Violent Accounts presents a compelling study of how ordinary people commit extraordinary acts of violence and how perpetrators and victims manage in the aftermath. Grounded in extensive, qualitative analysis of perpetrator testimony, the volume reveals the individual experiences of perpetrators as well as general patterns of influence that lead to collective violence. Drawing on public testimony from the amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the book interweaves hundreds of hours of testimony from seventy-four violent perpetrators in apartheid South Africa, including twelve major cases that involved direct interactions between victims and perpetrators. The analysis of perpetrator testimony covers all tiers on the hierarchy of organized violence, from executives who translated political doctrine into general strategies, to managers who translated these general strategies into specific plans, to the staff-the foot soldiers-who carried out the destructive plans of these managers. Vivid and accessible, Violent Accounts is a work of innovative scholarship that transcends the particulars of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to reveal broader themes and unexpected insights about perpetrators of collective violence, the confrontations between victims and perpetrators in the aftermath of this violence, the reality of multiple truths, the complexities of reconciliation, and lessons of restorative justice.

'Street Wars' highlights current law enforcement policies in America which actively contribute to the continuance of gang culture in cities such as Los Angeles. Tom Hayden advocates a new deal for inner city youth to rescue them from the conditions & attitudes which make gang membership attractive.

A searing, intimate memoir tracing the author’s attempt to find out the truth about her father’s murder.

Robin McGregor, an older man living in a small town outside Cape Town, is brutally murdered in his home. Cecil Thomas is convicted for the crime, but his trial leaves more questions than answers. His daughter, Liz, tries to move beyond her grief but she still wants answers. What drove Thomas to torture and kill a complete stranger?

The author meets the murderer’s family and discovers that he comes from a loving, comfortable home. He is educated and skilled – there is no apparent reason for his descent into delinquency. After protracted obstruction from the prison authorities, she finally gets to confront him but not without putting herself in danger. She finds answers, but not the answers she is looking for.

Unforgiven tells a story seldom told: what happens to a family when one of their own is murdered?

The word “lynching” has immediate and graphic connotations for virtually all people who hear and use the word. When Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas claimed he was lynched by a Senate investigating committee, he intentionally and deliberately drew on two key components of the term -- race and punishment – that stemmed from the long and ugly history of lynching in America. Yet if we follow the history of the term itself – which is over two centuries old – we learn that lynching has had several different meanings over time, with murder endorsed by the community as one of its most enduring definitions. Tracing the use and meaning of the word “lynching” from the colonial period to the present, historian Christopher Waldrep reveals that while the notion of lynching as a form of extralegal punishment sanctioned by the community did not alter significantly over time, the meaning of the word itself changed drastically, paralleling changes in how Americans grappled with law enforcement, community, and most importantly, race relations.

Contemporary debates about mass media violence tend to ignore the long history of staged violence in the theatres and rituals of many culture. In Theatres of Human Sacrifice, Mark Pizzato relates the appeal and possible effects of screen violence today--in sports, movies, and television news--to specific sacrificial rites and performance conventions in ancient Greek, Aztec, and Roman culture. Using the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan, Kristeva, and ž iž ek, as well as the theatrical theories of Artaud and Brecht, the book offers insights into the ritual lures and effects of current mass media spectatorship, especially regarding the pleasures, purposes, and risks of violent display. Updating Aristotle's notion of catharsis, Pizzato identifies a sacrificial imperative within the human mind, structured by various patriarchal cultures and manifested in distinctive rites and dramas, with both positive and negative potential effects on their audiences.

"The most significant fact about people who abuse children is how ordinary they are. They come from all walks of life, they live in cities and rural communities; they are often successful people (but not always) who hold good jobs and keep neat and clean homes. They are seldom terrible or sadistic people.

In "Questions of an abused child" offers hope to abused children and adults in this simple, no-nonsense look at the realities of abuse. Author Ivan Muise draws upon his own battle with abuse to bring you an in-depth guide to breaking this deadly cycle.

Broken down into easy-to-understand chapters, you'll discover the answers to your most important questions in the following categories, among others:

• Children
• Marriage
• Parents
• Relationships between the abused and the police
• Religion
• Things your children should know

Learn how to recognize abuse and acquire strategies on how to deal with abuse. If you or someone you know is being mistreated, "Questions of an abused child" can help. Your future depends on it!

Torn by ongoing civil and military violence, Africa presents a challenge to scholars interested in the root causes of conflict. Each conflict is unique, but overall they exhibit common patterns. The contributors of this book employ an eclectic array of current explanations of civil strife and how to resolve it. The first half of the book provides the relevant theoretical background. Theories of conflict and conflict resolution, the larger context of African strife in Africa, and patterns and trends of conflict are discussed. Shifting from the general to the particular, the remaining chapters of this volume gauge the accuracy and usefulness of the current thinking on conflicts by grounding it in case studies drawn from the Great Lakes Region, Liberia, Nigeria, and Zambia.

This book engages with some of the most intractable political and social problems of the time - terrorism, ethnic and religious conflict. It reflects originality in urging the application of social theory - in particular Durkheim's lessons for the transformation of France into a unified enlightened nation after the Revolution - in approaching solutions to contemporary political violence. It also challenges conventional role of sociology.Ethno-national and religious identity and violence dominate modern politics, from Northern Ireland to terrorism in Sri Lanka, the former Yugoslavia or Afghanistan and Iraq. Sociology generally has made only a small contribution to the discussion. It is the contention here that sociology, particularly social theory, should be a major tool in helping explain national, religious and identity problems.

The Sicilian Mafia, or Cosa Nostra, is one of the most intriguing criminal phenomena in the world. It is an unparalleled organised criminal grouping that over almost two centuries has been able not only to successfully permeate licit and illicit economy, politics and civil society, but also to influence and exercise authoritative power over both the underworld and the upper-world. This criminal phenomenon has been a captivating conundrum for scholars of different disciplines who have tried to explain with various paradigms the reasons behind the emergence and consolidation of the mafia. Challenging the Mafia Mystique provides an analysis of the changes the Sicilian mafia has undergone, from legitimisation to denunciation. Rino Coluccello highlights how, from the very emergence of the organised criminal groups in Sicily, a culture existed that was protective and tolerant of the mafia. He argues that the various conceptualisations of the mafia that dominated the public and scientific debate in the nineteenth and more than half of the twentieth century created a mystique, which legitimised the mafia and contributed to their success. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of organised crime, Italian politics and Italian literature.

This book presents a comprehensive history of lynching and mob violence in North and South Carolina, focusing on seven specific case studies from the region. Lynching marked the violent outer boundaries of race and class relations in the American South between Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Everyday interactions could easily escalate into mob violence, and did so thousands of times. Bruce Baker examines this important aspect of American history by taking seven lynchings in North Carolina and South Carolina and studying them in detail. He succeeds in getting behind the superficial accounts and explanations provided at the time to explain the deeper causes and wider contexts of these events.Many studies of lynching begin only after Reconstruction had ended and African Americans found themselves with little political power. However, this book provides the most thorough study yet written of the Ku Klux Klan's most violent episode - the killing of thirteen black militia members in Union, South Carolina, in 1871 - to argue that this act of mob violence set the conditions in important ways for the entire lynching era. Enmities born in Reconstruction lingered afterwards and lay behind an 1887 lynching in York County, South Carolina. As lynching became an unsurprising part of life in the South, African Americans even found that they could use it themselves, in once case to punish a child's killer and in another to settle a church's factional squabbles. In addition, a variety of forces opposing lynching was rising and by the 1930s their efforts would begin to make a difference.

Children are the most criminally victimized segment of the population, and a substantial number face multiple, serious "poly-victimizations" during a single year. And despite the fact that the priority emphasis in academic research and government policy has traditionally gone to studying juvenile delinquents, children actually appear before authorities more frequently as victims than as offenders. But at the same time, the media and many advocates have failed to note the good news: rates of sexual abuse, child homicide, and many other forms of victimization declined dramatically after the mid-1990s, and some terribly feared forms of child victimization, like stereotypical stranger abduction, are remarkably uncommon. The considerable ignorance about the realities of child victimization can be chalked up to a field that is fragmented, understudied, and subjected to political demagoguery. In this persuasive book, David Finkelhor presents a comprehensive new vision to encompass the prevention, treatment, and study of juvenile victims, unifying conventional subdivisions like child molestation, child abuse, bullying, and exposure to community violence. Developmental victimology, his term for this integrated perspective, looks at child victimization across childhood's span and yields fascinating insights about how to categorize juvenile victimizations, how to think about risk and impact, and how victimization patterns change over the course of development. The book also provides a valuable new model of society's response to child victimization - what Finkelhor calls the Juvenile Victim Justice System - and a fresh way of thinking about barriers that victims and their families encounter whenseeking help. These models will be very useful to anyone seeking to improve the way we try to help child victims. Crimes against children still happen far too often, but by proposing a new framework for thinking about the issue, Childhood Victimization opens a promising door to reducing its frequency and improving the response. Professionals, policymakers, and child advocates will find this paradigm-shifting book to be a valuable addition to their shelves.

"New Arenas for Violence" examines the history, nature, and causal factors of occupational homicide--murder in the workplace--with a view to the development of a comprehensive understanding of the issue and the introduction of prevention measures designed to establish a safer work environment for the American worker. Through the analysis of a number of actual incidents of homicide, the author constructs a new framework for understanding occupational homicide and its perpetrators. Kelleher develops a new method of categorizing and evaluating crimes of this sort and offers an invaluable profile of the potentially violent worker or client. The book concludes with a compendium of prevention methodologies that are both practical and applicable to a wide variety of workplace environments.

Whether in the form of warfare, dispossession, forced migration, or social prejudice, Australia's sense of nationhood was born from-and continues to be defined by-experiences of violence. Legacies of Violence probes this brutal legacy through case studies that range from the colonial frontier to modern domestic spaces, exploring themes of empathy, isolation, and Australians' imagined place in the world. Moving beyond the primacy that is typically accorded white accounts of violence, contributors place particular emphasis on the experiences of those perceived to be on the social periphery, repositioning them at the center of Australia's relationship to global events and debates.

The problem of children 'in trouble' is the subject of repeated media panics and of heated political rhetoric. Drawing on wide-ranging original research, Carol Hayden reviews evidence about children in trouble across a range of circumstances, demonstrating the tensions between welfare and justice, care and control in the treatment of these vulnerable young people and evaluating the methodological as well as practical implications of the current 'what works' debate within social policy. All students and professionals working with children, whether in social work, teaching or the criminal justice system, will find this book invaluable.

It's spring, 1964. Beatle mania crashes the American shores. The Vietnam War and push for black civil rights divide the nation. Tommy Mack and his proud, beat-up, poverty stricken family have traded the freshness of Appalachia for a malodorous chemical plant in the suburbs of a small, east coast metropolis. Surrounded by traffic, congestion, and as much culture shock as one can imagine, they put down new roots-and pray for the best.

How do economic conditions such as poverty, unemployment, inflation, and economic growth impact youth violence?Economics and Youth Violenceprovides a much-needed new perspective on this crucial issue. Pinpointing the economic factors that are most important, the editors and contributors in this volume explore how different kinds of economic issues impact children, adolescents, and their families, schools, and communities.Offering new and important insights regarding the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and youth violence across a variety of times and places, chapters cover such issues as the effect of inflation on youth violence; new quantitative analysis of the connection between race, economic opportunity, and violence; and the cyclical nature of criminal backgrounds and economic disadvantage among families. Highlighting the complexities in the relationship between economic conditions, juvenile offenses, and the community and situational contexts in which their connections are forged, Economics and Youth Violenceprompts important questions that will guide future research on the causes and prevention of youth violence.Contributors: Sarah Beth Barnett, Eric P. Baumer, Philippe Bourgois, Shawn Bushway, Philip J. Cook, Robert D. Crutchfield, Linda L. Dahlberg, Mark Edberg, Jeffrey Fagan, Xiangming Fang, Curtis S. Florence, Ekaterina Gorislavsky, Nancy G. Guerra, Karen Heimer, Janet L. Lauritsen, Jennifer L. Matjasko, James A. Mercy, Matthew Phillips, Richard Rosenfeld, Tim Wadsworth, Valerie West, Kevin T. WolffRichard Rosenfeldis Curators Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri - St. Louis.Mark Edbergis Associate Professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services.Xiangming Fangis Professor of Economics and Director of the International Center for Applied Economics and Policy in the College of Economics and Management at China Agricultural University.Curtis S. Florenceis the lead health economist for the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC).

Violence holds considerable philosophical interest, especially today, and yet this concept has not been given sufficient attention by contemporary philosophers. This is the first anthology of philosophical essays on the nature and justifiability of violence. The essays in this volume, taken from the last 100 years, explore a range of philosophical issues pertaining to violence. Three basic questions are scrutinized: 'What is violence?', 'Is violence always wrong?', and 'Can violence be justified?'. Students and Philosophers in political and moral philosophy, but also political theorists, political scientists, and political sociologists, will find this an important and valuable contribution.

Recent research has begun to highlight the importance of German arguments about legitimate resistance and self-defence for French, English and Scottish Protestants. This book systematically studies the reception of German thought in England, arguing that it played a much greater role than has hitherto been acknowledged. Both the Marian exiles, and others concerned with the fate of continental Protestantism, eagerly read what German reformers had to say about the possibility of resisting the religious policies of a monarch without compromising the institution of monarchy itself. However, the transfer of German arguments to England, with its individual political and constitutional environment, necessarily involved the subtle transformation of these arguments into forms compatible with local traditions. In this way, German arguments contributed significantly to the emergence of new theories, emphasising natural rights.

Violent Becomings conceptualizes the Mozambican state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously emergent and violently challenged mode of ordering. In doing so, this book addresses the question of why colonial and postcolonial state formation has involved violent articulations with so-called 'traditional' forms of sociality. The scope and dynamic nature of such violent becomings is explored through an array of contexts that include colonial regimes of forced labor and pacification, liberation war struggles and civil war, the social engineering of the post-independence state, and the popular appropriation of sovereign violence in riots and lynchings.

Violent Becomings conceptualizes the Mozambican state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously emergent and violently challenged mode of ordering. In doing so, this book addresses the question of why colonial and postcolonial state formation has involved violent articulations with so-called 'traditional' forms of sociality. The scope and dynamic nature of such violent becomings is explored through an array of contexts that include colonial regimes of forced labor and pacification, liberation war struggles and civil war, the social engineering of the post-independence state, and the popular appropriation of sovereign violence in riots and lynchings.

Joint winner of the North American Conference on British Studies 2017 Stansky Book Prize for the best book on British Studies since 1800 Communal Violence in the British Empire focuses on how Britons interpreted, policed, and sometimes fostered violence between different ethnic and religious communities in the empire. It also asks what these outbreaks meant for the power and prestige of Britain among subject populations. Alternating between chapters of engaging narrative and chapters of careful, cross-colonial analysis, Mark Doyle uses outbreaks of communal violence in Ireland, the West Indies, and South Asia to uncover the inner workings of British imperialism: it's guiding assumptions, its mechanisms of control, its impact, and its limitations. He explains how Britons used communal violence to justify the imperial project even as that project was creating the conditions for more violence. Above all, this book demonstrates how communal violence exposed the limits of British power and, in time, helped lay the groundwork for the empire's collapse. This book shows how violence, and the British state's handling thereof, was a fundamental part of the imperial experience for colonizer and colonized alike. It offers a new perspective on the workings of empire that will be of interest to any student of imperial or world history.

An examination of the historical experience of African Americans as a case study of America's legacy of racial violence. In this comprehensive overview of how the law has been used to combat racism, author Christopher Waldrep points out that the U.S. government has often promoted discrimination. A veritable history of civil rights, the story is told primarily through a discussion of key legal cases. Racial Violence on Trial also presents 11 key documents gathered together for the first time, from the Supreme court's opinion in Brown v. Mississippi to a 1941 newspaper account entitled The South Kills Another Negro, to a 1947 New Yorker piece, Opera in Greenville, about a crowd of taxi drivers who killed a black man. Also included are a listing of key people, laws, and concepts; a chronology; a table of cases; and an annotated bibliography. Four narrative chapters examine the history of black-white relations since America was founded A-Z entries cover important people, laws, events, and concepts and a special documents section includes court decisions, magazine stories, and personal accounts

Violence has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in our world. Occurring daily across the globe, violence is sparked by diverse and complicated societal and political factors. While certain aspects of violence such as terrorism have received increasing scrutiny in recent years, violence has rarely been examined as a political phenomenon in and of itself.

Emphasizing the importance of memory, narrative, and political solidarity, The Legitimization of Violence enlists illuminating case studies for comparison, within a general framework of discourse theory. Not merely a description of events, the book explores how violence evolves and takes on a life of its own, thereby enhancing our fundamental understanding of the phenomenon of political violence itself.

Violence, nationalism, and politics are inextricably linked in such controversial political movements as Neo-Nazism in contemporary Germany and the Shi'ia in Lebanon. By analyzing the diverse factors which lead to violent acts, the essays in this volume address the complexity and the correlations between politics and violence. International scholars assess such groups as the Shining Path in Peru and the E.T.A. in Spain's Basque country to reveal how political violence affects the chaotic living condition of millions of people worldwide.

Violence against women is a key concern for society and feminism. Organizing for social, political and legal change in relation to violence is a pressing issue, and through the critical appraisal of approaches adopted by the anti-violence movement in a variety of countries, this book informs future strategy and approaches when organizing against violence. Lesley McMillan provides the first detailed comparative account of women's anti-violence movement in Western countries, ideally suited for upper-level students interested in this fascinating topic.

In 1932 Einstein asked Freud, 'Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?' Freud answered that war is inevitable because humans have an instinct to self-destroy, a death instinct which we must externalize to survive. But nearly four decades of study of aggression reveal that rather than being an inborn drive, destructiveness is generated in us by experiences of excessive psychic pain. In War is Not Inevitable: On the Psychology of War and Aggression, Henri Parens argues that the death-instinct based model of aggression can neither be proved nor disproved as Freud's answer is untestable. By contrast, the 'multi-trends theory of aggression' is provable and has greater heuristic value than does a death-instinct based model of aggression. When we look for causes for war we turn to history as well as national, ethnic, territorial, and or political issues, among many others, but we also tend to ignore the psychological factors that play a large role. Parens discusses such psychological factors that seem to lead large groups into conflict. Central among these are the psychodynamics of large-group narcissism. Interactional conditions stand out: hyper-narcissistic large-groups have, in history, caused much narcissistic injury to those they believe they are superior to. But this is commonly followed by the narcissistically injured group's experiencing high level hostile destructiveness toward their injury-perpetrator which, in time, will compel them to revenge. Among groups that have been engaged in serial conflicts, wars have followed from this psychodynamic narcissism-based cyclicity. Parens details some of the psychodynamics that led from World War I to World War II and their respective aftermath, and he addresses how major factors that gave rise to these wars must, can, and have been counteracted. In doing so, Parens considers strategies by which civilization has and is constructively preventing wars, as well as the need for further innovative efforts to achieve that end.