Understanding and Preventing Violence.

by Jeffrey A. Roth

--------------------------------------------------

Issues and Findings

Discussed in the Research in Brief:  The findings
of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on the
Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior,
established to review the current status of
research in violence.

Key issues:  The extent and nature of violence in
this country; promising opportunities for
prevention; and areas in which further research and
better meas-ures are needed, particularly to
identify causes and additional opportunities for
prevention.

Key findings:

o    The level of violent crime in this country has
reached high, though not unprecedented levels.

o    Between 1975 and 1989, harsher prison
sentencing prevented some violent crimes through
incapacitation and deterrence, but crimes by
persons still in the community offset those
preventive effects. 

o    In addition to an effective criminal justice
response, the strategy for violence reduction
should include preventive interventions directed at
the multiple factors affecting the risk of
violence.

o    Recognizing the full range of risk factors
expands the list of promising, though often
untested, opportunities for violence prevention. 

o    Long-term prevention should include strategies
directed toward children and their caregivers;
interventions undertaken at the social and
community level; and biomedical strategies in such
areas as substance abuse by pregnant women.  More
immediate effects may be obtainable by intervening
in situations where violent events cluster, such as
illegal drug markets, certain places where alcohol
and firearms are readily available, and physical
locations conducive to crime. 

o    Because evaluations are not yet conclusive
enough to warrant a commitment to any single
strategy, violence control policy should proceed
through a problem-solving strategy in which many
tactics are tested, evaluated, and refined.  This
approach requires sustained, integrated efforts by
criminal justice, social service, and
community-based organizations. 

o    The knowledge base needs to be increased by
developing better systems to measure violence,
expanding research support in certain neglected
areas, and through long-term study of the factors
that give rise to violent behavior.

Target audience:  Law enforcement officials
(including prosecutors and judges), community
leaders, health workers, school and other public
officials, and researchers.
---------------------------------------------

The National Academy of Sciences Panel on the
Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior was
established to review existing knowledge about
violence, with a view toward controlling it in the
United States. The panel, set up at the request of
three Federal agencies--the National Institute of
Justice, the National Science Foundation, and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention--reached
the following fundamental conclusions:

o    While present murder and other violent crime
rates per capita are not unprecedented for the
United States in this century, they are among the
highest in the industrialized world.

o    While sentencing for violent crimes grew
substantially harsher between 1975 and 1989, the
number of violent crimes failed to decrease. This
happened apparently because the violence prevented
by longer and more common prison sentences was
offset by increases due to other factors and
suggests a need for greater emphasis on preventing
violent events before they occur. 

o    Although findings of research and program
evaluations suggest promising directions for
violence prevention strategies, developing
effective prevention tactics will require long-term
collaborations between criminal justice and
juvenile justice practitioners, other social
service agencies, and evaluation researchers.

o    More research and better measurement are
needed to identify the causes of violence and
opportunities for preventing it--in situations where
violence occurs, in communities, and in
psychosocial and biological facets of individual
human behavior.

This Research in Brief more fully explains these
conclusions and their implications. 

Patterns and trends in violence

Violence is a serious social problem. In 1990,
23,438 Americans were murdered--a rate of 9.4 for
every 100,000 people. In the latest years for which
comparative data are available, this rate was
nearly double that of Spain, which had the second
highest rate in the industrialized world. The
murder rate in the United States in 1988 was four
times that of Canada. 

Violent crime short of murder is also a frequent
occurrence in this country. An estimated 2.9
million serious nonfatal violent
victimizations--rapes, personal robberies, and
aggravated assaults--occurred in 1990, according to
the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The
rates per 100,000 population for these crimes were
also among the world's highest. In addition, the
NCVS reported more than 3.1 million simple
assaults--less serious crimes that neither involved
a weapon nor injured the victim. National reporting
systems do not include many other violent acts,
especially those committed in families, between
friends and intimates, by caregivers, by law
enforcement officers, in prisons, and in schools.
And no statistics fully capture the devastating
effects of violence on local communities--their
economies, neighborhoods, and quality of life.

Violence falls most heavily on ethnic minority
males and occurs most often in urban areas. The
lifetime risk of being murdered is about 42 per
1,000 for black males and 18 per 1,000 for Native
American males. By contrast, it is only 6 per 1,000
for white males and 3 per 1,000 for white females.
Except for forcible rape, serious violent crime
reported through the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting
Program is highest in our largest cities. The
violent crime rate is 2,243 per 100,000 population
in cities with populations greater than 1 million.
This is three times the rate for the country as a
whole. Since 1980, however, serious violent crime
rates in the third population tier (cities between
250,000 and 499,999) have exceeded those in the
second tier (cities between 500,000 and 999,999).

Violence in America today is not unprecedented.
Nor, despite the statistics above and some news
media portrayals, is it limited predominantly to
young men, or common in all areas of large cities,
or primarily a matter of attacks by strangers, as
the following panel findings attest: 

o    Murder rates have been as high as they are now
twice before in this century--around 1931-34 and
again in 1979-81.

Because the U.S. population today is higher than
ever, however, these per capita rates are producing
unprecedented numbers of deaths. 

o    The 1990 count of serious violent crimes (2.9
million) is at about its 1975 level, following a
peak around 1980, a decrease during the early
1980's, and an increase that began in 1986.

o    Blacks' murder victimization rates have
generally exceeded those of whites throughout this
century. However, the trends for the two races do
not always move together over time. Between 1970
and 1980, for example, the rate at which white
males became murder victims rose from 7.3 to 10.9
per 100,000 population, while the rate for black
males fell from 82.1 to 71.9. 

o    The black/white difference in murder
victimization rates appears primarily to reflect
conditions in low-income neighborhoods and tends to
disappear altogether in high-income neighborhoods
(according to the four available studies of this
topic).

o    Although teenagers and young adults are more
likely than older adults to be murdered in any
given year, three-fourths of all murder victims are
killed after age 24, regardless of ethnicity.
Minority murder rates are higher than white rates
at all ages.

o    Not all types of violent victimization rates
move together over time. After 1973, aggravated
assault and rape increased fairly steadily in
cities of all sizes, but murder increases were
greatest in large cities, and robbery rose during
some periods and fell during others.

o    Variations in violent crime rates by
neighborhood in large cities are comparable to the
variations in rates between large and small cities,
and only a small percentage of all street addresses
may account for a substantial share of a city's
violent crimes.

o    In nearly 40 percent of all murders, the
relationship between victims and their killers is
unknown to police at the time the statistics are
reported. Among the remaining murders, strangers
account for only 2 of every 10, while intimate
partners or family members account for 3 of every
10, and other acquaintances for 5 of every 10.

o    Women face only about one-third the murder
risk faced by men. However, among murder victims,
women are more than four times as likely as men to
have been killed by spouses or other intimate
partners. Male victims are nearly twice as likely
as female victims to be killed by friends,
acquaintances, or strangers.  

The need for prevention

Usually the criminal justice system responds after
a violent event occurs. The event must be reported
to, or observed by, the police. Then an arrest may
be made, the arrestee convicted, and the offender
punished. Between 1975 and 1989, the probability of
clearing a violent crime by arrest remained roughly
constant. However, sentencing policy became much
harsher. Increases in both a convicted violent
offender's chance of being imprisoned and the
average prison time served if imprisoned at all
combined to cause a near tripling of the expected
prison time served per violent crime.

The criminal justice system's increased use of
prison reduced violent crime levels in two ways.
First, it prevented 10 to 15 percent of potential
violent crimes through incapacitation--the isolation
that prevents prisoners from committing crimes in
the community. (These figures are based on an analysis prepared for
the Panel.) Second, it prevented additional
violent crimes through deterrence, by discouraging
people in the community from committing them.

There is no reliable means of estimating the size
of the deterrence effect and the total number of
violent crimes the harsher sentencing policy
averted. Whatever the number, however, those
potential crimes must have been "replaced" by
others, because the actual number of serious
violent crimes was about the same in 1989 as in
1975-2.9 million. This suggests that by itself the
criminal justice response to violence could
accomplish no more than running in place. An
effective control strategy must also include
preventing violent events before they happen.

Risk factors and violence prevention

Every violent event is a chance occurrence, in the
sense that no human characteristic, set of
circumstances, or chain of events makes violence
inevitable. It seems reasonable to assume that some
intervention might have prevented each violent
event, but the correct intervention cannot be known
in advance for every individual case. As starting
points for exploring prevention, there are
well-documented risk factors, which increase the
odds that violence will occur. Some risk factors
can be modified to reduce those odds. There is
always a chance, however, that violence will occur
in a low-risk setting or fail to occur in a very
high-risk setting.

Risk factors for violence can be classified in a
framework that has two dimensions. The first is
temporal proximity-how close in time the factor is
to the violent event. Furthest removed in time are
predisposing risk factors, which increase the
probability of violent events months or even years
ahead. Situational risk factors are circumstances
that surround an encounter between people and that
increase either the chance that violence will occur
or the harm that will take place if it does.
Activating events are those that immediately lead
to a violent act.

The second dimension of the framework is the level
at which the risk factor is most directly observed.
The panel thought in terms of four levels:

o    Macrosocial: Characteristics of large social
units such as countries and communities. Examples
are social values that promote or discourage
violence against women, the structures of economic
rewards and penalties for violent and nonviolent
behavior, and catalytic events such as the 1992
announcement of the Rodney King beating trial
verdicts.

o    Microsocial: Characteristics of encounters
among people. Examples are whether insults are
exchanged, whether weapons are easily accessible,
and how bystanders respond to an escalating
confrontation.

o    Psychosocial: Individuals' characteristics or
temporary states that influence patterns of
interaction with others. Examples are individuals'
customary ways of expressing anger, or of behaving
under the temporary influence of alcohol or stress.

o    Biological: Chemical, electrical, and hormonal
interactions, primarily in the brain, which
underlie all human behavior. 

Boxes 1 and 2 illustrate the framework with two
descriptions of murders, which were adapted from
actual murder cases adjudicated during 1988 and
recorded for other purposes. Just these two cases
are sufficient to illustrate three principles about
understanding and preventing violence:

o    The diversity of these two events demonstrates
the inadequacy of broad legal and statistical
categories such as "murder" for understanding and
preventing violent events. The risk factors and
associated prevention strategies in just these two
murders are quite different, and they represent
only a small slice of the diversity in murder. 

o    It is important for prevention purposes to
view a violent event as the outcome of a long chain
of preceding events, which might have been broken
at any of several links, rather than as the product
of a set of factors that can be ranked in order of
importance. To devise a strategy that might have
prevented Jason's death (see box 1), one need not
designate either Dave's accumulated humiliations or
Jason's crying as the more "important" cause;
rather, one must search for interventions that
might have broken some link in a chain of events. 

o    Encouragingly, the two murders described here
suggest a broad set of intervention points for
preventing violent deaths before they occur.

It is useful to speculate about strategies that
might have prevented Jason's and Andy's deaths.
Conceivably, Jason's death might have been
prevented if Dave had been raised to have higher
self-esteem, if Evelyn had sought help when Dave
first slapped her, if a nurse or social worker
making regular home visits had noticed the
inadequate family functioning or Dave's poor
parenting skills and shown Dave how to deal with
problems more constructively, or if the
neighborhood were characterized by more active
social networks or more accessible child care
services. Andy's death might have been avoided if
Bob's early adolescent patterns of drinking and
fighting had led to a referral for successful
alcohol abuse treatment, if someone had thought of
a recreational alternative to the usual Sunday beer
party, if Andy's older brother had used his
influence to stop the escalating fight instead of
moving it outside, or if emergency medical services
had been more accessible. The point is not that any
single strategy will eliminate all violence, but
that violence levels can be reduced by a variety of
individual decisions and nonintrusive public
policies.                                          

Comprehensive violence prevention 

Murder was only one of many types of violence
explored by the panel. Research and evaluation
findings concerning all forms of interpersonal
violence suggest a variety of strategies that merit
consideration and testing in any comprehensive
violence prevention effort.

During child development. Promising violence
prevention strategies include:

o    Programs and materials to encourage and teach
parents to be nonviolent role models, provide
consistent discipline, and limit children's
exposure to violent entertainment.

o    Regular postpartum home visits by public
health nurses to provide health information, teach
parenting skills, and give well-baby care, while
taking the opportunity to detect signs of possible
child abuse.

o    Programs such as Head Start preschool
enrichment and early-grade tutoring to reduce the
risk of early-grade school failure, a well-known
precursor of violent behavior.

o    Social learning programs for parents,
teachers, and children to teach children social
skills for avoiding violence, ways to view
television critically, and non-violent means to
express anger and meet other needs.

o    School-based anti-bullying programs.

Neurological and genetic processes. All human
behavior, including aggression and violence, is the
outcome of complex processes in the brain. Because
of ethical constraints on research involving human
subjects, the most firmly established knowledge
about these processes concerns aggressive behavior
by animals. Its applicability to violent human
behavior is still speculative.

Available research suggests that violent behavior
may be associated with certain relatively permanent
conditions and temporary states of the nervous
system. These possibilities relate to the following
processes: the functioning in the brain of certain
hormones and other body chemicals called
neurotransmitters; certain physical abnormalities
in the brain, which could be present at birth or
develop as a result of brain injuries or
maturation; certain abnormal brain wave responses
to outside stress; brain dysfunctions that, by
interfering with communication and thought
processes, lead to school failure and other
childhood problems that are well-known precursors
of violent behavior; and temporary effects of
drinking alcohol, perhaps heightened by
hypoglycemia or other health problems.

The roles of these processes in human behavior are
far too uncertain to specify any neurological
"markers" for violence or to warrant any wholesale
biomedical interventions solely to prevent violent
behavior. However, they do suggest that violence
prevention may be a positive side-effect of certain
interventions intended to achieve other goals.
Based on its review of available evidence, the
panel concluded that potentially useful biomedical
violence prevention strategies include:

o    Programs to reduce maternal substance abuse
during pregnancy, children's exposure to lead in
the environment, and head injuries.

o    Intensive alcohol abuse treatment and
counseling programs for those in their early
adolescent years whose behavior patterns include
both conduct disorder and alcohol abuse, especially
if alcohol dependence runs in their families.

o    Developing pharmacological therapies to reduce
craving for nonopiate illegal drugs, much as
methadone reduces demand for heroin.

o    Completing the development of medicines that
reduce potentials for violent behavior during
withdrawal from opiate addiction.

In statistical studies of twins, adoptees, and
their families, researchers have found correlations
suggesting that genetic and social processes
interact as influences on the probabilities of many
human behaviors, including alcoholism, antisocial
behavior, and juvenile delinquency.  However, the
few available studies of human violent behavior
have produced mixed results, suggesting at most a
weak genetic influence on the chance of violent
behavior. The statistical patterns make clear that,
even if eventually discovered, any such influence
would involve many genes rather than any single
"violence gene" and would involve interactions with
social conditions and life events. 

Social and community-level interventions. Research
on social and community-level influences on
violence is difficult to carry out, and evaluations
of interventions at these levels are scarce. As a
result, the knowledge base for formulating violence
prevention strategies at these levels is not as
strong as it should be. Research conducted thus far
highlights the need for further development in the
following areas: 

o    Housing policies to reverse the geographic
concentration of low-income families. 

o    Programs to strengthen community
organizations, social networks, and families that
promote strong prosocial values.

o    Economic revitalization in urban neighborhoods
to restore opportunities for economic
self-advancement through prosocial, nonviolent
activities.

o    Stronger community policing programs as a
means of improving police responsiveness to
community needs, stronger community-based violence
prevention initiatives, reinforcement of prosocial
values, and increased certainty of arrest and
punishment for violent crimes.

o    Strategies to reduce the violence-promoting
effects of community transitions that occur in the
course of new construction, gentrification, and
other disruptions.

o    Programs to reduce violence associated with
prejudice and with the activities of some gangs.

Situational approaches. The strategies outlined
above are long-range approaches rather than
immediate means to prevent violence. Time is needed
to change the pathways through which a few
aggressive children develop into violent adults and
to change the communities in which they live.

Shorter-term strategies for violence prevention
require altering or eliminating situations that
present immediate opportunities for violent events.
One approach involves cooperation between police
and business proprietors to diagnose and remove the
risk factors in "hot spots"-addresses or telephone
locations that generate unexpectedly high volumes
of "911" calls for emergency police assistance to
deal with violence. 

The diversity of violence means that different "hot
spots" will require different remedies. However, a
large body of research points directly to three
commodities that should often be considered in
situational violence prevention:

o    Alcohol: Use of prevention education, laws and
law enforcement, taxes, and social pressure, among
other measures to deal with underage drinking. Such
meas-ures appear to reduce teenagers' involvement
in automobile crashes and may therefore reduce
their excessive involvement in violence.

o    Illegal drugs: Reducing the demand that fuels
violence-ridden illegal drug markets; and using
drug abuse prevention, drug treatment, coordination
of in-prison drug treatment with post-release
treatment, and (in the near future) methadone
equivalents for drugs other than heroin.

o    Firearms: Better enforcement of laws that
regulate the allocation and uses of guns, and
especially reducing juveniles' access to guns by
enforcing laws prohibiting gun sales to minors and
by disrupting illegal gun markets.


Diversified problem-solving in violence prevention


The strategies discussed above constitute a
portfolio of promising violence prevention
opportunities. The findings of program evaluations
are not yet conclusive enough to warrant a national
commitment to any single strategy. Therefore,
violence control policy should be diversified
through small investments in testing many
strategies rather than a major commitment to
nationwide implementation of one or two. 
Interventions that succeed in one setting sometimes
fail in another because of the unintended
consequences of interactions that are poorly
understood. Even when the potential effectiveness
of a specific strategy is fairly clear, the choice
of implementation tactics may not be. Strategies
aimed at predisposing risk factors, even when they
are effective, require time to demonstrate that
they will work. And while some strategies will
doubtless prove more effective than others, the
diversity of violent events guarantees that no
single strategy will prevent more than a small
fraction of them.

For these reasons, "diversified investments" in
many small-scale but sustained problem-solving
initiatives are needed. Like initiatives to develop
vaccines for preventing a single disease, each
problem-solving initiative should focus on a
specific source of violence. Each initiative
involves five steps:

1.   Diagnose the problem, using criminological and
epidemiological techniques to document its
importance and identify risk factors that suggest a
preventive strategy.

2.   Develop prototypes of several tactics for
strategy implementation that show promise based on
theory, research findings, or experience.

3.   Compare the effectiveness of the alternative
tactics through rigorous evaluations that use
randomized assignment wherever feasible.

4.   Refine the tactic for implementation, using
the evaluation findings as the basis.

5.   Replicate the evaluation and refinement steps
to sharpen the effectiveness of the interventions
and adapt them to local community characteristics.

The panel called for problem-solving initiatives
aimed at sources of violence in several areas:
childhood development; "hot spot" locations,
routine activities, and situations; illegal
markets, especially for drugs, guns, and
prostitution; firearms, alcohol, and drugs; bias
crimes, gang activities, and community transitions;
and relationships between intimate partners.

Over time, this problem-solving approach may reduce
the levels of different types of violence in large
enough numbers to make a significant "dent" in the
overall problem. Such progress in prevention is
especially likely when the chances of early success
can be maximized by focusing on certain categories
of problems and interventions: those for which the
risk factors are most firmly established, those for
which evaluation findings are most positive, and
those for which tactics are most easily marshaled.
Progress in prevention also requires treating
initial evaluation failures (which are inevitable)
as indicators of the need for tactical refinements
rather than as signals to abandon a strategy
entirely. Simultaneously, progress in understanding
violence will be made to the extent social
scientists make greater use of findings from
well-controlled outcome evaluations as evidence of
the causes of violent events.

The preventive, problem-solving approach to
violence is not intended to replace arrest and
other traditional criminal justice responses. But
it would involve integrating criminal justice
responses with a broad range of preventive
interventions, which are often administered by
other public and private agencies. For example,
arrest at the crime scene has been found to break
the cycle of spouse assault/intervention under some
conditions. However, arrest has never been
systematically compared to, or integrated with,
such interventions as referring battered women to
shelters, teaching batterers nonviolent ways to
deal with anger, or requiring batterers to
participate in alcohol abuse treatment.
Coordinating and evaluating all these elements of a
spouse assault prevention initiative would require
cooperation between police departments and the
agencies that provide the other services. 

More generally, violence problem-solving will
require long-term collaboration and new
organizational arrangements among local law
enforcement, criminal justice, schools, and public
health, emergency medicine, and social service
agencies, all working with program evaluators and
other researchers. Developing these arrangements
will also require new leadership approaches by
administrators of all agencies involved.


Building knowledge for future use

To strengthen the knowledge base for developing the
next generation of violence prevention strategies,
three research initiatives are needed: better
systems to measure violence, research in neglected
topics, and a long-term study of the factors
operating in communities and in individual
development that cause a small percentage of
children to have high potential for violent
behavior as adults, while most do not.

Measurement systems. Because of certain basic
limitations in systems for gathering information on
violence, many important questions in policy and
science cannot be answered today, and emerging
violence problems are sometimes slow to be
discovered. For these reasons relevant information
systems should be modified and expanded to provide:

o    Better counts of intrafamily violence,
robberies committed in commercial establishments,
violent bias crimes, and violence in schools and
correctional facilities.

o    More comprehensive recording of sexual
violence, especially events involving intimates,
and acts (for example, serial killings) in which
the sexual component may not be immediately
apparent.

o    Baseline measures of the prevalence and
incidence of risk factors for violence (for
example, arguments between intoxicated spouses or
intimates, drug transactions, and situations in
which employees handle cash alone, especially at
night).

o    Links between the systems that measure all
aspects of a violent event-the consequences, the
treatment of victims, and the circumstances
precipitating the event.

o    Better systems for measuring violence levels
in small geographic areas, to facilitate evaluating
the effects of intervention. 

o    More detail about the attributes of violent
events and their participants, to facilitate better
studies of risk factors.

Neglected research areas. Certain research areas
are of special concern because, having been largely
devoid of resources, they could make rapid progress
with relatively small-scale infusion of funds.
These areas include: 

o    The effects of weapon type on death rates in
assaults and robberies.

o    Interactions among demographic, situational,
and spatial risk factors for violent events and
violent deaths.

o    Comparisons of how individuals' potentials for
violent behavior develop in ethnically and
socioeconomically different communities.

o    The nature of neurological responses that
indicate elevated potentials for violent behavior.

o    Development of medications that prevent
violent behavior without the debilitating side
effects of "chemical restraint."

o    Interactions among cultural, developmental,
and neuropsychological causes of sexual violence
against strangers, intimate partners, and other
family members. 

o    Violent behavior of custodians (for example,
caretakers, correctional officers) against wards
(for example, children in day care and prison
inmates).

Multicommunity longitudinal studies. To lay the
scientific groundwork for the next generation of
preventive interventions, a multicommunity program
of developmental studies of aggressive, violent,
and antisocial behaviors is needed. By tracing the
influences of the community, the family, and other
individuals on children as they grow up, this
program should improve the understanding of causes
and lead to improved medical, developmental, and
social interventions. The program should include
randomized experiments that will identify
developmental and social interventions for
preventing high potentials for violent behavior in
children. With support from the National Institute
of Justice and the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation, implementation of this
recommendation has begun through a Program on Human
Development and Criminal Behavior. Additional
support is being solicited from a consortium of
private and public sources.


Conclusion and implications

Violence is a pervasive national problem, more
serious in the United States than in the rest of
the industrialized world, and especially serious
for males who belong to demographic and ethnic
minorities. However, the problem is neither
unprecedented nor intractable. Existing knowledge
reveals a number of promising prevention strategies
involving factors at work in communities, in
individuals, and in hazardous situations that
present special risks of violence.

Implementing effective prevention strategies
requires recognizing that the criminal justice
response is not enough to reduce violence levels.
Rather, prevention requires comprehensive
problem-solving strategies that involve criminal
justice agencies, schools, and public health,
emergency medicine, and social service agencies.
Cooperation among these agencies and
community-based organizations is needed in specific
problem-solving initiatives to systematically test
and refine promising violence prevention tactics. 
At the same time, to lay the groundwork for the
next generation of approaches to violence
prevention, research should be carried out to
improve the measurement of violence, to study
certain topics neglected in recent years, and to
learn more about what causes a small proportion of
all children to commit violent acts as adults.

Sidebar:
Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent
Behavior

Violence is universally recognized as a pervasive
part of contemporary American society and of our
Nation's past as well. Many of the attempts to
understand the phenomenon have been made in
response to specific situations, such as the
lawlessness of the Prohibition era, the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the
urban riots of the mid-1960's. Other attempts at
understanding violence singled out particular
causes for analysis. In none of these studies,
however, was the full body of research on violence
reviewed comprehensively, and none of them took an
interdisciplinary scientific approach.  

The Panel on the Understanding and Control of
Violent Behavior was set up to meet the need for a
more comprehensive assessment of what is known
about violent behavior. It was established in
response to a request made by three Federal
agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF),
the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
NSF asked for a review of current knowledge about
the causes of violent behavior and recommendations
for future research. The other two agencies shared
these goals, but their areas of interest reflected
their particular missions. As the research arm of
the U.S. Department of Justice, NIJ wanted to find
out about means to prevent and control violent
crime. The CDC wanted assistance in setting
priorities for preventing injuries and deaths
caused by violence. 

Created in 1989, the panel reviewed research on
interpersonal violence-events involving at most a
few perpetrators and victims.  This limitation
excluded suicide and self-mutilation as well as
large-scale collective and State violence. The
focus was on describing, understanding, and
controlling violence in the United States. Research
in biomedical, psychological, and social sciences
was reviewed. The work of the panel was intended
both to help guide future research and evaluation
projects aimed at prevention and control and to
suggest strategic directions for violence control
policy.

The findings, conclusions, and recommendations of
the panel were published in Volume 1 of
Understanding and Preventing Violence, published by
the National Academy Press. Three volumes of
background papers commissioned by the panel are
forthcoming. The panel concluded that numerous,
often interacting factors, give rise to violent
events. Although the underlying interactions are
not well understood, attention to these factors
suggests many promising preventive interventions.
Testing and evaluating these interventions creates
opportunities to prevent particular types of
violence while gaining better understanding of
them.  The panel made recommendations in a number
of areas, among them development of problem-solving
initiatives to control and understand violence,
better statistical systems for measuring violence,
and a program of research to identify underlying
causes. This Research in Brief is one of a series
that summarizes the panel's findings.

NIJ is committed to implementing the
recommendations of the panel. Its commitment has
begun through support for the Program on Human
Development and Criminal Behavior, a longitudinal,
multicommunity research project that is exploring
the factors associated with violence. In addition,
the panel's recommendations have helped shape the
goals of NIJ research and evaluation activities and
its long-range plans for research. 

Copies of Understanding and Preventing Violence are
available from the National Academy Press, 2101
Constitution Avenue N.W., Washington, DC 20418
(800-624-6242).

BOX 1:
Jason's and His Father's Story

Dave, Evelyn, and their 10-month-old son Jason were
struggling. Jason was born just a few weeks after
Evelyn's 20th birthday and 4 months before Dave was
laid off from his job as a day laborer.

Things had clearly gone wrong since the layoff.
Dave had become moody. They argued more frequently,
mostly about money. During several of the
arguments, Dave had slapped Evelyn, but begged
forgiveness each time and promised never to hit her
again. Worst of all, Dave seemed to have begun
resenting Jason. He had never quite mastered
feeding and changing and had stopped trying to
learn. He had almost stopped playing with the baby,
and what playing he did struck Evelyn as too rough.

Evelyn finally figured out a solution: she'd get
back her old job as a waitress. Even though she
would miss being away from Jason, they needed the
money. Less financial pressure might relieve the
psychological pressures that, she believed, were
making Dave more abusive. 

Dave didn't fight her idea, but Evelyn had mixed
feelings about leaving Jason in his care. He was no
model babysitter, but perhaps time alone together
would build his bonds with Jason and take his
attention off his joblessness. Anyway, there was no
choice. She knew none of their neighbors,
especially none whom she would trust with Jason,
and the local day-care center had a 3-month waiting
list.

As Evelyn left for her first day at work, Dave "hit
bottom." All the humiliation-over the layoff, the
rejections, loans from Evelyn's parents, and his
new status as babysitter-descended at once. He
heard Jason's bawling as yet another insult, not a
cry for mother. Whatever Jason's problem was, Dave
couldn't fix it. The more he tried, the louder the
bawling, and the deeper his own despair and
frustration.

Dave's self-control finally broke when Jason wet
him. He turned on the "hot" tap, filled the bathtub
with scalding water, and held Jason in the tub by
his arm and leg. Jason's crying eventually stopped,
but not until third-degree burns covered 35 percent
of his body, according to the medical examiner's
report.


BOX 2:
Andy's and Bob's Story

Wrightstown had long been known as a tough
blue-collar suburb. Residents rarely ventured
downtown, with its open-air drug markets and
drive-by shootings. Still "men were men," and their
reputations depended on toughness, sexual and
beer-drinking prowess, and family honor. Big
Sunday-afternoon beer parties were a local ritual,
and everyone knew that some of the biggest and
wildest happened at Andy's house.

In a tough town, Andy's friend Bob was one of the
toughest. Like his father before him, Bob had begun
drinking heavily as a teenager and had accumulated
records of school fights and simple assaults. He
nearly always won the fights, but had recently lost
his job for missing work--he had been in jail after
a bar brawl that got out of hand.

Late one Sunday afternoon, on a run to replenish
the beer supply, Andy ran into his out-of-luck
friend and invited him back to join the party. Once
there, Bob quickly drank up a six-pack and began
making passes at Andy's sister Charlene. Charlene
had never liked Bob. The more she resisted his
advances, the more aggressive he became, until she
slapped him hard across the mouth. Bob stepped back
and tripped over a coffee table. As he picked
himself up, half the crowd was laughing at him. The
other half was yelling at Charlene to "make it up
to him like a good girl," but Andy saw his sister's
honor at stake.

Andy came at Bob. The two fought in the living room
until Andy's older brother told them to "take it
outside" after they broke the coffee table. As the
crowd moved out to the porch to watch and cheer,
Bob yanked a tire iron out of his trunk and used it
to knock Andy to the ground, unconscious. The crowd
fell silent only after Bob jumped into his car, ran
over Andy twice, and roared away. After what seemed
like forever, an ambulance responded and took Andy
to the hospital emergency room, where he died 4
hours later of massive internal injuries.


Authors Biography

Dr. Jeffrey A. Roth served as study director for
the Panel on the Understanding and Control of
Violent Behavior. Currently he is research director
in the Bethesda, Maryland, office of the Law and
Public Policy Area of Abt Associates, Inc.