With a prompt to reflect on myself and how I feel about violence in all its forms, I find that it is easy to focus on the negative aspects of my behavioral tendencies. I am often quick to judge and I tend to react to stimulus without fully considering the input or the alternative viewpoints possible prior to execution of my response. In being quick to judge, I am often “judging a book by its cover” when I encounter new people or situations and I find that I am constantly surprised at how incorrect my initial and, admittedly, superficial assessments are. I also believe I have a good ability to “connect the dots” on and between numerous topics and concepts. I am often lucky in that I make educated guesses about the workings of systems and processes, and in contrast to my previous self-assessment, these judgements turn out to be correct much more often.
In focusing my personal reflection on violence and more specifically on my understanding and acceptance of violence in my life, I believe these two behavioral tendencies are going to need a watchful eye. The discussion of schemas starting on page 78 in Conflict was very interesting to me specifically because of my behavioral tendencies of quick judgment. The authors compelling examples of how schemas “…come into play when one is faced with interpreting ambiguous or incomplete information and/or is under stress” (Cheldelin & Druckman & Fast (Ed.), 2008, p. 80) certainly foreshadow how my experiences and preconceptions are likely
How does this program differ from the types of punishment that are typically used for violent criminals?
My operational definition of violence is any kind of physical action where the intention is to hurt, damage or kill someone or something. There is the question of whether violence is a part of human nature or simply some people way of interacting with the world around us, were we always violent or is it a more pronounced feature of the modern era? I believe that violence is a key part of human nature and has contributed to our survival and evolution on many occasions, however it can also a major drawback and has led to some of humanities most devastating mortality rates, wars and atrocities. It is widely accepted that violence is present in at least some humans, and so where does this violence originate from? The nature vs nurture debate explores whether people are born with this violent gene or are raised by their parents or guardians to act in a violent way but are not born with it. The nature vs nurture debate is a key part of violences origins in humanity and so will be explored in this essay.
For as long as humanity has existed, men have committed violence against one another. Assuredly, Nancy G. Guerra’s and Lyndee Knox’s entry on violence in the Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice affirms that, “As historical and cross-cultural records demonstrate, our evolutionary history is laced with examples of violence. Indeed, paleontological data reveal a rather continuous stream of human violence dating back thousands of years.” It is clear that violence is a part of human nature that has always existed and will likely never be eradicated. One of the aspects that all forms of violence seem to share is that, societally (in terms, at the very least, of Western societies), they are looked down upon. Consequentially, those who commit violent
When I was a kid, I did not think about gun violence. In fact, I grew up in a household that accepted guns. My dad, uncle, and grandfather all owned guns, and I never really gave much thought about it. When I was younger my dad bought me a little BB gun and taught me how to use it. We used to go outside in our backyard which was all fenced off. He taught me all the safety precautions, and set up the paper targets for me to shoot. I always believed that was normal, everyone owned guns. I didn't realize the importance in which they played, in our society, for protection, until July 20, 2012. I watched the frightening and horrific incident that took place in a no gun-zone theater in Aurora, Colorado. It was that day at my house that the importance of guns became very clear to me. As I watched the intense news, I saw how all those victims were in danger, and how they appeared so helpless. They were trapped, and left with nothing to do but call 911, and wait for the police to show up. In the last five years, I have come to realization the importance that guns play, whether or not it is in a gun-free zone or not. They are a base of protection, because attackers will always find away to obtain them.
Beginning with the urban drug wars and the Rodney King riot all the way up the spectacular lynchings in Texas and Wyoming, and now the mass murder/terrorist strike by teenagers in their own high school, the 90s is a decade made numb by civil disorder.
What has America come to? Although the articles, “We’re No.1(1)!” written by Thomas Friedman, and the article “Violence is Who We Are,” by Steven Crichley, have different overall subjects, they have a similar arguments. The world isn’t as great as it used to be, we are lacking good leadership, and we happily invite wrong doings into our lives.
Violence is not the answer for resolving your problems. Violence can be saved in abounding ways, but they can also end in tragic manners. Violence can cause wounds, injuries, and as well deaths. Consequently, many suffer in pain as you carry the burden of having killed someone.
Over the last thirty years, significant scholars of American (particularly southern) lynching such as George C. Wright, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, Christopher Waldrep, William D. Carrigan, Amy Louise Wood, and Manfred Berg have written at length about the social structure and cultural context of the collective violence, much of it racially motivated, that plagued the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. With the exception of Wright's and Waldrep's work, lynching scholarship (including my own) has tended to focus more on the structure and context of lynching violence than on its impact on African American communities. Focusing on the violence itself as well as those who perpetrated it, scholars
In the article by Jones, the research presented demonstrates that humans are not genetically programmed to be destructive--instead, our goals, culture, and society create motivations that cause violence to manifest. Two evolutionary
In reading this book what stood out to me the most was how easy it can be to become a victim of violence. We would all like to think that this will never happen to us or that we would never allow for it to happen, but the reality is, it happens in so many forms and can be at the hands of the people we trust the most. This is where I realized one of the most common excuse for the abuse comes from manipulation.
In the next lecture, Allan Wade immerses into how people react and resist violence, why it is significant to understand it and what difference it can make. In addition, Mr. Wade asserts that the details are essential in all contexts in order to get a tangible image of how human beings respond to violence. Several of the examples he presents later comes from his own experiences as a therapist.
The chapters that are being reviewed in this analysis, chapters five, six, and seven, are far more explanatory about the pattern of semi-recent violent acts and the basis of human nature than the previous four chapters.
Based on my readings of Violence: The Enduring Problem, Alvarez says genocide it a word that is difficult to define because it shares many defining characteristics with many other war crimes and human rights violations. In order to have a set in stone definition, our textbook informed us that the United Nations defined this as “the intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group” (Alvarez 2013, p. 247).
In the year 2000 there are many problems with society. One of the biggest and most controllable is the issue of violence. Although we are subjected to violence everyday by simply turning on the news, other forms of violence for entertainment can be censored.
According to E.F Dubow and L.S Miller, authors of Television Violence and Aggressive Behavior: Social Science Perspectives on Television, “Ignoring consequences of violence (including the pain of victims, the victims’ families, and the families of perpetrators) or depicting the consequences unreasonably sets in motion a destructive encoding process.” There could be found a direct correlation between aggressive behavior and violence witnessed on television. The more violence watched, the more desensitized a viewer would become. Dubow and Miller further state “viewers become [fearful] and begin to identify with the aggressors and the aggressors’ solutions to various problems.” It is this identification that causes violent behaviors to become encoded in the person’s mind when exposed to repeated violent acts. The person may then come to see the world as a bleak and sinister place. Along with this