excess based on participation in status elevation rituals.

The Range of Violent Crimes

• Violence is a deeply emotive topic reflected in graphic illustrations on television and cinema screens and in newspapers, coloring political and criminal justice responses.

Homicide and Assault

• Homicide is the preeminent type of violent crime because it results in the taking of another life.
• In Canada, homicide includes murder and manslaughter; murder refers to causing a deliberate, intentional death, while manslaughter is an act that causes an unintentional death through reckless disregard.
• "Hate is infectious” when the 1989 mass shooting of 14 women echoes today.
• Assault defined as any unwanted application of force without consent, is the more prevalent type of physical violence.

Domestic Violence

• Homicidal deaths and violent assaults remain a fundamental challenge for justice systems worldwide and include family violence or domestic violence, partner violence and abuse, child and elder abuse.
• Statistics Canada reported from 2009 to 2016 police reported a family violence rate decline (-19%) and in 2019 police reported a family violence rate that increased for the third consecutive year (13% over previous period).
• A report from 2021 shows how the COVID-19 pandemic led to an exacerbation of pre-existing hardships and disparities in many vulnerable populations, including individuals affected by intimate partner violence.
• Pre-pandemic statistics showed that 30% of women are victims of sexual or physical Intimate Partner Violence and that the incidence and severity of intimate partner and family violence increased during the pandemic began.

Family Violence in Canada

• Family violence takes many forms, ranges in severity, and includes neglect as well as physical, sexual, emotional, and financial abuse.
• In Canada, an average of 172 homicides are committed every year by a family member, with 85,000 victims with family member as responsible for the crime.
• One in three Canadians said they had experienced abuse before age 15.
• 760,000 Canadians Said They Experienced Unhealthy Spousal Conflict In previous five years with 766,000 elderly Canadians experiencing neglect in the previous year.
• Women, children, Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ persons are at greater risk of experiencing family violence and its impacts.

Violence against Children

• Violence against women and children is a public health issue of global importance with one out of every three women experiencing violence in their lifetime.
• Family violence is very complicated where no single cause can accurately predict the violence.
• Fear, safety, stigma, and concerns prevent the reporting of abuse.
• The Chief Public Health Officer's Report in 2016 identified that 18% of women and 8% of men say they have been victims of abuse as a child.
• A 2016 Canadian example reported torture of his daughter for Four year before drowning her was convicted for murder.
• Violence against children takes forms, including child molestation and pedophilia.
• Child sex tourism and pedophile crime networks operate globally.

Female Infanticide and Feticide

• Violence against children also extends to the murder of newborn infants and fetuses, predominantly females.
• A 2018 report identifies female feticide which one woman is denied her most basic and fundamental right i.e "the right to life"
• Gender - Selective Infanticide or Feticide is a practice driven by gendered honor codes within extreme patriarchal cultures.

Violence against Women

• Violence against women is a pernicious, recurrent category of violent crime, taking various forms depending on culture.
• Femicide is the deliberate murder of females because of their gender.
• As of 2017, a culture of Machismo is in Central America and Mexcio led to widespread impunity for perpetrators with majority of killings going unsolved.
• Canada is no exception to to femicidal violence that include the Montreal Massacre in Montreal.
• The event known as the Montreal Massacre when in the afternoon on December 1989 a man engineering school with a semi-automatic rifle and killed 14 women, injured 14 others, and self suicide.
• In April 2018 a man named Alek Minassian drove a van on Toronto and killed 10 people where there were 2014, incel shot people.
• Pickton's case when the worst serial killer in history killed multiple women and fed them to pigs before claiming have murdered 49 women.

Gun Violence

• Firearms are directly involved in various types of violent crime, including homicide, gang-related shootings, armed robbery, home invasions, and school shootings.
• Kleck(2009) identifies the connection between guns and three fundamental facts.
• Whereas gun ownership affects in various ways a crime also affects gun ownership The possession and use of guns affect both reducing and increasing violence.
• Who possess guns are also part of this as well as the effect the effect of victims using guns.
• A 2021 Associated Press news article a 3 year old in Florida accidentally shot a young sister
• In Canada criminal possess handguns is highly restricted.
• Hypermasculinity in popular culture reinforces the Capacity To wield lethal gun violence is an expression of manhood
• The Government of Canada reports report indicates 1 in 3 homicides are firearm related with an increase rate increase violent
• Canadian legal Marijuana has contributed a violent increase shooting.
• The US war US Fifth navy had dozens of thousands of type Machine gun.

Hate Crime Violence

• Hate crimes are the motivations for the crimes that victim as a group.
• Canadas Sections the Criminal Code that deal hate crimes.
• 318(1) makes it a crime to a crime to advocate to promise.
• To incite hatred the identifiable group where in leading disturbance leading to violence against anybody identified with the group
• Offence instance of salt and vandalism can be considered crime.
• Racioal and ethnic exclusion has been officially sanctioned by governments through history laws.
• On July 21 right wing attack that mass shooting that made other terrorist.

Terrorist Violence

• Terrorism is a disruptive and of violence on the world.
• Terrorism is a destructive and disruptive use of violence by fringe groups.
• Terrorist violence been has been strategy among in both political and religious revolutions.
• Recent news report includes Islamic State claims responsibility for attack on Pakistan's Shi'ite by the throats.
• White Supremacist had that took kill 51.
• There are many different forms of conceptions violence illegal warfare.

The Ethics of Violence

• Police brutality, violence and peaceful protests determine violence is used.
• Sociologist max asserted said it is a way of controlling
• Wolff describes it unauthorized use of force those in all

Violence and Crime Committed by the State

• Leaders crimes of corruption foreign invasion crimes.
• State crimes continue to occur from a traditional biased focus.
• Michalowski wrote the criminology has. from concerned most harms animal.
• Injustices will develop within inquiries has been contributed substantially the analysis of the crime

The Violence of War and Genocide

• Warfare represents forms crimes against one’s owns.
• Over 220 million people war Approximately 7170 were killed.
• Conflicts have increase sharply state crimes and violence.
• Genocide, massacres, and other crimes exist.
• The conduct Geneva conventions the Geneva limit casualities with
• There is a lack of official rules of warfare.
• Civilians primary victims violence and crimes against humanity.

Controlling State Crime

• Controlling violent crimes and violence presents itself is a complicated and challenging paradox
• Maintain sovereign violence and power.
• Authortarian nations often engage the power violence from descension.

Explore the multifaceted nature of violence, its normalization in everyday life, and scholarly perspectives. Delve into power dynamics, forms of violence, and the impacts of media representation. Contrast Arendt's view with common understandings and examine the challenges in explaining and controlling violence.