Perspectives on Violence exam 3

- attempt to situate individual and family in the wider context of community and society

- "mismatch" between family and its neighborhood or community could result in violence

- locate "causes" of  most behaviors  in genetic sources

- try to find "adaptive value" of behavior, why natural forces might actually select for it.

- hold negative attitude toward male nature and instinct-- males are costly

- emphasize cultural values, practices, and institutions that support male social power (patriarchy)

- people use violence in the family or with loved ones because they can

- when there are rewards for violent behavior and when the costs of violence do not outweigh the rewards

- violence is rational choice by abuser

- more likely to be assaulted/beaten/killed in your own home at the hands of a loved one

- more vulnerable if you're a woman, teenage girls, and young children, the elderly and the disabled

- Jekyll and Hyde: cyclical abusers, alternately violent and pleasent. 30%

- Psychopathic wife assaulters: psychological problems make them unlikely to change or improve. can stay unusually detached from their actions, cool, unaroused. 40%

- Overcontrolled wife assaulters: more out of touch with their feelings, avoidant, passive aggressive. 30%

"Active  controller"-- control freak

"Passive controller"-- relatively unemotionalbut rigid i n sex role attitudes and verbally aggressive

1. Younger wives more likely to be abused than older

2. Women who are denied  important economic role i n society more likely to be abused

3. Women who are isolated from their own kin  by marriage residence are more likely to be abused

4. women who are "hidden" behind a  wall of domestic "privacy" are more likely to be abused

5. Women who live in societies that deny them status of "autonomous adults" especially where their identity (legal or social) is dependent on or merged into the man's

- US is former British colony, Britain draws culture from Roman/Christian

- wives/offspring were property of male head of family

- males regarded as dominant, male being created first and woman coming from him

- Roman custom law

- granted men the right of life and death over their families

- gave them the power to disinherit, to dispose, to sell into slavery, or to kill

- parents and occasionally siblings are responsible

1) exploitation of the infant as a resource, usually cannibalism

2) competition for resources, where death of infant increseas resources available

3) sexual selection, improve opportunities to breed by eliminating dependent offspring of a prospective mate

4)parental manipulation of progeny-- parents increase lifetime reproductive success

5) social pathology: infanticide decreases fitness of infanticidial individual

1) resource shortage

2) defectiveness of the child

- infant is shaken vigorously, generally by a caretaker to stop it from crying

- symptoms: brain swelling and damage, bleeding  under theskin, blindness, hearingloss, speech/learning difficulties, developmental delays, paralysis and even death

- historically suicide was far more common in the United States in the first decade of the 1900s and in the 1930s and dropped dramatically in the 1920s and 1950s

- near record-low today (in US)

- in other socities characterized by macrosocial institutions of abusive behavior, suicide is accepted as form of escape

- in sexually repressive socities including Muslim and Chinese, women turning to suicide

- suicide leading cause of death for Chinese under 35, rural chinese women drinking pesticide

- Afghanistan: women burning themselves, attempting to avoid arranged marriages, no social options, etc

- violence and harm in the world done without even a knowledge of doing it, by means of hte institutions, practices, and structures  of society

- the harm that occurs as a result of the very rules and arrangements of society: power inequalities, gender relations, class stratification, race and ethnic differences

- 1/3 of the world's female pop is illiterate

- poor women especially cannot get health care, cannot obtain  contraception, have unhealthy babies, or die during pregnancy or childbirth

- Low crime rates: northeast (15.8%) and midwest (19.4%)

- West  had relatively proportionate crime rate to its pop: 23.4%

- South was disproportionately high: 41.4%

- larger cities had more crime, then suburbs, then rural areas. Larger cities had higher crime rates than smaller citities.

-- Of all groups, American Indians had very highest violent victimization rates

- males experience more victimization rates than females unless sex crimes

- poorer families highest rate of violence

- signle people who have never been marriedhigher risk of violence

- family members (1/5)

- friend or acquaintance most likely to kill an older child

- competitive

- individualistic

- achievement seeking

- highly self-oriented

- self-assertive and egoistic

-antiauthority

- nonconformist

- highly value independence, freedom, liberty

- differentiated and even hierarchal

- callous and unempathetic toward the suffering of others

- moralism and idealism

- communicate that force is an acceptable even valuable way  to solve conflicts

- value order and structure

- superficial charm and good intelligence

- absence of delusions/irrational thinking

- absence of nervousness/pyschoneutrotic traits

- unreliability

- Insincerity /lack of truthfulness

- lack of remorse/shame

- poor judgement/failure to learn from experience

- pathological egocentricity/incapacity for love

- low emotional relations

- loss of inishgt

- unresponsive to interpersonal behavior

- sex life impersonal, trivial, poorly integrated

- failure to follow a life plan

- rarely sui

- in 2000, 879,000 US children abused

- 1,200/100,000

63% neglect, 19% physical, 10% sexual, 8% psychological.emotional

- the younger the child, the higher the rate of victimization (under 3 y.o. highest risk)

- 51.9% females, 48.1% males

- 50.6%white, 24.7%black, 14.2% hispanic, 1.6% american indian/alaska natives

- 79% victimizers = parents, women accounting for more than half (59.9%) of abusers

- look at a particular measure used/measuring in the SARA -- spousal abuse risk assesment

- psychological evaulation

- subjective

- wanted to predict future behavior because we have limited resources to deal with  DV

- if individual is arrested for any offense after 18 months  of being sentenced  of another crime, they areconsidered at risk

- most human infanticide constitutes parental manipulation of reproduction, especially when practiced by the mother

- taking away the right to reproduce