Violence In America Research Articles

Book Review: Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America

Book Review: Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America

Violence

This book presents the complex problem of violence in America using a question-and-answer format to address selected topics: child abuse, youth violence, spouse and domestic abuse, rape and sexual assault, murder, and suicide. An important set of questions and answers deals with guns.

“Maybe the Coach Deserved Choking”: Latrell Sprewell and the Politics of Violence in America

“Maybe the Coach Deserved Choking”: Latrell Sprewell and the Politics of Violence in America

Book ReviewsCrime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America.By Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 272. $35.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America. By Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 272. $35.00.Gary Kleck Gary KleckFlorida State University Search for more articles by this author Florida State UniversityPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 104, Number 5March 1999 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/210191 Views: 19Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Rick Ruddell, Noelle E. Fearn Simplistic Explanations are the Problem: Crime, Homicide, and the Zimring–Hawkins Proposition, Criminal Justice Studies 19, no.44 (Dec 2006): 323–336.https://doi.org/10.1080/14786010601083652

Black Civil Violence and White Social Science: Sense and Nonsense

Some thirty years ago, the Kerner Commission report explained the outbursts of urban violence in America’s Black ghettos as caused by Black deprivation wrought by white racism. In its rendition of the Black experience through four hundred years of American racism and its description of the conditions in the urban ghettos of the 1960s, the report is worthy of the acclaim it has received. In its analysis of the causal factors that led to the riots, the report attempts to appeal to intuition but falls far short of making a case on the basis of any remote standard of causal analysis. Indeed, the report strikingly resembles the academic studies that have invoked relative and absolute deprivation theories to explain the American urban riots of the 1960s and which have repeatedly collapsed under the scrutiny of basic considerations of social science methodology. The causes of riots might as aptly fall into situational explanations, including the pattern of police response, as they fall into theoretical ones. While social scientists debate such issues, policy makers have had to respond to the realities of riots, both in terms of causes and effects. Surprisingly, many policy makers, irrespective of their own ideologies and notions of causes, when dealing with America’s urban riots, appear to have come to the same general conclusions about the policies that need to be implemented to prevent future racial crises. Looking at these responses, as well as both the idiosyncratic and common attributes of riots, this paper suggests reconceptualizing and rethinking the nature of riots so as to move toward a better understanding of this type of racial crisis.

Violence in the emergency department

PREVIEWThe growing trend of violence in America's emergency departments (EDs) has the medical community on alert. Many hospitals have implemented security protocols, but the very nature of the ED environment makes it vulnerable to violence that jeopardizes the safety of staff and patients. Dr Kuhn discusses management of violent patients as well as safety measures and prevention of dangerous situations.

Beside the golden door: policy, politics, and the homeless

James Wright's Address Unknown: The Homeless in America focused on the problem of homelessness during the mid-to-late 1980s, making an important contribution to the then-emerging public debate of a rapidly growing and increasingly visible social problem. Beside the Golden Door updates the story and our knowledge of homelessness through the middle 1990s, advancing the thesis that an emphasis on factors such as mental illness or substance abuse is descriptively accurate but fails as a causal account of the rise of homelessness as a social problem. The authors reject efforts to cast the issue in either-or terms, as social structure versus individual deficiencies, arguing that poverty and housing trends have created a situation where some people are destined to be homeless, but personal factors such as mental illness or substance abuse are critical in predicting who those people turn out to be. Beside the Golden Door details numerous dimensions of the homelessness issue: the rise in poverty; the decline of low-income housing; conceptual, measurement, and practical problems of counting the homeless and the Census Bureau's ill-fated 1990 effort to do so; the role of familial estrangement, mental illness, and substance abuse; and health status and behaviors. It concludes with discussions and comparisons of rural versus urban homelessness, street children in North and Latin America, and homelessness in post-industrial societies. The material in Beside the Golden Door will be accessible to undergraduate students and interested lay readers as well as specialists. Both the content and style of this book make an excellent instructive read for students, practitioners, and scholars, alike.--Social Forces James D. Wright is Charles and Leo Favrot Professor of Human Relations, Department of Sociology, Tulane University and author of over thirteen books including Address Unknown and Crime and Violence in America. Beth A. Rubin is associate professor, Department of Sociology, Tulane University. She is the author of Shifts in the Social Contract: Understanding Change in American Society. Joel A. Devine is professor, Department of Sociology, Tulane University, and coauthor of The Greatest of Evils: Urban Poverty and the American Underclass.

The Allen priority/consequence model as a behavioral approach to reduction of high risk behavior in youth

Youth violence in America has grown to insurmountable levels. Homicide is now the third leading cause of death for youth ages 5–14, the second leading cause of death for those ages 15–24 and the number one cause of death among black males ages 15–34. With increased levels of violence and senseless killings across the nation, there is a need to explore behavioral and environmental causes of high risk behavior and various types of interventions to decrease antisocial behavior. Violence prevention should be approached comprehensively from a myriad of approaches and levels of prevention and intervention that should infiltrate individuals, homes, schools, communities and systems. Numerous types of theories are being designed, implemented and evaluated to decrease and prevent unhealthy behaviors. While there is a need to continue to refine intervention and containment strategies, a preventative approach to addressing root causes of antisocial behaviors needs to be considered as we comprehensively look at interventions for violence prevention. The purpose of this article is to add to the body of research a theory, the Priority/ Consequence model, which depicts interrelated dynamic behavioral and societal variables that can influence, positively or negatively, attitudes, values and beliefs that establish prioritized behaviors that produce consequences.

Family violence: implications for the pediatrician.

1. Jane F. Knapp, MD* 2. M. Denise Dowd, MD MPH† 1. 2. *Director, Division of Emergency Medical Services, Children’s Mercy Hospital; Professor of Pediatrics 3. 4. †Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, Kansas City, MO. 1. Primary prevention should have the highest priority in attempting to eliminate family violence. 2. A high percentage of mothers of abused children are themselves victims of battering. 3. Children who witness violence are at risk for the same psychosocial and developmental sequelae as children who are the direct victims of abuse. 4. The pediatrician may identify family violence through screening. 5. The pediatrician can be an advocate for the prevention and management of family violence. There is no escape from violence in America, even for children. Public health leaders have identified violence as a problem of epidemic proportions. Family violence has been described as endemic; its existence is a constant feature of many American families, with the home as its major setting. Family violence accounts for at least 21,000 hospitalizations, 99,800 hospital days, 28,700 emergency department (ED) visits, and 39,000 physician visits each year. The United States Department of Justice estimates that from 1987 to 1990, the aggregate cost of domestic violence amounted to$ 67 billion per year. Losses due to violence against children exceed$ 164 billion annually. In 1962, Dr Henry Kempe raised the consciousness of the nation and pediatricians to the problem of child abuse with the publication of his paper “The Battered Child Syndrome.” Over the subsequent decades, pediatricians have become well educated and familiar with the problems of child abuse, sexual assault, and neglect. Yet, overwhelming evidence indicates that violence in childhood is much more complex than abuse and neglect. Children are exposed to violence in their communities and in their homes. Children suffer from witnessing violence in a variety of ways, including the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Children also are the perpetrators of violence. For pediatricians, this realization means that to have a significant effect on both the short-term and long-term consequences of violence, we cannot view …

Christian Violence in America

As the millennium approaches, the wave of antimodernism that has brought violent movements of religious nationalism in its wake around the world has arrived at America's shores. In the United States, attacks on abortion clinics, the killing of abortion clinic staff, and the destructive acts of members of Christian militia movements are chilling examples of assaults on the legitimacy of modern social and political institutions, based on the theological frameworks of reconstruction theology and Christian Identity thinking. These examples of Christian militancy present a religious perception of warfare and struggle in what is perhaps the most modern of twentieth-century societies. The secular political order of America is imagined to be trapped in vast satanic conspiracies involving spiritual and personal control. This perception provides Christian activists with both the justification and the obligation to use violent means to fulfill their understanding of the country's Christian mission—and at the same time offers a formidable critique of Enlightenment society and a reassertion of the primacy of religion in public life.

Violence in America: coping with drugs, distressed families, inadequate schooling, and acts of hate

Today's culture of violence affects everyone. Dr. Flannery, a clinical psychologist and author of Preventing Youth Violence--to date the only reliable and substantive book of its kind--as well as four other books for the general reader on stress and its most extreme manifestation, posttraumatic stress disorder, offers causes as well as inspiring solutions in this timely book.

Youth Violence in America

Youth Violence in America

Violence in America: Lessons on understanding the aggression in our lives, by Arnold P. Goldstein. Palo Alto, Calif, Davis-Black Publishing, 1996, xiii + 270 pp.

Violence in America: Lessons on understanding the aggression in our lives, by Arnold P. Goldstein. Palo Alto, Calif, Davis-Black Publishing, 1996, xiii + 270 pp.

Book Review: Preventing Violence in America

Book Review: Preventing Violence in America

Violence in America: A Survey of Suicide Linked to Homicides

This paper describes murder-suicide in the United States from 1990 through 1995, using the cases reported in six major newspapers. Spousal murder-suicide was the predominant type with a range of 42%-57%; familicide-suicide was the second predominant type with a range of 22%-47%. The perpetrators were predominantly males; the victims were female sexual partners or consanguineous relatives. Firearms (guns) were used in 90% of the cases. The author concludes that a national surveillance system that specifically identifies and codes this phenomenon, and multi disciplinary studies are necessary to hinder this phenomenon.

Applying Science to Violence Prevention

Violence in America runs the risk of becoming endemic at very high levels. Each year, approximately 25500 people die from homicide and 31000 die from suicide in the United States.¹Violence is the second leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 years and the leading cause of death for young African Americans in this age group.²Adolescents and young adults are disproportionately represented among the victims and perpetrators of violence in our society. The average age of both violent offenders and victims has been growing younger and younger in recent years.³Youth interpersonal violence is also closely associated with the problems of child abuse and neglect, dating violence, substance abuse, suicide, and violence against women.⁴Because research suggests that violence is also transmitted from one generation to the next⁵and that aggressive children tend to become violent

Preventing Violence in America

Professor Health Promotion and Gerontology University of Texas Medical Branch School of Allied Health Sciences Galveston, Texas

Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder From the Frontier to the Inner City

Violence The thesis of Violent Land is that violence in America is best explained as a consequence of a surplus of single and violence could be reduced if more young men were to marry and raise families. The author, David T. Courtwright, a professor of history at the University of North Florida, acknowledges that alcohol, racism, honor, and social influences on young men have contributed to their involvement in a disproportionate number of violent incidents throughout US history, but he argues that the root cause of these incitements to violence has something to do with being single. Consequently, says Courtwright, marriage and family life can shape, control, and sublimate the energies of young men, thereby reducing violence. It may sound like wishful thinking, but Courtwright is dead serious. To support his case, Courtwright has amassed a wealth of historical anecdotes and perspectives from anthropology, biology, criminology, demography, epidemiology, psychology,

Preventing Violence in America.

Several recent theoretical models for human spatial vision posit that cortical receptive fields act to minimize simultaneously the product of the standard deviation of the sensitivities to position (Δx) and to spatial frequency (Δω) in accord with the uncertainty principle from Fourier analysis. The receptive-field functions resulting from this approach—one-dimensional or two-dimensional Gabor elementary functions—have been shown by others to fit measured receptive fields adequately in some species. However, only complex-valued Gabor functions minimize this product, and these cannot be fitted to single-cell receptive fields. We point out that the derivations of others have an implied metric or measure of positional and spatial-frequency uncertainties and that there is an infinitely large class of such metrics, many of which yield other receptive-field functions that are quite plausible biologically. We review neurophysiological measurements of others and analyze psychophysical masking data and find that in many cases receptive-field functions other than Gabor functions fit better. We conclude that there are insufficient theoretical demonstrations and experimental data to favor Gabor functions over any of a number of other plausible receptive-field functions.

Firearms and Fatalities

<h3>To the Editor.</h3> —The highly charged political debate over firearms and violence in America continues. As noted by Teret,¹there is little agreement about specific actions necessary to reduce violence in America, but there appears to be some agreement that more data are needed. The Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS) has been proposed as a model for data collection.²During this controversial debate, it is especially important for health care professionals to discuss what can reasonably be concluded from proposed data collection and to carefully consider such data prior to making recommendations. Since most automobile-related deaths are unintentional and most firearm-related deaths are intentional, it is likely that the 2 situations will be different. The interesting data in the article by Dr Hargarten and colleagues³fall short of supporting some of the authors' conclusions. Table 2 clearly shows that the most common firearm caliber associated with gun