Motivations For Violence Research Articles

Student Perspectives on the Reasons for Physical Violence in a Thai Vocational College: An Exploratory Study

Physical violence in Bangkok schools has been the subject of considerable public concern in recent years and yet relatively little is known about the nature of violence perpetrated by vocational college students. This study sought to understand the reasons for such violence through a series of semi-structured interviews with 32 male students. The analysis identified revenge from previous fights as a key motivation for violence. Students described a range of different responses to threats of violence, including renting safe accommodation and concealing weapons. These findings are discussed in relation to how an understanding of cross-cultural risk factors for violence is important for the development of effective prevention strategies.

Re-interpreting Genesis 34 in the Light of Religious Violence in Nigeria

Religion plays significant roles in social harmony, yet it also serves as a motivation for violence. In Nigeria, religion has been at the centre of most violent conflicts, thereby gaining notoriety as one of the prime security challenges confronting the country. Genesis 34 is an important chapter in the Old Testament Bible. It demonstrates the violence done to Dinah, the only daughter of Jacob by Shechem and also the violence done by the children of Jacob to Hamor, Shechem and the whole community. This shows the reality of violence in every nation that is made of up of various tribes and ethnic groups. The reality of violence in Nigeria is even more pronounced as the nation is made up of millions of people with many ethnic groups and with various religious affiliations. Genesis 34 also gives the causes of religious violence in both Israelite and Nigerian societies. Paramount among the causes of religious violence include religious intolerance, religious fanaticism, lack of forgiveness, poverty, unemployment, suspicion and lack of trust. In order to control religious violence in Nigeria, this paper recommends that there should be respect for one another, respect for sanctity of human life, forgiveness and rightful engagement of youths.

Substance use and motivations for violence: Event-level analyses of gender differences in antecedents to dating vs. peer violence

Substance use and motivations for violence: Event-level analyses of gender differences in antecedents to dating vs. peer violence

Biondich, Mark. The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878 (review)

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 564 Biondich, Mark. The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878. Zones of Violence. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2011. xv + 384 pp. Maps. Tables. Chronology. Notes. Bibliography. Index.£65.00. Since the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s scholars have dedicated a considerable amount of effort in countering the common perceptions of a certain Balkan exceptionalism and a particular predisposition to violence. Theories and methods from a range of disciplines have been utilized both to deconstruct the othering discourses that inform such myths — Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997) remains the classic text in this field — and to offer alterative explanations as to the causes of violence in the region. It is within this tradition that Mark Biondich’s book falls. It approaches the task with the historian’s tools, producing a serious survey of the most violent chapters of modern Balkan history. In less than three hundred pages the book covers an impressive amount of data, offering quick summaries of long tracts of Balkan history that will be very helpful to the non-specialists, along with focused studies of key violent episodes of Balkan history. It is all informed by an impressive bibliography that is remarkably diverse, relevant and up to date. Biondich has produced the new essential reference work on the history of violence in the Balkans. As with all stereotypes, the image of the violent Balkans relies on vagueness and elusiveness as to the origins, aims and forms of violence, but Biondich does not tackle this methodological challenge head on. ‘Revolution, war and political violence’ could mean many things. Soon, however, it becomes clear that the author is really focused on the link between violence and nationalism, on which he puts all his analytical attention. And in this he is excellent: detailed and balanced, offering long passages of creative synthesis, avoiding any sort of deterministic linearities, looking persistently for explanations that are time and space specific, and always in dialogue with his extensive bibliography. The most original sections of the book are on this nationalist-related theme: on the Macedonian Question at the turn of the twentieth century (pp. 63– 75), the treatment of minorities and the rise of the fascist ‘New Right’ in the interwar (pp. 98–130), the civil war in Yugoslavia during the Second World War (pp. 130–49), the minority policies of the Cold War Communist states (pp. 159–80) and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. It is on the latter that the author offers his most elaborate analysis on the forms and motives of violence (pp. 215–37). Balkan modernities — their roots, adaptations and effects — are an old scholarly preoccupation. At least since John Allcock’s Explaining Yugoslavia (London,2000)modernityhasbeenalsocentralinthemorefocuseddiscussions on the origins and particularities of violence in the region. It is in the same REVIEWS 565 pool where Biondich looks for his overarching argument. His model focuses on the long, and frequently ‘abortive’, modernization process undergone by the region, starting from the early national independence wars of the nineteenth century and going all the way to the recent crises in Yugoslavia. Seen through this overstretched, but not unappealing, explanatory framework, the wars of the 1990s were ‘in actual fact the culmination of a process of state-building that had been initiated in the nineteenth century’ (p. 195). The key link here is the slightly vague concept of the ‘modernizing’, ‘nationalizing state’ (pp. vi) and its elites, which opt for violence always as a calculated choice in order to establish and affirm their authority. The book charts how again and again, in conflict after conflict, local actors made specific choices that led to specific forms and acts of violence. Despite its relativizing tendencies, Biondich’s argument leaves Balkan exceptionalism without any oxygen on which to breathe, political choice being the author’s answer to the stereotype of primordial instincts. Although the nebulous spectre of ‘Europe’ is never far away (see p. 156), nonBalkan players have a secondary role in this story. They are present mainly diplomatically, while the foreign occupation regimes of the two World Wars receiveonlyabriefmention.Butthisisanoddomission.Balkanexceptionalism cannot be understood outside the European comparative framework on which it...

Violent climate or climate of violence? Concepts and relations with focus on Kenya and Sudan

Addressing deficits of current research on the link between climate change and violent conflict, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic understanding of the violence concept in the context of environmental change. We present a theoretical framework and potential pathways between climate change and violence and an agent-based approach to assess the interplay between capabilities and motivations for violence and the conditions for conflicting or cooperative interactions. Acting as a ‘threat multiplier’, climate change could exceed adaptive capacities and undermine the livelihoods of communities. In the most affected regions, the erosion of social order and state failure as well as already ongoing violent conflicts could be aggravated, leading to a spiral of violence that further dissolves societal structures. Against this background we analyse case studies in Kenya and Sudan, focusing on factors driving or preventing a spiral of violence. While interpastoral conflicts in north-western Kenya result in limited numbers of casualties, the Darfur conflict has been shaped by the civil war in Sudan, involving the government, rebel forces and militias, causing significant loss of lives and destruction. The impact of climate change is less direct in Sudan than in Kenya. To avoid a spiral of violence, in both cases it is essential to reduce socio-economical marginalisation, develop resource-sharing mechanisms and restrain access to arms as part of long-term strategies for a sustainable and peaceful intervention to contain the adverse impacts of climate change.

Profile of Female Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence in an Offender Population: Implications for Treatment

Despite evidence that the incidence of female-to-male intimate partner violence (IPV) in the general population is as high as that of male-to-female intimate violence, until recently little attention has been devoted to understanding women perpetrators of partner violence or to the design of programs to address their violence. This study explored the characteristics of female perpetrators of IPV in an offender population and examined the context, consequences, and motives for their aggression. There were 897 women serving a federal sentence in the Correctional Service of Canada at the time of data extraction, of whom 15% (n = 135) had a history of IPV. Results indicated that these offenders were most often classified as moderate criminal risk and high criminogenic need. Most had been victims of severe abuse during their youth and in adult relationships. Women’s motives for violence were diverse. Although most women had a history of mutual violence with their partners, 64% were the primary perpetrators in at least 1 incident. Violence in self-defense or in defense of their children were the least frequently coded categories. Similar to a comparison group of male offenders, the Spousal Assault Risk Assessment tool indicated that the most common risk factors associated with women’s IPV included past physical assault against intimate partners, substance abuse, and employment problems. These findings reinforce the need for a correctional programming targeting the diverse circumstances and motivations of women who are violent against their partners.

Psychopathic predators? Getting specific about the relation between psychopathy and violence.

The psychopathy checklist-revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991, 2003) is often used to assess risk of violence, perhaps based on the assumption that it captures emotionally detached individuals who are driven to prey upon others. This study is designed to assess the relation between (a) core interpersonal and affective traits of psychopathy and impulsive antisociality on the one hand and (b) the risk of future violence and patterns of motivation for past violence on the other. A research team reliably assessed a sample of 158 male offenders for psychopathy, using both the interview-based PCL-R and the self-report psychopathic personality inventory (PPI: Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996). Then, a second independent research team assessed offenders' lifetime patterns of violence and their motivation. After these baseline assessments, offenders were followed in prison or the community for up to 1 year to assess their involvement in 3 different forms of violence. Baseline and follow-up assessments included both interviews and reviews of official records. First, the PPI manifested incremental validity in predicting future violence over the PCL-R (but not vice versa)-and most of its predictive power derived solely from impulsive antisociality. Second, impulsive antisociality-not interpersonal and affective traits specific to psychopathy-were uniquely associated with instrumental lifetime patterns of past violence. The latter psychopathic traits are narrowly associated with deficits in motivation for violence (e.g., lack of fear or lack of provocation). These findings and their consistency with some past research led us to advise against making broad generalizations about the relation between psychopathy and violence.

Eastern European Transformation and Youth Attitudes toward Violence

This cross-national examination of the motives behind adolescent approval of violence in major cities in Germany and four Eastern European transformation societies (Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Slovenia) draws on Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT), which leads us to expect higher instrumental motivation for violence among adolescents in the transforming societies. Differences in institutional structure and cultural orientations between Germany and the Eastern European societies are assessed using data from ILO and ESS. Analysis of the different motives for violence is based on data collected by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony (KFN) in Krakow, Volgograd, Ljubljana, Plzen, and Hamburg. Comparability and cross-cultural interpretability of the violence attitude measure is assessed by applying confirmatory factor analyses in multi-group comparisons. A lack of sufficient data meant that specific assumed linkages as implied by IAT could not be established, but the results for a specific instrumental/utilitarian motive for violence and for institutional structure and cultural orientations point to the utility of applying insights from IAT to understanding the dynamics of violence within the Eastern European context of transformation. We find empirical indications that specific features of the family mediate the “Eastern effect” on the instrumental/utilitarian motive. Further research is needed to discover whether economic dominance affects motives for youth violence indirectly via the socialization provided by non-economic institutions rather than directly via cultural orientations.

Terror and the Liberal Conscience: Political Fiction and Jihad—The Novel Response to 9/11

After the attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington, D.C. in 2001 the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication devised a new classification. The category, September 11 Terrorist Attacks 2001-Fiction, responds to a distinct genre of political novels. In the light of the philosopher Richard Rorty's contention that the Western novel can clarify the moral and political options that confront the West, the article examines what insight, if any, into the motive for violence, and the capacity to recuperate a sense of liberal progressive purpose, the novels of 11 September afford?

The Islamicization of Politics: Motivations for Violence in Kashmir

The Islamicization of Politics: Motivations for Violence in Kashmir

The Pathways Model of Assault

Research on offending behavior rehabilitation suggests that offenders would gain the maximum benefit from programs that reflect the individual needs of different types of offender. Multivariate theories of offending behavior are thus required to inform individualized rehabilitation. The aim of the current study was to construct a multivariate model for the prolific offense of assault. Qualitative methodology was used to construct a descriptive model of assault for 25 adult assault offenders. The model incorporated the development of violent behavior, types of anger, violence motivation, and the assault offense. The model consisted of 14 categories, 10 of which allowed for individual differences in behavior. A total of 35 participant transcripts were then coded through the model where the individual differences occurred. Five main offense types were found. The characteristics of the types of assault offense gave indications for how rehabilitation may be targeted for each group.

The Effect of Perpetrator Motive and Dispositional Attributes on Enjoyment of Television Violence and Attitudes Toward Victims

Previous research (Zillmann & Bryant, 1975) suggests that over-retributive and under-retributive violent acts are deemed unjust, enjoyed less, and influence attitudes toward perpetrators and victims of violence. This study extends this research to examine how disposition and motive influence enjoyment and liking of victims and perpetrators. An experiment manipulating perpetrator disposition and motive for violence showed that liking for neutral targets is decreased by incongruous perpetrator disposition and motive, whereas liking for perpetrator was affected only by motive. Balance Theory is offered to explain how dispositional considerations influence the evaluation of characters and other features of a story line.

The Unveiled Motivations of Violence in Intra-State Conflicts: The Colombian Guerrillas

This article explores the motivations that push individuals to join and remain in insurgent groups. Though I consider the Colombian guerrillas, these findings are not necessarily case-specific. I argue that socio-psychological motivations at the individual level may be the most significant reason for joining, surpassing in importance grievance-based, ideological and even economic motivations. Moreover, I find that the lack of cohesion inside the Colombian guerrillas may boost economic motivations, further weakening insurgents' commitment to the pursuit of political power, and to the improvement of the socio-political position of those they claim to represent. This type of research contributes to a greater understanding of those in armed groups and it provides insights for developing focused recruitment prevention programs. It also contributes to the growing literature that explores the meaning and character of insurgencies, and possibly terrorist organizations.

Violent Entertainment Pitched to Adolescents: An Analysis of PG-13 Films

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the violence content of the top-grossing PG-13 films of 1999 and 2000 to determine what percentage of it had potential for negative effects on young viewers and what percentage of it had potential for prosocial or beneficial effects. A large, multidimensional analytic instrument was designed for systematic coding of each act of violence and its contextualization by features that have been shown either to enhance or to protect against harmful effects that are associated with violent media exposure: perpetrators and victims of violence, motivation for violence, presence of weapons, degree of realism, and consequences of violence. Descriptive statistics by genre were performed for each film. An ordinal logistic regression model was used to examine the association between the seriousness of violence and weapons, motive, and genre. In the sample of 77 PG-13 films, a total of 2251 violent actions were observed with roughly half (47%) of lethal magnitude. A total of 118 acts contained justified violence that were initiated by major characters and were extremely serious, and approximately two thirds of the films (49 [64%]) were rated PG-13 for reasons other than violence. Violence permeated nearly 90% of the films in our study. Although only a small subset of this content contained violence that was associated with negative effects, only 1 film contained violence that was associated with protective or beneficial effects.

Instrumentally Violent Youths

Psychopathy in adults has been well documented as a robust predictor of violence. Explanations for this relation have focused on the affective deficit that characterizes psychopathy. This study examined the relations among psychopathic traits, empathy, attachment, and motivations for violence in 51 incarcerated adolescent offenders. Psychopathy scores were related to both instrumental and reactive violence. Youths who were classified as instrumentally violent scored higher on psychopathy than those who were not, which could be attributed to the interpersonal and affective features of psychopathy. These findings provide support for the construct of psychopathy existing in youths. Implications of the current study for potential interventions and prevention of persistent violent offending are discussed.

Child Support Enforcement and Domestic Violence Among Non-Cohabiting Couples

Some advocates worry that stronger child support enforcement may increase domestic violence. The predictions of a simple economic model are ambiguous; stronger enforcement may increase the mother's bargaining power, which reduces violence, but may also increase the father's opportunity and motive for violence thereby increasing violence. This paper examines whether enforcement is associated with domestic violence using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. We find that stricter enforcement increases the risk of violence among non-cohabiting mothers who receive welfare and have not obtained legal entitlement to child support. Controlling for sample selection and using difference-in-differences strengthens the result.

Shame, Guilt, and Violence

DURING the past 35 years I have used prisons and prison mental hospitals as “laboratories” in which to investigate the causes and prevention of the various forms of violence and the relationships between these forms and to what I will call (with a nod to William James) “the varieties of moral experience.” In the course of that work, I have been struck by the frequency with which I received the same answer when I asked prisoners, or mental patients, why they assaulted or even killed someone. Time after time, they would reply “because he disrespected me” or “he disrespected my visitor [or wife, mother, sister, girl-friend, daughter, etc.].” In fact, they used that phrase so often that they abbreviated it into the slang phrase, “He dis’ed me.” Whenever people use a word so often that they abbreviate it, it is clearly central to their moral and emotional vocabulary. But even when they did not abbreviate it, references to the desire for respect as the motive for violence kept recurring. For example, I used to think that people committed armed robberies in order to get money; and indeed, that is the superficial explanation that they would often prefer to give, to themselves and to us. But when I actually sat down and spoke at length with men who had repeatedly committed such crimes, I would start to hear comments like “I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I pointed a gun at some dude’s face.” On one occasion, the officers in a prison had become involved in a running battle with a prisoner in which he would assault them and they would punish him. The more they punished him the more violent he became, and the more violent he became the more they punished him. They placed him in solitary confineSOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Winter 2003) Shame, Guilt, and Violence JAMES GILLIGAN ment, deprived him of even the last few privileges and possessions a prison inmate has; there was no further punishment to which they could subject him without becoming subject to punishment themselves, and yet he continued to assault them whenever they opened his door. At that point they gave up and asked me to see if I could help them understand what was going on so they could extricate themselves from a situation that was only harming both parties to the conflict. (Incidentally, one can observe this same mutually self-defeating vicious cycle on a national and international scale and throughout history, both in this country and elsewhere , as in Chechnya, Israel-Palestine, and Iraq; and historically, as in the punitive peace settlement following the First World War that strengthened the revanchist political movements that culminated in the Second World War—to choose just a few among many possible examples). When I saw this prisoner I asked him, “What do you want so badly that you are willing to give up everything else in order to get it?” It seemed to me that this was exactly what he was doing. In response, this man, who was usually so inarticulate that it was difficult to get a clear answer to any question, astonished me by standing up tall, looking me in the eye, and replying with perfect clarity and a kind of simple eloquence: “Pride. Dignity. Selfesteem .” And then, speaking more in his usual manner, he added “And I’ll kill every motherfucker in that cell block if I have to in order to get it.” He went on to describe how the officers were, he felt, attempting to strip away his last shred of dignity and selfesteem by disrespecting him, and said, “I still have my pride and I won’t let them take that away from me. If you ain’t got pride, you got nothin’.” He made it clear to me that he would die before he would humble himself to the officers by submitting to their demands. Nor was that true just of this man. One of the most common fantasies I have heard from many of the most violent prison inmates is the scenario of going to their deaths in a hail of...

The Legacy of Violence in Indonesia

In a journal whose primary focus has consistently been on the hic et nunc, on explaining contemporary sociopolitical realities, it may strike our readers as a bit bizarre to devote so much ink and space to events that transpired some 35 years ago, as we have in this issue. But the inherent importance of the massive cataclysm unleashed in Indonesia between October 1965 and March 1966, resulting in the essential extermination of the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia, the Indonesian Communist Party), hitherto the largest communist party in the free world, was to reverberate in the country’s subsequent history. Beginning in 1975, violence was exerted against the struggle for independence in East Timor, intensifying during the culmination of that struggle in 1999. The Asian financial crisis in 1997–99 hit Indonesia harder than any of its neighbors, precipitating nationwide violence during the 1997 elections, which culminated in the fall of the Suharto regime the following year and in the still-fragile transition of the world’s fourth-largest nation (population ca. 228 million) to democracy. This ambitious special issue is hence concerned with violence in the Indonesian archipelago (the largest in the world, with some 13,000 islands and some 300 distinct ethnolinguistic groups): with the phenomenon itself, its origins, its political memorialization, and its future. As Professors Zinoman and Peluso explain below, most of these papers originated in a conference organized by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Berkeley in February 2001; to these we have added the study “Democratization and Regional Power Sharing in Papua/Irian Jaya: Increased Opportunities and Decreased Motivations for Violence,” by Timo Kivimaki and Ruben Thorning, as it is concerned with much the same problematic and in the same region.

Religious Persecution: And What To Do About It

Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions can all be found in geographically diverse Indonesia. Adding to this layered society are many different ethnic groups, political groups, and socio–economic groups. The joining of all these factors led to different communities forming adats–religio–customary agreements. When talking about “religious persecution” in Indonesia, all of these factors must be taken into account. Even so, it would be extremely naive to think that religious belief is a peripheral motivation for violence. This article explores a method by which religious scholars, leaders, and communities can curtail religious persecution in Indonesia; the method includes: personal encounter; discussion of the scholarly agenda; a public engagement through dialogue that leads to commitment; and finally, the appeal of prayer and ritual.

The development of an assault patient questionnaire to allow accident and emergency departments to contribute to Crime and Disorder Act local crime audits

Objective—To evaluate and refine an assault patient questionnaire to facilitate the contribution of accident and emergency (A&E) departments to Crime and Disorder Act local crime audits. Method—A brief nine item...