Book summary “Understanding Violence”: summary

Introduction

You face the heavy social and economic costs of human violence across your community every day. Understanding why people harm one another often feels confusing because news reports and public debates offer contradictory explanations. Elizabeth Kandel Englander examines definitions, statistics, biological and social causes, and distinct forms of violence including family abuse and sexual assault.

Violence is a complex, multi-determined human behavior rooted in biological vulnerabilities, social environments, and developmental pathways that require targeted prevention strategies.

The book guides you through specific questions:

• How do experts measure true crime rates beyond flawed police reports?
• What combination of poverty and environmental stressors triggers aggression?
• How do biological variables and early developmental disorders elevate risk?
• What separates domestic violence and sexual assault from street crime?

1. Defining Violence and Measuring Crime

Violence involves explicit intent to cause harm, and measuring its true frequency requires looking beyond flawed police reports to comprehensive family and self-report surveys.

Types of Aggression

Violence is defined strictly as aggressive behavior executed with the explicit intent to cause physical or psychological harm. Accidental harm without intent is not classified as violence. The legal system acknowledges this distinction when premeditated murder leads to severe imprisonment while accidental killings are charged as manslaughter.

Human aggression is divided into instrumental aggression, which aims at a separate goal, and hostile aggression, which is performed specifically to harm the victim. Both humans and other animals engage in instrumental aggression like stealing or competing for mates. Only humans predominantly engage in hostile aggression designed purely to inflict psychological or physical suffering.

Hitting a woman over the head strictly to steal her purse is categorized psychologically as instrumental aggression. The ultimate motive is to gain the purse rather than inflict harm for its own sake.

A third category of violence involves impulsive or stimulus-seeking behavior driven by nervous system underarousal rather than a deliberate desire to harm. Stimulus-seekers constantly crave risky situations or act violently due to extreme quick tempers in response to minor provocations. Drugs or alcohol often exacerbate this tendency.

Violent crime imposes staggering financial burdens on society through medical expenses, lost productivity, legal processing, and incarceration. Government spending on the criminal justice system and victim losses scale into tens of billions of dollars annually. These figures remain underestimates due to unreported domestic crimes.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that federal, state, and local governments spent $94 billion for civil and criminal justice in 1992. This represented a 59% increase over 1987. Other tracked costs include:

• $11.5 billion spent by US federal and state prison systems in 1990;
• $15,603 average annual cost per inmate in 1990;
• $22 billion spent annually on prisons in 1994;
• $29 billion spent annually on prisons in 1998;
• $368 spent per resident by all three levels of government combined in 1992;
• $17.6 billion lost by crime victims according to the 1992 National Crime Victimization Survey;
• $1.5 billion cost of rape, robbery, and assault to victims in 1992;
• $1.7 billion estimated cost of family homicide in 1984.

Sources of Crime Statistics

Crime statistics rely on three distinct sources. Their varying methodologies lead to dramatically different conclusions about the frequency of violence. Government and media statistics are derived from official police reports called the Uniform Crime Reports, government victimization surveys called the National Crime Survey, and self-report surveys.

Official police reports systematically underestimate domestic and hidden violence because police often fail to record crimes they detect. The Uniform Crime Reports compiled by the FBI depend on local police detection and recording. Police may fail to record crimes due to unidentifiable offenders, lack of prosecution evidence, victims dropping charges out of fear, or officers prioritizing more serious crimes.

Self-report surveys that avoid legal terminology and survey both husbands and wives randomly provide the most accurate estimates of domestic violence. The National Family Violence Surveys overcame reporting reluctance by asking respondents to endorse a list of specific conflict behaviors rather than asking if they committed crimes or were victims.

The 1985 National Family Violence Survey found that 1.8 million women were beaten domestically each year. By contrast, the 1992-1993 National Crime Survey recorded that 660,000 women were assaulted by strangers on the street.

2. Social Causes and Contexts of Violence

Poverty, social class, and environmental stressors interact with individual vulnerabilities to influence violent behavior, though relationships vary significantly between street and domestic crime.

The assumption that poverty directly breeds all types of crime is overly simplistic. The relationship between social class and violent behavior is complex and often mediated by other factors. Tittle, Villemez, and Smith reviewed 53 studies in 1978 and concluded there was no compelling evidence of an inverse relationship between social class and criminal behavior. Subsequent studies indicate that while low social status correlates with certain crimes, factors such as academic achievement and cultural attitudes toward violence heavily mediate this relationship.

Social Class and Delinquency

Poverty increases the risk of adolescent violent delinquency. This risk can be strongly nullified by positive academic environments and high parental expectations. A large study utilizing two waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth tracked more than 4,500 young people in the United States over many years.

Adult violent offending shows clear links to poverty and unemployment. Separating offenders into distinct categories reveals that social class impacts street crime more strongly than domestic abuse. Kandel-Englander's 1992 study of violent males from the National Family Violence Survey separated offenders into family, street, pan-violent, and nonviolent groups. Street and pan-violent men came from lower social classes than nonviolent men. Family-only violent men did not differ in social class from nonviolent men.

Educational attainment patterns differ between violent and nonviolent individuals. Lack of education serves as a stronger contributor to violence among non-White men than White men. In Kandel-Englander's 1992 study, violent men tended to complete a middle number of years of school rather than dropping out very early or completing many years.

Statistically, Black individuals comprise 12 percent of the U.S. population, while committing over half of all homicides. Part of this statistical disparity stems from prejudicial handling within the criminal justice system. During the 1988 presidential campaign, George Bush ran an advertisement featuring the early release of a violent inmate named Willie Horton to attack Michael Dukakis's record on crime.

Environmental Factors

Sociological perspectives attribute antisocial behavior primarily to external social environments. These theories focus on lack of societal investment or the learning of law-breaking beliefs. Sutherland theorized in the first half of the 20th century that antisocial behaviors stem from acquiring belief systems from law-breaking associates.

Environmental stressors like high temperatures and private space crowding exhibit complex links to aggression and violence. Human responses vary widely compared to animal models. Calhoun conducted experiments in the 1960s showing that crowded conditions caused male rats to become extremely aggressive and destroy other nests.

3. Biological and Developmental Factors

Biological variables such as neurotransmitters, hormones, and neurological abnormalities combine with early developmental disorders to heighten the risk of violent offending.

Biological influences on behavior comprise both genetic factors encoded in DNA and biological environmental influences that affect you physically without being encoded in chromosomes. Genotype refers to genetic blueprints inherited from biological parents, while phenotype is the outward expression of those genes. Biological environmental influences are events such as head injuries from car accidents that alter personality and behavior without any genetic predisposition.

Physiology and Neurotransmitters

Minor physical anomalies serve as an indirect indicator of minimal brain dysfunction originating during fetal development and correlate with adult violent delinquency. During fetal development, the neural tube and neural crest form both the brain and external tissues like skin and bones. Pregnancy disturbances can cause both minor external malformations and minor brain dysfunction, which correlates with an increased risk of violent delinquency.

A longitudinal study of 170 boys examined at age 14 found that minor physical anomalies were related to an increased risk of violent delinquency by age 17. Four or more minor physical anomalies indicate an unusually high number suggesting minimal brain dysfunction.

Low levels of monoamine neurotransmitters like serotonin are linked to impulsive aggression and violent criminal offending, particularly in males. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers transmitting information between neurons. Research links reduced serotonin activity to aggression, hostility, and self-injurious behavior, though findings often apply primarily to males rather than females.

A large-scale study of 781 21-year-olds evaluated whole blood serotonin levels, finding that these levels were associated with violent criminal offending in males but not in females. Non-psychiatric cardiac study participants evaluated by Manuck and colleagues spanned the 30 to 60 years old range.

The hormones testosterone and cortisol play complex roles in modulating aggression, with high testosterone and low cortisol each associating with increased aggressive tendencies. Testosterone, an androgen, is linked to dominance behaviors, sexual offending, and violence, though inconsistencies exist across studies involving different demographics. Conversely, low levels of cortisol, which regulates stress responses, correlate with early-onset and severe aggressive symptoms.

A study of 692 male prisoners evaluated for salivary testosterone levels by Dabbs in 1995 compared those who committed sex and violent crimes with property offenders and found higher salivary testosterone levels associated with violent offending and confrontational behavior. Thirty-eight boys aged 7 to 12 were evaluated for saliva cortisol over 4 years by McBurnett and colleagues. Chemical castration is another author term related to androgens.

Antisocial personality disorder, or psychopathy, is characterized by a lack of conscience, shallow emotions, and structural brain differences, particularly in the frontal lobes. Psychopaths constitute a small percentage of criminals but are exceptionally dangerous. Hare estimated that 15% to 20% of the criminal population meet diagnostic criteria for psychopathy as intraspecies predators.

Magnetic resonance imaging scans revealed that 21 psychopathic men showed an 11% reduction in the volume of their frontal lobes compared to control subjects.

Developmental Disorders

Adult violence does not appear spontaneously; it is typically preceded by childhood behavioral disorders and developmental problems. Developmental psychopathologists study how early behavioral styles and diseases arising during development predict later adult violence and aggression, enabling society to identify risks and potentially prevent violence using longitudinal research.

A child's innate temperament, such as being undercontrolled or having a difficult disposition, serves as a congenital risk factor that influences later aggressive behavior. Temperament reflects habitual emotional responses and is influenced by hereditary and biological factors. A confrontational temperament can elicit high parental stress and difficult parenting styles, further reinforcing aggressive tendencies in children.

A prospective study in New Zealand by Caspi and Silva found that an undercontrolled temperament at age 3 was linked with aggression at age 18.

Conduct disorder is a persistent pattern of behavior violating the basic rights of others or age-appropriate norms, strongly linked to later adolescent and adult violence. Conduct disorders are associated with biological factors like androgen secretion levels and serotonin regulation, as well as family environments characterized by poor cohesion, conflict, and exposure to parental violence. Individuals with conduct disorders often exhibit cognitive deficiencies, lack empathy, and show proactive aggressive behaviors.

Dodge and colleagues examined 128 adolescent boys in a maximum-security prison aged 14 to 19 and found that hostile biases and aggressive conduct disorders were positively related to the number of violent crimes. Vitaro studied 742 teenage boys on conduct disorders and proactive aggression.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a clinical condition characterized by hyperactivity, distractibility, and aggression, which significantly increases the risk of adult violent crime if left untreated. While biological factors such as poor perinatal health, brain trauma, and genetic influences contribute to ADHD, the associated impulsivity, concentration difficulties, and playground aggression frequently lead to peer rejection and academic failure, compounding the long-term risk for criminal behavior.

Approximately 80% of hyperactive children respond favorably to stimulants. You can apply specific clinical practices:

• Administer stimulant medication such as methylphenidate (Ritalin) to help control concentration problems in approximately 80 percent of hyperactive children who respond favorably.
• Accompany medication with psychotherapy to help children control behavior, maintain positive self-esteem, and adjust to the disorder.
• Provide parent training and family psychotherapy.

Learning disorders impair basic language or number processing skills and increase your risk of developing delinquency, criminal behavior, and aggression. Children with normal intelligence who suffer from learning disabilities like dyslexia experience secondary psychosocial side effects, low self-esteem, and frustration because they may be mischaracterized as stubborn or uncooperative, which predisposes them to antisocial behavior. Approximately 5% of the population has dyslexia.

Robinson and Kelley compared 19 repeat violent offenders, 19 repeat nonviolent offenders, and 18 first-time offenders, finding that repeat violent offenders demonstrated the highest levels of neuropsychological dysfunction, including learning disorders.

4. Social Learning and Biosocial Models

Observational learning, media exposure, and a biosocial combination of risk and protective factors explain how aggressive patterns form and persist in individuals.

Social Learning and Media

Social learning theory posits that individuals learn aggressive behavior through the psychosocial environment via observational learning and operant conditioning. Observational learning or modeling involves imitating the overt behavior of others, while operant conditioning relies on rewards and punishments to shape behavior. Witnessing violence or being rewarded for aggressive acts heavily increases the likelihood of future violent actions.

Bandura and colleagues demonstrated modeling by showing that children who watched an adult aggressively kick, sock, and beat a Bobo doll while shouting commands were significantly more likely to imitate those aggressive actions themselves.

Exposure to mass media violence, including violent video games and television, correlates with short-term increases in aggressive behavior and thoughts, especially in males and younger children. While correlational studies show positive links between violent media consumption and aggression, experimental studies prove that media exposure immediately provokes higher aggressive responses. Preexisting tendencies toward aggression also heighten individual vulnerability to media influences.

Irwin and Gross found that school-aged boys aged 7-8 who played violent video games in a laboratory setting played more aggressively, both when frustrated and when not frustrated, compared to control groups.

The Biosocial Model

Violence cannot be explained by a single factor, but rather emerges from the combination of multiple internal risk factors and external environmental influences within a biosocial model. Epidemiology seeks to identify risk factors that increase the probability of a disorder rather than pinning down a single cause. Protective factors promote health and reduce the likelihood of violent behavior, forming an equation of risk and protective elements.

Driving without a seat belt is a risk factor for injury, while wearing one is a protective factor. Similarly, having four or more minor physical anomalies or watching violent television increases the risk of aggression.

Males perpetrate the vast majority of street and fatal violence, whereas females commit family violence at rates comparable to males but with significantly less severity. Official police records and government statistics show that about 9 out of 10 murderers, as well as most perpetrators of assault and rape, are male. However, self-report surveys on family violence reveal that women commit child abuse and spousal violence at rates similar to men, though men use more severe violence like punching or kicking, while women's violence is more often defensive or minor.

Biological factors such as prenatal androgen exposure and low levels of the enzyme monoamine oxidase are linked to higher rates of impulsiveness and aggressive behavior in males. Prenatal exposure to androgens influences brain development and behavior. Additionally, men statistically have lower blood levels of monoamine oxidase, an enzyme that drops further during a person's twenties and thirties and is correlated with aggressiveness and impulsiveness.

Berenbaum and Hines studied girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia who were exposed to high androgen levels in utero and found a marked preference for boys' toys.

Extremely violent recidivistic criminals on death row consistently exhibit a severe convergence of neurological impairments, psychological disorders, and histories of brutal abuse. Research by Dorothy Otnow Lewis on adult and juvenile death row inmates revealed that nearly all subjects suffered significant head injuries, neurological abnormalities, and high rates of psychosis, severe mood disorders, and extreme physical or sexual abuse during childhood.

Lewis and colleagues studied 15 condemned adult inmates and found that every single one had a history of significant head injury, 80% had other neurological symptoms, and 40% were psychotic.

5. Sexual Assault and Family Violence

Family violence and sexual assault represent widespread forms of maltreatment driven by distinct offender characteristics, situational alcohol use, and severe victim trauma.

Sexual Assault Perpetrators

Rapists are frequently categorized into distinct types based on their motives and the level of violence they employ. Groth distinguished between specific forms of assault:

• violent rapists who use sexual assault as an expression of hostility, rage, and brutality where sexuality is secondary;
• power rapists who use only enough force to demonstrate dominance and cope with underlying feelings of inadequacy.

Finkelhor and Yllo described Gretchen, whose husband frequently beat and raped her, including two days before and two days after she gave birth. This case illustrated violent marital rape driven by a desire to punish and humiliate.

Men who commit sexual assault often exhibit a distinct lack of empathy regarding victim distress and a higher acceptance of societal rape myths. Rice et al. in 1994 found that 14 nonrapists displayed significantly more empathy for a rape victim than 14 heterosexual rapists did. Boxley et al. in 1995 found that 10 percent of girls and 30 percent of boys in eighth grade accepted rape myths.

Domestic Homicide and Physical Punishment

The 1985 National Family Survey showed that 16 percent of U.S. couples had physical aggressive encounters in the previous year, with 6.3 percent of couples being severely violent during 1985. Four women are killed every day by men who batter them.

The vast majority of violent men specialize by confining their violence to either the home or the street. Kandel-Englander's study of unincarcerated U.S. men found that 15 percent of the sample admitted assaulting a spouse, someone outside the family, or both. Within this group, 13 percent of wife beaters also assaulted individuals outside their families, while 1.5 percent of the entire sample were pan-violent individuals.

Homicides perpetrated by male spouses differ fundamentally in style, motive, and initiator dynamics from homicides perpetrated by female spouses. Cazenave and Zahn examined 83 total homicide cases examined across Philadelphia and Chicago, finding 42 cases of husbands killing wives and 41 cases of wives killing husbands. Men were the initiators of violence in over 90 percent of domestic homicide cases, and 43 percent of male-perpetrated homicides involved multiple blows versus 12 percent for females.

Browne studied 42 couples where the wife killed or seriously wounded her abusive husband. The average age of these women was 36 years with an average of two children each, and almost half of the homicide group reported being beaten more than once a week by the end of the relationship.

Physical punishment is nearly universal in American society. Between 17 to 71 percent of parents admit using physical punishment over short periods, while 89 to 95 percent of adults recall experiencing physical punishment over their entire childhood. Prospective longitudinal research spanning 3 to more than 20 years, such as McCord's study following 253 boys over a 20-year span, indicates that physical punishment administered to school-aged children and older may contribute to later aggressive behavior.

Severe spouse abuse and intimate sexual assault carry profound physical and psychological consequences. Regarding injuries, 7.3 percent of severely abused women needed to see a doctor compared to 1 percent of men. Furthermore, 19 percent of female victims and 10 percent of male victims took time off work due to severe spouse assault, and almost 60 percent of women in severely violent marriages have depressive difficulties.

Abused individuals often remain in violent relationships not out of masochism, but due to severe economic and emotional dependency, profound fear of lethal retaliation upon leaving, and a lack of faith in the justice system. Adler's findings revealed that 54 percent of women in persistently abusive relationships had witnessed parental abuse.

10 Key Ideas

1. Violence involves the explicit intent to cause physical or psychological harm, distinguishing it from accidental injury and separating instrumental goals from hostile motives.
2. Official police reports systematically underestimate domestic and hidden violence, whereas self-report family surveys provide much more accurate frequency estimates.
3. Poverty increases the risk of adolescent violent delinquency, but this risk can be strongly nullified by positive academic environments and high parental expectations.
4. Low levels of monoamine neurotransmitters like serotonin are linked to impulsive aggression and violent criminal offending, particularly in males.
5. Conduct disorder presents a persistent pattern of behavior violating basic rights and strongly predicts later adolescent and adult violence.
6. Social learning theory posits that individuals learn aggressive behavior through the psychosocial environment via observational learning and operant conditioning.
7. Males perpetrate the vast majority of street and fatal violence, whereas females commit family violence at rates comparable to males but with significantly less severity.
8. Men who commit sexual assault often exhibit a distinct lack of empathy regarding victim distress and a higher acceptance of societal rape myths.
9. Women who kill or seriously wound their abusive husbands frequently endure severe, chronic physical battery and report feeling trapped by a lack of alternative escape routes.
10. Multi-determined human violence requires targeted prevention strategies that address biological vulnerabilities, social environments, and developmental pathways.