The outgrowth of a conference planned as a response to the need for researchers and clinicians to develop integrated plans for addressing the psychological trauma of children exposed to violence, this volume's goals are:
* to summarize research on the subject with particular emphasis on the Gulf War;
* to use this information to formulate an outline of what current knowledge suggests are reasonable approaches to public mental health intervention; and
* to develop an agenda for future research necessary for improving clinical efforts in varying international conflicts.
A significant collection of diverse perspectives attending to a diversity of cultural and political contexts, the contributors offer many conclusions about important dimensions for analyzing the effects of violence on children. Suggesting informed approaches to public mental health efforts which can be implemented, the work presented here directs attention to the need for interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers and clinicians to better understand the effects of exposure to violence on the psychological well being of children and the optimal modes of remediation on individual, family, and community levels.

Over the fifty years between 1940 and 1990, the countries of eastern Africa were embroiled in a range of debilitating and destructive conflicts, starting with the wars of independence, but then incorporating rebellion, secession and local insurrection as the Cold War replaced colonialism. The articles gathered here illustrate how significant, widespread, and dramatic this violence was. In these years, violence was used as a principal instrument in the creation and consolidation of the authority of the state; and it was also regularly and readily utilised by those who wished to challenge state authority through insurrection and secession. Why was it that eastern Africa should have experienced such extensive and intensive violence in the fifty years before 1990? Was this resort to violence a consequence of imperial rule, the legacy of oppressive colonial domination under a coercive and non-representative state system? Did essential contingencies such as the Cold War provoke and promote the use of violence? Or, was it a choice made by Africans themselves and their leaders, a product of their own agency? This book focuses on these turbulent decades, exploring the principal conflicts in six key countries - Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Tanzania. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been called the 'worst place in the world' for women, with reports of widespread and horrific incidents of rape and sexual violence and almost complete impunity for the perpetrators of such violence. However, despite the high profile media reporting on sexual violence in the DRC, and the widely publicized responses of the international community, there is still very little real analysis of the real situation of women in the country. This book provides such detailed analysis of gender relations in the DRC, and goes beyond the usual explanations of sexual violence as a product of conflict, to examine the complex and socially constructed gender norms and roles which underlie incidences of violence. The book benefits from a comprehensive account of men's and women's roles in conflict, violence, peace building and reconstruction, and evaluates the impacts of national and international political responses. In doing so, this book provides valuable new evidence and analysis of the complex and multilayered conflicts in the DRC.

In more than 100 essays, written over a three-year period for the "New York Observer", Howard Fast looks with horror at the official violence inflicted on Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada, Panama and Iraq and the unofficial violence that is taking place in the cities of the United States. In "War and Peace", Fast summons us to face the wars and the social disintegration that degraded the Reagan and Bush years, with all the explanations and excuses stripped away. He dwells on the monumental folly of the Cold War and shows us repeatedly what we could have done with the billions spent on planes, bombs and guns if we had spent them on the education and safety of our children, on housing, medical care, rebuilding the cities - and what we can still do in the future. As in Swift, Yahoos populate the essays of this book: the drug dealers; the local political hacks; the anti-Semites; the racists; the women-bashers; the arms traffickers: the whole unsavory cast. As in Mencken, boobs run loose in the White House and in the halls of Congress. From time to time, a Candide-like character named D'emas (Yiddish for the "the truth") appears and asks embarrassing questions about the ways of our civilisation, which his interlocutor is hard-pressed to answer. And yet, after Howard Fast recounts the inanity and brutality of these years, he offers a humane vision of what America and the rest of the world could be. These essays should hold a place in 20th-century letters as a statement of unsurpassed passion on the theme: war and peace.

This book is aimed at employers, managers and professional and administrative staff in the health care services. GP practices, home visits and the hospital are all covered. Despite growing evidence of violence against health care workers, some employers have been slow to acknowledge the risks faced in both primary and secondary health care settings. Personal Safety for Health Care Workers provides the tools to investigate the risks involved and to develop policy and practice to ensure staff safety. It also deals with the vexed question of under-reporting. Part I deals with the respective roles and responsibilities of employers and employees and offers guidance on developing a workplace personal safety policy. Workplace design and management are addressed and guidelines provided for health care workers when away from their normal work base. Part 2 gives detailed guidelines for use by individual workers in a variety of work situations. Part 3 considers training issues and contains a number of sample training programmes with handouts. The message of this book is that prevention is better than cure - proper attention to risk can reduce both the incidence of aggression and its development into violent acts. The aim is to achieve the dual effect of protecting health care workers, and also of providing services in a more sensitive way. Good practice implies a responsibility to ensure that health care can be delivered in conditions of safety for staff and patients alike.

On February 26th 2012 seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking home with a bag of Skittles and a can of juice when a fatal encounter with a gun-wielding neighbourhood watchman ended his young life. In a matter of weeks, Trayvon Martin's name would be spoken by President Obama, honored by professional athletes, and passionately discussed all over traditional and social media. Trayvon's parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, driven by their intense love for their lost son, launched a nationwide campaign for justice that would change the USA and the world. Five years after his tragic death, Travyon Martin has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a young man, wearing his favourite hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became an icon? And how did one black child's death become the match that lit a civil rights movement? Rest in Power, told through the compelling alternating narratives of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, answers those questions from the most intimate of sources. It's the story of the beautiful and complex child they lost, the cruel unresponsiveness of the police and the hostility of the legal system, and the inspiring journey they took from grief and pain to power, and from tragedy and senselessness to meaning.

In the country s changing threat environment, homegrown violent extremism (HVE) represents the next challenge in counterterrorism. Security and public policy expert Erroll Southers examines post-9/11 HVE what it is, the conditions enabling its existence, and the community-based approaches that can reduce the risk of homegrown terrorism. Drawing on scholarly insight and more than three decades on the front lines of America s security efforts, Southers challenges the misplaced counterterrorism focus on foreign individuals and communities. As Southers shows, there is no true profile of a terrorist. The book challenges how Americans think about terrorism, recruitment, and the homegrown threat. It contains essential information for communities, security practitioners, and policymakers on how violent extremists exploit vulnerabilities in their communities and offers approaches to put security theory into practice.

The subject of lynching has spawned a vast body of important research, but this research suffers from important blind spots and disjunctures. By broadening the scope of research problem formulation, staking out new theoretical-analytical tracks, and drawing upon recent innovations in statistical methodology to analzye newer and more detailed data, Doing Violence, Making Race offers an innovative contribution to our understanding of this grim subject matter and its place within the broader history and sociology of US race relations. Indeed, this volume demonstrates how different forms of lynching fed off and into the formation of the racial group boundaries and identities at the foundation of the Jim Crow system. The book also demonstrates that as dominant white racial ideologies and conceptions took an extremist turn, lethal mob violence against African Americans increasingly assumed the form of public lynchings, serving to transform symbolic representations of blacks into social stigma and exclusion. Finally, Smangs also explores how public lynchings were expressive as well as generative of the collective white racial identity mobilized through the southern branch of the Democratic Party, whilst private lynchings were related to whites' interracial status and social identity concerns on the interpersonal level. The most complete and complex scholarly treatment of this grim subject to date, this enlightening volume will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students interested in areas such as Sociology, Political Science, History, Criminology/Criminal Justice, Anthropology, American Studies, African-American and Whiteness Studies.

This book is aimed at employers, managers and staff in social work agencies. Historically there has been a slowness to acknowledge the risks which social workers routinely face and some employers have adopted a re-active approach, waiting for incidents to occur before taking action. They are thus placed in the position of having to make policy 'on the hoof' and at a time of crisis. Support to staff who have been attacked has been patchy, and in some instances sadly lacking. The absence of agreed procedures for dealing with violent attacks can leave the staff concerned, feeling unsupported, anxious and stressed. Social work staff, in their turn, may have experienced feelings of guilt when they have been unable to prevent aggression or assault; at best they may lack confidence in the level of understanding and support their line managers will show, and at worst they may feel that they will be blamed for the incident. As a result there is a tendency towards under reporting violent acts. For these reasons a joint approach to the problem is urged which involves social workers, support staff and managers. Personal Safety for Social Workers examines the special issues which social workers, and their employers, need to address. Part 1 reviews some of the information now available about violence in social work settings and within the context of violence in society at large. The respective roles and responsibilities of employers and employees are discussed, and guidance offered on developing a workplace personal safety policy and on the steps which will need to be taken for effective implementation. Advice is given on developing procedures for reporting violent incidents and for providing after-care to staff who have been on the receiving end of violence. This section of the book also looks at the ways in which the design and management of the workplace can enhance personal safety and provides guidelines to social workers on the issues to consider when working away

Violence sabotages development, both children's development and the development of the communities and neighbourhoods they rely on. There is abundant evidence of the deep and lasting harm that can be done. Violence breaks bodies and minds and exerts an insidious influence at every level. The effects are immediate but can also linger, damaging health, trust and capability, traveling through generations. This book argues that it is impossible to understand the violence in young children's lives or to respond to it adequately without considering how embedded it is within their physical surroundings. The relations of power that are the context for violence within households, within communities and beyond are often expressed through control over space and the material conditions of life. This book links the abstract concept of structural violence to the stark reality of personal harm, drawing on evidence from a range of disciplines and from countries throughout the global South. It explores the dynamics of cramped, insecure housing, poor water and sanitation, neglected neighbourhoods, forced evictions, cities that segregate the rich and the poor, landscapes of conflict and disaster, and discusses their implications for young children. An alternative approach to child protection is proposed, anchored in the actions of organized communities negotiating to challenge inequities, mend their environments and achieve security. There is a fundamental synergy between building community and protecting children. These are not separate agendas. A place that works for children works better for everyone else as well. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in young children in a global context, whether as child protection professionals, or those with a more general interest in children's rights issues or in cross cultural approaches to child development. It will also be of great interest to students and researchers of development studies, conflict studies, family studies, child development, public health and urban planning.

Violence sabotages development, both children's development and the development of the communities and neighbourhoods they rely on. There is abundant evidence of the deep and lasting harm that can be done. Violence breaks bodies and minds and exerts an insidious influence at every level. The effects are immediate but can also linger, damaging health, trust and capability, traveling through generations. This book argues that it is impossible to understand the violence in young children's lives or to respond to it adequately without considering how embedded it is within their physical surroundings. The relations of power that are the context for violence within households, within communities and beyond are often expressed through control over space and the material conditions of life. This book links the abstract concept of structural violence to the stark reality of personal harm, drawing on evidence from a range of disciplines and from countries throughout the global South. It explores the dynamics of cramped, insecure housing, poor water and sanitation, neglected neighbourhoods, forced evictions, cities that segregate the rich and the poor, landscapes of conflict and disaster, and discusses their implications for young children. An alternative approach to child protection is proposed, anchored in the actions of organized communities negotiating to challenge inequities, mend their environments and achieve security. There is a fundamental synergy between building community and protecting children. These are not separate agendas. A place that works for children works better for everyone else as well. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in young children in a global context, whether as child protection professionals, or those with a more general interest in children's rights issues or in cross cultural approaches to child development. It will also be of great interest to students and researchers of development studies, conflict studies, family studies, child development, public health and urban planning.

Women, Violence and Social Change demonstrates how refuges and shelters stand as the core of the battered women's movement, providing a basis for pragmatic support, political action and radical renewal. From this base movements in Britain and the United States have challenged the police, courts and social services to provide greater assistance to women. The book provides important evidence on the way social movements can successfully challenge institutions of the State as well as salutatory lessons on the nature of diverted and thwarted struggle.
Throughout the book the Dobashes' years of researching violence against women is illustrated in the depth of their analysis. They maintain the tradition established in their first book, Violence Against Wives, which was widely accalimed.

As the average life expectancy continues to rise, the long-held assumption that age is a protective factor against criminal offending and victimisation is being challenged. Recognising that people who commit offences later in life are an overlooked group in criminology, Not Your Usual Suspect is the first collection to assemble research on different forms of violence and abuse perpetrated by individuals predominantly over 60. Examining intersections of gender, crime and age, this collection highlights how the increase in older people entering the criminal justice system has emphasised the unpreparedness of policies and practices for dealing with this cohort. Moving beyond existing research and policy which has focused primarily on those who are sentenced in later life for crimes they committed as younger adults - so called historic crimes - the chapters pay crucial attention to those who commit offences as long-term, repeat or first-time offenders in later life. Offering an important contribution for researchers across the criminological, gerontological, feminist and elder abuse fields, Not Your Usual Suspect expands existing research to consider the behaviour and drivers of older offenders, addressing the increasingly important issue of how the needs of this group can be addressed by policy and practice.

Addressing the problem of men's violence to known women, this book considers the scale of, and critically reviews the theoretical frameworks used to explain this violence.

From the perspective of critical studies on men', Jeff Hearn discusses issues, challenges and possible research methods for those researching violence. He draws on extensive research to analyze the various ways in which men describe, deny, justify and excuse their violence, and considers the complex interaction between doing violence and talking about violence. The book concludes with a summary of the key issues for theory, politics, policy and practice.

On Media Violence is a definitive examination of this hotly debated social topic. Media scholar W. James Potter asks provocative questions such as: How much media violence is there? What are the meanings conveyed in the way violence is portrayed? What effect does it have on viewers individually, as members of particular groups, and as members of society?

The book is organized in four parts. The first part presents a thorough review of more than 40 years of research and theories about media violence. The second part is an extended critique of the assumptions and practices of that research and thinking. The book proposes re-conceptions of definitions of violence, context, levels of phenomena, the role of human development, effects, risk, and the nature of the media industries. Potter also addresses the necessity for a reconfiguration of the methodological tasks used to assess the content and effects of media violence. The final part introduces Lineation Theory, a suggested perspective and new theoretical approach explaining it.

On Media Violence is essential reading for students and scholars of Media Studies, Communication Theory, Popular Culture, Social Psychology, and Sociology. Part I of the book offers a thorough review of more than 40 years of research on media violence. Part II proposes re-conceptions of these theories, focusing in particular on violence, context, levels of phenomena, human development, effects, risk, and the media industries. In the latter half of the book, Part III addresses the necessity for a reconfiguration of the methodological tasks used to assess media violence. Part IV introduces the concept of Lineation Theory, a suggested perspective for thinking about media violence and a new theoretical approach to explaining it.

On Media Violence is essential reading for students and scholars of Media Studies, Communication Theory, Popular Culture, Social Psychology, and Sociology.

This volume includes five case studies on war and the military in the USSR, Russia and Yugoslavia. It argues that the armed forces were at the core of socialist statehood and that their role and their change in late socialism and post-Communism are thus far understudied. Discussing the similarities as well as the differences between the Soviet, the Russian, and the Yugoslav case, the introduction seeks new explanations for war and military violence in these countries. Rather than pointing exclusively to ethnic mobilization and nationalism, it views the transformation and collapse of the Communist party-state and its army as a precondition for violence and civil war. It places these cases using innovative methodological approaches to the research on physical violence, war, and military. These studies explore the experience and the representation of violence, army service, combat, and war in late socialism and scrutinize individual actors and their behaviour within violent spaces. In retrospect the emerging wars in the post-Soviet space - from Chechnya to the Donbas - and in Yugoslavia are at least as crucial for the region as Gorbachev's reforms. They help to better understand the conflicts of the present in the post-Soviet space. This book was originally published as a special issue of Nationalities Papers.

Amidst the carnage of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg posed a stark choice for humanity: socialism or barbarism. Violence Today asks if current patterns mark a decent into the barbarism that Luxemburg feared and if a just society, one capable of transcending the endemic violence of the neoliberal order, is possible in the new century.

This powerful and provocative new collection explores the roots of violence -- military, terrorist, criminal, and casual -- in contemporary society. It analyzes the social context, history, and structure of modern violence, casting light on patterns and practices from America's inner cities and prisons to "failed states" like Afghanistan. Violence Today also gives special attention to debate within the Left about violence, including a controversial defense of armed struggle.

Contributors: John Berger, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, Peter Thomas, Vivek Chibber, Christian Parenti, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Georgi Derluguian, Sofiri Joab-Peterside, Ulrich Oslender, Achin Vanaik, Barabara Harriss-White, Lynne Segal, Joe Sim and Steve Tombs, Dennis Rodgers, Avishai Erlich, Philip Green, Garance Upham, Mary des Chenes and Stephen Mikesell, Samir Amin.

International football fixtures, such as the World Cup finals in italy in 1990, draw together not only rival teams but rival fans. The police and the media are increasingly geared up to tackle international fixtures as occasions for the outbreak of crowd disorder. It can sometimes seem that the behaviour of the fans is more important than the game itself. "Football on Trial" examines some of the causes of football hooliganism as a European and World phenomenon. It casts an eye forward to the 1994 World Cup in Los Angeles and asks why soccer hooliganism has not been a problem in the USA. It also examines the connections between player violence and spectator violence, and considers the role of the media in producing soccer crowd disorder. The authors have also written "Hooligans Abroad" and "The Roots of Football Hooliganism".

To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered? In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation from a nationally oriented ethics to a trans-national one. The authors look at media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to manoeuvre between the duties of remembrance and the benefits of forgetting. This, the authors argue, is the "ethics of Never Again."

Human life is intimately woven into place. Through nations and homelands, monuments and sacred sites it becomes the anchorage point for ethnic, cultural and national identities. Yet it is also place that becomes the battlefield, war zone, mass grave, desecrated site and destroyed landscape in the midst or aftermath of cultural wounding. Much attention has been given to the impact of trauma and violence on human lives across generations, but what of the spaces in which it occurs? How does culturally prescribed violence impact upon place? And how do the non- human species with whom we coexist also suffer through episodes of conflict and violence? By identifying violence in place as a crisis of our times, and by encouraging both the witnessing and the diagnosing of harm, this book reveals the greater effects of cultural wounding. It problematises the habit of separating human life out from the ecologies in which it is held. If people and place are bound through kinship, whether through necessity and survival, or choice and abiding love, then wounding is co- terminus. The harms done to one will impact upon the other. Case studies from Australia, North and South America, Europe and the Pacific, illustrate the impact of violence in place, while supporting a campaign for methodologies that reveal the fullness of the relational bond between people and place. The book will appeal to students and practitioners alike, with interests in cultural and human geography, anthropology, environmental humanities and moral ecology.

Perpetrators of mass violence are commonly regarded as evil. Their violent nature is believed to make them commit heinous crimes as members of state agencies, insurgencies, terrorist organizations, or racist and supremacist groups. Upon close examination, however, perpetrators are contradictory human beings who often lead unsettlingly ordinary and uneventful lives. Drawing on decades of on-the-ground research with perpetrators of genocide, mass violence, and enforced disappearances in Cambodia and Argentina, Antonius Robben and Alex Hinton explore how researchers go about not just interviewing and writing about perpetrators, but also processing their own emotions and considering how the personal and interpersonal impact of this sort of research informs the texts that emerge from them. Through interlinked ethnographic essays, methodological and theoretical reflections, and dialogues between the two authors, this thought-provoking book conveys practical wisdom for the benefit of other researchers who face ruthless perpetrators and experience turbulent emotions when listening to perpetrators and their victims. Perpetrators rarely regard themselves as such, and fieldwork with perpetrators makes for situations freighted with emotion. Research with perpetrators is a difficult but important part of understanding the causes of and creating solutions to mass violence, and Robben and Hinton use their expertise to provide insightful lessons on the epistemological, ethical, and emotional challenges of ethnographic fieldwork in the wake of atrocity.

This revised and updated second edition introduces students of violent conflict to a variety of prominent theoretical approaches, and examines the ontological stances and epistemological traditions underlying these approaches. Theories of Violent Conflict takes the centrality of the 'group' as an actor in contemporary conflict as a point of departure, leaving us with three main questions: * What makes a group? * Why and how does a group resort to violence? * Why and how do or don't they stop? The book examines and compares the ways by which these questions are addressed from a number of perspectives: primordialism/constructivism, social identity theory, critical political economy, human needs theory, relative deprivation theory, collective action theory and rational choice theory. The final chapter aims to synthesize structure and agency-based theories by proposing a critical discourse analysis of violent conflict. With new material on violence, religion, extremism and military urbanism, this book will be essential reading for students of war and conflict studies, peace studies, conflict analysis and conflict resolution, and ethnic conflict, as well as security studies and IR in general.

Climate change caused by human activity is the most fundamental challenge facing mankind in the 21st century, since it will drastically alter the living conditions of millions of people, mainly in the Global South. Environmental violence, including resource crises such as peak fossil fuel, will lie at the heart of future conflicts. However, Genocide Studies have so far neglected this subject, due to the emphasis that traditional genocide scholarship places on ideology and legal prosecution, leading to a narrow understanding of the driving forces of genocide. This books aims at changing this, initiating a dialogue between scholars working in the areas of climate change and genocide. Research into genocide as well as climate change is a highly interdisciplinary endeavour, transcending the boundaries of established disciplines. Contributions to this book address this by approaching the subject from a wide array of methodological, theoretical, disciplinary and regional perspectives. As all the contributions show, climate change is a major threat multiplier for violence or non-violent destruction and any understanding of prevention needs to take this into account. They offer a basis for much needed Critical Prevention Studies, which aims at sustainable prevention. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights.

Racist Violence and the State is the first serious study to apply a comparative research-based approach to the study of racist violence in Britain, France and The Netherlands since 1945. Setting racist violence within a historical background of the post-imperialist legacy, the author presents an accessible, fascinating and highly original analysis of the development of public and state attitudes to racist violence over the past 50 years.

Anton Blok combines anthropology and history in a comparative exploration of the links between honour and violence in widely different settings. He draws on material from two interrelated projects: micro-studies of the rural mafia in Sicily, and banditry in the Dutch republic, each set in its historical context.

Blok discusses the social role of marginal people, such as those in 'infamous occupations' from chimney-sweeping to prostitution, arguing that the most despised members of society are often the most indispensable. He examines how nicknames reflect and reflect on cultural codes, and how the authority of female rulers throughout the centuries has relied on their singleness. The book also includes studies of the social meanings of violence, including public executions, rural banditry, and the minor differences which underlie violent conflicts. Drawing on the work of thinkers from Georg Simmel to Norbert Elias, Anton Blok explores the complex interrelations between honour and violence in European societies.

This highly original work will be of great interest to scholars and students of history, anthropology and sociology.