Violence

Toby Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429516269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Using discourses from across the conceptual and geographical board, Toby Miller argues for a different way of understanding violence, one that goes beyond supposedly universal human traits to focus instead on the specificities of history, place, and population as explanations for it.

Violence engages these issues in a wide-ranging interdisciplinary form, examining definitions and data, psychology and ideology, gender, nation-states, and the media by covering several foundational questions:

• how has violence been defined, historically and geographically?
• has it decreased or increased over time?
• which regions of the world are the most violent?
• does violence correlate with economies, political systems, and religions?
• what is the relationship of gender and violence?
• what role do the media play?

This book is a powerful introduction to the study of violence, ideal for students and researchers across the human sciences, most notably sociology, American and area studies, history, media and communication studies, politics, literature, and cultural studies.

1
Meaning and data

This first chapter looks at definitions and numbers. Just as the meaning of many abstract nouns is contingent and contested, so is the signifier of ‘violence.’ As a consequence, there are many controversies over the nature of the topic, quite apart from differences of opinion and practice over how to classify, collect, and respond to the statistics it generates. I endeavor here to outline some of these definitions and associated problems, what might be made of the numbers (albeit under erasure), and how they can elucidate two particular issues: intimate and domestic violence, and violence in the United States.

Whatever ‘violence’ signifies, and however much of it there is, we probably all agree that its material referents matter—that this is one of the world’s most enduring and pressing issues. From time immemorial, violence has been a key theme of religions, societies, families, economies, and politics. It is a central concern of public policy, social movements, academic research, drama, journalism, fiction, war, and policing. Hegel suggested that one could regard ‘History as the slaughter bench’ of collective suffering and the formation of states (2008: 123). For Joyce, ‘History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ (2000: 316) and later, a ‘nightmare from which you will never awake’ (2000: 641).

In other words, violence is a universal problem. Whether we look at nuclear weaponry, cartel rivalry, or domestic assault, it stalks both macro-and micro-discussions of international, social, and interpersonal relations. I cannot imagine news, criminology, health care, so-called social media, or Congress without discussions of violence. For example, no US news organization can resist concluding the old year and ushering in the new one without reviewing annual numbers of homicides, whether locally or nationally (Monkonnen, 2001: 1).

Women around the world must avoid violence on a daily basis, on the street and in the home (World Health Organization, 2013). For working-class US youth, the military is the best bet for ongoing employment (Miller, 2008). Colombians aged under 75 have no experience of life beyond the conflict/civil war that began in the 1940s. Australians date their emergence as a nation from the attempt to invade Turkey in 1915 (McKay, 2018). French and US citizens rise to national anthems celebrating weaponry and slaughter. For religious believers, deities are intimately bound to crime and punishment. And a lock on the legitimate use of force is foundational to the essence of the state and intimately bound up with the nation that legitimizes it via mythic origins and obligations (Weber, 1946).

Violence is generally thought of ‘as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space … erupting into instant sensational visibility’ (Nixon, 2011: 2). That is probably the dominant understanding in popular, governmental, and scholarly discourse.

But the term itself undergoes regular and contentious redefinition. There are differences between state, collective, and interpersonal violence, between planned and passional violence, and between fatal and non-fatal forms. Violence is not only physical. Even proponents of absolute free speech worry about hateful words either indexing or provoking violence, whether they arise interpersonally or demagogically. Violence ‘can be legal or illegal, visible or invisible, necessary or redundant, illogical or rational and strategic’ (Ahluwalia et al., 2007: 1).

People’s experiences of violence generate different understandings of it. Low-income, marginal groups in Colombia came up with 60 different definitions in the late 1990s, mostly connected to economic deprivation (Moser and McIlwaine, 2000: 2). Numerous difficult questions arise from such varied discourses. If countries have dual legal systems for indigenous and other citizens, or if religions require adherents to obey separate and incompatible laws, what happens when distinctive notions of criminality and punishment are in conflict within secular nation-states (Black, 2019)? And what do we make of capital cases where defenses are based on cultural relativism? Such arguments have been mobilized, for example, to exonerate a Chinese-American man who murdered his wife, a Japanese-American woman who killed her children (each because of adultery), and a Hmong man who abducted and raped a Laotian-American woman. In each case, the assailants maintained they were acting in accordance with their cultures of origin (Benhabib, 2002: 86–91). And of course, is the death penalty an infringement of human rights (Steiker and Steiker, 2019), and how does it relate to such defenses?

What of violence done to oneself? Some might query discussion of self-harm in this volume, but of course it includes what are controversially known as ‘altruistic’ suicides, associated with 神風 (Kamikaze), حزب لله(Hezbollah), தமிழீழ விடுதைலப் புலிகள் (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) القاعدة (Al-Qaeda), and assorted suicide-vest wearers and explosives-laden truck drivers. In such instances, the body is transformed into a bomb, whose destruction is a guaranteed and necessary part of harming others. There is a coeval desire to kill and to die and a high degree of ideological commitment and collective organization, rather than anomic individual suffering. Ronald Reagan was cowed by such suicide attacks on US troops in 1980s Lebanon, and he withdrew his occupiers. That reaction encouraged countless attacks in the decades since (Barbagli, 2015: 954–1050).

Then there is the much less personally directed and dramatic, but equally destructive, form: what Robert Nixon calls ‘slow violence,’ enacted by the dread hand of development, capital, international organizations, and states. This is:

a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all … neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.

(Nixon, 2011: 2)

That violence is destroying our very Earth.

Given this complexity, I have adopted a nominalist position on the meaning of ‘violence,’ such that it signifies in a commonsensical way to cover physical harm done to others. But many other aspects come and go with the efflux of time and space, as social movements, laws, and geopolitics create different circumstances and discourses.

The World Health Organization (WHO) favors this broad definition:

The intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation. It takes the forms of self-directed violence, interpersonal violence and collective violence.

(2002)

That version has been enormously influential in its inclusion of emotion, poverty, and power as well as direct and immediate injury (Lee, 2019: 4).

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) specifies political violence as:

the use of force towards a political end that is perpetrated to advance the position of a person or group defined by their political position in society. Governments, state militaries, rebels, terrorist organisations and militias engage in political violence, as well as actors who may adopt both political and criminal motives.

(2016: 20)

It describes social violence like this:

a broader manifestation of grievances, criminal behaviours and interpersonal violence in society. These include multiple types of crime, homicides, and interpersonal and self-directed violence.

(2016: 20)

Complexities abound. For the last quarter of a century, the United Nations (UN) has approached ‘human security’ as ‘much more than freedom from violence and crime.’ In 2012, it adopted a definition that incorporated ‘challenges to survival, livelihood and dignity’ as obstacles to the desired goal that people should be able to ‘exercise choices safely and freely’ (Gómez and Gasper, 2013).

These definitions both derive from and inform policies and laws, which vary hugely. For example, at what stage of life are people deemed to be criminally violent and worthy of punishment for their actions? Over 40 countries nominate 14 years of age, a few 16, but the figure is often much lower, especially across the Global South. In South Asia, it is mostly 7 years of age (‘If a 13,’ 2019). And whose lives matter most? In the United States, data on the slaughter of African Americans and Native Americans were less complete than those covering deaths of European Americans (Roth, 2009: xii).

Consider when and where statistical history ‘begins.’ Numerical data on violence are notoriously difficult to follow or have faith in, given wide differences in the definition and collection of information across time and space (OECD, 2016). Has Colombia been in a civil war for 70 years? And if so, did it end with the 2016 peace accord between two of the principal parties (Miller, 2020)? And how might one compare the data with the level of killing in Latin America prior to and during the Spanish and Portuguese conquest and subsequent struggles for independence? Is the Korean War still in play, given that no peace treaty has been concluded since the horror of the 1950s, when four million died (Cumings 2010: 35)? Does the incarceration of so many African Americans represent a continuity with the violence of the slave trade and hence should be counted as such (Davis, 2003)? If a woman kills an abusive partner, does that constitute murder, manslaughter, or neither (Belew, 2010)? Why did knife crime among the young suddenly become so prevalent in 21st-century London, across racial and class divisions, and what is the basis for comparing it with the previous decade (A New Approach, 2018)?

How should one adjudicate between the numbers presented by the military, the police, the judiciary, hospitals, and non-government organizations on supposedly similar topics? The UN Office on Drugs and Crime claims that its coverage of violent crime now extends to three-quarters of the world’s population and over half of all countries (2017). But controversy abounds whenever serious attempts are made to meet the UN Population Fund’s call for adequate data on ‘the nature and magnitude’ of violence against women, not least because gendered assault ‘is sensitive and often hidden.’ Police and medical reports ‘represent the tip of the iceberg’ and coordinated efforts to compile comparable data internationally only date from this century (2013). Over the past decade, the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean has developed a ‘regional femicide indicator.’ It shows that almost 4,000 women in the area’s 34 nations were murdered in gendered ways in 2018—a number that is rather dubious, as many countries only count partner killings, or exclude them (2019).

And executions? Almost 150 countries do not have or apply the death penalty, but it is used with seeming relish in others. Whereas 1,634 people were executed in 2015, the number had fallen to fewer than a thousand a year later. Religious states were the keenest: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iraq accounted for 84%. But because the preternaturally frightened Chinese state considers such assassinations to be state secrets, no one outside its anxious administrative cloisters knows those numbers (Amnesty International, 2018).

The Pentagon declined to account for civilian deaths in Panamá in 1989, or Yugoslavia ten years later (Herman, 2004: 6–7). When asked if he knew how many Iraqis had died as a result of the 1991 conflict, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell replied, ‘It’s really not a number I’m terribly interested in’ (quoted in Zinn, 2003: x); and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced in 1996 that although the death of half a million Iraqi children because of economic sanctions ‘was a very hard choice … we think the price is worth it’ (quoted in Roy, 2002: 225).

When the Lancet, one of the world’s major medical journals, published an epidemiological paper late in 2004 suggesting that 100,000 people may have died from violence in Iraq since DC and its allied lapdogs invaded the year before, the US media barely noted the fact, despite the story’s prominence elsewhere. Three months later, the nation’s TV networks began to discuss the number of Iraqi dead, with their ‘estimates’ ranging between 16,500 and 20,000. Reporters discredited the Lancet study, despite support for it among mortality and bio-statistical experts (Roberts et al., 2004; FAIR, 2005). It ran counter to the bourgeois media’s faithful reportage of Pentagon data, which had been in flated during the American War in Việt Nam, in order to pretend the military was winning; de flated thereafter to pretend they were humane; then redeployed to claim success in murdering non-state terrorists while suppressing word of civilian casualties (Richardson, 2017).

México’s homicide level briefly crested in 2017 at 25% greater than the previous record high (Institute for Economics & Peace, 2018: 2). Then there were 28,839 homicides in 2018, up 15% on 2017 (Martínez, 2019). By July 2019, someone was murdered every 15 minutes (Observatorio Nacional, 2019). As the Covid-19 virus hit, March 2020 became the dead-liest month on record, with over 2,500 homicides (Ferri, 2020). These horrendous numbers were fueled by a weak but violent state and a noxious blend of needy nostrils in the Global North matched by craven criminalization south of the border. The Consejo Ciudadano Para La Seguridad Pública y La Justicia Penal AC (Citizens’ Council for Public Safety and Penal Justice) placed five Mexican cities in the top ten of its 50 most violent urban regions in the world for 2018; the others were in Venezuela and Brazil (2019).

The numbers, under erasure

With all those caveats in place, where possible I use statistics with strong inter-agency, inter-authorial correlations. In terms of what appear to be relatively independent and rigorous 21st-century accounts, well over 1.5 million people worldwide die each year from violence. It is one of the biggest ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Meaning and data
• 2 Mind
• 3 Gender
• 4 Nation-state
• 5 Media
• Conclusion
• Works cited
• Index