Chapter 1: Defining Violence Flashcards
Types of Violence -
Instrumental
Violence is means to an end
Designed to improve financial or social position of the criminal
- Inheritance
Types of Violence -
Expressive
Violence that vents rage, anger or frustration
- Serves to fill internal/intrinsic desire
3 Interconnected Types of Violence
Interpersonal
Person to person
murder, rape
3 Interconnected Types of Violence
Institutional
Violence perpetrated in organizational settings (family violence, corporate, and workplace violence)
3 Interconnected Types of Violence
Structural Violence
Discriminatory social agreements in light of negative effects on life changes on particular groups
Jackman Ranges of Injurious Outcomes
- Psychological Outcomes
- Fear
- Anxiety
- Shame
- Low self esteem
Jackman Ranges of Injurious Outcomes -
Material Outcomes
- Destruction
- Confiscation
- Defacement of property
- Loss of earnings
- Loss of material goods
Jackman Ranges of Injurious Outcomes
- Social Outcomes
- Public humiliation
- Stigmatization
- Exclusion
- Imprisonment
- Banishment
Jackman Ranges of Injurious Outcomes
- Most Profound Effects
Most profound effects of physical violence are often nonphysical
Measuring Violence - 2 Significant Reasons
Important for 2 reasons
- Assuming that we as a society have mutually agreed on and accepted common definition of violence, any subsequent social or public response to violence requires knowledge of its scope, magnitude and location in society
- Measure themselves are grounded in actions, decisions & interpretations of individuals who measure it, very act of measurement itself is aspect of reality construction
UCR
- Police Stats
- Launched in 1961
- Applied to standard definition of all offences using the UCR manual and stats Canada
- Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics
^ collects & reports data - Collects information about each crime, greater detail.
- Information on victims, accused, and circumstances of the incident type
- Most police forces participate, reporting about 60% of crimes.
- But better analyses of crime trends
- Under this system, information is collected from more than 400 municipal police departments across Canada on 91 detailed categories of crime
- Annually, the government publishes data on types of offences and characteristics of offenders
UCR2
- 1984: revised UCR2 collects information about each crime; 148 police forces participate (90% of all crime)
^ More details of each crime (accused and victim characteristics) - Use of incident based date allows for a more specific sense of how and why offences occurs
Limitations of UCR
- Only most serious offence is counted when there is more than one offence involved in incident
- Each act is listed as a single offence for some crimes but not for others
CSI (crime severity index)
- Measure both volume and severity of police reported crime in Canada
- Created to reflect different rates in volume and seriousness of different crimes
- Assigns weight to different crimes so that large changes in less serious crimes do not unduly affect crime rates
Victim Surveys
Victimization surveys are used to measure the number of crimes not reported to the police.
United States since 1966, Canada since 1988
- Mainly telephone interviews
- Often include questions about fear of crime
Canadian Urban.
Victimization Survey (CUVS)
General Social Survey (GSS)
- Most violence & property crimes are not reported to police
- People only report crime which involves major loss or injury
Violence Against Women Survey (VAWS)
International Youth Survey
Advantages of Victimization Surveys
- Helps estimate unreported crime
- Helps explain why victim don’t report crime
- Provide information about impact of crime on victims and identifies populations at risk
Limitations of Victimization Surveys
- Underreporting (many crimes are forgotten by victims of seem insignificant)
- Repose bias (white more likely to report victimization than Blacks and University graduates more than the less educated)
Characteristics of Violent Victimization - 2014 GSS
- Women at higher risk than men of victims of violent crime
- Age was the key risk factor
- Drug use, binge drinking and frequency of evening activities were associated with risk of victimization
- Mental health risk factor
- People who suffered child maltreatment more likely to be victims
- People with history of homelessness more likely to being victimized
- Risk of violent victimization higher among people residing in neighbourhood with low social cohesion
- Members of the LGBT community recorded high victimization rates
- Aboriginal people, in particular women, were more likely to be victims
1. 4 of violent incidents took place at victim’s place of work - The majority of offenders were male and, on average, in their early thirties
- Most victims knew their attacker
- Most violent incidents did not involve weapons and did not result in physical injury
Self Report Surveys
- Asking people about crimes they may have committed
- Not necessarily reported to police
- Questions about subjects attitudes, values, personal characteristics and behaviours
- Information used for various purposes (measure attitudes toward criminal offences; examine relationships between crime and certain social variables)
- Used to measure prevalence of offending
Most focus on youth, drug offences, specific criminological subjects
Victimization Surveys
%’s
men (4%) and women (4%) are equal
but women are more sexually assaulted
men more physically assaulted
UCR 2019 violent crime
accounted for 1/5 (22%) of all criminal code offences (not including traffic offences)
Annual Increase 2019
11% rise per population (1,277 per 100,000)
largest annual increase in violent crime dating back to 1998
Violence Replicated in Different Spheres
Examples how violence overlaps in different contexts
- More society engages in ‘legitimate violence’ the more ‘illegitimate violence’ there will be
- ‘brutalization hypothesis’ which argues states with death penalty have higher rates of homicide than those that don’t; essentially argument says death penalty desensitizes society to killing and devalues human life which increases tolerance toward lethal behaviour
- War also found to increase rates of illegitimate violence, not just among returning soldiers in domestic realm, but within larger soceity as well. Study by Archer and Gartner found that most combatant nations experienced significant postwar increases in rates of homicide
Overlapping Violence (Macro/Micro)
Examples of people engaging in violence in multiple spheres would include:
- Athletes in violent/contact sports who commit violent crimes (e.g. sexual assault, domestic violence)
- Military and/or law enforcement officials and problem of domestic violence among its members
Overlapping Nature of Violence
Research consistently shows that violence is “connected by a web of actions, behaviours, ideas, perceptions and justifications.”
- Violence – despite how it is manifested – often committed for same kinds of reasons
- Perpetrator often sees violence as justified
- Violent behaviour often replicated in different spheres of one’s life (e.g. predictor of violence is history of violent behaviour)
- Violence overlaps in variety of situations (e.g. macro/micro linkages)
Definitions of Violence - Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
“exertion of physical force so as to injure or abuse…intense, turbulent, or furious and often destructive action or force.”
Definitions of Violence - National Panel on the Understanding & Control of Violent Behaviour
“behaviors by individuals that intentionally threaten, attempt, or inflict physical harm to others.”
Definitions of Violence - Newman
“a series of events, the course of which or the outcomes of which, cause injury or damage to persons or property.”
Definitions of Violence - Iadicola & Shupe
“Violence is any action or structural arrangement that results in physical or non-physical harm to one or more persons”
Strengths of Mainstream Violence Definitions
All definitions agree that violence and aggression are harmful.
- Differ in conceptualizing what kinds of harm count
Limitations of Mainstream Definitions
Violence is about injuring, damaging, destroying, or killing.
- Can be for constructive reasons, but always destructive
- Important to differentiate between intent and purpose of act and act itself
Jackman 4 Issues that Distort Understanding of Violence
Issues that Distort Understanding of Violence
1) the important of physical injuries vs. psychological, social, and material injuries
2) the weight placed on physical vs. verbal and written actions
3) the role of force vs. the victim complicity in the infliction of injuries
4) the emphasis on interpersonal vs. corporate agents and victims
Mary Jackman - Attempt to?
present “generic definition of violence that focuses unequivocally on the injuriousness of actions, detached from their social, moral, or legal standing”
Mary Jackman Argues?
Author argues that research on violence has been limited because of legal discourse and focus on forms of violence deemed socially deviant and motivated by willful malice
Jackman Range of Injurious Outcomes
All are highly consequential, sometimes devastating for human beings
- Most profound effects of physical violence often nonphysical
1) Physical
2) Material Outcomes
3) Psychological Outcomes
4) Social Outcomes
Jackman Injurious Behaviours - Physical
Emphasis on physically violent behaviour misleading because:
Verbal & written actions may also cause physical injuries
- Either directly or indirectly
Legalistic concept of agency holds individual physically responsible for act; ignores others who are equally complicit but further removed
Jackman Injurious Behaviours - Verbal & Written
Verbal & written actions can accomplish variety of non-physical injuries as well
- Actions that denigrate, defame, or humiliate individual/group inflicts significant psychological, social, or material injuries
- To some degree, law provides remedies for individual, not group
Jackman Definition of Violence
Actions that inflict, threaten, or cause injury.
Actions may be corporal, written, or verbal.
Injuries may be corporal, psychological, material or social
Importances of Statistics
Statistics reflect decisions by authorities and wider public on which criminal acts to report and which to ignore
- If for instance, the authorities decide to crack down on drugs, more drug-related crimes will be counted - not because more drug-related crimes are committee - but because more drug criminals are apprehended
- Changes in legislation, which either create new offences or amend existing offences, also will influence the number of recorded offences
UCR2 - Incident Based Data
Compared with aggregate (UCR) crime data, incident-based data provides data on specific factors, such as the location of the offence and the relationship.
What are Self-Report Surveys?
Respondents report on their own illegal activity anonymously.
- telephoned at home
- mailed or online surveys
Used with captive audience.
E.g. Students, prisoners
What do Self-Report Surveys show?
- Crime is universal, criminals are versatile.
- Common offences- truancy, soft drug and alcohol abuse, trespassing, shoplifting, fighting, property damage.
- Females are less likely to commit offences.
