Iolence in Ocial IFE: Mary R. Jackman

12 Jun 2002 10:14 AR AR163-16.tex AR163-16.
SGM LaTeX2e(2002/01/18) P1: GJC

10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.140936
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2002. 28:387–415

doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.140936
Copyright °
c 2002 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
VIOLENCE IN SOCIAL LIFE

Mary R. Jackman
Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis, California 95616;
e-mail: mrjackman@ucdavis.edu
Access provided by New York University - Bobst Library on 02/06/15. For personal use only.
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2002.28:387-415. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
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 the
object of urgent social concern, and relatedly, (b) an overwhelming focus on forms
of violence that are socially deviant and motivated by willful malice. The resulting
literature 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 of
physical injuries vs. psychological, social, and material injuries; the weight placed on
physical 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 of
ad hoc restrictions, that encompasses the full population of violent social actions. This
directs 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 each
inspiring 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
0360-0572/02/0811-0387$14.00 387
12 Jun 2002 10:14 AR AR163-16.tex AR163-16.SGM LaTeX2e(2002/01/18) P1: GJC
388 JACKMAN
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 deviant—legally, socially, or morally—from

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 coexist
without 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 ambiguity
hangs 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 probabilistic
injuries 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
SOCIAL VIOLENCE 389
together a generic definition of violence. Those definitions reveal the forces that
have shaped research on violence and the consequent biases, lapses, and incon-
sistencies in our understanding of it. I then discuss the four key dimensions that
have nebulously shaped working conceptions of violence. That discussion reveals
a variability in the human relationship with violence that belies the biases of most
research and undermines the reigning assumptions that hostility and deviance are
the hallmarks of violence. I turn to those next. Once we widen our field of vision,
it becomes apparent that the impetus to violence is not confined to episodes of de-
viant hostility. Instead, violent actions are a normal part of the human repertoire of
strategic social behaviors. Violence incorporates a diverse array of actions that are
an integral feature of social life. To capture this, we need a systematic, autonomous,
generic conception of violence, freed from the biases and inconsistencies of past
research. With that template in hand, we can begin to identify, differentiate, and
assess systematically the full population of actions that fall within the family of
violence. New questions then emerge about violence in social life.
EXISTING DEFINITIONS OF VIOLENCE

As scholars have rushed to the analysis of specific forms of violence that have gen-
erated urgent social concern, the systematic definition of violence has languished.
Those few analysts who have attempted to cast a broader conceptual net have
generally restricted themselves to a subset of violent behaviors, such as domestic
violence (itself subdivided into child abuse, intimate-partner violence, and elder
abuse), gender violence, civil violence, criminal violence, or some selective com-
bination of these (e.g., Bart & Moran 1993; Reiss & Roth 1993; Graham & Gurr
1969; Gurr 1989). The result has been a series of partially overlapping conceptual
amalgams, with inconsistencies and gaps both within and among them. When def-
initions have reached over different domains of violence, they have been stretched
and modified to accommodate inconsistent approaches, without attempting to rec-
oncile them.
One of the most ambitious—and precise—definitions of violence is that laid
out by Reiss & Roth in the introduction to an important, four-volume compendium
sponsored by the National Research Council, Understanding and Preventing Vio-
lence (Reiss & Roth 1993, p. 35–37).
The panel limited its consideration of violent behavior to interpersonal vi-
olence, which it defined as behavior by persons against persons that inten-
tionally threatens, attempts, or actually inflicts physical harm. The behaviors
included in this definition are largely included in definitions of aggression.
A great deal of what we believe about violence is based on psychosocial
research on aggressive behaviors . . ..
The panel’s definition deliberately excludes consideration of human behavior
that inflicts physical harm unintentionally . . . even when they occur as a result
of corporate policies (e.g., to expose workers to toxic chemicals) that increase
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 & Roth’s formulation of a precise definition that spans the various
bodies of research in their compendium highlights the emphases—as well as the
inconsistencies—that 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; Darke
1990), 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 definition’s
restriction 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 definition’s 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 physically
or 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).
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 against
another 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 something
separate 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 of
nonviolence, 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. 1–2).
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 Holmes’s examples—verbal abuse of children, racism, and sexism—are
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
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. In
this 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 spouses
have 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 hazardous
working 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
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 a
broader, 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, functional
impairment, 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 expulsion
are 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 of
its 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
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 injury
are not well understood. To what extent do psychological injuries like depres-
sion or stress increase people’s 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 fundamentally
the 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 itself—a key ingredient of what we understand as physical injury—is
a complex intermixture of physiological and psychological stimuli: The precise
causal contribution of each to people’s 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 rights
groups have drawn attention to the devastating psychological effects of solitary
confinement in prisons (perhaps the ultimate social punishment) (Human Rights
Watch 1997, p. 62–74). 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 daughters
to 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
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 100–132 million women
in Africa today (El Dareer 1982; Lightfoot-Klein 1989, Economist 1999, World
Health 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. 338–339). 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 materials
are 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
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 credibility—and are
therefore more damaging—than 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 of
violence, we should respect their potency and analyze the conditions under which
agents of violence choose one or another method of delivery.
VICTIMHOOD AND COMPLIANCE
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 behaviors
that 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
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 the
press, 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 has
haunted 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 victim’s alternatives to compliance may be risky or
futile. Depending on the agent’s and the victim’s relative control over resources,
compliance may be the victim’s 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 attacker’s superior
physical strength or the presence of a weapon), but if the woman offers no evidence
of 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 of
compliance 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
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 observe
empirically. People’s revealed behaviors do not always reflect their preferences,
especially in threatening situations. Added to this, people’s 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 often
fail. 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 agent’s 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) (Kieckhefer
1974; Dickson 1989; Lambert 1992; Los Angeles Times 1993). 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 people’s 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 tolerate—or even to seek—the infliction of injuries on
themselves.
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 over
more 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 connection
between 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 analysis
of 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 1930
exceeds 700,000 (National Safety Council, 1995; Pollack & Keimig 1987), and an
estimated 50,000–100,000 American workers continue to die annually from oc-
cupationally induced diseases (Office of Technology Assessment 1985, National
Safe Workplace Institute 1990).
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 that
he appears. Instead, his violence may be consonant with the institutional or group
settings in which he lives.
WHAT MOTIVATES 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 on
others 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,” or
cigarette 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 children’s 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 study’s subjects,
but when funding for that goal was withdrawn, the investigators seamlessly shifted
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 the initial 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 victim’s 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 history—gladiator games, bull fights, dog fights,
boxing matches,“action” movies—suggests a widespread attraction to violence,
whether for catharsis, excitement, thrills, or sexual arousal. Malevolent feelings
toward the victims may contribute to the audience’s 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 one’s 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 violence
is 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 stem
from 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
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 the
estimated 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 5000–6000; 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) (CDCP
1996, Farley 1996, pp. 222–28). 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 designed
automobiles, 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 one’s body to meet the beauty standards of one’s culture), or simply to
satisfy 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
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 inspired
by hostile intent is gravely misleading and undermines the endeavor to decipher
the human relationship with violence.
VARYING INCIDENCE AND SOCIAL

ACCEPTANCE OF VIOLENCE
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 has
changed 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 deviant
truncates 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. 36–37), and it subverts
any attempt to understand why certain forms of violence are tolerated, accepted,
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 moral
code). 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 victim’s 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 people’s moral judgments of violent incidents; this research highlights the
need for analysis of the sociological factors that shape the structure of media
accounts. 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.
GENERIC DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE

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.
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 target’s 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. 36–40). 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
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 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

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 violence—as agents, victims, and observers—but
most 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 actor’s 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 of
injuries 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 clearer
about 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
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. I
suggest, 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 people’s 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), men’s quest for proprietary control
over 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 that
screen 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
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 their
violence 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 should
examine the social, economic and political goals—and resources—of 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 whole
if 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.
SOCIAL VIOLENCE 409
The Annual Review of Sociology is online at http://soc.annualreviews.org
LITERATURE CITED
American Psychiatric Association. 1994. Diag- in a prismatic metropolis: mapping identity,
nostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Dis- stereotypes, competition, and views on affir-
orders. Washington, DC.: Am. Psychiatr. As- mative action. In Prismatic Metropolis: In-
soc. 4th ed. equality in Los Angeles, ed. LD Bobo, ML
Asch P. 1988. Consumer Safety Regulation: Oliver, JH Johnson, Jr, A Valenzuela, Jr, pp.
Putting a Price on Life and Limb. New York: 81–163. New York: Russell Sage Found.
Oxford Univ. Press Bograd M. 1988. How battered women and

Bachrach P, Baratz MS. 1970. Power and Po- abusive men account for domestic violence:
verty: Theory and Practice. New York: Ox- excuses, justifications, or explanations? In
ford Univ. Press Coping with Family Violence: Research and
Barstow AL. 1994. Witchcraze: A New History Policy Perspectives, ed. GT Hotaling, D
of the European Witch Hunts. San Francisco: Finkelhor, JT Kirkpatrick, MA Straus. New-
Harper Collins bury Park, CA: Sage
Bart PB, Moran EG, eds. 1993. Violence Aga- Brigham JC. 1971. Ethnic stereotypes. Psychol.
inst Women: The Bloody Footprints. New- Bull. 76(July):15–38
bury Park, CA: Sage Browne A. 1993. Violence against women by
Berkowitz L. 1993. Aggression. New York: male partners: prevalence, outcomes, and
McGraw-Hill policy implications. Am. Psychol. 48:1077–
Berman DM. 1978. Death on the Job: Occu- 87
pational Health and Safety Struggles in the Brownmiller S. 1975. Against Our Will: Men,
United States. New York/London: Monthly Women, and Rape. New York: Simon &
Rev. Schuster
Blake CF. 1994. Foot-binding in neo-Confucian Brush LD. 1993. Violent acts and injurious out-
China and the appropriation of female labor. comes in married couples: methodological
Signs 19(Spr):676–712 issues in the National Survey of Families and
Blumenthal MD, Kahn RL, Andrews FM, Head Households. See Bart & Moran 1993, pp.
KB. 1972. Justifying Violence: Attitudes of 240–51
American Men. Ann Arbor, MI: Inst. Soc. Bulman RJ, Wortman CB. 1977. Attributions of
Res. blame and coping in the ‘real world’: severe
Blumenthal MD, Chadiha LB, Cole GA, Jaya- accident victims react to their lot. J. Pers. Soc.
ratne TE. 1975. More about Justifying Vio- Psychol. 35(5):351–63
lence: Methodological Studies of Attitudes Burgess AW, Holstrom LL. 1974. Rape trauma
and Behavior. Ann Arbor, MI: Inst. Soc. Res. syndrome. Am. J. Psychiatry 131(9):981–86
Blumstein A, Wallman J. 2000. The Crime Drop Burt MR. 1980. Cultural myths and supports
in America. New York: Cambridge Univ. for rape. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 38(2):217–30
Press California Policy Council on Violence Preven-
Bobo LD, Smith RA. 1996. From Jim Crow tion. 1995. Violence Prevention, A Vision of
racism to laissez-faire racism: the transfor- Hope: Final Report. Sacramento: Crime &
mation of racial attitudes in America. In Be- Violence Prevention Ctr., Calif. Attorney
yond Pluralism: Essays on the Conception of General’s Office, August
Groups and Group Identities, ed. N Lands- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
man, W Katkin, A Tyree. Urbana: Univ. Ill. 1996. Monthly Vital Statistics Report. 44(7)
Press Supplement, February 29. Washington, DC:
Bobo LD, Johnson D. 2000. Racial attitudes US Dep. Health & Human Serv.
410 JACKMAN
Cerulo KA. 1998. Deciphering Violence: The Dunnigan JF. 1993. How to Make War: A Com-
Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong. prehensive Guide to Modern Warfare for the
New York: Routledge Post-Cold War Era. New York: William Mor-
Clark KB, Clark MP. [1947] 1958. Racial iden- row. 2nd ed.
tification and preference in Negro children. Dworkin A. 1994. Gynocide: Chinese foot-
In Readings in Social Psychology, ed. TM binding. In Living with Contradictions: Con-
Newcomb, EL Hartley, pp. 602–11. New troversies in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. AM
York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. 3rd ed. Jaggar, pp. 213–19. Boulder, CO: West-
Clendinnen I. 1991. Aztecs: An Interpretation. view
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press Dworkin R. 1977. Taking Rights Seriously.
Cover R. 1986. Violence and the word. Yale Law Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press
J. 95:1601–29 Eagly AH, Steffen VJ. 1986. Gender and ag-
Crawford SC. 1992. Punishments and rewards. gressive behavior: a meta-analytic review of
In Without Consent or Contract: The Rise the social psychological literature. Psychol.
and Fall of American Slavery, Conditions of Bull. 100:309–30
Slave Life and the Transition to Freedom: Economist. 1999. Female genital mutilation: Is
Tech. Pap., ed. RW Fogel, SL Engerman, it crime or culture? Economist (Feb 13):45–
2:536–50. New York: Norton 46
Curran, DJ. 1993. Dead Laws for Dead Men: El Dareer A. 1982. Woman, Why Do You Weep?:
The Politics of Federal Coal Mine Health Circumcision and its Consequences. Lon-
and Safety Legislation. Pittsburgh, PA: Univ. don: Zed
Pittsburgh Press Elkins S. 1968. Slavery: A Problem in American
Dahl RA. 1968. Power. In International Ency- Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago:
clopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. DL Sills, Univ. Chicago Press. 2nd ed.
12:405–15. New York: Macmillan Emanuel S. 1987. Criminal Law. Larchmont,
Daly M, Wilson MI. 1988. Homicide. New NY: Emanuel Law Outlines
York: Aldine de Gruyter Evans P. 1992. The Verbally Abusive Relation-
Darke JL. 1990. Sexual aggression: achieving ship: How to Recognize It and How to Re-
power through humiliation. In Handbook of spond. Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams
Sexual Assault: Issues, Theories, and Treat- Evans P. 1993. Verbal Abuse Survivors Speak
ment of the Offender, ed. WL Marshall, DR Out. Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams
Laws, HE Barbaree, pp. 55–72. New York: Fagan J, Browne A. 1994. Violence between
Plenum spouses and intimates: physical aggression
de Loos WS. 1990. Psychosomatic manifesta- between women and men in intimate re-
tions of chronic posttraumatic stress disor- lationships. In Understanding and Prevent-
der. In Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Etiol- ing Violence, Social Influences, Vol 3, Social
ogy, Phenomenology, and Treatment, ed. ME Influence ed. AJ Reiss, JA Roth, 115–292.
Wolf, AD Mosnaim, pp. 94–104. Washing- Washington, DC: Nat’l Acad.
ton, DC: Am. Psychiatric Farley R. 1996. The New American Reality.
Dickson G. 1989. The flagellants of 1260 and New York: Russell Sage Found.
the crusades. J. Medieval Hist. 15(3):227–67 Farley R, Steeh C, Krysan M, Jackson T, Reeves
Dobash RE, Dobash R. 1979. Violence Against K. 1994. Stereotypes and segregation: neigh-
Wives: A Case Against the Patriarchy. New borhoods in the Detroit area. Am. J. Sociol.
York: Free 100(Nov):750–80
Dotter E. 1998. The Quiet Sickness: A Photo- Feagin JR, Sikes MP. 1994. Living with Racism:
graphic Chronicle of Hazardous Work in The Black Middle Class Experience. Boston:
America. Fairfax, VA: Am. Indust. Hygiene Beacon
Assoc. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Annual.
SOCIAL VIOLENCE 411
Uniform Crime Report. Washington, DC: US D Finkelhor, RJ Gelles, GT Hotaling, MA

Govt. Printing Off. Straus. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage
Figley CR, ed. 1985. Trauma and its Wake: The Greenwald AG, Banaji MR. 1995. Implicit
Study and Treatment of Post-traumatic Stress social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem, and
Disorder. New York: Brunner/Mazel stereotypes. Psychol. Rev. 102(1):4–27
Figley CR, ed. 1986. Trauma and its Wake. Vol. Gurr TR, ed. 1989. Violence in America. Vols.
II: Traumatic Stress Theory, Research, and 1, 2. Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Intervention. New York: Brunner/Mazel Hair WI. 1989. Lynching. In Encyclopedia of
Fillippelli RL. 1990. Labor Conflict in the Southern Culture, Vol. 1, ed. CR Wilson &
United States. New York: Garland W Ferris, pp. 294–97. New York: Anchor
Finkelhor D, Yllo K. 1983. Rape in marriage: a Hardin CD, Higgins ET. 1996. Shared reality:
sociological view. In The Dark Side of Fam- how social verification makes the subjective
ilies: Current Family Violence Research, ed. objective. In Handbook of Motivation and
D Finkelhor, RJ Gelles, GT Hotaling, MA Cognition, 3:28–84. New York: Guilford
Straus, pp. 119–30. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Holinger PC. 1987. Violent Deaths in the US.
Foucault M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The New York: Guilford
Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Holmes RL. 1990. Nonviolence in Theory and
French M. 1992. The War Against Women. New Practice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
York: Ballantine Hughes R. 1987. The Fatal Shore: The Epic of
Frieze IH, Browne A. 1989. Violence in mar- Australia’s Founding. New York: Knopf
riage. In Family Violence, ed. L Ohlin, M Human Rights Watch. 1997. Cold Storage: Su-
Tonry, pp. 163–218. Chicago: Univ. Chicago per Maximum Security Confinement in Indi-
Press ana. New York: Human Rights Watch
Gelles RJ, Straus MA. 1988. Intimate Violence: Jackman MR. 1994. The Velvet Glove: Pa-
The Causes and Consequences of Abuse in ternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class,
the American Family. New York: Simon & and Race Relations. Berkeley: Univ. Calif.
Schuster Press
Gitelman HM. 1973. Perspectives on Ameri- Jackman MR. 1999. Gender, violence and ha-
can industrial violence. Bus. Hist. Rev. 47 rassment. In Handbook of the Sociology of
(Spr):1–23 Gender, ed. JS Chafetz, pp. 275–317. New
Goffman E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in York: Plenum
Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Jackman MR. 2001. License to kill: violence
Goffman E. 1970. Strategic Interaction. Lon- and legitimacy in expropriative intergroup
don: Blackwell relations. In The Psychology of Legitimacy:
Graham HD, Gurr TR, eds. 1969. Violence in Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice,
America: Historical and Comparative Per- and Intergroup Relations, ed. JT Jost, B Ma-
spectives. A Report to the National Commis- jor, pp. 437–67. New York: Cambridge Univ.
sion on the Causes and Prevention of Vio- Press
lence, Vols. I, II. Washington, DC: US Govt. Jackman MR. In preparation. The Social Ca-
Printing Off. pacity for Violence. Berkeley: Univ. Calif.
Gramsci A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Press
Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (ed. and Jackman RW. 1993. Power Without Force: The
trans. Q Hoare, GN Smith). New York: Int. Political Capacity of Nation-States. Ann Ar-
Publ. bor: Univ. Mich. Press
Greenblat CS. 1983. A hit is a hit is a hit . . . Jackson R. 1990. The Chinese foot-binding
Or is it?: approval and tolerance of physical syndrome: observations on the history and
force by spouses. In The Dark Side of Fami- sequelae of wearing ill-fitting shoes. Int. J.
lies: Current Family Violence Research, ed. Dermatol. 29(June):322–28
412 JACKMAN
Johnson P. 1987. A History of the Jews. New of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the US.
York: Harper & Row Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press
Johnson R. 1990. Death Work: A Study of the Lerner MJ, Simmons CH. 1966. Observer’s re-
Modern Execution Process. Pacific Grove, action to the ‘innocent victim’: compassion
CA: Brooks/Cole or rejection? J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 4(2):203–
Jones EE, Nisbett RE. 1971. The Actor and 10
the Observer: Divergent Perceptions of the Levack BP. 1993. The Witch-Hunt in Early
Causes of Behavior. Morristown, NJ: Gen- Modern Europe. London: Longman. 2nd ed.
eral Learning Levenson JD. 1993. The Death and the Resur-
Jones JH. 1993. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee rection of the Beloved Son: The Transforma-
Syphilis Experiment. New York: Free tion of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Chris-
Jost JT, Major B. 2001. The Psychology of Le- tianity. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press
gitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideol- Levy HS. 1966. Chinese Footbinding: The His-
ogy, Justice, and Intergroup Relations. Cam- tory of a Curious Erotic Custom. New York:
bridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press Walton Rawls
Kelman HC, Hamilton VL. 1989. Crimes of Lightfoot-Klein H. 1989. Prisoners of Ritual:
Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumci-
Authority and Responsibility. New Haven: sion in Africa. New York: Haworth
Yale Univ. Press Lincoln B. 1991. Death, War, and Sacrifice:
Kieckhefer R. 1974. Radical tendencies in the Studies in Ideology and Practice. Chicago:
flagellant movement of the mid-fourteenth Univ. Chicago Press
century. J. Medieval & Renaissance Stud. Los Angeles Times. 1993. Filipinos Mark Good
4(2):157–76 Friday With Crucifixion Ritual. April 10
Kilpatrick DG, Resnick HS, Freedy JR, Pel- Lukes S. 1974. Power: A Radical View. London:
covitz D, Resick P, et al. 1998. Posttraumatic Macmillan
Stress Disorder field trial: evaluation of the Lynch MA, Roberts J. 1982. Consequences of
PTSD—Construct criteria A through E. In Child Abuse. London: Academic
DSM-IV Sourcebook 4:803–38. Washington, Malamuth NM. 1981. Rape proclivity among
DC: Am. Psychiatric Assoc. males. J. Soc. Issues 37:138–57
King ML Jr. 1963. Why We Can’t Wait. New Manchester W. 1992. A World Lit Only by Fire:
York: New Am. Library The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance.
Kors AC, Peters E. 1972. Witchcraft in Europe Boston: Little, Brown
1100–1700: A Documentary History. Phila- Mann RW, Sledzik PS, Owsley DW, Droulette
delphia: Univ. Penn. Press MR. 1990. Radiographic examination of
LaFree GD, Reskin BF, Visher CA. 1985. Ju- Chinese foot binding. J. Am. Podiatric Med.
rors’ responses to victims’ behavior and le- Assn. 80(Aug):405–9
gal issues in sexual assault trials. Soc. Prob. Mazur A. 1983. Physiology, dominance, and
32(4):389–407 aggression in humans. In Center for Research
Lambert M. 1992. Medieval Heresy: Pop- on Aggression, Prevention and Control of
ular Movements from the Gregorian Re- Aggression, pp. 145–55. New York: Per-
form to the Reformation. Oxford: Blackwell. gamon
2nd ed. May M. 1978. Violence in the family: an histor-
Land K, McCall PL, Cohen LE. 1990. Struc- ical perspective. In Violence and the Family,
tural covariates of homicide rates: Are there ed. JP Martin, pp. 135–67. New York: Wiley
any invariances across time and social space? McFarlane AC, Atchison M, Rafalowicz E, Pa-
Am. J. Sociol. 95(4):922–23 pay P. 1994. Physical symptoms in post-
Laumann EO, Gagnon JH, Michael RT, traumatic stress disorder. J. Psychsom. Res.
Michaels S. 1994. The Social Organization 38:715–26
SOCIAL VIOLENCE 413
McGarity TO, Shapiro SA. 1993. Workers at oped countries: indirect estimation from na-
Risk: The Failed Promise of the Occupa- tional vital statistics. The Lancet 339 (May
tional Safety and Health Administration. 23):1268–78
Westport, CT: Praeger Phillips JA. 1997. Variation in African-
Mill JS. [1869] 1970. The subjection of American homicide rates: an assessment of
women. In Essays on Sex Equality: John potential explanations. Criminology 35(4):
Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, ed. AS 527–59
Rossi, pp. 123–242. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Pleck E. 1989. Criminal approaches to family
Press violence 1640–1980. In Family Violence, ed.
Miller DT, Porter CA. 1983. Self-blame in vic- L Ohlin, M Tonry, pp. 19–57. Chicago: Univ.
tims of violence. J. Soc. Issues 39(2):139– Chicago Press

52 Pollack ES, Keimig DG, eds. 1987. Counting
Millett K. 1970. Sexual Politics. New York: Injuries and Illnesses in the Workplace: Pro-
Doubleday posals for a Better System. Washington, DC:
Monter EW. 1976. Witchcraft in France and Nat’l Acad. Press
Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Radford J, Russell DEH, eds. 1992. Femicide:
Reformation. Ithaca, New York: Cornell The Politics of Woman Killing. New York:
Univ. Press Twayne
Morris DB. 1991. The Culture of Pain. Berke- Reiss AJ, Jr, Roth JA, eds. 1993. Understanding
ley/LA: Univ. Calif. Press and Preventing Violence. Vols. 1–4. Wash-
National Safe Workplace Institute. 1990. Be- ington, DC: Nat’l Acad. Press
yond Neglect: The Problem of Occupational Resick PA. 1993. The psychological impact of
Disease in the United States–Labor Day ’90 rape. J. Interpers. Violence 8:223–55
Report. Chicago: The Institute Resnick HS, Acierno R, Kilpatrick DG. 1997.
National Safety Council. 1995. Accident Facts. Health impact of interpersonal violence:
Chicago: Natl. Safety Council medical and mental health outcomes. Behav.
Nelkin D, Brown MS. 1984. Workers at Risk: Med. 23(2):65–78
Voices from the Workplace. Chicago: Univ. Rich A. 1980. Compulsory heterosexuality and
Chicago Press Lesbian existence. Signs 5(4):647–50
Office of Technology Assessment. 1985. Pre- Robertson DB, Judd DR. 1989. The Develop-
venting Illness and Injury in the Workplace, ment of American Public Policy: The Struc-
OTA-H-256. 99th Congress. Washington, ture of Policy Restraint. Glenview, IL: Scott,
DC: US. Gov’t Printing Off. Foresman
Ohlin L, Tonry M. 1989. Family violence in per- Rosenberg M. 1994. Violence prevention: inte-
spective. In Family Violence, ed. L Ohlin & grating public health and criminal justice.
M Tonry, pp. 1–18. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Presentation at the US. Attorneys’ Conf.,
Press Washington, DC, Jan 20
Pennebaker JW, Kiecolt-Glaser JK, Glaser R. Rosenfeld R. 2000. Patterns in adult homicide:
1988. Disclosure of traumas and immune 1980–1995. In The Crime Drop in America,
function: health implications for psycho- ed. A Blumstein, J Wallman, pp. 130–63.
therapy. J. Consult. Clin. Psychol. 56:239– New York: Cambridge Univ. Press
45 Rosner D, Markowitz G, eds. 1987. Dying
Peters E. 1989. Inquisition. Berkeley: Univ. for Work: Workers’ Safety and Health in
Calif. Press Twentieth-Century America. Bloomington:
Peters E. 1996. Torture: Expanded Edition. Indiana Univ. Press
Philadelphia: Univ. Penn. Press Ruback RB, Weiner NA, eds. 1995. Interper-
Peto R, Lopez AD, Boreham J, Thun M, Heath sonal Violent Behaviors: Social and Cultural
C, Jr. 1992. Mortality from tobacco in devel- Aspects. New York: Springer
414 JACKMAN
Russell DEH. 1982. Rape in Marriage. New Straus MA, Gelles RJ, eds. 1990. Physical Vio-
York: Macmillan lence in American Families: Risk Factors and
Russell JB. 1972. Witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press New Brunswick, London: Transaction
Scully D. 1990. Understanding Sexual Vio- Straus MA, Hamby SL, Boney-McCoy S, Sug-
lence: A Study of Convicted Rapists. New arman DB. 1996. The revised Conflict Tac-
York: Routledge tics Scale (CTS2): development and prelim-
Sinclair S, Hardin CD, Lowery B. 2002. Im- inary psychometric data. J. Family Issues
plicit self-stereotyping in the context of mul- 17(3):283–316
tiple group identities. Unpublished paper, Stryker S, Serpe RT. 1982. Commitment, iden-
UCLA tity salience, and role behavior: theory and

Small M, Singer JD. 1982. Resort to Arms: In- research example. In Personality, Roles, and
ternational and Civil Wars, 1816–1980. Bev- Social Behavior, ed. W Ickes, ES Knowles,
erly Hills, CA: Sage pp. 199–218. New York: Springer-Verlag
Snyder M. 1981. On the self-perpetuating na- Taft P, Ross P. 1969. American labor violence:
ture of social stereotypes. In Cognitive Pro- its causes, character, and outcome. See Gra-
cesses in Stereotyping and Intergroup Behav- ham & Gurr 1969, I:221–301. Washington,
ior, ed. DL Hamilton, pp. 183–212. Hillsdale, DC: US Gov’t Printing Off.
NJ: Erlbaum Tajfel H. 1969. Cognitive aspects of prejudice.
Stampp KM. 1956. The Peculiar Institution: J. Soc. Issues 25:79–97
Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Taylor R. 1981. Within the halls of ivy: the sex-
Vintage ual revolution comes of age. Change 13:22–
Stanko EA. 1985. Intimate Intrusions: Women’s 29
Experience of Male Violence. London: Rout- Tierney P. 1989. The Highest Altar. New York:
ledge & Kegan Paul Viking/Penguin
Stanko EA. 1995. Gendered criminological Tolman RM. 1989. The development of a mea-
policies: femininity, masculinity, and vio- sure of the psychological maltreatment of
lence. In Crime and Public Policy: Putting women by their male partners. Violence Vic-
Theory to Work, ed. HD Barlow, pp. 207–26. tims 4(3):159–78
Boulder, CO: Westview US Dep. Health Hum. Services. 1990. Smok-
Stark E, Flitcraft AH. 1988. Personal power ing and Health: A National Status Report.
and institutional victimization: treating the Washington, DC: US. Govt. Printing Off.
dual trauma of woman battering. In Post- Utech MR. 1994. Violence, Abuse and Neglect:
Traumatic Therapy and Victims of Violence, The American Home. New York: General
ed. FM Ochberg, pp. 115–51. New York: Hall
Brunner/Mazel Von JM, Kilpatrick DG, Burgess AW, Hartman
Stark E, Flitcraft AH. 1991. Spouse abuse. In CR. 1991. Rape and sexual assault. In Vio-
Violence in America: A Public Health Ap- lence in America: A Public Health Approach,
proach, ed. ML Rosenberg, MA Fenley, pp. ed. ML Rosenberg, MA Fenley, pp. 95–122.
123–57. New York: Oxford Univ. Press New York: Oxford Univ. Press
Straus MA. 1990. The Conflict Tactics Scale Walker LE. 1979. The Battered Woman. New
and its critics: an evaluation and new data on York: Harper & Row
validity and reliability. See Straus & Gelles Warr M. 1994. Public perceptions and reactions
1990, pp. 49–74 to violent offending and victimization. In Un-
Straus M, Gelles R. 1986. Societal change and derstanding and Preventing Violence, Vol. 4:
change in family violence from 1975 to 1985 Consequences and Control, ed. AJ Reiss Jr.,
as revealed by two national surveys. J. Mar- JA Roth, pp. 1–66. Washington, DC: Nat’l
riage Family 48:465–79 Acad. Press
SOCIAL VIOLENCE 415
Weis JG. 1989. Family violence research Rule of Law, ed. RP Wolff, pp. 54–72. New
methodology and design. In Family Justice, York: Simon & Schuster
ed. L Ohlin, M Tonry, pp. 117–162. Chicago: Wolfgang ME, ed. 1967. Studies in Homicide.
Univ. Chicago Press New York: Harper & Row
White W. [1929] 1969. Rope and Faggot. New Wolfgang ME, Figlio RM, Tracy PE, Singer SI.
York: Amo 1985. The National Survey of Crime Sever-
Williams JE, Holmes KA. 1981. The Second ity. Washington, DC: US. Gov’t. Printing
Assault: Rape and Public Attitudes. West- Off.
port, CT: Greenwood Word CO, Zanna MP, Cooper J. 1974. The non-
Wilson JP, Raphael B, eds. 1993. International verbal mediation of self-fulfilling prophecies
Handbook of Traumatic Stress Syndromes. in interracial interaction. J. Exp. Soc. Psych.

New York: Plenum 10:109-20
Witt M, Dotter E. 1979. In Our Blood: Four World Health Organization. 2001. Female
Coal Mining Families. New Market, TN: Genital Mutilation. http://www.who.int/frh-
Highlander Res. & Educ. Ctr. whd/FGM/infopack / English / fgm infopack.
Wolff RP. 1971. Violence and the law. In The htm
P1: FRK
June 10, 2002 12:5 Annual Reviews AR163-FM
Annual Review of Sociology

Volume 28, 2002
CONTENTS
Frontispiece—Stanley Lieberson x
PREFATORY CHAPTER
Barking Up the Wrong Branch: Scientific Alternatives to the Current

Model of Sociological Science, Stanley Lieberson and Freda B. Lynn 1
THEORY AND METHODS
From Factors to Actors: Computational Sociology and Agent-Based
Modeling, Michael W. Macy and Robert Willer 143
Mathematics in Sociology, Christofer R. Edling 197
Global Ethnography, Zsuzsa Gille and Seán Ó Riain 271
Integrating Models of Diffusion of Innovations: A Conceptual
Framework, Barbara Wejnert 297
Assessing “Neighborhood Effects”: Social Processes and New
Directions in Research, Robert J. Sampson, Jeffrey D. Morenoff,
and Thomas Gannon-Rowley 443
The Changing Faces of Methodological Individualism, Lars Udehn 479
SOCIAL PROCESSES
Violence in Social Life, Mary R. Jackman 387
INSTITUTIONS AND CULTURE
Welfare Reform: How Do We Measure Success? Daniel T. Lichter
and Rukamalie Jayakody 117
The Study of Islamic Culture and Politics: An Overview and
Assessment, Mansoor Moaddel 359
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY
Financial Markets, Money, and Banking, Lisa A. Keister 39
Comparative Research on Women’s Employment, Tanja van der Lippe
and Liset van Dijk 221
DIFFERENTIATION AND STRATIFICATION
Chinese Social Stratification and Social Mobility, Yanjie Bian 91
v
P1: FRK
June 10, 2002 12:5 Annual Reviews AR163-FM
vi CONTENTS
The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences, Michèle Lamont

and Virág Molnár 167
Race, Gender, and Authority in the Workplace: Theory and
Research, Ryan A. Smith 509
INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY
Reconsidering the Effects of Sibling Configuration: Recent
Advances and Challenges, Lala Carr Steelman, Brian Powell,
Regina Werum, and Scott Carter 243
Ethnic Boundaries and Identity in Plural Societies, Jimy M. Sanders 327

POLICY
Ideas, Politics, and Public Policy, John L. Campbell 21
New Economics of Sociological Criminology, Bill McCarthy 417
HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY
The Sociology of Intellectuals, Charles Kurzman and Lynn Owens 63
INDEXES
Subject Index 543
Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 19–28 565
Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 19–28 568
ERRATA
An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Sociology chapters
(if any, 1997 to the present) may be found at http://soc.annualreviews.org/

Iolence in Ocial IFE: Mary R. Jackman

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Iolence in Ocial IFE: Mary R. Jackman

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

12 Jun 2002 10:14 AR AR163-16.tex AR163-16.

SGM LaTeX2e(2002/01/18) P1: GJC

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2002. 28:387–415

VIOLENCE IN SOCIAL LIFE

Key Words ideology, deviance, intent, injury

it is usually assumed that violence is deviant—legally, socially, or morally—from

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 389

EXISTING DEFINITIONS OF VIOLENCE

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 391

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

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

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 393

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

THE RANGE OF INJURIOUS OUTCOMES: PHYSICAL,

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 395

amount of evidence on the pervasiveness and duration of psychological injuries

INJURIOUS BEHAVIORS: PHYSICAL, VERBAL, WRITTEN

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

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

VICTIMHOOD AND COMPLIANCE

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 397

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 399

AGENTS AND VICTIMS: INDIVIDUAL AND CORPORATE

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

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

WHAT MOTIVATES VIOLENCE?

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 401

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

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 403

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

VARYING INCIDENCE AND SOCIAL

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

GENERIC DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 405

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

NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 407

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 409

The Annual Review of Sociology is online at http://soc.annualreviews.org

Oxford Univ. Press Bograd M. 1988. How battered women and

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 411

Uniform Crime Report. Washington, DC: US D Finkelhor, RJ Gelles, GT Hotaling, MA

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 413

tims of violence. J. Soc. Issues 39(2):139– Chicago Press

UCLA tity salience, and role behavior: theory and

SOCIAL VIOLENCE 415

Handbook of Traumatic Stress Syndromes. in interracial interaction. J. Exp. Soc. Psych.

Annual Review of Sociology

Barking Up the Wrong Branch: Scientific Alternatives to the Current

The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences, Michèle Lamont

Ethnic Boundaries and Identity in Plural Societies, Jimy M. Sanders 327

S-ar putea să vă placă și