Social Work, Political Violence and Historical Change:

In this paper the author outlines the background to the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland which led to the current ‘Troubles’. In this discussion a range of key ideas are highlighted, including the nature of sectarianism and patterns of violence which have profoundly affected the society. The second part of the paper reviews a number of issues which face social workers when they try to deal with the effects of such violence as well as highlighting new challenges which have emerged as the society moves towards the resolution of conflict. It concludes with the argument that, wherever there is such conflict in the world, social workers need critically to understand the way in which political and social structures impinge upon their everyday practice.

Neighbourhoods Mobilise the Troops - Community Organising, Violence and Governmentality

The article reflects on the difficult relation between community work against domestic violence and local crime prevention under the conditions of the neoliberal state that cuts down on social benefits and promotes self-help, active citizenship and self-responsibility instead while at the same time restoring the punishing state with its strict regime of law-and-order. The author describes a project Tarantula - she started herself while being a social worker in Hamburg, Germany. Tarantula was aimed at strengthening social networks and the neighbours' willingness to get involved in favour of affected women. Although conceptualized as an emancipatory approach referring to community organizing in the tradition of social movements it is questionable whether and how this can really work in the current situation. At present, the field of crime control is being reconfigured as a result of political and administrative decisions, which, for their part, are based on a new structure of social relations and cultural attitudes. The demolition of the 'welfare state' means the re-coding of the security policy that facilitates the development of interventionist techniques that govern and control individuals through their own ability to act.

Anti-Feminist Backlash and Violence against Women Worldwide

Although globalization, through the communications revolution and international law, brings the promise of progressive social change, the concern of this paper is with the backlash against women’s increasing emancipation, a backlash that is evidenced in the United States through making a mockery of women’s bid for equality by turning the principles against some women whose lives are troubled while rewarding others. Meanwhile across the world the victimization of women, personal and cultural, is taking place in both democratic and totalitarian regimes. Two related forms of backlash are institutional and personal. That forces from the global market and the corporate media help fuel this backlash is a major contention of this paper.

Is There a Culture of Violence in Colombia?

During the past decade, economic factors have been given a prominent role in explaining political violence. The example of Colombia shows that economic factors can explain the ubiquitous nature of violence in that country only in the context of a socio-culturally rooted propensity to use violence. The study draws on relevant published research to identify evidence of a culture of violence in Colombia and discusses the structural conditions that allow or cause such a culture to arise. It is shown that violence in Colombia cannot be explained without taking into account cultural factors that are in turn dependent on other explanatory factors, including economic ones.

Neighborhood Violence and Adolescent Friendships

This paper investigates the social consequences of neighborhood violence. Using ego-centered friendship network data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a survey of adolescents in the United States in the mid-1990s, it examines the relationship between neighborhood violence and the quantity, closeness, and composition of adolescent same sex friendships. Though neighborhood violence is unrelated to quantity and closeness net of individual and family characteristics, it predicts boys’ friendships with individuals who no longer attend school (who are presumably older or have dropped out of school) and predicts boys’ and girls’ friendships with individuals who attend other schools. These results are consistent with the theory that violence and fear of victimization focus adolescents’ social attention on their neighborhoods and lead them to develop friendships with individuals who can help them to stay safe. By structuring who adolescents interact with, neighborhood violence may play a role in determining the cultural messages and ideals to which they are exposed.

Deprivation, Violence, and Conflict: An Analysis of “Naxalite” Activity in the Districts of India

This paper asks: is it a fact that there is more violence in districts affected by Naxalite (Maoist) activity compared to those which are free of Naxalite activity? And can the existence of Naxalite activity in some districts of India, but not in others, be explained by differences in economic and social conditions? This study identifies districts in India in which there was significant Naxalite activity and correlating the findings with district-level economic, social, and crime indicators. The econometric results show that, after controlling for other variables, Naxalite activity in a district had, if anything, a dampening effect on its level of violent crime and crimes against women. Furthermore, even after controlling for other variables, the probability of a district being Naxalite-affected rose with an increase in its poverty rate and fell with a rise in its literacy rate. So, one prong in an anti-Naxalite strategy would be to address the twin issues of poverty and illiteracy in India.

Modernity Strikes Back? A Historical Perspective on the Latest Increase in Interpersonal Violence (1960-1990)

There is a plethora of criminological explanations why criminal violence increased during the three decades between the early 1960s and the early 1990s. This paper argues that most available interpretations are lacking in three respects: they lack a historical perspective that anchors the three critical decades in a wider understanding of long-term trends; they take the nation-state as their unit of analysis and disregard important commonalities across the Western world; and they pay insufficient attention to different trends in broad categories of physical violence.This paper therefore takes a macro-level and long-term perspective on violent crime, focussing on European homicide during the past 160 years. It demonstrates that the period of increase was preceded by a long-term decline and convergence of homicide rates from the 1840s to the 1950s. Also, it shows that both the decline and the increase primarily resulted from temporal variation in the likelihood of physical aggression between men in public space. It argues that explanations of these common trends need to take into account broad long-term cultural change common to Western societies. In particular, the paper suggests that shifts in culturally transmitted and institutionally embedded ideals of the conduct of life may provide an explanation for long-term change in levels of interpersonal violence.