Sociology of Violence: Definition

January 5th, 2008 Posted in

INTRODUCTION
As a teacher violence was my most successful course. A lot of students. A low absentee rate. My approach: to remain objective under all circumstances and to emphasize context. My presentation was not as convincing or as elegant as I wanted, but that is not an unusual complaint. Working violence is like searching for the great white whale. Woe to the one who gets close enough to grapple with it.

THE SLAP
Remember the woman slapping the man. My experience of it is mainly literary. It does not happen much anymore but is still a favored, even stereotyped, action in the movies. As I recall, they are in formal dress at a large gathering. The focus is tight on them, face to face. He, sometimes the villain, makes a lewd proposition or says something that disparages her honor and she hauls off and slaps the side of his face with her open hand. Smack, a loud noise, and everyone looks. He smiles insolently and walks off. Or maybe if he is an Anglo he will consider but then reject hitting her back. But if he is a cad he might. Her Latin lover would be seriously tempted. Watch it! Not too hard unless she has a mean character and a rough edge. If the members of the pair are emotionally involved but have never revealed feelings to each other, her slap might be confession of passion and they could fall into each other’s arms in a big moment of love and heat. Right on. An established cultural form. Variability in outcome depending on the governing social organization that tells us who the actors are–their prior histories and their current relationships. And do not forget the interaction as it rolls-out. Seemingly simple, yet actually complex. A violent incident

AS FOR ME, I DON’T LIKE VIOLENCE
In the mid-1970’s at a college that specialized in police science. We had a very large class, maybe close to sixty people. Many were mature police officers or prison guards and a few of the younger ones seemed to have experience of the other side of the law. A class of cops and robbers.

I had not made a special study of the subject but I had great confidence, which I obviously still entertain, that I could apply a sociological attitude to any human activity. I also had the usual previous experience with violence. I had been involved in military combat operations. Nothing heavy except for the casualties. A few shots and shells, minded fields and roads. And I had pegged a few shots toward the other. I had the usual fundamental experience with firearms and hand-to-hand fighting in training. Later I spent a dreary winter with the military police as a guard in a prison filled with American rapists, deserters, thugs. Obstreperous career criminals: with escapes, flourishing of arms, some men shackled hand and foot, others in solitary confinement on bread and water. And back in civilian life I had worked in a drug rehabilitation program most of whose clients were tough convicted felons. In my youth I had a little experience with street fisticuffs and had witnessed a few student riots. With all this, throughout my life I have disliked violence and avoided involvement in its expression as much as possible.

Violence at its most grotesque and disgusting, for most of us sociologists, is a solid immovable wall that confronts and defeats the requirement that we be scientific, objective and value neutral. You can viscerally feel the contradiction and the refusal. The clash of the actively moral with the logic of the method. Still we continue as though this knot of rejection does not exist and we hope that there is something to learn and this is the way through to that possibility. You will note however that I avoid the more egregious cases of injury and death. I tend to avert my eyes at the scene of horrific action.

THE QUICK. VIOLENCE IS WITHIN THE LIVING
The source of man’s violence is within his biological and associated psychological nature. We are alive and animal and our behavior has an instinctual quality that is close to that of our fellow beasts, but we tend to hide and deny our basics, at least in public. I am not complaining only observing. The act of eating is destructive. The use of the hands and teeth to kill, grind, and breakdown the vegetable and animal victims, those violent acts that we cover with etiquette and good manners. Our strong aggressive feelings cannot be denied. We are not unfamiliar with competitive striving for sexual and other favors. The fight or flight response of the intended victim. No joke in that moment. There is also the cooperative hunting and destroying ventures, something like that of wolves and dogs in packs. Maybe we are imitating them or maybe there is a primeval joy in this togetherness. The instinctual defense of our young. All resonate in our human experience. We have the capacity for violence in our physiology: hands, feet; the solid impact of the body against the other.

From psychology we get another hint: violence is just another form of aggression. The energy of being alive and having to act within an environment requires a push outward. Violence is merely a higher intensity aggression.

This capacity for violence doesn’t specify the variety of forms that our violent behavior can take. We are all, in our differing cultures, human with very similar biological capacities, but our violent forms are quite distinct. Some scarify their bodies. Some take scalps as trophies. Some favor stealth, others direct attack. Some anger quickly, others slowly. Who and when and where and how and with whom vary. The biological and psychological push can go off in all directions. The road map, giving the choices we make and those we reject, is the social and cultural paradigm. The sociology is in the ritual and in the pattern of behavior.

EVEN THE GOOD ARE VIOLENT
Toward definition. Traditionally violence is studied from the egocentric perception that it is only significant in so far as one finds it directed at himself. I am in danger from street crime and unruly public behavior and I want the threat to stop. I study the people who place me in danger or make me uncomfortable so they can be thwarted. Anyone whose neighborhood has been under criminal attack would certainly understand and identify with this wish.

Part of this popular approach is to evaluate violent behavior as immoral and unethical. So the same exact behavior might or might not be violent depending upon whether the participants or the observers see it as either good or bad. The policeman attacking and restraining a perpetrator is enacting a social good while the same act by the perpetrator against the police is not, unless perhaps we can get and accept the opinion of the perpetrator himself.

The humanistic way to violence is to emphasize the macabre, grotesque, Gothic, exaggerated, and madness beyond knowing. The violent concept here engenders a delicious fear in the distant observer. It is like the appeal of the Saturday midnight horror movie. The exhibited others, destroyer and destroyed, are surrogates for the self in confronting the inflated images of pain and death.

All these types of definition are satisfying and make moral, egoistic, and aesthetic sense but block out a large chunk of our subject; specifically the acts of the good, moral and beautiful that lead to pain, destruction, injury and death. What we refuse to see we cannot analyze. Instead of hiding them we have to insist that these psychological and cultural attitudes of refusal can be a significant part of what we study. Within the context of violence they can be strong legs for our analysis and our understanding. So we need an all-inclusive definition that will trap our subject in all of its variety. Let us try with the following…

A violent action is one that has a significant probability of inflicting injury or death on another or that has a significant probability of resulting in psychological trauma such as humiliation, shock, fear, anxiety.

Note that we have not included the intention of the actor. With intention included we would usually drop out accidents or errors. But subjective reports have some probability of being mischaracterizations. They can be self-serving and involve a conflict of interest. The dart sometimes misses the board entirely.

We have not totally specified the identity of the ego or the alter, the subject and object under danger. It could be an animal as well as a human or any life form in general or we could expand the alter to include inanimate material objects–furniture, houses, crops, flags and so on. It could be stretched to include symbols and ideals. In some societies people can be charged with sacrilege, intellectual damage to a revered ideal. This could also be argued as a psychological attack upon the one who values the symbol. The alter as self is, of course, the case of ego attacking himself, committing suicide.

Possibility of the objectified other who is not granted feelings and intentions similar to ego’s own. This question of degree of objectification can shift the interactive sequence toward pure engineering, pure rational action. E. Franklin Frazier has called this refusal to see the human other as part of the moral order as a conflict at the biological level. In the encounter life and death are in the balance. This ultimate possibility, in general, is the frame for any violent event, even the sweet slap of the lovely woman.

Making the definition broader or narrower would depend upon the particular social sector we observe. In general I would opt for the most inclusive definition. Exceptions can be made later as required.

We will continue with this topic in future posts.