Violence in Social Life

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Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2002. 28:387415doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.140936

Copyright c 2002 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

VIOLENCE IN SOCIAL LIFE

Mary R. JackmanDepartment of Sociology, University of California, Davis, California 95616;

e-mail: [email protected]

Key Words ideology, deviance, intent, injury

Abstract Two features have marked the sociological analysis of violence:(a) disparate clusters of research on various forms of violence that have been theobject of urgent social concern, and relatedly, (b) an overwhelming focus on formsof violence that are socially deviant and motivated by willful malice. The resultingliterature is balkanized and disjointed, and yet narrowly focused. The systematic un-derstanding of violence as a broad genus of social behavior has suffered accordingly.I examine the issues that have clouded the analysis of violence: the importance ofphysical injuries vs. psychological, social, and material injuries; the weight placed onphysical vs. verbal and written actions; the role of force vs. victim complicity in the in-fliction of injuries; and the emphasis on interpersonal vs. corporate agents and victims.

That discussion highlights the widely varying forms of violence in social life, includ-ing many instances that are neither driven by malicious intent nor socially repudiated.I consider the diverse motives that drive violent actions and the variant social accep-tance or repudiation that they meet. I propose a generic definition of violence, freed ofad hoc restrictions, that encompasses the full population of violent social actions. Thisdirects us to more systematic questions about violence in social life.

INTRODUCTION

The sociological analysis of violence has been driven by social and policy im-peratives that have molded and warped our understanding of it. Most sociologists

relegate violence to the domain of criminology and deviance, and, indeed, it is

there that one finds most of the pertinent research. Those forms of contemporary

violence that are illegal, socially deviant, popularly censured, or associated with

social conflict have elicited intense clusters of research, as have historical cases

of violence now viewed censoriously or attached to an historical moment of high

conflict. Various forms of criminal violence (homicide, assault, and more recently,

child abuse, intimate-partner violence against women, and sexual violence against

women) have been the primary targets of attention among sociologists, with eachinspiring disparate bodies of research. Other specialized bodies of research (pri-

marily among historians and political scientists) have evolved on such topics as

labor violence, violence in slavery, lynching, and urban civil violence. The result

is a research literature that is both specialized and balkanized. As researchers have

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delved into the immediate demands of their respective domains of inquiry, gap-

ing holes and inconsistencies have gone unnoticed. Much as some scholars have

bemoaned the lack of cohesion in research on violence (see, e.g., Ohlin & Tonry

1989; Weis 1989; Reiss & Roth 1993), most scholars have proceeded without hesi-tation as though the conceptual tangle had been cleared. Researchers commonly

refer to a phenomenon called violence that implies a clearly understood, generic

class of behaviors, and yet no such concept exists.

This research environment has spawned a conception of violence that is biased

and morally charged at the same time as it is clouded and unwieldy. Two overar-

ching assumptions have dominated the line of vision. First, violence is typically

assumed to be motivated by hostility and the willful intent to cause harm. Second,

it is usually assumed that violence is deviantlegally, socially, or morallyfrom

the mainstream of human activity. Although these assumptions are rarely stated ex-plicitly, that has not detracted from their influence. Violence has come to be viewed

as comprising eruptions of hostility that have bubbled over the normal boundaries

of social intercourse. When violence is motivated by positive intentions, or is the

incidental by-product of other goals, or is socially accepted or lauded, it escapes

our attention.

Beneath those framing assumptions lies a conceptual quicksand. Most re-

searchers have slipped into a set of working conventions about the specific defining

attributes of violence. Others have been silently pulled by the demands of their

subject matter into incorporating variant criteria. Alternative approaches coexistwithout reconciliation. By these means, four issues have irresolutely shaped our

understanding of violence. First, most analysts have restricted their attention to

actions that result in physical (corporal) injuries, although psychological, mate-

rial, and social injuries have been invoked on an ad hoc basis in some contexts.

Second, conceptions of violence are usually restricted to physical behaviors and

the threat of physical behaviors, although verbal and written actions have also

been included on a sporadic basis. Third, the issue of victim compliance has led to

uncertainty about the status of some injurious actions. When force has clearly been

used (i.e., the victim is unwilling), actions are defined as violent, but ambiguityhangs over many injurious actions in which the resistance of the victim is unclear

or in which s/he endures the injuries willingly. Is it violence when the recipient of

the injury has complicity in the behavior, either tacitly (as when the victim fails

to offer resistance or to leave a relationship or an environment in which injury is

inflicted) or actively (as when someone is masochistic or suicidal)? Fourth, our

narrow, legalistic concept of agency has led scholars to highlight interpersonal

violence. Such actions have individually identifiable agents and victims and im-

mediate and certain outcomes. By contrast, injurious actions with fragmented or

corporate agency, amorphous or anonymous victims, and delayed or probabilisticinjuries are included only intermittently in research on violence.

In this conceptual quagmire, important questions about the defining attributes of

violence and the human relationship with violence have slipped into the shadows.

I begin with a brief discussion of some attempts that have been made to patch

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390 JACKMAN

the risk of injury or death for some category of persons. Also excluded are

certain behaviors that inflict physical harm intentionally: violence against

oneself, as in suicides and attempted suicides; and the use of violence by state

authorities in the course of enforcing the law, imposing capital punishment,and providing collective defense. . ..

Our definition of violence also excludes events such as verbal abuse, harass-

ment, or humiliation, in which psychological trauma is the sole harm to the

victim. However, especially in the context of violence in the family and sex-

ual violence, we do attend to the psychological consequences of threatened

physical injury.

Reiss & Roths formulation of a precise definition that spans the various

bodies of research in their compendium highlights the emphasesas well as theinconsistenciesthat have marked that research. Their definition restricts violence

to behaviors that are interpersonal, inflict or threaten physical harm, and are moti-

vated by harmful intent. These restrictive criteria are relaxed, however, on an ad hoc

basis when they become inconvenient for the inclusion of features that have come

under scrutiny in a specific line of research. For example, psychological injuries

are selectively included in the context of family and sexual violence, and then only

when they result from threats of physical injury. This ad hoc adjustment incor-

porates the emphasis on psychological harm made by many scholars of spousal

violence and rape (e.g., Russell 1982; Finkelhor & Yllo 1983; Stanko 1985; Darke1990), but it implies that is the only context in which psychological injuries result

or are serious enough to warrant attention. Such an assumption is implausible on its

face and is flatly contradicted by the evidence (see section on The Range of Injuri-

ous Outcomes below). However, the definition simply incorporates past oversights

and inconsistencies without trying to rectify them. In similar fashion, a variety of

behaviors that meet the specified criteria of physical injury and harmful intent are

specifically excluded from the definition: those that are self-inflicted, and those

inflicted by state authorities in the course of enforcing the law, punishment, or

providing collective defense. The first exclusion is consistent with the definitionsrestriction to interpersonal violence, although that restriction is itself arbitrary. The

second exclusion conforms to the common focus on criminal or deviant behaviors

found in extant research, but it is an ad hoc adjustment that summarily dismisses

legitimized violence that otherwise meets the definitions criteria.

Reiss & Roth draw explicitly on the term aggression, and this is in keeping with

much of the literature on violence. Unfortunately, the definition of aggression is

itself subject to many of the same restrictions and ambiguities (cf., Mazur 1983;

Berkowitz 1993). However, some analysts have used a relatively clear definition of

aggression as any form of behavior that is intended to injure someone physicallyor psychologically (Berkowitz 1993, p. 3; see also Eagly & Steffen 1986). As

with violence, this definition restricts itself to injurious behaviors with harmful

intent, but it gives equal weight to physical and psychological harm (while still

excluding material and social harm).

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SOCIAL VIOLENCE 391

Now consider the definition of violence employed by the Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention (Rosenberg 1994) and the California Policy Council on

Violence Prevention (Final Report, August 1995):

Violence is the threatened or actual use of physical force or power againstanother person, against oneself, or against a group or community that either

results in, or has a high likelihood of resulting in, injury, death, or deprivation.

This definition is much broader and more inclusive, but it is also less precise. Unlike

Reiss & Roth (1993), it includes not only injuries inflicted on another person, but

also self-inflicted injuries, as well as injuries inflicted on groups and communities,

and injuries that are either certain or probabilistic. Physical violence is emphasized,

although apparently not exclusively, in the stipulation of physical force or power

to inflict the injury. If the definition does mean to include power as somethingseparate from physical force, the range of pertinent actions is broadened, although

with the addition of a complex and amorphous concept whose ambiguities have

themselves spawned a huge literature and heated disagreement (see, e.g., Dahl

1968; Bachrach & Baratz 1970; Gramsci 1971; Lukes 1974; R. Jackman 1993;

M. Jackman 1994). This definition also contains an internal inconsistency: Self-

inflicted injuries are included, thereby implying that victim complicity does not

negate the definition of an injurious act as violent, but it also stipulates that all

violent actions involve the use of physical force or other means of coercion.

Another way to approach the conception of violence is through the lens ofnonviolence, since the latter involves the self-conscious renunciation of the former.

Here, too, the concept is both restricted and nebulous:

Physical violence, which is what we most often have in mind when we speak

about violence, is the use of physical force to cause harm, death, or destruction,

as in rape, murder, or warfare. But some forms of mental or psychological

harm are so severe as to warrant being called violence as well. People can

be harmed mentally and emotionally in ways that are as bad as by physical

violence . . .. Although physical violence often attends the infliction of psycho-

logical violence, it need not do so. . .

. [People] can also be terrorized without

being harmed physically. . .. An unlimited commitment to nonviolence will

renounce psychological as well as physical violence (Holmes 1990, p. 12).

This definition puts primary emphasis on coercive physical behaviors that result in

physical injuries, but it also specifies that some forms of mental or psychological

harm are sufficiently severe to warrant inclusion. It remains unclear how to judge

whether specific cases of psychological injury are sufficiently severe for inclu-

sion, and Holmess examplesverbal abuse of children, racism, and sexismare

themselves ambiguous: When does a racial joke cross the line between mere taste-less remark and serious racial slur, and so on? Like definitions of violence and

aggression, this definition also neglects material and social injuries.

Some analysts have observed that the strong policy orientation of research on

violence has driven scholars to conceive of the phenomenon in terms that are

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392 JACKMAN

unduly influenced by legal definitions of violent crime. For example, Fagan &

Browne (1994, p. 131) note that many scholars working on domestic violence

have been interested in informing legal policy and have thus relied primarily on

definitions that stressed codified behaviors used in the criminal justice system. Inthis vein, Straus (1990, p. 58) argues that it is useful for empirical measures of

marital violence to focus on specific acts that reflect the legal distinction between

simple and aggravated assault as well as the distinctions that are commonly made

in normative standards of conduct. The motivation of most scholars of violence

to address policy issues has been further encouraged by the fact that the funding

for research on violence has overwhelmingly come from agencies with a strong

interest in social policy. This slant has shaped both the kinds of violence that have

been studied and the way in which they are conceptualized. Thus, acts such as

emotional maltreatment, verbal harassment, and persistent denigration of spouseshave had an uncertain status in family violence research because they produce

little or no physical injury, even though scholars are increasingly recognizing the

salience of psychological injuries when they spin off from the infliction or threat of

physical injuries. Acts like marital rape that are not crimes in all American states

have sometimes been excluded from examination (see Russell 1982). Concern

for maintaining consistency with legal definitions has also steered researchers to

focus overwhelmingly on interpersonal acts of violence (e.g., Stanko 1995) and to

restrict attention to acts that are clearly premeditated with an intent to harm.

In a parallel discussion of political violence three decades ago, Wolff (1971)complained that notions of illegitimate force are too central to conceptions of

violence (Wolff 1971). Wolff summarized what he saw as the prevailing conception

of violence as the illegitimate or unauthorized use of force to effect decisions

against the will or desire of others (Wolff 1971, p. 59). In this schema, the killing

of a police officer by a civilian is considered homicide (a.k.a. violence), whereas the

killing of a civilian by a police officer in the line of duty is considered justifiable

homicide, outside the realm of violence. Similarly, when the state lawfully executes

a convicted criminal, it is not usually treated as violence, but a lynch mob executing

a convicted criminal is treated as violence. The exposure of workers to hazardousworking conditions that result in death or injury is also not considered violence,

either because the hazard level is within the law or because the motives of the

employer are impossible to verify within legalistic notions of premeditated intent.

Instead, the term labor violence is generally restricted to the deaths, injuries,

and property damage associated with strikes and other challenges to the lawful

authority of employers.

Wolff was moved to conclude that, since the concept of legitimate authority

is itself problematic and the identification of violence depends on distinguishing

illegitimate from legitimate force, the concept of violence is inherently confused,as is the correlative concept of non-violence (Wolff 1971, p. 55). Indeed, Reiss &

Roth (1993, p. 36) observe that their own definition of violence (quoted above)

excludes from consideration the important question of why some violent behaviors

are criminalized while others are not, and why this varies over time and across

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SOCIAL VIOLENCE 393

cultures. Although they feel bound to hew close to the vagaries of extant research

in their own definition of violence, they recognize that understanding will be

enhanced in future research by studying a broader range of violent behavior using

classes based on behavioral rather than legal categories (1993, p. 36).This paper is an attempt to respond to that challenge. Urgent concerns about

particular forms of criminal and socially deviant violence (especially homicide

and assaults, and more recently, child abuse, rape, and intimate-partner violence)

have dominated the research agenda. As a result, disparate clusters of research

have erupted concerning specific forms of violence that are physical, interper-

sonal, forceful, harmfully intended, and socially/legally repudiated. Within that

narrow set, the imperatives of each research cluster have produced specific work-

ing conventions and emphases. Current definitions of violence reflect the biases,

inconsistencies, and ambiguities that have thus arisen. We are overdue to cast abroader, more systematic conceptual net. The place to begin is with a brief assess-

ment of the key sources of variation that have been glossed over, side-stepped, or

summarily assumed away in most research on violence.

THE RANGE OF INJURIOUS OUTCOMES: PHYSICAL,

PSYCHOLOGICAL, MATERIAL, AND SOCIAL

Physical outcomes such as pain, injury, disfigurement, bodily alteration, functionalimpairment, or death, as well as physical restraint or confinement, have a wincing

resonance that violates our basic desire for physical survival, avoidance of pain,

and preservation of bodily integrity and autonomy. The apparent concreteness and

immediacy of physical injuries heightens their visibility and ease of observation.

They hardly encapsulate, however, the full assortment of injuries that humans find

consequential. Psychological outcomes such as fear, anxiety, anguish, shame, or

diminished self-esteem; material outcomes such as the destruction, confiscation, or

defacement of property, or the loss of earnings; and social outcomes such as public

humiliation, stigmatization, exclusion, imprisonment, banishment, or expulsionare all highly consequential and sometimes devastating for human welfare. The

personal pain caused by some of these injuries may be more severe or prolonged

than from many physical injuries. Indeed, the most profound effects of physical

violence itself are often nonphysical. For example, among survivors of airplane

hijackings, wars, prison camps, and concentration camps, the suffering caused

by subsequent psychological distress (now medicalized as post-traumatic stress

disorder) often endures long after any physical injuries have healed.

More generally, a physically harrowing experience or a debilitating or muti-

lating bodily injury is often consequential for the victim in large part because ofits long-term impact on his or her psychological, material, or social welfare. In-

deed, the boundaries between different types of injury are fundamentally clouded.

For example, is humiliation primarily a social or a psychological injury? Do its

injurious effects hinge more on the loss of social status or of self-esteem? One

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394 JACKMAN

type of injury spills over into another, as when material deprivation results in

negative corporal outcomes (like starvation or lack of resistance to disease) and

negative psychological outcomes (like anxiety, despair and feelings of powerless-

ness). Even more fundamentally, the relationships among different types of injuryare not well understood. To what extent do psychological injuries like depres-

sion or stress increase peoples vulnerability to negative corporal outcomes like

illness, harmful addictions, or propensity to harmful accidents? Medical research

has demonstrated the negative impact of psychological states like stress and de-

pression on physical health outcomes, through its effects on the autonomic nervous

system, the endocrine system, the immune system, and poor health behaviors (e.g.,

Pennebaker et al. 1988; de Loos 1990; McFarlane et al. 1994; Resnick et al. 1997).

Rape, which is typically seen as a physical injury, may actually be more signi-

ficant for the psychological and social injuries it inflicts: Rape is fundamentallythe violation of sexual autonomy, which is in large part a social and psychological

injury, bringing in its trail personal humiliation, sense of violation, loss of control,

anxiety, and frequently social shame (e.g., Burgess & Holstrom 1974; Finkelhor &

Yllo 1983; Darke 1990; Von et al. 1991; Resick 1993). Finally, the sensation of

physical pain itselfa key ingredient of what we understand as physical injuryis

a complex intermixture of physiological and psychological stimuli: The precise

causal contribution of each to peoples felt sensation of pain is still debated by

medical researchers (Morris 1991).

Authorities concerned with devising compelling human punishments have dis-played a more sensitive appreciation of noncorporal injuries than have most scho-

lars of violence. Such authorities have stocked their repertoires as much with

actions that inflict humiliation, stigmatization, material loss, and social isolation

as with those inflicting physical pain or mutilation, even in historical periods when

there was a heavier reliance on corporal punishments [see, e.g., the punishments

employed by slave-owners in the antebellum South (Stampp 1956; Elkins 1968;

Crawford 1992) and by church and secular authorities in Europe in the Mid-

dle Ages, Renaissance, and early modern period (Russell 1972; Foucault 1977;

Johnson 1987; Manchester 1992; Barstow 1994; Peters 1989, 1996)]. Human rightsgroups have drawn attention to the devastating psychological effects of solitary

confinement in prisons (perhaps the ultimate social punishment) (Human Rights

Watch 1997, p. 6274). When thought has gone into the matter, human sensibilities

are apparently just as finely attuned to psychological, social, and material injuries

as to physical ones.

Indeed, some human behaviors suggest there are certain social, psychological,

and material injuries that are considered more daunting than physical injuries

hardly surprising, given humans high sociability and manifest desire for material

gain. For example, the millions of Chinese women who compelled their daughtersto bind their feet (thereby inflicting on them permanent physical injury, debilitat-

ing functional impairment, and chronic physical pain) might have reported that

such physical injuries were preferable to the social isolation, material impover-

ishment, stigmatization, and crushed self-esteem that would have befallen their

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SOCIAL VIOLENCE 395

daughters had their feet not been bound (Levy 1966; Jackson 1990; Mann et al.

1990; Blake 1994; Dworkin 1994). A similar calculus motivates the painful and

debilitating practice of genital cutting on an estimated 100132 million women

in Africa today (El Dareer 1982; Lightfoot-Klein 1989, Economist1999, WorldHealth Organization 2001). Even when the stakes are less extreme, millions of

Western women submit without hesitation to surgical pain (e.g., face lifts, lipo-

suction, breast implants) or self-inflicted calorie deprivation in order to promote

their social or economic prospects and enhance their self-esteem.

Research on violence has ridden roughshod over this complex territory, assign-

ing overwhelming significance to physical injuries (e.g., Graham & Gurr 1969;

Reiss & Roth 1993; Utech 1994; Ruback & Weiner 1995). Despite the increasing

amount of evidence on the pervasiveness and duration of psychological injuries

such as PTSD resulting from a wide range of traumatic experiences (see, e.g.,Figley 1985, 1986; Wilson & Raphael 1993; American Psychiatric Association

1994; Kilpatrick et al. 1998), the only violence research to have routinely incor-

porated psychological injuries is that on family or sexual violence. Many studies

of child abuse, intimate-partner violence, and sexual assault have emphasized the

importance of such negative psychological consequences as PTSD, depression,

substance abuse, low self-esteem, sense of violation, and the inability to function

independently (e.g., Dobash & Dobash 1979; Walker 1979; Lynch & Roberts 1982;

Finkelhor & Yllo 1983; Frieze & Browne 1989; Tolman 1989; Darke 1990; Stark &

Flitcraft 1991; Von et al. 1991; Evans 1992; Browne 1993; Laumann et al. 1994,pp. 338339). Even in that context, actions that inflict solely psychological injuries

are usually bypassed (for exceptions, see Tolman 1989; Evans 1992, 1993). Ma-

terial injuries are also generally overlooked in formal definitions of violence and

in discussions of interpersonal violence, even though acts like vandalism and the

destruction of property are routinely acknowledged as some of the terrible costs of

terrorism and war with profound material, psychological, and social repercussions.

Social injuries are the least likely to be acknowledged in discussions of violence, al-

though their significance is highlighted sporadically, as when striking workers prac-

tice social exclusion against nonstriking workers, or when pornographic materialsare alleged to commit violence against women by demeaning their social status.

The inclusion of specific nonphysical injuries in one or another domain without

acknowledging the general significance of such injuries results in a patchy, ad hoc

conception of violence. We need to be consistent about what kinds of injuries are

consequential, and to develop more systematic criteria to assess the severity of

various injuries.

INJURIOUS BEHAVIORS: PHYSICAL, VERBAL, WRITTEN

Primacy has usually been accorded to physically violent behaviors, but that is mis-

leading on two main counts. First, verbal and written actions may also accomplish

the infliction of physical injuries, either by directly initiating them (as in formal

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396 JACKMAN

edicts or contracts) or by inciting others to acts of physical violence (as in news-

paper or magazine articles or television programs that either directly advocate the

infliction of injuries on an individual or group, or that encourage physical violence

indirectly by portraying an individual or group as a moral or physical threat). Be-cause of our legalistic concept of agency, our attention is drawn to the most obvious

physical perpetrator of the deed, but the instigators of the action may lie discreetly

elsewhere. Who is the responsible agent of violence: the lynch mob, the legal sys-

tem and police who fail to prosecute the members of the mob, or the people who

encourage lynchings by actively asserting white racial dominance or the heinous-

ness of certain breaches of the moral order? Surely, it is a communal complicity

made up of an accumulation of verbal and/or written actions that accomplishes the

deed, even though only a small number of actors may be physically implicated.

Second, verbal and written actions may directly accomplish a variety of non-physical injuries. Verbal or written actions that derogate, defame, or humiliate

an individual or group may inflict substantial psychological, social, or material

injuries without being as conspicuous or flagrant as physical violence (see, e.g.,

Clark & Clark [1947] 1958; Tajfel 1969; Evans 1992). Our legal code recognizes

the significance of such actions against individuals (in permitting litigation for

alleged slander or libel), although not against groups (as when stereotypes de-

fame group members and diminish their self-esteem, social status, and material

prospects) (Clark & Clark [1947] 1958; Tajfel 1969; Brigham 1971; Word et al.

1974; Snyder 1981; Jackman 1994; Farley et al. 1994; Feagin & Sikes 1994;Greenwald & Banaji 1995; Bobo & Smith 1996; Bobo & Johnson 2000; Jost &

Major 2001; Sinclair et al. 2002). In many contexts (as in academia, where indi-

viduals stature is more dependent on their command of language than on their

physical prowess), verbal and written assaults carry more credibilityand are

therefore more damagingthan crude physical assaults. Perhaps for this reason,

the flaming email, the vituperative verbal attack, and back-biting gossip are more

familiar features of departmental life than fist-fights.

In short, there are diverse, and often quieter, ways of inflicting injuries than

by physical assault alone. Instead of disregarding verbal and written methods ofviolence, we should respect their potency and analyze the conditions under which

agents of violence choose one or another method of delivery.

VICTIMHOODANDCOMPLIANCE

Violence is typically thought to involve force, that is, the victim is an unwilling

recipient of the injury. Compliance or complicity from the recipient of the injury is

usually thought to negate victimhood and thus to jeopardize the characterization of

the event as violent (e.g., see definitions above). And yet certain injurious behaviorsthat do not involve force are occasionally included within the rubric of violence, or

they are left hanging nebulously at the margins. Cases in which someone inflicts an

injury on himself (such as suicide or self-mutilation) are especially problematic.

Suicides are usually excluded (as in Reiss & Roth 1993) but sometimes included

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SOCIAL VIOLENCE 397

(as in Holinger 1987). And some behaviors involving agent-to-victim injuries are

subject to doubt because of ambiguity about the degree to which the victim is

willing, compliant, or even has complicity. The high interpersonal injury rate in

some sports, such as boxing or football, occasionally generates concern in thepress, but such discussions are rarely couched in terms of violence because of the

high degree of voluntarism among players. Spousal abuse, sexual harassment, and

rape have increasingly been included within the umbrella of violence, but there is

dissension about the status of individual cases in which battered wives fail to leave

their husbands, sexually harassed women fail to file charges or quit their jobs,

or women allege rape but are unable to produce convincing physical evidence

of coercion. Victims are then confronted with the frustrating inconsistency of a

society that expresses moral outrage about the category of behaviors, but diffidence

about particular cases (Jackman 1999). Indeed, the issue of victim compliance hashaunted the literature on violence against women, threatening the very status of the

most prominent forms of female victimization as bona fide instances of violence

(e.g., Burt 1980; Taylor 1981; Jackman 1999).

In short, the criterion of force is a nebulous decision rule that has been incon-

sistently applied, giving some injurious behaviors an uncertain status in the family

of violence. There are three main reasons why the force criterion should be aban-

doned. First, the compliance/noncompliance distinction is inherently ambiguous

because people rarely act as free agents, but instead must usually make choices

from a constrained set that has been predetermined by organizational or situa-tional factors beyond their control (see, for example, Bachrach & Baratz 1970;

Gramsci 1971; Lukes 1974; R. Jackman 1993; M. Jackman 1994, 1999). Given a

constrained set of choices, the victims alternatives to compliance may be risky or

futile. Depending on the agents and the victims relative control over resources,

compliance may be the victims best survival strategy. Rape provides a particularly

blatant example of the compliance dilemma. Police often advise women that if they

are sexually assaulted, their best survival strategy is to offer no resistance, since

resistance may result in more serious physical injury (given the attackers superior

physical strength or the presence of a weapon), but if the woman offers no evidenceof physical resistance, she automatically undermines her legal claim to victimhood.

Poverty of resources and lack of access to information can also work to pro-

duce compliant victims. Take, for example, the victims who willingly consented to

participate in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment in Macon county, Alabama, from

1932 to 1972 (Jones 1993). These poor, rural, uneducated African-American men

who were suffering from syphilis had no access to medical care at the onset of

the experiment. Most of these victims did not have to be forced to participate be-

cause poverty and ignorance had already foreshortened their options sufficiently to

produce their participation. The examples of victimhood that confound notions ofcompliance are endless. Workers who willingly expose themselves to hazardous

working conditions do so because they do not know of alternative opportunities for

employment, they fear reprisals from management if they were to complain, or they

are unaware of the gravity of the hazards to which they are being exposed. Workers

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398 JACKMAN

who continue to work in settings where they are subject to sexual harassment may

be unaware of alternative employment opportunities, or they may fear substantial

economic or career losses if they filed a grievance or moved to a new job.

Second, the compliance/noncompliance distinction is also difficult to observeempirically. Peoples revealed behaviors do not always reflect their preferences,

especially in threatening situations. Added to this, peoples observation and recol-

lection of events, especially volatile ones, are highly subject to bias and confusion.

Injurious behaviors that take place without any outside witnesses, such as rape,

intimate-partner assaults, and many instances of sexual harassment in the work

place, are especially vulnerable to this ambiguity because the injurious event can

only be reconstructed through the recollections of the two participants. Allegations

of sexual assault or harassment are unusual in that they hinge intrinsically on evi-

dence of force (non-consenting adult), and for this reason such allegations oftenfail. The agent has self-interested reasons for portraying the victim as an instiga-

tor or confederate. The victim may lack either the self-confidence or the social

credibility to counter the agents claims effectively, or she may be too shaken or

humiliated by the event to formulate allegations with fortitude. Even when there

are outside witnesses, those witnesses are rarely unbiased or free from perceptual

error. For example, a number of studies have documented the common bias found

among both bystanders and participants (including victims themselves) toward

blaming the victim (Lerner & Simmons 1966; Bulman & Wortman 1977; Miller

& Porter 1983; Stark & Flitcraft 1988).Finally, there is little a priori reason to exclude those injurious behaviors that

do manifest relatively clear instances of voluntary submission to injury. These

include suicide, masochistic self-mutilation, voluntary submission to hunger or

injury on behalf of a political cause (as with protestors tactics such as hunger-

striking or passive resistance), voluntary submission to painful or hazardous beauty

practices (such as breast implants or face-lifts), religiously motivated abstinence

from food, sexual gratification, or material possessions, or religiously motivated

self-mutilation (such as the flagellation practiced by some fervent Christian wor-

shipers in Europe of the Middle Ages and in the Philippines today) (Kieckhefer1974; Dickson 1989; Lambert 1992;Los Angeles Times1993). In such instances,

injuries are nonetheless sustained, and those injuries still affect the welfare of the

victim. If injuries are sometimes endured willingly, inclusion of such instances

may hold lessons about the myriad and sometimes turbid dynamics of violence in

social life.

Attributions of responsibility for violence need to assess the degree to which

organizational arrangements frame peoples opportunities to commit or resist vio-

lence, and to recognize that the place of individual agency in submitting to violence

is variable, complex, and subject to bias or confusion in its observation. To com-prehend the human propensity for violence, we need to analyze not only the factors

that cause people to inflict injuries on others, but also the conditions and dispo-

sitions that lead people to tolerateor even to seekthe infliction of injuries on

themselves.

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SOCIAL VIOLENCE 399

AGENTS AND VICTIMS: INDIVIDUAL AND CORPORATE

The legal/criminology impetus in violence research has led to an overwhelming

focus on the infliction of injuries person-to-person, while ambiguity hovers overmore corporate acts of violence (Jackman 2001). Some specific forms of collective

violence have been the subject of inquiry, such as political violence, civil unrest,

labor violence, and intergroup conflict and violence. War, genocide, and armed con-

flict arising from ethnic, racial, or religious differences are commonly recognized

as corporate violence writ large. However, the analysis of such corporate actions is

almost always disconnected from research on interpersonal violence. More mun-

dane corporate actions with injurious outcomes are unlikely to be couched in terms

of violence at all. Especially germane are the decrees, decisions, and activities of

governmental agencies (such as the police, courts, prison systems, armed forces,legislative bodies, and governmental bureaucracies) that adversely affect the wel-

fare of groups or individuals (see, e.g., Foucault 1977; Dworkin 1977; Cover 1986;

Hughes 1987; Kelman & Hamilton 1989; Robertson & Judd 1989; Johnson 1990),

and production and marketing decisions of corporations that endanger the health

or safety of workers or consumers (see, e.g., Gitelman 1973; Pollack & Keimig

1987; Kelman & Hamilton 1989; Asch 1988; McGarity & Shapiro 1993, National

Safe Workplace Institute 1990, National Safety Council 1995).

Our legalistic concept of agency requires a plainly visible actor, and to be an

agent of violence there must be a directly observable, deterministic connectionbetween the behavior of one and the suffering of another. In the forms of collective

violence that have been analyzed, corporate actors behave as an observable con-

glomerate, and there are plainly observable events with injurious effects on persons

or property. Other forms of corporate violence have been harder to recognize

specifically, actions that result from the fragmented or cumulative activities of

multiple actors, in which the agents or victims are faceless and/or amorphous,

or in which there is either a temporal lag or a probabilistic relationship between

the actions taken by agents and the outcomes experienced by victims. The net

result is that our understanding of violence has not been informed by an analysisof corporate or institutional violence, despite the heavy toll of death and suffer-

ing that they cause. For example, although the term labor violence commonly

denotes the violence that surrounds strikes and other collective labor actions, the

death toll from such activities is minuscule compared to the deaths from injuries

and diseases that are caused by the routine use of hazardous machinery, proce-

dures, or substances in the workplace. A total of about 300 people were killed in

strike-related violence in the United States in the twentieth century, almost all of

them prior to 1950 (data from Fillippelli 1990), whereas a conservative estimate

of the number of American workers killed by work-related injuries since 1930exceeds 700,000 (National Safety Council, 1995; Pollack & Keimig 1987), and an

estimated 50,000100,000 American workers continue to die annually from oc-

cupationally induced diseases (Office of Technology Assessment 1985, National

Safe Workplace Institute 1990).

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400 JACKMAN

The repeated spotlight on interpersonal violence fosters the impression, how-

ever inadvertently, that the institutional backdrop is nonviolent, thereby sustaining

the view of violence as an individual-level, deviant behavior. The individual who

practices violence against others or himself may not be, however, the anomaly thathe appears. Instead, his violence may be consonant with the institutional or group

settings in which he lives.

WHATMOTIVATES VIOLENCE?

Violence is commonly associated with the intent to cause harm, and with anger, hos-

tility, coercion or conflict, but many of the examples raised in the discussion above

belie such a narrow range of motivations for the human decision to inflict injury onothers or oneself. Once we step away from the legal and moral imperatives that have

shaped research on violence, we are confronted with the diverse and sometimes

complex motivations that shade the variegated practice of violence in social life.

Our legal system has developed a network of rules to determine the willful

intent of defendants (e.g., Emanuel 1987), but those rules necessarily entail arbi-

trary decisions in order to steer through an area that is intrinsically shaded and

complex. Take, for example, husbands who remorsefully declare that they love

their battered wives and did not mean to hurt them, or gun-shot assaults on victims

on inner-city streets who were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, orcigarette manufacturers who for many years disputed any causal link between their

product and negative health outcomes. Similarly, many parents who use corporal

punishments are following the dictates of a benevolent intent because they believe

such punishments are beneficial to childrens moral development (spare the rod

and spoil the child). Motivations for violence are often complex admixtures, but

in addition to the familiar motivation of hostile intent, we can identify at least four

further types of motivation for violent actions: to benefit the community, to benefit

the victim, to satisfy recreational or entertainment needs, or simply tolerating it

because it is incidental to other goals.First, a variety of violent acts appear to be motivated by the desire to benefit

the community. For example, ritual human sacrifice was practiced in a number

of premodern societies in order to supplicate deities and thus bring benefits to

the community (Tierney 1989; Clendinnen 1991; Lincoln 1991; Levenson 1993).

Modern nation-states have repeatedly sacrificed highly valued young men in war in

order to further expansionist or defensive goals of the community (Small & Singer

1982; Dunnigan 1993; Jackman 1999). The witch-hunts of early modern Europe

and North America were motivated by the desire to rid communities of harmful el-

ements believed to threaten the public welfare (Russell 1972; Kors & Peters 1972;Monter 1976; Levack 1993). The infamous Tuskegee Experiment, which deliber-

ately withheld medical treatment from syphilis-infected, African-American men

for forty years, was initially motivated by the desire to benefit the studys subjects,

but when funding for that goal was withdrawn, the investigators seamlessly shifted

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SOCIAL VIOLENCE 401

their goal to that of advancing science and benefitting the practice of medicine

(Jones 1993). The low racial and class status of the subjects made it easy to disre-

gard their well-being(even though that had been theinitial goal of the study), but the

primary purpose was not to express hatred for African Americans or to kill them.Second, some violent acts are benevolently intended toward the victim, some-

times in self-inflicted actions and sometimes inflicted on others. The self-

flagellation practiced by some fervent Christians in the Middle Ages involved

the prostration of oneself before God in order to protect oneself from future harm

(Kieckhefer 1974; Dickson 1989; Lambert 1992). As noted earlier, many violent

female beauty practices, such as foot binding, liposuction, breast implants, and

face-lifts, are motivated by the desire to enhance the social or economic prospects

of the victim. Western medicine routinely uses surgical or drug therapies that are

painful, arduous, or debilitating in order to prolong the victims life: Historically,these methods of treating the sick have had variable efficacy, but they have been

motivated by benevolent intentions.

Third, sometimes actors seek violence for its intrinsic entertainment or recre-

ational value. The prominence and success of physical violence in the organization

of mass entertainment throughout historygladiator games, bull fights, dog fights,

boxing matches,action moviessuggests a widespread attraction to violence,

whether for catharsis, excitement, thrills, or sexual arousal. Malevolent feelings

toward the victims may contribute to the audiences enjoyment (as when early

Christians were publicly fed to lions), but more often the audience is merely indif-ferent to the victim (as was often the case with Roman gladiators) or even adulates

the victim (as with boxing or wrestling stars and some Roman gladiators).

Finally, violence often occurs because the infliction of injuries is simply in-

cidental to other goals. In such instances, violence is neither deliberately sought

nor a mere accident (i.e., with no expected probability of occurrence). Instead, it

is knowingly tolerated as a by-product of ones actions. Spectators at auto races

and other high-risk sports events are willing to tolerate the spectacle of injured

drivers or players in order to serve their desire for excitement or entertainment (of

course, if the injuries are an active part of the entertainment value, the violenceis not incidental). The purpose of the Tuskegee Experiment was not to inflict suf-

fering on its victims, but the scientists who ran the Experiment were willing to

subordinate the welfare of their low-status subjects to scientific goals they con-

sidered more important. Historically, manufacturers have placed a higher priority

on maximizing profits than on the health and safety of either their workers or the

consumers of their products (Berman 1978; Witt & Dotter 1979; Nelkin & Brown

1984; Pollack & Keimig 1987; Rosner & Markowitz 1987; Asch 1988; McGarity

& Shapiro 1993; Dotter 1998). I have already commented on the large number of

injuries and illnesses that result from employers labor practices; these do not stemfrom a deliberate desire of employers to injure their workers, but instead from their

willingness to tolerate a given probability of worker injury or illness in their pursuit

of profit. Acceptable tolerance levels for worker risk receded with rising levels of

affluence over the course of the twentieth century in the United States and remain

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402 JACKMAN

highly variant between affluent and poor nations in the world today. It is unlikely

that American cigarette manufacturers are motivated by a deliberate intent to harm

their customers (especially since they constitute the market for their product),

but they have not been deterred from the aggressive marketing of cigarettes by theestimated 400,000 deaths that are caused annually in the United States by cigarette

smoking (U.S. Dep. Health & Hum. Serv. 1990, Peto et al. 1992). Discussions

of white racial violence usually focus on lynching, but the number of African

Americans killed by lynching (estimated at 50006000; White [1929] 1969; Hair

1989) does not compare with the vast number of premature African-American

deaths brought about by discriminatory racial practices that limited blacks access

to life-enhancing goods and services such as food, housing, health care, education,

and remunerative occupations (resulting in a 16-year gap in life expectancy be-

tween black and white males in 1900 and still an 8-year gap in the 1990s) (CDCP1996, Farley 1996, pp. 22228). Whites may not have intended to cause the prema-

ture deaths of so many African Americans, but they were surely willing to tolerate

that price in order to maintain their racial status prerogatives.

Homicides, which have provoked intense attention from students of vio-

lence (e.g., Wolfgang 1967; Daly & Wilson 1988; Land et al. 1990; Phillips 1997;

Blumstein & Wallman 2000), account for fewer than 25,000 deaths annually in the

United States (FBI annual, Rosenfeld 2000), a very small number compared with

the annual death toll from such incidental violence as harmful labor practices, the

marketing of unsafe consumer products like cigarettes, guns, and poorly designedautomobiles, and discriminatory group practices that restrict subordinates access

to life-enhancing goods and services. The latter escape attention because they often

have relatively faceless, corporate perpetrators, and the outcomes are probabilistic

rather than certain; even more misleading is the absence of a deliberate harmful

intent, which makes it easy to portray the injurious outcomes as accidents, despite

documented evidence that the perpetrators actively resist attempts to rectify the

practices that have caused injury (see, e.g., Asch 1988; Curran 1993; McGarity

& Shapiro 1993). Surely, however, it is a measure of human callousness when

social actors, despite the absence of a deliberate intent to harm, fail to be de-terred from a course of action by the knowledge that injuries may or will be the

by-product.

The emphasis in violence research on acts that are motivated by willful malice

is in keeping with legal imperatives, but it effects a drastic and arbitrary reduction

in our awareness of the diverse range of injurious actions in social life. Humans are

moved to use violent means in the pursuit of a broad array of personal, social, ma-

terial, or political goals. Violence may be used to perform an instrumental service

(such as to punish those one seeks to control, to make a political statement, or to

transform ones body to meet the beauty standards of ones culture), or simply tosatisfy expressive needs (such as anger, excitement, catharsis, or sexual arousal).

Most significantly, perhaps, humans also readily tolerate violence as an incidental

outcome of their goals, as when whites tolerate a higher mortality rate among

African Americans as the by-product of maintaining racial status prerogatives, or

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SOCIAL VIOLENCE 403

when employers choose to leave workers exposed to hazardous working condi-

tions as a by-product of maximizing profits. Whether instrumental, expressive, or

incidental, violence may be carried out with malice, good will, or indifference for

the victim. Restriction of our field of vision solely to those acts that are inspiredby hostile intent is gravely misleading and undermines the endeavor to decipher

the human relationship with violence.

VARYING INCIDENCEAND SOCIAL

ACCEPTANCE OFVIOLENCE

We have liked to think that humans have a natural repugnance for violence and

that such actions therefore deviate from the main impetus of social life. Gen-der relations constitute the only context in which a sustained argument has been

made that violence is an integral part of social interaction. A number of feminist

scholars have asserted the normality of violence against women (e.g., Mill [1869]

1970; Millett 1970; Rich 1980; French 1992; Radford & Russell 1992), although

ironically as part of an argument that this feature of gender relations sets it apart

from other social relations, indicative of a uniquely pervasive intergroup hostility

(misogyny).

However, a number of the examples of violence that I have discussed are neither

rare nor repudiated in the cultures in which they occur (e.g., female genital cutting,the subjection of workers to hazardous working conditions, violence in spectator

sports and other entertainment). There is wide variation in both the frequency of

occurrence and the social acceptance of the diverse acts of violence that mark

social life. Some injurious behaviors are socially identified as violent and are

popularly vilified (as when parents murder their children) or feared (such as murder

or assault by strangers or politically motivated terrorist violence). Others remain

nestled, unrecognized, in the bosom of everyday life (such as beauty practices

that are painful, confining, or hazardous). Still others are viewed differently in

different historical periods or cultures (e.g., the physical beating of children haschanged in the United States over the past 100 years from being stipulated parental

behavior to being culturally chastised; definitions of lawfully acceptable hazard

levels in the workplace have altered significantly over time in the United States

and continue to vary cross-nationally; female genital cutting is regarded as one

of the leading human-rights issues in the world today by many Westerners, but

it is culturally mandated and celebrated in the cultures that practice it). Our own

culture, like others, lauds a number of violent practices as exemplary (such as

organized boxing or valor in warfare).

The confinement of research to those injurious actions that are socially devianttruncates and distorts the observed variance in violence. It pushes aside important

questions about historical and cultural variation in the criminalization of spe-

cific violent actions (as noted by Reiss & Roth 1993, p. 3637), and it subverts

any attempt to understand why certain forms of violence are tolerated, accepted,

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404 JACKMAN

endorsed, mandated, or glorified, while others are repudiated or even excoriated, or

why some acts of violence erupt only in anger while others occur in tranquility or

as an element of recreation. The behavioral properties of various forms of violence

need to be divorced from the meaning attached to them legally and culturally.Once we acknowledge explicitly that the social response to violent actions or

events is malleable, we can also recognize that not all acts of violence meet with

uniform interpretations within the same culture (Jackman 2001). The perpetrators,

victims, and third-party observers whose lives are entangled in violent acts often

perceive and interpret them quite differently. Perpetrators and others from their

group have an interest in denying or obscuring the violence, minimizing it, claim-

ing it was an accident or anomaly, claiming the victim precipitated it, willfully

desired it, or benefitted from it, or glorifying it as altruistic or necessary for the

common good (e.g., to maintain law and order, appease a deity, or enforce a moralcode). Victims and their allies have an interest in emphasizing or exaggerating

the incidence, frequency, or severity of injuries, attributing base motives to the

perpetrator(s), claiming the victims innocence and lack of complicity, or claiming

the violence is detrimental to communal goals or values. When perpetrators and

victims make contested symbolic appeals, third party observers may join the fray

or choose to look the other way.

The most sustained investigation of this issue has been in research on violence

against women. A number of scholars have explored legal and cultural judgments

of rape and intimate-partner assault (e.g., May 1978; Burt 1980; Malamuth 1981;Greenblat 1983; LaFree et al. 1985; Pleck 1989; Bograd 1988; Scully 1990). This

work has demonstrated the inventiveness of social actors in their responses to

various kinds of violence against women, historically and in the contemporary

United States. Public opinion data from the United States have also been used to

explore popular definitions and moral evaluations of other violent events, primarily

various forms of collective violence (Blumenthal et al. 1972, 1975). Cerulo (1998)

examined how both the content and the structure (sequencing) of media reports

affect peoples moral judgments of violent incidents; this research highlights the

need for analysis of the sociological factors that shape the structure of mediaaccounts. Research thus far on cultural responses to violent acts provides promising

leads that need to be extended to a wider, representative range of injurious actions

to address the varying social acceptance of violence.

GENERICDEFINITIONOFVIOLENCE

In an attempt to introduce a more systematic, comprehensive analysis of violence,

Jackman (1999, 2001, in preparation) has proposed a generic definition that fo-

cuses unequivocally on the injuriousness of actions, detached from their social,

moral, or legal standing. We need to recognize that violence is a genus of behaviors,

made up of a diverse class of injurious actions, involving a variety of behaviors,

injuries, motivations, agents, victims, and observers. The sole thread connecting

them is the threat or outcome of injury.

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SOCIAL VIOLENCE 405

VIOLENCE:

Actions that inflict, threaten, or cause injury.

Actions may be corporal, written, or verbal.Injuries may be corporal, psychological, material, or social.

This definition includes all actions that directly inflict injury as well as those that

either threaten or result in injury. It specifies that injurious actions and outcomes

may take many forms. The language also permits the injurious outcomes to be

immediate or delayed, certain or probabilistic. It further permits both agents and

victims to be either identifiable individuals or more amorphous corporate enti-

ties. More significantly, this definition sets no constraints on the motivations of

either the victim or the agent, and is agnostic about whether the behavior is un-

usual or commonplace and whether it meets with societal repudiation, disinterest,

acceptance, or admiration. It thus provides a stripped-down template to identify

all behaviors that inflict, threaten, or cause injury. This provides a consistent, au-

tonomous basis for identifying the full population of injurious social behaviors,

purely on the basis of their indigenous behavioral attributes. Like other generic

nominations (e.g., chair, building, university), there is no implication that all phe-

nomena falling within the genus are to be equated. To the contrary, the application

of autonomous and consistent rules for the identification of violent actions forces

us to confront the diverse forms of violence in social life. Only then may we begin

to differentiate the character and severity of those actions systematically.

By enlarging the field of violent actions, my definition also points to the limi-

tations of claims of nonviolence. Activists who refrain from the use of physical or

psychological violence may still engage in tactics that inflict (intentionally) social

or material harm on their targets, as in economic boycotts or media campaigns

decrying the targets actions. The choice to refrain from physically violent tactics

is made strategically within a political context or because of personal moral aver-

sion to physical violence (e.g., King 1963, p. 3640). Much as their ideological

positions may try to obscure it, political actors must often find effective ways to

weaken (i.e., harm) their opponents if they are to prevail. It is more productive

to observe the types of tactics they select without imposing a moral ordering on

those tactics. Violence may appear (in some guise) in many unexpected places.

Violence is not a constant: It varies in its presence, its character, and its severity

but the human propensity for violence is certainly more pervasive than the current

reigning conception implies. Humans do not have to inflict injuries on others or

themselves, and many human behaviors are indeed benign. However, one does

not have to assert that violence is a dominant human strategy to recognize that

it is a pervasive part of the normal social repertoire. Most humans do choose at

least sometimes to engage in various actions that inflict some sort of injury. The

interesting assessment is not whether some individuals employ violence: It is not

a dichotomous yes-or-no category. Instead, violence is a multifaceted genus of

behaviors whose component elements vary on continua. The productive questions

are the degree to which various social actors use violent means (on a continuum

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406 JACKMAN

from never or rarely to frequently), what methods they use, what type of injury

they inflict, what their purpose is, who the targets are, and the severity of the

injuries.

NEW RESEARCHQUESTIONS

Once we conceive of violence as a genus of social behaviors, new questions can be

pursued about violence in social life. Jackman (1999, 2001, in preparation) posits

that social actors, far from being averse to actions that inflict injuries on others

or themselves, instead incorporate such actions routinely when they seem like

feasible, efficacious strategies for the attainment of their goals. Individuals vary

in their personal propensity for violenceas agents, victims, and observersbutmost neither seek out nor shrink from it. Cursory evidence suggests that the human

capacity to commit, endure, and observe violence is elastic. It expands and shrinks

in accordance with such factors as: the actors goals and the presumed efficacy of

the violence in delivering those goals; the immunity or vulnerability of the actor

to sanctions or negative repercussions stemming from the behavior; the relative

status and group affiliations of agents, victims, and observers (which bears on

the previous consideration); the spatial, temporal, or organizational insulation of

actors from the victims; and the availability and relative efficacy of other strategies.

Decisions to take actions that will result in injuries to others or oneself, the type ofinjuries that are sought or tolerated, the type of behavior that is employed, and the

social construction placed on those actions, are all made within a strategic political

context.

This approach suggests three key steps in building a systematic understanding

of violence in social life. First, we must define and measure the myriad components

of violence. This is a difficult undertaking, in view of the many dimensions that

shade the practice of violence, but it is essential if we are to have a clear road map

through this highly charged territory. By developing a consistent set of criteria

to measure the severity and character of all injurious actions, we can be clearerabout where to situate any specific act in the family of violence. Measures like the

Conflict Tactics Scales (Gelles & Straus 1988; Straus & Gelles 1990; Brush 1993;

Straus et al. 1996) and the National Survey of Crime Severity (Wolfgang et al.

1985; Warr 1994) are productive models: The measures themselves, the questions

they reveal, and the ensuing debates force us to grapple with the precise meaning

of violent acts.

To start, we need to build systematic, autonomous rules to assess the severity

of violent acts. Our legal code judges severity of crimes with a complex admix-

ture of multiple criteria, including the intent of the offender and the victim (e.g.,manslaughter and victim-precipitated homicide are both less severe than homi-

cide), the seriousness of the injury that results (e.g., attempted homicide is less

severe than homicide), and the status of the victim and the offender (e.g., homicide

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SOCIAL VIOLENCE 407

is more severe when the victim is a police officer or an elected political official,

less severe when the offender is a youth) (Emanuel 1987). This code compounds

societal values with factors indigenous to the act itself, and their relative weights

in specific cases are often resolved only by invoking arbitrary decision rules. Isuggest, instead, a cleaner assessment of the severity of violence that attends to

attributes of the violence itself [as the CTS attempts to do (Straus & Gelles 1990;

Straus et al. 1996)], and/or to explicit measures of the social judgments of severity

[as does the NSCS (Wolfgang et al. 1985; Warr 1994)]. The former model invokes

such factors as the number, frequency, and duration of violent acts, and/or the ex-

tent, duration, certainty, and irreversibility of injury, whereas the latter model relies

on peoples opinions about the severity of specific violent acts (either hypothetical

or experiential). Both sets of factors may be relevant, but we should be clear about

which elements contribute to a specific assessment.Beyond assessments of severity, we need to focus systematically on other ele-

ments that define the character of violent acts. A wide array of factors is pertinent,

e.g., what type of behavior is used by the perpetrator/s, what type of injury re-

sults, what is the apparent motivation of the agent and the victim, are the agents

and victims individual, multiple, or corporate, what are the status attributes of

the agent and victim, is the injury immediate or delayed, are there witnesses and

what is their relationship to the agent and the victim, is the action legal or il-

legal, socially condoned, admired, or repudiated, and what are the rewards or

penalties for committing or resisting the act? We need systematic, empirical mea-surement of the constituent elements that are conjoined in diverse configurations of

violence.

Second, we must examine the way in which institutional arrangements facili-

tate or obstruct the practice of various types of violence, that is, the social orga-

nization of violence. For example, a systematic examination of the relationship

between gender and violence (Jackman 1999) suggests that, contrary to the em-

phasis of much research on misogyny and violence against women (e.g., Millett

1970; Brownmiller 1975; Dobash & Dobash 1979; Stark & Flitcraft 1988; Scully

1990; French 1992; Radford & Russell 1992), mens quest for proprietary controlover women leads them to commit considerably more interpersonal, physical vi-

olence against other males than against females, to shelter women routinely from

many of the more violence-prone corporate environments (e.g., the battlefield, the

blue-collar workplace), and to establish institutionalized incentives and punish-

ments that goad women to carry out violence against their own bodies without any

direct intervention by men. In a broader investigation of the social organization of

violence in race, class, and gender relations, Jackman (2001) explored the institu-

tional arrangements in systems of expropriation that facilitate and veil dominants

practice of violence against subordinates, by providing organizational niches thatscreen interpersonal violence from third-party observation, or by using chains of

command or selective incentives to make subordinate-group members the visible

henchmen. Institutions grant subordinates few opportunities to practice violence

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408 JACKMAN

either on their own initiative or against dominants, thus channeling their violence

into interpersonal and extraorganizational forms that are directed primarily against

members of their own group. This fosters the illusion that it is subordinate group

members (e.g., blacks, the lower class) who are more violence-prone, but theirviolence is simply more visible because it is committed by and against individuals

without the benefit of organizational cover.

Third, we must analyze the ideology of violence, to try to assess how and

why various acts of violence are repudiated, ignored, denied, praised, or glorified.

In keeping with theory on the dynamics of social construction and ideology (e.g.,

Gramsci 1971; Goffman 1959, 1970; Jones & Nisbett 1971; Stryker & Serpe 1982;

Jackman 1994; Hardin & Higgins 1996), I propose that the social definition of a

violent act emerges out of a cultural contest between the motivated perceptions

of the agent and the victim as well as of third parties. This suggests we shouldexamine the social, economic and political goalsand resourcesof the agents,

victims, and third-party observers of violent actions, and the significance of the

violence in furthering or obstructing their respective goals. The characteristics

of the act (the number of agents, the method of injury, the type and severity of

injury, the motivation for the act, and so on) and the organizational context within

which it occurs may provide opportunities alternately to deny it, claim it was an

accident, claim it was an exception, displace blame, justify it, glorify it, exaggerate

its severity or incidence, or vilify the motives of the perpetrator. We must break

away from the preoccupation with violent acts that are socially repudiated. Instead,we should try to determine why only a small proportion of social violence meets

such a negative social judgment, and what the factors are that drive the symbolic

manipulation of violent social acts.

None of these suggestions should be taken as a call to end more specialized

research on particular forms of violence. Detailed attention to specific types of

violence is invaluable to the cumulation of information about violence (whether

specific empirical forms such as homicides or female genital cutting, or subsets

such as physical violence or social violence). However, such work will contribute

more to our understanding of the specific type itself and of the genus as a wholeif it is situated in a consistent, systematic framework that reaches comprehen-

sively across the family of violence. To that end, specialized research needs to

be supplemented with work that compares alternative forms of violence and ad-

vances a more generic frame. Without the full population of violent actions held

coherently in view, we impoverish the quest to understand the place of violence in

social life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author thanks Robert W. Jackman, Bill McCarthy, and an anonymous reviewer

for their helpful comments on this paper, as well as many other colleagues and stu-

dents who have argued with me about the ideas expressed herein. Their comments

have helped me formulate the ideas, and they have made life more fun.

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SOCIAL VIOLENCE 409

TheAnnual Review of Sociologyis online at http://soc.annualreviews.org

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