collective violence

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collective violence, violent form of collective behaviour engaged in by large numbers of people responding to a common stimulus. Collective violence can be placed on a continuum, with one extreme involving the spontaneous behaviour of people who react to situations they perceive as uncertain, threatening, or extremely attractive. Riots and random youth gang fights are examples of spontaneous collective violence. At the other extreme are the organized forms of collective violence. These include coups, rebellions, revolutions, terrorism, and war.

Defining collective violence

Criminologists divide violence into two major types: individual violence and collective violence. Individual (or personal) violence is injurious force directed by one person against others. It includes making physical attacks and destroying another’s property. In contrast, collective violence consists of a number of persons directing injurious force against others. Acts of collective violence do not spring from madness, perversion, or intentional criminality; they spring from everyday life and mundane issues, and the people who commit these acts are normal people who become convinced that the time has come to take matters into their own hands.

Generally speaking, collective violence can be divided into three categories:

  1. Situational collective violence is unplanned and spontaneous. Something in the immediate situational environment triggers a group to violent action. For example, in a barroom brawl, one group of patrons interprets messages sent by another group as a form of disrespect and feels it necessary to retaliate physically.
  2. Organized collective violence is planned violent behaviour. It is also unauthorized or unofficial and lacks government approval. Lynching is an example of organized collective violence.
  3. Institutional collective violence is carried out under the direction of legally constituted officials. Examples include a country fighting a war, a state’s national guard putting down a riot, or a SWAT team attacking a barricaded suspect.

Within the context of collective behaviour, situational collective violence can be understood as spontaneous behaviour, and organized collective violence and institutional collective violence can be combined into the category of organized collective behaviour.

Examples of collective violence

Compared with conventional, everyday behaviour, collective behaviour is less inhibited, more spontaneous, more open to change, less structured, less stable, and generally shorter lived. One by-product of mass action can be collective violence. The specific forms of collective violence are described below.

Riots

The most elementary form of collective violence is referred to as “social unrest.” The significance of social unrest is that it represents a breakdown of established routines and behaviours and substitutes a preparation for new collective action. Social unrest is not a new phenomenon; it is most likely a characteristic of urban society. Often, tensions exist in any given social environment. These tensions may be a result of racial, ethnic, or religious discrimination and prejudice that are operant in society. People become frustrated when they realize there is unequal access to the desired social goals (success, wealth, health, sense of self-fulfillment, and the like). There are instances when people will engage in various methods of adaptation. In extreme cases, riots may occur.

When groups of people become dissatisfied and frustrated with existing economic and political institutions, there may come a point when the breakdown of law and order is preferred to their preservation. During the chaos of a riot, many emergent forms of behaviour occur that might not occur otherwise. Acts of violence take on new meaning; they are now viewed as legitimate by the performers and the active witnesses.

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Gang violence

Youths have formed groups, usually within their own age cohorts, from the beginning of human history. Some groups engage in what would be described as “normal” or socially acceptable behaviours. Other groups, however, may engage in behaviours that are harmful or even criminal. Youth gangs have existed since at least the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe. Descriptions of youth gangs in England during this period note that gangs committed various forms of theft and robbery, along with extortion and rape. Gangs found great amusement in breaking windows, demolishing taverns, and assaulting the watch.

In the United States, youth gangs have existed since at least the Revolutionary era. As the number of youth gangs slowly increased in American cities, certain characteristics remained constant. Gangs were typically organized along ethnic or racial lines, and the time spent in a gang was generally restricted to one’s youth, as former gang members moved into the mainstream blue-collar workforce. Gang violence was more likely to occur because of some chance meeting of rivals; however, some fights were organized as a form of either retaliation or intimidation.

Beginning in the 1980s, gangs in the United States took on a new focus. They were far more violent than in the past, as the primary motive of “turf protection” was replaced with the goal of attaining wealth through control of the illegal drug market. Drug money fueled an urban arms race, and gun violence in American urban centres such as Los Angeles and Chicago became endemic. With the shift of the U.S. economic structure from blue-collar industry to white-collar service professions, the traditional exit path from gang life evaporated. Former youth gang members were now in their 20s and 30s and still participating in gangs. The foundation of youth gangs had transformed from the relatively unstructured, spontaneous group, engaged in random, relatively short-lived forms of violence, to a more organized and structured criminal enterprise.