Levels Of Interpersonal Violence Research Articles

Teen Unions and Intimate Partner Violence in South America

AbstractPrecocious exits from adolescence via early union formation are often argued to represent a strong risk factor for intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization. However, causal evidence for this claim is scant. This study examines the impact of teen union formation (before age 18) on experiences of IPV in Brazil and Colombia, where early family transitions are common and levels of interpersonal violence are high. Using data that allow instrumenting for teen union formation with age at menarche, results show that both Brazilian and Colombian women who start a co‐residential union before age 18 have a higher probability of experiencing psychological violence from partners. Early cohabitation is also linked to greater risk of past‐year sexual abuse among Black/Brown Brazilian women, and lifetime sexual IPV in Colombia, including among women who partnered once. Among testable potential pathways, age‐heterogamy (male partner being older) explains part of the results, but lower educational attainment among early cohabiting women emerges as a key driver in both countries. Education remains a powerful policy tool to confront both forms of gender‐based violence in South America.

Frontier Violence and Law and Order: Historical and Geographical Variance in the Great Plains of the North American West

Stark differences between the United States and Canada in the post-Civil War/post-Confederation frontier West of the Great Plains and Prairies regarding the role of government, levels of interpersonal violence, and access to firearms (especially handguns) helped to shape the two countries’ divergent developmental paths. Utilizing the alternative approaches of Seymour Martin Lipset’s “origins thesis” and borderlands studies to structure its analysis, this article contrasts the frontier experiences of both countries in the nineteenth century concerning gun laws, violence, and the enforcement of law and order. Canada’s frontier West was demonstrably more orderly and peaceful than was the American frontier, yet the closer one came to the 49th parallel, the more rowdy and violence-prone were the Canadian towns and settlements. Nevertheless, despite occasional instances of lawlessness, even the Alberta borderlands were not as violent or unruly as the American frontier, due in large measure to a strong central government and the effectiveness of the North-West Mounted Police.

Cues for different diagnostic patterns of interpersonal violence in a psychiatric sample: an observational study

BackgroundInterpersonal violence has increased as a health concern, especially in psychiatry practice, over the last decades. Nevertheless, most patients with stable mental disorders do not present an increased risk of violence, and mental disorder is not a necessary or sufficient cause of violent behaviours. People with mental disorders endorse more often a number of risk factors for violence that could confound this association, such as young age and male gender. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of age, gender, and diagnosis on reported levels of interpersonal violence in a sample of people with severe mental illness.MethodsThe sample was composed of 160 inpatients: 73 with a psychosis within the schizophrenia spectrum, 53 with a mood disorder and 34 with a personality disorder. All patients enrolled in the study were assessed for experiences of victimization and perpetration of interpersonal violence using the Karolinska Interpersonal Violence Scale interview. Demographic variables were also collected.ResultsBoth violence perpetration and victimization negatively correlated with age. Compared to males, females were exposed to higher degree of victimization in childhood and adulthood, whereas males were more involved in the perpetration of violence in childhood. Personality disorders were associated with higher levels of interpersonal violence, both perpetration and victimization; an interaction effect of gender and diagnosis was also observed for violence perpetration in adulthood. Distinct patterns of interpersonal violence did emerge for the diagnostic groups with mood disorder showing a victimization pattern, personality disorders a perpetration pattern and psychoses less defined patterns.ConclusionsThe main finding is that psychotic disorders, mood disorders and personality disorders have different patterns of violent experiences interacting with age and gender. This study offers a better understanding of how gender and age could affect violent behaviours. Moreover, study findings may increase the comprehension of the reason why some mental disorders, compared to others, are more associated with the risk of victimization or perpetration of violence. These patterns could have pathophysiological or pathoplastic meaning addressing clinical and diagnostic trajectories and they could interact with other intervening risk factors.

Urban upgrading and levels of interpersonal violence in Cape Town, South Africa: The violence prevention through urban upgrading programme.

Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading applies second generation crime prevention through environmental design, which includes built environment interventions alongside social programmes and community participation initiatives in Khayelitsha, one of South Africa's poorest and most violent suburbs. We conducted a retrospective population-based study using survey data from 3625 geo-located households collected between 2013 and 2015 and mapped alcohol outlets to assess the association between the intervention and reported experience of violence. The analysis used generalised linear models to estimate and compare selfreported experience of violence adjusting for known confounders, which included area and household deprivation as well as alcohol outlet density. Living in close proximity to the upgraded urban infrastructure was associated with a 34% reduced exposure to interpersonal violence after adjusting for confounders. This association was consistent across age and gender. Access to additional social programmes alongside the urban upgrading intervention was not associated with further reduction in risk. The association between urban-upgrading and reduced exposure to interpersonal violence supports its inclusion among interventions in national and local crime prevention policies to address social and structural environments.

Frontier Violence and Law and Order: Historical and Geographical Variance in the Great Plains of the North American West

Stark differences between the United States and Canada in the post-Civil War/post-Confederation frontier West of the Great Plains and Prairies regarding the role of government, levels of interpersonal violence, and access to firearms (especially handguns) helped to shape the two countries’ divergent developmental paths. Utilizing the alternative approaches of Seymour Martin Lipset’s “origins thesis” and borderlands studies to structure its analysis, this article contrasts the frontier experiences of both countries in the nineteenth century concerning gun laws, violence, and the enforcement of law and order. Canada’s frontier West was demonstrably more orderly and peaceful than was the American frontier, yet the closer one came to the 49th parallel, the more rowdy and violence-prone were the Canadian towns and settlements. Nevertheless, despite occasional instances of lawlessness, even the Alberta borderlands were not as violent or unruly as the American frontier, due in large measure to a strong central government and the effectiveness of the North-West Mounted Police.

MICROWEAR ANALYSIS OF BIPOLAR TOOLS FROM THE CRESCENT BAY HUNT CLUB SITE (47JE904)

Previous microwear analysis of a sample of artifacts from the Crescent Bay Hunt Club site has demonstrated that, in general, morphofunctional typology has limited value for the assessment of tool function at that site. The site is a small Oneota village (ad 1200–1400) near Lake Koshkonong in southeastern Wisconsin. Multiple data sets indicate a year round occupation, a subsistence regimen of maize agriculture and exploitation of a wide variety of plants, large and small mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and shellfish. Mortuary data indicate significant levels of interpersonal violence. This analysis is an attempt to determine if lithic manufacturing techniques are correlated with tool use at the site. The analysis incorporates low power and high power microscopy of morphofunctionally defined bipolar cores and/or pièces esquillées, as well as triangular arrow points. These tools were made using both bipolar and free hand knapping techniques; the analysis was designed to determine if a bipolar manufacturing origin is related to specific functions. Results indicate that both the bipolar cores and triangular points were used on a variety of materials, including hide, plant matter, and wood. From this we infer that a bipolar manufacturing origin is not predictive of subsequent tool use at the site.

Violence and Warfare in Precontact Melanesia

Levels of interpersonal violence and warfare for 30 Melanesian societies at the time of contact with Europeans are estimated based on ethnographic and historical records. While violence was common in indigenous Melanesia, it was not ubiquitous and some societies experienced extended periods of internal and external peace. Interpersonal violence and warfare were correlated-when one occurred there was a high probability of finding the other. Violence was not dependent on total population. It was, however, higher for population density greater than 50 persons per square kilometer. Violence in Melanesia may have been stimulated by the large number of relatively small polities, many of which competed with one another for prestige and, in some cases, land.

Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transitional Jamaica, by Deborah A. Thomas

Exceptional Violence. Embodied Citizenship in Transitional Jamaica, by Deborah A. Thomas. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2012. xiv, 298 pp. $84.95 US (cloth). Post-independence discussions about Jamaica's violence range from esoteric examinations, domestic- and international-research reports and statistical rankings, to more sophisticated theorizing that attribute violence to a number of economic, social, and political factors. Using an anthropological lens, Deborah Thomas acknowledges traditional sociological and criminological explanations, but also challenges, expands, and locates the problem within the historical context of slavery with its practice of social exclusion, alienation, and inequalities. Thomas uses the discussion of violence to rethink the post-colony from the perspective of an earlier imperial moment, and by so doing, she interrogates particular forms of violence, that for her, foundational to the development and deployment of ideologies regarding (p. 3). For Thomas, two related themes are repeated: one examines and its relationship to history, violence, and practices of citizenship; the other explores culture and its relationship to representation, debates about the appropriateness and availability of representations, notions of who has the power to create representations, and the relationships between representation and economic development (p. 4). She situates violence within the colonial epoch. This systematic interrogation sets the context for understanding possession and perception of citizenship, its meaning, impact, representations, and power relations in the experience of violence. Current manifestations of violence in Jamaica have been observed in other post-colonial societies. Indeed, the discussion underscores how historic injustices are overlaid on contemporary Jamaican cultural and political practices and institutions, thereby replicating, in different forms, that which the colonial made dominant. The chapters are treated topically. The introduction, entitled Moving Bodies and subtitled Reluctant Witnessing articulates how violence pervades the psyche of government and citizens. Consequently, levels of interpersonal violence are symptomatic of historical trajectories of structural violence. The explication of Dead Bodies in Chapter one lays the groundwork for the understanding that patterns of authority in the political sphere are extensions of practices from colonial period (p. 7). Chapter two invokes the notion of Deviant Bodies to contextualize the effects of slavery on family formation, as well as provide the scaffolding for understanding culturalist notions of poverty and violence. The discussion of Spectacular Bodies in Chapter three dismisses the attribution of violence in Jamaica to the influence of American media, suggesting instead that such interpretation obscures earlier histories of imperialista and slavery, and specifically the transnational organization of violence. Instead, spectacular forms of punishment and discipline during slavery better account for the more performative dimensions of current killings. Public Bodies, in Chapter Four, juxtaposed narratives and counter-narratives about the emancipation statute--Redemption Song--to explore the crisis. This discussion deconstructs the superimpositions of norms related to gender, sexuality, and family, and thereby underscores how these control mechanisms serve as a foundation for respectability. The most poignant articulation of interrupted citizenship is outlined in Chapter five. …

Association of Interpersonal Violence With Self-Reported History of Head Injury

The purpose of this study was to examine differences in interpersonal violence among individuals who reported a head injury compared with those who did not report a head injury. We used data from an 8-year longitudinal study of youth selected by their grade point average to study those at-risk for high school dropout in 4 public high schools in a Midwestern city (N = 850). Participants were followed up from mid-adolescence to the transition into young adulthood. One-way analyses of variance were used to test for differences in levels of interpersonal violence, and repeated measures multivariate analyses of variance were used to assess differences in levels of violence over time among participants based on reports of head injury. A series of multivariate regression analyses examined whether head injury was associated with subsequent violent behavior. Participants who had ever experienced a head injury before young adulthood reported more interpersonal violence in young adulthood than participants who had never had a head injury. In multivariate analyses, respondents who had a head injury in the past year reported more subsequent interpersonal violence than respondents who had not had a head injury. Our findings support other studies that link history of head injury to later interpersonal violence.

Civilization, economic change, and trends in interpersonal violence in western societies

This article moves forward on recent studies on historical trends in violence. Whereas many studies agree that levels of interpersonal violence have subsided since the late Middle Ages, some have found periods of strong increases within this general decline. Building on Norbert Elias’s civilizing thesis, this article proposes to incorporate a greater degree of attention to economic processes. Using illustrative evidence from Western Europe and the USA, this article demonstrates how within the overall decline of violence, cycles of increasing and decreasing violence can be tied to the development of both state formation and the growth of a world economic system.

Modernity Strikes Back? A Historical Perspective on the Latest Increase in Interpersonal Violence (1960–1990)

There is a plethora of criminological explanations why criminal violence increased during the three decades between the early 1960s and the early 1990s. This paper argues that most available interpretations are lacking in three respects: they lack a historical perspective that anchors the three critical decades in a wider understanding of long-term trends; they take the nation-state as their unit of analysis and disregard important commonalities across the Western world; and they pay insufficient attention to different trends in broad categories of physical violence. This paper therefore takes a macro-level and long-term perspective on violent crime, focussing on European homicide during the past 160 years. It demonstrates that the period of increase was preceded by a long-term decline and convergence of homicide rates from the 1840s to the 1950s. Also, it shows that both the decline and the increase primarily resulted from temporal variation in the likelihood of physical aggression between men in public space. It argues that explanations of these common trends need to take into account broad long-term cultural change common to Western societies. In particular, the paper suggests that shifts in culturally transmitted and institutionally embedded ideals of the conduct of life may provide an explanation for long-term change in levels of interpersonal violence.

A Time-Series Analysis of War and Levels of Interpersonal Violence in an English Military Town, 1700-1781

A Time-Series Analysis of War and Levels of Interpersonal Violence in an English Military Town, 1700-1781

A Time-Series Analysis of War and Levels of Interpersonal Violence in an English Military Town, 1700–1781

More than 7,000 assaults were reported to the magistrates of Portsmouth, England, between 1700 and 1781. Time-series analyses were run to see (1) what effects, if any, war had on levels of aggression and (2) whether overall levels of aggression decreased over time. Aggression was measured in two ways: (1) the extent to which assailants ganged up on adversaries and (2) levels of violence in individual confrontations (whether a weapon was used, and if so, what type; whether assailants refrained from using a weapon; and whether they stopped short of physical violence and instead merely insulted or threatened their enemies). Neither measure showed a significant variation over time. The participation of women in brawls decreased, but the aggressiveness of those who continued to brawl actually increased. Complaints about insults and threats declined, while complaints of a more serious nature showed a modest increase, reflecting, among other things, the emergence of new definitions of actionable behavior.

The role of coercion in the treatment of women with co-occurring disorders and histories of abuse

Debate continues on issues of involuntary treatment for individuals with behavioral healthcare problems. Women with co-occurring disorders and histories of abuse are an especially vulnerable population. This study seeks to increase our knowledge about the experiences of coercion for women in the behavioral healthcare system. Patterns of coercion are explored. This study did not find the predicted relationship between high levels of interpersonal violence and frequent involuntary treatment experiences. The results do offer support for the hypothesis that women are more likely to be currently mandated to treatment if they have been recently arrested, and that being mandated to treatment does not appear to be related to clinical issues such as recidivism and acute symptoms. As expected, women currently required to be in treatment report having less choice in other aspects of their care. Implications for future research in the current climate of increasingly coercive policies are presented.

Caregiver burden and psychological distress in partners of veterans with chronic posttraumatic stress disorder.

Caregiver burden and psychological distress were examined in a sample of 71 partners of Vietnam War combat veterans. Partners of patients (n = 51) diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) experienced more caregiver burden and had poorer psychological adjustment than did partners of veterans without PTSD (n = 20). Among PTSD caregivers, patient PTSD symptom severity and level of interpersonal violence were associated with increased caregiver burden. When accounting for patient PTSD symptom severity, hostility, presence of major depression, level of interpersonal violence, and health complaints, only PTSD severity was uniquely associated with caregiver burden. Caregiver sociodemographic factors including age, race, education, and the availability of social support, did not moderate the relationship between PTSD symptom severity and caregiver burden. Caregiver burden was strongly related to spouse psychological adjustment.

The Subculture of Violence and Delinquency: Individual vs. School Context Effects

This article examines the subculture of violence thesis using data on young males (N = 2,213) across 87 high schools. Aggregate analyses show that values reflecting a subculture of violence have substantial effects on the level of interpersonal violence among high school boys. Contextual analyses suggest that the school subculture of violence operates through a social control process. A contextual measure of school values regarding violence has a direct effect on interpersonal violence, controlling for individuals' commitment to these values. These results contradict the usual explanation of how the subculture of violence affects violent behavior. Further, evidence implying that values regarding violence predict other forms of delinquency suggests that the results may reflect a subculture of delinquency rather than a subculture of violence. Finally, young males are most likely to engage in delinquency when they go to schools where academics are valued, controlling for their own academic values.

The Subculture of Violence and Delinquency: Individual vs. School Context Effects

This article examines the subculture of violence thesis using data on young males (N = 2,213) across 87 high schools. Aggregate analyses show that values reflecting a subculture of violence have substantial effects on the level of interpersonal violence among high school boys. Contextual analyses suggest that the school subculture of violence operates through a social control process. A contextual measure of school values regarding violence has a direct effect on interpersonal violence, controlling for individuals' commitment to these values. These results contradict the usual explanation of how the subculture of violence affects violent behavior. Further, evidence implying that values regarding violence predict other forms of delinquency suggests that the results may reflect a subculture of delinquency rather than a subculture of violence. Finally, young males are most likely to engage in delinquency when they go to schools where academics are valued, controlling for their own academic values.