Theory Of Violence Research Articles

The reflective process of the perpetrator: representations of rape in novels of C.N. Adichie and V.T. Nguyen

ABSTRACT This article examines a new iteration of the representation of rape that is centered on the perspective of the perpetrator of sexual violence. By outlining advances in feminist discourses, critical men’s studies, and literary criticism, this article situates the current development within a tradition of theory and representations of sexual violence, which is followed by the author’s reading of rape in The Sympathizer (2015) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Narrated as men who slide into passivity in the build-up to rape, the protagonists of these novels are at the same time not condoned and learn to accept their guilt, shame, and responsibility. These representations follow established literary conventions of repression and silence, but then move beyond the unspoken to a constant articulation of the meaning of rape for the perpetrator. Following calls for contextually sensitive approaches to the study of violent men, this article explores how both novels narrate the perpetrator’s circumstances, choices, reflection, and growing awareness of the implications of rape. The meanings of rape for perpetrators, as represented in fiction, and their potential to create narratives with which to combat sexual violence are discussed.

The power of non-violence: Silmiya & the Sudanese Revolution

ABSTRACT This research explores the 2018 revolution in Sudan to assess the extent to which the adoption of non-violence led to a more successful revolution and set Sudan on a path of democratic governance. It investigates the revolution’s main slogan, Silmiya, coming from the Arabic word Salam meaning ‘peace’. Thus, the nature and function of non-violence as well as what motivates people to resort to non-violence will be considered. The research acts as a point of departure from Fanon’s theory of violence arguing that violence is revolutionary and liberating. Ultimately, the research challenges normative frameworks on the necessity of violence for social movements to succeed as Fanon theorises, sheds light on the power of non-violence, and highlights the importance of re-examining characteristics historically associated with non-violence, such as passivity or weakness.

Randall Collins’ micro-sociology, the Southern culture of honor, and the codes of violence pathway: Toward a general theory of violence

One of Randall Collins' principal theoretical projects is the advancement of a general theory of violence. The central framing mechanism driving Collins approach is the concept of confrontational tension/fear, and the various pathways a social actor might utilize to overcome its debilitating effects. Collins' approach successfully accounts for violence on a micro-situational level but struggles with macro-level variance in rates of violence, such as higher incidents of violence in cultures of honor. Since a general theory must account for violence on multiple conceptual levels, Collins' pathways around confrontational tension/fear need further development to establish those macro-cultural connections necessary for continued theoretical advancement. To that end, I suggest his micro-sociological theory of violence can bridge with cultures of honor by incorporating the seminal work of Elijah Anderson's code of the street into a “codes of violence pathway.” This “codes of violence pathway” expands the theoretical purchase of Collins' approach by reasserting the importance of sociological influences on individual behavior in situated action and, therefore, provides a mechanism to ground micro-behavior in a macro-cultural context.

An Interpretation of Femicide in Mexico: Violence and Human Rights

This paper studies the problem of femicide in Mexico, through three axes: violence, femicide and human rights. We interpret this phenomenon using Johan Galtung’s theory of violence as a framework, paired with concepts from Bourdieu, Segato, Lagarde and Russell, with whom he agrees in regards of the multiplicity of elements, levels and scopes of violence, but that also complement the voids in his original theory. We seek to unveil the divers dimensions in which femicidal violence operates, as well as its negative consequences, direct and collateral damages, and its multiple victims. Our theoretical approach intends to provide certain guidelines to reflect and humanize the victims, and also a deeper understanding of the contexts where it happens, emphasizing that these crimes eliminate women’s subjectivity and desensitize society, as such they are violations of women’s Human Rights.

Title: Randall Collins’ Micro-Sociology, the Southern Culture of Honor, and the Codes of Violence Pathway: Toward a General Theory of Violence

Title: Randall Collins’ Micro-Sociology, the Southern Culture of Honor, and the Codes of Violence Pathway: Toward a General Theory of Violence

Instagram as One of Generation Z's Choice of Health Information Sources in Indonesia

Social media is a communication tool that can disseminate or spread a culture, including YouTube. It has become a meeting place for various people from different backgrounds. However, YouTube becomes an arena where dominant groups exercise power over other groups. Trans TV company has the capital that can create a habitus that oppresses other groups. Through the ‘Ngobrol Asal' program, Trans TV tries to maintain its position. The program indicates the existence of symbolic violence against people with disabilities. Disability discrimination issues have been in the spotlight throughout history. Through the modernization of communication tools, discrimination of persons with disabilities occurs smoothly. Komeng, the actor, performs a comedy that refers to the symbolic violence against Daus Mini as a person with a disability whose limitations turn into a joke that indirectly impacts the negative perception of people with disabilities. This study uses qualitative research methods. This study uses the perspective of Stuart Hall's Representation Theory to reveal the meaning of the scene and Bourdieu's Theory of Symbolic Violence to explain comedic content, which is an arena for the practice of symbolic violence. The results of this study indicate the existence of symbolic violence in the 'Ngobrol Asal' program. This can be seen in Komeng's jokes, representing Daus Mini as a small child who cannot contribute to society. The limitation of Daus Mini as the actor is interpreted as a disgrace to the family or the surrounding environment. Trans TV as a capital owner, uses YouTube as a battle arena to maintain its position, regardless of the impact on people with disabilities.
 Keywords: Symbolic violence, Disability, YouTube, Trans TV, Representation

Symbolic Violence against Persons with Disabilities in the Trans TV Official Program Ngobrol Asal on YouTube

Social media is a communication tool that can disseminate or spread a culture, including YouTube. It has become a meeting place for various people from different backgrounds. However, YouTube becomes an arena where dominant groups exercise power over other groups. Trans TV company has the capital that can create a habitus that oppresses other groups. Through the ‘Ngobrol Asal' program, Trans TV tries to maintain its position. The program indicates the existence of symbolic violence against people with disabilities. Disability discrimination issues have been in the spotlight throughout history. Through the modernization of communication tools, discrimination of persons with disabilities occurs smoothly. Komeng, the actor, performs a comedy that refers to the symbolic violence against Daus Mini as a person with a disability whose limitations turn into a joke that indirectly impacts the negative perception of people with disabilities. This study uses qualitative research methods. This study uses the perspective of Stuart Hall's Representation Theory to reveal the meaning of the scene and Bourdieu's Theory of Symbolic Violence to explain comedic content, which is an arena for the practice of symbolic violence. The results of this study indicate the existence of symbolic violence in the 'Ngobrol Asal' program. This can be seen in Komeng's jokes, representing Daus Mini as a small child who cannot contribute to society. The limitation of Daus Mini as the actor is interpreted as a disgrace to the family or the surrounding environment. Trans TV as a capital owner, uses YouTube as a battle arena to maintain its position, regardless of the impact on people with disabilities.
 Keywords: Symbolic violence, Disability, YouTube, Trans TV, Representation

Agresores Sexuales que Cometen su Primer Delito cuando Son Mayores. ¿Un Problema del Ciclo Vital? Ó

Sexual offences are common among the older segment of the offender population. Frequently, these sexual crimes were committed at an older age and were offenders’ first known criminal offence. These men are labelled in scientific literature as “first-time older sex offenders”. Their existence is difficult to explain through contemporary sexual violence theories, which correlate the influence of risk factors with an early age. This paper reviews the existing research about older sex offenders and its implications with the phenomenon of first-time older sex offenders. This area has been primarily focused on psychopathological and neuropsychological variables, neglecting the explanatory role of factors such as the way individuals cope with psychosocial and sexual changes associated with normal ageing. Furthermore, limitations of the risk assessment procedures used with older sex offenders, and their implications for professional decision making are also analyzed.

Is Violence, Violence no Matter Where it Strikes? Adjudicated Boys, Thwarted Belongingness, Perceived Burdensomeness, and Acquired Capability for Suicide.

This study explores treating violence against others as a precursor to self-directed violence. It tests the utility of including violence against others in the measure of acquired capability to test assumptions from the interpersonal theory of violence. Four theoretical hypotheses are assessed that are consistent with the theory: (1) thwarted belongingness (parental abandonment and rejection) and perceived burdensomeness (exposure to parental interpersonal violence and child abuse) independently increase the likelihood of suicidal ideation; (2) the interaction of thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness increases the likelihood of suicidal ideation controlling for other pertinent variables; (3) the three-way interaction of thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness, and acquired capability (violence against others and prior suicidal attempts) increases the likelihood of suicidal attempts controlling for other pertinent variables; and (4) self-harm responds to the theoretical variables and similarly, to attempts. Subjects are court-adjudicated males (ages 13-18) who were residents for up to 1year at the Ocean Tides School and rehabilitation center from 1975-2019. The data span 44years and include 2195 youth. Depression, drug/alcohol use, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and interaction terms between SES and race and SES and ethnicity are also examined. Backward conditional logistic regression analyses find mixed support for the hypotheses, but strong support for including violence against others in the concept of acquired capability. Support is also found for conceptualizing child abuse and exposure to parental interpersonal violence as perceived burdensomeness in tests of this theory as well as measures of depression. Major implications for programming in the treatment and rehabilitation of delinquent boys include conceptualizing and approaching violence against others as a precursor to suicidal attempts and other self-directed harm.

Theorising violence in mobility: A case of Nepali women migrant workers

In this article, I examine violence as constitutive of mobility for the feminine diasporic subject through an examination of women migrant workers from Nepal. I frame this project with two distinct theoretical approaches to understanding violence. First, I draw upon Catharine MacKinnon's provocative question ‘Are women human?’ to elucidate points of disjuncture between individual women migrants and state policy that dehumanises them. Second, I address some of the gaps in MacKinnon's work by turning to Judith Butler's theory of violence as primarily embodied in the corporeal subject. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with returned women migrant workers, I examine three moments in the migration process that demonstrate how violence operates ubiquitously in and through circuits of mobility. I conclude that by putting Butler's and Mackinnon's approaches to violence in dialogue and examining the Nepali case through a dialectic framework, intriguing possibilities for approaching migration and its problematics are revealed.

"For the Dead cannot Shrive me Now”: Gender Violence, Precariousness and the Neo-Victorian Gothic in Katy Darby’s The Whores’ Asylum (2012)

Katy Darby’s neo-Victorian novel The Whores’ Asylum (2012) is set in Oxford in the 1880s. The Gothic plays an important role in the process of re-writing the Victorian period as a mirror of our contemporary societies where depravity and lack of humanity co-exist with modernity and civilisation. The protagonists—Stephen, Edward and Diana—are involved in the process of showing sympathy for the lives and deaths of the destitute and the dispossessed. Under the stance of Judith Butler’s theories of mourning and violence, my analysis has a two-fold aim: to discuss issues of the Victorian past such as venereal disease, prostitution and gender violence in the text, and to question to what extent the novel can be an attempt to hear the voices of the victims of sexual exploitation, giving them restoration and agency. However, my conclusion is that the text does not grant the victims of sexual exploitation real voice or agency.

Land, Opportunism, and Displacement in Civil Wars: Evidence from Colombia

It is common for combatants to deliberately force civilians to flee their homes, resulting in incalculable loss for millions around the world. Existing accounts suggest combatants displace civilians whom they suspect are loyal to their opponents. And yet violence is also frequently motivated by local actors taking advantage of war to pursue private interests unrelated to wartime loyalties. However, little evidence exists of these dynamics with respect to displacement. Drawing on theories of opportunistic violence, I test an account in which surges in demand for land create incentives for elites to prey on peasants for their land. Combining new municipal and survey data from the Colombian armed conflict, I find evidence that the expansion of a land-intensive industry—African palm oil—precipitated opportunistic displacement by elites and paramilitary allies. The results demonstrate how elites can take advantage of war to engage in private accumulation and have implications for transitional justice policy.

The myth of medical multiculturalism: how social closure marginalises traditional Chinese medicine in New Zealand

ABSTRACT This article uses neo-Weberian social closure theory and Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence to examine the epistemic tension between biomedicine and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), a country that aspires to a multicultural model of healthcare. Drawing on interviews with TCM practitioners and analysis of TCM practitioners’ attempt to become a regulated profession, we argue that a multicultural health model remains a myth as biomedical stakeholders deploy material and symbolic forms of social closure that limit the scope of TCM practice. Discourses of the need for scientific evidence, public safety, qualification standards and English language fluency undermine the culturally distinctive but pragmatic forms of medicine that TCM practitioners utilise. This has implications for TCM as practitioners are denied public funding, their scope of practice is limited, and the expectations for TCM to conform to a biomedical model of healthcare have created tensions within the TCM community.

Market development, state formation, and the historical abolition of the debtors’ prison

In the late 18th century, lenders’ right to imprison borrowers for defaulting on debts was taken for granted. By the mid-19th century, this power was widely and permanently revoked. Using a variety of archival evidence, this study explains the historical demise of the debtors’ prison in New York State, the first Western jurisdiction to permanently abolish imprisonment for debt. Tracing seven decades of contestation over moral aspects of credit exchange and incarceration, it shows that the development of capitalist markets, including their cultural and technological consequences, was necessary but not sufficient to render the debtor's prison obsolete. Rather, the development of a liberal polity and a penal state institutionalized new moral views about the use of force in economic exchange, consolidating the legitimacy of bodily detention around the punishment of crimes rather than the coercion of private agreements. The analysis has implications for theories of states, markets, and violence, as well as for recent trends in penal debt, debt resistance, and prison abolition.

“Systemic, Transhistoric, Institutionalized, and Legitimized Antipathy”: Epistemic and Sexual Violence inA Girl Is a Half-formed ThingandMilkman

AbstractThis article concerns the interrelations of epistemic and physical gendered violence in two award-winning contemporary Irish novels, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and Milkman (2018) by Eimear McBride and Anna Burns, respectively. It argues that patriarchal naming power which defines women as sexual objects is inextricable from the physical violence featured in both texts. Using theories of violence and naming, it examines how, faced with a climate of constant and submerged sexual threat, “middle sister” (as the narrator is called) and “Girl” (the protagonist of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing) attempt to appropriate dominant patriarchal narratives to retain subjectivity in the face of violence. While “middle sister” comes to recognize and articulate the violence done to her, Girl’s internalization of violence leads to the annihilation of both self and body.

The Ideology and Agency of Kosovar Albanian Marxist Groups in the Demonstrations of 1981

Abstract The author explores the ideological underpinning and political goals of Kosovar Marxist-Leninist groups and examines their role in the 1981 demonstrations in Kosovo. She contextualizes these events against the backdrop of theories of revolutionary violence that were prevalent in Kosovar Albanian Marxist groups. Describing the position of Albanians within socialist Yugoslavia, she traces the formation of these groups of dissidents and their support of Hoxhaism—following the political views of the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha. Hoxhaist propaganda shaped anti-Yugoslav dissidence to a certain extent, and the author throws light on the nationalist incentive to support Hoxhaism. She contextualizes Yugoslavia’s response to the demonstrations as an act of coercive violence aimed at stemming events that the Yugoslav officials perceived to be both counter-revolutionary and to presage the rise of nationalism.

Working for Protection? Precarious Legal Inclusion of Afghan Nationals in Germany and Switzerland

AbstractThis paper engages with the violent conditions deriving from neoliberal trends in European migration and asylum governance. We explore how continuous precarity, in conjunction with an integration imperative, affects the lives of recently arrived Afghan refugees in Germany and Switzerland. Drawing on critical engagements with the politics of integration and theories of violence, we argue that, in both European countries, Afghans are increasingly forced to earn their right to remain on the basis of labour‐market performance instead of obtaining humanitarian protection. Based on qualitative interview data, we show that persons with a precarious legal status are urged to fulfil neoliberal integration requirements to avoid being deported to their country of citizenship. Employing the “continuum of violence” as an analytical entry point, we specify how the interplay and consequences of structural and cultural violence manifest in the way those affected navigate precarious living conditions and uncertain futures in receiving countries.

Adjustments to gang exposure in early adolescence

The article investigates how exposure to gang-affiliated peers affects social behaviors and attitudes of early adolescents. Much of the literature finds that exposure to gangs contributes to adolescents’ antisocial behaviors. According to other studies, however, gang exposure can also promote prosocial behaviors. The present article re-examines this contradictory evidence, exploring potential complementarity of both reactions to gangs. Using a survey of 1,782 adolescents aged ten to 13 from rural Colombia, I compare adolescents who are and are not in a school class with members of youth gangs. I exploit the fact that schools in rural Colombia are unsegregated. Moreover, the presence of youth gangs across these schools is linked to incidence of historic armed conflict rather than typical forms of social disadvantage. This comparative setting thus allows me to establish an unconfounded relationship between exposure to gang-affiliated classmates and social outcomes. The analysis reveals gender differences in the effect of youth gang exposure. I find that girls react to male gang classmate by increased involvement in prosocial organizations. Boys, by contrast, adjust to male gangs by expressing more antisocial attitudes. There are no gender differences in the effect of gang classmates on alcohol consumption (an indicator of antisocial behavior). The article shows that the well-documented antisocial adjustments to gangs are – population-wide – complemented by prosocial adjustments, with gender being a key moderator. I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of violence and social change after conflict.

Conflict, Protection, and Punishment: Repercussions of Violence in Eastern DR Congo

AbstractHow does armed conflict affect attitudes that tolerate violence against women? This article examines the effects of armed violence on preferences for punishing crimes against women using original quantitative data from 80 focus groups across 20 villages in Democratic Republic of Congo and a matched pair design. Challenging unidirectional logics within theories of violence against women, the data reveal that local exposure to armed violence increases how severely men prefer to punish rape while decreasing how severely men and women prefer to punish domestic violence. Building inductively, I develop a theory of protective masculine norms to account for armed conflict's gendered and crime‐specific effects. When armed violence heightens demand for local male protection, crimes perceived to pose a community threat are affected differently from “private” crimes.

What goes around comes around: The loop of physical teen dating violence perpetration among Turkish adolescents.

Compared to Western literature, little is known about teen dating violence perpetration (DVP) in Turkey. One risk factor of physical teen DVP may lie within teens' witnessing interparental physical violence perpetration and subsequent accepting attitudes toward physical partner violence as a risk factor. Informed by the intergenerational transmission (IGT) of violence theory, we investigated attitudes toward physical partner violence as a likely mechanism that might account for the association between witnessing interparental physical violence perpetration and physical teen DVP. In a sample of 242 Turkish teens, the prevalence of teen DVP was 32.0% for females and 28.4% for males, with no significant gender difference. The results of the moderated mediation analyses confirmed the hypothesized model for men only. IGT of violence theory offers good guidance in understanding the etiology of physical teen DVP. For prevention practices, accepting attitudes toward physical partner violence seems a hurdle that needs to be breached.