Our Violent World by Kevin McDonald

Author:Kevin McDonald [McDonald, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Terrorism, Social Science, Violence in Society, Criminology, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781137296351
Google: AMG9CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Macmillan International Higher Education
Published: 2013-05-14T04:18:34+00:00

Violence, Ethics and Community

One way we can begin to approach the experience of violence is to explore its place in communities. This highlights the extent that violence is not simply a means to break down order. Violence can also produce order, as for example in the case of urban gangs, where fighting and defending borders produces order in worlds of disorder, producing internal hierarchy and loyalty through the violence of external competition (McDonald 1999). Violence plays a recurring role in building community identities, in particular in strongly integrated communities structured in terms of oppositions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (McDonald 1999). This form of violence occurs frequently in military barracks, boarding schools, fraternities and sporting teams. Joining such groups often requires the shedding of previous identities and loyalties, involving rituals which demonstrate acceptance of the power of the fraternity to determine one’s fate. This transition is often associated with shedding one’s clothes, accepting a status of vulnerability, being tested by physical violence, and emerging from the process as a fully-fledged member of the community. Groves et al.’s (2012) analysis of initiation or hazing in sporting teams in the United Kingdom notes the persistence of these themes: alcohol, nudity, humiliation, physical and psychological abuse leading to violence and at times injury. These initiation rituals involve ‘breaking down’ former selves that are then rebuilt by the leaders of the team. A considerable number of university students have died as a result of such rituals – one US study pointing to over 400 deaths or serious injuries involved in college-based hazing over the period 1900–90 (Nuwer

2002).

Violence thus plays a significant part in community cultures. The French sociologist Fran ç ois Dubet (1992) argues that the more a community is integrated, the more important will be community-sanctioned violence that often takes the form of deviance from dominant social norms, constituting the group and loyalty to it. The ‘bar brawl’, for example, was for a long time a tolerated form of violence, a kind of popular leisure that involved release and freedom from the constraints of daily life. This ‘drinking violence’ combines a dimension of social protest (breaking free of imposed laws) with resistance to middle-class morality (Tomsen 1997). What is distinctive about this violence is that it is regulated by a community: weapons are not used and serious injuries or deaths rarely occur, older people or community leaders will often be on hand to step in if things get out of control, and the violence is framed by shared limits and a sense of ‘fairness’. This is quite different from the violence that has become increasingly evident in bars since the 1980s, associated with the practice of ‘glassing’, where a glass or a bottle will be smashed to form jagged edges and then used as weapon. Almost unheard of in the 1940s or 1950s, in the 1990s ‘glassing’ attacks made up some 10 per cent of all assault injuries leading to admission to hospital in the United Kingdom, and in 75 per cent of these cases the glass used was thrust into the face of the victim (Shepherd 1998).

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