Local Violence Research Articles

“We know what's going on in our community”: A qualitative analysis identifying community assets that deter gun violence

Communities of color are disproportionately impacted by gun violence. Unlocking potential community-led solutions could be the key to quelling the gun violence epidemic and its impact on these communities. In this qualitative study, we explored community perspectives on local assets that may prevent and mitigate gun violence. We conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews (n ​= ​45) among individuals not directly involved in gun violence (i.e., shooting victim or perpetrator) despite having a high probability of being involved in gun violence in New Haven, CT. Participants were asked to describe social structures that may deter local gun violence. Here, we report emergent themes to preventing gun violence across multiple levels, including role models (interpersonal), social cohesion and home ownership (neighborhood), and community-based organizations (organizational). Our findings suggest that investments in stable housing, efforts to build social cohesion, access to community-based mental health services, and youth activities are needed to curb the drivers of community gun violence.

Agricultural value chains in a fragile state: The case of rice in Myanmar

The large majority of extreme poor in the world lives in fragile states. Yet, despite the enormous importance of these areas for global poverty and food insecurity, there is relatively little research examining how agricultural value chains, crucial for assuring food security, respond and adapt to such contexts. This paper analyzes Myanmar’s rice value chain – its most important staple and biggest value chain – during the economic collapse and political instability caused by a military coup in early 2021. It relies on unique data collected with a large sample of rice retailers and millers before and after the coup. Despite many challenges in the rice value chain after the coup – most importantly linked to banking and transport – rice processing and trade continued, assuring availability of rice in most retail markets and illustrating the resilience of the value chain to such major shock. While processing margins were mostly stable, an increased distribution margin (between rice millers and retailers) led to 11 percent higher average retail prices after the coup, implying welfare losses of almost USD 0.5 billion for the country. Using a market-pair regression method, we further find that localized violence near sellers and buyers, distances traveled, and distance of vendors from borders are associated with significantly increased rice price dispersion between rice retailers and mills. Despite the amalgam of problems to address in such settings, prioritizing the easing of transport restrictions and facilitating cheap and safe spatial arbitrage of food products would likely help prevent further food price inflation, assure higher farm prices, and therefore improve welfare.

Reducing Violence in Riyadh's Emergency Departments: The Critical Role of Healthcare Providers.

Emergency department staff are at high risk of experiencing violence and aggression from patients and visitors, which can have negative impacts on healthcare providers in the ED. The aim of this study was to explore the role of healthcare providers in addressing local violence in Riyadh EDs and investigate their preparedness for managing violent incidents. We used a descriptive, correlational design with survey methodology to collect data from a convenience sample of nurses, ED technicians, physicians, and advanced practice providers in Riyadh city's EDs. To examine the associations, we used an analysis of variance (ANOVA) for unadjusted relationships and an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) for adjusted associations. Measures included a demographic survey, and clinicians responded to an online survey. A total of 206 ED staff participated in the questionnaire, and 59% reported experiencing physical violence during an ED shift, with 61% of incidents being caused by relatives. Additionally, 32% of the participants witnessed workplace violence. Our findings revealed that male healthcare workers, physicians, and those working in the governmental sector were at the highest risk of experiencing violence. We also found a statistically significant association between the rate of patients seen in the ED and the frequency of assault (physical or verbal) in the ED. Our results suggest that the rate of workplace violence in Riyadh EDs is high, and more efforts are needed to protect the health and well-being of healthcare providers. Senior management should take a position against ED domestic violence and reinforce managerial and healthcare provider resources by adopting policies and procedures that protect healthcare workers' safety. This study provides valuable insights into the nature and prevalence of violence in Riyadh EDs and highlights the critical role of healthcare providers in reducing violence in EDs.

Exposure to neighborhood violence and child-parent conflict among a longitudinal sample of Dutch adolescents

An extensive body of research has documented the deleterious effects of community violence on adolescent development and behavior. Much of this research focuses on how exposure to violence structures social interaction, and, ultimately, how it motivates youth to engage in troublesome behavior. This study builds upon this body of research to demonstrate how exposure to community violence strains relationships between adolescents and their caregivers, resulting in higher levels of interpersonal conflict. Drawing on five waves of longitudinal panel data (n = 778; observations = 3458; 55 % female), combined with police records of violent crime in Utrecht, the Netherlands, a hybrid tobit regression documents how exposure to local and nearby violence affects child-parent conflict. The results indicate that youth who experience high levels of neighborhood violence report higher levels of conflict with parents than youth with low exposure to neighborhood violence. These results are consistent across different levels of neighborhood aggregation.

Community Violence and the Stability of Marriages and Cohabitations in Mexico

AbstractThis study evaluates the link between local violence and the stability of women’s first co-residential unions in Mexico by exploiting the drastic increase in homicide rates caused by the Mexican War on Drugs in December 2006. We use event history analysis and individual union histories collected by a national survey in 2009 to assess whether increasing homicide rates in the previous 2 years relates to the dissolution of marital and cohabiting unions, and to transitions to marriage among cohabitors. Cox models show that a recent spike in violence is associated with a higher risk of dissolution for first coresidential unions among less educated women. Competing-risks Cox models further show that for first cohabiting unions among the less educated, exposure to increasing violence is not only associated with a higher risk of dissolution, but also with a higher risk of transitioning to marriage. In contrast, recent spikes in violence were not significantly associated with union transitions for more educated women. This suggests that increasing local violence may be pushing disadvantaged women in coresidential unions to accelerate significant transitions in their family trajectories, by either dissolving their relationships, or getting married to their cohabiting partner, which plausibly reflects underlying differences in union quality. By evaluating the link between local criminal violence and union stability, our findings contribute to understanding how disadvantaged families cope with disruptions to their social environments.

Violence-induced migration and peer effects in academic performance

We document that local violence generates spillover effects beyond areas where violence takes place, via out-migration from violence-affected areas and peer exposure to violence. In the context of the Mexican war on drugs, we use violence-induced student migration as an exogenous source of variation in peer exposure to violence to estimate its effects on the academic performance of non-moving students in areas not directly affected by violence. Our results show that municipalities that face more violence experience higher rates of student out-migration. In receiving schools in areas not directly affected by violence, adding a new peer who was exposed to local violence to a class of 20 students decreases incumbents’ academic performance by 2 percent of a standard deviation. Negative effects are more pronounced among girls and high-achieving students.

Local violence and transitions to marriage and cohabitation in Mexico

AbstractObjectiveTo assess whether local violence is associated with the timing and type of women's first union formation.BackgroundLocal violence may cause disruptions to marriage markets and psychological and behavioral changes that may affect union formation patterns.MethodThe authors exploited the variation in homicide rates caused by a shift in national drug‐enforcement policy in Mexico in December 2006. Competing‐risks Cox models and union histories from a nationally representative survey of women (N = 33,292) were used to assess whether a recent increase in violence was associated with the timing of the first union transition, which could be either marriage or cohabitation. Analyses were conducted separately by education level.ResultsA recent increase in the local homicide rate was associated with delayed first marriage formation for less educated women. Supplementary analyses suggested that a decrease in the number of employed men per women, as well as reduced social interaction due to fear of victimization could be plausible causal mechanisms. No statistically significant associations were found between a recent increase in violence and transitions to first cohabitation for the less educated, or with any first union transition for the moderately and more educated.ConclusionAmong less educated women, a recent increase in violence was associated with a delayed entrance into marriage as a first union transition.ImplicationsBy increasing their barriers to marriage, local violence may contribute to the accumulation of disadvantage among disadvantaged women and families.

Postcolonial churn and the impact of the criminal justice system on Aboriginal people in Western Australia, 1829–2020

This article analyses how the criminalisation and imprisonment of Aboriginal people operated as tools of colonisation in Western Australia (WA) in the nineteenth century, and how this shaped the postcolonial criminal justice system. The racialised double standard embedded in the colonial foundations of state institutions, including the criminal justice system, rippled across generations of Aboriginal people: a reiterative and disruptive process that we dub the ‘postcolonial churn’. This term, adapted from the ‘carceral churn’, describes the destabilising mobilisations embedded in carceral and settler-colonial logics over the long term. It uses data from archival prison registers (Rottnest Island 1838–1931 and Roebourne Prison 1908–1961), as well as historic court, police and newspaper data to map the use of the criminal code in protecting and expanding colonial property rights in the original waves of settler-colonisation. WA is an outlier among the Australian colonies: it was the largest in terms of size (2,642,753 km2), the last colony to receive European convicts (1850–1868), and the last to be awarded self-government (1890). This created a situation where the British government dictated policy for legal forms of subjugation of Aboriginal people at the frontier (first for resisting pastoral industry, later as workers in it) which butted up against localised extra-legal violence by police and settlers. We can trace this dichotomy between policy and practice in the development of surveillance and policing of Aboriginal populations across time and settler-colonial space due to the protracted pace of frontier ‘development’. Revealing the mediated historical aspects of structural racism is crucial to analysing the persistence of racialised policing in postcolonial settings and understanding why, despite repeated inquiries into mistreatment of Aboriginal people, institutional inertia remains.

Top-Down and Local Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Role of Security Concerns and a Century of “Accumulated Experience”

ABSTRACT During the extermination process of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in the World War I, there were two related, but dynamically different forms of violence at work. The first of these can be termed “top-down” violence, in the form of government policies put into practice by the ruling Union and Progress Party through the decisions of its Central Committee. The other form, “bottom-up” violence, was perpetrated by local forces who took advantage of the possibilities and opportunities created by wartime conditions and central government decisions. The target of both types was the population of Ottoman Christians, and the Armenians, first and foremost. The origins of the “top-down” violence are to be found in the century of “accumulated experience” of the Ottoman regime in dealing with various Christian populations within its European territories and their demands for greater economic, social, and political rights, as well as the Great Power intervention on their behalf. Against this background, the Armenian genocide can be seen as a “preventive measure”. Its main purpose was the search for “permanent security”, and in this sense the article acts as a case study based on the theses found in Dirk Moses’ book The Problems of Genocide. As for the phenomenon of “bottom-up” violence, the article also presents a number of previously unpublished documents that give hints as to the role played by different groups—especially the Kurds in the Armenian genocide.

Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age: A Sourcebook

Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age: A Sourcebook

Evaluating the Impact of Policy and Programming on Female-Victim Intimate Partner Homicide at the County Level in Florida.

Legal and social service interventions aim to mitigate intimate partner violence (IPV) and keep IPV from becoming lethal. Accordingly, this study examines the impact of policies and programs on female-victim intimate partner homicide (FVIPH) rates across the 67 counties of the state of Florida. It focuses on community coordinated response efforts, batterer intervention programs, local domestic violence (DV) ordinances, DV fatality review teams, and DV shelter programs. Results indicate that community coordinated response efforts are associated with decreasing FVIPH rates. Discussions of findings, limitations, and implications are provided accordingly.

Police Violence in Black and White

AbstractDrawing on articles fromThe New York Timesand theNew York Amsterdam News, this study analyzes reporting on the police killings of ten-year-old Clifford Glover in 1973, and twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell in 2006, in both instances by New York City Police Department (NYPD) 103rdPrecinct officers in Jamaica, Queens. Using critical discourse analysis to study the differences in newspaper representations of police killings, this analysis follows Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s classic 1892 studySouthern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases.Wells-Barnett’s framework of Black Press and White Press is applied to this contemporary comparison of news coverage, asking how Black Press and White Press challenge or accept official police accounts of encounters where police kill Black youth and adults, as well as how they engage community members in their account of events leading to fatal police contact. The study historically contextualizes the localized relationship between police violence, media, and protest by focusing on depictions of two separate, publicized police killings and subsequent officer acquittals in the same neighborhood and precinct, thirty-three years apart. Studying the history of policing and rebellion in one neighborhood provides critical insight into representations of localized police violence by Black Press and White Press over time. The findings of this study function together to explain racialized discourse on police, victims, and communities in the wake of historic police violence and officer acquittals.

The ‘Bolsonaro bridge’: Violence, visibility, and the 2019 Amazon fires

News coverage of noteworthy environmental events is often fleeting, moving from one spectacle to another and rarely retaining global attention. But in August 2019, news of Amazon rainforest fires spread seemingly as quickly as the fires themselves, with sustained global coverage and funding pouring into environmental organizations. Yet Amazon fires regularly occur and fires were simultaneously burning in other important Brazilian biomes, with some causing worse damage. What was it about the 2019 Amazon fires that elicited such a strong and persistent global response? In this paper, we draw on distinctions between slow/immediate (Nixon, 2011) and structural/direct violence (Galtung, 1969) to answer this question. We argue that the Amazon’s reputation as a global treasure and its association with climate change and biodiversity through ‘giantness’ (Slater, 2002) meant that the fires’ local spectacular violence became felt as an instant global threat, shifting perceptions of violence from slow to immediate. Moreover, as the identified instigator of the violence, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro became a sort of ‘bridge’ between structural and direct dimensions of violence, thus making the violence personal. These three dynamics combined to enhance visibility of the Amazon’s destruction and its connection to planetary stability, thereby inspiring the 2019 fires’ extraordinary reactions. Through this analysis, the paper contributes to psychological literature on perceptions of ecological crises and to discussions in political ecology/geography concerning violent environments by demonstrating how and why both the slow and structural violence of the global climate and biodiversity crises can be rendered more visible via localized effects.

Foreign Fighters, Returnees and a Resurgent Taliban

Abstract This essay surveys the recent history of Central Asian mobilization to foreign conflicts and insurgencies and offers a discussion potential for a new wave of migration that the fall of the Afghan government and a victorious Taliban insurgency could present for the region. It argues that new developments have increased the importance of understanding the causes of conflict migration from Central Asia to both ensure successful re-integration of returnees and prevent a new wave of conflict migration. This contribution presents evidence that a one-dimensional focus on ideological or theological motivations for past waves of conflict migration is a poor explanatory mechanism for the broader conflict. A complex, localized, and multi-factor approach provides a much better explanatory model for mobilization to both local violence and foreign conflict.

Firearm Dealers and Local Gun Violence: A Street Network Analysis of Shootings and Concentrated Disadvantage in Atlanta

Objectives Examine the spatial relationship between firearm dealers and shootings in Atlanta. Methods We combine data from the Atlanta Police Department (APD), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and the American Community Survey (ACS) to conduct a street network analysis from 2016 through 2018. We employ the Network Cross K Function to assess whether firearm dealers attract shootings in the city. We examine whether this spatial relationship differs by level of concentrated disadvantage in neighborhoods. Results Without consideration of concentrated neighborhood disadvantage, firearm dealers and shootings are spatially unrelated to one another. Tract-level disadvantage influences the relationship between firearm dealers and shootings wherein dealers significantly attract shootings in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Conversely, shootings are located further from gun stores in non-disadvantaged communities. Shootings related to manslaughter and assault, but not robbery, are spatially associated with firearm dealers in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Conclusions Building on prior research regarding firearm dealers and gun violence, we find support for an attraction effect in disadvantaged neighborhoods for certain types of shootings. We contextualize these findings within a broader discussion of how firearm dealers contribute to the complex ecology of local gun violence. This is important in light of federal policies and investments related to the prevention of and response to gun crime.

Analysis of the impact of political isolation of ethnic groups on the growth of terrorism

The presented work examines terrorist violence at the subnational level, taking into account the fact that the regions of residence of politically excluded ethnic groups are exposed to a higher terrorist risk. Moreover, this risk may be exacerbated by the high population density of the region, the level of economic development and the type of political regime of the country. There is some reason to believe that the influence of political isolation may also be more likely to motivate cases of ethnic violence when this exclusion is combined with numerous local and country conditions that increase awareness of group competition and unequal distribution of socio-economic resources. The study uses geocoded incidents of terrorist attacks within States in combination with a set of data on ethnic groups' access to political power in the country and an additional set of control variables. The analysis focuses on the assessment of domestic terrorism incidents for 185 countries in 1970-2019. Logistic regression with random effects was used to verify the assumptions made. In general, it was found that ethnic political isolation is an important risk factor for local terrorist violence. It was also revealed that more densely populated and affluent regions are at much greater risk of violence if at least one excluded ethnic group is present in them. These trends are much more pronounced in democratic countries, in which cases of political isolation are deviations rather than the norm.

Chimera Project

Chimera Project: Riis Beach (2012) was created in response to the suicides of four trans people in spring and summer 2012.1 The resonances of these deaths rippled through local Toronto, New York, and Chicago communities and the internet; the effect was devastating.Chimera Project is a collaborative photography project in which trans people can participate as subject and photographer simultaneously. The photographs are attributed to all the participants, each of whom is mourning a deceased trans loved one. Each Chimera Project shoot is in response to local transphobic violence or the loss of a trans community member, with trans mourners and survivors aspiring to channel mourning as a generative power.Using photography as a generative process for survivors of transphobic violence, this project uses skill sharing, oral transmission, and intergenerational collaboration as methods of building trans art histories relationally among peers. Each frame is a shared combination of performance, composition, and guided technical experimentation. Each participant confirms the boundaries of their participation, in voice, technics, and desire, with freedom to improvise and change roles as they wish.Participants included Tobi Halberstroh, Jax Jackson, Zackary Wager Scholl, Kerry Downey, and Tinker Coalescing. The fishtail costumes were designed and fabricated by Aimée Finlay, founder of Beestung Lingerie, for Chimera Project: Toronto (2004).2 Nogga Schwartz and I taught the participants night photography, painting the subject with torches, lit by the August supermoon. It was also on the birthday of my beloved friend Flo McGarrell, a trans artist creating a unique safe haven for LGBTQ+ in Haiti, killed in the earthquakes of January 2010, to whom I dedicated my role in the shoot.Imagining trans futures, Chimera Project reclaims the chimera motif from its transphobic application. As derived from various classical sources and mythologies, a chimera's sole purpose is to embody a lesson or provide “object-voice” to wisdom the hero/protagonist needs to continue his journey (Dolar 2006). As a discontiguous entity, a chimera has no purpose without a hero to encounter and is not the protagonist in its own story. It exists only to dazzle in the realm of the fantastical/symbolic, not as a person—with lovers, family, friends.The silvery light in long exposure creates images that shimmer in simultaneous darkness and brightness as an analogy to the complexities of a lived trans life. The camera's historic relationship to queer bodies, as a pathologizing and colonizing tool, is counteracted; rather than “taking” a picture, we are “making” an image,3 while exchanging memories and wisdom inherited from our friends who passed away. The spirit of Chimera Project is t4t; creating possibility together via a horizontal model of intergenerational skill sharing, oral histories, and play as queer sustainability tactics.Whenever I travel, I feel compelled to bring the mermaid costumes. I travel only when invited to be an artist-scholar somewhere, for a month, or six, or eleven. In the likelihood that I will meet other trans people who are mourning a trans loved one lost to suicide, bashing, cancer, medical neglect, I can propose to them Chimera Project. I ask participants to bring as many cameras as they can and, in memory and celebration of our dead friends, please, “tell me what you learned from Aligül (Istanbul) and I can tell you what I learned from Flo (Haiti), regardless of how little else we have in common, we all have unresolved anguish, love, and laughter for our dead friends. I want to learn about your friend, and I want to share with you about my friend. To take the unspent churning energy of mourning and do something with it, despite the religious traditions that rejected you.”* * *Thus far there have been three Chimera Project collaborations in Toronto, Brooklyn, and Istanbul.

Review: In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, by Gema Kloppe-Santamaría

Review: <i>In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico</i>, by Gema Kloppe-Santamaría

Are homicides and robberies associated with mortality due to COVID-19? Lessons from Urban Mexico

Studies on the symbiosis of crime and COVID-19 have analyzed governmentmandated lockdown effects. However, it is unknown to what extent previous crime rates determined a larger and more mortal spread of the pandemic. We study how homicides and robberies in the pre-pandemic year of 2019 are associated with 2020 mortality rates due to COVID-19 in urban municipalities in Mexico. Considering sex differentials in health, exposure to the virus and experiences of violence, we study whether gender differences in mortality exist in 2020. Using publicly available data on deaths due to COVID-19 provided by the Mexican Secretariat of Health, along with a series of indicators to characterize local pre-pandemic conditions of urban municipalities, we estimate a series of ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models on age-standardized crude death rates (ASCDR) by sex. Findings show that homicides—a proxy for criminal violence that might encourage people to stay home—show significant negative associations with mortality rates. Comparatively, robberies—a proxy of local violence and safety—were positively associated with mortality rates for both sexes. Sex differences in the determinants of ASCDR are discussed.

Firms and Labor in Times of Violence: Evidence from the Mexican Drug War

I study how industrial development and employment in an emerging economy are affected by urban violence due to drug trafficking. Employing rich longitudinal plant-level data covering all of Mexico from 2005–2010, and exploiting plausibly exogenous spatiotemporal variation in homicide rates during the outbreak of drug-trade related violence in Mexico, commonly referred to as the Mexican Drug War, I show that a violent environment has a significant negative impact on manufacturing plants’ output, product scope, employment, and capacity utilization. The impact is very heterogeneous among plants. Studying within and cross-plant heterogeneity points to two underlying channels through which the Drug War affects firms: violence induced reduction in local demand and violence induced drop in labor supply participation. The output sensitivity of plants to a violent conflict increases in less diversified, locally selling and sourcing plants. The employment sensitivity increases with lower wages and a higher share of unskilled female workers. The results show both channels co-exist, and by reallocating resources from smaller, local, and female-intensive plants toward bigger and more diversified ones, the rise of drug violence has significant distortive effects on domestic industrial development in Mexico.