Violence Prevention

Evaluation of the adults and children together (ACT) against violence training program with child caregivers.

by Nilufer Kafescioglu

Thomas, V., Kafescioglu, N., & Love, D. P. (2009). Evaluation of the adults and children together (ACT) against violence training program with child caregivers. Journal of Early Childhood and Infant Psychology, 5, 141-156.

The Risk of Emergence of Boomerang Effect in Communication against Violence

by Gaspar Brändle

Violence, The Fragile Ego and the Peaceful Self

by Max Velmans

This paper is based on an invited lecture on “Violence, the fragile ego, and the peaceful self” given at the National Seminar on Containing Violence: Measures for Resolution hosted by the Center for Ghandian Studies, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India, 28th January, 2011, during the period that I was a National Visiting Professor of the Indian Research Council of Philosophy (Govt. of India).

This paper gives a brief introduction to various categories of violence along with some of their biological,... more This paper gives a brief introduction to various categories of violence along with some of their biological, socio-cultural, psychological and existential causes, for example violent responses to frustrated needs or desires of the kind specified by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The paper goes on to examine some of the basic principles for ameliorating violence. It then considers a special case of violence associated with fundamentalist beliefs, arguing that these can be understood as a form of destructive self-transcendence, that can ultimately only be remedied by the genuine self-actualization and self-transcendence required for a peaceful self.

School Violence: To What Extent do Perceptions of Problem Solving Skills Protect Adolescents?

by Halil Eksi

Ayşe Sibel TÜRKÜM
Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice - 11(1) • Winter • 127-132

This study examined whether adolescents’ perceptions of problem solving skills differ according to their sex,... more This study examined whether adolescents’ perceptions of problem solving skills differ according to their sex, experiences
of exposure to violence, age and grade, and the variables predicting their experiences of exposure to
violence. Data were collected from 600 (298 females, 302 males) 14-19 year-old students attending various types
of high schools in central Eskişehir. The Problem Solving Inventory and a questionnaire were used in the study.
Findings of the study revealed that students’ perceptions of problem solving skills do not change according to
their sex and the place they are exposed to violence. Adolescents’ perceptions of problem solving skills differ in
accordance with the level of their exposure to violence; perception level of the problem solving skills of the students
rarely exposed to violence is higher than that of the students exposed to violence occasionally or often. Perception
level of the adolescents who are often exposed to violence does not change depending on their sex and
age. The variables predicting adolescents’ experiences of exposure to violence are listed as perceptions of problem
solving skills, sex, grade, age, and school type. In conclusion, the adolescents’ perceptions of problem solving
skills are partially effective in protecting them against school violence. The place of the skills training programs
-particularly the ones that aimed at prevention of and protection from violence- in the content of counseling
programs was discussed.

A longitudinal-experimental approach to testing theories of antisocial behavior development

by Eric Lacourse

fuzzy theory and its application in designing and applying of the intelligent system of internet crime prevention and identification of the suspicious behaviors leading to abuse in electronic interactions

by Navid Kamali

THIS IS ONE OF MY PROJECTS

one of the biggest obstacles on the way of using the national information exchange space and internet interactions, is... more one of the biggest obstacles on the way of using the national information exchange space and internet interactions, is the lack of security and the occasional abuses occurring in the process of financial exchange. Therefore, prevention of the illegal breaching and identification of the crime are among the important issues for financial firms, banks and security centers.
In this paper, an intelligent system of recognition and prevention of users’ abuse has been introduced, which has the capability of recognizing the unusual and suspicious behavior of the users in interaction and exchange-based systems such as electronic banking. Since different users’ behaviors are ambiguous and uncertain, this system has been created based on the phasic theory and as well as my own previous experiences in designing the cyber criminal identification system (cyber police) and is able to classify different suspicious behaviors according to their intensity.

Kashmir Conflict, South Asian Security & Global Peace

by Owais Rajput

Evaluation of the Adults and Children Together (ACT) Against Violence Training Program with Child Care Providers

by Dreama Love

Published in the Journal of Early Childhood and Infant Psychology; co-authored with Volker Thomas and Nilufer Kafescioglu

The Land of the (Not Quite) Free: Women and Religion Behind Bars by Amy Levin

by Feminism and Religion

originally published on the Feminism and Religion Project.

The sun was setting on an early Friday evening in October 2008 as I pulled into the parking lot of the Iowa... more The sun was setting on an early Friday evening in October 2008 as I pulled into the parking lot of the Iowa Correctional Institute for Women, a maximum level security prison housing nearly 700 inmates. Though the serene drive on Iowa’s main highway lasted a mere 40 minutes from Grinnell to Mitchellville, my co-teacher and I felt worlds away from our tiny utopian bubble of books and booze. As we gathered our teaching materials for a course we designed called “Feminist Playwriting,” we made sure not to bring in any contraband, one of the many precautions given during our orientation for students participating in Grinnell Liberal Arts in Prison, a program created in 2003 that allows students to design liberal arts courses in either a men or women’s Iowa prison. My experience interacting with an incredible roomful of women, some who would suffer behind bars for the rest of their lives, was needless to say a life changing experience. That semester ignited a fire in me for prison rights, which recently has manifested in a concern for the nexus of religion and prison.

Many Americans view prison and prisoners through a binary lens – the good are free, and the bad are behind bars, or at least should be. We also tend to pride ourselves on the fact that we value freedom, but when Francis Scott Key invoked the phrase “Land of the Free,” he must not have predicted that the United States would imprison more people than any other country on the planet. America incarcerates roughly 2.3 million Americans, 208,000 of which are women. As a New York Times article in 2008 put it quite shockingly: “The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.” These statistics do not even touch upon the staggering disproportionate number of African Americans in prison, and it certainly doesn’t tell us anything about women’s experiences in prison.

"This can't happen here!" Community Reactions to School Shootings in Finland

by Atte Oksanen

Oksanen, Atte; Räsänen, Pekka; Nurmi, Johanna & Lindström, Kauri (2010) "This Can't Happen Here!" Community Reactions to School Shootings in Finland. Research on Finnish Society 3, 19-27.

The recent school shootings in Jokela and in Kauhajoki received immediate worldwide media coverage on mass violence in... more The recent school shootings in Jokela and in Kauhajoki received immediate worldwide media coverage on mass violence in a welfare society. This article examines community response to these incidents. We have gathered comparable survey data from the local communities Jokela (N=330) and Kauhajoki (N=319). Both surveys were conducted approximately six months after the shootings, and they represent local adult populations. With these data, we analyse the reactions of local residents to the shootings. We focus on questions such as whether the shootings were considered isolated tragedies or not, and whether they could have been prevented or not. The article considers what implications these recent critical incidents may have for Finland as a Nordic welfare society.

Keywords: violence, school shootings, insecurity, Finland

Cultural and peer influences on homicidal violence: A Finnish perspective

by Atte Oksanen

Kiilakoski, Tomi & Oksanen, Atte (2011) Cultural and Peer Influences on Homicidal Violence: A Finnish Perspective. New Directions for Youth Development 33: Spring (number 129), 31-42.

School shootings in Finland have involved both peer bullying at school and peer encouragement of violence through the... more School shootings in Finland have involved both peer bullying at school and peer encouragement of violence through the Internet, suggesting multiple avenues for prevention

Dismantling violent forms of masculinity through Developmental Transformations

by Fred Landers

The Double Flow of Vigilantism

by Yari Lanci

[first appeared in the sixth issue of the journal "NYX" (http://nyxnoctournal.org/) in November 2011].

In the composition of a bestiary of contemporary capitalism, the figure of the vigilante should be given particular... more In the composition of a bestiary of contemporary capitalism, the figure of the vigilante should be given particular attention. As a hybrid at the intersection of governmental police and civilians, the vigilante floats between forces which constantly redefine its position within the body of the Leviathan.

In the regimes of liberal and neoliberal securitization, the vigilante/overseer also takes the form of a set of dispositifs of security - as part of a broader discursive apparatus - which can control and influence the alleged natural movements of the market. Conversely, Anders Behring Breivik - who in July 2011 killed some ninety people in Norway - is only the most recent example of an introjected conduct which suddenly becomes ‘visible’ and crystallises in violent outbursts.

In the realm of popular culture, the “revisionist superhero comics” provide an appropriate model for our discussion of vigilantism. Frank Miller’s Batman: the Dark Night Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen were the first two manifestations of a superhero narrative which problematised the concept of vigilantism in the second part of the 1980s.

This article will try to answer the question “who are the watchmen today?”. In order to do this, the article will draw a red line between the different kinds of vigilantism detectable in Miller and Moore’s graphic novels, and it will also try to identify contemporary manifestation of the disciplinary subjectification we are enclosing under the broad definition of “vigilantism”. This article, moreover, will argue that since neoliberal capitalism is characterised by its application on a micropolitical level of society - something that Deleuze and Guattari understood well - vigilantism has become a set of “practices of the self” which aim at the production of docile-but-vigilant subjectivities. The “neighbourhood watch area” and “report suspect behaviour” we see every day displayed on the streets, or on public transport, are only two examples supporting our thesis. Consequently, the becoming-vigilante is a process that seems incapable of escaping monstrous metamorphosis.

Bullying in Italian Schools: An Overview of Intervention Programmes

by Gianluca Gini

Actitudes de la policía ante la intervención en casos de violencia contra la mujer en las relaciones de pareja: Influencia del sexismo y la empatía [Police attitudes toward intervention in cases of partner violence against women: The influence of sexism and empathy]

by Fernando Garcia

Police Involvement in Cases of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women

by Fernando Garcia

Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. 2011. Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies. Political Geography. 30 (2), 90-98.

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that... more Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is 'irrational' marks particular cultures as ‘other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to putatively ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.

Effectiveness of anonymised information sharing and use in health service, police, and local government partnership for preventing violence related injury: experimental study and time series analysis

by Iain Brennan

Co-authored with Curtis Florence, Tom Simon (both Centers for Disease Control, US) and Jonathan Shepherd (Cardiff University).

Abstract

Objective To evaluate the effectiveness of anonymised information sharing to prevent injury... more Abstract

Objective To evaluate the effectiveness of anonymised information sharing to prevent injury related to violence.

Design Experimental study and time series analysis of a prototype community partnership between the health service, police, and local government partners designed to prevent violence.

Setting Cardiff, Wales, and 14 comparison cities designated “most similar” by the Home Office in England and Wales.

Intervention After a 33 month development period, anonymised data relevant to violence prevention (precise violence location, time, days, and weapons) from patients attending emergency departments in Cardiff and reporting injury from violence were shared over 51 months with police and local authority partners and used to target resources for violence prevention.

Main outcome measures Health service records of hospital admissions related to violence and police records of woundings and less serious assaults in Cardiff and other cities after adjustment for potential confounders.

Results Information sharing and use were associated with a substantial and significant reduction in hospital admissions related to violence. In the intervention city (Cardiff) rates fell from seven to five a month per 100 000 population compared with an increase from five to eight in comparison cities (adjusted incidence rate ratio 0.58, 95% confidence interval 0.49 to 0.69). Average rate of woundings recorded by the police changed from 54 to 82 a month per 100 000 population in Cardiff compared with an increase from 54 to 114 in comparison cities (adjusted incidence rate ratio 0.68, 0.61 to 0.75). There was a significant increase in less serious assaults recorded by the police, from 15 to 20 a month per 100 000 population in Cardiff compared with a decrease from 42 to 33 in comparison cities (adjusted incidence rate ratio 1.38, 1.13 to 1.70).

Conclusion An information sharing partnership between health services, police, and local government in Cardiff, Wales, altered policing and other strategies to prevent violence based on information collected from patients treated in emergency departments after injury sustained in violence. This intervention led to a significant reduction in violent injury and was associated with an increase in police recording of minor assaults in Cardiff compared with similar cities in England and Wales where this intervention was not implemented.

Acceptability of domestic violence against women in the European Union: a multilevel analysis

by Enrique Gracia

Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 2006;60:123-129

Public Attitudes Toward Reporting Partner Violence Against Women and Reporting Behavior

by Enrique Gracia

Journal of Marriage and Family, 68 (3), 759 - 768, 2006