Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines whether American predominance among industrialized nations in homicide rates also applies to violence socialization experiences and attitudes approving violence, and examines gender differences in these aspects of violence. Data are from university students in the International Dating Violence Study in 32 nations , N=17,404. The results show that the US is above the median of the 32 nations for Within-Family Violent Socialization (such as witnessing violence between parents) and for Non-Family Violent Socialization (such as witnessing physical fights). However, for Violence Approval, US students are close to the median; and on Approval of Sexual Aggression (such as agreeing that once sex gets beyond a certain point, a man can't stop) in the lowest quartile. Thus, the US is high in violent socialization, but paradoxically, at or below the median in violence approval. The Violence Socialization and Violence Approval scale and subscale scores were always higher for men than women, but nations that are high in Violence Socialization of men are also high for women (r = .78) and nations that are high in Violence Approval by men are also high for women (r=.93). Implications for violence prevention will be discussed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: My task, as I see it, is to suggest that theorizing about suffering, and more explicitly about the differences between the way secular societies and religious ones live and think about suffering, may have a great deal more to do with understanding the actions of people half a world away planning suicide attacks against Western monuments, bystanders, and occupation forces than does contract theory or rights talk, or the self-justifying equivocations of just war theory.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Under what scope conditions can organizations act strategically and when are they constrained by their environment to act in scripted fashion? This paper evaluates the different images world polity and geopolitical theories have of the basis and timing of extra-constitutional violence in Latin America. Using data made available by School of Americas Watch (2003), we present a quantitative and longitudinal examination of the School of Americas (SOA), a United States training program for military officers from nations throughout the Western Hemisphere, to examine the relationship between SOA training and extra-constitutional violence in Latin America from 1954 to 1996. To emphasize temporal processes and causal relationships, we employ event history techniques to examine the transition from peace to violence and the degree to which SOA training and United States intervention contribute to the onset of violence. Results corroborate geopolitical theory, suggesting that states continue to harm their citizens when threatened and that a hegemonic state may condone and (at times) actively contribute to human rights abuse. In sum, even as social scientists attend to and attempt to understand a process of rationalization that occurs across centuries, it is important that social theory and research come to terms with the violence and strategic actions that states undertake at the present time and in the foreseeable future.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Though the past three decades have witnessed an explosion of research on domestic violence, the existing literature does not study the role of the body in reflecting and sustaining gendered power inequality between batterers and battered women. Heeding Grosz’s (1994) call to centralize the body in our understanding of gender, we find that a gendered and hierarchical mind/body dichotomy occupies a central, though rarely acknowledged, place in the power and control dynamics at the heart of domestic violence. Using Foucault (1979, in Rabinow, 1984) and Scarry (1985), we can begin to elaborate a corporeal framework for understanding batterers' use of violence against and creation of pain in battered women's bodies. Through in-depth interviews with 20 batterers and 15 battered women, we find empirical evidence that violence and pain play a role in batterers’ association of themselves with the idealized mind and their relegation of battered women to the denigrated realm of the body. Specifically, the current study reports on batterers’ denial of their bodies, their exploitation of battered women’s physical vulnerabilities, and the unique role of battered women’s injuries. The current study represents an empirically-based expansion of traditional understandings of domestic violence that more holistically incorporates the body and embodied experience.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Utilizing a linked national victimization data set providing a sample of 20,990 women, this longitudinal cohort study differentiated the experiences of violence perpetrated by an intimate (IPV) from violence perpetrated by a stranger (SV) by specifically looking at the exposure of residential change. Violence research either aggregates types as seen in most violence theory or completely disaggregates types as seen in the proliferation of IPV research. Very little research has looked at the similarities or disparities between different forms of violence. This study examines the risk of both IPV and SV following a woman’s recent residential change. Residential change is both a key construct in a numerous mainstream criminological frameworks and has been found to be a marker of gender-power differentials in IPV research as it serves as a source for forced social isolation. Violence victimization risk, estimated by weighted and unweighted, crude and adjusted measures, consistently showed that while residential change resulted in a two-fold increased risk for IPV compared with non-movers, recent movers had no increased risk of SV. Furthermore, additional constructs including a woman’s education, employment and having a child in the home appear to independently influence IPV risk but not SV risk, which was more influenced by urbanization. These robust findings support the argument that mainstream theoretical frameworks of violence may not be applicable to IPV.