Physical violence,child abuse,and child homicide

The study of child abuse and child homicide has been based on the often implicit assumption that there is a continuum of violence ranging from mild physical punishment to severe abuse and homicide. Empirical data supporting this assumption are sparse. Existing data can be shown, however, to support an assumption that there are distinct forms of violence, not a continuum. This paper reviews these data and discusses their implications for the study of violence, abuse, and homicide in terms of substantive and methodological explanations. In addition, the implications of the assumption that violence consists of distinct behaviors as opposed to a continuum are discussed in light of sociobiological and evolutionary explanations of child abuse and child homicide. This paper was written under the auspices of the Family Violence Research Program at the University of Rhode Island. A complete list of books and articles is available upon request. Richard J. Gelles is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology and the Director of the Family Violence Research Program at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author or coauthor of 14 books and more than 90 articles and chapters on family violence. His most recent books areIntimate Violence, published in 1988 by Simon and Schuster;Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations in 8,145 Families, published by Transaction Books in 1990; andIntimate Violence in Families, published in 1990 by Sage Publications.     

The impact of civil conflict on child health: Evidence from Colombia

Internal armed conflicts have become more common and more physically destructive since the mid-20th century, with devastating consequences for health and development in low- and middle-income countries. This paper investigates the causal impacts of the long-term internal conflict on child health in Colombia, following an identification strategy based on the temporal and geographic variation of conflict intensity. We estimate the effect of different levels of conflict intensity on height-for-age (HAZ), weight-for-age (WAZ), and weight-for-height z-scores among children under five years old, and explore the underlying potential mechanisms, through maternal health behavior and health care utilization. We find a harmful effect of exposure to conflict violence in utero and in early childhood for HAZ and WAZ, in the full sample and even more strongly in the rural sample, yet these estimates are smaller than those found for shorter term conflicts. The underlying pathways appear to operate around the time of the pregnancy and birth (in the form of maternal alcohol use, use of antenatal care and skilled birth attendance), rather than during the post-birth period (via breastfeeding or vaccination), and the impacts accumulate over the childhood. The most adverse impacts of conflict violence on child health and utilization of maternal healthcare were observed in municipalities which suffered from intermittent presence of armed groups.     

The patterns of ethnic settlement and violence: a local-level quantitative analysis of the Bosnian War

The debate on the link between ethnicity and violence has been raging in political science literature since the end of the Cold War. Often, cross-country quantitative studies dismissed the importance of ethnic heterogeneity as a source of violent conflict. How the patterns of ethnic settlement within a country affect the severity of violence, though, has not yet been studied through similar techniques. In this essay, we build and analyse a data set of major violence-related variables collected at the local level during the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. What emerges is that the local distribution of the population, in terms of the number and relative size of the groups, is a key factor in explaining the intensity of violence in the Bosnian municipalities.     

Aggressor or protector? Experiences and perceptions of violence predict preferences for masculinity

Women's preferences for masculine male partners have been explained in terms of heritable health. The evidence between masculinity and health, however, is controversial and therefore, alternative explanations for masculinity preferences reflecting income inequality and protection from violence have been proposed. This study thus aimed to test the effect of exposure to violence (i.e., experiences of robberies and perceptions of danger) on the individual masculinity preferences of women and men from the capital city of Colombia, Bogota, and surrounding small towns. One hundred and fifty three adult participants (mean age ± S.D. = 31.3 ± 9.4), all heterosexual, were surveyed in reference to indicators related to health (e.g., drinking water access, frequency of illnesses), access to media (e.g., television and internet access), education (e.g., graduating from high school, attending university) and exposure to violence (e.g., frequency of robberies/attacks, feelings of danger from violence). Participants made two alternatives, preference forced-choice for masculinized and feminized versions of both rural Salvadoran and European male faces. We found that men and women exposed to higher levels of violence preferred less masculine male faces, although this effect was only significant for women. Additionally, the effect of violence exposure was more relevant for the Salvadoran stimuli. Violence contributed significantly to explaining masculinity preferences after controlling for participant age, education, access to media, and health-related factors. These preferences may reflect women's strategy to avoid male violence demonstrating that exposure to violence matters in interpersonal attraction.     

Determinantes sociodemográficos de violencia en adultos mayores ecuatorianos

Background and objectiveOlder adults are at increased risk of violence. In order to prevent this, it is necessary to identify associated risk factors. The objective of the present study was to determine the association between violence and various socio-demographic factors (age, gender, ethnic group, level of education, and place of residence) in older adults.Material and methodsCross-sectional study that included participants from the SABE-Ecuador study, who were selected through probabilistic sampling and came from all over the national territory. Data were analysed with R using ordinal logistic regression models.ResultsSample included 4321 older adults, women (52%) and men (48%), with a mean age of 72 years (SD 8). Having suffered violence was reported in 21.3% (n = 922) of older adults. It was observed that the odds of suffering violence was lower in men than in women (OR = 0.753, p< .001), decreased as age increased (OR = 0.989, p = .012) and decreased as level of education increased (primary vs. no education OR = 0.866, p = .001; secondary vs. no education OR = 0.622, p = .003; higher vs. no education OR = 0.323, p< .001).ConclusionsBeing a woman and having a low level of education is associated with an increased risk of violence in older adults. Reducing gender gap and improving access to education for older adults could reduce their risk of violence.     

Warlords,priests and the politics of ethnic cleansing: a case-study from rural Bosnia Hercegovina

There is a tendency among social scientists and others to interpret the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Hercegovina as the result of a political policy carefully orchestrated from above and systematically carried out. Whatever eruptions of war violence might deviate from this interpretation are generally viewed as primitive balkanism, pointless acts, banditism or mental aberrations. Terms of this kind reflect an uncritical acceptance of a central or national leader perspective, dismissing as deviant everything that fails to go according to plan, and denying the significance of specific local and regional circumstances or failing at any rate to problematize and examine them. This article describes a process the final result of which can be seen as the ethnic homogenization of a region, but only part of its dynamics can be attributed to a policy implemented from above. Rather, its course can largely be traced back to local vendettas and a long-standing conflict between Franciscan friars and diocesan priests. The case illustrates that a systematic study "from below" is crucial to a better understanding of the dynamics and the developmental logic of the processes of ethnic cleansing. The article concludes with some theoretical thoughts which fit into the current debate on civilizing and decivilizing processes.     

When the Patient Remains in Danger: Psychotherapy in U.S. Combat Zones

Much of the literature on the psychological treatment of victims of violence focuses on demographic populations that do not represent the majority of victims. Part of the origin of this problem is that the prototypical victim and the prototypical perpetrator are often the same. Young, poor, minority males often constitute both the victim and the perpetrator class in America. As a group, these individuals, while disproportionately thought of as suitable for incarceration, are not thought of as good candidates for psychological treatment. However, their suffering is real, unrelenting and often not addressed. Therapists face significant barriers, in the patient, in society and in themselves, in trying to help these individuals. This article examines the issues of racism, drugs, ongoing danger, class inequalities, misogyny and the blended victim/perpetrator, all of which complicate engagement and understanding between therapist and patient.     

Proximity and Distance: Vietnamese Memories of the War with the USA

By employing an intergenerational perspective, this article examines the ways in which memories about the war between Vietnam and the USA are engraved in the social and individual body in a northern Vietnamese rural community. Throughout the 1990s, Vietnam and the USA attempted to improve their postwar relationship. The current atmosphere of coming to terms with a past of war through coexistence and reconciliation fosters ambivalences and ambiguities in young postwar generations. On the one hand, they have to reconcile themselves to the pain and bitterness caused by the war. On the other, they have to bridge the gap between themselves and their parents and grandparents concerning the extent to which they are able to ‘forget the past and look toward the future’, as one national postwar strategy recommends. The article thus highlights the complex ways in which war and postwar generations in local Vietnam attempt to remember and/or forget brutality, sorrow and anger, in order to come to terms with what in Vietnam is referred to as the American War.     

Between votes and bullets. Conflicting ethnic identities in the Basque Country

With settlement of the Northern Irish conflict, the Basque Country hosts the most threatening nationalist conflict in the European Union. After the breakdown of the ceasefire late in 1999, a return of intensive and indiscriminate ETA violence has provoked a political and social crisis for Basque (and Spanish) society, and, according to all recent opinion polls, the issue of terrorism now ranks first among citizens' worries. This article focuses on the historical origins of the Basque conflict, its evolution during the Francoist dictatorship (1939–75), and the reasons for its continuity in the new political context of democracy. Special attention is paid to the attempt of kick-starting a peace process in 1998, comparison with the Northern Irish experience, and factors which contributed to the collapse of that attempt of peaceful accommodation. Finally, in the light of the most outstanding theoretical approaches towards the explanation of political violence in the Basque Country, several proposals for the necessary rethinking of this problem are presented.     

The tyranny of the binary: race,nation and the logic of failing liberalisms

This article explores the consequences of rapidly fissuring binary models of community and progress in a national and global context. It suggests that this is a dominant (black/white) paradigm used to map both mainstream and particularly liminal sites of cultural/political articulation. Furthermore, it argues that such models of imputed progress, reason and civility contain the narcissistic residue of an earlier liberal encounter: namely, the fetish quality attached to the black body as abject text and privileged humanist ontology by the twentieth-century European movement of liberal humanism. The article argues that recent attempts to rethink this position vis à vis the European Holocaust have actually rehearsed the logic, both of fetish and binarism. Moreover, that this stasis in liberal thinking on issues of race and violence has heightened the attraction of those political movements characterized by cultural absolutism. The essay suggests that acknowledgement of the 'public secret' which underwrites liberal narrative stasis is the first step towards a more appropriate cultural grammar.