What We Don’t Know About Violence
What We Don’t Know About Violence
Today, most criminological theory and research does not distinguish between violent and nonviolent crime. Instead, many criminologists accept the existence of a unidimensional construct, called variously criminality, deviance, delinquency, conduct disorder, antisociality, or aggression, which includes a variety of behaviors including theft, property damage, drug use, and violence. This is not unique to the field of criminology. Even in the field of psychology, there are those who focus on “antisocial” characteristics and conduct disorders in theory and research. In this chapter, we outline the reasoning for a differential etiology of violence per se. We make the case that the research on violence is incomplete, and we explain the methodological challenges for disentangling the causes of violence from the causes of nonviolent criminal activity.
Keywords: Violence, Aggression, Violent Crime, Differential Etiology
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
