In that culture vacuum is growing alienation and out of that vacuum comes violence. There is violence against things, as in vandalism and arson, and violence against people, as in physical assault and battery. There is group violence as in gangs, and mobs and war, and family violence as in parricide, child abuse and spousal abuse. Nor are the sources of violence any less intricate. And, perhaps most serious and most preventable of all, it is inherent in the very fabric of the drug culture.
Violence is the final common path of a host of interacting developmental events.
A variety of such clusters exists in the actual crucible of personality as it is formed genetically, in utero, with one's primary caretakers, within the matrix of the family, within the sphere of influence of the extended family and subculture, and finally within the socioecologic context that surrounds children as they develop. In the beginning mankind's most serious and dangerous threat was the elements. Now, the most serious threat to mankind is man himself. In lower animals, violence is not new, but its characteristics seem not to have changed appreciably over the generations. It now appears that there are serious defects in our humanization, socialization, and culturalization processes.