The Cambridge Handbook Of Social Problems [2, 1 ed.] 1108426174, 9781108426176, 1108426166, 9781108426169, 1107121558, 9781107121553, 9781108550710

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Title
Copyright
Contents
About the Contributors
Introduction
Part I | Problems Related To Health, Safety, And Security
1 | Illness And Health Care
2 | Mental Illness And Social Problems
3 | Substance Abuse
4 | Epidemics, Pandemics, And Outbreaks
5 | Disaster As Social Problem And Social Construct
6 | Surveillance
7 | Domestic Spying: A Historical-Comparative Perspective
8 |Computer Hacking As A Social Problem
9 | War And Militarism
10 | The Social Problem Of Terrorism
11 | Genocide
Part II | Problems Related To Crime And Violence
12 | The Problem Of Crime
13 | Corporate Malfeasance As A Social Problem
14 | The Construction Of School Bullying As A Social Problem
15 | Rampage School Shootings
16 | Understanding Sexual Violence: The Role Of Causal And Precipitating Factors In Sexual Offending
17 | Critical And Intersectional Understandings Of Campus Sexual Assault As A Social Problem
18 | Child Abuse And Neglect
19 | Family Violence
20 | Juvenile Violence
21 | Gangs And Gang Violence
22 | State Violence
23 | Hate Crime
24 | Police Brutality
25 | Capital Punishment/Death Penalty
26 | Wrongful Convictions: Comparative Perspectives
Part III | Problems Of Global Impact
27 | Urbanism And Urbanization
28 | Technology And Social Problems
29 | Population And Contemporary Social Problems
30 | Environmental Problems
Index

Citation preview

The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems The introduction of the Affordable Care Act in the United States, the increasing use of prescription drugs, and the alleged abuse of racial profiling by police are just some of the factors contributing to twenty-first-century social problems. The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems offers a wide-ranging roster of the social problems currently pressing for attention and amelioration. Unlike other works in this area, it also gives great consideration to theoretical and methodological discussions. The Handbook will benefit both undergraduate and graduate students eager to understand the sociology of social problems. It is suitable for classes in social problems, current events, and social theory. Featuring the most current research, the Handbook is an especially useful resource for sociologists and graduate students conducting research.

A. Javier Treviño, Professor of Sociology at Wheaton College, is the author and editor of several books, including The Social Thought of C. Wright Mills (2012), Investigating Social Problems, second edition (2018), The Development of Sociological Theory: Readings from the Enlightenment to the Present (2017), and C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution: An Exercise in the Art of Sociological Imagination (2017). He has served as president of the Justice Studies Association (2000–2002) and as president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (2010–2011). He was a visiting research Fellow at the University of Sussex, UK (2006), was a Fulbright scholar to the Republic of Moldova (2009), and, since 2014, has been a visiting professor in Social and Political Theory at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems

 Volume 2 Edited by

A. Javier Treviño Wheaton College, Massachusetts

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi - 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108426176 doi: 10.1017/9781108550710  C Cambridge University Press 2018

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Treviño, A. Javier, 1958– editor. Title: The Cambridge handbook of social problems / edited by A. Javier Treviño, Wheaton College, Massachusetts. Description: New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017042226 | isbn 9781107121553 (2 vol. set : hardback : alk. paper) | isbn 9781108426169 (vol. 1 : hardback : alk. paper) | isbn 9781108426176 (vol. 2 : hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Social problems. Classification: lcc hn18.3.c36 2018 | ddc 306.4/61 – dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042226 isbn 2 Volume Set 978-1-107-12155-3 Hardback isbn Volume 1 978-1-108-42616-9 Hardback isbn Volume 2 978-1-108-42617-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

About the Contributors

page vii

6. Surveillance

xi

S. E. Costanza

Introduction

7. Domestic Spying: A Historical-Comparative Perspective

pa r t i PROBLEMS RELATED TO HEALTH, SAFETY, AND SECURITY 1. Illness and Health Care

3

23

43

Kathleen Tierney

9. War and Militarism

143

10. The Social Problem of Terrorism

155

Pat Lauderdale and Annamarie Oliverio

11. Genocide 59

Martin French, Eric Mykhalovskiy, and Carmen Lamothe

5. Disaster as Social Problem and Social Construct

127

Daniel Burland

Clayton Mosher and Scott Akins

4. Epidemics, Pandemics, and Outbreaks

8. Computer Hacking as a Social Problem Brian Alleyne

Joan Busfield

3. Substance Abuse

109

Mathieu Deflem, Derek M. D. Silva, and Anna S. Rogers

Erin Ruel and Amanda Powell

2. Mental Illness and Social Problems

95

79

173

Christopher Powell

pa r t i i PROBLEMS RELATED TO CRIME AND VIOLENCE 12. The Problem of Crime

199

Walter S. DeKeseredy v

vi

contents

13. Corporate Malfeasance as a Social Problem

215

22. State Violence

Melissa Rorie

14. The Construction of School Bullying as a Social Problem

23. Hate Crime 237

269

287

309

Erika Gebo

449

27. Urbanism and Urbanization

475

28. Technology and Social Problems

489

Govert Valkenburg and Harro van Lente

327

29. Population and Contemporary Social Problems

503

Fred M. Shelley

345 30. Environmental Problems

Kathleen M. Heide

21. Gangs and Gang Violence

26. Wrongful Convictions: Comparative Perspectives

Ranita Ray and Michael Ian Borer

Claire M. Renzetti and Allison M. Adair

20. Juvenile Violence

433

pa r t i i i PROBLEMS OF GLOBAL IMPACT

Mark A. Winton

19. Family Violence

25. Capital Punishment/Death Penalty

Marvin Zalman

Ashley C. Rondini

18. Child Abuse and Neglect

411

Michael L. Radelet and Scott Phillips

Heng Choon (Oliver) Chan

17. Critical and Intersectional Understandings of Campus Sexual Assault as a Social Problem

24. Police Brutality Malcolm D. Holmes

253

Jack Levin and Eric Madfis

16. Understanding Sexual Violence: The Role of Causal and Precipitating Factors in Sexual Offending

399

Paul Iganski and Abe Sweiry

Jeffrey W. Cohen and Robert A. Brooks

15. Rampage School Shootings

381

M. Gabriela Torres

519

Kayla Stover

363 Index

541

About the Contributors

Allison M. Adair, MA, is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests are in the areas of gender and crime and violence against women. Scott Akins is Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University. His research interests include drug use, drug policy, and structural criminology. Brian Alleyne is a sociologist interested in social movements, information technology, and ethnographic and narrative research methods. His ongoing work is on hacker cultures and political narratives. Michael Ian Borer is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the editor of The Varieties of Urban Experience: The American City and the Practice of Culture (2006), author of Faithful to Fenway: Believing in Boston, Baseball, and America’s Most Beloved Ballpark (2008), and coauthor of Urban People and Places: The Sociology of Cities, Suburbs, and Towns (2014) and Sociology in Everyday Life (2016). Robert A. Brooks is Professor in the Criminal Justice Department at Worcester State University. He holds graduate degrees in law, psychology, and sociology.

Daniel Burland is Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth, Kansas. He holds doctoral degrees in sociology (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and in comparative literature (University of Chicago) and has served on active duty in the US Army. His research focuses on the new and evolving social, legal, and identity issues confronting today’s military service members and veterans. Joan Busfield, who initially trained as a clinical psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic, London, is now a professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. She is the author of various books, including Managing Madness ([1986] 2015), Men, Women, and Madness (1996), and Mental Illness (2011), and is now researching the pharmaceutical industry. Heng Choon (Oliver) Chan, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Criminology at the Department of Applied Social Sciences in City University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on sexual homicide, offender profiling, sex offending, homicide, stalking behavior, and criminological issues related to the Asian population. Jeffrey W. Cohen is currently serving time as an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice vii

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about the contributors

at the University of Washington, Tacoma. His scholarship focuses on the intersections of gender, masculinities, and crime; the criminalization of school bullying; and the development of transdisciplinary, multiperspective research methodologies. S. E. Costanza is Geospatial Data Analyst at the Center for Public Policy, located in the University of South Alabama’s Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice. He has published articles in Homicide Studies, Police Quarterly, Criminal Justice Review, and Security Journal. Mathieu Deflem is Professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina. His research and teaching interests include sociology of law, police and social control, popular culture, and sociological theory. Walter S. DeKeseredy is Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences, Director of the Research Center on Violence, and Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. He has received awards for his scholarly contributions from sections of the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Martin French is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. Martin’s research examines the social dimensions of technology with an empirical focus on communications and information technology in public health. Erika Gebo is Associate Professor of Sociology at Suffolk University. Her primary publication and teaching areas are youth justice and communitybased prevention of violence and crime. Kathleen M. Heide is Professor in the Criminology Department at the University of South Florida. She is widely recognized as one of the leading experts in the world on juvenile homicide and parricide (kids who kill parents). Malcolm D. Holmes is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wyoming. His research primarily analyzes the relationship of race to criminal justice outcomes, particularly how the racial and spatial composition of cities affects the police use of violence. Paul Iganski is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice in the Lancaster University Law School, UK. For almost two decades, he has been

researching, writing, teaching, and undertaking public engagement about the problems of hate crime and hate speech. Carmen Lamothe is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. Carmen’s research is at the intersection of critical public health and surveillance with a focus on mobile technology. Pat Lauderdale is Professor of Justice and former director of the university-wide PhD/JD program in Justice Studies, Law, and the Social Sciences at ASU. He is author or coauthor of numerous books, including Lives in the Balance (1997), Terrorism: A New Testament (2005), Theory and Methodology of World Development (2010), The Struggle for Control: A Study of Law, Disputes, and Deviance (1993), Law and Society (Japanese translated version [Miyazawa], 1994), Invitation to Globalogy (new ed., 2016), and A Political Analysis of Deviance (3rd ed., 2011). Jack Levin, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Criminology and codirector of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University. He has published a number of books about multiple homicide, including Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder (2018), The Will to Kill: Making Sense of Senseless Murder (2011), Serial Killers and Sadistic Murderers: Up Close and Personal (2008), Killer on Campus (1996), and Mass Murder: America’s Growing Menace (1991). Eric Madfis, PhD, is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Washington, Tacoma, where his research focuses on theoretical criminology, the causes and prevention of school violence, and the criminalization of American public schools. He recently completed his book titled, The Risk of School Rampage (2014), which explores how threats of multiplevictim rampage school attacks are assessed and prevented. Clayton Mosher is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Washington State University Vancouver, Canada. His current research interests include drug policies and juvenile justice. Eric Mykhalovskiy is Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Eric’s work focuses on the social organization of the biomedical and broader

about the contributors

ix

institutional and discursive response to the HIV epidemic in Canada.

and coeditor of the Interpersonal Violence book series.

Annamarie Oliverio is Lecturer at Arizona State University and the founder and Director of the Social Research Institute (of Arizona). She has been studying and publishing in the area of terrorism and the state since the 1990s.

Anna S. Rogers is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of South Carolina. Her research and teaching interests include popular culture, deviance and social control, and gender and society.

Scott Phillips is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Denver. His research and teaching focus on capital punishment, wrongful conviction, and conflict management.

Ashley C. Rondini is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Franklin and Marshall College. Her work integrates qualitative analyses of social justice and social policy issues with critical, intersectional inquiry along lines of race, gender, socioeconomic class, and other dimensions of social identity.

Amanda Powell is a doctoral candidate of Sociology at Georgia State University. Ms. Powell’s research focuses on food availability and accessibility, health disparities, racial inequities, and how the built environment influences these factors. Christopher Powell, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, whose research foci have included genocide, the sociology of knowledge, relational sociology, and systems theory. His work on genocide includes the book Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide (2011) as well as contributions to the Journal of Genocide Studies and Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal. His chapters also appear in the recent edited volumes Understanding Atrocities (2017), The Idea of a Human Rights Museum (2015), and Colonial Genocide and Indigenous North America (2014). Michael L. Radelet is Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado–Boulder. For the past thirty-five years he has worked with death row inmates and family members of homicide victims and published research on a wide array of death penalty issues. Ranita Ray is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is author of The Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City (2017). She has published articles on urban issues in Social Problems and Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Claire M. Renzetti, PhD, is the Judi Conway Patton Endowed Chair for Studies of Violence against Women at the Center for Research on Violence against Women and a professor and chair of Sociology at the University of Kentucky. She is also editor of the international interdisciplinary journal Violence Against Women, editor of the Gender and Justice book series,

Melissa Rorie is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her primary research interests involve formal and informal factors driving corporate compliance and overcompliance, especially the impact of regulatory agencies. Erin Ruel is Professor of Sociology at Georgia State University. Dr. Ruel’s research focuses on health disparities; affordable and low-income housing; and how aspects of place, such as racial residential segregation, neighborhood effects, and the built environment affect health. Fred M. Shelley is Professor of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests include political, economic, and cultural geography; world systems; and the geography of the United States. Derek M. D. Silva is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of South Carolina with interests in terrorism, social control, and the sociology of sports. He is writing a dissertation on counterterrorism and radicalization, an article on which topic he published in Sociological Forum. Kayla Stover is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Tennessee. Her research focuses on environmental policy, politics, and justice. Abe Sweiry, PhD, is Senior Research Associate in Law in the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University. He conducts research on hate crime, hate speech, and contemporary anti-Semitism. Kathleen Tierney is Research Professor with the Institute of Behavioral Science and the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado– Boulder, having recently stepped down from the

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about the contributors

directorship of the Natural Hazards Center. Her research interests include disaster theory and the political economy of hazards and disasters. M. Gabriela Torres, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, is a Guatemalan-born anthropologist specializing in the study of violence and state formation. Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage and Social Change in Global Context (2016) is her most recent coedited volume. Govert Valkenburg is a researcher at the Science, Technology, and Society Studies program of Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He holds degrees in philosophy, engineering, and music and has studied the social and political aspects of topics as diverse as energy, privacy and security, genomics, and responsible innovation in a development context. Harro van Lente is Full Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Head of Department at

Maastricht University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He graduated in physics and philosophy and has published widely on technological change, innovation policy, technology assessment, and the politics of knowledge production. Mark A. Winton is Associate Lecturer with the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida. He is also a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in the state of Florida, a National Certified Counselor, and a Clinically Certified Forensic Counselor. Marvin Zalman, JD, PhD, Professor of Criminal Justice at Wayne State University, has conducted research and written on constitutional criminal procedure, sentencing, and a variety of criminal justice policy issues. His main research focus since 2005 has focused on the incidence of wrongful convictions, the innocence movement, the policy process of innocence reform, and wrongful conviction in China.

Introduction

Social problems – those conditions, events, or behaviors that occur locally, nationally, or globally and cause or threaten to cause harm to all or some segment of the population – tend to be regarded as enduring and entrenched. Two thousand years ago, Jesus told his followers that the poor will always be among them, indicating to some readers of the New Testament that poverty would a persistent phenomenon (Mark 14:7). In The Rules of Sociological Method, first published in 1895, Emile Durkheim noted that crime was not only universal but also unavoidable (Durkheim 1938, 67–72). In 1932, Sigmund Freud, in partial response to Albert Einstein’s query about the inevitability of war, maintained that humans are instinctually inclined toward aggression and destruction (Einstein 1968, 198). At first blush, these exemplifications seem to suggest that some of the towering minds in history have regarded social problems – poverty, crime, war – as intractable. And yet, these three personages were neither pessimistic nor complacent about such adverse circumstances. Indeed, in the very next phrase, Jesus invited his disciples to help the poor.

Durkheim, a few pages later, noted that the behaviors of criminals can have transformative benefits for society. And Freud, for his part, proposed the establishment of an international judicial court with unquestioned centralized authority to resolve conflicts before they escalate into armed violence. This is all well and good, but the fact is that poverty, crime, and war, to say nothing of racism, sexism, unemployment, drug abuse, and numerous other social problems, continue to be pervasive in many societies – a circumstance that seems to naturally, and perhaps exasperatedly, evoke Tolstoy’s imperative inquiry, “What then must we do?” Clearly, action must be taken to address and rectify social catastrophe, injustice and oppression demand reform, and societal ills cry out for alleviation. But it is also important that sociologists and students of sociology understand social problems: their histories and trajectories, their causes and consequences, their incidence and prevalence. The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems provides analyses of a large variety xi

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introduction

of social problems. The sixty chapters that compose this two-volume work were prepared by distinguished (and soon-tobecome-distinguished) scholars – primarily from the United States, but also from several other countries – all of them experts in the topics on which they have written. This is a handbook, implying that it is to be used as a basic reference – in this case, as a reference to the broad, amorphous, and unwieldy field commonly known as the sociology of social problems. But it is also intended as a compendium that provides an inventory of today’s most pressing troublesome issues. Of course, not every such issue could be included, and the reader will be certain to note the absence of this or that social problem. But every effort has been made to make every chapter included in the collection to be as comprehensive and current as possible. The first volume of the handbook is organized into four parts. Part I consists of chapters having to do with “General Concerns and Orientations in the Study of Social Problems.” Part II focuses on “Historical and Theoretical Issues in the Study of Social Problems,” and Part III considers specific social problems, namely, those having to

do with “Problems of Discrimination and Inequality,” including sexualities and homophobia, housing market discrimination, and hunger and food insecurity. Part IV looks at social “Problems of Institutions,” including media, family, education, and work. The second volume consists of three parts. The chapters here continue an analysis of specific social problems, in this case in relation to “Problems Related to Health, Safety, and Security,” the subject of Part I, and “Problems Related to Crime and Violence,” the subject of Part II. The volume ends with the chapters in Part III that discuss “Problems of Global Impact.” The object of The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems is to inform, guide, and inspire academics and activists, practitioners, and students in better understanding their social world – in all its troublesome variety.

References Durkheim, Emile. 1938. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press. Einstein, Albert. 1968. Einstein on Peace. Edited by O. Nathan and H. Norden. New York: Schocken Books.

Pa r t I

PROBLEMS RELATED TO HEALTH, SAFETY, AND SECURITY



CHAPTER 1

Illness and Health Care Erin Ruel and Amanda Powell

Abstract This chapter introduces several health-related social problems. The first is that there are health disparities by socioeconomic status and racial group. These disparities are long standing and persistent, despite overall improvements in health. Three models are used to explain health disparities: health behaviors, health care, and the physical and social environment. Next, we discuss the dauntingly complicated US health care system. We focus on two problematic aspects: the high costs of health care and lack of access to health care. We examine this both before and after the 2010 enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and find it will not significantly improve costs in the short run. It may not reduce health disparities given that the Medicaid expansion piece is voluntary. We conclude that there is much work to be done to create a fair and equitable health care system.

Introduction Over the last century, there have been striking improvements in population health (Phelan and Link 2005). For example, in the United States, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the annual death rate was 28 persons per 1,000 population compared with 7.6 persons per 1,000 at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Miniño et al. 2009). Infectious diseases that once ravaged the United States and other developed countries, such as small pox, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diphtheria, have become nearly extinct (Armstrong et al. 1999). Life

expectancy has also increased dramatically. In 1900, the average life expectancy was about forty-seven years, whereas during the 2010s, it nearly doubled to eighty-two years. However, life expectancy and health have not increased equally for all (House et al. 1990). This is a major health social problem. Health disparities exist by both race and social class, with minorities and lowerclass individuals experiencing worse health. These health inequalities, despite efforts to eliminate them, appear to be persistent over time (House 2001). Much of the etiological research on chronic health conditions has focused on

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risky health behaviors, such as unhealthy eating, lack of exercise, and consumption of alcohol and drugs (Phelan et al. 2004). While these are important factors to consider when explaining health, they do little to explain health disparities (Dressler et al. 2005; Link and Phelan 1995). Since the 1990s, scholars have begun to examine the distal and macro-level influences on health as well as social and economic factors – such as neighborhood disadvantage, social cohesion, discrimination, and residential segregation – that are likely to predict health disparities (Link and Phelan 1995, 2005; Link et al. 1998; Robert and Ruel 2006; Ruel et al. 2010). The structuring of the health care system in the United States is a serious social problem in its own right, but it is also considered a causal factor in explaining health disparities. Health care costs have been rising dramatically since the 1960s and are a major concern for all developed countries regardless of how health care is distributed. In addition to rising and exorbitant costs, the United States, unlike other developed countries, such as Canada or the United Kingdom, does not provide universal access to health care. Almost 50 million Americans were without health insurance in 2010 prior to the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), colloquially known as “Obamacare” (Lorenzoni et al. 2014). Racial minorities and lower-class individuals were overrepresented among the uninsured, contributing to disparities in health care (Frist 2005). The ACA had as one of its objectives increased accessibility to health care. This chapter examines two major healthrelated social problems: health disparities and the functioning of the US health care system before and after ACA. First, we examine socioeconomic and racial differences in health and focus on diabetes as an example of a serious chronic condition. We present the theories and evidence that explain these disparities, highlighting risky health behaviors, environmental and social conditions, and health care. Next, we exam-

ine the health care system and its vast complexity both before and after implementation of the ACA. Finally, we highlight some of the more serious problems the health care system is still facing.

Socioeconomic Disparities in Health In advanced societies, chronic illnesses, such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, have surpassed infectious disease as the main causes of poor health and mortality. In the past, the poor were more likely than the affluent to contract and die from infectious diseases (Armstrong et al. 1999). Many factors linked to infectious disease have been addressed, such as poor sanitation, poorly ventilated housing, crowding, and dangerous work conditions (Link and Phelan 1996). Yet, despite the reduction of infectious diseases and increased life-span, the negative association between low socioeconomic status (SES) and poor health has persisted (House 2002; Link and Phelan 1996, 2002). With the rise of chronic disease as the primary cause of illness and mortality, the socioeconomic differences that used to be found among people with infectious disease are now associated with chronic health conditions (Link and Phelan 1996). Today, serious socioeconomic and racial disparities exist in the prevalence of chronic disease that were essentially nonexistent in the early 1900s (Frohlich et al. 2006; Link and Phelan 1996; Williams and Mohammed 2009; Willson 2009). Essentially, the rich live longer; the poor die younger. In addition, when compared to the rich, the poor experience greater morbidity and are five times more likely to report being in fair or poor health (Frohlich et al. 2006; Marchand et al. 1998). Research has found differences in diabetes prevalence by social class (Karter et al. 2002; Link and McKinlay 2009). For example, Link and McKinlay found that lower-class people were three times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes compared to people that were more

illness and health care

affluent. As Williams and Jackson (2005, 327) state, “Americans with low SES have levels of illness in their thirties and forties that are not seen in groups with higher SES until three decades of age later.” Thus, it is not surprising that low socioeconomic status is related to mortality for each of the fourteen major causes of death, including heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer, and diabetes (Adler et al. 1994; Frohlich et al. 2006; Phelan et al. 2010). SES is typically measured by education, income, and occupation at the individual level. All three measures have been linked to a wide range of health problems, such as low birth weight, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, arthritis, diabetes, cancer, and death (Adler and Newman 2002; Mare 1990; Pamuk et al. 1998). However, education, income, and occupation influence health differently (Lantz et al. 2010). One study, for example, found that education, but not income or occupation, was associated with risk factors for cardiovascular disease (Winkleby et al. 1999). The 1984 Whitehall study in England used occupation to measure SES. This study demonstrated a gradient association, meaning an incredibly linear pattern, between health and SES. Each step up on the occupational ladder was associated with decreased morbidity and mortality (Marmot et al. 1984). All subjects in the study were white-collar workers and had access to the National Health Service, and yet, as occupational prestige increased, so did health. Thus, access to health care is not the only explanation for SES disparities in health. This pattern has also been found in US studies focusing on infant mortality, prevalence of osteoarthritis, hypertension, cervical cancer, and many other chronic conditions (Adler and Ostrove 1999). Furthermore, there is evidence that SES is associated with risky health behaviors. For example, research has shown that people in the lower socioeconomic strata have higher measures of smoking, overweight and obesity, sedentariness, stress, social isolation, malnutrition, and lack of preventive

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health care (House et al. 1990; Phelan et al. 2010).

Racial Disparities in Health There are also racial differences in the morbidity and mortality rates of many diseases. In this chapter, we focus primarily on white-black health disparities, which are greater than between other groups (Dressler et al. 2005, 3); we do not, however, discount the importance of health disparities for other racial and ethnic groups. Like the SES health gap, racial differences in disease and mortality also persist (House 2001; Mulye et al. 2009). African Americans are more likely to report being in fair or poor health than whites and have higher rates of overall mortality, infant mortality, tuberculosis, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and a number of other diseases (Li et al. 2013; Lovasi et al. 2009; Pan et al. 2004; Williams and Collins 2001). African Americans have the largest annual death rate at 10 persons per 1,000 population compared to whites at 7.6 persons per 1,000 population (Miniño et al. 2007; Frist 2005; Hummer et al. 1999). Keppel et al. (2002) found that, between 1990 and 1998, African Americans were 2.5 to 10 times more likely to die from heart disease, lung cancer, breast cancer, stroke, and homicide – exceeding all other populations. It is estimated that racial health disparities lead to more than 100,000 premature deaths for African Americans than would otherwise be the case (Levine et al. 2001). Type II diabetes is quickly becoming one of the most concerning chronic conditions of the twenty-first century. African Americans are 50 to 100 percent more likely to acquire diabetes than whites (Signorello et al. 2007; Schulz et al. 2002; Zenk et al. 2005a). Of all racial populations, whites tend to have the lowest levels of diabetes, while American Indians have the highest levels, followed closely by African Americans (CDC 2014; LaVeist et al. 2009). While blood pressure control, glucose control, and

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cholesterol levels have improved since 1999 for persons with diabetes, racial and socioeconomic disparities have not narrowed significantly (McWilliams et al. 2009). The fact that improvements are differentially affecting the poor and people of color suggests that health disparities will not be declining any time soon. One reason for this is that race in the United States is strongly intertwined with social class (Williams and Sternthal 2010). However, the measures of SES are not equivalent across race. Studies that have controlled for SES measures, such as education, have shown that African Americans are still more likely to be unemployed, have more hazardous work conditions, have less wealth, and have less purchasing power (Williams and Mohammed 2009). Indeed, within every level of SES, African Americans have worse health compared to whites (Shuey and Willson 2008). Thus, while SES is important for understanding racial health disparities, it is not their cause. In what follows, we discuss three explanations for SES and racial health disparities.

Predictors of Health Disparities Three broad theoretical models explain health disparities: (1) behavior and lifestyle, (2) health care, and (3) environmental and social exposures. Research on premature mortality reveals that socioeconomic status underlies all three of these models. Lee and Paxman (1997) found that behavior and lifestyle explain about 50 percent of the SES health disparity, the physical and social environment account for about 20 percent, and health care explains about 10 percent. This section discusses the evidence supporting each model. Individual Health Behaviors This model suggests that people who engage in poor health behaviors, such as smoking, excessive drinking, high caloric intake, and low physical activity, will have more illness and disease compared to those who engage in health-promoting activities

(Dressler 1993). This model argues that poor people and people of color have worse health and higher mortality because they are more likely to engage in risky health behaviors (Adler and Newman 2002; Dressler et al. 2005; Phelan et al. 2004; Lantz et al. 2010). There is evidence that SES is associated with certain risk and protective factors. For example, studies show that people in lower SES strata have higher rates of smoking, overweight and obesity, poor nutrition, sedentariness, stress, social isolation, and malnutrition (Pan et al. 2004; House et al. 1990; Phelan et al. 2010). Given the current emphasis on health prevention behavior, it is clear that the media and health insurance companies have accepted this model, which seems to explain some of the social class health disparities. Though there is also evidence that the effect of behaviors and lifestyle on health is overstated, these are nonetheless important in explaining SES health disparities. Longitudinal studies show that behaviors and lifestyle do not eradicate all SESbased health disparities (Arendt and Lauridse 2008; Feinglass et al. 2008; Lantz et al. 1998, 2010). Lantz et al. (2010) found that risky health behaviors reduce but do not eliminate the SES mortality gap. Dressler et al. (2005) argues that there is little evidence that risky health behaviors explain racial health disparities. For example, though obesity (Sowers et al. 2002) and high alcohol consumption are associated with high blood pressure (Estruch et al. 2004), African Americans have significantly higher blood pressure compared to whites, even after controlling for alcohol consumption (Schoenborn et al. 2004) and obesity (Bell et al. 2004). Dressler et al. (2005) finds that African American women, who tend to be heavier, are more likely to have lowbirth-weight babies despite the fact that heavier women tend to have heavier babies (Institute of Medicine 1990). These findings are inconsistent with the behaviors and lifestyle theory. There are other contradictory findings. For example, Hallfors et al. (2007) found

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that while white adolescents were more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors compared to African Americans, African Americans were at greater risk of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. There is also evidence that among Latinos, higher-SES groups are more likely to engage in risky behaviors than are lowerSES groups (Rosero-Bixby and Dow 2009). Thus, while risky health behaviors explain some of the social class health disparities, they by no means account for many of the racial health disparities. Health Care Access to health care explains part of SES and racial health disparities. In the United States, health care access is often dependent on having health insurance, which is related to education. Those without a high school diploma are almost four times more likely to be uninsured than college graduates (Monheit and Vistnes 2000). The majority of the uninsured are from low-income households (Hafner-Eaton 1993; Monheit and Vistnes 2000; Shi et al. 1999). There are federal insurance protection plans for the poor, but enrollment is problematic (Gross et al. 1999; Selden et al. 1999). Health plans accessible to lower-class people perform more poorly than the plans of higher-SES individuals (Karter et al. 2002; McWilliams et al. 2009). Those without insurance receive less medical care, and the care they do receive is often of inferior quality (Hafner-Eaton 1993). Therefore, inadequate treatment and poorly performing insurance plans lead to SES and racial health disparities. These disparities are also seen in the delivery and quality of health care. In 2002, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) examined more than 100 studies that assessed the quality of health care for different minority groups, while holding constant the variables of income, insurance status, and other access-related factors (Institute of Medicine 2002). They found that the majority of studies indicated that racial and ethnic minorities were less likely than whites to receive necessary services. One of the major find-

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ings was that doctors were less likely to recommend necessary medical procedures to African American women; that they evaluated minority patients more negatively; and that they tended to rate African American patients as less intelligent, less educated, and more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol (Baicker et al. 2004; Institute of Medicine 2002). As the IOM report states, “although myriad sources contribute to these disparities, some evidence suggests that bias, prejudice, and stereotyping on the part of healthcare providers may contribute to differences in care” (1). We use diabetes care to demonstrate how the health care model contributes to health disparities. Research finds racial disparities in the delivery of diabetes care (Baicker et al. 2005; Duru et al. 2009; Harris 2001; Institute of Medicine 2002; Schneider et al. 2002; Sequist et al. 2008). Results reveal that racial and ethnic minorities receive lower-quality treatment for diabetes than do whites, even when they are insured to the same degree and when other health care access–related factors, such as the ability to pay, are the same (Institute of Medicine 2002). African American patients with diabetes are less likely than white patients to receive the recommended processes of care, while also experiencing less ideal outcomes than white patients who have the same physicians (Sequist et al. 2008). Baicker et al. (2005) find that, as the African American population in a treatment area increases, the quality of care received deteriorates for both white and African American patients. These findings are consistent with discrimination and bias occurring with health care delivery. But this last finding also suggests that the physical and social environment may explain some of the relationship between health care and health disparities. Physical and Social Environment The United States is highly segregated in terms of race and social class. Residential segregation refers to the separation of poor and/or racial minorities in neighborhoods (Li, Campbell, and Fernandez 2013; Massey

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and Denton 1993; Williams and Collins 2001, 405). A high level of segregation is problematic because it isolates African Americans, Latinos, and the poor, thereby denying opportunities, amenities, and resources that determine their social and economic wellbeing (Massey and Denton 1989, 1993). For example, racial segregation in the housing market affects African American employment, reduces job opportunities, and creates geographic separation and economic differences (Kain 1968; Massey and Denton 1993). In terms of the physical environment, racial and economic segregation leads to differing exposures to pollution. Minorities and low-income people are more likely to live in neighborhoods located near highways, industrial areas, and waste and dump sites. They also are more likely to be exposed to pollutants such as lead, asbestos, carbon dioxide, and industrial wastes (Pamuk et al. 1998). Research estimates that lower-class families show much higher blood lead levels compared to middle-class families who show higher blood lead levels than upper-class families (Pamuk et al. 1998). Finally, the incidence of childhood asthma is highest in poor and minority neighborhoods (Cookson and Moffatt 1999; Weitzman et al. 1992). Another consequence of residential segregation is having access to different built environments, which is to say how the design of neighborhoods creates access or barriers to amenities like stores, parks, restaurants, pharmacies, and health facilities (Cohen, Inagami, and Finch 2008; Sallis and Glanz 2006). Because residential segregation isolates populations, it determines how the different built environments are experienced by different populations. There are more liquor stores (Cohen et al. 2008; Moore and Diez-Roux 2006), convenience stores, and fast-food restaurants but fewer supermarkets in low SES and minority segregated neighborhoods (Moore and DiezRoux 2006; Morland et al. 2002; Powell, Chaloupka, and Bao 2007). Of all types of food stores, supermarkets offer the greatest variety of high-quality products at lower cost (Larson et al. 2009). Even among stores of the same type, those in lower-income

areas have less availability, more limited selection, and higher prices of foods (Zenk et al. 2005b). There are also social class and racial differences in health care access as a result of segregation (Frist 2005). In disadvantaged areas, health care facilities, such as hospitals and health clinics, when they exist at all, are more likely to close, less likely to have adequate medication, and patients are less likely to receive appropriate medical care (Williams and Collins 2001). The built environment affects a population’s food intake (i.e., what they eat) and energy expenditure (i.e., how much they exercise). Weight gain and energy expenditure imbalances could be a function of access to healthy options, such as supermarkets and recreational facilities, along with limited access to liquor stores and fast-food restaurants (Dearry 2004; Frank et al. 2009). Research shows that accessibility to food outlets, parks, recreational facilities, pharmacies, and liquor stores, differs by SES and racial composition of neighborhoods, and have been linked to health (Cohen et al. 2008). The exposure to poor quality food and limited access to parks and playgrounds amplifies individual risk factors for diabetes and obesity (Cummins and Macintyre 2006). In fact, the most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods are the most likely to have the highest rates of obesity, which is a major risk factor for diabetes. These neighborhoods face a paradox of food insecurity and obesity, because residents of poor neighborhoods tend to have limited financial and geographic access to healthy food. This means that they tend to consume energy-dense inexpensive foods, such as processed and frozen foods high in carbohydrates and sodium (Cummins and Macintyre 2006). Communities isolated by residential segregation are also characterized by differing housing quality. Residents of minority and poor neighborhoods tend to live in more crowded conditions and have lower-quality housing (Evans and Saegert 2000; Pamuk et al. 1998). Thus, they are more likely to be exposed to noise pollution, which is in turn associated with learning outcomes,

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memory problems, and hypertension (Evans and Lepore 1992). Residents also experience a greater exposure to molds, pests, and lead poisoning leading to higher levels of asthma and allergies (Evans et al. 2000; Shaw 2004). Neighborhoods also have varying social conditions that could affect health differentially. In fact, Adler and Newman (2002) argue that the social environment is a more important determinant of health than the physical environment. The Institute of Medicine states that the social environment influences behavior by “shaping norms, enforcing patterns of social control, providing or not providing environmental opportunities to engage in particular behaviors, reducing or producing stress, and placing constraints on individual choice” (IOM 2003, 13). Communities differ in regard to the types and strength of social network ties and cohesion of residents. Communities with strong network ties and social cohesion have less violence and lower mortality rates (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997). Urban renewal, which has disproportionately affected African American neighborhoods, dismantled long-standing social structures, such as network ties, social cohesion, and civic participation. This led one psychiatrist to describe what happened to relocated individuals as “root shock,” a form of posttraumatic stress disorder (Fullilove 2005). Isolated people have two to five times greater mortality rates than those with better social networks. During the Chicago heat wave of 1995, Klinenberg (2002) found that people who were isolated in communities with weak social ties were at greater risk of dying compared to those in communities with strong social connections. Physical and social environmental factors are not only distal from health outcomes (making causal connections difficult), they can be measured at both the individual level and at the neighborhood or housing level. This makes for complicated modeling. The research above suggests that the physical and social environments are exogenous to health care access and risky health behaviors, that is, they are prior to and predict health care access and health behaviors. Therefore, addressing the com-

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plexity of the social and physical environment is extremely important for understanding health disparities by race and SES. Thus, these factors must be considered in designing interventions and reducing health disparities. We now turn to examining the US health care system before and after enactment of the Affordable Care Act.

The US Health Care System A country’s health care system is shaped by its values and norms. The US health care system is market-based, which is in keeping with the country’s capitalist and individualist values (Barton 1999; Roemer 1991). A market-based system allows the private sector to organize and provide health services. However, many other sectors are also involved. The US health care system consists of a complex array of providers, receivers, and payors (Moses et al. 2013) including (1) consumers who need and pay for health care; (2) providers, such as doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals, clinics, and hospitals that deliver health care for a fee; (3) employers who pay to insure workers; (4) insurance companies that pay providers for their insured consumers; (5) public health departments that provide population-based health services; (6) nonprofit agencies, such as the American Lung Association or the Diabetes Research Institute Foundation, that provide health services or assist with paying for services; and (7) the government, which acts as a provider, insurer, or payor (Barton 1999). The federal government is a major payor for health care through Medicare and Medicaid, through programs for low-income children, and through direct health care to personnel in armed forces or veterans (Barton 1999). The US health care system is plagued with high costs, strict eligibility criteria, and inequality in accessibility and treatment. Because the United States has voluntary rather than compulsory health insurance coverage, many Americans have no access to health care, particularly young adults

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and the elderly (Collins and Nicholson 2010; Landers 2010). Not surprisingly, in 2000 the World Health Organization ranked the US health care system as thirty-seventh in the world, based on criteria such as disabilityadjusted life expectancy, health equality, responsiveness level and distribution, financial contributions, and overall health system performance (World Health Report 2000). While the United States was ranked first in terms of health care spending in 2006, it was also ranked thirty-ninth for infant mortality, and thirty-sixth for life expectancy (Doe 2009; Murray and Frenk 2010). In 2011, the United States paid $7,212 per capita for health care – more than any other country by a wide margin (Lorenzoni, Belloni, and Sassi 2014). The high costs are due in part to the heavy reliance on expensive medical technology, which proved so effective against infectious diseases (such as diphtheria and polio) but is finding chronic illness (such as diabetes and heart disease) to be less responsive to treatment (Moses et al. 2013). This is problematic given that chronic illnesses are now the most common illnesses Americans face. Some of the major problems with the US health care system are the high costs associated with its bureaucracy and a lack of access via insurance. Other problems include the third-party payor system and a lack of independent oversight of medical service providers. Given the system’s complexity these will not be easy to solve. In fact, rather than attempting to overhaul the system, over time the United States has simply “patched” any newly arising health care problem by, for example, extending Medicaid to cover a new group or disease (Morreale and English 2003). This has increased the complexity of engaging with the health care system and created difficulties for people who need health care. Costs Total health care spending in the United States was about 8 percent of GDP in 1975, about 16 percent of GDP in 2006, and about 20 percent of GDP in 2016 (Orszag and

Ellis 2007). In dollars, the United States spent $2.7 trillion on health in 2011. This is unsustainable growth in the costs of health care. Compared to other developed countries, the US health care system differs in two important ways: first, medical expenses are twice as high, and second, the share of expenditures paid for by the government is much lower at 46 percent compared to 75 percent for the average Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) country (Fuchs 2013). Higher health care costs and lower government involvement appear to be due to the capitalistic and individualistic values Americans place on all institutions, including the medical institution. Growth in spending has been attributed to the development and diffusion of new medical technology and pharmaceuticals (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality 2005; Lorenzoni, Belloni, and Sassi 2014; Moses et al. 2013; Orszag and Ellis 2007; Pozarycki 2006). The growth in new drugs and medical devices is estimated to contribute 84 percent to the growth in costs (Moses et al. 2013). Some of these medicines and technologies, such as the increased use of electronic health records or more efficient blood testing experiences are new; others are simply replace existing treatments, but at a much higher cost. Whether they work substantially better than existing treatments is not known, nor is that a requirement for approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (Abramson 2004). Consumer demand for the new technology and drugs has also increased due to direct to consumer marketing and advertising (Abramson 2004). Doctors also encourage the use of new technologies, such as improved diabetes blood monitoring systems, for better patient outcomes. These might reduce costs if illness is caught and treated in its earliest stages (Pozarycki 2006). The costs of new technologies and medicines are higher in the United States than in other countries because there are fewer price controls once the product has FDA approval (Lorenzoni, Belloni, and Sassi 2014).

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Research has shown that market processes will not motivate insurance companies and health plans to oppose technological advancements (Pozarycki 2006). This is partly due to the influence of the medical technology industry, but also to how health care is paid for. In the United States the patient pays very little for health care directly; the insurance company covers most of the costs, so there is little incentive for patients to demand fewer services or less expensive alternatives. Insurance companies pass on the costs to the employers that foot the bill by paying the lion’s share of insurance premiums for their employees. The proportion of health care paid for by consumers has declined over the past forty years. For example, consumers paid 33 percent of health care costs in 1975. By 2005, that had declined to 15 percent, and by 2015 it had plummeted to 11 percent (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 2016; Orszag and Ellis 2007). Separating payment for services from the client receiving the service disrupts the usual market practice of seeking the best values. Costs are also high due to the voluntary nature of insurance coverage. Because the US government has no centralized control, unlike Canada and Switzerland, it does not negotiate health spending budgets or prices with providers (except in the case of Medicare) (Lorenzoni, Belloni, and Sassi 2014; White 2007). The government’s mandates and regulations contributed to rising health care costs, which more than doubled between 1980 and 2010 (Moses et al. 2013; Pozarycki 2006). Administrative costs are high because of our complicated health care system with multiple payors. Centralization might reduce some of the administrative costs. Access Access to health care is also a serious social problem in the United States given that health insurance is extremely expensive. Having health insurance does not equate to having good health; it merely provides access to health services. Most Amer-

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icans obtain health insurance through their employer, through a government plan such as Medicare or Medicaid, or they purchase their own plan. However, a large proportion do not have any health insurance. The number of uninsured Americans increased from 36.6 million in 2000 to almost 50 million in 2010 (Lorenzoni, Belloni, and Sassi 2014). This increase was mainly due to the economic recession that lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, but over 36 million is a large number of citizens to have uninsured when there is no recession. The uninsured rate was 15 percent in 2012, after the recession, which is estimated to be about fortyeight million people (Smith and Medalia 2015). Clearly, a lack of insurance is a major barrier to receiving health care. Poor people and people of color are more likely to be uninsured (Frist 2005). Employers bear the primary burden of the increases in the costs of health care. Employer-sponsored health insurance declined between 2000 and 2011 by 6.5 percent, meaning that 11.9 million fewer employees were covered (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith 2012). This decline, however, was countered by an increase in Medicaid recipients. Medicaid increased its coverage between 2000 and 2011 by 20 million individuals, which is about a 60 percent increase (Lorenzoni, Belloni, and Sassi 2014). The State Children’s Health Insurance Program was introduced in 1999 to provide insurance coverage for children living in poverty. It was renewed in 2009 and expanded its coverage (typical “patching” of the health care system). It was estimated to cover 93 percent of low-income children in 2011 (Lorenzoni, Belloni, and Sassi 2014). The cost of insuring Americans is slowly shifting from employers to tax payers. Bankruptcy is a common problem facing many families due to the high cost of health care and to a lesser extent a lack of access to it. In 2001, approximately four million families filed for bankruptcy (Himmelstein et al. 2005). This is a problem primarily of the middle class, a group that feels somewhat safer because they have health insurance and some assets. The poor are least likely

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to declare bankruptcy because they have no assets to protect and less access to legal resources. Himmelstein and colleagues found that medical problems contributed to at least 46.2 percent of all bankruptcies in five states in 2001. This means that almost two million American families entered bankruptcy for medical reasons in 2001. Of those bankrupted by medical expenses, 60 percent cited medical bills from providers as the main problem, 48 percent cited drug costs, and 35 percent had no income because of illness – either their own or a family member’s (Himmelstein et al. 2005). Himmelstein and his colleagues (2009) followed up that study with a nationally representative sample and found that, conservatively, 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were due to medical expenses. Of these, 92 percent had medical debts over $5,000 or 10 percent of pretax family income. The rest had lost significant income due to illness or had mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Threequarters of them had health insurance. The odds that bankruptcy was declared for medical reasons increased by 138 percent between 2001 and 2007 (Himmelstein et al. 2009). Access is about more than just having insurance, if Americans cannot afford health care while insured, the system is clearly broken.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act There have been many attempts at health care reform and all failed (Quadagno 2006) until the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed in 2010. The failures have been partly due to the powerful medical and insurance industries that receive huge profits from the health care system (Quadagno 2006). While ACA was signed into law, it too experienced much opposition and controversy and the opposition continued long after its passage. In fact, in January 2017, the Senate voted in a

budget that would essentially stop funding the ACA. This is a first step in the Republican-dominated Senate’s goal to repeal ACA. The ACA’s primary aims were to increase health insurance coverage and decrease the costs of health care. However, the ACA itself has been called a “patchwork approach to expanding health insurance,” similar to the US health care system itself (Sommers, Kenny, and Epstein 2014, 2). Thus, its overall effectiveness is limited by design, but the impact will be discussed below. The ACA changed how health care is funded as well as the medical costs for which the individual is responsible. In 2010, the ACA eliminated limits on the benefits an individual could use and required insurance plans to report the share of premiums that were spent on medical costs (Collins and Nicholson 2010). It also no longer allowed insurance carriers to enforce annual or lifetime limits on benefits. By 2014, all annual limits on insurance coverage were banned (Collins and Nicholson 2010). In 2015, employers began receiving penalties for not offering health insurance or offering low quality benefits to their employees (Collins and Nicholson 2010; Kaiser Family Foundation 2017). The ACA does not mandate coverage, but instead penalizes employers that do not provide adequate coverage to their employees. The ACA provides temporary subsidized insurance programs for people who have been unable to get insurance due to preexisting medical conditions (Landers 2010). These programs are offered at different levels of coverage based on mandated requirements intended to reduce the number of uninsured individuals. In addition, insurance offered through the marketplaces or exchanges must follow the same requirements as those provided by employers, namely that insurers cannot deny coverage to children with preexisting medical conditions (Landers 2010). Insurance programs offered through the government using state exchanges would resemble the typical employer plan, in that individuals seeking a doctor of their

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own choosing, would pay a small co-pay to receive treatment, and the remaining expenses would be covered through the state exchange programs (Buck 2011). With these funding changes both individuals and employers would be able to obtain insurance, increasing the number of people to be covered. Finally, there are several changes in Medicaid implemented through the ACA. All states were be able to extend eligibility under Medicaid (Sonfield 2010). The number of people who qualify for Medicaid was expanded, and the benefits that they receive are the same as those who qualify for health plans offered through the state insurance exchanges (Buck 2011). The income limit for Medicaid qualification rose to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, up from 56 percent of the poverty level for working adults in 2014 (Buck 2011; Collins and Nicholson 2010; Landers 2010; Sonfield 2010). Medical expenses that are incurred on Medicaid will be fully covered by the government until 2020, and will be covered at 90 percent thereafter (Buck 2011). The Medicaid expansion addresses some of the inequities of the prior system by providing those without coverage improved access and lower out-of-pocket costs. The inclusion of currently disqualified individuals into the Medicaid program provides access for the medically underserved. These services focus on high-risk families, such as those with low-income, young children, elderly, and who live in poor communities (Buck 2011; Sonfield 2010). Approximately 40 percent of those living below the poverty level are eligible for Medicaid coverage due to ACA. In addition, expanded coverage disproportionately serves racial and ethnic minorities. Thus, Medicaid expansion could reach a large number of people with previously unmet health care needs compared to expansion of private insurance (Sommers, Long, and Baicker 2014). Unfortunately, only thirty-two states implemented the Medicaid expansion leaving many poor without coverage (Kaiser Family Foundation 2017). There were several concerns raised with the implementation of ACA. One was that there were not enough medical providers

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to render care to all the newly insured. ACA provides no funds for enlarging the physician and nurse workforces (Lehman 2015). The physician shortage, estimated at 25,000, is predicted to worsen by an additional 5,000 due to increased demand (Howard and Feyman 2014). An overextended medical workforce could seriously affect the quality of care provided. Teaching new insurance recipients how to navigate the health care system was a challenge (Sommers, Kenny, and Epstein 2014). Medicaid recipients prior to ACA experienced constraints to access when attempting to see a specialist or a primary care doctor (McKinsey Center for US Health Care Reform 2013). Given that there is no requirement that providers accept Medicaid, a concern was raised that Medicaid recipients could struggle to find providers even with their current coverage (Lehman 2015). There was also concern that implementation of ACA could seriously increase the costs of care, which were already very high. There have been delays in starting some parts of ACA that were designed to offset the costs of increasing insurance coverage. For example, the employer mandate, which was delayed until 2016, was estimated to lose about $10 billion in tax revenue that would have been charged as penalties for employer noncompliance (CBO 2013). Out-of-pocket spending caps which were delayed until 2015 increased costs for individuals with expensive and chronic conditions (Pear 2013). Post-ACA Implementation There are some preliminary findings on ACA coverage. Three surveys have reported an increase in insurance coverage, with estimated increases ranging from 5 million to 9 million people (Carmen and Eibner 2014; Levy 2014; Long et al. 2014). In fact, the US Census Bureau (Smith and Medalia 2015) reported a 2.9 percent decline in the uninsured rate from 2008 to 2014. This means that in 2014 the number of uninsured persons, 33 million (Smith and Medalia 2015), was the lowest it had been in a long time. Still, it is estimated that it will take ten years

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to get all Americans insured (CBO 2014). Currently, those opposing ACA repeal suggest 20 million could lose their insurance coverage gained through ACA (KFF 2017). ACA is already showing a substantial increase in insurance coverage with over two million young adults (under age twenty-seven) continuing coverage on their parent’s insurance plans with thirty-two states using the ACA option to expand Medicaid coverage (KFF 2017; Lorenzoni, Belloni, and Sassi 2014). Between 2013 and 2014 there was a 5 percent increase in any type of coverage for those between nineteen and twenty-five years of age, but the largest increase in coverage at 5.5 percent was for those between twenty-six and thirtyfive years of age (Smith and Medalia 2015). ACA implementation also increased coverage for low-income households. Households earning less than $25,000 increased coverage by 4.3 percent, and households earning between $25,000 and $49,999 increased coverage by 5 percent (Smith and Medalia 2015). The majority of these increases came from private coverage rather than government coverage (Smith and Medalia 2015). Still, in 2014, individuals living below the poverty line had the highest uninsured rate (4.8 percent) (Smith and Medalia 2015). Smith and Medalia argue that this may be associated with the state of residence given that some states did not expand coverage. Between 2014 and 2015 health insurance coverage expanded for all racial groups, but coverage for African Americans increased by 4.1 percent, Latinos by 4.5 percent, and Asians by 4.5 percent (Smith and Medalia 2015). In 2014, 92 percent of whites held some form of coverage, compared to 88.2 percent African Americans, 80.1 percent of Latinos, and 90.7 percent of Asians (Smith and Medalia 2015). Government coverage increased for all racial groups except African Americans (Smith and Medalia 2015). The expansion in coverage is coming from all sources. There is some early evidence that suggests small increases in employer coverage post-ACA implementation (Decker et al. 2013). The US Census Bureau found a slight decline in employer

coverage between 2013 and 2014, however (Smith and Medalia 2015). It estimated employer coverage at 55.4 percent and government coverage at 36.5 percent. The largest increase in source of coverage was for direct individual purchase, which increased by 3.2 percent in 2014 (Smith and Medalia 2015). All government insurance plans increased, but most of it was due to the over 2 percent increase in Medicaid (Smith and Medalia 2015). There was an expectation that 10 to 20 million individuals would sign up for expanded Medicaid (Sommers, Swartz, and Epstein 2011). In legal challenges to the ACA, the US Supreme Court left this provision in the hands of states themselves, meaning that states did not have to implement Medicaid expansion. Many states originally refused the ACA expansion due to the added costs or for political reasons, but by 2017, nearly two-thirds of all states had accepted Medicaid expansion (KFF 2017; Lehman 2015). Between 2013 and 2015 all fifty states plus the District of Columbia showed a decline in the uninsured population (KFF 2017; Smith and Medalia 2015). Still, there were state differences in coverage in 2014. Massachusetts had the lowest uninsured rate of 3.3 percent, and Texas had the highest at 19.1 percent (Smith and Medalia 2015). So, while Medicaid expansion could have been the most impactful part of the bill, especially for minorities and the poor, it has not been fully implemented. Those states that expanded Medicaid saw improved coverage. In fact, research has found that enrollment in Medicaid was highest among people with health-related limitations suggesting that the ACA was reaching those in need (Sommers, Kenny, and Epstein 2014). There are only a few findings regarding health outcomes post-ACA. Given that the ACA was based on the Massachusetts health reform model of 2006 we can look at that state for outcomes to be expected. There is evidence from Massachusetts of better access to health care, improved health, and decreased mortality (Long et al. 2012;

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Sommers, Long, and Baicker 2014). A 2015 study examined improvements in coverage, access to care, and health and found improvements in all these areas (Sommers et al. 2015). Using a nationally representative sample and trend series analyses, researchers found a 3.4 percentage point decline in the number of persons reporting that their health was fair or poor, and there was a reduction in the number of days in which activities were limited by poor health (Sommers et al. 2015). One negative finding comes from research on medical bankruptcy. Himmelstein and colleagues (2011) found that in Massachusetts there were no improvements in medical bankruptcy since the state implemented its health reform program in 2006. They argue that this was due to people being under-insured. People continue to pay for the health insurance they can afford rather than the coverage they need (Himmelstein et al. 2011). More needs to be done to reduce health care costs, but there is evidence that the rapid rise in costs has slowed down since the ACA was passed. Health care costs, which more than doubled between 1980 and 2010 (Moses et al. 2013; Pozarycki 2006), have been increasing more modestly since 2010. Health expenditures grew by 9 percent in 2010, but grew by only 5.3 percent in 2014 and 5.5 percent in 2015. This is a much lower growth rate in expenditures than has been seen since 2000 (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 2016). As this is being written in 2017, the US Senate has begun the repeal process for ACA. There are many speculations about what will happen after repeal to the 20 million Americans who will lose their ACAprovided insurance. Lifetime caps and preexisting measures will deny many people health insurance. There is concern that insurance companies may pull out of the exchanges due to concerns that repeal will leave many without insurance. There is speculation that as many as three million jobs will be lost, in addition to the $1.5 trillion in lost productivity in the health sector (Mangan 2017). Despite these issues, no

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replacement plan has yet been offered by the Trump administration.

Conclusion This chapter focused on SES and racial health disparities and the delivery of health care in the United States. Health appears to be a privilege of majority groups. The rich and whites have better health and live longer than do the poor and people of color. These disparities are long standing and persistent despite efforts to reduce or eliminate them. We introduced three explanations for these health disparities: health behaviors, health care, and the physical and social environment. Health care plays a limited role in explaining both SES and racial health disparities. Health behaviors are more influential in explaining class but not racial disparities. However, health behaviors themselves are explained by the physical and social environments that people segregated by race and class experience. While these are distal causal predictors, they present opportunities to intervene and improve general health rather than focus on one disease at a time. The US health care system is itself a major social problem. This vast and complicated bureaucracy affects all Americans – even those who are healthy, primarily because it is they who finance health care (Moses et al. 2013). We focused on two aspects of the health care system: cost and access. Costs are high mainly because of advances in medical technology that are unregulated and expensive. Population health measures do not generally correspond to the amounts paid for health care. Population health care measures rank the United States at the bottom of developed countries while the country’s high costs rank it at the top. Access to health care is through insurance coverage, which is not universal. Almost 50 million Americans were without insurance in 2012. By 2015, that number had dropped to 28.9 million (KFF 2017).

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The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which was introduced in 2010 to reform the health care system, has been highly controversial and contested, and in 2017 is being repealed. It was slowly implemented throughout the country and its early impact is just now becoming known. There are increases in coverage, accessibility of health care, improvements in health, and a slowdown in the growth of health care costs. There is no evidence of improvement in terms of individual bankruptcy, however. Furthermore, several cost-saving aspects of the ACA had as of 2016 not yet been implemented, and it could have taken up to ten years to get to full insurance coverage. What happens now that repeal has begun is not known. The Medicaid expansion piece of the ACA is not universal, but is dependent upon states for implementation. Medicaid expansion is the part of the ACA bill that could reduce SES and racial health disparities since it opened accessibility to those least able to afford insurance in any other way. States that refused to participate were primarily in the South where many poor people of color live.

Glossary Built environment The design of neighborhoods and how it creates access or barriers to facilities like stores, parks, restaurants, pharmacies, and health facilities. Health disparity When a health outcome is seen to a greater or lesser extent between populations (Healthy People 2020, www.healthypeople.gov/2020/about/ foundation-health-measures/Disparities). Morbidity Another term for illness. Common measures for morbidity include incidence (new cases of a disease in a population) and prevalence (the total number of new and old cases of a disease in a population) (from www.health.ny.gov/diseases/ chronic/basicstat.htm). Mortality Another term for death. Mortality is often measured by rate, which is the number of deaths due to a

disease divided by the entire population (from www.health.ny.gov/diseases/ chronic/basicstat.htm). Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act A federal statute enacted in 2010, popularly known as Obamacare, designed to reform the health care system with a special effort to increase the quality and affordability of health insurance for all. Residential segregation The isolation of poor and/or racial minorities who live in neighborhoods isolated from other socioeconomic groups (Li, Campbell, and Fernandez 2013).

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CHAPTER 2

Mental Illness and Social Problems Joan Busfield

Abstract Mental illness is not only in itself considered a major social problem, it also often results from the diverse social problems individuals have to face. This chapter explores four questions relevant to the extent of mental illness as a social problem and to the way in which social problems generate mental ill health. How is mental illness defined? What do the data show about its extent? What is the evidence that mental illness is often the result of social problems in individuals’ lives? And finally, how should mental illness be dealt with?

Mental illness as currently conceptualized is considered a major social problem of our times. This is partly because it can be associated with dangerous behavior (though the strength of this association is hotly contested) and is often seen, especially in the media, as posing a threat to other individuals and to the social order. It is also because it can be associated with incapacity to perform one’s normal role reflected, for instance, in shorter or longer absences from work, and sometimes in longer-term disability, matters which are also seen as problematic for society’s smooth functioning and productivity. Indeed, as measured by the 2010 Global Burden of Disease study that covered many illnesses, depressive disorders on their own were a leading cause of years lived with disability (Ferrari et al. 2013). Equally mental illness as currently defined is itself frequently the result of vari-

ous social problems, such as poverty, homelessness, marital breakdown, and unemployment, as well as physical and sexual abuse. Hence mental illness and social problems are inseparable. In this chapter I explore four questions. First, what is defined as mental illness? Second, how common is mental illness so defined? Third, what are its causes, and more specifically, is there good evidence that identified mental illness often results from other social problems? And fourth, what services can and should be provided for those judged mentally ill?

What Constitutes Mental Illness? The term mental illness is modeled on that of physical illnesses and refers to certain 23

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disturbances of thought, feeling and behavior in individuals. Its use reflects the medical dominance of the field, psychiatry having developed from the mid-nineteenth century as a distinct medical specialty dealing with mental illness, although medical involvement in the domain of madness (a lay term like lunacy and insanity) had far earlier origins. An important connotation of the term illness that it is viewed as something that happens to individuals for which they should not be held responsible (though they sometimes are), and this can make it more attractive to recipients when compared to deviance or wrongdoing for which they typically are held responsible. It is not easy to provide a general definition of mental illness and many have avoided doing so, simply defining it extensively by listing a series of specific types. For example, the World Health Organization’s (1992) list of mental and behavioral disorders, which is part of its International Classification of Diseases (ICD), now in its tenth edition, does not offer any general definition. However, the third and subsequent editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) do provide a general definition. The term “disorder” is used in the manual’s title since this permits the inclusion of conditions such as intellectual disability (formerly called mental retardation), and personality and behavioral disorders, where the word illness can seem less appropriate. The definition of mental disorder in the current, fifth edition of the DSM (DSM-5) reads: A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress in social, occupational or other important activities. An expectable or culturally sanctioned response to a stressor or loss, such as

the loss of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (eg political, religious or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual as described above. (APA 2013, 20)

There are a number of important elements here. First, there is the initial reference to a “clinically significant disturbance in cognition, emotion regulation or behaviour” – the three key dimensions of mental functioning. Second, there is the reference to dysfunction in “psychological, biological or developmental processes underlying mental functioning” – the term dysfunction suggesting that one or more key elements of mental functioning are not working properly. Third, there is the emphasis on the link with “significant distress in social, occupational or other important activities.” Fourth, the definition states that culturally sanctioned response to stressors (external pressures) or losses are not mental disorders. And fifth and finally, there is a clear statement that neither “socially deviant behaviour” – such as criminality and antisocial conduct – nor conflicts between the individual and society amount to mental disorder unless they arise from one of the listed dysfunctions. This is an attempt to ensure that socially unacceptable conduct, for instance criminal behavior, is not in itself regarded as mental disorder. Whereas the first three elements attempt to specify what counts as mental disorder, the final two are essentially exclusionary saying what it is not. However, in practice the various components of the definition depend on personal judgments by clinicians and so lack precision, and such general definitions do not get us very far in determining the boundaries of mental disorder or illness. Arguably the lists of specific disorders in psychiatric classifications are more important in setting mental disorder’s boundaries. These listings encompass a very diverse range of conditions varying from autistic spectrum disorder, through schizophrenia,

mental illness and social problems

social phobia and gambling disorder, conditions that have changed over time, as with the exclusion of epilepsy, homosexuality and the addition of premenstrual dysphoric disorder and a set of substance use disorders, and have been variously grouped. Classifications in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century mostly concentrated on severe disorders typical of asylum inmates of the time, disorders encompassed by the lay terms madness, lunacy and insanity. There was considerable emphasis on disorders with known or presumed organic (physical) causes, such as various types of senile dementia, as well as on what the German psychiatrist, Emil Kraepelin in his classificatory work had identified as dementia praecox (precocious dementia), soon to be called schizophrenia, and manic-depressive psychosis (later relabeled bipolar disorder). These severe disorders were usually marked by major changes in mental functioning, either a significant decline in intellectual faculties or disturbances in reasoning. Indeed, French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault (1965) emphasized the importance of unreason to notions of madness. Later classifications included many less severe disorders, where the focus was largely on emotions, personality and behavior, not reasoning, and in lay terms might be encompassed by expressions such as “troubled in mind, “suffering from nerves,” or with the advent of Freudian ideas, “neurotic.” The first two editions of the DSM published in 1952 and 1968 followed earlier practice in simply offering descriptions of the various types and subtypes. For instance, what were called schizophrenic reactions (the term reaction was favored by American psychiatrist, Adolf Meyer, a key influence on the first edition) were introduced as follows: This term is synonymous with the formerly used term dementia praecox. It represents a group of psychotic reactions characterised by fundamental disturbance in reality relationships and concept formations, with affective, behavioural, and intellectual disturbances in varying degrees

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and mixtures. The disorders are marked by a strong tendency to retreat from reality, by emotional disharmony, unpredictable disturbances in stream of thought, regressive behaviour, and in some, by a tendency to “deterioration.” (APA 1952, 26)

However, since its third edition (APA 1980) the DSM has listed specific criteria for each disorder that have to be met if a particular diagnosis is to be made. The aim was to add more precision to the delineation of each disorder in order to enhance the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis at a time when numerous studies had shown it to be very poor (Ash 1949; Beck et al. 1962). Importantly, however, the diagnostic criteria introduced in the DSM-III are almost entirely symptom-based and do not usually require any attention to the social context in which the supposedly disturbed emotions, cognitions or behaviors have occurred, and which might account for them. This shift was in part intended by the dominant organically oriented psychiatrists who constructed the manual to eradicate almost entirely the psychoanalytic ideas about psychological dynamics that had informed the first two editions. Yet the exclusion of consideration of cultural and structural context can lead to defining mental states as pathological when they might more appropriately be viewed as normal responses to the difficult social situation a person faces, such as being unemployed or being socially isolated. Underpinning this issue are fundamental questions about the distinction between normal mental functioning and psychopathology. Is misery arising from certain adverse experiences, such as domestic violence, normal or pathological? It also needs to be noted that even though the necessary symptoms for a diagnosis are now clearly listed in the DSM, they still require clinical judgments to be made as to the presence or absence of particular symptoms. Even the psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, the leader of the Task Force that developed the DSM-III, indicated that the improvements in diagnostic reliability were modest (Lane 2007, 69).

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One significant exception to the DSMIII’s focus on symptoms was the category of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) where the occurrence of a traumatic event had to have preceded the specified symptoms for the diagnosis to be made. Another was the so-called bereavement exclusion in the criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD), a disorder radically reframed from earlier categories of depression (Busfield 2014). The exclusion specified that the major depressive episode diagnostic for the condition should not be an instance of “uncomplicated bereavement” (APA 1980, 214). This was consistent with the DSM-III’s general definition, which indicated that normal reactions to stressors or loss did not count as mental disorder. Yet no other major stressors were listed as possible grounds for exempting flattened or depressed mood and associated symptoms from a diagnosis of MDD. Controversially, the DSM-5 has now removed even this clause (APA 2013, 125; Wakefield and First 2012), although there is a complex note, plus a footnote, suggesting the need for exercising clinical judgment in assessing responses to bereavement and other significant losses. Probably the most fundamental change in ideas about what constitutes mental disorder over the last hundred years has been that its clinical boundaries have expanded considerably. On the one hand, behaviors previously viewed as socially unacceptable have come to be defined as mental disorders. Examples include the range of substance use problems, such as alcohol abuse and dependence, as well as behaviors such as restlessness and inattention, now constituted as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which first appeared in the second edition of the DSM as “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood” (APA 1968, 12). On the other hand, what had previously been regarded as normal difficulties of everyday life were pathologized. For example, the 1980 DSM-III for the first time added a set of sexual dysfunctions such as “male erectile disorder” and “inhibited female orgasm” alongside the earlier sexual disorders like transvestism and fetishism. It also added a list of special symptoms

including “feeding disturbance,” the DSM’s first reference to any eating disorder. These additions have continued through to the DSM-5 with the inclusion of new conditions such as binge eating disorder, gambling disorder and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, and are more frequent than the occasional exclusion of behaviors once deemed pathological, such as homosexuality, removed from the DSM in late 1973. Of the many additions, the inclusion for the first time of alcoholism and drug dependence in the second edition of the DSM (Conrad and Schneider 1980) was of particular significance. First, as alcohol and drug problems are relatively common (see below) their inclusion markedly increased the proportions who could be identified as having a mental disorder. Second, since they are typically male problems, in contrast to mental states like anxiety and depression more often identified in women, when included they help to make the gender balance in overall mental disorder more even. And third, it is important because they are associated with somewhat higher levels of violence than most other mental disorders, or indeed those without any disorder, though the evidence shows that most violence is carried out by those without a mental disorder. Hence the inclusion of these forms of dependence somewhat strengthens the association between mental disorder and violence, though overall most of those identified as having a mental disorder are not violent (Swanson et al. 1990; Swanson and Holzer 1991). However, although officially shifted from the sociological domain of deviance to the clinical domain of mental disorder, and associated with special treatment regimens and facilities, alcohol and drug problems are by no means always regarded by the public as mental disorders – they may equally be viewed as morally reprehensible or as personal failings. Hence, though considered major social problems due to their behavioral and social consequence and their high frequency in society, how to view them is not settled. Expansion in the boundaries of what is considered a mental disorder can equally be generated by having broad diagnostic

mental illness and social problems

criteria. This can, for instance, occur by requiring only a short duration for certain symptoms, or requiring a relatively small number of symptoms to be present. For example, the duration of the depressed mood or loss of interest or pleasure (which has to involve a change from previous functioning) fundamental to a diagnosis of major depressive disorder need only have been present for a two-week period, notwithstanding the epithet “major.” A number of writers have been critical of the way that, by such means, normal sorrow has been transformed into the pathology of depression (Horwitz and Wakefield 2007; Dorwick and Frances 2013). The extension of what constitutes mental illness can also be achieved by indicating that a condition previously considered specific to a particular period in the lifecycle can be applied more generally. An example is that of ADHD which is no longer formulated as a disorder specific to childhood (Conrad and Potter 2000). Greater breadth can also result from changes in the wording of particular criteria as with posttraumatic stress disorder. Whereas the initial criterion in the DSM-III-R required the individual to have experienced a traumatic event, the criterion in the DSM-IV was modified to also include witnessing or being confronted with the traumatic event (APA 1994, 427). This broadening of the boundaries of mental disorder has been described as an example of medicalization – the extension of medicine into new domains – with certain extensions, such as the expanding boundaries of depression, particularly criticized. The sociologist Peter Conrad (1975), who analyzed the emergence of hyperkinesis as a mental disorder, identified four problems with medicalization: first, expert control over an activity removes it from the public realm where it can be discussed by lay people; second, it gives doctors the responsibility for treatment, which often includes prescribing more psychoactive drugs; third, it encourages “the individualisation of social problems” (19) – that is, focusing on the individual rather than the social conditions they face; and fourth and

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related to this, it leads to the “depoliticisation of deviant behaviour” (19) by dealing with the individual’s behavior and emotions rather than with social-structural issues. Put another way, if a condition is defined as a mental disorder the problem is located within the individual – there is something medically wrong with them – rather than with the society and its deficiencies. The last two criticisms depend on evidence that the individual’s mental state is often the product of the troubling social conditions they face – a matter I discuss below. Such individualization and depoliticization are crucial issues when examining the way in which mental illness is constituted and the social responses to it. The factors underpinning the clinical expansion of mental disorders are varied. In the United States, the DSM’s home territory, one of the pressures for expansion has come from the insurance-based character of the health care system where a clear diagnosis is usually required for access to medical care. This can encourage the construction of new disorders so that there is a label that can be applied to the individual to enable them to obtain insurance coverage; it can also lead to the application of diagnostic labels to marginal or doubtful cases. A further major pressure comes from the highly commercial character of the pharmaceutical industry that seeks to expand the markets for its psychotropic medications (Conrad 2005; Dumit 2012). What, therefore, has been happening is that some forms of social conduct, such as compulsive behaviors, have been shifted from the domain of deviance and wrongdoing to that of mental disorder, and some from what were considered normal difficulties to that of mental disorder so that the overall terrain of social problems has been restructured.

How Common Is Identified Mental Illness? Determining the level and types of mental illness, as officially defined, and its distribution across a population is an essential task

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in considering the size and character of the problem it poses to society, and also in planning and providing services. Not surprisingly, given the expanding conceptualization of mental illness and the different ways it is measured, we would expect to find its levels depend on which disorders are measured, how they are measured, and the definitions the measures embed, all of which change and vary. There have been numerous epidemiological studies seeking to assess the incidence and prevalence of mental illness across specific populations. Many of these studies now measure mental illness in people living in the community and do not rely on data from those treated in clinical settings. There are different approaches to the task of measuring mental illness. One is to use what are called structured diagnostic instruments involving detailed questionnaires covering a selected range of disorders, though surveys differ as to which disorders they cover. In Britain the first such instrument was the Present State Examination (PSE) (Wing et al. 1974), introduced in the 1960s and linked to ICD diagnoses – it was later to become Schedules for Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (Wing et al. 1990). Given the major concerns about diagnostic reliability, the initial aim was to try to standardize psychiatric assessments in clinical contexts, but the PSE was soon also being used in epidemiological surveys. In the United States, the listing of diagnostic criteria in the DSM-III facilitated the construction of such instruments. The first to be introduced was the Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS) (Robins et al. 1981), developed in tandem with the DSM-III. Like the DSM-III the DIS focused on identifying the presence or absence of the clusters of symptoms listed for different disorders. However, many epidemiological studies employ rather different instruments. Some use one or more scales designed to measure specific disorders or groups of disorders, usually based on self-reports of mental states without any follow-up questions, distributing individuals along a single dimension. These have a relatively long

history and include instruments, such as the Hamilton Depression Scale (Hamilton 1960), the more recent PHQ-9 measure of depression (Kroenke et al. 2001), and the Beck Anxiety Inventory (Beck et al. 1988), for measuring depression, anxiety, psychosis, alcohol problems and so forth. Other instruments, such as the General Health Questionnaire (Goldberg 1972) also distribute individuals across a single dimension but seek to provide a single general measure of mental illness, again based on selfreported psychological states. Such instruments typically focus on less severe mental troubles relating to feelings of anxiety and unhappiness that Freud termed neurotic and do not include questions about more debilitating experiences, such as hallucinations or eating problems. All such instruments focus on reported feelings and experiences and ignore any structural and cultural factors that might account for them. It is not surprising to find that the rates of mental illness identified in community surveys using different measuring instruments and different conceptualizations vary enormously. Some of the earliest epidemiological studies assessed very low proportions as mentally healthy. For example, the Midtown Manhattan Survey in 1954 placed individuals on a single scale and identified only 18.5 percent as entirely mentally healthy at the time of the study, with some 23.4 percent with marked or severe symptom formation or incapacitated. The figures are given in Table 2.1. However, the Midtown Manhattan study was carried out at a time when the distinction between normality and pathology had become blurred. This was partly the result of the growing acceptance, as a result of cases of shell-shock and battle fatigue across two world wars, that a high proportion of individuals were susceptible to mental problems in the face of severe pressures. It was also due to the spread of the psychoanalytic view that almost all individuals experience inner conflicts and tensions. The latter is illustrated by one Midtown Manhattan Survey researcher’s assertion that “the human psyche is made up of a wide band

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Table 2.1. Prevalence of Mental Health (%) by Age, Midtown Manhattan, 1954 Age (years) Mental health

20–29

30–39

40–49

50–59

All

Well Mild SF Moderate SF Marked SF Severe SF Incapacitated N

23.6 37.5 23.6 9.6 4.1 1.6 365

16.8 37.6 22.4 14.7 7.5 1.0 388

19.3 37.0 20.5 11.6 7.7 3.9 467

15.0 33.1 21.1 16.4 10.5 3.9 440

18.5 36.3 21.8 13.2 7.5 2.7 1,660

Note: SF = symptom formation. Source: Srole et al. ([1962] 1975, 197, 224)

of psychopathology and a narrow band of normality” (Lapouse 1967, 952). Thinking like this meant that few people were likely to be identified as mentally healthy. The Stirling County study in a rural area of Canada in 1952 (Leighton 1959), the year in which the first edition of the DSM was published, put the proportion of mentally healthy individuals in the total population at only 17 percent. By the time of the Epidemiological Catchment Area study (ECA), carried out in five US sites in the early 1980s, the standard psychiatric view of mental pathology, which was incorporated into the new DSMIII (APA 1980), was very different. Inner conflicts and tensions were no longer the focus; rather, as we have seen, attention was given to the specific patterns of symptoms listed as the diagnostic criteria for each disorder, assessed using the new Diagnostic Interview Schedule. However, although the idea of a narrow band of normality had been rejected, the focus on symptom clusters meant that there was only minimal attention to the social context that might give rise to particular mental states, and so could lead to judging some states as symptomatic when they were appropriate responses to the difficulties of life that the individuals faced. As Table 2.2 shows, the ECA study assessed 21.7 percent of adults (aged eighteen and older) as having had a mental disorder sometime during the previous twelve months (Bourdon et al. 1992).

This suggested that close on 80 percent were mentally healthy, a much higher figure than the percentage judged mentally healthy in the Midtown Manhattan and Stirling Country studies, reflecting the changed conceptualization of mental health and illness. However, the 21.7 percent assessed as having some disorder in the ECA study was not so far from the figure for marked or severe impairment (23.4 percent) in the Midtown Manhattan study. Table 2.2 also shows the reported twelvemonth prevalence rates of the different types of disorders measured using the Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS). As we might expect, the prevalence of schizophrenia plus the more broadly defined schizophrenia-like disorders was relatively low at only 1 percent, and for bipolar disorder (formerly manic-depressive psychosis) only 0.6 percent, indicating that Table 2.2. Twelve-Month Prevalence Rates (%) of Mental Disorder, ECA, 1980–84 Disorder

Twelve-month prevalence

Affective Anxiety Substance use Somatization Personality Schizophrenic/schizophreniform Cognitive impairment (severe) All disorders covered

6.3 10.1 7.5 0.1 1.2 1.0 1.7 21.7

Source: Bourdon et al. (1992)

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the disorders usually considered archetypical of madness are relatively rare – a finding repeated in numerous other studies. In contrast the reported twelve-month prevalence rate of anxiety disorders was 10.1 percent, and of major depression and dysthymia (persistent depressive disorder) 6.8 percent – hence their designation as “common mental disorders.” The twelvemonth prevalence rate for substance use disorders was 7.5 percent, also quite a high figure, though these are not usually placed in the group of common mental disorders (Goldberg and Huxley 1992). The next major US study, the National Comorbidity Survey (NCS) (Kessler et al. 1994), used a variant of the DIS, the Composite International Diagnostic Interview developed for the World Health Organization. It surveyed those aged fifteen to fiftyfour, a younger age range than in the Epidemiological Catchment Area (ECA) study, and did not cover schizophrenia, but still yielded a higher twelve-month prevalence rate of 30.2 percent for the mood, anxiety and substance use disorders covered against the ECA’s figure of 21.7 percent. The difference between the findings of the two studies was explained by Regier and colleagues (1998) as due to changes in diagnostic criteria between the DSM-III used in the ECA, and its revised form, the DSM-III-R (APA 1987) used in the NCS, and also to the different ordering of questions in the two surveys. Consequently, they argued, the data did not indicate a real increase in mental illness. However, the identification of what were considered rather high levels of mental illness prompted concern among psychiatrists and the US medical insurance companies that funded treatments. As a result, when the DSM was revised for a fourth edition in 1994 a new criterion known as “clinical significance” was added for most disorders. For example, the list of criteria for major depressive disorder included the statement: “The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational and other important areas of functioning” (APA 1994, 327). This criterion was intended to ensure that to count as patho-

logical the symptoms must clearly affect the individual’s functioning. However, some argued that the new criteria were imprecise (Frances 1998) or that measures of disorder should not be shaped by the need for treatment (Spitzer 1998). A reanalysis of the National Comorbidity Survey (NCS) data taking account of the new criteria resulted in a decline in the twelve-month prevalence level from 30.2 percent to 20.6 percent – a significant reduction (Narrow et al. 2002) and much closer to the ECA figure. Nonetheless, a replication of the NCS some ten years later over the period 2001– 3, using the diagnostic criteria from the 1994 DSM-IV that included the new clinical significance criteria, yielded a twelvemonth prevalence rate for all disorders of 26.2 percent. This figure was a little lower than that from the original NCS, suggesting the inclusion of clinical significance criteria had had an impact, but was still higher than the 20.6 for the NCS once adjustments for clinical significance were made. In part this could have been due to the loosening of the boundaries of some disorders in the DSM-IV, as with the changes in the criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder noted earlier, which counterbalanced the inclusion of clinical significance. The NCS replication also made an attempt to measure the severity of particular cases of each disorder, finding 22.3 percent were severe, 37.3 percent moderate, and 40.4 percent mild (Kessler et al. 2005). Surveys in Britain have unfortunately tended to assess levels of specific types of disorder using a range of instruments, so the data cannot be readily aggregated, thereby making comparisons with the US data difficult. This brief summary of findings from some of the major epidemiological surveys of psychiatric disorders shows the impact of different definitions and measures of mental disorder on the prevalence rates obtained. This not only makes attempts to identify any changes over time rather difficult (Busfield 2012), it also means that there can be no definitive answer to questions about the levels of mental illness or disorder in

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particular populations. This conclusion is crucial for any evaluation of attempts like the Global Burden of Disease survey to assess the level of disability resulting from depression, and their claims about the size of the burden caused by specific mental disorders need to be treated with considerable caution. It seems very likely, given the character of the measures often used, that the levels of depression across different populations are often overstated.

Social Problems as Causes of Identified Mental Illness The fact that what is defined and measured as mental disorder varies across time and place needs to be remembered when discussing its causes. There is a range of evidence that social problems play a causal role in the genesis of mental states and behaviors now defined as mental disorder. I discuss three broad types. First, the epidemiological evidence shows that socioeconomic inequalities are related to levels of distress and disturbance judged pathological. Second and related to this, the extensive evidence that private troubles in adult life such as severe financial difficulties and marital problems make mental troubles more likely. And third, the equally extensive evidence that social adversity in childhood often has similar negative effects. However, before looking at each type of societal evidence, a brief consideration of the place of genetic factors in causing mental illness is necessary. The idea that heredity plays an important role in producing mental disturbance is an old one with early claims often based on observations that madness sometimes ran down the generations within families, although in such instances the mechanism of transmission could be environmental (in these discussions heredity and environment, or nature and nurture, are constructed as mutually exclusive alternatives). From around the mid-twentieth century, by which time the role of genes in inheritance was established, research

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focused on comparing the level of concordance (agreement) of diagnosed mental illness (usually schizophrenia) in genetically identical twins when compared with non-identical twins, with studies showing higher levels of concordance in the identical twins (Riley et al. 2003). However, since concordance in these twins was usually no more than 50 percent, the studies equally showed the importance of environmental factors. Moreover, more recent work has emphasized the importance of the interaction between the two and the way in which the expression of genes can be modified by environmental factors, a process known as epigenesis (Szyf 2009). Here I focus on direct evidence of the importance of social factors in environmental causation. I start with the epidemiological evidence. The existence of a marked association between social class and identified mental disorder is well-established. The classic US study, carried out by Hollingshead and Redlich (1958) in the early 1950s, was a study of individuals in any form of specialist mental health treatment (defined as patients), who were compared with a 5 percent sample of the normal population. The data showed an inverse association between treated mental illness and social class measured in terms of area of residence, occupation and education, with those in the lowest class, class V, having far higher prevalence rates than those in the top social class, class I (see Figure 2.1), despite the fact that the latter would have had easier access to health services. The class difference was not restricted to overall prevalence and was also linked to the type of mental illness identified, to how the individuals entered treatment, and to the type of treatment received. The association between social class and prevalence was also found in community surveys that looked beyond those in treatment. For example, the Midtown Manhattan community survey mentioned above, which constructed six socioeconomic status (SES) groups based on parental schooling and occupation, found that the proportion deemed “well” varied from 9.7 percent in

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Figure 2.1. Class status and the distribution of patients and nonpatients, New Haven, 1950. Source: Hollingshead and Redlich (1958, Table 8)

the lowest SES group, group F, to 24.4 percent in the highest, group A, whereas the figures for “marked,” “severe” or “incapacitated” varied from 17.5 percent in SES group A to 32.7 percent in the lowest, group F – close on double. The data are given in Table 2.3. More recent studies have often collected data on income rather than social class, but the pattern is similar. Data on the identified prevalence of common mental disorders (anxiety and depression) by income from the 2007 English Psychiatric Morbidity survey are given in Table 2.4. The higher rates of these disorders identified in women is typical.

However, a major question prompted by such findings is about causal direction. Do the characteristics associated with a person’s class position influence the level of mental distress and disturbance? Or is a person more likely to drift down the SES scale as a result of their disturbance? These are usually termed the hypotheses of social causation and social selection respectively. Various studies have been carried out to test these alternatives and they show that while social selection may play some role in accounting for the association it cannot account for the major part (Fox 1990; Hudson 2005). Hence we need to consider what social factors might cause those in the

Table 2.3. Mental Health (%) and Parental SES, Midtown Manhattan, 1954 Parental SES Mental health Well Mild SF Moderate SF Marked SF Severe SF Incapacitated Total N

A 24.4 36.0 22.1 11.8 3.8 1.9 100 262

Note: SF = symptom formation. Source: Srole et al. ([1962] 1975, Table 14.1)

B 23.3 38.3 22.0 8.6 4.5 3.3 100 245

C 19.9 36.6 22.6 11.8 8.1 1.0 100 287

D 18.8 36.6 20.11 13.3 8.3 2.9 100 384

E 13.6 36.6 20.4 16.2 10.2 3.0 100 265

F 9.7 32.7 23.9 18.0 10.1 4.6 100 217

mental illness and social problems Table 2.4. Common Mental Disorder (%) in Past Week by Income and Gender, England, 2007 Household income – quintiles

Men Women

Highest

2nd

3rd

4th

Lowest

8.8 18.1

8.6 13.1

10.1 20.1

16.2 24.0

23.5 25.1

Source: McManus et al. (2009, Table 2.7)

lower social classes to have more mental troubles. This leads to the second body of research providing evidence that social factors play a causal role in mental disturbance: research on the impact of the social adversities an individual may face in adult life. These adversities or stressors can be divided into two broad types: adverse life events, and socalled ongoing difficulties. A typical adverse life event would be the death of a close family member, getting divorced, or being fired from a job; a typical ongoing difficulty would be being unemployed, being homeless or struggling financially. Many studies have found an association between life events and difficulties and the levels of mental illness identified (as well as various physical illnesses) (Dohrenwend and Dohrenwend 1974; Thoits 2010). Many focus on the different levels of stress facing individuals at a single point in time, but some look at population-level data, as in Reeves et al.’s (2014) study showing an increase in suicides, particularly in men of working age, in Europe and North America as a result of the financial crisis of 2007/8, with job loss, housing repossession and debt playing a key role in the increase. Ideas about which types of events are especially stressful differ, as do the ways of attempting to measure them. While some studies use longitudinal data to study measure the effect of stressful events, as in Pevalin’s (2009) study of the impact of housing repossessions, more often the research is retrospective. Here a key issue is the contamination that can arise from the fact that a person’s mental state can influence their responses to questions about the stressful events and difficulties they have

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experienced, affecting both their recall of earlier circumstances and events and the weight attached to them. Assigning standard weights based on the evaluations of certain types of events by large groups of individuals is one strategy for dealing with this concern (Holmes and Rahe 1967). Another is to use independent evidence of the importance attached to particular aspects of a person’s life to assess the stressfulness of particular events or difficulties. This was the approach adopted by George W. Brown and Tirril Harris (1978) in their classic Social Origins of Depression, a study that sought to link adversities in adult life to social class. Brown and Harris’s study, which used samples of women because of their higher rates of depression and the greater chance of finding them at home since at that time women’s levels of paid employment were relatively low, found that the experience of severe life events and ongoing difficulties increased the likelihood of clinical depression as measured by the Present State Examination. However, the authors argued that the extent of their impact depended on what they termed vulnerability factors, which were more common in the working class than the middle class, and accounted for much of the observed socioeconomic differences in levels of measured depression. They identified four vulnerability factors (some prefer to talk of capacity to cope, or of resilience). These were the absence of an intimate, confiding relationship; the loss of their mother before the age of eleven; the presence of three or more children under the age of fourteen at home; and the lack of employment outside the home. While Brown and Harris’s analysis of vulnerability has been contested, there is nonetheless extensive evidence that the first factor in particular, defined more broadly as social support, can protect against mental distress in the face of adversity (Brugha 1995; Thoits 2011). Genetic factors may also play a role in producing greater susceptibility to stressors, and psychologists talk of a stress-diathesis model or a diathesisstress model, with diathesis referring to a

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predisposition that influences the response to stress. The third type of research that provides direct evidence of the role of social factors in the causation of mental problems examines the impact of social adversity in childhood. The importance of early childhood experiences to subsequent mental health was especially emphasized by Freud and has been explored by many other writers. In the period following the Second World War the psychiatrist John Bowlby (1952) was asked to carry out a study of the welfare of homeless children, orphaned or separated from their families as a result of the war. Influenced by Freudian ideas, he introduced the concept of maternal deprivation to describe their situation, arguing that deprivation of the person responsible for their care to whom the child had been attached had adverse psychological consequences. Michael Rutter (1972), reviewing work in this field twenty years later, argued that the varied experiences and their possible effects needed to be disaggregated, and included “disruption of the bonding process,” “privation of perceptual and linguistic experience,” “nutritional privation,” “family discord,” and “failure to develop bonds in the first three years of life” (122). Subsequent research has confirmed the importance of various types of childhood adversity to later mental health, particularly the trauma of physical and sexual abuse (ironically while Freud emphasized the importance of sexuality he came to think that children’s reports of such abuse were phantasies). Research shows that the sexual abuse of children is more common than might be expected. For instance, a large-scale study of some 2,626 men and women carried out in the United States in 1985 found that 27 percent of the women and 16 percent of the men had been sexually abused prior to the age of eighteen (Finkelhor et al. 1990). Some of this abuse consisted of touching, grabbing or kissing, but 14.6 percent of the women and 9.5 percent of the men reported efforts at sexual intercourse or something similar. The emotional responses to sexual abuse

varied, with anger and hostility being common (Finkelhor et al. 1990) at least initially. But such abuse often has severe consequences for the individual’s subsequent mental state, the most common being depressed mood and suicide attempts. Studies also show that the effect depends on the relation of the abuser to the individual, the length of time over which the abuse occurs, and whether there was the threat or actual use of force (Russell 1986). A wider-ranging study carried out in the United States known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study (Felitti et al. 1998; Edwards et al. 2003) divides adverse experiences into three types: abuse, neglect and family dysfunction. Abuse was differentiated into emotional, physical and sexual; neglect into emotional and physical; and household dysfunction into five subtypes – the mother being treated violently, household substance abuse, household mental illness, parental separation or divorce, and having an incarcerated family member. As Table 2.5 shows, levels of adversity across the different types were relatively high including all three forms of abuse. Given the rather broad types of household dysfunction (nearly one in four children had experienced parental separation or divorce and nearly 30 percent household substance abuse) it is not surprising to find that, as Table 2.6 shows, only 36 percent of the sample had not faced any of these adversities. The study found that the overall level of adversity was associated with both depressed mood and suicide attempts as Table 2.7 shows. Most studies of childhood adversity, as with stressful events in adulthood, are retrospective. However, Horwitz et al. (2001) carried out a prospective study of childhood abuse and neglect based on records of court cases and interviews with the respondents as adults. The data showed that men who had been abused or neglected in childhood reported more psychological experiences judged as long-term depression (dysthymia) or antisocial personality disorder than a set of matched controls, but not more

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Table 2.5. Prevalence of Individual Adverse Childhood Experiences, 1995–97 Women N = 9,367

Men N = 7,970

Total N = 17,337

Abuse Emotional abuse Physical abuse Sexual abuse

13.1 27.0 24.7

7.6 29.9 16.0

10.6 28.3 20.7

Neglect Emotional neglect Physical neglect

16.7 9.2

12.4 10.7

14.8 9.9

Household dysfunction Mother treated violently Household substance abuse Household mental illness Parental separation or divorce Incarcerated family member

13.7 29.5 23.3 24.5 5.2

11.5 23.8 14.8 21.8 3.1

12.7 26.9 19.4 23.3 4.7

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2015)

alcohol problems (perhaps because the latter are more common in men); whereas the abused and neglected women reported more mental states and behaviors judged as symptomatic of all three of the mental disorders compared with the control group. The figures are given in Table 2.8. Other studies have linked childhood adversity to psychotic experiences where the impact of adverse events is less well accepted, and the assumption of a strong genetic basis more common. For example, a study of the effect of sexual and physical abuse in childhood and adulthood by Read and colleagues (2003) in New Zealand that analyzed community mental health center clients found that those with documented childhood abuse were more likely to report hallucinations, but not delusions or thought Table 2.6. Number of Adverse Childhood Experiences, 1995–97 Number

Women

Men

Total

0 1 2 3 4 or more

34.5 24.5 15.5 10.3 15.2

38.0 27.9 16.4 8.6 9.2

36.1 26.0 15.9 9.5 12.5

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2015)

disorder, than those in the non-abused client group. And an English study using data from the 2007 national psychiatric survey showed a large association between sexual abuse before sixteen and identified psychosis (Bebbington et al. 2011). There can, therefore, be little doubt of the importance of social factors in generating mental distress and disturbance for individuals. Yet as critics have noted, presentday Western societies do not usually see such rates of psychopathology as reflecting dysfunctional features of society – its values and how it is structured. Instead they are viewed as private troubles that are the property of pathological individuals and Table 2.7. Number of Categories of Adverse Childhood Exposure and Prevalence of Depressed Mood and Suicide Attempts Number

Depressed mood

Suicide attempt

0 1 2 3 4 or more

14.2 21.4 31.5 36.2 50.7

1.2 2.4 4.3 9.5 16.3

Total

22.0

3.5

Note: The number indicates the categories of events experienced, not the total number. Source: Felitti et al. (1998)

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Table 2.8. Lifetime Diagnoses in Abused/ Neglected and Control Samples Men

Women

Abused/ Abused/ neglected Control neglected Control % % % % Dysthymia 14 Alcohol 66 Antisocial 27 PD

5 67 17

16 43 9

12 33 5

Source: Horwitz et al. (2001)

indicative of their weaknesses – a view reinforced by the psychiatric emphasis on the influence of genetic factors. And, as we shall see, this individualization is built into the standard ways of dealing with the widespread problem of mental illness.

Dealing with Identified Mental Illness Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of Britain, popularized the mantra “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” Applied to mental health services this suggests that we need to look not only at how identified mental illness is treated (using the term treatment in its broadest sense), but also at how societies deal with all of the determinants of mental illness. Discussion of the expanding boundaries of mental illness suggests, however, that a further issue needs consideration: have the measures and symptoms of clinically defined mental illness been extended too far? Would it be better for individuals and for society if, in some instances, they were set more narrowly so that fewer individuals were pathologized and instead there was more effort to modify the dysfunctional features of society? There are, therefore, three issues to consider in reference to mental illness: the actions taken to deal with individuals judged to have a mental illness; the actions taken to deal with its causes; and how it is constituted. How is mental illness treated? During the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, individuals judged to be severely

disturbed were usually sent to a lunatic asylum, with the number and size of these institutions increasing markedly over the period (Scull 1993). A key feature of the asylums and the far smaller private madhouses was that those admitted were legally detained. It was assumed that the loss of the individual’s capacity to reason, and in some cases past or perceived potential dangerousness, required compulsory detention. Hence, among other functions, the asylums provided a “solution” to the problem of dangerousness. Outside the asylums those who felt “troubled in mind” could turn to friends, religious figures, or any of the diverse groups of healers, such as physicians, apothecaries, herbalists or “wise women,” offering help, often for a fee. However, from the mid-twentieth century, policies changed and there was an increase in services outside the asylums (relabeled mental hospitals) for those deemed severely disturbed. New policies emphasized the desirability of reducing the number of asylum inmates and providing more services for such individuals in the community. This policy change was in part the product of major changes in welfare provision in Western societies in the first half of the twentieth century, including the growth of different types of health insurance, the related improvement in access to health services, along with the increasing costs of maintaining mental hospitals, and a decline in belief in their value – changes that eventually led to plans to close them down. In Britain individuals judged to need a psychiatric bed were to be helped in psychiatric units attached to general hospitals, and in the United States in community mental health centers. And if the mental disorders were chronic, they were to be housed in a variety of residential homes in the community or, if necessary, in secure or semisecure psychiatric units. A major change, however, and one that arguably facilitated the closure of mental hospitals, was the increasing use of psychoactive medications to treat all types of conditions regarded as mental illnesses. Various sedatives had long been given to

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asylum inmates and new ones were introduced in the first half of the twentieth century, but the more extensive use of psychoactive medications developed from the 1950s onward, with the introduction of chemically synthesized medicines such as chlorpromazine (branded as Largactil and Thorazine) for the treatment of schizophrenia, the tricylics and monamine oxidase inhibitors to treat severe depression, and drugs like meprobamate (branded as Miltown and Equanil) to treat anxiety, the latter soon known among the lay public as happiness pills (Herzberg 2009). These were followed by many other psychoactive drugs, including psychostimulants such as Ritalin, a second generation of antipsychotics, such as Zantac, and SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), such as Prozac, for treating less severe depression. Almost all individuals judged to have some mental health problem who receive any treatment are now prescribed some psychoactive medication, and health service spending on these drugs is continuing to increase (Busfield 2015), despite controversies over their effectiveness – much of the apparent efficacy of antidepressants results from the placebo effect (Kirsch 2009). We can see, therefore, that individuals diagnosed with a mental disorder are highly diverse in terms of their condition and the services they receive vary markedly. Arguably the most neglected group are those with severe, chronic symptoms who often find it difficult to manage on their own. When mental hospitals started to close in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere, researchers often found that alternative provision was often inadequate, that individuals frequently ended up in another form of residential care in a form of transinstitutionalization (Brown 1985), on the streets, or in prison (Dear and Wolch 1987; Knowles 2000). The expanding numbers of people with senile dementia arising from increased longevity need to be included in the group of those with severe mental health problems, and the difficulties of finding support for them are well known.

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Individuals judged to have acute mental health issues are more likely to have access to psychiatrists and to be admitted to a psychiatric unit, usually for a relatively short period since these services offer a greater chance of some improvement. Admission is more likely if the individual is considered potentially dangerous to themselves or others and there are legal grounds for compulsory detention, though some may be placed in a secure or semisecure psychiatric unit. There are also some specialist units for individuals with severe alcohol problems or eating disorders. People with milder forms of mental disorder are more often seen by a primary care practitioner, who may have little expertise in mental health, than by a mental health specialist, and the treatment offered is usually some psychoactive medication. However, there have been some efforts to redress the bias toward the heavy reliance on psychoactive medicines. In Britain, for example, in 2007 a policy was introduced to encourage the use of psychological therapies, particularly cognitive behavior therapy (Department of Health 2011), though most who take any mental trouble to a general doctor are simply prescribed a drug. Regrettably, attempts to act on the social problems than can generate mental disturbance are all too rare. To illustrate the issues, I want to look at two areas: first, the physical and sexual abuse of children; and second, unemployment and poverty in adult life. Perhaps because they often, though by no means always, occur within the family, the physical and sexual abuse of children has not been seen as a widespread social problem by the public or policy makers, and even where it has been reported to someone in authority has often been ignored. Equally, where abuse is carried out by nonfamily members and is reported, usually little is done, often because of the potential damage to the reputation of the institutions that would be implicated, as for instance with the Catholic Church, the Church of England, local authorities and leading media companies. Yet, as the ACE and other studies show, such abuse is quite common, and

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while it is now increasingly coming to public attention, it is not clear that there will be any major efforts to reduce the incidence and prevalence of abuse, other than providing greater support after it occurs. The impact of unemployment and poverty on mental states is in some respects more widely recognized, yet at the same time there is a tendency to blame individuals for their unemployment and poverty, and there is often a marked reluctance by governments to support them. Moreover, when looking at policies concerning welfare provision in relation to unemployment and poverty, the link between these circumstances and mental distress is rarely acknowledged – a situation exacerbated by the currently dominant politics of neoliberalism. Finally, there is the issue of whether we should restrict the clinical definition of mental disorder. I agree with the critics of particular types of medicalization – the extension of the realm of medicine – in the psychiatric field, and argue that most of these expansions, such as those outlined above, have not been helpful to the patients who receive the diagnoses. As others have argued, identifying mental states as indicative of mental illness locates the problem within the individual and legitimizes medical intervention, primarily the prescribing of psychoactive drugs. While it is essential that those who are mentally distressed should receive some form of support and help in their lives, it is far from clear that the best support is prescribing some medication. Moreover, it is also essential that the individual’s mental distress is fully understood within its social and institutional context, and that attempts are made to tackle the social problems that often underpin it.

Conclusion Present-day Western societies view mental disorder identified in individuals as posing a significant and extensive concern. Yet the evidence indicates that assessments of its extent depend both on the way diagnostic

categories have been broadened to identify a wider range of mental states as pathological, and on the often imprecise measures used to assess its levels. The result of this pathologization of individuals is that the link between the individual’s mental states and the social and institutional difficulties they face – with the way societies are organized and structured – is frequently ignored. The problem is seen instead as one of disturbed individuals who can be treated, though rarely cured, by prescribing psychoactive medication. Yet the evidence indicates that it is structural and cultural aspects of societies that underpin much mental disturbance and distress. Genetic factors play a part in contributing to susceptibilities or vulnerabilities, susceptibilities and vulnerabilities that can also be affected by childhood experiences, but the dominant focus in psychiatry on genetics and the neurosciences draws attention away from the key influence of some of the major social problems, including unemployment, poverty, lack of community support, and the abuse and neglect of children. Far more attention needs to be directed to the social problems that generate mental disturbance and distress instead of pathologizing individuals.

Glossary Medicalization The extension of the domain of medicine. Mental disorder A broader term than mental illness referring to mental problems that includes learning difficulties, personality and behavior disorders. Mental illness Medical term modeled on physical illness for a range of mental disturbances, often including the behavioral. Psychiatric epidemiology The study of the distribution of mental illness by factors such as age, ethnicity, gender, income and social class in order to generate causal hypotheses. Psychiatry The specialty of medicine focusing on mental health problems and their treatment.

mental illness and social problems

Psychoactive medication A substance that acts on the brain and changes mental states. Stressor An external condition or event that generates stress in an individual.

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Brown, G. W., and T. O. Harris. 1978. Social Origins of Depression. London: Tavistock. Brown, P. 1985. The Transfer of Care: Psychiatric Deinstutionalization and Its Aftermath. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brugha, T. S., ed. 1995. Social Support and Psychiatric Disorder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Busfield, J. 2012. Challenging claims that mental illness has been increasing and mental wellbeing declining. Social Science and Medicine 75:581–88. 2014. Transforming misery into sickness: The genealogy of depression in the DSM. In Demedicalizing Misery II, edited by J. Moncrieff, M. Rapley, and E. Speed, 154–73. London: Palgrave. 2015. Assessing the overuse of medicines. Social Science and Medicine 131:199–206. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2015. Prevalence of Individual Adverse Childhood Experiences. www.cdc.gov/ violenceprevention/acestudy/prevalence .html. Conrad, P. 1975. The discovery of hyperkinesis. Social Problems 12:12–21. 2005. The shifting engines of medicalization. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 46:3–14. Conrad, P., and D. Potter. 2000. From hyperactive children to ADHD adults: observations of the expansion of medical categories. Social Problems 47:559–82. Conrad, P., and J. W. Schneider. 1980. Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness. St. Louis, MO: Mosby. Dear, M., and J. Wolch. 1987. Landscapes of Despair: From Deinstitutionalisation to Homelessness. Oxford: Polity. Department of Health. 2011. Talking Therapies: A Four-year Plan of Action. London: Department of Health. Dohrenwend, B. S., and B. P. Dohrenwend, eds. 1974. Stressful Life Events: Their Nature and Effects. New York: Wiley. Dorwick, C., and A. Frances. 2013. Medicalising unhappiness. BMJ 347:f7140. Dumit, J. 2012. Drugs for Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Edwards, V. J., G. W. Holden, V. J. Felitti, and R. F. Anda. 2003. Relationship between multiple forms of childhood maltreatment and

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adult mental health in community respondents: Results from the Adverse Childhood Experiences study. American Journal of Psychiatry 120:1453–60. Felitti, V. J., R. F. Anda, D. Nordenberg et al. 1998. The relationship of adult health status to childhood abuse and household dysfunction. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14:245–58. Ferrari, A. J., F. J. Charlson, R. E. Norma et al. 2013. Burden of depressive disorders by country, sex, age and year: Findings from the Global Burden of Disease study, 2010. PLOS Medicine 10(11):e1001547. Finkelhor, D., G. Hotaling, I. A. Lewis, and C. Smith. 1990. Sexual abuse in a national survey of adult men and women: Prevalence, characteristics and risk factors. Child Abuse and Neglect 14:19–28. Foucault, M. 1965. Madness and Civilization. London: Tavistock. Fox, J. W. 1990. Social class, mental illness, and social mobility. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 31:344–53. Frances, A. 1998. Problems in defining clinical significance in epidemiological studies. Archives of General Psychiatry 55:119. Goldberg, D. 1972. The Detection of Psychiatric Illness by Questionnaire. London: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, D., and P. Huxley. 1992. Common Mental Disorders. London: Routledge. Hamilton, M. 1960. A rating scale for depression. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 23:56–62. Herzberg, D. 2009. Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Hollingshead, A. B., and F. C. Redlich. 1958. Social Class and Mental Illness. New York: Wiley. Holmes, T. H., and R. M. Rahe. 1967. The social re-adjustment rating scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research 11:213–18. Horwitz, A. V., A. S. Widom, J. McLaughlin, and H. R. White. 2001. The impact of childhood abuse and neglect on adult mental health: A prospective study. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 42:184– 201. Horwitz, A. V., and J. C. Wakefield. 2007. The Loss of Sadness. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hudson, C. G. 2005. Socioeconomic status and mental illness. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 75:3–18. Kessler, R. C., K. A. McGonagle, S. Zhao et al. 1994. Lifetime and 12-month prevalence of DSM-III psychiatric disorders in the United States. Archives of General Psychiatry 51:8–19. Kessler, R. C., W. T. Chiu, O. Demler et al. 2005. Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of 12month DSM-IV disorders in the national comorbidity survey replication. Archives of General Psychiatry 62:617–27. Kirsch, I. 2009. The Emperor’s New Drugs. London: Bodley Head. Knowles, C. 2000. Bedlam on the Streets. London: Routledge. Kroenke, K., R. L. Spitzer, and J. B. Williams. 2001. The PHQ-9: Validity of a brief depression severity measure. Journal of General Internal Medicine 16:606–13. Lane, C. 2007. Shyness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lapouse, R. 1967. Problems in studying the prevalence psychiatric disorder. American Journal of Public Health 57:947–54. Leighton, A. H. 1959. My Name is Legion. New York: Basic Books. McManus S., H. Meltzer, T. Brudh et al. 2009. Adult Psychiatric Morbidity in England, 2007. London: NHS Information Centre. Narrow, W. E., D. S. Rae, L. N. Robins, and D. A. Regier. 2002. Revised prevalence estimates of mental disorders in the United States. Archives of General Psychiatry 59:115–23. Pevalin, D. J. 2009. Housing repossessions, evictions and common mental illness in the UK. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 63:949–51. Read, J., K. Agar, N. Argyle, and V. Aderhold. 2003. Sexual and physical abuse during childhood and adulthood as predictors of hallucinations, delusions and thought disorder. Psychology and Psychotherapy 76:1–22. Reeves, A., M. McKee, and D. Stuckler. 2014. Economic suicides in the great recession in Europe and North America. British Journal of Psychiatry 205:246–47. Regier, D. A., C. T. Kaelber, D. S. Rae et al. 1998. Limitation of diagnostic criteria and assessment instruments for mental disorders. Archives of General Psychiatry 55:109–15.

mental illness and social problems Riley, B., P. J. Asherson, and P. McGuffin. 2003. Genetics and schizophrenia. In Schizophrenia. 2nd ed., edited by S. R. Hirsch and D. Weinberg. Oxford: Blackwell. Robins, L. N., J. E. Helzer, M. D. Croughan, and K. S. Ratcliff. 1981. National Institute of Mental Health diagnostic interview schedule. Archives of General Psychiatry 38:381–89. Russell, D. E. H. 1986. The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women. New York: Basic Books. Rutter, M. 1972. Maternal Deprivation Reassessed. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Scull, A. 1993. The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Spitzer, R. L. 1998. Diagnosis and treatment are not the same. Archives of General Psychiatry 55:120. Srole, L., T. S. Langner, S. T. Michael et al. 1975. Mental Health in the Metropolis. New York: Harper & Row. Swanson, J. W., and C. E. Holzer. 1991. Violence and ECA data. Hospital and Community Psychiatry 42:954–55. Swanson, J. W., C. E. Holzer, V. K. Ganju, and R. T. Jono. 1990.Violence and psychiatric disorder in the community Evidence from

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the Epidemiologic Catchment Area surveys. Hospital and Community Psychiatry 41:761– 70. Szyf, M. 2009. The early life environment and the epigenome. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 1790:878–85. Thoits, P. A. 2010. Stress and health: Major findings and policy implications. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 51(S):541–53. 2011. Mechanisms linking social ties and support to physical and mental health. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 52:145–61. Wakefield, J. C., and M. B. First. 2012. Validity of the bereavement exclusion to major depression: Does the empirical evidence support the proposal to eliminate the exclusion in the DSM-5? World Psychiatry 11:3–10. Wing, J. K., J. E. Cooper, and N. Sartorius. 1974. The Measurement and Classification of Psychiatric Symptoms. London: Cambridge University Press. Wing, J. K., Y. Babor, T. Brugha et al. 1990. SCAN: Schedules for clinical assessment in neuropsychiatry. Archives of General Psychiatry 47:589–93. World Health Organization. 1992. The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders. Geneva: World Health Organization.

CHAPTER 3

Substance Abuse Clayton Mosher and Scott Akins

Abstract Psychoactive substances have been used throughout human history in virtually all cultures; the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that (globally) in 2013, approximately one out of twenty people between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four used an illicit drug. In addition, there is relatively widespread use of prescription and over-the-counter psychotherapeutic drugs. In discussing drugs as a social problem, it is important to distinguish between substance use and substance abuse, as the latter term has often been loosely applied to describe all forms of consumption of substances. In this chapter, we distinguish between physical and psychological dependence on drugs and discuss five broad categories of drugs (stimulants, depressants, hallucinogenics, marijuana, and antidepressants). We then address a variety of theories of drug use/abuse and discuss responses to substance use, noting that in the United States, criminalization has been the dominant approach. The chapter also discusses drug use prevention and treatment programs and drug courts as a response to substance use/abuse.

Introduction Psychoactive substances have been used throughout human history in virtually all societies and cultures. Although such data should be treated with some caution due to variations in measures across countries, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that in 2013, a total of 246 million people, or one out of twenty between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four years, used an illicit drug (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2015). Among the illegal drugs most commonly used are cannabis

(2.7 percent to 4.9 percent of the world’s population are estimated to be users); amphetamines (0.3 percent to 1.1 percent); opiates (0.6 percent to 0.8 percent); and cocaine (0.3 percent to 0.4 percent). In addition, in the United States in 2014, an estimated 6.5 million people aged twelve or older reported nonmedical use of psychotherapeutic drugs in the past month (the majority involving prescription pain relievers) (SAMHSA 2015). In this chapter, we first discuss the concepts of substance use and abuse, dependence, and addiction. We proceed 43

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to a discussion of the most prominent consciousness-altering substances, grouped into various categories based primarily on their physiological, psychological, and behavioral effects, as opposed to their legal status (due to space considerations, the list is not intended to be exhaustive). We also refer to the classification of these drugs under the US Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (see the appendix). The illegal status of certain drugs is often based on claims that illegal substances are somehow distinct in terms of the harms they pose to individual users and society – however, when substances are evaluated on multiple dimensions of harm, it turns out that there are few differences between legal and illegal drugs. We then address several theories of drug use, including the nature theory, genetic/biological explanations, the disease theory, and psychological and sociological theories. The last three sections of the chapter examine responses to substance use and abuse in the United States, followed by a critical discussion of substance use prevention and treatment programs.

Substance Use and Substance Abuse: Addiction and Dependence It is initially important to distinguish between substance use and substance abuse, as the latter term is frequently loosely applied in order to describe any type of substance use as abuse. For example, in their annual report on arrests in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation refers to arrests for drug offenses as “drug abuse violations.” Clearly, simply being in possession of an illegal drug or consuming it does not constitute substance abuse. More generally, drugs can be evaluated in terms of their ability to generate dependence, which is sometimes referred to as addiction. With respect to substance use, there are two distinct forms of dependence. The first is physical (or physiological)

dependence, which refers to the potential of a drug to generate withdrawal – a set of symptoms that affect the user when the use of a drug is discontinued, in most cases after heavy, long-term use. Physical dependence develops in part because users develop tolerance to some drugs; that is, the body adapts to repeated drug use so that the same dose of a drug produces less of a desired effect. For some drugs, such as alcohol and heroin, the body eventually depends on the presence of some amount of the substance in the system, and when use is discontinued, users may experience physical withdrawal. In addition to physical dependence, consumption of drugs may also result in psychological or behavioral dependence – repetitive and positively reinforced behaviors such as drug use are sometimes accompanied by craving and a tendency to be repeated. Psychological dependence is usually determined according to criteria listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association 2000).1 The DSM distinguishes between substance abuse and substance dependence. According to the DSM criteria, an individual is an abuser of a substance if he or she meets one or more of the following criteria: 1 Recurrent use of the substance resulting in a failure to fulfill major role obligations 2 Recurrent use of the substance in physically hazardous situations 3 Recent drug use related legal problems 4 Continued use of the substance despite having persistent or recurring problems caused by or exacerbated by the use of the substance According to the DSM, an individual is dependent on a substance if they meet at least three criteria from the following list: 1 Tolerance, defined by a need to use increased amounts of the drug to achieve the desired effect 2 Withdrawal, as manifested by the characteristic withdrawal syndrome

substance abuse

3 Using the substance in larger amounts over a longer period of time than intended 4 A persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to reduce use of the drug 5 A considerable amount of time spent obtaining, using, or recovering from the effects of the drug 6 Giving up or reducing important social, occupational, or recreational activities in favor of consuming the substance 7 Continued use of the drug despite persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problems caused or exacerbated by the use of the drug It is important to note that mere use or consumption of a drug does not constitute addiction, abuse, or dependence, despite the fact that these terms are often loosely used to describe an individual’s relationship with a drug (see the appendix).

Types of Drugs Stimulants Stimulants are drugs that make users feel more alert and energetic – exerting these effects by causing nerve fibers in the brain to release adrenaline and additional neurotransmitters. Among legal stimulant drugs are included caffeine, which occurs naturally in plants used to produce coffee, tea, and chocolate – caffeine has long been the most widely used drug in the world. Coffee beans have been chewed for their stimulating effects since at least a.d. 600, and by the late eighteenth century, coffee was being widely consumed in Europe. The other main source of caffeine – tea – was first used medically in China around a.d. 340, and by the early seventeenth century, tea was being used in European countries. While caffeine can be considered a very safe drug compared to other stimulants, like most drugs, the excessive use of the substance is associated with a number of negative side effects, including physical

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dependence. Heavy use of products containing caffeine can produce restlessness, rapid heartbeat, and can cause death by overdose. On the other hand, caffeine can be useful for treating headaches (it is a key ingredient in the over-the-counter headache pain reliever, Excedrin), and may lower the risk of diabetes. In addition, studies have found that the use of green tea is associated with a reduced risk for certain forms of cancer, as well as for heart disease and high cholesterol. A more recent development in substances containing caffeine is the massive increase in sales of high caffeine “energy drinks” (probably the most well known of which is Red Bull). The primary consumers of energy drinks are teenagers and young adults – approximately one-third of all teenagers and young adults, and more than half of college students report regular use of energy drinks. In addition to being consumed on their own, energy drinks are frequently combined with alcohol – such mixtures have been found to result in a higher incidence of risky behaviors. Tobacco, another stimulant drug, was cultivated in South America up to 8,000 years ago and use of the substance spread to European countries in the 1500s. In its raw plant form, tobacco is one of the most powerful stimulants known, and its primary active ingredient, nicotine, is one of the most toxic of all known drugs. In its most commonly used form of cigarettes, it is also one of the most addictive drugs known. Tobacco is associated with a myriad of negative health outcomes, with more than six million people dying from smoking-related diseases annually worldwide Coca is native to South America, and has been cultivated and used by native peoples in South American countries for thousands of years. Although coca contains fourteen different drugs, cocaine is the most important with respect to its psychoactive effects. Prior to the passage of the Food and Drugs Act in the United States in 1906 and the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, cocaine was used for several recreational

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and medical purposes – as many will know, it was an ingredient in Coca-Cola and other products. Users of cocaine typically report feelings of excitement, alertness, pulse rate and blood pressure increases, and insomnia can often result. Crack cocaine, which became popular in the United States in the mid-1980s, is made by dissolving cocaine hydrochloride in water and adding baking soda. Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that the occasional use of small amounts of cocaine poses health threats to users. However, both extended and short-term heavy use of the drug can produce hallucinations, paranoia, and depression, and the substance is likely to generate psychological (although not physical) dependence. It is also important to note that crack cocaine is not more addictive than powder cocaine – there is no pharmacological difference in the addictive liability of the two substances (see also below). Amphetamines are similar to cocaine and are synthesized from adrenaline and ephedrine. The use of these drugs to treat various medical conditions led to the realization that they were strong appetite suppressants, resulting in widespread use (especially by women) in the United States in the 1950s through the 1970s. The type of amphetamine of most concern in recent years has been methamphetamine, the most potent and fast-acting of this group of drugs. Amphetamine use results in increased energy, alertness and stamina, as well as decreased appetite and sleeplessness, and excessive use can lead to paranoia and schizophrenia-like symptoms. Although amphetamines and especially methamphetamines have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, it is important to note that several legal herbal (and other) products, and cold remedies, many of which contain ephedrine (used to create amphetamines) are widely available. The term “bath salts” has been applied by media and government and law enforcement agencies to the broad category of synthetic stimulants. These drugs have stimulant and hallucinogenic properties, with

effects that are similar to cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD, and ecstasy (MDMA). As sensationalistic media accounts of the effects of these drugs proliferated in the first decade of the twenty-first century, governments moved to ban the precursor products used to manufacture them. Methylphenidate, more commonly known by its trade name Ritalin, is a chemical relative of amphetamine, and is a legal drug used predominantly in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Despite the fact that Ritalin and other drugs used to treat ADHD are viewed as different from other stimulants, it is important to note that there is little difference between Ritalin, cocaine, and methamphetamines when considering the effects of these substances rather than the motivation for using them. In recent years, use of these legal ADHD drugs has increased substantially, especially among college students, many of whom consume these substances as “cognitive enhancers.” Sometimes referred to as a “club drug,” ecstasy (MDMA) has effects that are distinct from those produced by other stimulants. This is because ecstasy has effects that are similar to both mescaline and amphetamines, although it does not have as strong a stimulatory effect as other amphetamines. Despite the fact that ecstasy has been demonized as a dangerous drug by some, many in the mental health community believe that the drug is valuable as a therapeutic resource in helping mental patients to access painful emotions. MDMA has also been found to be useful in treating depression, addiction, anxiety, and eating disorders, however, it remains a Schedule I drug in the United States. Depressants Depressant drugs, also known as sedative hypnotics, reduce the energy level of the nervous system, weaken sensitivity to external stimulation, and, in sufficient doses, can induce sleep. Although it is not widely known, depressants are more dangerous than stimulants because the use of these

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substances can kill people by interfering with the vital centers of the brain. Alcohol is the most widely used depressant drug and its use results in approximately 80,000 deaths each year in the United States and 2.5 million deaths globally – there is little doubt that it is responsible for far more fatalities than all illegal drugs combined. Although the short-term consequences of alcohol use are substantial, it is the long-term effects of this drug that are the most damaging. Prolonged and excessive use of alcohol can result in cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, cancer, and brain damage. Additional public health problems associated with alcohol abuse is fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), a condition in which babies born to alcoholic mothers display neurological problems, mental retardation, and facial malformations. However, while there are serious health problems associated with the heavy use of alcohol, there are also health benefits associated with moderate consumption. Research has shown that moderate daily consumption of alcohol may prevent Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, and may also prevent heart attacks. Barbiturates, also referred to as downers, tranquilizers, sedatives, or sleeping pills have been used for more than 100 years. The effects of these drugs are similar to those of alcohol – they depress the brain by interfering with oxygen consumption and produce a reduction in central nervous system activity, leading to drowsiness and problems with muscular coordination. Benzodiazepines were developed in the 1950s to offer a safer alternative to the barbiturates – these best well known of these drugs, Valium, was the best-selling psychoactive pharmaceutical drug in the 1960s and 1970s. Opiates were among the first drugs ever to be used by humans, with records of their use dating back at least as far as 5000 b.c. These drugs are considered a subclass of depressants, because one of their effects is to depress the central nervous system, and they are among the best analgesics (painkillers) known to science. Included in this category of drugs are morphine,

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heroin, codeine, and synthetic opiates such as Oxycontin. Manufactured (and widely marketed) by Purdue Pharma, Oxycontin is a sustained release formula of oxycodone, and is used to treat serious chronic pain. Use of Oxycontin and other prescription opiates in the United States increased substantially from 2000 to 2012, and in 2010, the Centers for Disease Control reported that more than 16,000 deaths in the United States involved prescription opiates. As is the case with other prescription drugs, part of the reason for increases in the use of prescription opiates is the role of large pharmaceutical companies who advertise and market these drugs aggressively – in 2010, it was estimated that prescription opiate drugs generated $11 billion in revenue for pharmaceutical companies. As legislation restricting access to prescription opiates was enacted in the 2010s, many addicted users switched to heroin, which was cheaper than prescription opiates, and readily obtainable. Between 2002 and 2013, the rate of heroin-related overdose deaths nearly quadrupled, with more than 8,200 people dying in 2013 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2014). The heroin problem has become especially severe in northeastern states – the governor of Vermont devoted his entire State of the State address in 2015 to what he referred to as a “full-blown heroin crisis” in that state (Shear 2015). Hallucinogenics/Psychedelics Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was discovered in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, who produced it from a chemical in ergot, a naturally occurring fungus that grows on wheat, rye, and other grasses. After being marketed by Sandoz Laboratories, in the 1950s, LSD became widely used in psychiatric treatment as it proved useful for recovering repressed memories and emotions during psychoanalysis. The US military also experimented with LSD as a debriefing drug or brainwashing agent in the 1940s. As was the case with several other psychoactive drugs, the recreational

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use of LSD spread rapidly during the 1960s, being popularized by prominent individuals such as Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary. Use of this drug can result in adverse psychological effects such as panic attacks and psychotic reactions. Although LSD is classified as a Schedule I controlled substance, there are not withdrawal symptoms associated with its use, and there have been no recorded human fatalities (directly) resulting from its use. Additional hallucinogenic drugs would include psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in several species of mushrooms, and peyote (a small spineless cactus that grows primarily in Texas and northern Mexico). These drugs have been used by indigenous peoples of North America for thousands of years, and although its possession and consumption are illegal in the United States, members of the Native American church are permitted to use peyote. An additional hallucinogenic drug which saw significant increases in use in the 2000s is Salvia (Divinorum), a member of the mint family. Marijuana Marijuana is the most widely used illegal drug in the world and is somewhat difficult to categorize, because it has some properties of the stimulants, depressants, and hallucinogens with respect to its effects. Marijuana refers to a preparation of the leafy material of cannabis plants for smoking, and the terms “cannabis” and “marijuana” are used interchangeably. The primary psychoactive agent in cannabis is delta 9-tetrahydrocannabidinol (THC) which is concentrated in the resin of the cannabis plant. The effects of marijuana are diverse: users of the drug experience changes in perception and it can result in a sense of well-being, feelings of relaxation, a distorted sense of time and distance, laughter, talkativeness, and increased sociability. Its use can also result in paranoia in some users, impaired short-term memory, difficulty concentrating, impaired motor coordination, and slowed reaction time.

However, it is important to note that these effects are not consistent across users. The primary chronic health concern associated with marijuana use is the potential for lung cancer and emphysema, due to the fact that most users consume the drug by smoking it. It has also been alleged that marijuana use is associated with mental illness, including schizophrenia. However, there are questions whether this link is causal, as individuals with mental illness may be “selfmedicating” through the use of marijuana, and any association that may exist between marijuana use and schizophrenia is clearly not strong. Marijuana has been consumed for its medicinal properties for thousands of years, and more recently, research has shown that it can be effective in treating migraine and chronic headaches, relieving the pain, nausea, vomiting, and weight loss associated with surgery, cancer, and AIDS, among other conditions. These medical applications and the safety of the drug when compared to alternative treatments has prompted a call for its reclassification from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act to allow for medical usage. Although (as discussed in more detail below) in 2015, twenty-three states and the District of Columbia allow for medical marijuana use, the federal government has refused to reclassify the drug. “Spice” (synthetic marijuana, also known as K2) refers to a wide variety of herbal mixtures that produce psychoactive experiences similar to marijuana. Use of these drugs increased substantially in the 2000s, and in 2011, the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported close to 7,000 cases of people reporting adverse reactions to Spice. Antidepressant Drugs Antidepressant drugs include prescription drugs such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil (as well as ecstasy) and are also referred to as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). These drugs do not result in users getting “high” in the same way as

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other psychoactive drugs, but they do have the ability to alter perception and mood. Depression is a very serious and pervasive disease, with studies suggesting that it affects approximately 10 percent of adults in the United States, and there is no question that antidepressant drugs have improved and even saved the lives of countless people. However, it is important to note that the effectiveness of SSRIs in treating depression remains a subject of debate. And, in addition to the debate over their effectiveness, antidepressants have numerous side effects, including sexual dysfunction, emotional numbing, insomnia, weight gain, restlessness, and memory lapses, among others. An additional concern is the association between the use of antidepressants and suicidality.

Theories of Substance Use/Abuse There are several theories of why people use and abuse drugs. Some of these are applicable to all forms of drugs and patterns of use, while others are more focused, addressing only a particular drug or a particular pattern of use. Below, we discuss several broad theories of drug use, including the nature perspective, genetic/biological explanations, the disease model, psychological, and sociological theories. Nature Theories Nature theories assert that the desire to use psychoactive substances is an innate and universal drive in humans that is similar to the hunger or sex drive (Weil and Rosen 1998). As articulated by Andrew Weil, a medical doctor and expert on alternative medicine, this perspective notes that, from infancy, humans engage in a variety of behaviors that serve to alter their consciousness, and drugs provide a quick and easy method of achieving this goal. Support for this position is revealed in the ubiquity of substance use across historical time in virtually all human societies and cultures, and the fact that people engage in consciousness alteration through other

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means, such as meditation, intense physical activity, and risk taking behaviors. The nature perspective contends that, because the drive to alter consciousness is present in all humans, drug use should not necessarily be viewed as pathological. Genetic/Biological Theories Genetic or biological theories of substance use contend that individuals who are most likely to use and (particularly) abuse drugs have genetically inherited predispositions to these behaviors. Via genetics, an individual’s biological characteristics are believed to affect the experience of substance use in several ways, including whether the individual feels pleasant after ingesting a particular drug, and whether the consumption of the drug increases instead of reducing feelings of anxiety, among other things. The vast majority of research on genetic/biological theories of substance use have focused on alcohol, with far less attention paid to other psychoactive substances. This research includes twin studies, most of which have found identical twins to be more similar than fraternal twins in terms of patterns of alcoholism, and adoption studies, which have also found support for the hypothesis that a predisposition to alcoholism may be inherited. However, it is important to stress that several factors other than genetics may explain these findings. Possible confounding factors include peer influence on substance use, systematic differences in those selected to participate in this research, and the inability (particularly in twin studies) to completely control for the influence of environmental factors. Disease Theory Disease theories of drug use are somewhat similar to genetic theories; some versions emphasize genetic/inherited factors in the etiology of addiction, while others emphasize psychological processes. All disease perspectives tend to phrase the discussion of drug use in medical terms and contend that addiction should be conceptualized

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in the same way as traditional medical problems – this is why the disease model is sometimes referred to as the medical model of substance use. The disease model is supposedly applicable to all drugs of abuse, but has focused primarily on alcohol. While the development of the disease model in the United States dates to at least 1784 (with US Founding Father and physician, Benjamin Rush), its popularity and acceptance is most strongly associated with the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in 1935. AA proposed that alcoholism was essentially an “allergy to alcohol” that could only be “treated” with total abstinence from the substance. Interestingly, the disease model and its conception of addiction has been applied to a wide variety of non-drug-related patterns of compulsive behavior, including eating, surfing the Web, exercise, shopping, sleeping, sex, tanning, and gambling, among others. Psychological Theories There are several psychological theories of substance use and abuse – these tend to emphasize either the importance of reinforcement and punishment (social learning theories) or the importance of dysfunctional personality characteristics or type. Self-derogation theory regards illegal drug use and the abuse of legal drugs as being the result of self-rejection and a lack of self-esteem. Problem behavior theory views substance use as just one of a number of various problem behaviors, including a willingness to take risks and a commitment to unconventionality that are symptomatic of a broader underlying condition. Social learning theory can be included under psychological or sociological perspectives. These theories assert that substance use can be reinforced both socially and psychologically – as in the case of receiving positive feedback from one’s peers for getting high, but can also be reinforced in a physiological sense based on the effects of the drug being consumed. Some social learning theorists also emphasize the role of imitation and modeling on substance use,

pointing out that (especially) adolescent substance use is often associated with substance use and abuse by the adolescents’ parents, as well as peers’ use of substances. Sociological Theories Social control or social bonding theory asserts that individuals will engage in deviant behavior (including substance use and abuse) to the extent that their bond to society is weak and broken. This bond reflects a person’s integration into conventional society and includes relationships to family, conventional friends, employment, education, religion, community organizations, and other institutions in society. According to social control theory, the greater the number and strength of ties that bind the individual to conventional society, the less likely it is that the individual will engage in substance use and abuse. Life course theories (also referred to as developmental theories) of substance use are most suited to explaining stability and change in the occurrence of this type of behavior over the life course. For example, a substantial proportion of people engage in illegal drug use during adolescence but eventually “age out” of this behavior. Anomie or strain theories propose that when societies or cultures are characterized by an imbalance in their social order, it creates conditions favorable to substance use. According to anomie theory, there is a discrepancy between the valued goals in American society, particularly monetary success, and the legitimate means to attain these goals, such as high-paying jobs. Individuals experiencing such discrepancies may turn to the use of substance in order to deal with the stress/strain created by the discrepancies. A promising and more recent theory of substance abuse and other addictions includes certain aspects of the theories discussed above, as well as additional factors. Gabor Mate (2010) argues that many addictions can be viewed as the individual’s attempt to deal with adverse childhood experiences and trauma across the life

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course through (in the case of drugs) selfmedication. This theory emphasizes the neuroplasticity of the human brain, and suggests that exposure to trauma (both in childhood and throughout the life course) can create physical changes in the brain, which can ultimately lead to drug addiction.

Responding to Substance Use and Abuse Beginning with the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914 and continuing through the current period, the United States has focused on a criminal justice (as opposed to medical) response to drug use. The Harrison Act launched a policy of arresting and incarcerating increasingly large numbers of drug users and traffickers in drugs that became illegal under the Act. In 2010, there were 1,638,846 arrests for what the Federal Bureau of Investigation inappropriately refers to as “drug abuse violations,” comprising more than 12 percent of total arrests in that year, and constituting about the same number of arrests as for murder, rape, robbery, burglary, and theft combined (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2011). Within this total, arrests for possession of drugs were about four times greater than arrests for trafficking, and marijuana arrests constituted 52 percent of all drug arrests. Between 2000 and 2010, nearly 8 million people were arrested on marijuana charges in the United States. Arrests for drug offenses and the severe penalties typically associated with drug law violations have been a major driver in unprecedented levels of imprisonment in the United States – as of December, 2013, there were more than 2.2 million people incarcerated. Fifty percent of sentenced inmates in the federal prison system were serving time for drug offenses and approximately 16 percent of state prisoners were convicted drug offenders (Carson 2015). As of the mid-2000s, the United States had 100,000 more people incarcerated for drug offenses than the European Union had for all offenses combined, despite the fact that

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the European Union had 100 million more inhabitants (Wood et al. 2003). An examination of illegal drug policies and their application reveals that both historically and in the contemporary period, they have had a disproportionately negative impact on members of minority groups in the United States, particularly African Americans (Alexander 2010). It is estimated that approximately 14 percent of all users of illegal drugs in the United States are African American (SAMHSA 2011), however, in 2010 this comprised 34 percent of those arrested for drug offenses. More generally, from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, African Americans constituted 38 percent of all drug arrests, 59 percent of prosecutions for drug offenses, and 75 percent of those incarcerated for such offenses (Harkavy 2005). It is important to stress that the higher arrest rates for blacks are not the result of higher rates of illegal drug use by blacks – African Americans use illegal drugs in approximately the same proportion as whites. Instead, these higher arrest rates for blacks are at least partially the result of law enforcement’s emphasis on inner-city areas where illegal drug use and trafficking are more likely to occur in the open, and where African Americans are disproportionately concentrated. An additional and related problematic aspect of drug laws in the United States has been the passage of mandatory minimum sentences for drug law violations. Although mandatory minimum sentences have been a part of criminal laws in the United States since 1790, they have had their greatest impact since the mid-1980s. At the federal level, the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act created mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, with the most important change being a distinction between crack and powder cocaine. Under the legislation, a first-time offender convicted of possession of 5.01 grams of crack cocaine was subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of five years imprisonment. In contrast, for possession of powder cocaine, the five year mandatory minimum sentence did not apply until an individual possessed

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more than 500 grams of the substance. This distinction is despite the fact that crack and powder cocaine are basically the same drugs pharmacologically and have the same effects. Similar to other laws related to drugs, this distinction resulted in further over-representation of African Americans in the criminal justice system, as the laws were disproportionately applied to them. In addition to the creation of mandatory minimum sentences for violations of drug statutes, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act provided enhanced mandatory minimum penalties for individuals convicted of trafficking in drugs within 1,000 feet of locations where youth congregate (schools, playgrounds, youth centers, swimming pools), and required public housing agencies to evict tenants if the tenant, a member of his or her family, or guests were involved in drug-related crimes. Additional legislation passed in the 1990s further disadvantaged those convicted of drug offenses. For example, under a provision of the 1996 federal Welfare Reform Act, any individual convicted of a felony drug offense can be denied welfare benefits. Under provisions of the Higher Education Act, passed in 1998, individuals convicted of a drug offense, including possession of marijuana, can be denied student financial aid. It is important to note that neither of the above two provisions apply to individuals who commit murder, rape, and other serious crimes. There are, however, signs that the severity of drug laws may be relaxing somewhat, with most of this activity taking place at the state level. In 2010, the federal Fair Sentencing Act passed, which narrowed the gap between crack and powder cocaine for sentencing from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1. In defending this change, then Attorney General Eric Holder commented, “There is simply no logical reason why their [crack cocaine users/traffickers] sentences should be more severe than those of other cocaine offenders” (as quoted in Serrano, Savage, and Williams 2011). As a result of this change, an estimated 12,000 federal prisoners would be eligible for sentence length reductions.

The federal government has also gradually been moving toward an approach to drugs that places more emphasis on treatment as opposed to incarceration, manifested in the increased support of, and funding for, drug courts (see below). At the level of state governments, several states have relaxed penalties for drug law violations. In part, this shift in thinking emanates from a realization that drug treatment can be effective and also may provide a cost-effective alternative to the very costly practice of incarcerating large numbers of nonviolent drug offenders. Most prominently, and despite the fact that marijuana remains a Schedule I drug under federal legislation, as of 2015, twenty-three states and Washington, DC, had legalized marijuana for medical purposes, and four states (Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) and Washington, DC, had legalized recreational marijuana. It is predicted that several other states will include marijuana legalization measures on their ballots in the 2016 elections.

Drug Use Prevention Programs Drug use prevention programs in the United States are consistent with, and founded on many of the same misguided themes and principles as the policies discussed above. And, relative to the funds devoted to law enforcement, corrections, and treatment in dealing with illegal drugs, prevention programs are grossly underfunded and characterized by neglect, and, in some cases, suppression of scientific information that should be used to inform them. These programs are also characterized by the dominance of vested bureaucratic interests in shaping and maintaining them, and, probably most importantly, by their almost universal failure to achieve their stated goals of preventing or reducing drug use. Most prominent in this regard is the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, which was developed by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1987 and quickly became the most prominent

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school-based drug education program in the United States (it also was adopted in more than forty countries). Although the number of schools using the DARE program has declined substantially in recent years, in the early 2000s, the program had been adopted in nearly 80 percent of schools, at an estimated cost of between $1 billion and $1.3 billion per year. As Rosenbaum (2002) notes, DARE programs, whose mantra was “Just Say No to Drugs,” were characterized by a number of problematic myths about drugs, including: (1) experimentation with drugs is not a common aspect of youth culture; (2) any drug use is equivalent to, or will eventually lead to, drug abuse; (3) marijuana is a gateway to hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine (i.e., drug users start with marijuana and proceed to the use of harder drugs); and (4) exaggerating the risks associated with drug use will deter young people from experimenting with such drugs. This misinformation can have counterproductive effects, in many cases leading youth to reject all of the antidrug messages they are exposed to in DARE programs. While the initial, largely unscientific evaluations of DARE, which were typically conducted by DARE officials themselves, asserted that the program was effective in reducing youth drug use, virtually every scientific study of the program found that it either had no effect on drug use or, in some cases, actually lead to increases in drug use (Wright 2001). Although changes to the traditional DARE program have been made in the 2000s, the fundamental program has not changed, as police officers still deliver classroom-based drug prevention education, and many of the myths surrounding drugs promoted by DARE remain intact. An additional drug prevention strategy that has been prominent in the United States over the past few decades, and which the federal government spent more than $1.4 billion on between 1998 and 2007, is antidrug advertisements sponsored by the Partnership for a Drug Free America and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Similar to the DARE program, these ads served to reinforce a number of myths and

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stereotypes about drugs – for example, the idea that use of all illegal drugs causes extensive brain damage, that marijuana is a gateway drug, that the use of illegal drugs leads to involvement in risky sexual activities (including homosexual activities), and that illegal drug traffickers are largely foreigners. An evaluation of the effectiveness of the antidrug advertising campaign by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that the ads had not reduced drug use among youth, and may have also led to the counterproductive effect of increasing marijuana use (Hornik et al. 2002). Later analyses by the US Government Accountability Office (2005, 2006) found the campaign to be ineffective in reducing youth drug use. A final example of policies implemented with the purpose of preventing youth drug use are zero tolerance school policies, which result in suspension and/or expulsion of students who possess or consume alcohol or other drugs (and/or possess “weapons”) on school property. By the late 1990s, close to 90 percent of schools in the United States had adopted zero tolerance policies. Examples of the questionable application of these policies include students being suspended from school for sharing lemon drops; possessing over-the-counter medications such as Advil, Midol, Tylenol, and Alka Seltzer; using inhalers, consuming mouthwash, and sniffing Kool-Aid and Wite-out. While these individual cases (and others) should be of concern, more problematic are the social class and racial disparities in their application. Furthermore, research indicates that zero tolerance policies can actually lead to overall increases in youth drug use, as students who are suspended or expelled are more likely to drop out of school, and dropouts are more likely to use drugs.

Drug Treatment In discussing drug treatment, it is initially important to emphasize that the majority of people who consume psychoactive substances do not become substance

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abusers, and as such do not require drug treatment (although, as discussed below, they are frequently coerced into treatment). And of the relatively small portion of users who do escalate to substance abuse, the condition is usually temporary, and most will quit or regain control of their drug use without any formal treatment program (Lewis 2015). An additional central issue in drug treatment is that the motivation of the individual to change is likely the most important factor in predicting successful treatment outcomes. There are several different approaches to drug treatment (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive – i.e., much of drug treatment involves combining aspects of the strategies listed below), including: (1) pharmacological treatment, a strategy that employs the use of drugs or medications to treat substance abuse – examples here would be methadone maintenance for heroin addicts, or nicotine replacement therapy for those addicted to nicotine; (2) residential drug treatment, which involves “patients” living in a treatment facility for periods of from (typically) one month to two years; (3) compulsory drug treatment, which is a treatment that is mandated in some way by the criminal justice system; (4) Alcoholics Anonymous and related peer-support and twelve-step programs; and (5) outpatient drug treatment, which involves a range of treatment options that individuals can receive while they reside in the community. Given space concerns and given their prominence in drug treatment in the United States, we focus here on Alcoholics Anonymous and related programs, and compulsory drug court programs, which have significantly expanded in number over the last few decades. Alcoholics Anonymous The dominant substance abuse treatment model in the United States, which applies across a host of domains, is Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs. As discussed earlier, AA was founded in 1935 – AA and related groups such as

Narcotics Anonymous are peer-based selfhelp groups in which individuals identified as alcoholics/addicts attend meetings in their community with other like-situated individuals, enabling them to draw on each other for support and understanding in their struggles with addiction. As also noted earlier, AA is based on the disease model of addiction, which characterizes addiction as an incurable, degenerative disease that is characterized by a loss of control when exposed to psychoactive substances, and will ultimately result in death if left untreated. The twelve steps that guide recovery from addiction under AA (and other twelve-step programs) places considerable emphasis on spirituality (e.g., Step 2 – “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”; Step 6 – “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character”) – this emphasis has resulted in some critics characterizing AA as being equivalent to a “fanatical religious cult” (Trice and Staudenmeier 1989). The adherence to religious authority central to AA also contributes to a number of logical inconsistencies within its twelve steps. For example, the first step involves conceding personal power over addiction, followed by the second step’s commitment to a higher power in order to restore sanity. Inconsistent with the first two steps is the third – requiring that decisions be turned over to the will of the higher power, and this raises the issue of how one could turn over power to a higher power when the individual is already powerless and supposedly dependent on that higher power for change. Despite the prevalence of twelve-step addiction treatment programs in the United States (especially as compared to other Western industrialized nations), there is only limited and equivocal scientific evidence on the effectiveness of these programs in treating addictions. Drug Courts With the goal of reducing reliance on incarceration for those convicted of drug law

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violations, the first drug court was created in Miami, Florida, in 1989. Since that time, drug courts (and related “therapeutic specialty courts”) have expanded considerably in the United States – there are currently more than 3,000 drug and other spin-off specialty courts in the United States, including juvenile drug courts, family drug courts, driving under the influence courts, mental health courts and Veterans’ courts, among others. While there is considerable variation across drug court programs with respect to who is eligible to participate, they typically accept “offenders with a long history of drug use and criminal justice system contacts, previous treatment failures, and high rates of health and social problems” (Belenko 2001). In drug courts, offenders (now referred to as “clients”) are expected to engage in drug treatment as a condition of avoiding incarceration, are required to attend a variety of twelve-step and other meetings, are subject to frequent, usually random, urinalysis tests, and are subject to sanctions (including the possibility of incarceration) if they fail to comply with these and other program requirements. In comparison to the traditional legal model, drug courts are based on a “therapeutic jurisprudence” model, with an active role played by the judge and other drug court team members (which typically includes probation counselors, treatment providers, defense counsel and prosecutors, and law enforcement). The emphasis in these courts is less about assigning blame and punishment to individuals with substance use problems, and more about achieving positive change in the life of the offender. Most studies assessing the effectiveness of drug courts have found them to be reasonably successful in reducing drug use and recidivism among treated populations (and especially those who graduate from drug courts), at least in the short term. Perhaps more importantly, research has confirmed that drug courts produce substantial cost savings when compared to incarceration.

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However, drug courts have come under increased scrutiny recently, and two recent meta-analyses (Mitchell et al. 2012; Shaffer 2011) suggest that the positive outcomes in drug courts with respect to recidivism reported in the literature have been somewhat inflated. In addition, there is emerging evidence of social class, gender, and racial/ethnic biases in terms of who is admitted to drug court, and who graduates from drug court. But the broader concerns are related to the possible “net widening” and “mesh tightening” aspects of drug court. Net widening refers to the expansion of criminal justice system influence – drug courts may contribute to forcing greater numbers of nonviolent, first-time offenders who are believed to have substance abuse problems into coerced treatment and intensive monitoring. Drug court clients tend to have greater scrutiny than average citizens, those on probation, and even (arguably) those in prison, and criminal justice system officials may discover and sanction minor offenses that previously were ignored. However, drug courts are certainly a more humane solution to drug problems than simply incarcerating offenders with substance abuse problems.

Conclusion Millions of people worldwide consume substances to alter their consciousness, but in discussing such use, it is important to distinguish between simple use and substance abuse. The classification of drugs under drug scheduling in the United States is at least somewhat arbitrary, and the United States has adopted a criminalization approach in addressing use of these substances. This approach has resulted in unprecedented levels of incarceration, and gross racial and ethnic disparities in the application of these laws. Drug prevention and treatment programs are characterized by several of the same myths surrounding psychoactive substances that inform US drug laws and are largely ineffective. In recent years, several Western industrialized

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nations have adopted drug policies which place more emphasis on principles of harm reduction – emphasizing that the damage done by the response to drug use must be weighed against the harms posed by drug use itself. Although the specifics of these policies vary widely across countries, the lack of substantial increases in drug use following these policy changes suggest that the United States should consider a more balanced approach in reducing the harms associated with substance use.

Glossary Addiction In the context of substance use, addiction refers to a person’s inability to stop using a drug when it is causing him or her problems. The term is very loosely used in society and has been applied to many behaviors that have nothing to do with drugs. Controlled Substances Act This act, which was passed in 1970, classifies drugs into five schedules. The legal classification of a drug under this Act is allegedly based on (1) the potential for abuse of the drug, (2) whether the drug has medical applications, and (3) the potential of the drug to generate psychological and physical dependence. DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) A school-based drug education program led by police officers. There is little scientific evidence that DARE has realized its stated purpose of reducing substance use by youth. Physical dependence The potential of a drug to generate a withdrawal syndrome. Drugs that are not accompanied by a withdrawal syndrome when long-term or heavy use is stopped are not regarded as physically addicting. Psychological dependence A desire to repeatedly use a drug. A drug that cannot cause a user to become physically dependent may still be able to produce psychological dependence. Tolerance A need for increased amounts of a drug to achieve the desired effect or

a markedly diminished effect with continued use of the same amount of the substance. Withdrawal A predictable set of symptoms that affect the user when use of a drug is discontinued after some period of use.

Appendix: Drug Schedules Drugs, substances, and certain chemicals used to make drugs are classified into five (5) distinct categories or schedules depending upon the drug’s acceptable medical use and the drug’s abuse or dependency potential. The abuse rate is a determinate factor in the scheduling of the drug; for example, Schedule I drugs are considered the most dangerous class of drugs with a high potential for abuse and potentially severe psychological and/or physical dependence. As the drug schedule changes – Schedule II, Schedule III, etc., so does the abuse potential – Schedule V drugs represents the least potential for abuse. A listing of drugs and their schedule are located at Controlled Substance Act (CSA) Scheduling or CSA Scheduling by Alphabetical Order. These lists describes the basic or parent chemical and do not necessarily describe the salts, isomers and salts of isomers, esters, ethers and derivatives which may also be classified as controlled substances. These lists are intended as general references and are not comprehensive listings of all controlled substances. Please note that a substance need not be listed as a controlled substance to be treated as a Schedule I substance for criminal prosecution. A controlled substance analogue is a substance which is intended for human consumption and is structurally or pharmacologically substantially similar to or is represented as being similar to a Schedule I or Schedule II substance and is not an approved medication in the United States. (See 21 USC §802(32)(A) for the definition of a controlled substance analogue and 21 USC §813 for the schedule.)

substance abuse

Schedule I Schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule I drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence. Some examples of Schedule I drugs are heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), marijuana (cannabis), 3,4methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy), methaqualone, and peyote

Schedule II Schedule II drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with a high potential for abuse, less abuse potential than Schedule I drugs, with use potentially leading to severe psychological or physical dependence. These drugs are also considered dangerous. Some examples of Schedule II drugs are combination products with less than 15 milligrams of hydrocodone per dosage unit (Vicodin), cocaine, methamphetamine, methadone, hydromorphone (Dilaudid), meperidine (Demerol), oxycodone (OxyContin), fentanyl, Dexedrine, Adderall, and Ritalin

Schedule III Schedule III drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence. Schedule III drugs abuse potential is less than Schedule I and Schedule II drugs but more than Schedule IV. Some examples of Schedule III drugs are products containing less than 90 milligrams of codeine per dosage unit (Tylenol with codeine), ketamine, anabolic steroids, testosterone

Schedule IV Schedule IV drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with a low potential for

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abuse and low risk of dependence. Some examples of Schedule IV drugs are Xanax, Soma, Darvon, Darvocet, Valium, Ativan, Talwin, Ambien, Tramadol

Schedule V Schedule V drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with lower potential for abuse than Schedule IV and consist of preparations containing limited quantities of certain narcotics. Schedule V drugs are generally used for antidiarrheal, antitussive, and analgesic purposes. Some examples of Schedule V drugs are cough preparations with less than 200 milligrams of codeine or per 100 milliliters (Robitussin AC), Lomotil, Motofen, Lyrica, Parepectolin Source: Drug Enforcement Agency (2005)

Note 1. Although the DSM-5 has slightly revised definitions, we refer to DSM-IV here, as the new definitions have not been widely adopted.

References Alexander, M. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press. American Psychiatric Association. 2000. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Belenko, S. 2001. Research on Drug Courts: A Critical Review, 2001 Update. New York: National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2011. Crime in the United States. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics. Carson, A. 2015. Prisoners in 2014. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice and Bureau of Justice Statistics. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2014. Today’s Heroin Epidemic. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Drug Enforcement Agency. 2005. Drugs of Abuse. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice. Harkavy, W. 2005. The numbers beyond the bling. Village Voice. January 4. www .villagevoice.com/2004/12/28/the-numbers -beyond-the-bling/ Hornik, R., et al. 2002. Evaluation of the National Youth Anti-drug Media Campaign: Fourth Semi-annual Report of Findings. Rockville, MD: Westat. Lewis, M. 2015. The Biology of Desire. New York: Public Affairs. Mate, G. 2010. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Mitchell, O., et al. 2012. Assessing the effectiveness of drug courts on recidivism: A metaanalysis of traditional and non-traditional drug courts. Journal of Criminal Justice 40:60–71. Rosenbaum, M. 2002. Safety First: A RealityBased Approach to Teens, Drugs, and Drug Education. San Francisco: Drug Policy Alliance. Serrano, R., D. Savage, and C. Williams. 2011. Early release proposed for crack cocaine offenders. Los Angeles Times. June 1. http:// articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/01/nation/la-na -holder-crack-20110602 Shaffer, D. 2011. Looking inside the black box of drug courts: A meta-analytic review. Justice Quarterly 28:493–521. Shear, M. 2015. U.S. budgets cash to treat heroin abuse in Northeast. New York Times. August 17. www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/us/ white-house-plan-to-combat-heroin-abuse -focuses-on-treatment.html

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). 2011. Results from the 2010 NSDUH. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. 2015. Results from the 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Trice, H., and W. Staudenmeier. 1989. A sociocultural history of Alcoholics Anonymous. In Recent Developments in Alcoholism: Volume 7: Treatment Research, edited by M. Galanter, 11–35. New York: Plenum Press. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. 2015. World Drug Report. Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. US Government Accountability Office. 2005. Anti-Drug Media Campaign. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2006. ONDCP Media Campaign. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office. Weil, A., and W. Rosen. 1998. From Chocolate to Morphine. Boston: Houghton Miffin. Wright, K. 2001. DARE rethinks drug prevention. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 15. www .Seattlepi.com. Wood, E., et al. 2003. The health care and fiscal costs of the illicit drug epidemic: The impact of conventional drug control strategies, and the potential of a comprehensive approach. British Columbia Medical Journal 45: 128–34.

CHAPTER 4

Epidemics, Pandemics, and Outbreaks Martin French, Eric Mykhalovskiy, and Carmen Lamothe

Abstract How do epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks become recognized as social problems? In this chapter, we suggest that the constructionist perspective focuses on the perception of these phenomena as social problems, often neglecting their materiality. A complementary approach, organized by the concept of medicalization, directs attention to the processes of authority and social control that both produce and regulate epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks as social problems. In our view, these approaches, while important for the study of medicalized social problems more generally, are somewhat ill-suited to the study of epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. Accordingly, we turn to Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality, refracted through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), as an alternative approach. This yields a perspective on epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks that arcs back to materiality and also brings attention to the actor-networks, processes, and practices that (imperfectly) translate these phenomena into social problems. As we argue, this method of analysis should consider, at a minimum, (1) cultural understandings about bodily vulnerability; (2) social processes of stigmatization and marginalization; (3) structural inequalities and structural violence; and (4) public health efforts to detect and preempt disease spread.

Introduction: The Widespread Occurrence of Undesirable Phenomena The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definition of the term epidemic: “a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time,” such as “a flu epidemic.” Beyond this, it sug-

gests that the term could be applied to any class of “undesirable phenomena,” for example “an epidemic of violent crime” (ibid). Pandemic, in comparison, connotes something larger than epidemic. From the Greek, pand¯emos (from pan “all” + d¯emos “people”), pandemic suggests the occurrence of an undesirable phenomenon, which affects “a whole country or the world.” Outbreak,

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meanwhile, suggests suddenness, the “violent start of something unwelcome, such as war, disease, etc.” Epidemics and pandemics could, under certain conditions, be described as outbreaks (think of popular culture representations, such as the 1995 Wolfgang Petersen film Outbreak or the 2011 Steven Soderbergh film Contagion, both of which fictionalized the outbreak and spread of infectious viruses). All three terms could be applied to describe many different kinds of undesirable phenomena. Consequently, the literature that one can draw on to characterize them is vast. On the basis of these definitions, we could easily discuss in this chapter an epidemic of hurricanes, the pandemic spread of American cultural products, or the outbreak of dancing at a party. Indeed, because these concepts are part of everyday speech and popular discourse, they are commonly used to refer to a wide variety of phenomena that stand outside of issues of health and disease. Moreover, they have been used recently to underpin processes of medicalization whereby particular physical states come to be recognized and acted on as widespread social problems. For example, researchers who have framed obesity as an epidemic have sought to raise awareness of its social dimensions and its public health implications, as well as to catalyze structural responses, such as increased access to healthy food, and the regulation of junk food advertising (e.g., Ebbeling et al. 2002; Moffat 2010). Within discourse on communicable or contagious disease, epidemic, pandemic, and outbreak typically refer to conditions that stem from viral or bacterial infection. News headlines in recent years have reported on, for example, the Ebola epidemic, the worldwide risk posed by pandemic influenza, local outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness caused by salmonella infection, and, in 2015–2016, the Zika virus. In this chapter, we shall confine our commentary to these kinds of usages, focusing especially on their connotations in the context of discourse on infectious disease.

We want to consider how epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks of infectious disease become recognized as social problems, and with what consequences. Additionally, we will discuss the implications, for the study of social problems, of focusing on epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. In contrast with previous social problems scholarship that has taken health or disease as focal points, we suggest that epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks call forth a different set of analytic concerns. Epidemic, pandemic, and outbreak are all concepts that connote the scale and spread of disease. They call to mind the way that diseases can escalate and affect growing numbers of bodies and populations. They also indicate the peculiar mobility of infectious agents, which transform the bodies of humans and other animals into vectors in order to move through space and across time. To explore these considerations, we begin with a brief discussion of social problems theory. Next we consider how the issue of medicalization has been taken up in the social problems literature. We then turn to a consideration of epidemics, pandemics and outbreaks as social problems, focusing our discussion on (1) cultural understandings and anxieties about bodily vulnerability, (2) social processes of stigmatization and marginalization, (3) structural inequalities and forms of structural violence, and (4) the role played by public health in the identification of infectious disease and its constitution as a social problem.

Social Problems Theory Research on social problems covers a vast array of issues and draws from diverse theoretical traditions. This diversity stems, in part at least, from what Joel Best has described as the “great advantage” and “glaring flaw” of the social problem concept. “The advantage,” he writes, “was that the term seemed familiar and most people thought they understood what it meant; the flaw was that it proved almost impossible

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to define social problems in any analytically satisfactory way” (Best 2004, 14). Jamrozik and Nocella (1998) offer a useful account of social problems theory, outlining seven perspectives that give “a historical overview of the changes” in the sociological theorization of social problems (23). These authors begin with a discussion of what they call the (1) social pathology perspective, which emerged during the later part of the nineteenth century, and which “was built on an organic analogy” that explained “such problems as poverty, crime, drunkenness and dependency” with reference to “flaws of human character” (24). Jamrozik and Nocella note that elements of this perspective still persist today, for example in the search for underlying genetic causes for certain personal characteristics deemed to be “undesirable” (25). Next discussed is the (2) social disorganization perspective, developed in the 1920s at the University of Chicago and most closely associated with Robert E. Park. This perspective shifted the focus from the individual “to the social and economic environment” (25). Recognition of the role of culture, and of the subjective perception of social reality, are characteristic of this perspective. Next Jamrozik and Nocella describe what they call the (3) value conflict perspective. They argue that this developed during the 1930s “as an outcome of the Great Depression” (26). Characteristic of this perspective was the view that “an objective social condition may be perceived differently by different persons” and the consequent conceptualization of a social problem as an objective condition that is subjectively defined (26). Working in some senses in contrast with the value conflict perspective was what Jamrozik and Nocella describe as the (4) deviant behavior perspective. Although this perspective emerged in the 1930s, the height of its popularity was in the 1950s and 1960s (26). Most closely associated with Robert K. Merton’s work on social structure and anomie, this perspective viewed socially deviant behavior as “a form of adaptation” to “structural arrangements” (27).

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Deviant behavior – behavior that, in this perspective, becomes a social problem – was argued to stem from an individual’s inability to achieve social goals through legitimate means. Jamrozik and Nocella next discuss the (5) labeling perspective. This is described as emerging in the 1950s with the goal of turning attention away from the so-called deviant person, who had been the focus of the deviant behavior perspective, and onto “the people who had the power to define the appropriateness or legitimacy of certain social conduct and apply the label of ‘normalcy’ or ‘deviance’ to those who engaged in such conduct” (27). Howard S. Becker’s work on Outsiders is held up as the exemplar of this perspective because it argued that a deviant person was simply a person “to whom that label has successfully been applied” (cited in Jamrozik and Nocella 1998, 28). Next Jamrozik and Nocella discuss (6) critical theory, suggesting that this perspective emerged in social problems scholarship in the 1970s. “The essence” of this perspective, according to Jamrozik and Nocella, “is the argument that the nature of social problems and their etiology can be properly studied and understood only in the context of the social system in which such problems occur” (29). Unsurprisingly, critical theorists emphasized the study of a society’s political economy and a focus on social structure, as opposed to social groupings or individuals within in these groups. Both the labeling perspective and the critical theory perspective were instrumental in the critique of social problems scholarship for its assumed value neutrality (29–30). Finally, Jamrozik and Nocella describe the (7) constructionist perspective. Emerging in social problems literature during the 1970s as a result of dissatisfaction with the “objectivist stance” (Best 1989, cited in Jamrozik and Nocella 1998, 30), this perspective emphasized the study of the processes of social problem construction. Citing the work of Spector and Kitsuse (1987), as well as Best (1980), Jamrozik and Nocella argue that the

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theoretical assumption of this perspective clearly distinguishes social phenomena from physical phenomena, in that social phenomena are not perceived to have an independent existence from the perception and interpretation of the observer. In the study of social problems the focus of this perspective is therefore primarily on the processes through which a social condition is perceived as a social problem, and not on the condition itself. (30)

The constructionist perspective was recognized, during the 1990s, as highly visible and “influential” in the study of social problems (e.g., Bogen and Lynch 1993). However, in the years since the rise of this perspective, several challenges have been raised. Challenges to the Constructionist Perspective Best (1993) describes the emergence, during the 1980s, of what he calls the “strict” constructionist perspective. Characterized by an avoidance of “any contamination by objectivism” and an exhortation “to shun all assumptions about the empirical world” (135), this perspective was a response to earlier criticisms of the epistemological and ontological assumptions often found in constructionist approaches (e.g., Woolgar and Pawluch 1985). However, the difficulty with the strict constructionist perspective, Best (1993) argues, was that it took constructionist theory “too seriously” (143). He writes: Just as quantitative researchers continually risk sacrificing sociological substance for more elaborate research designs and more sophisticated statistics, qualitative researchers must balance substance against the demands of theoretical consistency. Analytic purity can come at a terrible cost. Constructionist theory warns against being distracted by the conditions about which claims are made, but the implications of strict constructionism push the analyst well beyond that boundary, into a contextless region where claimsmaking may only be examined in the abstract. The sociology of social problems began with the assumption that sociological knowledge might help people under-

stand and improve the world; strict constructionism sells that birthright for a mess of epistemology. (143)

Such criticisms, leveled at the underlying epistemological and ontological assumptions of (a variant of) the constructionist perspective, highlighted some more general challenges. However, as Miller (1993) notes, whereas there was once a rejection of the idea that social problems were constructed, many “contemporary criticisms are not organized as outright rejections of the constructionist perspective, but as attempts to relocate social constructionists’ concerns and studies within perspectives that the critics argue are more comprehensive” (254). For example, one line of critique has emphasized “the realist and elitist assumptions of social constructionism,” arguing that, “while social constructionists state that social problems conditions only exist as claimsmaking activities, social constructionists’ analyses actually treat social problems conditions and claims as observable” (254). Another line of critique holds that the constructionist focus on claimsmaking activity misses causes of social problems that may operate beyond claimsmakers’ knowledge. From this perspective, because such causes are not matters of conscious reflection or public debate, they are also left out of social constructionist analysis (254). Arcing Back toward Materiality In his provocative 2013 Presidential Address at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, Ricardo Dello Buono (2015) reviewed the state of constructionist approaches to social problems and identified “an urgent need to arc back towards the materiality lurking behind social constructionist imaginary” (333). For Dello Buono, the contemporary constructionist perspective, even in its “patched-up and re-politicized eclectic phase,” was losing its capacity “to generate new insights for confronting social problems” and to “interface with the ‘actually existing’ struggles

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unfolding in the current global economic crisis” (331). Eschewing what he calls a “left postmodernist reading of the constructionist legacy” that “leans on” the Foucaultian tradition, Dello Buono advances a strategy to the study of social problems that emphasizes “a dialectical approach” (335). Drawing from the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács, and the Hungarian critical theorist István Mészáros, Dello Buono advocates for a praxis-centered, dialectical analysis that would allow scholar-activists “to find better prototypes for envisioning how the social construction of reality can be replaced with reimagining the reality of social construction” (336). In making the case for a dialectic approach to the study of social problems, Dello Buono takes issue with left postmodernism’s theorization of power. While Foucault argues that power by its nature implies resistance, it is in theorizing exactly how power in practice also shapes its own resistances that forms the weak spot in left postmodernism. Foucault’s spiraling reflexivity usually ends in pessimism if not outright reactionary de-legitimation of any real manifestation of an emancipatory project. (337)

While we are sympathetic with much of Dello Buono’s critique of the constructionist perspective, we find that Foucault’s theorization of power is particularly important for understanding our particular problematic of epidemics, pandemics and outbreaks as social problems. In our view, Foucault’s work is not antithetical to constructionist efforts that arc back toward materiality. Below we will suggest that Foucault, in conversation with contributions from science and technology scholars and actor-network theorists (e.g., Haraway 1997; Latour 2005; Star 1988), can shed important light on the complex dynamics that are integral to the materialization of epidemics, pandemics and outbreaks as social problems. Before turning to this discussion, however, it will be worthwhile to briefly consider social problems literature on medicalization. As we shall illus-

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trate, Foucault’s insights, particularly when refracted through the lens of actor-network theory, suggest a mode of social problems analysis that arcs back to materiality. For the study of epidemics, pandemics and outbreaks, this mode of analysis gives us something provocatively different than the mode of analysis organized by the concept of medicalization. Medicalization and Social Control as Social Problems According to Conrad (2007), medicalization “describes a process by which nonmedical problems become treated as medical problems, usually in terms of illness and disorders” (4). Conrad argues that the first studies of medicalization emerged in the 1960s and focused on the medical treatment of deviance. These studies sought to understand, for example, “the medical control of deviant behavior,” in particular “the ways in which medicine functions (wittingly or unwittingly) to secure adherence to social norms; specifically, by using medical means to minimize, eliminate, or normalize deviant behavior” (Conrad 1979, 1). Following the early studies examining the medical treatment of deviant behavior, researchers began to explore how “medical jurisdiction” was expanding into many aspects of everyday lived experience (Conrad 2007, 4). Drawing from Freidson (1970), for example, Zola described four processes through which medical jurisdiction was expanding. First, Zola (1972) argued that expansion was driven by the rise of a preventive perspective that sought to push medical intervention into “the habits of a patient’s lifetime – be it of working, sleeping, playing or eating” (493). Second, he contended that expansion of medical jurisdiction was related to control over technical procedures, especially the use of drugs to address an increasing number of “psychosocial states” (495). Third, medical jurisdiction was said to expand by labeling phenomena as medical problems. Here Zola had in mind the way that phenomena like aging, once regarded as a normal and natural

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process, becomes, in the twentieth century, an object of medical treatment. Likewise, Zola viewed early-twentieth-century alcoholism in the United States as a social problem and a matter of legal regulation. It was to be solved by a Constitutional amendment enacting Prohibition. By the late twentieth century, however, alcoholism had become thinkable as a disease and a medical problem. The fourth driver of expanded medical jurisdiction and, for Zola, “the most powerful of all ‘the medicalizing of society’ processes” had to do with the authority attributed to medical science: what Zola took issue with, here, was the way “the prestige of any proposal is immensely enhanced, if not justified, when it is expressed in the idiom of medical science” (496). For Zola, Conrad and other scholars working on medicalization, there was a clear relationship between the expansion of medical jurisdiction and the rise of medical forms of social control. As Conrad (2007, 151) notes, Parsons (1951) had “pointed out the social control functions of medicine, especially in terms of managing and reintegrating people who are sick into society.” But, for Conrad and others writing in the late 1970s, it was important to emphasize that the “reach of medical social control” had widened “as medical jurisdiction [ . . . ] expanded” (151). Thus, the study of the role of medical authority in social control became a key focal point for scholars working on medicalization. Drawing from David Armstrong’s work (e.g., Armstrong 1995), for instance, Conrad suggests that medical surveillance represents an “expanded form of medical social control” leading “an increasing number of individuals to become objects of medical interest, even though they may not be currently ill” (Conrad 2007, 151). Medical surveillance, from this perspective, is understood as a process of identification. It identifies a practice, such as smoking, as a risky one and then makes that practice an object of social control. Conrad also argues that medical therapies can be conceptualized as a form of social control:

Pharmaceuticals have long been considered a form of medical social control of deviance, and their use is expanding to modify everyday behavior, mood, sexuality, learning abilities, and so forth. Medications like Prozac, Viagra, and hGH only extend what has long been medicine’s province [ . . . ] One social implication of increased medical social control is that more forms of behavior are no longer deemed the responsibility of the individual. That is, when the cause is seen as biological and subject to “medical excuse,” the individual is no longer considered responsible for the behavior. The social response moves from being punitive to being therapeutic. (Conrad 2007, 151–52)

In the case of drug-mediated social control, as in the case of surveillance-mediated social control, one of Conrad’s key concerns is that medicalization engenders “the individualization of social problems” (152). This process of individualization is effected through a kind of “definitional” power – “the power to have a particular set of (medical) definitions realized in both spirit and practice” (8). Thus, from this perspective, medicalization could be said to bring about social control by defining social problems like alcoholism as individual problems, framed in this case as an individual’s biological susceptibility to alcohol, or psychological predispositions toward addictive behaviors.

From Social Control to Governmentality Arguments about medicalization and social control have been important streams of social problems research. Building on, but also diverging from this work in some significant ways, has been a line of critique developed in scholarship influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, which has troubled the relationship between medicalization and social control. For contemporary thinkers working in the Foucaultian idiom, the concept of social control was not attentive enough to the complexity of modern modes of regulation, nor to what Foucault (1995) had called the “micro-physics” of power (26). Foucault’s work encouraged

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scholars to move away from the classic juridical theory of power, as something that could be possessed, to a more processual theory of power as “something that is exercised” and that “exists only in action” (Foucault 2003, 14). In line with this reconceptualization of power, Foucault proposed the concept of governmentality to describe an analytic approach focused on the broad “ensemble” of actors, procedures, practices, and knowledges that gradually became necessary for governing not just individuals but also populations in Europe during the passage from the Middle Ages to the early modern period (Foucault 2009, 108). To many of Foucault’s followers, this concept seemed to provide a more nuanced way of understanding the operation of power, and the diverse practices of government, in the contemporary era. As Rose and colleagues note, the idea of governmentality resonated with concurrent critical discussions of established ways of thinking within sociology. “Within critical sociology and criminology,” for example, “the social control analyses popularized in the 1970s and early 1980s were already being criticized as overly functionalist and simplistic by critical theorists before governmentality became a popular word” (Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde 2006, 92). Other concurrent critical discussions, mentioned by Rose et al. in their (admittedly nonexhaustive) review, included those taking place within science and technology studies, and the sociology and philosophy of knowledge practices and classification. On the crest of these critical discussions, a number of scholars developed governmentality concepts and methods (e.g., Burchell et al. 1991; Chakrabarty 2000; O’Malley 1996; Valverde 1998). Rose and Miller (1992) provide an articulation of the concept of governmentality that we find particularly useful because it refracts their reading of Foucault through actor-network theory (ANT). Building on Foucault and Latour, they offer a nuanced account of the heterogeneous processes involved in “governing at a distance” (173):

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Two centuries after the political revolutions that overthrew the absolutists monarchies of Europe, Foucault argued that in the field of political thought we had not yet cut off the king’s head. In his remarks on “governmentality” Foucault sketches an alternative analytic of political power. The term governmentality sought to draw attention to a certain way of thinking and acting embodied in all those attempts to know and govern the wealth, health, and happiness of populations. Foucault argued that, since the eighteenth century, this way of reflecting upon power and seeking to render it operable had achieved pre-eminence over other forms of political power. It was linked to the proliferation of a whole range of apparatuses pertaining to government and a complex body of knowledges and “knowhow” about government, the means of its exercise and the nature of those over whom it was to be exercised. From this perspective on political power, Foucault suggested, one might avoid over-valuing the “problem of the State,” seeing it either as a “monstre froid” confronting and dominating us, or as the essential and privileged fulfilment of a number of necessary social and economic functions. The state possessed neither the unity nor the functionality ascribed to it; it was a “mythical abstractions” which has assumed a particular place within the field of government. (174, notes omitted)

Following Foucault, Rose stresses, elsewhere, that governing at a distance is dependent upon a range of authorities – “philanthropists, doctors, hygienists, managers, planners, parents, and social workers” – who link “the general to the particular” by translating governmental rationalities “to a multitude of workplaces, hospital wards, classrooms, child guidance centers, or homes” (49–51). Rose and Miller appropriate a couple of key concepts from the work of Bruno Latour (e.g., Latour 1987) in order to develop this understanding of governmentality. They highlight Latour’s articulation of inscription devices, which are material conditions that enable thought to work upon objects. “By means of inscription,” they note, “reality is made stable, mobile, comparable, combinable. It is rendered

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in a form in which it can be debated and diagnosed” (Rose and Miller 1992, 185). Additionally, Rose and Miller borrow Latour’s notion of centers of calculation, which describes the “accumulation of inscriptions in certain locales, by certain persons or groups,” in ways that make them “powerful in the sense that it confers upon them the capacity to engage in certain calculations and to lay a claim to legitimacy for their plans and strategies because they are, in a real sense, in the know about that which they seek to govern” (185–86). In our view, by displacing the concept of social control with that of governmentality, ANT-adapted Foucaultian scholarship on epidemics, pandemics and outbreaks is set up to focus analytic attention on the inscriptions and calculations, active concepts, knowledges, actor-networks, processes, and practices that attempt to define and regulate these phenomena as they are translated into social problems. And, as Rose says of translation, it is “an imperfect mechanism and one that is subject to innumerable pressures and distortions” (Rose 1999, 51). In other words, the rendering of these material realities as social problems is a far-from-straightforward process. To examine the social problems posed by epidemics, pandemics and outbreaks in a way that arcs back to their complex materiality requires moving beyond simply treating infectious disease as a natural phenomenon that then creates social problems. We must attend to the intermingling of what van Loon (2005) has described as “the microphysics of infection and the macrophysics of epidemics,” the crisscrossed space-time “where microbes (and the infected/infectious bodies they inhabit) meet technologies of regulation” (40). As we shall now suggest, an ANT-adapted governmentality approach to the study of epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks allows us to do just that, to understand their symbolic import while also arcing back to their materiality. It thus represents a promising avenue for future research into how these phenomena get taken up as social problems.

Epidemics, Pandemics, and Outbreaks as Social Problems The medicalization thesis highlighted, for social problems scholars, several important areas of inquiry, including the rise of the preventive perspective, the increasing use of pharmaceutical interventions to treat psychosocial states, the labeling of social problems as medical problems, the growing prestige of medical authority, and so on. The analytic approach suggested by these focal points would seem to call into question the very notion of epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. For example, if we hold that pandemic influenza is primarily the product of the medicalized governance of everyday life by a fear-pedaling, economically self-interested global pharmaceutical industry, then it may be hard to take pandemic influenza seriously as a material reality. Instead analysts might prefer to study the underlying political economy of the global pharmaceutical industry, state policies that mandate the stockpiling of antiviral drugs, international agreements designed to protect revenues from patented drugs, and so on. The pandemic itself, in this analysis, might be sidelined, as would several other important actors, not least those coping with influenza infection, the health professionals and organizations that diagnose and treat them, and the influenza virus itself. Obviously, the above example is a caricature, a depiction confined by the space constraints of this chapter. Scholars working on medicalization have developed far more nuanced accounts of the processes that render everyday life sensible according to the matrix of biomedical intelligibility (e.g., Clarke et al. 2003). Nevertheless, the above example points to a tendency – not limited to scholarship on medicalization, but characteristic of social problems scholarship more generally – to sideline certain material realities in order to focus on social and/or symbolic realities. Bronwen Lichtenstein’s (2004) discussion of AIDS as a social problem represents a case in point. Lichtenstein discusses the “concept of AIDS as a

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social problem along two dimensions: first, in its creation of social pariahs through discourse about who was infected, and second, in the subsequent problems of this representation for responding to the epidemic” (316). She states: My approach to AIDS as a social problem will center on the understanding of disease as a socially constructed phenomenon. In this conceptualization, AIDS is not just a virus that afflicts hapless individuals at random but is the product of social and economic forces that help determine how, when, and where particular persons are infected. (316)

Lichtenstein makes the important point that HIV/AIDS affects certain people more than others, harming particularly those who are poor or disenfranchised. By describing AIDS as a social problem, her aim was to bring attention to “how structural factors give rise to differential HIV infection patterns,” and how these patterns reflect the connection between the “stigmatizing iconography” and management of HIV (316). Focusing on the iconography of AIDS, on the way “groups of people are presented, created, and reproduced through pictorial, textual, or media representations” (316), is an important area of inquiry. It can help researchers tackle the social problems created by the stigmatizing dynamics of disease and should be a component of research into epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. At the same time, a diverse array of other considerations is necessary for a robust theorization – which arcs back to materiality – of epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks as social problems. In our view, a study of these phenomena that takes seriously what Dello Buono might call the reality of their construction must apprehend their cultural, symbolic, structural (political-economic) and complex material dimensions. It must explore, at a minimum, (1) cultural understandings of bodily vulnerability; (2) social processes of stigmatization and marginalization; (3) structural inequalities and forms of structural, everyday violence, which

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predispose people and communities to the harmful effects of communicable disease while also undercutting their capacity to respond to these effects; and (4) the role played by public health and other authorities in disease construction as well as the problems, unintended consequences, and issues arising out of their efforts to detect, preempt, and contain disease spread. Cultural Understandings of Bodily Vulnerability With West African governments increasingly desperate to contain an everquickening Ebola epidemic, Sierra Leone has decreed a stringent new measure confining residents to their homes later this month. For three days, from Sept. 19 to Sept. 21, “everybody is expected to stay indoors” as 7,000 teams of health and community workers go door to door to root out hidden Ebola patients [ . . . ] The military and police will enforce the measure. (Nossiter 2014)

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the Ebola virus causes an acute, serious illness that is often fatal if untreated. Ebola virus disease first appeared in 1976 in the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In March 2014, cases of the disease began appearing in West Africa. As the WHO noted, the “most severely affected countries, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, have very weak health systems, lack human and infrastructural resources, and have only recently emerged from long periods of conflict and instability” (WHO 2015). The 2014 Ebola epidemic highlighted several of the dynamics we noted above, including anxiety over the porousness of the body. It provoked widespread discussion about containment and, notably, quarantine. As the quotation that starts this section suggests, Ebola ignited fear among residents and officials in West Africa (not to mention globally), about the capacity of the virus to spread from body to body and place to place. Indeed, officials in Sierra Leone deployed one of the oldest measures

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for dealing with the spread of infectious disease – quarantine. Quarantine is a containment strategy. As an intervention contra the apparent social problems posed by Ebola in Sierra Leone, quarantine had both supporters and critics. According to one supporter, “The reality is that the fight against Ebola will not be won in the Ebola clinic. By the house-to-house campaign, you try to stop transmission at the family level” (UNICEF representative, cited in Nossiter 2014). However, as one critic noted, “It has been our experience that lockdowns and quarantines do not help control Ebola, as they end up driving people underground and jeopardizing the trust between people and health providers” (Doctors without Borders representative, cited in Nossiter 2014). In addition to local quarantine measures, the Ebola epidemic initiated global containment strategies. Researchers based at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention argued, in September 2014, that the total number of Ebola cases had been significantly underreported, and that by the end of 2014 there could be as many as 1.4 million Ebola cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone (Meltzer et al. 2014). The limited capacity of health systems in West Africa, combined with the perceived scale of the Ebola outbreak, sparked worry that this epidemic may not be contained within its regional context. In response, world leaders renewed commitment to the Global Health Security Agenda, three key planks of which are (1) preventing avoidable epidemics; (2) detecting threats through realtime disease tracking; and (3) rapid response led by trained “disease detectives” (Frieden 2014). Foucault’s famous discussion of panopticism sheds light on the global effort to partition space and bodies in order to contain communicable disease. As Elden (2003) notes, this discussion, in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, begins by contrasting two methods of dealing with communicable disease. On the one hand are rituals of exclusion and confinement as exemplified by the medieval treatment of leprosy. On the other hand are “disciplinary projects”

that, instead of invoking a “massive, binary division between one set of people and another . . . called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power” (Foucault 1995, 198). As Elden (2003) argues, Foucault’s theorization of panopticism shows how processes of exclusion and confinement are overlain by processes of disciplinary surveillance to yield an internalized form of exclusion, “exclusion without control of banishment” (244). This is a fundamentally global exercise in the sense that it reckons with the problem of no outside to which the excluded can be banished. In a world where disease cannot be banished, where there has been recognition of the limits of antibiotic medical technology and concomitant anxiety about losing the so-called battle against infectious disease (US IOM 1992, v), cultural understandings of bodily and community vulnerability are crystalized. This crystallization mobilizes certain ways of thinking about epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks (Weir and Mykhalovskiy 2010). Attention, perhaps undue, is given, for example, to the international mobility of disease and its capacity to transfer and alter itself as it moves from people, animals, or objects to other people and places. Charting the spread of microbial infection along international air transit routes becomes a significant preoccupation. This mobility of disease, in such a context, is understood as carrying with it a threat to the integrity of human and social bodies. The apparent porousness and vulnerability of bodily and communal boundaries provokes widespread anxiety about the ways that bodies and communities are organized, monitored, and made resilient in the face of communicable disease. Anxieties about bodily vulnerability, and concomitant containment efforts, circulate in scientific and popular discourse, and scholarship on this circulation constitutes an important touchstone for social problems research into epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. For instance, with reference to virological, immunological and

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epidemiological discourses on HIV/AIDS, Waldby (1996) illustrates a problematic vision of the body as protected by an “unnegotiable boundary between the body’s inside and outside, and between self and other, a strictly closed system” (59; see also, e.g., Martin 1994; Persson and Newman 2006). Shildrick (2000), with reference not to infectious disease per se, but instead discussing how disability takes on connotations of contagion in contemporary western discourse, argues that vulnerability itself is feared as though it was some kind of disease. This research into vulnerability amplified by disease, and into vulnerability as a diseaselike condition, emphasizes the role of cultural understandings of bodily and community boundaries in the framing of risks posed by epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. They point to how infectious diseases play on “the contingency of the human ‘we’” (Cohen 2011, 15) and are typically made known to the public in ways that bring forward constructions of marginalized people (immigrants, racialized people, sex workers, gay men) as threats to others and to the imagined moral order. Such constructions have been an important focus of social science research on epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks, both in the form of analyses of popular culture, and in the form of analyses of the role played by the “outbreak narrative” (Wald 2008) in expressing or encouraging public anxiety about “foreign” bodies. Social Processes of Stigmatization and Marginalization According to Priscilla Wald (2008), the outbreak narrative is “an evolving story of disease emergence” (2). The outbreak narrative has several different incarnations – in scientific, journalistic, and fictional discourse – which cross-contaminate each other. Outbreak narratives follow “a formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment” (2).

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And, they have material implications in the sense that they promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, populations, locales (regional and global), behaviors, and lifestyles, and they change economies. They also influence how both scientists and the lay public understand the nature and consequences of infection, how they imagine the threat, and why they react so fearfully to some disease outbreaks and not others. (3)

Outbreak narratives thus represents a powerful way of thinking about the irreducible mixture of cultural and biological factors that make up infectious disease, and that cause disease to signify as problematic (or not). Consider the example of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). According to the WHO, SARS was “the first severe and readily transmissible new disease to emerge in the 21st century” (WHO 2003, 1): The first cases of SARS are now known to have emerged in mid-November 2002 in Guangdong Province, China. The first official report of an outbreak of atypical pneumonia in the province, said to have affected 305 persons and caused 5 deaths, was received by the WHO on 11 February [ . . . ] In the meantime, SARS was carried out of Guangdong Province on 21 February by an infected medical doctor who had treated patients in his home town. He brought the virus to the ninth floor of a four-star hotel in Hong Kong. Days later, guests and visitors to the hotel’s ninth floor had seeded outbreaks of cases in the hospital systems in Hong Kong, Viet Nam, and Singapore. Simultaneously, the disease began spreading around the world along international air travel routes as guests at the hotel flew home to Toronto and elsewhere, and as other medical doctors who had treated the earliest cases in Viet Nam and Singapore travelled internationally for medical and other reasons. (1)

According to Wald (2008), this description presents a fairly typical example of an outbreak narrative.

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A particularly troubling feature of such narratives is the way they single out individuals and communities as especially guilty of causing outbreaks. As Wald notes, a New York Times article promising to explain “How One Person Can Fuel an Epidemic” began, typically, with the dramatis personae of an unfolding tragedy: “A child in China so infectious that he is nicknamed ‘the poison emperor.’ A Chinese doctor who infects 12 fellow guests in his Hong Kong hotel, who then fly to Singapore, Vietnam and Canada. An elderly Canadian woman who infects three generations of her family” [ . . . ] The epidemiological precedent of an “index case” responsible for subsequent outbreaks quickly transformed these figures from victims to agents – and embodiments – of the spreading infection. A twenty-six-year-old Singaporean flight attendant, for example, became infamous for “importing” the disease from China. It killed her parents and pastor, sickened other members of her family and community, and turned her into a national scapegoat when Singapore’s minister of health announced at a press conference in early April that she “infected the whole lot of us.” She was among the SARS “superspreaders,” as the media termed the “hyperinfective” individuals who ostensibly fostered the spread of infection by “spewing out germs like teakettles.” (3–4)

Outbreak narratives emphasize cultural anxieties over the vulnerability of the body and the community, while commonly also stigmatizing and marginalizing those identified, in a moral register, as responsible for infection. Stigmatization and marginalization have been important focal points for social problems research into epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. For example, in the context of HIV/AIDS, scholars have emphasized the relationship between the production of stigma and the routine practices of epidemiological monitoring and subsequent media representation of “risk groups.” In the early years of the epidemic in the United States, AIDS surveillance involved a mode of reasoning that linked reports of unusual increases in diseases such as Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia

with specific groups of people – particularly gay men – and characteristics and behaviors attributed to them. Lamenting the stigmatizing consequences that followed, Patton (1986, 7) argued that epidemiological surveillance contributed to homophobia and AIDS stigma by laying the groundwork for the popular construction of AIDS as a gay disease linked to gay “promiscuity and bizarre practices.” In a similar vein, Oppenheimer (1988, 267), writing about the early activities of the US Centers for Disease Control, emphasized that epidemiological constructions of AIDS supported a gay “lifestyle” explanation of the disease that provided scientific justification for popular prejudice against gay men. The interface of epidemiological practices of classification and popular media coverage contributed to HIV stigma by constituting already marginalized groups of people – gay men, but also drug users, sex workers, and African Americans – as risk groups. Here the attachment of risk to categories of persons fed public anxieties about infection with grave material consequences for people living with HIV, including the Regan Administration’s failure to acknowledge the epidemic, the public vilification of marginalized people living with HIV, and considerable discrimination in the workplace, as well as in the provision of health and social services (Conrad 1986). Meanwhile as many commentators have noted, the outbreak narratives that amplify stigmatization and marginalization are typically silent with respect to the structural inequalities that predispose people and communities to the effects of communicable disease (Wald 2008). Neither do they offer a reflexive account of the role played by public health in disease construction as well as the problems, unintended consequences, and issues arising out of public health efforts to detect, preempt, and contain disease spread. Structural Inequalities and Structural Violence While considerations of stigma have formed an important conceptual axis for theorizing

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the way that prejudice, discrimination, and marginalization interlock with epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks of infectious disease, another, related axis of work interrogates the relationship between inequality, disease, and human suffering. Sociologists have examined the way that poverty and structural inequality produce, and get taken up as, social problems (e.g., Babones and Turner 2004; Dwyer 2010; Santiago 2015), and the way that health status is socioeconomically conditioned (e.g., Cockerham 2004; De Maio 2014; Raphael 2004). Where infectious disease is concerned, the concept of “structural violence” has had significant purchase for theorizing the way that epidemic, pandemics, and outbreaks can act as forms of violence. Paul Farmer, drawing from the work of liberation theologians, suggests that the concept of “structural violence” captures “a host of offensives against human dignity: extreme and relative poverty, social inequalities ranging from racism to gender inequality, and the more spectacular forms of violence that are uncontestably human rights abuses, some of them punishments for efforts to escape from structural violence” (Farmer 2003, 8). “Structural violence,” he writes, is violence exerted systematically – that is, indirectly – by everyone who belongs to a certain social order: hence the discomfort these ideas provoke in a moral economy still geared to pinning praise or blame on individual actors. In short, the concept of structural violence is intended to inform the study of the social machinery of oppression [ . . . ] One way of putting it is that the degree to which agency is constrained is correlated inversely, if not always neatly, with the ability to resist marginalization and other forms of oppression. (Farmer 2004, 307; cf. Bourgois and Schonberg 2009, 16–17)

The concept of structural violence thus suggests how epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks interlock with inequality. It represents, along with work that focuses on the political economy and social determinants of health, an important touchstone

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for social problems research into epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. However, we need to go beyond this touchstone for a robust theorization of epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. Why? With reference to the concept of structural violence, Brown and Kelly (2014) note that, “as a means to render visible the diverse social, political, and material conjunctions on which [disease] transmission depends, structural violence has considerable limitations” (292). A key limitation of the concept, Brown and Kelly assert, is that it “elides the materiality of pathogenic encounters by limiting transmission processes to questions of economic vulnerability” (292). While we see more promise, than do Brown and Kelly, in explanatory value of the concept of structural violence, particularly when it is augmented by a concentration on other focal points, we share their concern to foreground the study of the materiality of epidemics. Public Health Efforts to Detect and Pre-empt Disease Spread The term “public health” typically describes an institution that has population-level health as its focus. In Canada this approach is based on a recognition “that the health of populations and individuals is shaped by a wide range of factors in the social, economic, natural, built, and political environments,” which can interact in complex ways (Canada, NAC 2003, 19). A focus on the institution of public health would seem to re-introduce into the picture that mythic abstraction of the state that was critiqued by the governmentality perspective we discussed earlier. Yet, as we shall suggest, by looking at how epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks are identified and tracked, the analytic gaze is drawn well beyond the institutional and organizational boundaries commonly associated with the abstract state to the diverse assemblage of actors and practices that seeks to render them visible and subject to intervention. Epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks of influenza virus mark a good starting point for this consideration. Contemporary discussions of influenza outbreaks

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invariably (if problematically) make reference to the post–World War I influenza pandemic. Characterizing this pandemic as the Great Influenza, Barry (2004) argued that, before it faded away in 1920, it would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history [ . . . ] The lowest estimate of the pandemic’s worldwide death toll is twenty-one million, in a world with a population less than one-third today’s. This estimate comes from a contemporary study of the disease and newspapers have often cited it since, but it is almost certainly wrong. Epidemiologists today estimate that influenza likely caused at least fifty million deaths worldwide, and possibly as many as one hundred million. (4)

While the worldwide spread of influenza in 1918 would clearly seem to count as a pandemic, and while the recurrence of mortality on the same scale is widely feared today, the identification of contemporary pandemics is not straightforward. Perhaps no case demonstrates the potential for controversy in the transformation of pandemics into social problems more clearly than the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. In spite of some initial worries that H1N1 could be severe, its relatively mild impact prompted questions as to whether the WHO was justified in characterizing it as a pandemic, and as therefore deserving of an internationally coordinated response. With reference to the controversy over this pandemic, Morens, Folkers, and Fauci (2009) note that any “assumption that the term pandemic had an agreed-upon meaning was quickly undermined by debates and discussions about the term in the popular media and in scientific publications” (1018). At issue was whether H1N1 was a social problem of pandemic proportions. As Sanford, Polzer, and McDonough (2015) observe, the WHO published four key planning documents between 1999 and 2009, which propose models of “pandemic phases” designed to “designate pandemic risk and structure global health” responses (2). The 2009 outbreak of H1N1 was a test

of this revised pandemic classification system. According to Abeysinghe (2013), the use of this classification system was called into question when the WHO first delayed describing H1N1 as a pandemic even though it met the formal definition, and then by delaying a declaration of the pandemic’s end. She argues that there was an essential tension in the WHO’s pandemic classification scheme. On the one hand, the scheme was set up to recognize pandemics according to their spatial distribution on the global map. On the other hand, lay understandings of pandemic influenza, which frequently harken back to the 1918–20 pandemic, tend to fixate more on the severity of such events than on their spatial distribution. As Abeysinghe notes, the tension between spatialization and severity yielded criticisms on both sides. On one side, criticisms “revolved around whether a pandemic declaration had been necessary and when a Post-Pandemic Period would be announced” (Abeysinghe 2013, 911). Another, opposing set of criticisms, concerned whether phase “increases were occurring too slowly” (911). Under the weight of such controversies, public health professionals face enormous pressure to get the call right. They thus have rather extraordinary incentives to invest in extended detection networks that we have theorized in terms of public health intelligence, vigilance, and surveillance (e.g., Mykhalovskiy and Weir 2006; Weir and Mykhalovskiy 2010; French 2009; French and Mykhalovskiy 2013). Epidemiological intelligence was classically described as “the collection and utilization of current reports on morbidity and vital statistics” in order to facilitate international cooperation in the control of listed, notifiable diseases (Lothian 1924, 288). Contemporary public health intelligence is distinguished from this classic approach by its goal of attempting to detect and even preempt health events (French and Mykhalovskiy 2013). This preemptive ideal requires public health data gathering initiatives to enroll a variety of novel sources, which we will say more about momentarily. All of this is enveloped within

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the broader concept of public health vigilance, which invokes the broader field of relations in which disease detection is based, particularly the “politico-juridical framework for global public health emergencies” (Weir and Mykhalovskiy 2010, 6): Vigilance directs analytic attention to apparatuses that continuously monitor phenomena that may give rise to catastrophic events. In the public health sense, vigilance refers to an attitude of being attentive, alert, and watchful; vigilance is an ethical standard to be used by public health officials in the course of their work. (8)

To direct scholarly attention to the processes and practices of public health intelligence and vigilance is to concentrate on the ways that health events come to be identified, and flagged, for example, as problems of international concern. Traditionally, gathering information about disease on an international level meant waiting for state parties to report through official channels on their internal conditions (Weir and Mykhalovskiy 2010). Today, global digital communication has enabled disease detection processes to circumvent official channels. Consider, for instance, the way that the Zika virus was tracked in 2016 by social media sites such as Twitter. Public health researchers can monitor social media to get a sense of the global spread of discourse associated with epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. Additionally, beyond social media tracking of discourse, public health can enroll a diverse array of actors (which lie above and below “the state”) into the process of producing knowledge about Zika. These include international bodies, like the WHO, but also non-human actants such as news aggregators and data-mining technologies, as well as airplanes and mosquitos, which may function as vectors. Also included in this disease detection actor-network are mundane objects like Kleenex, sales of which may be tracked through local pharmacies and monitored for spikes, allowing public health officials to infer the presence

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of outbreaks in these areas. In addition to mundane objects, disease detection actor-networks also include people whose material conditions expose them to the Zika virus, and the public health campaigns that target them, such as the one now being promoted by many health organizations to raise awareness (in pregnant women in particular) of the risks stemming from mosquito bites. In a recent statement, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized the advice that some governments were giving to women “to delay getting pregnant due to the possible link between the virus and neurological disorders affecting newborns” (UN 2016a). He noted that this advice ignored “the reality that many women and girls simply cannot exercise control over whether or when or under what circumstances they become pregnant,” and also called for Zika-affected states to provide “comprehensive and affordable quality sexual and reproductive health services and information,” including contraception and abortion services (UN 2016b). These actors too – including women targeted by the advice not to get pregnant, restrictive sexual health policies, contraceptive interventions, human rights advocates, and so on – are all part of the actor-network that translates this infectious disease into a social problem and object of governance. And, let’s not forget Zika, an RNA Flavivirus, itself. This subvisual actant lies at the center of an extended, highly mediated actor-network of diverse interests, contestations, and translations. By studying this actor-network, by attending carefully to the way that statements about Zika are inscribed and transported to different centers of calculation, we can learn something about how it is translated into a social problem. If we locate these inscriptions, calculations, and translations within a broader vigilance apparatus that is set up to detect, if not prevent, harm, we can learn something about the contemporary governmentality of epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. They are risks to be contained, to be secured against

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their potentiality to have translocal effects, to be quarantined, in a manner of speaking, within a matrix of visibility and intelligibility that permits calculated, efficient intervention designed to only minimally disrupt the global flow of goods and capital while controlling global flows of risky (human, animal, and microbial) bodies.

Conclusion How, then, to systematically apprehend the complex dynamics of epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks as social problems? In writing this chapter, we have deliberately avoided offering a conventional account of these phenomena. That is to say, we have avoided offering a naïve realist (objectivist) account, which would simply appeal to epidemiological literature to describe some epidemic, pandemic, or outbreak, and then proceed with how the magnitude of the phenomenon creates social problems. Equally, we have avoided offering a strict constructionist account, which would deemphasize the material dimensions of epidemics, pandemics and outbreaks, and focus primarily on the labels and other symbolic representations of these phenomena. Following a path between these unsatisfactory alternatives, we have sought to acknowledge instead the “material-semiotic” (Haraway 1997, 2) character of epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks. We think that social problems research on epidemics, pandemics and outbreaks can draw profitably from Foucaultian concepts – particularly governmentality – that arc back to materiality. As we have already noted, the ANT-informed account of governmentality directs analytic attention to the inscriptions and calculations, active concepts, actor-networks, processes, practices and translations that attempt to define and regulate phenomena. Applied to the study of epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks, analyses should consider at a minimum: (1) cultural understandings of bodily vulnerability; (2) social processes of stigmatization

and marginalization; (3) structural inequalities and forms of structural violence that predispose people and communities to the effects of communicable disease while also undercutting their capacity to respond to these effects; and (4) the role played by public health in disease construction as well as the problems, unintended consequences and issues arising out of public health efforts to detect, preempt, and contain disease spread.

Glossary Actor-Network Theory An approach to empirical research and the study of (mainly scientific) knowledge production that focusses on phenomena in their networked relations, and the way that actors in networks come together to yield emergent phenomena. Analysts adopting this approach are typically more interested in what actors – alongside non-human “actants” – do than in what is, for example, said. Epidemic A wide and rapid spread of something such as infectious disease to a disproportionately large number of people in a population in a short amount of time. Governmentality A term proposed by Michel Foucault to refer, in his words, to the “ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of [a] very specific, albeit complex, power that has population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument” (2009: 108). Medicalization The expansion of medical jurisdiction to encompass previously nonmedical problems. Outbreak A sudden increase in occurrences of something unwelcome such as war or a disease. Pandemic A large epidemic of an undesirable phenomenon, such as infectious disease, that affects a large region, or is global.

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epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks 267–300. Berkeley: University of California Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Patton, Cindy. 1986. Sex & Germs: The Politics of AIDS. Montréal: Black Rose Books. Pearsall, Judy, and Patrick Hanks, ed. 1998. The New Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Persson, Asha, and Christy Newman. 2006. Potency and vulnerability: Troubled “selves” in the context of antiretroviral therapy. Social Science & Medicine 63(6):1586– 96. Raphael, Dennis, ed. 2004. Social Determinants of Health: Canadian Perspectives. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Nikolas, and Peter Miller. 1992. Political power beyond the state: Problematics of government. The British Journal of Sociology 43(2):173–205. doi:10.2307/591464. Rose, Nikolas, Pat O’Malley, and Mariana Valverde. 2006. Governmentality. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2:83–104. Sanford, Sarah, Jessica Polzer, and Peggy McDonough. 2015. Preparedness as a technology of (in)security: Pandemic influenza planning and the global biopolitics of emerging infectious disease. Social Theory & Health 14:18–43. doi:10.1057/sth.2015.8. Santiago, Anna Maria. 2015. Fifty years later: From a war on poverty to a war on the poor. Social Problems 62(1):2–14. Shildrick, Margrit. 2000. Becoming vulnerable: Contagious encounters and the ethics of risk. Journal of Medical Humanities 21(4):215– 27. doi:10.1023/A:1009025125203. Spector, Malcolm, and John Kitsuse. 1987. Constructing Social Problems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

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CHAPTER 5

Disaster as Social Problem and Social Construct Kathleen Tierney

Abstract There are few examples of studies that view disasters through a social problems lens. Disasters are seldom constructed as social problems, and when they are, such collective definitions typically follow the occurrence of major disasters that are defined as revealing policy deficits. While recognizing the importance of symbolic processes surrounding disaster-related phenomena, most research proceeds from a realist stance that takes the occurrence and consequences of disasters as givens. Too little attention has been paid to how hazards and disasters are discursively framed and how their consequences are produced through institutional and elite action. At the same time, both research and real-world developments illustrate the extent to which claims regarding the genesis of disasters, the nature of the harms disasters produce, and responsibility for causing and ameliorating such harms shift and evolve. Constructions of disaster and other perils reveal the power dynamics and reigning ideologies within the societies in which they occur.

Introduction Organized and systematic research on disasters began in the late 1940s. Largely funded by military institutions whose Cold War planning raised questions about how the public would respond in the event of nuclear war, teams at academic institutions such as the University of Chicago and its National Opinion Research Center conducted field work in the immediate aftermath of disasters. These classic field studies addressed fundamental questions about public responses during and after

disaster events, such as whether social order and social organization would break down under conditions of extreme stress; whether panic would break out among affected populations; whether there would be postdisaster looting and increases in crime; and whether mental health problems would develop among members of the population in the aftermath of disasters (Quarantelli 1987; Knowles 2011). Studies found essentially no support for these ideas. Instead, researchers identified many positive aspects of the public response to disasters. Altruism and pro-social 79

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behavior predominated, status distinctions became less important as populations in disaster-stricken communities worked together to deal with disaster impacts, and the period following disasters was marked by the emergence of a “therapeutic community.” Instances of panic were found to be vanishingly rare. Looting was not an issue, and there were no spikes in criminal behavior after disasters. While disaster survivors did experience heightened levels of stress and stress-related symptoms, such symptoms typically dissipated over time, and the vast majority of survivors did not experience long-term or serious mental health sequelae (for representative work, see Dynes and Quarantelli 1968; Drabek 1986; Tierney, Lindell, and Perry 2001; National Research Council 2006). Elsewhere (Tierney 2007) I referred to early findings on disasters as the “good news” paradigm and pointed out that subsequent research documented major conflicts during disasters in addition to altruism and that the status leveling and camaraderie early research emphasized existed alongside glaring inequities. Disaster researchers also found that “corrosive communities,” not just therapeutic ones, can emerge after disasters, particularly those involving technological agents (Picou, Marshall, and Gill 2004; Ritchie and Gill 2013). Nonetheless, many findings from initial field studies on disasters have remained remarkably robust. For example, media reports to the contrary, panic (as opposed to fear) is rarely seen in disasters, and public concerns about looting and sensational media accounts are far more common than looting itself. In this chapter, I discuss how disasters – such as hurricanes, earthquakes, oil spills, and toxic contaminations – have been theorized in sociology and show that they seldom have been framed as social problems. I comment on the ontological and epistemological assumptions that have guided and continue to guide most research on disasters. I also suggest that as an alternative to current realist, objectivist approaches to studying disasters that the occurrence, causes, consequences of,

and remedies intended to reduce disaster risks can fruitfully be viewed as social constructions. There is a need for a wider application of fundamental constructionist insights and frameworks rooted in constructivism, such as science and technology studies, research on the social construction of illness, and studies on environmentally related contested illnesses.

Common Conceptual Frameworks in the Study of Disasters From its inception and for a longer time than might otherwise have been expected given theoretical developments in the broader field of sociology, theory and research on disasters were heavily influenced by functionalism and systems theory. Communities were conceptualized as systems that were organized around key societal functions, and disasters were seen as suddenly occurring agents of destruction that interfered with or prevented the performance of those functions (Fritz 1961). Under disaster conditions, demands on the social system exceed the system’s capacity to respond, necessitating adaptation on the part of affected social units and efforts to restore the system and bring it back into equilibrium through response and recovery activities. The range of adaptations documented by early disaster researchers included the convergence of personnel and resources into disaster-affected areas; greater involvement in response and relief activities by members of the public, including the emergence of new groups seeking to address disaster-induced problems; decentralization of authority and decision making; and changes in the tasks and structural arrangements of organizations responding to disaster. Disaster research has also been influenced by symbolic interactionism. Scholars have long recognized that responses to hazards and disasters are shaped by the meanings that those at risk assign to them.1 For example, one early finding was that “disaster subcultures” can develop in which

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community residents respond to recurring disasters such as seasonal floods by normalizing them and developing coping mechanisms. The ecological-symbolic approach to the study of what some researchers term “chronic technological disasters” argues that “social responses to hazards and disasters are affected by both the nature of the disruption in the human/environmental relations and the appraisals people make of those disruptions” (Couch and Kroll-Smith 1994, 28). Researchers have applied the emergent norm theory of collective behavior, which is based on symbolic interactionist assumptions, to the study of public responses to disasters, arguing that disaster-induced social disruption leads to the development of new norms, such as those calling for more intensive pro-social behavior (Drabek and McEntire 2003). Disaster researchers who studied the civil uprisings that occurred in US cities in the 1960s argued that rather than being random, looting patterns reflected emergent community sentiments regarding property norms. Emergent norm theory has also been used to explain evacuation behavior – for example, how people make decisions to evacuate following disaster warnings and why in some cases community residents evacuate spontaneously in the face of threats even when warnings indicate that they are not at risk (Perry, Lindell, and Greene 1981; Lindell and Perry 2004). Notwithstanding this acknowledgment of the importance of symbolic processes, disaster scholarship has rarely challenged the objective existence of disasters and disaster-related impacts. Until relatively recently, the overarching explanatory framework employed by researchers was that disasters occur when physical phenomena originating in natural systems (e.g., the earth or atmospheric system) or in technology exert forces that disrupt the ongoing functions of social systems. Deaths, injuries, physical damage, population dislocation, reduced functionality of community institutions, and governmental responses such as official disaster declarations were seen as objective evidence of

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disaster occurrence. Consistent with its theoretical underpinnings, research on disasters tends to be ontologically realist – and can even be challenged as naively realist – and epistemologically empiricist.

Disasters as “Nonroutine Social Problems” To what extent have hazards and disasters been framed as social problems, and how much of that research has employed the kinds of constructionist assumptions that are typical of social problems theory? The inclusion of a chapter on disasters by pioneering researcher Charles Fritz in the first edition of Merton and Nisbet’s Social Problems (Fritz 1961) indicates that at least some scholars in the field categorized them as such,2 but Fritz offered no specific rationale for that characterization. That contribution and others notwithstanding, researchers have not generally considered disasters to be social problems. Spurred in part by the field’s own theoretical and definitional concerns and by the growth of social problems scholarship, some members of the second generation of disaster researchers – that is, those trained or influenced by the pioneers in the field – did attempt make a case for viewing disasters as social problems. In the late 1980s Thomas Drabek argued for categorizing disasters as “nonroutine social problems” (Drabek 1989). His position was in part a response to other scholars whose research suggested that hazards are generally not important political priorities, that the public cares little about disaster risks, and that when disasters occur, they have few discernable long-term effects (Wright and Rossi 1981; Rossi, Wright, and Weber-Burdin 1982). Drabek countered by arguing that even when societal conditions are not widely recognized as social problems, as was the case, for example, with race relations in the 1950s, tensions and strains can still be present in social systems that, when catalyzed by events, stimulate intense public reactions. He also expressed the view that social

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scientists should not assess the importance of social problems like disasters in terms of public views about their importance, but rather through the use of objective criteria related to the extent of harm or disruption. As noted earlier, as the field evolved researchers began to place more emphasis on the role of collective definitional processes in influencing societal responses to the likelihood and occurrence of physical threats. Kreps and Drabek (1996), using both realist and symbolic interactionist and constructivist imagery, argued that disasters should be seen as nonroutine social problems that represent “conjunctions of historical conditions and social definitions” (143). Disasters disrupt social systems, but hazards and disasters also have life histories that resemble the careers of other social problems, in which claimsmaking activities ebb and flow over time. With some exceptions, during “normal,” non-disaster periods, disaster threats are not collectively defined as problematic; they do not loom large on political agendas, and both political and economic elites and residents of at-risk locations tend to downplay their significance. However, when disasters do occur, they may be accompanied by collective action and claimsmaking that result in their being defined as social problems. Subsequently Drabek (2007) re-emphasized the importance of viewing disasters through a social problems lens. Among his arguments were that disasters resemble other social problems in the sense that they constitute unexpected negative outcomes of institutionalized social behavior and that political and economic power shape the designation of societal conditions as social problems. Although Kreps and Drabek did not cite Anthony Downs’s (1972) influential discussion of the issue-attention cycle, their argument concerning disasters as social problems is similar: objectively negative and undesirable conditions can exist without either public or elite recognition, but dramatic events can bring to light the significance of those conditions, initiate processes that result in their being labeled as social problems, and stimulate public

demands for solutions. However, putative problems can also drop off public agendas when elites and their supporters begin to recognize that solutions will be costly and inconvenient, when issues are no longer considered newsworthy by the media, or when public attention shifts to other concerns. These arguments are consistent with John Kingdon’s framework for understanding agenda setting in the policy arena, which emphasizes the importance of policy windows that can open as a result of events, elevating problem definitions and making policy solutions possible (Kingdon 1995, 2011). Also related is Hilgartner and Bosk’s (1988) ecological or public arenas model of the life history of social problems, which argues that at any given time a wide array of putative social problems compete with one another within different “environments” or public arenas, which include the executive and legislative processes, the courts, and the media. Factors that influence the inclusion of candidate problems on the public agenda include novelty and drama, ongoing organizational routines, elite interests, and the presence of advocacy groups and political operatives that press claims about the importance of addressing the problem. Disaster risks are thus most likely to gain widespread attention in the immediate aftermath of disasters, as policy windows that were formerly closed are forced open by disaster events – and particularly by the way that events are covered in the media. During and immediately after disasters are periods when the public is most aware of disaster threats and impacts, when Congressional hearings and governmental investigations take place, when advocates for disaster risk reduction come forward with suggested solutions, and when new legislation is proposed and is most likely to pass. Political scientist Thomas Birkland has studied how disasters can become focusing events – that is, the conditions under which they lead to the identification of disasters as public problems and to policy change. The disaster must be severe and must be framed as representing a failure of policy, and both the lessons learned and candidate policy

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remedies must be identified. Most disasters and threats never reach this threshold, and even when they do, pace Kingdon, both problem definitions and their solutions usually already exist somewhere in the policy system, and the ones promoted most strongly by advocates and the media have the greatest chance of succeeding (Birkland 1997, 2007). Robert Stallings’s (1995) research on the construction of the earthquake threat is perhaps the clearest example of the application of the social construction of social problems perspective to disaster-related phenomena. In his telling, earthquake hazards exist in many parts of the United States, but the elevation of earthquakes to the level of a public problem requiring policy responses did not come about as a result of changes in public opinion or popular pressure. Although aware of the earthquake threat, even in higher-risk areas members of the public were not urging action to reduce earthquake hazards. Rather, efforts to construct earthquakes as a public problem consisted of claimsmaking and mobilization on the part of a group of relatively elite actors Stallings labeled the “earthquake establishment.” The establishment was a network made up primarily of earth scientists, a few social scientists, engineers specializing in mitigating earthquake damage, and representatives of government agencies, that coalesced around the idea that the earthquake threat was a serious problem requiring legislative, policy, and practical solutions. For Stallings, on the one hand, the fact that organized claimsmaking occurred around earthquake issues partly qualifies earthquakes to be considered a social problem. However, on the other, the earthquake threat lacks other defining characteristics of socially constructed social problems. There was consensus and a lack of controversy surrounding establishment activities; the establishment avoided identifying who was to blame for earthquake vulnerability; and the threat was not framed as taking place in the immediate present. For these reasons, Stallings considered earthquake risk to be a “partially constructed” social problem.

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Aside from the approaches discussed above, the field of disaster research has placed little emphasis on disaster-related phenomena as either social problems or socially constructed, even though various constructivist approaches are clearly relevant to the study of disasters. As I discuss in the sections that follow, constructivist insights can be applied to a range of disasterrelated phenomena, including the potential for and occurrence of disasters, disaster victimization, and the types of remedies that are suggested to reduce disaster risk.

The Social Construction of Hazards and Disasters Assessments of the potential for and likelihood of disastrous events purport to be scientific and objective. Sophisticated mapping technologies show where hurricane, flood, and earthquake hazards are most common, and risk-analytic and loss estimation methodologies indicate where physical and social impacts are likely to be most severe. Yet taking a closer look and using a critical lens, such projections can also be seen as a reflection of institutional and discursive processes. Findings from science and technology studies (STS), which among other things reveal the extent to which objective, empirical scientific “facts,” come into being as a consequence of socially shared practices, understandings, and discourses, are clearly relevant for understanding disaster impact assessments and a range of other disaster-related phenomena. A group of STS scholars is seeking to develop a specific disaster-related body of STS research, arguing that “STS theory and empirical findings clearly have great relevance in efforts to better understand how technoscientific knowledge, experts, and institutions condition and respond to catastrophic events and impact disaster policy” (Fortun and Frickel 2013). Major impacts of disastrous events may be ignored in risk estimates projections, as occurred in the case of the US military’s failure in its war-planning analyses to acknowledge that huge firestorms

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would accompany the detonation of nuclear weapons, despite having knowledge of those effects based on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This blind spot existed in part because institutional knowledge, routines, and competencies were better-suited for the analysis of blast effects than of those resulting from fire, but also because that type of analysis enabled the military to conceptualize nuclear weapons as creating targeted rather than indiscriminate death and destruction (Eden 2004). Probabilistic risk analysis and disaster loss estimation methodologies are widely used by entities employing risky technologies such as the nuclear power industry; by the insurance, reinsurance, and catastrophic modeling industries; and in organizational and governmental disaster mitigation and preparedness activities. Such modeling efforts are thought by users to approximate (within some margin of error) the real-world effects of accidents and disasters and to be objectively sound. Yet STS cautions that the phenomena like those that are simulated in models do not exist “out there.” As indicated earlier, impact assessments can ignore major agents of death and destruction – a process Lee Clarke (1993) has referred to as “the disqualification heuristic.” Although widely accepted as in some sense reflecting “reality,” risk assessments can actually function more as rhetoric, for example when “scientific” findings are used to discredit critics and quash opposition to risky technologies (Freudenburg 1996) and in other situations in which powerful economic actors need to justify their actions. For example, the development of risk-analytic methods themselves coincided with the US government’s aggressive promotion of nuclear power (Clarke 1988), and scenarios employed by corporations such as Exxon framed the risk of marine oil spills as low and manageable (Clarke 1999) Financial engineering methods developed apace with the expansion of the financial services sector and the need for ever-moreexotic securitization schemes; indeed it was claimed that the global economy could not have functioned as it did without such tools.

However, in the hands of parties seeking to maximize profits, financial engineering encouraged institutional and individual investors to accept poorly understood risks and was implicated in the financial meltdown of 2008 (Tierney 2010, 2014).3 Putatively objective projections such as hazard models construct experts, particularly scientists and engineers, as those most qualified to understand disaster impacts. Alternative perspectives on danger, such as those rooted in indigenous knowledge or “lay” understandings derived from direct experience with hazards, are thus discredited (Tierney 2010). Models showing that risks are low are also useful in arguments based on the claim that “there is no alternative” (known as TINA) to technologies such as nuclear power,4 which are used to silence critics. By virtue of using probabilistic analytic methods, risk models imply that the destructive phenomena most worth considering are those that are “probable” or “credible” – meaning that outliers or worst cases are unworthy of serious consideration – even though probability and credibility are themselves social constructions. According to such reasoning, the probabilities associated with events like the 2008 financial collapse and Great Recession, the BP blowout and oil spill, and Fukushima earthquake/tsunami/nuclear reactor meltdown were infinitesimal, but nevertheless those events happened.5 The presence of hazards and occurrence of disaster may seem intuitively obvious: a hazardous condition exists, or an event occurs, people are killed and injured, there is property damage, and ongoing social life is disrupted. And yet here too disasterrelated phenomena can be seen as social constructs. The 1995 Chicago heat wave was not considered a disaster by the media or local government, even though it killed almost 800 people. As Klinenberg’s “social autopsy” of the heat wave showed, rather than treating the event as a significant threat to life and health, the media focused instead on the large numbers of people who were heading for the beaches and eating ice cream as temperatures soared. Public safety

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agencies continued with business as usual – for example, the city’s heat emergency plan was not activated and staffing was not stepped up – and Chicago’s mayor argued that the death toll was nothing out of the ordinary (Klinenberg 2002). Scholars who write about chronic technological disasters such as toxic contamination and oil spills tend to argue that those types of hazards create stress for affected community residents and lead to conflicts over actual and potential impacts such as physical illness. However, other researchers find that responses to such hazards vary. Auyero and Swiston’s (2008) research on an Argentine shantytown that is literally located on top of a toxic industrial site (to bring home the point, the neighborhood is called Flammable) found that residents were quite doubtful and confused about whether the toxic exposure was harmful, denied the hazard, or deflected the blame for harmful consequences onto other sources. Gunter, Aronoff, and Joel (1999) studied communities where toxic contamination was present and found complacency and an absence of conflict in those communities, leading them to argue for a contextual constructionist approach to understanding differing community responses. Norgaard (2001) studied a community in Norway where residents engaged in collective denial of the impacts of climate change even as they observed the changing climate around them. Non-recognition of actual or potential harm is attributable to both organizational blind spots and the exercise of political power by elites. Crescive or long-incubating environmental crises may go unrecognized when agencies lack a clear mandate to manage them, or when solutions are not readily available (Beamish 2002). The potential for the occurrence of worst cases may be downplayed or ruled out entirely (Clarke 2006). Organizations and institutions are prone to upside thinking that can render the potential for worst cases invisible (Cerulo 2008). Elites can succeed in framing risks as low and disasters as rare despite evidence to the contrary, as seen in the reframing

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of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and conflagration as primarily a fire in order to persuade Eastern banks to finance the recovery (Fradkin 2006) and the downplaying of hazards to encourage development in greater Los Angeles (Davis 1999). The organized climate change denial industry in the United States is perhaps the clearest contemporary example of elite efforts to deny the existence of hazards. Despite overwhelming scientific consensus and evidence that climate change is affecting the United States now, networks of fossil fuel companies, political donors, think tanks, and media outlets, along with the leadership of Republican Party, have succeeded in convincing large segments of the public that climate change is not occurring, or that even if it is, human activities are not responsible (McCright and Dunlap 2000; Dunlap and McCright 2015). As this example suggests, insights from a branch of STS known as agnotology, or the study of the cultural and social construction of ignorance (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008), are relevant for the study of hazards and disasters. Regarding the putative causes of disaster, attributions clearly vary and evolve over time as a consequence of societal and cultural contexts. One obvious historic shift in Western societies was the move from framing disasters as divine in origin to seeing human beings as having a role in preventing and responding to disasters. Scholars point to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 as the event that marked the transition in the West from religious views of catastrophe – that such events represented God’s punishment of sinners – to secular and Enlightenment constructions emphasizing that disasters are preventable and that postdisaster recovery activities should seek to mitigate the impacts of future events (Dynes 2000). At the same time, while it is now common to conceptualize the occurrence of disasters in scientific terms, this perspective is by no means universal, even in industrialized societies. Fundamentalist Christians in the United States still interpret disasters as divine in origin. Evangelist and media personality Pat Robertson claimed that

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Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans because the practice of abortion offends God and that the 2010 Haiti earthquake occurred because in the past Haitians had made a pact with the devil in order to gain independence from France. In China, disasters have historically been traced to the shortcomings of rulers and ruling groups. Ancient beliefs held that the occurrence of disaster was an indication that a ruler had lost the “mandate of heaven” and needed to be replaced, and the influence of these ideas can still be seen in contemporary times. For example, popular opinion made connections between the catastrophic 1976 Tangshan earthquake, the death of Mao Zedong two months later, and subsequent regime change (Leonard 2008).6 Evidence suggests that rather than identifying divine forces or natural extremes as causal factors in disasters or framing industrial explosions and nuclear releases as accidents, the public increasingly views such events and their outcomes as the result of institutional failures. Environmental sociologist William Freudenburg coined the term “recreancy” to describe the elevated sense of risk that emerges as a consequence of the public’s lack of trust in institutional actors that are charged with managing hazardous technologies (Freudenburg 1993). The deaths, injuries, and destruction that accompanied Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were widely attributed not to the hurricane itself but to levee failures brought about by institutional mismanagement. Some African American residents believed that the levees were intentionally blown up – an idea that was not as far-fetched as it might seem, given that is what happened during the catastrophic floods of 1929. Constructions of the causes of disasters continue to shift, with human agency being seen as responsible for disaster losses in an increasing number of cases. The triggering event for the 2011 Fukushima triple core meltdown and nuclear releases was a massive earthquake-induced tsunami, yet the governmental panel that investigated it framed the disaster as a consequence of collusion between Japan’s nuclear industry

and its regulator and even of Japanese culture itself, calling it a disaster that was “made in Japan” (Kurokawa 2012). One official investigation of the levee failures in Hurricane Katrina emphasized that the deadly flooding that ensued was not a consequence of hurricane-driven storm surges but rather of a deteriorating levee system that was a system in name only (American Society of Civil Engineers 2007). A damaging earthquake struck the city of L’Aquila, Italy in 2009, resulting in nearly 300 deaths. In 2014, six earth scientists and one former government official were convicted of manslaughter for statements they had made downplaying the threat of a large earthquake and were sentenced to six years in prison. The verdicts involving the scientists were overturned in 2014, but the conviction of the government official was left to stand, and he was sentenced to two years in prison (Cartlidge 2014). Disaster victimization is also a social construct; the counting of disaster victims is an example of what Martin and Lynch (2009) refer to as “numero-politics.” There is typically little consensus on mortality and morbidity resulting from disasters (Bourque et al. 2007). Death and injury estimates are products of institutional processes, and consequently at the extreme end estimates of the number of people killed in disasters can vary by orders of magnitude. For example, according to initial reports and official Haitian government statistics following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, that disaster caused upward of 300,000 deaths; in contrast, according to official reports from the US Agency for International Development, the earthquake resulted in between 46,000 and 85,000 deaths. Depending on the information source, the 1994 Northridge earthquake in greater Los Angeles caused thirty-three, fifty-seven, sixty, or seventy-two deaths. Florida experienced several deadly and damaging hurricanes in 2004; official statistics compiled by the state indicated that 123 people were killed in those events, but the federal government determined that 315 people were eligible for disaster death benefits.

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Aguirre and Quarantelli (2008) document a number of historic and contemporary disasters in which the deaths of members of racial and ethnic minority groups, migrant workers, transients, and other marginalized groups were rendered invisible. Their research on deaths in the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attacks emphasized the importance of social connectedness and the ability of survivors to produce bureaucratically acceptable forms of identification (social security numbers, driver licenses, passports, official affidavits) for those who were lost as factors influencing whether deaths are recognized and counted. Medical and bureaucratic procedures establish how many people die in disasters and whether deaths are “disaster-related.” Fatal heart attacks and traffic accidents that occur in the context of disasters, accidental deaths that take place during the postimpact cleanup phase, and postdisaster suicides may or may not be counted as disaster-related deaths. Political interests are influential as well; death tolls may be intentionally inflated on the assumption that news of widespread mortality will attract more disaster aid, as is thought to have happened following the Haiti earthquake. Injury estimates vary even more widely than death tolls and are typically based on numbers of injuries treated by official care providers such as hospitals and clinics. However, such statistics are a function of care availability, ease of obtaining treatment (including the ability to afford it), injury severity, and other factors. There are almost no broad surveys on disaster injuries in affected communities, but one study conducted following the 1994 Northridge earthquake resulted in much higher selfreports of injury than did official statistics (Shoaf et al. 1998). Regarding another aspect of victimization, the construction of the mental health consequences of disasters is related to the broader notion of the social construction of illness. In the United States, the notion that disasters can cause or exacerbate mental health problems was institutionalized

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following the 1972 Hurricane Agnes floods, when the nation’s main disaster assistance law, the Stafford Act, was amended to include the provision of disaster mental health services. Later, the “discovery” of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its inclusion in 1980 in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), itself the subject of constructivist research (Scott 1990; Summerfield 2001), made possible the application of the PTSD diagnosis in the disaster context. The identification and treatment of putatively disaster-induced PTSD is now widespread both in the United States and in many other countries, including Japan, where there was little awareness of putative traumatic disaster impacts until the 2011 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear accidents. More recently, the PTSD concept has been expanded to include different forms of “secondary” PTSD, including traumatic reactions to media images of disasters, such as television coverage of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in the 2001 terrorist attacks, along with therapists’ and family members’ responses to traumas experienced by others (Ahern et al. 2004). Arguing that such “disorders” are social constructs is not the same as saying that those who experience or learn of horrifying and frightening events such as those that can occur in disasters suffer no ill effects. Rather, it calls attention to the role of claimsmaking in such designations and links claims to broader trends, such as the medicalization of deviance (Conrad and Schneider 1992) and of a wide range of conditions and circumstances that were formerly thought of as part of everyday life (Conrad 2007). Claimsmaking, advocacy, power, hegemonic discourse, and other aspects of the social construction of illness are evident in the case of contested illnesses (Cable, Shriver, and Mix 2008; Mix, Cable, and Shriver 2009). Insights from that line of research are clearly relevant for the study of hazards and disasters, the health and mental health consequences of which are often contested. Conflicts are common in cases involving chronic technological hazards

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such as long-term toxic contamination, as well as for industrial disasters, oil spills, and many so-called natural disasters. Among the parties typically making claims and counterclaims in such situations are victims, victims’ advocates, citizen scientists, social movement organizations, government agencies, lawmakers, lawyers on opposing sides of lawsuits, psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, researchers, and the media. To a large degree, contention over illnesses following disasters resembles conflict over environmental illnesses more generally, but with the added element that the designation of an event as a disaster can trigger new forms of assistance, including government and private aid, as well as long-term monitoring and special victim compensation programs. Currently, for example, the World Trade Center terrorist attacks, the BP oil spill, and the Fukushima nuclear release are marked by conflicts over health impacts, the creation of special health registries and related research, and large amounts of assistance for putative victims. The construction of animals as disaster victims has taken place largely in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in which numerous pets and other animals were killed, lost, and abandoned. After Katrina, animal advocates, scholars, and the media began highlighting the harm caused to animals in disasters (Irvine 2009). One consequence of this claimsmaking was the passage of the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (PETS Act) which requires state and local governments to provide for the accommodation of pets and service animals in disasters, as an amendment to the Stafford Act. In Japan following the 2011 triple disaster, researchers and the media claimed that dogs in the impact area were exhibiting symptoms of PTSD, as evidenced by the presence of high levels of stress hormones and by difficulties with attachment and training (Pappas 2012). Current claimsmaking centers primarily on companion animals, as opposed to laboratory, zoo, and food animals. In an interesting constructivist twist on victimhood, sociologist and legal scholar

Michelle Dauber (2013) has shown that part of the strategy used by President Franklin Roosevelt and his allies for gaining acceptance of New Deal welfare policies necessitated by the Great Depression was to frame poor and unemployed citizens as victims of a disaster. US disaster policies were based on the notion that victims were not responsible for their misfortunes and were deserving of aid, and the Roosevelt administration’s rhetorical strategy was to argue that the same could be said for those affected by the Depression: what had happened to them was a disaster beyond their control. Strategic mobilization of disaster discourse thus contributed to the development of the US welfare state. Ways of reducing disaster losses and providing assistance are also social and cultural constructs involving powerful interests and broader sociopolitical frames that shape which solutions and disaster remedies are privileged over others. Internationally, the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction influences national disaster-reduction platforms, and the World Bank and regional development banks essentially dictate what less developed nations must do to reduce their risks. In the recent past, reducing disaster losses was linked discursively to the notion of sustainable development. Currently, risk-reduction discourse frames resilience – the ability to anticipate disasters, reduce damage and disruption, and “bounce back” (or some would say “bounce forward”) after disasters – as the most important strategy for managing hazards and disasters. The term has gained currency in the disaster research, practice, and policy communities, as well as among funding sources that support research and programs (Tierney 2014, 2015). The methods advocated for enhancing disaster resilience and aiding at-risk and disaster-stricken communities are rooted in turn in broader social, political, economic, and cultural frameworks. Current disaster resilience narratives and approaches reflect the core assumptions and politicaleconomic processes of neoliberalization (Tierney 2015). In the United States, for

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example, reducing disaster losses is currently constructed as the responsibility not of the state but of the “whole community” – that is, a collaboration among government, civil society, and the private sector. Public-private partnerships are framed as a key resilience-enhancing mechanism. Communities, institutions, organizations, and individuals are urged to be more resilient in order to cope with the consequence of forces such as globalization, rapid urbanization, and climate change, which are framed as inevitable (see, e.g., Rodin 2014). Neoliberal ideology and practices shape the provision of assistance to victims of disaster. Postdisaster damage assessments are conducted by private contractors. The handling of disaster relief and recovery aid has been increasingly privatized, as contracts for managing a broad range of recovery activities are typically awarded to consulting companies, many of which are publicly traded entities. Neoliberal discourse constructs the private sector as superior to government in terms of service quality and efficiency, but research on disasters such as Katrina has revealed numerous examples of waste, inefficiency, corruption, and sheer incompetence on the part of private-sector providers of recovery assistance (Adams 2012, 2013; Gotham 2012).

Concluding Comments The beginning of the twenty-first century has been marked by the occurrence of a significant number of catastrophic and nearcatastrophic disasters, both in the United States and worldwide: the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), Hurricane Katrina (2005), the Sichuan earthquake (2008), the Haiti earthquake and BP oil spill (both in 2010), the Japan triple disaster (2011); Superstorm Sandy (2012), and many other less costly events. Moving forward, climate change and related phenomena, such as sea level rise and the increasing likelihood of periods of extreme heat, will increase the impacts of some types of disaster events (Intergov-

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ernmental Panel on Climate Change 2012). Despite these trends, the occurrence of disasters and the potential for escalating losses are not viewed as a social problem, except perhaps in the immediate aftermath of deadly and damaging events. Disaster risk reduction does become a focal point for claimsmaking and successful mobilization in some communities – typically those at high risk from hazards – but even then efforts to reduce risks often fail, and when they do succeed, they tend to be piecemeal and incremental, such as the passage of ordinances addressing highly hazardous buildings and the adoption of stricter building codes for new construction. These and other risk-reduction measures, such as land use controls, occasionally garner support but more often encounter opposition from local elites, particularly real estate and development interests (Burby 2006; Tierney 2014). Disaster losses continue to rise in the United States as a result of such opposition and of development practices that continually put more people and property in harm’s way. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to envision a future in which this trend would be reversed.

Glossary Disaster In conventional disaster research, an occurrence, originating from nature, technology, or intentional acts, that disrupts social life and causes human and material losses. Disaster as a “nonroutine social problem” The idea that while hazards that communities and societies face could potentially be defined as social problems, this is often not the case except in the aftermath of actual disasters, and even then may not be defined as such. Ecological-symbolic approach to disaster A perspective that argues that social definitions of chronic technological disasters result not only from physical conditions (such as environmental contamination) but also from public interpretations of those conditions.

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Hazard A condition that poses a risk to societies and communities and the things that they value. Systems approach to disaster An early perspective in disaster research, based in functionalist thinking, that emphasizes the idea that events originating in physical and technological systems are not disastrous unless they disrupt the fundamental functions of social systems and subsystems. If a social system can adapt to a physical occurrence (e.g. hurricane, earthquake), then that occurrence is by definition not a disaster.

Notes 1. That symbolic interactionism has an important influence on the study of disasters is not surprising, given that the founders of the field included Charles Fritz and E. L. Quarantelli, both of whom studied at the University of Chicago under Herbert Blumer’s direction (for more information on the influence of the Chicago School, see Knowles 2011). 2. The disaster chapter appeared only in the first edition of the Merton and Nisbet volume, not in subsequent ones. 3. I am not arguing here that deception and collusion were not involved – e.g., collusion between banks and their regulators – but rather that financial engineering lent a veneer of objectivity to shady practices in the financial services sector. 4. This has long been Japan’s justification for its reliance on nuclear power. The government and industry framed the nation as so resourcepoor that there was no alternative but to rely on that form of electricity generation. 5. Regarding the case of the 2011 Japan events, Japan is known for its extensive recordkeeping on earthquakes and tsunamis, and records showed that similar events had taken place in 869 in the same area. Sand deposits also suggested that the run-up from that tsunami was approximately as extensive as that of the 2011 disaster. However, the 869 event appears to have been discounted in the institutional memories of the nuclear industry and its regulators. Tokyo Power Company, which operated the Fukushima Daichi plant, where the triple meltdown occurred, had

access to information on potential tsunami impacts at the plant but chose not to act on it. 6. The Tangshan earthquake was among the deadliest disasters in Chinese and world history. Estimates of the death toll vary from 240,000 to 650,000. The Chinese government succeeded in suppressing information about the earthquake for decades after its occurrence.

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Kurokawa, Kiyoshi. 2012. The Official Report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Committee. Tokyo: National Diet of Japan. Leonard, Andrew. 2008. China’s earthquake and the mandate of heaven. Salon May 13. www.salon.com/2008/05/13/earthquake_ in_china/. Lindell, Michael K., and Ronald W. Perry. 2004. Communicating Environmental Risk in MultiEthnic Communities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Martin, Aryn, and Michael Lynch. 2009. Counting things and people: The practices and politics of counting. Social Problems 56:243– 66. McCright, Aaron M., and Riley E. Dunlap. 2000. Challenging global warming as a social problem: An analysis of the conservative movement’s counter-claims. Social Problems 47:499–522. Mix, Tamara L., Sherry Cable, and Thomas E. Shriver. 2009. Social control and contested environmental illness: The repression of ill nuclear weapons workers. Human Ecology Review 16:172–83. National Research Council. 2006. Facing Hazards and Disasters: Understanding Human Dimensions. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2011. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pappas, Stephanie. 2012. Dogs suffer PTSD-like stress after Japan disaster. NBCnews.com. October 11. www.nbcnews.com/id/49377791/ ns/technology_and_science-science/t/dogs -suffer-ptsd-like-stress-after-japan-disaster/ #.V8cuITW4IsI. Perry, Ronald W., Michael K. Lindell, and Marjorie R. Greene. 1981. Evacuation Planning in Emergency Management. Lexington, MA: DC Heath. Picou, J. Steven, Brent K. Marshall, and Duane A. Gill. 2004. Disaster, litigation, and the corrosive community. Social Forces 84:1493– 522. Proctor, Robert N., and Londa Schiebinger, eds. 2008. Agnatology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Quarantelli, Enrico L. 1987. Disaster studies: An analysis of the social historical factors

disaster as social problem and social construct affecting the development of research in the area. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 5:285–310. Quigley, J. T. 2014. PTSD plagues Tohoku three years after March 11 Disaster. The Diplomat. March 11. http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/ ptsd-plagues-tohoku-three-years-after-march -11-disaster/. Ritchie, Liesel A., and Duane A. Gill. 2013. Recreancy revisited: Beliefs about institutional failure following the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Society and Natural Resources 26:655– 71. Rodin, Judith. 2014. The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong. New York: Rockefeller Foundation. Rossi, Peter H., James D. Wright, and Eleanor Weber-Burdin. 1982. Natural Hazards and Public Choice: The State and Local Politics of Hazard Mitigation. New York: Academic Press. Scott, Wilbur J. 1990. PTSD in DSM-III: A case in the politics of diagnosis and disease. Social Problems 37:294–310. Shoaf, Kimberly I., Loc H. Nguyen, Harvinder R. Sareen, and Linda B. Bourque. 1998. Injuries as a result of California earthquakes in the past decade. Disasters 22:218–35.

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CHAPTER 6

Surveillance S. E. Costanza

Abstract Surveillance refers to the focused, systematic, and routine monitoring of behavior, activities, or information that provides either tactical or strategic intelligence. Collected information is most often used with the rationale of influencing, supervising, or protecting people. When utilized by law enforcement or government agencies, surveillance is frequently directed toward specific persons or groups that are perceived as threats. Corporations also use sophisticated mechanisms and techniques to survey rival corporations and private individuals. The use of surveillance creates unique social problems that involve violations of privacy, due process, and civil liberties. Although various civil liberties groups and advocates oppose many forms of surveillance, governments continue to increasingly employ it as its technology improves.

Defining Surveillance Surveillance is a focused, systematic, and routine effort to collect information for tactical and strategic purposes. Although it is possible for people to participate in “self surveillance” among their fellow community members, most of what we know about surveillance comes from our knowledge of law enforcement and corporate monitoring practices. This is because policing agencies and business organizations typically have the organizational skills, capital, technology, and perhaps most importantly, motive, to exert coordinated efforts toward data collection processes.

Corporate surveillance refers to the organizational practice of monitoring employees, customers, or other corporations to gain tactical and strategic information that will help to further corporate value, sales, and profits. Examples of corporate surveillance include watching employees at work through a camera to ensure that they are performing their designated tasks, or tracking the credit card purchases of individual shoppers in order to direct advertisements toward them. Many regard corporate surveillance as unethical because it facilitates the economic exploitation of employees and private citizens based on information collected secretively (Andrejevic 2002; Roberts 2001). 95

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Government surveillance, by contrast, is executed either by law enforcement or antiterrorism agencies to collect information on random people or specific targets (or targeted areas). This type of surveillance takes many forms, some of which are active (i.e., wiretapping and stakeouts), others passive (i.e., using closed-circuit televisions attached to streetlamps, routine motor patrols, and roving wiretaps). Law enforcement surveillance presents itself as a more complex social problem than corporate surveillance because of its Janusfaced nature. On the one hand, information collected on potential threats can be used as a tool to protect society. On the other hand, surveillance by law enforcement can be wielded as a cudgel with which to repress freedom of speech and force conformity. Surveillance by government agencies is frequently regarded as a deterrent to crime or terrorism. Information gathered by law enforcement may be used to target “hot spots” of criminal activity (Sherman and Weisburd 1995) or to neutralize a particular terrorist cell before it can strike (Costanza and Kilburn 2005). In social democracies, it has been assumed that people are willing to accept different types of surveillance in order to increase their own perceived and real safety. However, surveillance in a democratic society infringes on the rights to privacy and free speech. Although surveillance is sometimes called “domestic spying,” it helps to distinguish it from military spying or “scouting.” The first written records of scouting to obtain tactical and strategic information about military enemies date back to the fifth century b.c. and the Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu’s treatise The Art of War (2012). Throughout the doctrine, Sun Tzu makes at least fifty-seven references to the importance of scouting before battle, stating: “The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand” (42). There is also evidence that the ancient Egyptians and Greeks used surveillance during wartime, mainly to guard

against potential ambushes (Richmond 1998). While military scouting is unique from domestic surveillance, the latter sometimes finds foreign targets. However, efforts to target foreign governments or militaries often must remain covert and secretive, whereas many domestic surveillance techniques (such as the police use of closedcircuit cameras) are intended as visible deterrents of criminal activity and social dissent. Historically, societies implemented domestic surveillance on themselves. According to the sociologist Anthony Giddens, the development of modern capitalist society was responsible for the creation of the nation-state. As nation-states advanced, along with surveillance techniques, the rational application of those techniques became valuable to maintaining social order. During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church used the Spanish Inquisition as its eyes and ears to track the movements of suspected enemies of the church. Former Muslim territories were often subject to surveillance (Martin-Márquez 2008). France used undercover Gendarmes (police) as agents to survey the French population during the eighteenth century revolution against the monarchy (Gillis 1989). Over the years, interested parties have found more advanced ways to collect information. From a postmodern perspective, the development of surveillance as a valuable tool of social control is unavoidable. Though technological surveillance is today an inevitable part of societal progress and organization, it is not a foolproof mechanism for maintaining social order. Despite its omnipotent force, the Spanish Inquisition did not stop Protestantism from spreading across Europe. Nor could the Gendarmes’ undercover work prevent the toppling of the Bastille. Social scientists (Fuchs 2011, 2013; Lyon 2013; Giddens 1987) distinguish surveillance from the simple monitoring of events and people in two ways. The first distinction pertains to the level of organization involved in the observation. The most

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intense forms of surveillance are usually practiced by either governments or corporations and involve multiple levels of intelligence collection (Agre 1994). Accordingly, scholars have pointed out that corporations and governments (due to their advanced ability to carry out surveillance activities) are themselves insulated from being watched (Helms, Costanza, and Johnson 2012). The other difference between surveillance and simple monitoring involves the tendency of surveillance to reinforce an existing power dynamic, a phenomenon referred to as the “dialectic of surveillance” (Hier 2003). Surveillance has been defined in many ways by different scholars. Giddens (1991, 15) has defined it in the context of capitalist society as the control of information, indicating that it is “the main medium of the control of social activity by social means.” To be sure, surveillance tends to lend credibility to existing hierarchies of power while reinforcing existing value systems. Several researchers have pointed out that a group that employs surveillance on another group has the effect of propagating its own values and beliefs, thereby reasserting existing hierarchies of power (Foucault 1977; Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Giddens 1991; Hier and Greenberg 2007). Those capable of covertly watching the actions of others with impunity may use collected information to scrutinize, persecute, and generally manipulate the status and well-being of those they survey. In addition, those that collect such data may share information on people they deem relevant to certain agendas. According to Hier and Greenberg (2007), this lopsided dialectic, resulting from many surveillance practices, involves the simultaneous leveling and solidification of hierarchies. Maynard (1994) points out the ironic effects of the once-common police practice of watching homosexual behavior through “holes in walls.” While police did this to facilitate the apprehension of cases of “gross indecency,” the act of surveillance and discovery tended to confirm public fears of gays and widespread apprehensions

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about homosexuality. As Foucault (1977, 175) stated, surveillance is “a decisive economic operator both as an internal part of the production machinery and as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power.” Similarly, Fuchs (2013, 7) argues that a main goal of surveillance is to threaten people with the “potential exercise of organized violence (of the law) if they behave in certain ways that are undesired.” It is also important, for analytical purposes, to distinguish between targeted surveillance and mass surveillance. Targeted surveillance focuses on one particular person or a suspect group. A corporation for example may target the movements of an employee who is believed to be slacking on the job. Similarly, counterterrorism agencies may tap the phone line of an individual believed to be an affiliate of the global terror network al-Qaeda. Mass surveillance, in contrast, involves the active or passive collection of information on all members of society (Danezis and Wittneben 2006). One example is the National Security Agency’s (NSA) attempt to collect bulk phone records on tens of thousands of random phone calls (Gellman and Soltani 2013).

Surveillance as a Social Problem George Orwell’s 1984, one of the most widely read novels in western history (Marks 2015), uses powerful imagery to cast in sharp relief some of the social fears associated with mass surveillance. The narrative highlights visions of a totalitarian dystopia where freedoms of speech and press (among others) are non-existent. A central theme of the book is that when such freedoms are routinely monitored and censored, society has little chance for individualism. The novel pitches the reader into a despotic milieu where ubiquitous telescreens serve as instruments of mass surveillance. In Orwell’s imagined world, cameras and microphones pervade the environment and the government, symbolized by Big Brother, controls every aspect of life.

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Along similar lines, those who view surveillance as a threat to individuality would perhaps echo John Steinbeck (2015, 93) in East of Eden: “And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.” Surveillance as a social problem highlights efforts by governments or business enterprises to gather information on private citizens. The data retrieved by corporations from surveillance efforts is almost always used for purposes of monetary profit. Corporations have collected data on individuals and groups for both marketing purposes and to sell the data to other corporations (Campbell and Carlson 2002), and may at times share this information with government agencies. There is little regulation on the collection of private-sector data in capitalist society. Information on consumer buying and spending habits may include data on a person’s race, age, gender, and date of birth. Information collected and stored by corporations on private individuals may be sold to or shared with other corporations, credit agencies, predatory creditors, government agencies, as well as with “background check” websites that purchase personal information and resell it online. When the collected information for the aforementioned purposes is circulated, there is the risk that it will be appropriated by wrongdoers. Stalkers (Silverstein 2004) and identity thieves (Sykes 1999) have gained access to private information collected by background check profiteers. Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which corporations use to collect information on shoppers and random internet surfers, may also be stolen hackers. Ethical issues remain about the extent to which corporations can collect and store private information through Internet surveillance practices. Search engines like Google and Yahoo, for example, collect

information on users that involves tracking and recording their search history (Tene 2007). They may also scan the emails sent by their users in order to facilitate advertising based on personal e-mail content. Using this information, search engine companies may sell millions of dollars’ worth of advertising banners (Fabian et al. 2015). Search engine providers frequently use “cookies” to track users’ search histories and assemble information about their Internet preferences (Bennett 2001). Such information is subtly collected by these providers by keeping track of which sites people visit, and what they do in terms of page navigation when they are on these sites. For example, according to Lyon (1998), profiles of individuals’ spending habits, user group memberships, and romantic interests, can be used to target marketing strategies. Also, e-mail clients can glean information from e-mail accounts to create a detailed “consumer profile” of individual users without their knowledge or permission. Ethical problems have arisen as a consequence of providers and clients sharing private individual information with law enforcement agencies. As far back as 1995 (Lyon 1998) the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been working with providers to collect information on suspected pedophiles. While such covert data collection is not a crime, it may constitute an ethical violation of privacy. Surveillance by law enforcement agencies, because of its ostensible lack of profit, is seen as somewhat less dubious than corporate surveillance. As discussed above, law enforcement surveillance may have a benefit that has yet to be empirically demonstrated. Still, domestic surveillance with an order-maintenance or law-enforcement motive is often viewed as a social problem for several other reasons. First, covert information collection without legal authorization challenges the boundaries of personal freedom and privacy. Benjamin Franklin had strong critical views about surveillance and law enforcement, writing in a 1755 letter: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a

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little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” (Rossiter 1953). A second reason domestic surveillance by law enforcement is controversial has to do with the propensity for discrimination and human error. Should a person be singled out as a suspect for terrorism, for example, because they are a practicing Muslim? Because they are an immigrant? Because they have a “foreign” surname? The potential for racial or religious discrimination is ever present in law enforcement. Because surveillance by law enforcement theoretically offers a trade-off between public safety and the individual’s fundamental right to be left alone by government powers, it can be likened to a double-edged sword (Helms, Costanza, and Johnson 2012; Kilburn et al. 2011). Surveillance gives police and government agencies enhanced ability to collect detailed information on potential threats to society and take preventive measures (Coleman 2004). But the potential to target individuals in the name of public safety without judicial permission or probable cause has raised crucial questions related to civil rights and due process (Richards 2012; Cockfield 2003). Questions are often prompted about the extent to which surveillance can and should be legally employed by law enforcement agencies. Many cases involving policing practices have made their way to courtrooms. It is often argued that too little surveillance leaves us vulnerable to attacks from outsiders and criminals, while too much surveillance infringes upon individuality, constitutional rights, and the basic need for privacy (Richards 2012; Parenti 2004). Surveillance is also a threat to due process (Freeman 2006; Costanza-Chock 2004). Random, or mass surveillance by government or law enforcement agencies presents several challenges to both due process and the individual right to privacy. New developing technologies such as miniaturized cameras and wireless IP surveillance systems, make it easy for government agencies or police departments to target a person or groups of people and to monitor

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actions, particularly when new technologies are used in conjunction with legislations that allow warrantless pursuit. Usually information collected through surveillance facilitates building criminal cases against personal character. While people may think they have nothing to hide, a good percentage of the population periodically violates rules and norms. Some people commit minor infractions that, if revealed, could negatively affect their reputation, livelihood, and personal life. Surfing the Internet for personal use during a slow day at work may seem harmless, but if it is regarded as misuse of company equipment, it may be grounds for being fired. Enforcement agencies that practice unchecked surveillance and information collection are likely to find innocuous offenses against everyone. The idea that government organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI can selectively decide whether to leverage collected information against a person or group, without choosing to use such information against other groups, adds an insidious twist to surveillance (Curriden 1992). By contrast, supporters of mass surveillance believe that unchecked and random monitoring by government and police can help protect society from terrorists and criminals (see Clarke 2005). Supporters argue that surveillance can reduce crime through deterrence and observation (Koskela 2000). They believe that widespread surveillance can prevent individuals from engaging in criminal or terrorist activities by increasing the public awareness and perceived risk of being caught and punished. Advocates also point out that random surveillance of the population is essential to observation. In this sense, the use of mass surveillance is very similar to a police officer on general patrol. Supporters of mass surveillance also argue that it allows the police to reconstruct a criminal incident and prove guilt through the video and audio evidence. While some strongly argue in support or against the use of surveillance by

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government and law enforcement, others resign themselves to lack of privacy today (Feuer 2011). To be sure, in many everyday activities such as shopping and working, there are personal facts and information recorded with or without our approval. Internet hosts and service providers regularly place “cookies” on visitors to websites to track their IP address and web activity. Library patrons have their card number and physical address, as well as the materials they checked out, recorded in a computer. Whenever we pay our bills, we allow a collection of private information, including checking account numbers and credit card numbers by sources unknown to us. Accordingly, people will argue with resignation that lack of privacy is just another condition of today’s society. Americans are divided on the issue of whether and to what extent surveillance should be utilized by law enforcement and counterterrorism agencies to gather information on private citizens. In the United States, a predominant concern is that the widespread use of random surveillance will lead to the eventual attrition of basic liberties such as the right to privacy and the freedom of speech and religion. Some argue that when such basic freedoms are eroded, Orwellian totalitarianism will emerge.

Law Enforcement, Counterterrorism, and Surveillance At the center of the controversy about surveillance lie two ideas. The first concerns due process, which is the right to be treated openly and fairly by the criminal justice system. The second pertains to the idea of effective versus dysfunctional enforcement of law and counterterrorism measures. Democracies have historically had legislations that restricted the use of surveillance practices (Taylor 2002). In Western society, the judiciary frequently limits police surveillance to circumstances where public safety is at risk. For example, the legality of local police using electronic wiretap-

ping in some situations, as in for example the cases of Mafiosi in New York City during the 1980s, depends on obtaining a wiretapping order that is similar to a legal search warrant. Police must prove probable cause, or else any information collected through wiretapping is considered subject to the exclusionary rule and thrown out as evidence in a court of law. In most western democracies, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, tainted evidence is referred to as the “fruit of the poisonous tree.” Because of the intent and effects of the USA PATRIOT (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act, and other laws passed following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, law enforcement and counterterrorism agencies have been exempted from the exclusionary rule between 2001 to 2016. Accordingly, they are likely to lead both directed and random domestic surveillance efforts. Agencies such as the CIA and the FBI routinely use specifically targeted surveillance to collect evidence on particular suspects and areas. Cameras mounted on streetlights, police officers on motor or foot patrol, and the monitoring of suspicious motor traffic, are examples of random surveillance by local police. Such methods are presumed to have a deterrent effect on criminal activity (Sherman and Weisburd 1995). The USA PATRIOT Act, passed by the US Congress in October 2001, allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to begin an unchecked bulk data collection program in which no warrants were necessary to monitor terror suspects. The use of roving wiretaps and the collection of pinpointed telecommunications data became common practice for counterterrorist agencies. Similarly, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 created the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Office, which granted over $2 million to compile computer dossiers on 300 million unknowing US citizens (Lee 2014). While the PATRIOT Act and TIA have been made defunct by the USA Freedom Act of 2015 and the Homeland Security Act, they still allow information collecting and

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sharing between law enforcement agencies without court approval. Random monitoring activities are used routinely by law enforcement and are considered indispensable to modern police work. However, since most police surveillance takes place in the streets and other public places, it has generally been viewed as non-intrusive. Closed-circuit television (CCTV), for example, has been useful in crime deterrence efforts in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Nieto (1997) and Welsh and Farrington (2004) show that random surveillance by CCTV has reduced the incidence of convenience store robberies. Convenience store cameras, however, do not collect detailed information on people that enforcement personnel have singled out as potential suspects. By contrast, advances such as cell-phone tracking allow federal and local law enforcement agencies to extend random surveillance efforts into highly personal realms. By monitoring the content of personal Internet searches, e-mail, and telephone traffic, targets for further surveillance can be selected. It could be argued, for example, that people who send emails with the recurring use of the words “drugs” or “terrorism” are worthy of police scrutiny. The surveillance and data collection efforts of law enforcement agencies on individual persons throughout most of modern history has been limited by the courts to cases in which there is a clear and reasonable purpose for using surveillance (Taylor 2002). However, enforcement agencies have previously employed surveillance without permission of the courts. For example, under director J. Edgar Hoover the Federal Bureau of Investigation initiated a counterintelligence program during the 1950s known as COINTELPRO. Allegedly an effort to protect the United States from communism, COINTELPRO authorized FBI agents to expose, disrupt, discredit, and neutralize the activities of groups and individuals deemed subversive (Greenberg 2015). The FBI did not limit its surveillance efforts to suspected communists, however. The COINTELPRO program, which per-

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sisted until 1975, allowed the Bureau to use electronic surveillance on private individuals such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Pepper 2003), most of whom were neither criminal or disruptive forces, but voices for change. During this time, covert listening and video devices were employed against alleged “enemies of the state” including socialist organizations, Civil Rights movement leaders, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the American Indian Movement. Street gangs, such as the Chicago-based Puerto Rican Young Lords were also targeted. It is commonly known that the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) continue to officially and unofficially surveil private citizens in the United States and abroad (Gellman and Soltani 2013). The tapping of telephone lines by law enforcement organizations has become a staple of modern surveillance efforts. The NSA can activate the microphones in cell phones (Hosein and Palow 2013). The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, passed in 1994, allows enforcement agencies warrantless access to the telecommunications activities of private citizens (Woods 2015). The Act also requires that providers make telephone and internet communications available for realtime wiretapping by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies and share records with investigators. Telecommunications and technology companies such as Sprint, ATT, and Yahoo have cooperated with federal law enforcement agencies by disclosing customer location data and IP addresses (Soghoian 2010). InfraGard (Infrastructure Guard), an FBI initiative begun in 1996 (Carlin 2015), allows law enforcement the ability to partner with companies in order to share and access electronic communications databases. Agencies may obtain such information with a search warrant, or companies may willingly choose to cooperate with law enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses data from consumer credit and direct

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marketing agencies collected from monitored private citizens. The DHS boasted that it had enlisted over 30,000 companies and corporations to participate in the InfraGard program. In some cases, law enforcement agencies have forged contracts with their partners in the corporate sector. AT&T and Verizon, for example, are among those corporate entities that are paid to keep their communications databases readily searchable and available for the FBI (Soghoian 2010). Mass surveillance suggests a society in which law enforcement and counterterrorism agencies are free to do as they please without judicial qualification. Unlike cases of individual surveillance where there is a clear suspect, mass surveillance targets everyone equally. Many federal agencies and local police departments argue against judicial restrictions on their ability to surveil. Agencies such as the Department of Justice (DOJ), who advocate the unchecked use of mass surveillance by enforcement agencies, often align themselves with the signal detection model (Kilburn et al. 2011) that was developed by physicians who practiced preventive medicine. The original model involved physicians making decisions about a patient’s diagnosis in the absence of certain critical information. When applied to law enforcement this translates into the exploration of cases where there is even the most remote chance of criminal activity (Basuchoudhary and Razzolini 2006). As applied to counterterrorism, the signal detection model assumes that terrorists hide in plain sight. It also suggests that in order to keep society safe from terrorist and criminal disasters, every potential threat must be explored. Taken to its logical conclusion, the model proposes that the only way to achieve protection from terrorist attacks is to seek and vigorously pursue signals that potential terrorists transmit (Basuchoudhary and Razzolini 2006). The model relies on the constant surveillance of the general population, regardless of resources expended and the potential for wrong outcomes.

Information is assumed to be the key to the detection and neutralization of threats. Employment of surveillance methods such as internet monitoring and roving wiretaps allows for a vast amount of information to be gathered. Law enforcement and counterterrorism agencies argue that they need information to make decisions about assessing and targeting threats. Because quality data are highly valuable to enforcement efforts, many argue that the widespread use of surveillance can deter eminent crime or disaster. However, as Kilburn et al. argue (2006), the potential for human error in signal detection makes false positives much more likely than it does the apprehension of terrorists.

Judicial Challenges to Surveillance Advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) oppose law enforcement and corporate surveillance. These groups and their supporters have long stated that surveillance infringes upon civil rights, due process, and privacy (Strossen 2006). Civil rights include the right to vote, the right to free expression, the right to assemble, the right to freedom of thought, and the right to freedom of religion. It has been argued in court cases that prying into individuals’ personal lives by government agencies or corporations infringes on these rights. The constitutionality of surveillance and its use in the absence of required court warrants has been questioned in the United States. Early court cases involved mostly challenges to law enforcement rights to eavesdrop and wiretap without probable cause. Most legal cases that make criminal evidence collected through electronic surveillance inadmissible in court have been based on challenges to the Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable searches and seizures. Interestingly, the interpretation of the courts has largely ruled in favor of federal law enforcement’s ability to use electronic devices to track criminal

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offenders. In most cases, the US Supreme Court has ruled that electronic surveillance does not constitute unlawful search and seizure. In Olmstead v. U.S., argued in 1928, the plaintiff planned to violate the Prohibition Act by transporting alcohol from Canada into the United States. Federal prohibition officers wiretapped bootlegger Roy Olmstead’s telephones at his house and business. The Court determined that the wiretapping did not sufficiently constitute search and seizure, and thus evidence obtained through wire taping was admissible in a court of law even though a warrant had not been issued. Goldman v. U.S., argued in 1942, questions the constitutionality of federal agents using eavesdropping devices to collect evidence, arguing that such an action was in violation of the Federal Communications Act. In the case, agents targeted Martin Goldman, an attorney who intended to defraud his creditors, with listening devices to collect evidence against him. The federal agents accessed an office adjacent to Goldman’s and installed a microphone to project the conversation into the next room. Using Olmstead as precedent, the US Supreme Court ruled that the use of an eavesdropping device did not constitute search and seizure since no physical search had been conducted. The argument about whether or not eavesdropping constituted an illegal search continued well into the 1960s when Katz v. United States was heard by the US Supreme Court. The petitioner, Charles Katz, who was involved in illegal gambling, was overheard by FBI agents who had attached an electronic listening device to the outside of a telephone booth from which he was placing bets. The US Court of Appeals again affirmed that that there was no Fourth Amendment violation since there was no physical entrance into the area occupied by the petitioner. Hepting v. AT&T Corporation, argued in 2006 and decided in 2009, was a class action lawsuit filed against the telecommunications corporation AT&T for permitting the NSA to access its telecommuni-

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cations and Internet-use records without court approval. In this case the plaintiff, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued that the monitoring by AT&T of its own customers was unconstitutional. The case was dismissed in 2009 based upon the provisions of the state privileges afforded under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was subsequently declined for review by the US Supreme Court. United States v. Garcia argued in 2007, represented no shift of court opinion on the subject of surveillance through the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation devices. The plaintiff, Bernardo Garcia, a known methamphetamine dealer, claimed that the use of GPS devices on his and his wife’s vehicles to track their movements was a violation of his constitutional rights. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that officers did not physically search and seize any property while the GPS devices were in use, and therefore the evidence against Garcia was considered admissible. Wilner v. National Security Agency, decided in 2010, challenged the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. The lawsuit, filed against the NSA and the Department of Justice involved the right to fair trial. Lawyers for a group of twenty-three prisoners suspected of terrorism incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, demanded that the NSA relinquish records concerning the wiretapping of suspects. The US Supreme Court again decided that federal authorities were within their right to withhold information and denied the plaintiffs’ petition for certiorari. Although the courts have historically ruled in favor of federal authorities and law enforcement in cases of surveillance, there may be a shift in the legal environment as of 2013. In Klayman v. Obama, decided in 2013, Larry Klayman, the founder of the civil rights group Freedom Watch, along with several other plaintiffs, filed a civil suit against the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone surveillance program. The case was a victory for civil rights and privacy advocates as it challenged the long-standing verdict from Smith v.

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Maryland (1979) that denied the expectation of privacy in telecommunications activities. The Court found mass data collection on telephone and internet communications by the federal government to be an incursion into individual privacy. Judge Richard Leon of the US District Court for the District of Columbia stating the following: “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval . . . Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment” (Atkins 2014).

fected while new technologies are becoming increasingly efficient. Facial thermographs, a technology that will allow machines to “read” heat patterns emitted by human faces to identify emotions such as fear or stress, have the potential to aid enforcement officers in determining when a random suspect is nervous (Arya et al. 2015). Another technology that is being explored (Kelly and Erickson 2005) involves the use devices with radio frequency identification to relay detailed information about people as they walk past randomly placed scanners. In addition, as voice print identification advances, the admissibility of telephone conversations in court venues may see increased popularity.

Means of Surveillance

Recent Concerns

In his cautionary tale, George Orwell warns of technologies associated with surveillance. According to Haggerty and Ericson (2000), the abilities of surveillance have now far surpassed even Orwell’s dystopic vision. Among other agencies, the HSA, the Information Awareness Office, the NSA, and the FBI continue to fund the private sector to develop more precise and comprehensive surveillance technologies. Millions of dollars are spent annually in the pursuit of tactical and strategic information on perceived threats to national security (Costanza and Kilburn 2005). As pointed out in many of the court cases involving surveillance, new technologies are often at the crux of the constitutionality question. In Olmstead and Goldman, the use of listening devices, which were then new to law enforcement, were brought into question. In later cases, the use of the electronic telephone wiretaps was deliberated. Garcia challenged the constitutionality of GPS devices. Technology employed by law enforcement in surveillance efforts continues to advance. CCTV, orbital satellites, listening devices, Internet search monitoring, and electronic mail monitoring are among the many techniques employed by law enforcement. Old tools of surveillance are per-

The term “Panopticon” was once associated with an architectural design proposed by the eighteenth-century penal reformer Jeremy Bentham. In order to maximize the utility of the observation post, Bentham designed the prison to be laid out in a circular fashion with the guard post in the middle. The design was meant to allow the correctional officers to oversee prison security with minimal effort. Since then, Panopticon has become a notion that scholars have associated with the increasing utility of surveillance technology and coordinated efforts to monitor the lives of private citizens. In a world of databanks and electronic monitoring devices some would compare us to prisoners being overseen at all times with increasing effectiveness. This reinterpretation of Bentham’s Panopticon is largely due to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s interpretation of surveillance as a primary tool of scrutinizing and disciplining people in modern capitalist society (Lyon 1991; Wood 2003). In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) called the spreading process of surveillance “panopticism.” The prison comparison has provoked much controversy for fear that modern society will continue to experience continuous restraints to freedoms as surveillance technology continues to proliferate.

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The idea of democracy and the idea of surveillance seem to be at loggerheads. While many Americans were in favor of heightened governmental surveillance immediately after 9/11, now that the proverbial smoke is lifted, increasing means and methods of surveillance have begun to appear Draconian. In 2013, a former CIA contractor, Edward Snowden, leaked NSA documents that revealed the extent of federal surveillance. Snowden’s documents disclosed, among other things, secret court orders mandating that telephone service providers hand over information to the NSA on a daily basis (Sherry 2013; Atkins 2014). They also showed that the NSA had hacked into several Internet social media servers such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to track online communications (Perlroth et al. 2013). Americans are deeply divided on whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor. However, few seem to deny the truthfulness of the evidence. His revelations about the extent of NSA surveillance have created a great deal of controversy over an already edgy subject. Perhaps because of Snowden’s disclosures there was a populist backlash against law enforcement and corporate peeking into people’s private lives. In 2015, the USA PATRIOT Act, which allowed sweeping powers of surveillance to several US government agencies, was repealed by the Congress. Recent changes in the private sector may also relate to the post-Snowden era desire for privacy among US citizens. For example, Apple’s innovative iPhone 6 uses a complex mathematical algorithm to encrypt electronic information that may be of interest to government agencies and corporations. The iPhone 6 is designed to ensure the absolute privacy of e-mails, contacts, and photos. Corporate interests who track buying habits and monitor individual finances are also blocked from accessing the phone’s data. The information is also unavailable to Apple. Law enforcement officials have not responded kindly to Apple’s claim that it is nearly impossible to access information from the iPhone 6. Apple has been

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threatened with lawsuits by several law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and Department of Justice (Timberg and Miller 2014) for not allowing law enforcement a “backdoor” into its 2014 model iPhone. Enforcers argue that the encrypted information would require law enforcement personnel to either break the code or obtain the code from the phone’s owner via a warrant. Many argue that the Snowden revelations constitute only a fraction of information that was disclosed about US government trespass into the lives of private citizens. Other documents leaked to the Washington Post in 2015 suggested that the NSA had violated privacy laws hundreds of times every year. Even more alarming is that some US citizens are inadvertently placed under surveillance for dubious or innocuous reasons including for making computer errors. In 2015 the BBC and the Washington Post reported that in 2008, several telephone calls placed from Washington DC had been intercepted by Department of Homeland Security agents after an alleged computer error. During the debacle, a computer program was triggered to target numbers dialed from the 202 area code (the area code for Washington, DC) instead of targeting 20, the country code for Egypt. This harkens to what Kilburn et al. (2006) have said about the high potential for false positives and the tracking of potential terror threats. In the wake of 9/11, many Americans were supportive of government surveillance and held no opposition to government agencies pursuing potential terrorists with no regard for legal restraints. However, after fifteen years of allowing the government increased powers of surveillance, it is difficult to show that it has actually prevented terrorism. Instead, many citizens are left with concerns about their own privacy. In retrospect, the surveillance protocols implemented after 9/11 may seem like a Faustian deal with the devil. The argument, “If you aren’t doing something wrong then you don’t have anything to hide,” rings hollow after the Snowden controversy. Snowden’s revelations confirm

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that domestic surveillance is not just targeted at terrorists or criminals. Understanding the truth about surveillance underscored for many average citizens the fact that they too have activities they wish to hide. Looking for a new job, cheating on a significant other, or surfing porn on the internet are relatively innocuous behaviors. From the standpoint of law enforcement they do not matter. But the fact that such behaviors might be recorded in a databank somewhere for hackers, identity thieves, stalkers and others to obtain, puts many citizens ill at ease.

Glossary COINTELPRO A now defunct FBI program that authorized federal agents to expose, disrupt, discredit, and neutralize the activities of groups and individuals deemed “subversive,” including Martin Luther King Jr. Corporate surveillance The corporate practice of monitoring other corporations, employees, or customers to gain tactical and strategic information that will help further corporate value, sales, and profits. Dialectic of surveillance The tendency of surveillance to reinforce an existing power dynamic and to promote normative conformity. Government surveillance Surveillance executed either by law enforcement or federal antiterrorism agencies to collect information on random people or specific targets (or targeted areas). Panopticism A term coined by Michel Foucault to compare modern social life under heavy government surveillance to life in a prison. Signal detection model A law enforcement model based on the principles of preventive medicine. The model calls for the exploration of cases where there is even the most remote chance of activity. Surveillance The focused, systematic, and routine effort to collect information for tactical and strategic purposes.

References Agre, P. E. 1994. Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy. The Information Society 10(2):101–27. Andrejevic, M. 2002. The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure. Critical Studies in Media Communication 19(2):230–48. Arya, S., N. Pratap, and K. Bhatia. 2015. Future of face recognition: A review. Procedia Computer Science 58:578–85. Atkins, E. 2014. Spying on Americans: At what point does the NSA’s collection and searching of metadata violate the Fourth Amendment. Washington Journal of Law, Technology and Arts 10:51. Basuchoudhary, A., and L. Razzolini. 2006. Hiding in plain sight – using signals to detect terrorists. Public Choice 128(1–2):245– 55. Bennett, C. J. 2001. Cookies, web bugs, webcams and cue cats: patterns of surveillance on the world wide web. Ethics and Information Technology 3(3):195–208. Campbell, J. E., and M. Carlson. 2002. Panopticon.com: Online surveillance and the commodification of privacy. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 46(4):586– 606. Carlin, J. P. 2015. United States Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin delivers remarks at the American University Business Law Review 2014 symposium. American University Business Law Review 4:1. Clarke, R. V. 2005. Seven misconceptions of situational crime prevention. In Handbook of Crime Prevention and Community Safety, edited by Nick Tilley, 39–70. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Cockfield, A. J. 2003. Who watches the watchers – A law and technology perspective on government and private sector surveillance. Queen’s Law Journal 29:364. Coleman, R. 2004. Images from a neoliberal city: The state, surveillance and social control. Critical Criminology 12(1):21–42. Costanza, S. E., and J. C. Kilburn Jr. 2005. Symbolic security, moral panic and public sentiment: Toward a sociology of counterterrorism. Journal of Social and Ecological Boundaries 1(2):106–24.

surveillance Costanza-Chock, S. 2004. The whole world is watching: Online surveillance of social movement organizations. In Revisiting Media Ownership, edited by Pradip Thomas and Zaharom Nain, 271–92. London: WACC & Southbound. Curriden, M. 1992. Selective prosecution: Are black officials investigative targets? American Bar Association Journal 78:54– 57. Danezis, G., and B. Wittneben. 2006. The economics of mass surveillance-and the questionable value of anonymous communications. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, 1–16. Cambridge: WEIS. Fabian, B., B. Bender, and L. Weimann. 2015. E-mail tracking in online marketing– methods, detection, and usage. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik, 1100–1014. Osnabrück, Germany. Feuer, L. S. 2011. Who is poking around your Facebook profile?: The need to reform the Stored Communications Act to reflect a lack of privacy on social networking websites. Hofstra Law Review 40: 473. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Freeman, M. 2006. Terrorism and civil liberties in the United States: How to have both freedom and security. Democracy and Security 2(2):231–61. Fuchs, C. 2011. Web 2.0, prosumption, and surveillance. Surveillance & Society 8(3):288– 309. 2013. Political economy and surveillance theory. Critical Sociology 39(5):671–87. Gellman, B., and A. Soltani. 2013. NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show. Washington Post. December 4. www.washingtonpost.com/world/ national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphonelocations-worldwide-snowden-documentsshow/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56c6ca94801fac_story.html?utm_term= .65d4189a2bbe. Giddens, A. 1987. State, Society and Modern History: The Nation-State and Violence. Vol. 2 of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gillis, A. R. 1989. Crime and state surveillance in nineteenth-century France. American Journal of Sociology 95(2):307–41. Greenberg, I. 2015. From surveillance to torture: The evolution of US interrogation practices during the War on Terror. Security Journal 28(2):165–83. Haggerty, K. D., and R. V. Ericson. 2000. The surveillant assemblage. The British Journal of Sociology 51(4):605–22. Helms, R., S. E. Costanza, and N. Johnson. 2012. Crouching tiger or phantom dragon?: Examining the discourse on global cyber-terror. Security Journal 25(1):57–75. Hier, Sean 2003. Probing the surveillant assemblage: On the dialectics of surveillance practices as processes of social control. Surveillance & Society 1(3):399–411 Hier, S., and J. Greenberg. 2007. The Surveillance Studies Reader. Berkshire, UK: McGraw-Hill Education. Hosein, G., and C. W. Palow. 2013. Modern safeguards for modern surveillance: An analysis of innovations in communications surveillance techniques. Ohio State Law Journal 74:1071. Kelly, E. P., and G. S. Erickson. 2005. RFID tags: commercial applications v. privacy rights. Industrial Management & Data Systems 105(6):703–13. Kilburn, J. C., S. E. Costanza, E. Metchik, and K. Borgeson. 2011. Policing terror threats and false positives: Employing a signal detection model to examine changes in national and local policing strategy between 2001 and 2007. Security Journal 24(1):19– 36. Koskela, H. 2000. “The gaze without eyes”: Video-surveillance and the changing nature of urban space. Progress in Human Geography 24(2):243–65. Lee, N. 2014. Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness. New York: Springer. Lyon, D. 1991. Bentham’s panopticon: From moral architecture to electronic surveillance. Queen’s Quarterly 98(3):596. 1998. The world wide web of surveillance: The internet and off-world power-flows. Information, Communication & Society 1(1):91–105.

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2013. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lyon, D., and E. Zureik, eds. 1996. Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Martin-Márquez, S. 2008. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Maynard, S. 1994. Through a hole in the lavatory wall: Homosexual subcultures, police surveillance, and the dialectics of discovery, Toronto, 1890–1930. Journal of the History of Sexuality 5(2):207–42. McCahill, M. 2013. The Surveillance Web. New York: Routledge. Nieto, M. 1997. Public Video Surveillance: Is it an Effective Crime Prevention Tool? Sacramento: California Research Bureau, California State Library. Parenti, C. 2004. The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror. New York: Basic Books. Pepper, W. 2003. An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King. London: Verso. Perlroth, N., J. Larson, and S. Shane. 2013. NSA able to foil basic safeguards of privacy on web. New York Times. September 5. www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foilsmuch-internet-encryption.html. Richards, N. M. 2012. The dangers of surveillance. Harvard Law Review. 126:1934–1965. Richmond, J. A. 1998. Spies in Ancient Greece. Greece & Rome 45(1):1–18 Roberts, J. 2001. Corporate governance and the ethics of Narcissus. Business Ethics Quarterly 11(1):109–27. Roisman, J. 2013. Dealing with the unexpected. International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 26(4):838–42. Rossiter, C. L. 1953. Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty. New York: Harcourt-Brace. Rothfuss, I. F. 2013. An economic perspective on the privacy implications of domestic drone surveillance. Journal of Law, Economy and Policy 10:441. Sherman, L. W., and D. Weisburd. 1995. General deterrent effects of police patrol in crime “hot spots”: A randomized, controlled trial. Justice Quarterly 12(4):625–48.

Sherry, Allison. 2013 Poll: Almost half of Americans say feds infringe on civil liberties. The Denver Post. July 10. www.denverpost.com/ newsheadlines/ci_23634491/poll-almost-halfamericans-say-feds-infringe-civil. Silverstein, L. 2004. The double edged sword: An examination of the global positioning system, enhanced 911, and the Internet and their relationships to the lives of domestic violence victims and their abusers. Buffalo Women’s Law Journal 13:97. Soghoian, C. 2010. An end to privacy theater: Exposing and discouraging corporate disclosure of user data to the government. Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology 12(1):191–237. Steinbeck, J. 2015. East of Eden. Los Angeles, CA: California Books. Strossen, N. 2006. Freedom and fear post-9/11: Are we again fearing witches and burning women? Nova Law Review 31:279. Sykes, C. 1999. The End of Privacy: The Attack on Personal Rights at Home, at Work, On-line, and in Court. Toronto: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Taylor, N. 2002. State surveillance and the right to privacy. Surveillance & Society 1(1): 66–85. Tene, O. 2007. What Google knows: Privacy and internet search engines. Utah Law Review 4:1434–92. Timberg, C., and G. Miller. 2014. FBI blasts Apple, Google for locking police out of phones. Washington Post. September 25. www.washingtonpost.com/business/ technology/2014/09/25/68c4e08e-4344-11e49a15-137aa0153527_story.html?utm_term= .1228a4596094. Tzu, S. 2012. The Illustrated Art of War. San Francisco: Courier Corporation. Welsh, B. C., and D. P. Farrington. 2004. Surveillance for crime prevention in public space: Results and policy choices in Britain and America. Criminology & Public Policy 3(3):497–526. Wood, D. 2003. Foucault and panopticism revisited. Surveillance & Society 1(3):234–39. Woods, M. J. 2015. Data retention requirements and outsourced analysis: Should private entities become government surrogates in the collection of intelligence. American University Business Law Review 4:49.

CHAPTER 7

Domestic Spying: A Historical-Comparative Perspective Mathieu Deflem, Derek M. D. Silva, and Anna S. Rogers

Abstract Domestic spying is a cultural construct that refers to the activities of, and debate on, intelligence agencies oriented at the home population of citizens within nations. In the United States, the debate on domestic spying has been especially intense as the country has a long-standing culture and accompanying legal and political framework devoted to protecting individual rights of nonintervention. Unlike several other democratic nations, the United States has no specialized self-standing domestic intelligence agents, with such functions being handled by other agencies of law enforcement and foreign intelligence. This chapter reviews the patterns and dynamics of domestic spying in terms of the historical development of domestic intelligence work and offers a comparative overview of such activities in a number of nations. This comparative-historical outlook should be advantageous both for the analysis of domestic spying as a social problem and in terms of the normative framing of the debate within cultures committed to civil liberties as well as national security.

Introduction Since the expansion of counterterrorist measures following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the debate on domestic spying has moved to the center of the public consciousness. Traditionally a topic of relatively minor importance to the study of social problems, the manifold dimensions involved with domestic spying have strong normative connotations that invite an analytical approach from the perspective of the sociology of social problems. This

chapter will develop such a perspective on the basis of a comparative-historical framework. A useful academic approach to domestic spying cannot be restricted to contemporary aspects of domestic spying in the United States alone. This consideration is valid even though it is probably in no other context than that of the contemporary United States that the issue poses itself in its strongest and most manifest way given the nation’s liberal cultural focus on balancing personal rights and public

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security (Deflem and McDonough 2015). Yet, an informed analysis of domestic spying cannot legitimately restrict itself to the narratives that are presently at work among advocates of civil liberties and critics of domestic intelligence operations, whether in the context of the United States or elsewhere. It will be informative to treat domestic spying as a cultural construct that is located in space and time and, as a result, needs to be approached from a comparative and historical viewpoint.

Domestic Spying as a Social Problem Especially in the public media and among civil liberty groups, domestic spying readily invokes strong negative connotations of intelligence programs that are scrupulously targeted at a nation’s own citizens, rather than at foreign actors who might pose risks to national security from abroad. As a cultural construct, domestic spying relates to a variety of mechanisms and structures of social control internally directed at gathering information from the population. In more neutral terms it can be referred to as domestic intelligence (Deflem and Dilks 2008). In a related social science perspective as well as in the popular media and among the general public, domestic surveillance emphasizes intelligence activities intended to extract private information of a sensitive nature. Given that legal, cultural, and political, conditions differ across nations, domestic intelligence operations are not always neatly defined. As will be reviewed in detail later in this chapter, some countries have a specialized domestic intelligence agency, but others, most notably the United States, do not. In the case of the United States, there is not even an official definition of domestic intelligence. This state of conceptual confusion impacts what domestic intelligence is from an institutional viewpoint and what it can and should be in terms of aspired goals and activities. One useful approach is to define domestic intelligence as all the “efforts by government organizations to gather, assess,

and act on information about individuals or organizations in the United States or US persons elsewhere that is not necessarily related to the investigation of a known past criminal act or specific planned criminal activity” (Treverton 2008, 15). This definition distinguishes between intelligence as the routine collection of information, on the one hand, and information-gathering activities as part of criminal investigations, on the other (Deflem 2010, 77). Depending on country-specific factors, these two functions of routine intelligence and crimerelated information gathering are divided between intelligence and police agencies, respectively, or co-exist to some degree within agencies. The cultural construct of domestic spying also relates to the contentious debate about the activities or even the very idea of domestic intelligence in strongly normative terms. Such debates typically transpire in liberal political cultures committed to freedom and democracy that also maintain national interests related to public security. Democratic nations take special political and legal measures to assure the effectiveness and legitimacy of domestic intelligence work. In the current era, the domestic spying debate has mostly revolved around important intelligence and security developments enacted within nations since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the United States, in particular, a so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program was enacted on the basis of a secret order given by then President George W. Bush that involved gathering intelligence on American citizens. Once exposed in the news media in 2005, the program was heavily criticized but subsequently continued under the administration of President Barack Obama, despite the latter’s election on a political platform strongly opposed to Bush-era policies. Another factor in bringing domestic spying to the foreground were revelations made in 2013 by private security contractor Edward Snowden concerning the scale and intensity of domestic and foreign intelligence work conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

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The cases of the Terrorist Surveillance Program and the Snowden revelations on NSA mass surveillance, on which much of the current debate on domestic spying is focused, are not unique in the history of (domestic) intelligence in the United States. The cases are also not indicative of the pattern and dynamics of domestic intelligence issues found around the world. A historical and comparative outlook will reveal a broader and a more precise picture.

Domestic Intelligence in the United States: A History Ever since the founding of the United States, domestic intelligence has been of central importance, particularly in organizing security and intelligence institutions. Also relevant from the start, was the need to determine the permissible scope of domestic intelligence operations, on the one hand, and the need to secure civil liberties alongside national security interests, on the other. The following review will highlight the most important aspects of these developments (Batvinis 2007; Hulnick 2009; Morgan 1980; Schaefer 2009). Historical Beginnings Upon the founding of the nation, internal surveillance practices in the United States were only enacted as needed when a crisis arose. By example, concerns about French agents promoting Jacobinism inspired passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The Acts lengthened the period of residency to allow for US citizenship, enabled the President of the United States to deport anyone in the name of peace and safety, and imposed penalties for the promulgation of ideas against the United States and their dissemination in the news media. Foreshadowing some of the issues still relevant today, these laws were ultimately repealed as violations of the First Amendment to the US Constitution concerning freedom of speech.

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In 1861, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, through which prisoners can seek relief from unlawful imprisonment. The Habeas Corpus Act of 1863 subsequently allowed the Union armies to round up citizens suspected of being spies and saboteurs (Morgan 1980, 20). Upon the cessation of hostilities, the military relinquished its intelligence role, and private detective agencies, notably the Pinkerton Agency, filled the void as no federal intelligence and security agencies were yet developed. One exception was the US Secret Service, created in 1865, whose officers engaged in intelligence work during the Spanish-American War. In 1870, the US Justice Department was created, but it had no law enforcement agency and relied on agents from the Secret Service in the Treasury Department for internal intelligence activities, for instance to investigate corruption among members of Congress (Deflem 2006). The first special investigators were assigned to the Justice Department at the end of the nineteenth century to investigate selected federal crimes. After Congress had opposed the creation of a dedicated Justice Department enforcement agency, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 established the Bureau of Investigation by executive order (the word “Federal” was added in 1935). Originally charged with only a few federal offenses concerning interstate commerce, the Bureau would gradually expand its responsibilities on the basis of new federal criminal laws, such as the 1912 Mann Act that prohibited the interstate transportation of prostitutes. Domestic intelligence responsibilities would follow alongside of these expanding tasks. The main domestic threat in the United States during the earliest decades of the twentieth century argued to justify domestic intelligence came from threats made by anarchist individuals and anarchist. President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901, leading to efforts, both domestic and international, to target radical ideological individuals and groups

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(Deflem 2002, 66–68). Domestically, the Secret Service in the Department of the Treasury, not the Bureau of Investigation in the Justice Department, was at this time still the agency that provided for domestic intelligence. This situation changed in 1916 when the US Attorney General opposed assigning investigative powers to the Secret Service in matters not involving federal law. The Justice Department subsequently requested that it take control over such investigations from the Secret Service. After the United States joined World War I, the Bureau of Investigation and other branches of the Justice Department secured primary responsibility over domestic intelligence work. An expanded federal legal framework, passed during and because of the war, promoted a continued expansion of domestic intelligence institutions. In 1917, the Immigration Act (expanding the category of excludable aliens from the United States) and the Espionage Act (making it illegal to oppose wartime policies) were passed. The Sedition Act (forbidding criticism of the government) and the Immigration Act (allowing for the exclusion of “subversive aliens”) followed in 1918. After the war, US domestic intelligence changed focus from German enemy agents to radical and anarchist individuals and groups. A specialized General Intelligence Division was created in the Justice Department under the supervision of J. Edgar Hoover and engaged in numerous raids against radicals, collecting some 10,000 people believed to be communists (Deflem 2002, 118–19, 122). These so-called Palmer Raids (named after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) raised concerns over the domestic powers of the Justice Department and its investigators. In response, President Calvin Coolidge chose Harlan Fiske Stone, a well-known critic of the Palmer Raids, to become the new Attorney General in 1923, but a year later J. Edgar Hoover was appointed Director of the Bureau of Investigation. With its responsibilities restricted to a limited number of criminal law enforcement duties, the gathering of domestic

intelligence was initially not within the province of Bureau operations. The Centrality of World War II The most important change to the rise of the domestic intelligence apparatus in place in the United States today took place during the buildup toward World War II. As early as 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt secretly directed the Bureau of Investigation to investigate the American Nazi movement. Invoking the Appropriations Act of 1916, the FBI became the central agency responsible for many aspects of domestic intelligence work from here on out (Theoharis 2004, 46). In 1938, President Roosevelt and FBI Director Hoover secretly met to form the Interdepartmental Intelligence Conference, involving the FBI along with the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Military Intelligence Division. This initiative was a historically crucial moment in the building of American domestic intelligence because it was the first time that a “structure composed of specialized agencies with core competencies in such matters would focus on, direct, and coordinate all espionage, counterespionage, and sabotage investigations involving the federal government” (Batvinis 2007, 68). Although the US government was formally committed to neutrality on the war that had erupted in Europe after Nazi Germany had invaded Poland, President Roosevelt in 1939 formally charged the FBI to investigate violations of neutrality laws, espionage, sabotage, and subversive activities, thereby adding an additional 150 agents to the Bureau. During World War II, the FBI was responsible for all domestic intelligence as well as foreign intelligence in South America. Although FBI Director Hoover had hoped for the Bureau to be in charge of all intelligence activities, the leading US intelligence agency for all foreign nations besides South America was the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was created in 1947 (Hulnick 2009).

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During the war, the FBI expanded greatly, both in terms of personnel and financial support, powers it would not relinquish thereafter (Deflem 2006; Keller 1989). With the advent of the Cold War, the FBI’s domestic intelligence focus shifted toward communism as well as other radical and extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan. Anticommunist intelligence already dated back to the war when in 1943 a large investigation called Comintern Apparatus (or COMRAP) was initiated to investigate if the Soviet Union was trying to recruit US citizens as agents. Various specialized indexes, such as the Custodial Detention Index and the Security Index, were created to collect information on suspected extremists and radicals. Domestic spying against suspected communists among the US citizenry took on infamous proportions when the House Un-American Activities Committee, with assistance of the FBI, focused attention on US citizens in positions of power who might have connections to communism. Related activities by Senator Joseph McCarthy also fueled the notion that domestic intelligence was needed to halt a suspected Communist subversion process. The 1947 National Security Act led to the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the focus of which was to be on external rather than internal threats. An inevitable competitor of the CIA, the FBI by implication nonetheless was granted domestic intelligence responsibilities and greater autonomy to conduct such activities under an expanding legal framework, such as by passage of the Communist Control Act in 1954. In part supported by the public’s fear of a threat of communism from abroad, counterintelligence programs at home were expanded as well. Most famous is the COINTELPRO program that targeted communist groups but later grew to include other internal threats (Davis 1992). At the same time as the FBI expanded its domestic surveillance powers, the CIA’s domestic intelligence-gathering capacities also increased. For example, the CIA oversaw a program known as CHAOS that focused on

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external influences on Americans’ ideologies related to any protest activities in the United States. The most far-reaching FBI domestic intelligence program was Communist Infiltration (COMINFIL), which began in 1956 and continued even after the sharp decline of American participation in the Communist Party. The 1960s expanded domestic intelligence toward the civil rights movement, protest groups, and hate groups. While primary responsibilities in these matters were handled by (local) law enforcement, the FBI was involved whenever connections with Communism were feared or argued to exist. Such COINTELPRO programs were specifically initiated for socialist workers’ groups, white supremacists, black extremists, political student groups, and anti–Vietnam War organizations, among others. The Modern Era The 1970s proved to be an important decade in the history of American domestic intelligence. US President Richard Nixon attempted to increase the amount of domestic surveillance that would be allowed, but the only outcome of this effort was a lowered minimum age for informers so that college students could be included. As the legislators and the public at large generally became more and more concerned about privacy issues, several hearings were held by the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights. Of course, the Watergate affair also impacted the debate as the CIA came under fire for its domestic spying role and was itself being investigated in 1975. The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, or the Church Committee (named after chairperson Senator Frank Church), completed these investigations, and found several abuses of power by the CIA, the FBI, as well as intelligence agencies in the military. For instance, the CIA was discovered to have been involved in domestic intelligence activities by seeking

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to uncover foreign intelligence by means of opening and photographing first class mail within the United States (Sinha 2013). In light of concerns revealed about the powerful reach of the FBI and following the death of Director Hoover in 1972, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. FISA regulations require a court to approve the use of electronic surveillance on foreign agents and international terrorists operating within the United States. In the 1980s, the FBI shifted its effort toward investigating organized crime and terrorist attacks against US citizens, concerns on which the Bureau readily received popular support. The legitimacy of the FBI, however, would again be severely damaged during the 1990s under influence of several problematic incidents involving federal officers using lethal force against US citizens, most notably the shootings at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and the siege at Branch Davidian headquarters in Waco, Texas in 1993. Both of these incidents also motivated the Oklahoma City Bombing on April 19, 1995, at that time the worst terrorist attack on American soil, whereby 168 people died. The investigation and subsequent prosecution of the perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, would again be considered an FBI success. In part because of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe from the late 1980s onward, the 1990s witnessed a shift toward terrorism and the domestic implications of its response. The terrorist age as we know it today was initially launched with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which led to the death of six people. The investigations into the attack successfully lead to the arrest of the person who was driving the truck that transported the bomb used as well as the arrest of other perpetrators involved. Subsequently, the FBI could strengthen its antiterrorist role in the wake of the attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the coordinated bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, and the bombing of the USS Cole naval ship in October 2000.

Needless to argue, the most impactful milestone event for domestic intelligence was September 11, 2001, after which police and intelligence powers were expanded and strengthened in numerous ways. The USA PATRIOT Act authorizing special investigative powers of surveillance was passed in October 2001, and a new Department of Homeland Security, with a host of institutions and security agencies, was created in November 2002. The present state of and debate on domestic spying in the United States is greatly shaped by the 9/11 experience.

US Domestic Intelligence Post-9/11 The events of 9/11 have far from settled the question of whether or not the United States would benefit from a specialized domestic intelligence agency, how problems associated with information sharing information among the different existing security and intelligence organizations can be handled, and how US citizens’ privacy and other civil liberties can and should be balanced with national security needs. In fact, the present era of domestic intelligence in the United States is no less complicated than it has been historically. Charting the basic components of contemporary conditions and issues, attention must go to the domestic intelligence capabilities of law enforcement, both at the federal and local level, as well as the secret intelligence programs that were implemented following the events of 9/11 and the debate that has erupted when they were revealed. Domestic Intelligence and Law Enforcement American law enforcement agencies, as their counterparts in many nations across the world, have witnessed considerable shifts and transformations since the events of September 11, including a more resolute adoption of intelligence work. Most outstanding in this respect at the federal level has been the re-organization of the FBI as

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a federal security agency whose primary responsibility is terrorism (Deflem 2006, 2010, 45–48). Terrorism had already moved to the foreground of the FBI’s mission during the 1990s, especially following the World Trade Center Bombing in 1993 and the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, but the terrorist attacks of September 11 made terrorism the FBI’s primary focus. Closely related is a resolute orientation in the FBI toward developing domestic intelligence capabilities. While functionally akin to the activities of self-standing domestic intelligence services such as they exist in other countries (see below), the FBI’s role is more restrictive in terms of terrorism and related major security concerns. Additionally, of note is that contemporary domestic intelligence work in the United States has also been advocated to be developed at the local level of municipal and state law enforcement agencies, presenting an altogether new role to these agencies (Deflem 2010, 73–86). As of now, local intelligence capabilities among local police are only developed, however, in selected organizations of large metropolitan areas, such as the New York City Police Department, where special needs are argued to justify such special reorganizations. Smaller police agencies have generally refrained from activities that could perceived as spying on the local population. The complex nature of the system of US domestic intelligence and security agencies presents special problems even in an attempt to merely chart relevant organizations and activities (Treverton 2008). Pertinent agencies in the area of intelligence, security, and law enforcement cover more than just terrorism and national security issues and can also pertain to major crimes such as money laundering and drug smuggling. While the FBI generally takes the lead on domestic intelligence matters, there are other groups that play a relevant role, such as the foreign intelligence service CIA, the NSA, and agencies in the Department of Justice as well as the Department of Homeland Security. The domestic intelligence structure in the United States is as such

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essentially multilayered. Seeking to coordinate the various intelligence activities, a new cabinet-level Office of the Director of National Intelligence was established in 2004, but this new coordinating agency is not found to have any meaningful impact (Deflem 2010, 41–42). Additionally, contributing to the complexity of the US situation is that relevant policy decisions and legal frameworks may exist relatively independent from the work that is done at the level of the agencies of intelligence and law enforcement (Deflem 2010, 54–71). By example, the USA PATRIOT Act (the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorist Act) which was signed into law on October 26, 2001, has received much scrutiny. However, much less observed is the fact that the Act mostly specifies ways to allow for expanded powers of investigation and intelligence gathering, with an emphasis on advanced technological means of inquiry, which police and other security organizations had already developed irrespective of the new federal law (Deflem 2010, 60–61). Secret Domestic Intelligence Revealed Domestic intelligence work by the FBI in the post-9/11 era has at times been the subject of scrutiny and debate, for instance with respect to the rights of Muslim US citizens to worship without the interference of government surveillance. Nothing has compared, however, to the vigorous debates that have erupted following the revelations of secretly conducted intelligence programs by the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2005 and 2013. In December 2005, it was revealed through news reports in the New York Times that the NSA had been engaged in a domestic surveillance program that been secretly ordered by President George W. Bush in the wake of the events of 9/11 (Deflem 2010, 39–40; Deflem and Dilks 2008; Wong 2006). Created in 1952, the NSA’s main function is to protect the integrity of information systems in the United States while

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investigating and intercepting the codes used by potential foreign adversaries. Referred to as the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the secret program President Bush authorized in 2002 allowed the NSA to engage, without formal court approval, in surveillance of communications involving a US citizen whenever a foreign party was also involved and either one was suspected of involvement with al-Qaeda or related terrorist groups. In 2006, it was additionally revealed that the NSA was keeping logs of multiple billions of domestic phone calls. Upon revelation of the NSA program, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other civil liberties groups filed lawsuits against the Agency. President Bush in a public televised address defended the actions as necessary for national security in the post-9/11 era, while critics argued that the Fourth Amendment provision on illegal search and seizures had been violated. In 2006, a federal judge ruled the program to be unconstitutional, whereupon new federal laws were passed to allow for noncourt approved foreign intelligence while providing protections toward domestic intelligence. The most recent revelations concerning intelligence work by US agencies that have had problematic consequences occurred in the summer of 2013 when The Guardian and Washington Post newspapers reported on the purported massive scale and deep nature of surveillance work by the NSA that was revealed by private security contractor Edward Snowden (Sinha 2013). A former CIA employee and computer security expert, Snowden worked for a computer company’s NSA-related sharing activities when he began suspecting the NSA’s surveillance activities violated constitutional protections. The intelligence files Snowden copied and turned over to a few select journalists revealed that the NSA had been engaged in far-reaching and deeply penetrating intelligence work. Though mostly pertaining to foreign individuals and groups, these activities also included domestic spying programs that involved the monitoring and collection of US citizens’ emails,

cell phones, and the internet, including the data of private companies such as Yahoo and Google. The Snowden revelations brought about a renewed and invigorated attention toward so-called mass surveillance within the United States, although it primarily involved global surveillance directed abroad from the United States as well as from other nations. A closer look at the (domestic) intelligence conditions in selected other countries will therefore be useful to this review.

Domestic Intelligence Around the World: A Comparative Look The global constellation of domestic intelligence consists of a complicated amalgam of stated and implied functions and objectives, underlying philosophies, and institutions. It is instructive, not least of all to properly situate the American experience, to take a look at the main characteristics of domestic intelligence in a number of different countries. This review, of course, is necessarily selective, but it should nonetheless be useful in view of providing a clarification of issues and problems useful to assess the state and direction of the domestic spying debate in the United States. The countries discussed in the following pages are known for their political, cultural, and economic connections and/or similarities with the United States as well as, importantly, the fact that they have a specialized domestic intelligence agency unlike the United States. The Commonwealth: Canada and the United Kingdom In more than geographical respects the nearest neighbor to the United States, Canada has had relatively few cases of homegrown-based terrorism in recent years, yet it is suspected that the country has been an unwilling host to more representatives of international terrorist networks than any other country in the world. In Canada, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is responsible for domestic

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intelligence (Chalk 2009a; Deflem 2010, 89– 91). Created by an act of Parliament in 1984, CSIS was established as the sole agency responsible for internal surveillance, a function which until then was overseen by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The creation of a dedicated intelligence agency was decided upon after the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had highlighted problems with the coexistence of intelligence and police powers in the RCMP. In the 1980s, CSIS primarily focused on counterespionage, but from the 1990s onward its focus has been more and more directed at counterterrorism. The Service is part of Public Safety Canada, the government department that was created in 2003 in succession of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. Strikingly, Canada has no foreign intelligence service. CSIS conducts a wide range of intelligence efforts, from signals intelligence to human intelligence. Relying on a multitude of data sources (such as electronic surveillance, bugging and wiretapping, and opening emails), all CSIS operations have to be approved by a federal court affidavit. The Service also oversees domestic security screening, for instance to determine the legitimacy of individuals applying for citizenship and to assess the potential threat of foreign nationals posing a risk to Canadian security. Though formally separated from law enforcement, CSIS is a partner in the so-called Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams that have been established since 2002 to enhance information sharing among intelligence as well as with police agencies. Similar to the often-reported tension that exists in the United States between the FBI and the CIA, Canada’s central agencies for intelligence (CSIS) and policing (RCMP) have been known to regularly be at odds over respective responsibilities. This interagency tension was especially strong in the immediate years following the creation of CSIS as the Service was specifically set up against the RCMP’s earlier dual mandate of intelligence and police. Since then, a system

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of liaisons has improved communications between the agencies. Not unlike other countries committed to liberty and privacy, concerns exist over the potential of Canada’s CSIS to violate citizen rights. To prevent such problems, the CSIS Act that set up the agency also established two main oversight bodies: the Security Intelligence Review Committee and the CSIS Inspector General, both of which are held accountable by the Minister of Public Safety to monitor compliance of CSIS activities with policies and laws. Furthermore, all domestic intelligence activities have to be authorized in the Canadian federal court system. Given Canada’s specific system of external oversight, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has been used “as a model for informing the development of newly configured domestic security institutions in countries emerging from highly authoritarian nondemocratic rule” (Chalk 2009a, 57). Nonetheless, CSIS has not been without problems and criticisms, both in terms of suspected flaws in efficiency and for at times misrepresenting its activities to the courts. The United Kingdom is probably best known worldwide as a nation that has both a domestic and a foreign intelligence agency, the famous MI5 and MI6, respectively (Clutterbuck 2009; Deflem 2010, 92–93). The current intelligence situation in the United Kingdom dates back to the creation of the Metropolitan Police Force in 1829, which brought out the role of intelligence gathering toward the prevention of crimes, including public disorder and revolutionary activities. These activities included deploying plain clothed officers to act on criminal matters while gathering intelligence related to public disorder, meetings of revolutionary groups, and refugees. In 1883, a Special Branch formed within the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police to respond to a campaign of bomb attacks carried out in the name of Irish Republicanism. In 1909, the Secret Service Bureau was created in order to counter the threat of foreign espionage. In the years after

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World War II, the functions of the Security Service and of the police were more carefully differentiated. Issues of terrorism erupted from the 1960s onward in view of terrorist activities associated with the Irish Republican Army. As a result, the Security Service (MI5) has been working closely with other intelligence agencies such as the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), which is tasked with gathering information from outside the United Kingdom, and the Government Communications Headquarters, which is focused on intelligence-related electronic communications. The events of 9/11 drastically transformed the Security Service, when it began to focus primarily on the threat posed by al-Qaeda and similar Islamism extremist networks. The UK government did not officially acknowledge the existence of the Security Service until the Security Service Act of 1989. The Service does not restrict its domestic intelligence-gathering activities to counterterrorism, but gathers information and intelligence on all possible threats posed to the security of the United Kingdom. The principle intelligence-gathering techniques used by the Security Service, such as covert human intelligence sources and interception of communications, must be formally authorized subject to the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act 2000. The most intrusive techniques, such as eavesdropping operations, must even receive personal authorization from the Home Secretary, to whom the Director General of the Security Service must answer. Whereas in the United States intelligence and investigative powers co-exist within the FBI, MI5 is distinct from police agencies with which the domestic intelligence agency maintains cooperation. Specifically, MI5 works with law enforcement agencies through “Special Branches” (Masse 2003). These special branches are located in various police agencies to counter terrorism and other security concerns at the local level. MI5 is responsible for collecting intelligence and assessing associated security risks, while the police forces are responsible for collecting evidence for use in legal proceedings.

The MI5 intelligence service is subject to several accountability mechanisms. Political oversight exists at the ministerial and parliamentary level as the Service is subject to the authority of the Home Secretary, who in turn is responsible to Parliament for the Service’s activities. The Intelligence and Security Act of 1994 created the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, made up of counselors who report annually to Parliament. Additionally, an Investigative Powers Tribunal is mandated to investigate any complaints coming from the public about the Service. Continental Europe: France and Germany Turning to the European continent, France has the sometimes dubious distinction of having among the most extensive experience with intelligence and related law enforcement systems (Warnes 2009a). The French domestic intelligence organization is the General Directorate for Internal Security (Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure, DGSI) that was formed in 2008 by uniting the two earlier agencies of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (Directorate of Territorial Surveillance, DST) and the Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux (Central Directorate of General Intelligence, DCRG). These two agencies were set up in the wake of World War II. Originally, the DST mission was to research and prevent, on the territory of the French Republic, activities planned or committed on behalf of foreign powers that threatened the security of France. The mandate of the DCRG differed in its focus on inquiries concerning intelligence destined to inform the French government in matters of internal security. The DCRG’s mandate was thus broader and oriented at collecting information relating to terrorism as well as a wide range of social and political activities. In any case, since the amalgamation of the two agencies in the General Directorate for Internal Security in 2008, all domestic intelligence functions are united in one agency.

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Within the agency, various specialized units exist, such as on economic protection, terrorism, and counterespionage. As in other democratic nations, French intelligence operations face the dilemma of aspiring to work efficiently while not violating citizen rights. Civilian oversight concerning intelligence work has most recently been strengthened by placing the DGSI directly under the Ministry of the Interior, outside of the structure of the French national police. Likewise known for its long-standing traditions of elaborate security and surveillance systems, Germany has a unique domestic intelligence structure because there are numerous independent intelligences in the sixteen national Länder (states) of the country (Warnes 2009b). As ordered by the allied powers after World War II, then West-German authorities were in 1949 instructed to create an intelligence organization that was completely independent from the police. This arrangement brought about a separation of intelligence and policing functions alongside of a division of powers at the federal and state levels that exists until this day. At the federal level, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV) fulfills the role of Germany’s domestic security agency. Besides espionage in foreign nations, the BfV collects and analyzes intelligence on individuals and groups in Germany that pose any threat to the constitution and domestic security of the country. The organization is also responsible for cooperation among its counterparts at the level of the sixteen states and the coordination of all domestic intelligence. Under influence of left-extremist activities in the 1970s, involving assassinations and kidnappings, intelligence activities in Germany have a long-standing history of focusing on radical and extremist groups. As a result of the discovered al-Qaeda connections with terrorist cells in Germany, the BfV has been actively involved in monitoring the threat of Islamist extremism as part of the agency’s monitoring of all activities directed against the free democratic order.

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Collected intelligence is entered into the BfV’s intelligence database, which, because of the separation between intelligence and police, is not accessible to state and federal police authorities. Historically, cooperation between Germany’s intelligence and police agencies was limited, but a 1973 law changed this situation and mandated systems of police-intelligence cooperation be developed. Oversight of Germany’s domestic intelligence occurs through several different controls, mostly emanating from the federal parliament. Implications and Lessons for the United States Analyzing the case studies of democratic nations with specialized domestic intelligence agencies, some common themes emerge in terms of organization and policy (Chalk 2009b). Typically, countries that have separate domestic intelligence agencies reserve powers of arrest and detention for law enforcement agencies (Deflem 2010, 91–96). Rigorous systems of civilian oversight are instituted, more so than is the case where only foreign intelligence is concerned. Similar to law enforcement officials relying on information from members in the community to solve crimes, domestic intelligence services also have to rely on cooperation from the public and can therefore not be as divorced from the public as foreign intelligence agencies often are. Further, in matters of counterterrorism, in particular, domestic intelligence agencies are not the only players but perform a role next to, and in cooperation with, other intelligence and security organizations. Finally, it is interesting to observe that while foreign intelligence agencies, such as the CIA in the United States, are sometimes found (and criticized) to be involved in domestic intelligence work, specialized domestic intelligence agencies at times also engage in foreign intelligence work. The question can be asked if it is possible to draw lessons from these experiences around the world for the United States or even to develop a US domestic intelligence

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agency similar to those found in other democracies. From a scholarly informed viewpoint, it can readily be stated that any precise conclusions from comparative analyses are always precarious at best. Strikingly, however, the United States has witnessed, in the aftermath of the events of 9/11 and the failures that were then and have since been attributed to the intelligence and security community, occasional calls to create a dedicated domestic intelligence service. Desirable or not, it is possible to entertain the question of whether the United States should develop a domestic intelligence agency (Burch 2007; Masse 2003). Taking by example the United Kingdom and its domestic intelligence service MI5, which from time to time has been suggested as a model for developing a similar agency in the United States, it is to be noted that there are perhaps not many but definitely some noteworthy political, legal, and cultural differences between the United Kingdom and the United States (Masse 2003). At the political level, the United Kingdom’s national parliamentary structure is distinct from the United States, where power is decentralized in a federalist system. Moreover, in the UK parliamentary system the power of the executive lies in the Cabinet (formed by the Prime Minister), while in the US federal system power rests with the presidency. As a result, the British executive has fewer constrains in policy development and implementation than the US president. Aside from governance structure, and perhaps the most significant difference between the two systems as it relates to domestic intelligence, is that the United Kingdom has no formal, written constitution securing rights for individuals as the US Constitution does (Masse 2003). Whereas the US Supreme Court has final jurisdiction over the constitutionality of federal and state laws, the UK Parliament has final authority over law. And while the British system is based on common law established by courts and Parliament, the US system has a written constitution that establishes individual rights of its citizens against government intrusion. As such, the

British system can be said to be more flexible than the American rule of law as it can adapt much more quickly (Marks 2010, 83). At the operational level, relationships between domestic intelligence and law enforcement as well as between domestic and foreign intelligence are different in the United States and the United Kingdom (Masse 2003). Since domestic intelligence and law enforcement are separated in the United Kingdom, coordination and cooperation pose a challenge. Should the US intelligence and law enforcement apparatus be structured in a similar way, problems of coordination would be exponentially increased due to quantity of police organizations across the United States (with its more than 13,000 state and local law enforcement agencies) (Masse 2003). Similarly, there is a difference between how the United Kingdom and United States approach the relationship between domestic and foreign intelligence activities. In the United States, the separation between domestic and foreign intelligence work has been argued to have blurred to a greater extent. Culturally, finally, the United Kingdom and the United States differ with respect to public attitudes and perceptions on each respective country’s intelligence apparatus (Masse 2003). Many US citizens believe that intelligence is something that should be primarily, perhaps even exclusively, oriented at foreign countries. Americans are unlikely to tolerate the intrusiveness that comes with the British domestic intelligence apparatus (Deflem and McDonough 2015; Marks 2010). The dubious practices of the McCarthy era and the excesses of Hoover’s FBI are still remembered as problematic episodes in what can go wrong with domestic intelligence. Irrespective of civil liberty concerns, the issue of effectiveness of intelligence and related security tasks cannot be ignored, especially not in light of the continued threat of terrorist activities and other dangers affecting national security. It can be suggested that the experiences of countries similar to the United States but with self-standing domestic intelligence agencies,

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such as the ones reviewed above, can be examined to reveal critical factors needed for creating an effective domestic intelligence system (Burch 2007). Those in favor of establishing a US domestic intelligence agency often argue for its value in preventing terrorist activities. However, intelligence organizations focused solely on domestic intelligence gathering have also not proven their ability to prevent terrorist attacks, as demonstrated, for instance, by the failure to prevent the terrorist bombings against London transportation systems in July 2005. While systems to provide legal and political oversight are generally well developed in nations that have specialized domestic intelligence agencies, they may lack a degree of independence to get valuable work done efficiently. In any case, rather than creating a separate agency, the trend in the United States has been toward enhanced cooperation and coordination among existing and newly developed agencies.

The Debate on Domestic Spying From a social problems point of view, it is always important to offer a sound academic analysis of the patterns and dynamics as well as structures and processes of domestic intelligence in a variety of contexts located in space and time. At the same time, it should also be possible to uncover why certain social events and issues invoke strongly normative responses that hint at the negative impact of observed social realities and the need for change. As such, the debate on domestic spying incorporates both considerations related to the practical and relatively technical aspects of domestic intelligence work as well as the normative concerns that such intelligence activities invoke regardless of attained or aspired effectiveness. Effective Intelligence From a practical perspective interested in establishing effective security, domestic intelligence work in the United States and elsewhere raises several important issues.

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First, the activities of domestic intelligence and law enforcement operate in different fields. Law enforcement aims to prosecute crime, while domestic intelligence seeks to gather information (Burch 2007; Treverton 2008). There is an increase in so-called intelligence-led policing that is justified on the basis of terrorism and other contemporary concerns. As such, the worlds of law enforcement and intelligence may have come closer together in light of operational strategies. In the United States, in particular, however, the shift toward domestic intelligence in law enforcement does not meet with great popular support. Such practices are reminiscent of the days of anti-Communism when the FBI and other agencies were criticized for being overly intrusive. In the United States as in many other parts of the world, increased bureaucratization of intelligence-gathering systems has led to challenges associated with the sharing of information as agencies enjoy relative independence from one another (Deflem 2010). A great many organizations are involved in gathering information, but they do not always share information with each other in a systematic way. Recent efforts such as the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and presidentially directed collaboration efforts have not been found to effectively increase cooperation among agencies on the ground. As highly professionalized bureaucracies, relevant agencies in multiple departments and jurisdictions remain autonomous from each other. For instance, although the FBI is the lead-agency in matters of terrorism and intelligence activities on a national level, there is no clear leader in domestic intelligence (Hulnick 2009). As revealed throughout the history of domestic intelligence services, information sharing is both a key objective as well as a continuing challenge to intelligence and related security work (Deflem 2010; Treverton 2008). In particular, the FBI and CIA in the United States are infamously known for not cooperating well, if even at all. More generally, domestic intelligence agencies are

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known not to easily exchange information among one another, and a “wall” is often observed to exist between intelligence groups and law enforcement agencies. The competition that exists between agencies has also impacted intelligence sharing because each respective agency wants to be credited for its successful investigations. Additionally problematic in a decentralized system of governance such as the United States are the difficulties that are found in information exchange among different levels of domestic intelligence at the federal, state, and local level. In response, fusion centers for information sharing have been set up by the Department of Justice and joint enforcement teams have been established, such as the Joint Terrorism Task Forces directed by the FBI (Deflem 2010, 48, 63–64). But such efforts have not always been working well as local agencies may not always be willing to relinquish to the federal command under which such cooperation efforts are placed. In most recent years, especially since and because of the events of September 11, the scope of investigations has broadened for many intelligence and security organizations, and their intelligence-gathering efforts have consequently expanded. Moreover, new communications technologies have greatly facilitated the transmission of information so that the information that circulates for collection has increased exponentially over the past decades (Treverton 2008). As a result, the amount of data that have been collected by intelligence and security agencies has expanded greatly. Yet, while billions upon billions of data may have been collected, the separation of actionable information from the giant mass of collected information has become a more and more daunting task. Legality and Ethics The debate on domestic spying among civil libertarians, security officials, and the public at large revolves around important normative matters that have legal and political implications and foundations (Deflem and

Dilks 2008). From a legal perspective, intelligence officials and political representatives will typically argue that domestic intelligence activities are constitutionally and legally enacted and justified in view of special circumstances, such as the precarious state of international and domestic security in the wake of the events of September 11. Following the revelations of the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program, by example, President George W. Bush justified secret domestic intelligence activities on the basis of the Authorization of Military Force that passed on September 14, 2001 (Deflem 2010, 38–39; Deflem and Chicoine 2013). The federal law gave congressional approval to the executive to use all necessary means, particularly military measures, against persons and organizations responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Not only would these special powers be used to justify the Presidential decision to launch military interventions abroad, such as those initiated in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003, they would also allow investigations into suspected terrorists inside the United States and to gather intelligence on US citizens when deemed necessary in the interest of national security. Critics of the special counterterrorism means enacted in the wake of 9/11 have argued that presidential powers must always be overseen by judicial and congressional oversight and scrutinized on the basis of the principles of checks and balances among the branches of government. Therefore, for instance, it was argued that the NSA warrantless surveillance program even on legal grounds alone was not justified because it violated the National Security Act of 1947 which mandates that members of the intelligence oversight committees in Congress be informed of such activities (Deflem and Dilks 2008). Extending from the political and legal framework, the normative issues involved with domestic spying operations typically revolve around concerns over the need for security, on the one hand, and the invasion of privacy and other civil liberties, on the other. In the post-9/11 era, the arguments

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to defend intelligence and surveillance programs are especially defined in terms of a host of ongoing threats to security, not least of all terrorism, but also the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the shifting global dynamics, with important local implications, of related security issues. Under such precarious conditions, it can be suggested that citizens should and are indeed reasonably willing to surrender some measure of their privacy and other civil liberties and that the gains and positive contributions of provisions of security, surveillance, and intelligence cannot be simply ignored (Dunér 2005). From this perspective, it has been suggested that domestic intelligence can and, indeed, must be maintained and if necessary expanded, either in the form of a specialized agency, which in the case of the United States would have to be newly developed (Posner 2005), or by strengthening existing intelligence capabilities (Svendsen 2012). Critics, on the other hand, have argued that domestic spying is under most if not all circumstances to be scrutinized as an unnecessary violation of personal rights and privacy (Deflem and McDonough 2015). Coming from both civil liberties advocates, such as the ACLU, as well as certain scholars in law and surveillance studies, domestic surveillance activities are condemned as fundamental violations of central principles of rights protection and democracy. Recent advances in technologies of communication related to computerized data systems and the internet have made these concerns even more poignant. In view of concerns over privacy rights, some scholars have argued that formal systems of accountability, such as judicial review and congressional oversight, will never be sufficient to prevent abuses in the case of domestic spying as such legal provisions necessarily face limits when the secretive world of intelligence gathering is involved (Berman 2014). There are indeed, as noted time and again in the popular media, many challenges raised in relation to the protection of civil liberties and effective oversight of domestic intelligence organi-

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zations. For example, although in the years after September 11, 2001, there were several attempts to create a new intelligence agency in the United States, arguments against such an agency have consistently prevailed on the basis of considerations related to privacy rights (Jackson 2009). In the years immediately following the events of 9/11, survey results show, US citizens were relatively accepting of counterterrorism measures even when they curtailed civil liberties (Deflem and McDonough 2015). In more recent years, however, findings reveal that popular concerns have shifted from a fear of terrorism to a fear of counterterrorism, surveillance, and a loss of privacy. The revelations concerning domestic spying aspects of the NSA global surveillance programs have intensified these sentiments. In light of both concerns over national security issues involving radicalization and terrorism, on the one hand, and continued cultural dispositions toward the protection of privacy and civil liberties, on the other, domestic intelligence activities will continue to present special problems, both practically as well as legally and ethically. Under these circumstances, the debate on domestic spying is unlikely to go away any time soon.

Glossary COINTELPRO A domestic intelligence program started by the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) in 1956 to monitor communist groups, which was later expanded to other domestic threats. Domestic intelligence The routine collection and use of information by government agencies concerning people and organizations within the country and/or its nationals abroad. Domestic spying A cultural construct that refers to the activities of, and debate on, intelligence agencies internally directed at the home population of citizens within nations. Mass surveillance A cultural construct to denote, and implicitly criticize, the

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widespread nature of domestic intelligence activities by certain government intelligence agencies. Palmer Raids Named after US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the popular name for the raids conducted by the General Intelligence Division in the US Justice Department against communists and other political radicals in 1919 and 1920. Patriot Act (full name: USA PATRIOT Act) The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorist Act that was signed into law in the United States following the terrorist events of 9/11 on October 26, 2001. Terrorist Surveillance Program An intelligence program secretly ordered by US president George W. Bush in 2002 that allowed the National Security Agency to monitor communications, without approval by a court, involving US citizens suspected of involvement with al-Qaeda or related terrorist groups.

References Batvinis, Raymond J. 2007. The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Berman, Emily. 2014. Regulating domestic intelligence collection. Washington & Lee Law Review 71:3–91. Burch, James. 2007. A domestic intelligence agency for the United States? A comparative analysis of domestic intelligence agencies and their implications for homeland security. Homeland Security Affairs 3(June):Article 2. www.hsaj.org/articles/147. Chalk, Peter. 2009a. Canada. In Considering the Creation of a Domestic Intelligence Agency in the United States: Lessons from the Experiences of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, edited by B. A. Jackson, 43–64. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. 2009b. Conclusions: Lessons for the United States. In Considering the Creation of a Domestic Intelligence Agency in the United States: Lessons from the Experiences of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the

United Kingdom, edited by B. A. Jackson, 161–71. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Clutterbuck, Lindsay. 2009. The United Kingdom. In Considering the Creation of a Domestic Intelligence Agency in the United States: Lessons from the Experiences of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, edited by B. A. Jackson, 115–42. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Davis, James Kirkpatrick. 1992. Spying on America: The FBI’s Domestic Counterintelligence Program. Westport, CT: Praeger. Deflem, Mathieu. 2002. Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. Federal Bureau of Investigation. In Encyclopedia of American Civil Rights and Liberties, edited by Otis H. Stephens Jr., John M. Scheb II, and Kara E. Stooksbury, 360–61. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 2010. The Policing of Terrorism: Organizational and Global Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Deflem, Mathieu, and Lisa Dilks. 2008. Terrorism, domestic spying. In Encyclopedia of Social Problems, edited by Vincent N. Parrillo, 931–33. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Deflem, Mathieu, and Shannon McDonough. 2015. The fear of counterterrorism: Surveillance and civil liberties since 9/11. Society 52(1):70–79. Deflem, Mathieu, and Stephen Chicoine. 2013. War on terror. In Encyclopedia of WhiteCollar and Corporate Crime, Second Edition, edited by Lawrence M. Salinger, 987–90. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dunér, Bertil. 2005. Disregard for security: The human rights movement and 9/11. Terrorism and Political Violence 17(1–2):89–104. Hulnick, Arthur S. 2009. Home time: A new paradigm for domestic intelligence. International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 22(4):569–85. Jackson, Brian A., ed., 2009. Considering the Creation of a Domestic Intelligence Agency in the United States: Lessons from the experiences of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Keller, William W. 1989. The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

domestic spying Marks, Ronald A. 2010. Spying in America in the Post 9/11 World: Domestic Threat and the Need for Change. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Masse, Todd. 2003. Domestic Intelligence in the United Kingdom: Applicability of the MI-5 Model to the United States. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service. Morgan, Richard E. 1980. Domestic Intelligence: Monitoring Dissent in America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Posner, Richard A. 2005. Remaking Domestic Intelligence. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Schaefer, Agnes Gereben. 2009. The history of domestic intelligence in the United States: Lessons for assessing the creation of a new counterterrorism intelligence agency. In The Challenge of Domestic Intelligence in a Free Society: A Multidisciplinary Look at the Creation of a U.S. Domestic Counterterrorism Intelligence Agency, edited by B. A. Jackson, 13–48. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Sinha, G. Alex. 2013. NSA surveillance since 9/11 and the human right to privacy. Loyola Law Review 59:861–946.

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Svendsen, Adam D.M. 2012. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and change: addressing US domestic counter-terrorism intelligence. Intelligence and National Security 27(3):371– 97. Theoharis, Athan G. 2004. The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Treverton, Gregory F. 2008. Reorganizing U.S. Domestic Intelligence: Assessing the Options. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Warnes, Richard. 2009a. France. In Considering the Creation of a Domestic Intelligence Agency in the United States: Lessons from the Experiences of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, edited by B. A. Jackson, 65–92. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. 2009b. Germany. In Considering the Creation of a Domestic Intelligence Agency in the United States: Lessons from the Experiences of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, edited by B. A. Jackson, 93– 114. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Wong, Katherine. 2006. The NSA terrorist surveillance program. Harvard Journal on Legislation 43:517–34.

CHAPTER 8

Computer Hacking as a Social Problem Brian Alleyne

Abstract This chapter introduces the ideas and practices of digital technology enthusiasts who fall under the umbrella term of “hackers.” We will discuss how their defining activity has been constructed as a social problem and how that construction has been challenged. The chapter concludes with several policy suggestions aimed at addressing the more socially troublesome aspects of computer hacking.

Introduction Hacking is an activity that encompasses computer programming, designing, and executing solutions to problems. This is done by combining software and hardware, by modifying and repurposing digital media, and through software and digitally controlled hardware products. Hacking sometimes involves circumventing security systems designed to protect computer networks and digital data stores, activities that some argue should be called “cracking” in order to distinguish breaking into systems from more generic hacking activity. The first computers were developed during World War II, with a computer industry emerging in the 1960s, when we see the first representations of hackers and hacking. According to Levy (2010) the term “hack”

was first conceived as an engineering accomplishment in hardware, and only later came to take on the meaning of an unorthodox and efficient programming solution to a software problem. In computer science, a hack is generally seen as an inelegant but effective solution to a software development problem: hacks are at times necessary, but only in the sense of a necessary evil. By contrast, in the computing cultures that emerged in the late 1960s and that have been spreading globally ever since, a hack had more positive connotations: it came to be widely admired for its efficiency and ingenuity, and in an intriguing semantic reversal, was regarded as itself elegant. In a type of hacking where breaking into secure computer systems is the central activity, the hack is an episode or “exploit” in which the hacker successfully circumvents layers of electronic and sometimes physical

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security in order to gain access to the innards of computer networks. Who is a hacker? He/she is a highly skilled technologist, usually a software programmer, who explores problems in computing and in domains where computing is used, and seeks to develop solutions to these problems. Pioneering research on hackers defined them as technology enthusiasts who fit a particular social profile – young, often male, and highly skilled with computer technology (Jordan and Taylor 1998; Taylor 1999). The characteristic cultural practice of hackers centers on learning and exercising skills in programming and managing computer systems, and making and modifying computer-controlled objects. Some generic traits of hackers are a desire to acquire new knowledge and skills in their field along with peer recognition, seeking excitement, and a penchant for problem solving; often but not always the hacker is antiauthoritarian. These traits are sometimes combined with a desire for personal enrichment, but in most hackers’ accounts of their activities this is either not the case or it is only a small part of the overall identity constructed in the account. Hackers who work on free/libre and open-source software (FOSS or FLOSS) are active in writing, mostly in online forums, about their worldviews and identities (Alleyne 2011). Throughout the chapter I will refer to such hackers and their activities as “open hacking.” In contrast, hackers who penetrate secure systems (whose activities I call “clandestine” hacking), with some notable exceptions (e.g., Assange and Dreyfus 2011; Mitnick 2011; Mitnick and Simon 2005), are less willing to publicize their work and politics, but their activities have been investigated through interviews and personal narratives written by the hackers themselves (Turgeman-Goldschmidt 2005; Verton 2002). While there are key differences between open and clandestine hackers’ accounts, the self-representations of all hackers have in common creativity, individuality, adaptability, and originality as core elements of the hacker identity. These elements that were identified in Sherry

Turkle’s pioneering work on online activity (Turkle 1995; Turkle and Papert 1990). Contrary to conventional thinking based on news reports and movies, there is more to hacking than break-in exploits. Hackeractivism or “hacktivism,” which combines hacker techniques and tools with political activism (Jordan and Taylor 2004), has become more significant since the 1990s and unsettles the binary oppositions of good/open vs. bad/clandestine hackers. Further complicating efforts at understanding hacking are widely circulated myths built on both fictional and real representations of bright but socially maladjusted youngsters, shadowy corporations and states, and secret spaces of information espionage. William Gibson’s best-selling novel Neuromancer (1984) introduced much of the imagery and terminology used to represent hackers in fiction, film, and computer games: “cyberspace”; a “matrix” of networked computer systems and databases; high-value digital data stores that become the target of criminal activity; and the figure of the hacker (most often portrayed as a young male) whose skill is co-opted by sinister forces. In Neuromancer as in Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Snow Crash (2002) and in films such as War Games (1983) and Hackers (1995), hackers are portrayed as extreme individualists, social misfits with overdeveloped technical skills and underdeveloped interpersonal skills. Neuromancer was pivotal in constituting the subgenre of science fiction literature known as “Cyberpunk” (Cavallaro 2000) in which a dystopian world is ruled by giant corporations that rival nationstates in power and influence, and where there is rampant individualism, creeping social decay, and extremes of wealth and poverty.

Conflict or Continuum? Hacking is a complex field of activity. In order to assess hacking from a social problems perspective, we have to delve further into its open and clandestine aspects, which

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can appear as a social conflict and as lying on a continuum. The pioneering hackers of the late 1960s and early 1970s were committed to sharing and openness (Levy 2010; Raymond 2003), commitments that remain characteristic of some hacking cultures today. Against this, the 1980s saw the emergence of a new breed of hacker who operated in a clandestine fashion, whose main aim was to circumvent security systems (for reputation) to do damage to these systems (for personal gain). By the early 1990s the dual contradictory faces of hacking were apparent to most observers. The dichotomy between the open and the clandestine in the world of hacking is also articulated in terms of the interplay of “Black Hats,” who are clandestine and often portrayed as criminal, versus “White Hats,” who work in both open and clandestine modes, but always (ideally) with the intention of upholding the law in their battles against the Black Hats. Complicating the matter even further is the case of ethical hacking, one form of which involves a hacker seeking to penetrate a secure computer network in order to aid the administrators of that network in strengthening their security measures (Harris et al. 2008). In presenting a core dichotomy of open versus clandestine hackers as a starting point in thinking about hacking as a social problem, I am not arguing that actual hackers and their practices fit tidily on one or the other side of that dichotomy, rather, I employ the two categories in terms of their utility as ideal types. Such abstractions can help us to step back from the complex reality of hacking and its representations, in order to examine how and why it is sometimes seen as a social problem. In the remainder of this chapter I will elaborate different aspects of hacking that span the open-clandestine continuum. I will look at hacking as deviance and as cybercrime, at free and open-source hacker cultures, and at politically motivated hacking or hacktivism. I will view these aspects through the lens of social constructionism that involves actors, issues, institutions, and processes that are involved in the creation of social problems.

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What Is a Social Problem? As the concept of social problem is dealt with fully elsewhere in this volume, here I will only detail out how I use the term in analyzing computer hacking. While social problems are constructed, and are sites of contestation, this does not mean that real structural conditions do not furnish the context in which problems emerge. When one or more groups perceive events, processes, or relationships as troublesome, we have a social problem (Jamrozik 2008; Macionis 2007). Not everyone in the given social setting must agree that the situation in question is problematic, nor will the actors agree on the significance or even the existence of structural conditions that influence the putative social problem. It is because there is disagreement among interested parties on what is a social problem and on whether a phenomenon should be classed as such, that social problems are of interest to sociologists. Having become aware that something is seen as a social problem, an important question to ask is “a problem for whom?” The perspective I take in this chapter is the social constructivist approach (Holstein and Miller 2003; Spector and Kitsuse 2000), which considers that what counts as a social problem is not given, obvious, or natural, but is the outcome of ongoing debate and sometimes conflict. Of course, real social conditions and relations exist, but these must framed through some kind of discourse in order to be transformed into social problems. Furthermore, when we conceive a social problem, we are simultaneously planning if and how we can alleviate or eliminate that problem. In the conclusion of this chapter I raise several policy directions that have proved useful in addressing the problematic aspects of hacking. Connor (2013) discusses the stages of the problem policy process. The first step is to conceptualize and define a configuration of people, relationships, events, and behaviors that together constitute the problem; then we have to provide a solution to the

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problem. Hacking as a social problem has been fabricated in several stages that can be put into historical periods. First, we have identification of hacking as a distinct activity and of hackers as a distinct kind of person; this identification was constructed in the 1970s and early 1980s. Then we have the social construction of hacking as a problem that requires surveillance and control. It is at this point that the specialized computer security industry emerges in the 1980s and we see a growing public awareness of hacking. By the 1990s, we see clear lines of contestation between open and clandestine hackers; between all hackers and the computer security industry; and a growing public anxiety about hacking.

Computing Fears and Hopes The roots of the fabrication of hacking as a social problem lie ultimately in the complex relations of humans to the technologies they create. The technological progress that is a defining characteristic of modernity raised as many questions as it provided solutions to problems (Berman 1988). While computers and robots have long offered relief from dirty, dangerous, and repetitive work, they have also been regarded with some anxiety with respect to how they might displace and even control humans. Debates around the costs and risks of technology in general, and information and communication technologies in particular, are the base on which computer hacking is constructed as a social problem. Computer technology is double-edged in the general public consciousness: on the one hand, it offers great possibilities to expand our mental horizons; on the other hand, many people feel threatened by the complexity of the technology, and ultimately fear losing control to that technology. Computers therefore present an existential anxiety for humans and computer hacking is the sharp edge of that general anxiety (Taylor 1998). Threats, both real and imagined, lie at the core of hacking as a social problem: threats

to privacy, to public and private property, and to trust. I will introduce each threat only briefly here as the remainder of the chapter will address each in greater detail. First, we all have information about ourselves that we wish to keep private, much of this in the form of digitized information that helps us to navigate smoothly through our personal and professional lives. Having your identity “stolen” is a justified fear in a world in which so much of life is carried out online. Many of the systems on which our collective existence depends are based on heavily computerized and interconnected networked infrastructures that are potential targets for computer hackers. Computer hacking can threaten the security of public and private property, ranging from corporate assets to public infrastructure to the funds held in the bank accounts of private citizens. Hacking can also threaten trust. Our contemporary network society relies on trust in the makers of technology, in technology regulatory bodies, and in any users of these systems following appropriate procedures and guidelines. Some forms of computer hacking undermine this trust when they cause users of these systems to become fearful of becoming victims of a hack, and can deter people from using information technologies. When people are concerned about being victimized by hacking, they tend to limit their online activities and thus fail to benefit from, for example, online social networking, online shopping, or telemedicine.

Hacking as Deviance Some forms of hacking are regarded as deviance. Here we must shift our perspective away from the strictly legalistic and lawand-order focus of cybercrime (which we will discuss later) to consider hacking as a form of deviance. We define deviance as attitudes and behaviors that depart from social and cultural norms. It must be added that social and cultural norms are always contested, and there is never universal agreement on

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what should count as deviant. Nonetheless, widely agreed-upon norms do exist, and to violate these is to take on the label and or role of the deviant (Becker 1997; Curra 2000). Throughout this chapter, we will see that many practices that are generally regarded as computer hacking have at one time or another or in one place or another been viewed as deviant, and that the hackers so viewed have contested that labeling. In debates around intellectual property in a digital economy we see a clear example of how conflicting perspectives lead to the contested construction of an activity as a form of deviance. For many digital natives (persons born in the 1990s into a world characterized by ubiquitous information and communication technologies), traditional notions of property do not apply to digital goods. Having grown up with social media and a sharing economy, digital natives feel entitled to access many forms of digital content without paying. Hacking enters into debates around digital property because a key area of hacking covers the development and sharing of knowledge and skill aimed to circumvent the digital locks that enforce property rights in digital goods. This is a legal problem that is also a social problem in that different individuals are involved in the debate on intellectual property and on how to build a sharing economy (DeVoss and Porter 2006; Lessig 2001; Söderberg 2010). There is a conflict between, on the one hand, persons wanting to share digital artifacts, and, on the other hand, those businesses and countries that protect intellectual property. This is one of the most significant and prevalent consequences to hacking as a social problem.

the open, and share their code and techniques: so where is the problem in this? In order to explore this question, we must first be clear on what is “free” in free and open-source software. Free (Libre) and Open-Source Software (FOSS or FLOSS) is free in two senses. The first concerns free as in having no price; the second concerns free as in free access to the source code describing how the software works. Free and open-source software is free in the sense of freedom to examine and change the source code (Berry 2004; Söderberg 2008). Given that what is frequently seen as problematic about hacking involves activities that are clandestine (breaking into secure systems, defacing digital content, stealing information or money, injecting malicious code aimed to sabotage a system), it is important to understand that not all hacking activity leads to situations that are problematic, and this is true of many forms of open-source hacking. Nonetheless, it is not always easy to distinguish hacking activities used by open-source hackers from those used by clandestine and criminal hackers. To put it another way, in some cases of open-source hacking there is no useful reason to frame the activity as a social problem, while in others it is difficult to determine what contributes to a social problem and what does not. The latter happens when a hacker uses code or techniques developed as open source and freely shared in order to defeat systems of digital protection for intellectual property, or to carry out a clandestine hack aimed at identity theft.

Free and Open-Source Counterculture

Clandestine hackers include the mildly antiestablishment hacker to the criminal and even the “terrorist.” Clandestine hacking activity is directed largely against the infrastructure of state and corporate computer systems. Given that clandestine hackers are just that – clandestine – it is not easy to interview or observe these individuals

The sort of hacking that is concerned with free and open-source software production, sharing, and modification is one that initially seems to have little relevant to thinking about computer hacking as a social problem. After all, open-source hackers work in

Clandestine Hacking, Cybercrime, and the Darknet

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and groups. What is known about clandestine hackers occurs when a researcher cultivates a good relationship with one or a few hackers and then snowballs to others, or through clandestine hackers’ self-accounts (e.g., Turgeman-Goldschmidt 2005; Mitnick 2011), or through mainstream media coverage that is frequently sensationalist. From these sources we may get a sense of the personality and practices of the clandestine hacker, but we must be mindful of the limited nature of the sample available to scholars of this phenomenon. The activities of clandestine hackers include penetrating secure systems, information theft, intelligence gathering, and technical attacks designed to make systems malfunction or fail. For some clandestine hackers, circumventing the layers of security in corporate or government computer networks is an achievement in itself; for others it is the first step in obtaining information for subsequent trade or in order to gain direct access to electronically stored funds or other valuable data. These latter hackers may be working on their own account, or as employees of criminal organizations. For all clandestine hackers, the “exploit” – a successful circumvention or penetration of a secure target – is the focus of their activity. Clandestine hackers may be placed into two camps (though individuals may shift from one camp to the other over the course of a career or even a specific project). First there are those who claim to be motivated by a politics of libertarianism and for whom the computer security industry is the front line of repressive corporations and governments. Second there are the clandestine hackers who are in the game for personal gain. Both types of clandestine hackers operate under the radar, largely because these activities are seen as criminal by law enforcement agencies and the computer industry. Insofar as we have data on persons who fall into these categories, we are dealing with loners, known in their hacker identities only to a small circle of other hackers (and presumably sometimes, to the agencies that seek to police this kind of hacking). Clandestine hacking at its most

extreme presents a range of problems, from cybercrime, to the unregulated darknet, to cyberterrorism.

Cybercrime Cybercrime refers to any criminal activity that is carried out on a computer network or assisted in its execution by computer technology (Wall 2007; Yar 2006). There is overlap between criminality and social problems but not all social problems involve crime. Because crime is an acute social problem, so too is cybercrime. Cybercrime is usually executed with the aid of clandestine hacking tools and techniques, but cybercrime should not be conflated with clandestine hacking, because not all clandestine hacking is cybercrime. Cybercrime ranges from breaking into systems and stealing valuable information, using computer networks to aid efforts to defraud or steal in the offline world; producing, circulating, and consuming illicit or illegal images, as for example child pornography; online harassment and stalking; and defacement or sabotage of online information stores. Given that it is a type of criminal activity, cybercrime also includes any act, carried out on a computer or computer network or with the aid of a computer or computer network, that is deemed illegal in the jurisdiction in question. While cybercrimes come under the purview of law enforcement, there is still scope for debate as to the criminal status of acts defined as cybercrime. This in turn gives scope for the input of criminologists and other social scientists into processes of construction, labeling, and response to cybercrime. As with other social problems, cybercrime is the object of debated over definition and labeling. Different legal jurisdictions work with different understandings of cybercrime, and detection and prosecution of cybercrime varies from place to place (Martin and Rice 2011). Apart from activities such as child pornography or online fraud, on which there is broad agreement as to their criminal status, some activities that are labeled

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as cybercrime, such as the copying and sharing of copyright content or the defacement of websites, are objects of intense contestation as to whether they should be treated as criminal (Barassi 2015; Jordan 2015). In one tragic example of disagreement over what constitutes cybercrime, Internet activist, Aaron Swartz was arrested in 2011 for downloading and sharing thousands of academic papers from servers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MacFarquhar 2013). In response many open hackers and human rights activists argued that it was absurd to charge him as a criminal. Swartz, a highly skilled programmer who had become a prominent free software, open data and digital rights campaigner, took his own life while awaiting trial.

The Darknet One of the most problematic aspects of hacking culture is that of the darknet (sometimes referred to as the darkweb), which is an alternative to the net/world wide wide web as commonly known (Bartlett 2015). The darknet is layered on and sits alongside the existing internet, employing a vast array of hidden websites and secret access protocols. To gain access to the darknet, you must go through special sites accessible only via anonymous access points. The darknet is a globally dispersed collection of computer servers, users, technicians, content producers, and businesses. While it relies on the same technologies as the conventional internet, the darknet has different systems of regulation, and relies heavily on peer-topeer systems of control because top-down management structures would make it vulnerable to surveillance and penetration by security agencies. The darknet is anarchic, but not chaotic. There are norms on the darknet. Many hacker activists see it as the greatest effort so far to build a structured system of human relations designed on decentralized (even anarchist) political principles. To its critics, the darknet is a criminal network; to many hackers and activists, it is a self-

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organized network that is an alternative to an Internet that is dominated by private corporations and states that are either neoliberal, authoritarian, or both. There are legitimate concerns regarding trade in dangerous drugs, weapons, and money laundering that take place on the darknet. At the same time, there are sound political reasons why many people take advantage of the anonymity offered by the darknet, such as fear of repression for holding divergent political views. The darknet is a response to real problems of freedom and privacy, and it also is also a space in which criminal activity can evade detection and law enforcement.

Profit or Pleasure? To avoid conflating distinct motives in clandestine hacking (cracking), it is necessary to differentiate those hacking activities whose primary aim is to realize financial gain through illegitimate means, from those whose main purpose is the technical achievement itself. These two aims overlap but for analytical purposes we should keep them distinct, because they present two distinct kinds of problems. We explore this through the example of game modification, or “modding.” Modding a computer game entails persons, other than the creators or developers of the game, altering the mechanics of game play, changing or adding new levels, content and rewards, and even entirely new versions of the game (Hong and Chen 2013). The essence of the game modification or “mod” is that it is the result of activity by outside parties, even though the separation of users from developers/creators is not always clear-cut, and user/creator overlap is itself the object of debate and research. Modding requires access to the code and digital assets of the game. This access may be obtained by means of the source code of the game and/or by hooks into the source code, and to the source files of digital assets – images, sound and 3-D models. The knowledge and skills of reading and writing code that lie at the core of hacking

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practice are the same as those required to execute many kinds of mods, because after all, a computer game is fundamentally a software product. A key feature of the contemporary gaming scene is that many game producers provide tools to encourage the creation of new content and game play experiences. Whether supported by developers or not, many mods have become as popular as the original games on which they were based. The global game industry is worth tens of billions of dollars annually yet unpaid labor is the norm in game modding. The work of game modding is often a labor of love and it is in this affective character of modding that we can see direct parallels to open hacking. Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter (2009, 23–27) discuss modding as “playbor” – the gaming version of immaterial labor – and review debates around whether game modding should be considered an example of the empowerment of players to interact more deeply with and transform their favorite games (the preferred view of game producers), or as a way for game producers to exploit unpaid labor to enhance their products. Whether the modders break copyright protection or work with open assets and code, they intend their modifications to be used by others. Because sharing is a defining feature of game modding it can bring modders into conflict with owners and distributors of games and related digital content. Whichever way we look at the issue, there is potential and actual conflict leading to social problems. If we take the perspective of the corporate owners of intellectual property in games, then any modification not sanctioned by them is illegal, and therefore the culture of modding that has sprung up is organized illegality. Since game modding can involve circumventing systems of intellectual property protection, firms that own such property see modding as a slippery slope leading from tinkering to illegality. By contrast, in the hacking culture of which game modding is a part, many hackers see themselves as creative individuals who are resisting corporate control of

gaming. To further complicate the matter, if digital locks on a game are broken so that its content or code are copied and used in another for-profit product, that may be considered theft. Is the problem of modding mainly to do with people using games in ways that violate the intellectual property rights of the game producers? If so, then unauthorized modding and sharing is a social problem that requires intervention to change attitudes and behavior. If, by contrast, game modding is seen as an activity that is characteristic of a new digital economy in which property is being redefined through technological change and conflict between social actors with opposing interests, that is another kind of problem: one of large-scale legal and cultural change that must happen in order to match the new technical reality. In this scenario the social problem then leads to a social movement to redefine the meaning of property in digital goods (Söderberg 2008). Both conceptions of modding can and do exist. We thus have a social problem of a hacking activity – game modding – that spans radical creativity, deviance, and illegality.

Cyberwarfare and Cyberterrorism Cyberwarfare refers to conflict between nation-states that is pursued on computer networks (Richards 2014). The target of cyberwarfare is the computer capability of the opponent and it is not difficult to see how hacking can be central to cyberwarfare. But cyberwarfare is outside the social problem focus of this chapter. Of greater relevance is the related area of cyberterrorism. Terrorism is generally seen by states to refer to activities intended to instill fear or cause actual harm to groups or populations. Cyberterrorism is terrorism on or enabled by computer networks (EmbarSeddon 2002; Kenney 2015). Cyberterrorism is arguably the most extreme case of problematic usage of computer technology because of its potential to cause widespread damage and harm. Cyberterrorist methods

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are not only limited to computer hacking: if a terrorist attack is enabled by computer technology then it would count as cyberterrorism even if hacking is not directly implicated. Clandestine hacker skills and tools are core elements of cyberterrorist activity, but they can also be developed in FLOSS. While there is an emergent legal definition of cybercrime that has some consensus internationally, cyberterrorism is more difficult to define. What distinguishes cyberterrorism from other problematic forms of hacking has more to do with aims, objectives, and effects, than with the tools and techniques employed. And as with cybercrime, what counts as cyberterrorism depends on the legal jurisdiction in which the person accused of cyberterrorism is under. A further problematic aspect of cyberterrorism is that who is labeled a terrorist depends on how political and cultural issues and conflicts are rendered by powerful social actors (Vegh 2005). Moreover, insofar as the Western world is concerned, since 2001 terrorist threats have been frequently constructed as involving forms of militant Islamism; but what counts as a dangerous form of Islamism is itself enmeshed in debates about ethnic stereotyping, Islamophobia, and threats to “our Western way of life.” Cyberterrorism in the Western world is deeply interwoven with debates over radicalization and indoctrination into forms of nihilistic and violent politics.

Hacking as a Subversive Counterculture When we turn to hacking as a subversive activity we are faced with a range of issues that are relevant from a social problems point of view. We will take “subversive” to mean tending to or actually challenging the existing social and political order. From least to most problematic we have free and open-source hacking, challenges to intellectual property, and hacktivism. Open-source hacking, rarely, if ever, raises legal issues and is not a social problem in the sense in

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which we defined the term in the introduction to this chapter. Because open-source hacking is mainly concerned with sharing code and cooperation, there is little that would appear as socially problematic. Long before the networked digital age, political activism occupied a continuum that ranged from expressing disapproval of a political opponent to direct violent action. Some FOSS hacks use tools and techniques that were developed for clandestine hacking, or they may employ clandestine tools as part of a wider project that is not intended to circumvent any laws. This can be a murky area because the labeling of hacker tools and techniques as open or clandestine is itself an area of debate and conflict. As we discussed earlier, when the aim of hacking is to challenge existing ideas and practices around intellectual property, legal as well as normative issues come to the fore. Established thinking and practice on ownership of intellectual goods – digital entertainment or educational goods, for example – have strong state and legal support in most countries. Even though many people, especially digital natives, do not see digital goods as having the same structures of ownership as physical goods, the owners of digital content continue to assert their property rights and to lobby for legal prosecution of those who copy and share copyright content without paying. The very centrality of software to contemporary life means that it is seen by the firms that make, sell, and support it as intellectual property from which they have a right to make a profit. This kind of claim to intellectual property in software is rejected by hackers of all types.

Hacktivism: Good Causes and Fighting the Power As with open-source software production and sharing, computer-based or digital activism – hacktivism – is an aspect of computer hacking not usually considered a social problem. This is because it exists on a continuum ranging from the legal but oppositional through to the unambiguously

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illegal, with all points in between. Between the two extremes of open and clandestine, we have “hacking as activism,” where the hackers work, in the open or in secret, toward political activist aims (Jordan and Taylor 2004). Given the varied political motivations of hackers, there is no clear distinction between the hacker and hacktivist. Depending on the circumstances, perspective, or project, the same person may shift between being both. Hacktivism is manifested in various forms: attacking websites in order to deny access through overloading (called Denial of Service attacks); changing the content of websites to fit the aims of the hacktivist; using the web to disseminate an alternative viewpoint and to organize protest and actions (Gerbaudo 2012). In order for activism to become hacktivism, the activists in question must either be technically skilled or have access to requisite technical capability; they define their political objectives so that hacking can at the very least promise the possibility of achieving those objectives. Hacktivism for good causes encompasses humanitarian hacking, some kinds of ethical hacking, indeed any form of hacking that is shaped by a political project with a clearly stated aim of social or cultural change. In humanitarian hacking, the goal is to address the needs of people made vulnerable through extreme poverty, conflict, or natural disaster (Haywood 2013). Humanitarian hackers build applications and hardware to support relief efforts. Humanitarian hacking is performed with a clear ethical framework and, in and of itself, does not present a problem. But humanitarian hackers are always enmeshed in already existing social and political contexts. What can be socially problematic about political hacking is the “collateral damage” done to the general public that can ensue in the wake of a political hacking exploit. The same hacker who works on a humanitarian hacking project may also work on a political project that may contravene particular laws or norms. There is an ambiguity to hacktivism: one person’s freedom fighter

hacktivist may be another person’s criminal. The context is key to assessing this kind of hacking as a social problem, precisely because political hacking can range from the legal and broadly accepted political opposition to forms of direct action that threaten established institutions and indeed the state. Thus, contextual and case-based analysis is required to make any claim that a particular political hacking project is socially problematic. Let us consider the case of Anonymous (Coleman 2015), an activist collective that came to prominence in 2008 with a highprofile hack of the Church of Scientology. In 2010 Anonymous was believed to be one of several hacker groups that organized cyberattacks against the online operations of PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard as a reaction to these financial institutions cutting off the supply of donations to WikiLeaks, after WikiLeaks made public a huge quantity of classified US State Department memos. Anonymous justified these actions in terms of the public’s right to know what the intelligence agencies in the United States and other countries were doing. Even though the leaked documents were labeled topsecret, WikiLeaks argued that the United States and its allies were improperly collecting information on private citizens, and that many of the intelligence operations carried out by the United States and its allies were immoral and undemocratic. Anonymous used its member’s hacking skills to defend what they saw as the just cause being pursued by WikiLeaks. This put Anonymous in direct confrontation with the US government and its allies, who depicted WikiLeaks a dangerous organization and sought to arrest of its founder, Julian Assange.

Policy Responses Responses to computer hacking as a social problem fall under four broad headings: (1) general public education about hacker cultures; (2) socially and ethically aware training for computer professionals; (3) outreach programs aimed to foster socially

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responsible behavior in hackers; and (4) improved technical capability to mitigate the negative impact of clandestine hacker exploits. With respect to education, the aim should be to better reach both the general public and to develop campaigns aimed toward those groups most likely to get involved in the clandestine aspects of computer hacking. As to improved technical capability, this is largely a matter for governments and the computer security industry; key here is having appropriate systems of oversight of those charged with maintaining information security. In 2013, Edward Snowden, an American computer programmer and analyst who was at the time a contractor to the US National Security Agency, leaked classified government documents comparable in impact to the WikiLeaks case of 2010. The Snowden leak and subsequent revelations gave further insight into the extent of surveillance carried out by the US government around the world, and intensified debates about surveillance and control. As of late 2016, Snowden was resident in Russia where he was granted temporary asylum. The United States continues to seek his appearance in a US court of law. In the aftermath of these mass leaks, there was justified anxiety in liberal democracies over whether there are effective checks and balances on the actions of state and private security agencies. A democratically debated balance must be struck between security services, on the one hand, and individual rights and privacy, on the other. Such a balance will vary from one context to another. Responses to computer hacking as a social problem must have broad popular support. If they are imposed from the top down, they will be less effective than if they result from the widest possible democratic deliberation. In a global network society information security is a concern of all, and it is precisely because there are ongoing debates about what counts as privacy, security, and rights in intellectual property in the digital age, that we need to arrive at responses based on evidence and ultimately on democratic deliberation.

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False Hope? Cyberutopians and Techno-anarchists In the first decade of the World Wide Web (the 1990s), commentary and analysis were focused on the liberatory potential of information technologies and the dominant frame of reference was cyberutopian. Cyberutopianism is a set of ideas and practices based on the assumption that information technologies and especially the World Wide Web can lead to a more prosperous and fairer society at the local, national, and global levels (Rheingold 2000). Cyberutopianism tends to be content with the existing corporate and governmental structures in liberal-democratic capitalist societies, and sees these as being enhanced by the web. Techno-anarchists, as do cyberutopians, see information technologies as heralding improvements in life, but differ from cyberutopians in their distrust and open hostility toward capitalist enterprises and liberal-democratic states. Techno-anarchists look and work toward the destruction of capitalism and the supplanting of state structures with non-hierarchical, networked, democratic systems (Frediani and Ziccardi 2013). Techno-anarchists see information technologies as a way to bring about the radical reduction or total destruction of capitalism and its attendant state structures. Both cyberutopianism and technoanarchism create as many problems as they purport to solve. Social practices that may work in a collective on the margins of a large industrialized society may not scale up to become the norm for that society as a whole. Striking the best balance between individual freedom and privacy on the one hand, and the protection of both private and public property, all the while maintaining law and order, is hugely complex and requires constant monitoring and ongoing debate. Laws governing what people do with computer and communication technologies must seek to balance the rights of the various parties, in a world where the very meaning of property has shifted.

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Representing the Full Range of Hacker Cultures The news media play a key role in fostering a better public understanding of hacking as a complex and widespread culture, some aspects of which do create social problems. We need informed and balanced reporting on all aspects of hacking, allowing a range of voices and perspectives to be aired. The news media are also essential in alerting the public to the problems that some forms of hacking can pose for society. In addition, news media are instrumental in informing the public about how to embrace the positive aspects of hacking while guarding against the negative aspects. When we turn to the entertainment industry, we confront the most problematic area for making policy interventions. Artistic freedom, while not without limits in a democratic society, does mean that creators of entertainment products must be free to sensationalize. We cannot direct entertainment industries to filter representations of hacking culture. But if the news media and education institutions address the points set out above, most people will have the knowledge to engage critically with fictional accounts of hacking and see them as what they are – designed to entertain.

Hacking and the Knowledge Economy Computer and information studies curricula in colleges and universities must make students aware of the social and legal consequences of computer use, and instill in them a sense of responsible and ethical use of these technologies. The curricula for nonspecialists must be continually developed and delivered alongside all other areas of education and training for computer specialists. When we consider policy at the level of national and transnational economies and polities, we must acknowledge that production, consumption, and intellectual property have been refigured by the spread of computer technology into every aspect to

life (Benkler 2006). We need to think of new social, political, and economic structures that are adequate to a globalized network society. Hackers will be part of the rethinking about how best to foster a knowledgebased economy that will provide stable and legitimate employment for those with an interest in the technologies of hacking. It is important that policy makers accept that established programs for teaching information technology and computer science in schools and colleges may not only fail to motivate students with an interest in hacking, but can also alienate those with the aptitude and interest to hack code, driving them toward clandestine networks. Needed are programs that channel early interests in hacking culture in directions that are positive for the individual and away from the illicit. Notwithstanding the best plans and polices to steer people toward the positive aspects of hacking, it is certain that some will opt for the thrill of breaking into networks and cracking systems of intellectual property protection. Moreover, we must accept that, while there are ongoing political and policy processes of identifying, engaging, and regulating hacker cultures, many hackers will circumvent these processes. As in so many areas of social policy, problems and conflict are inherent and cannot be designed away. We should therefore work toward fostering open and democratic debate about the political, ethical, and legal spaces of hacking. Because the socially and legally problematic aspects of hacking will not disappear, we must develop a modus vivendi that accommodates the full range of hacking.

Conclusion There is no straightforward socialproblematic equation of hacking. Good versus evil offers a compelling storyline, but is inadequate for fully grasping actual practices of hackers as socially problematic, especially when we consider that an individual hacker may shift from one end to

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another of the open-clandestine continuum. Moreover, how particular hacking activities are read in moral or ethical terms (a first step in constructing hacking as a social problem) is as much dependent on the perspective of the person doing the reading as it is on the actual content of the practices under scrutiny. Added to this is the difficulty of accounting for the intentions of the hacker in question. Hacking is a complex and varied social and cultural phenomenon involving many identities, relationships, and practices. It has open and clandestine aspects that do not map easily into good/legal vs bad/illegal. While a subset of hacking is clearly socially harmful, most hacking activity cannot be easily regarded as deviant or problematic. There is often a subtle continuum of practice or ideology along which hacking can shift from creative and fun engagement with information technologies, to the socially problematic. In a world saturated with information technologies, we require a range of policy responses to the negative aspects of hacking: these involve proper research, responsible and informed news media coverage, enhanced training of computer technologists in social and ethical issues, greater investment in public education about information technology generally and about hacker cultures of all types. Whatever polices are put in place, some people will hack in order to harm others. The criminal aspects of hacking are a contemporary aspect of wider issues of crime and deviance in all societies. Ultimately, we must accept that many persons drawn to hacking will have an antiauthoritarian political outlook and will not be open to the wider policy responses outlined above.

Glossary Computer Security Industry A plethora of private-sector firms and individual consultants, state agencies, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as transnational agencies. The central concern is with maintaining the security of

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the world’s computer systems (which includes not only computers and other computing devices but the Internet and World Wide Web). Cracking A form of hacking aimed at circumventing the security of an application, computer, or network. Cracking uses many tools and techniques developed by hackers, but is distinguished from generic hacking by a focus on infiltration or theft of information. Cybercrime Covers a wide range of illicit and illegal activities that are either enabled or assisted by computer technology, often carried out on computer networks. Darknet (sometimes referred to as the darkweb) The alternative Internet that is not known to most people. It is a globally dispersed collection of computer servers, users, technicians, content producers, and whole businesses, which interoperates with the global World Wide Web, but works along channels that are hidden from the view of everyday users of the Web. Digital rights management Various hardware and software systems that control access to a digital product. The bestknown examples are those systems of encryption used to restrict access to digital video, music, and e-books. Hacking Making and modifying software, digital content, and computer-controlled hardware. One distinct variant of hacking involves breaking into secure computer networks (see “cracking”). Hacktivism Activism combined with hacker practice. It is useful to imagine an ideal continuum with a technically oriented hacking at one end, and with a politically motivated activism at the other. Actual hacktivist projects will exist at various points on this continuum. Social engineering In the context of hacker cultures, using techniques of deception and persuasion to get people to reveal confidential or sensitive information that can be used to conduct some form of hacking or cracking. A classic case is getting someone voluntarily to reveal

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their system password, or to hand over a physical or electronic key.

References Alleyne, Brian. 2011. Challenging code: A sociological reading of the KDE Free Software Project. Sociology 45(3):496–511. Assange, Julian, and Suelette Dreyfus. 2011. Underground. Paris: Editions des Equateurs. Barassi, Veronica. 2015. Activism on the Web: Everyday Struggles against Digital Capitalism. Routledge New Developments in Communication and Society Research. New York: Routledge. Bartlett, Jamie. 2015. The Dark Net. London: Windmill Books. Becker, Howard Saul. 1997. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New ed. New York: Free Press. Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Berman, Marshall. 1988. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin. Berry, David M. 2004. The contestation of code: A preliminary investigation into the discourse of the free/libre and open source movements. Critical Discourse Studies 1(1):65–89. Cavallaro, Dani. 2000. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. London: Athlone. Coleman, Gabriella. 2015. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. Reprint ed. London: Verso Books. Connor, Stuart. 2013. What’s Your Problem? Making Sense of Social Problems and the Policy Process. Northwich, UK: Critical Publishing. Curra, John. 2000. The Relativity of Deviance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole, and James E. Porter. 2006. Why Napster matters to writing: Filesharing as a new ethic of digital delivery. Computers and Composition 23(2):178–210. Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Embar-Seddon, Ayn. 2002. Cyberterrorism. American Behavioral Scientist 45(6):1033–43. Frediani, Carola, and Giovanni Ziccardi. 2013. Inside Anonymous: A Journey into the World of Cyberactivism. Rome: Informant. Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2012. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto Press. Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace. Harris, Shon, Allen Harper, Chris Eagle, and Jonathan Ness. 2008. Gray Hat Hacking, Second Edition: The Ethical Hacker’s Handbook. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Osborne. Haywood, Douglas. 2013. The ethic of the code: An ethnography of a “humanitarian hacking” community. The Journal of Peer Production 3(July). http://peerproduction.net/ issues/issue-3-free-software-epistemics/peerreviewed-papers/the-ethic-of-the-code-anethnography-of-a-humanitarian-hackingcommunity/. Holstein, James A., and Gale Miller, eds. 2003. Challenges and Choices: Constructionist Perspectives on Social Problems. Hawthorne, NY: AldineTransaction. Hong, Renyi, and Vivian Hsueh-Hua Chen. 2013. Becoming an ideal co-Creator: Web materiality and intensive laboring practices in game modding. New Media & Society 16(2): 290–305. Jamrozik, Adam. 2008. The Sociology of Social Problems: Theoretical Perspectives and Methods of Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, Tim. 2015. Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society. Digital Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics. London: Pluto Press. Jordan, Tim, and Paul Taylor. 1998. A sociology of hackers. Sociological Review 46(4): 757–80. 2004. Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause? London: Routledge. Kenney, Michael. 2015. Cyber-terrorism in a postStuxnet world. Orbis 59(1):111–28. Lessig, Lawrence. 2001. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random House. Levy, Steven. 2010. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution – 25th Anniversary Edition. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

computer hacking as a social problem MacFarquhar, Larissa. 2013. Requiem for a Dream. The New Yorker. March 11. www .newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/ requiem-for-a-dream. Macionis, John J. 2007. Social Problems. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Martin, Nigel, and John Rice. 2011. Cybercrime: Understanding and addressing the concerns of stakeholders. Computers & Security 30(8):803–14. Mitnick, Kevin. 2011. Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker. Boston: Little, Brown. Raymond, Eric S. 2003. The Art of Unix Programming. Harlow, UK: Addison-Wesley. Rheingold, Howard. 2000. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Richards, Julian. 2014. Cyber-War: The Anatomy of the Global Security Threat. London: Palgrave Pivot. Söderberg, Johan. 2008. Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement. Routledge Research in Information Technology and Society. London: Routledge. 2010. Misuser inventions and the invention of the misuser: Hackers, crackers and filesharers. Science as Culture 19(2):151–79. Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse. 2000. Constructing Social Problems. New ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

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Stephenson, Neal. 2002. Snow Crash. New ed. New York: Penguin. Taylor, Paul A. 1998. Hackers: Cyberpunks or microserfs? Information, Communication & Society 1(4): 401–19. 1999. Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime. London: Routledge. Turgeman-Goldschmidt, Orly. 2005. Hacker’s accounts: Hacking as a social entertainment. Social Science Computer Review 23(1): 8–23. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Phoenix. Turkle, Sherry, and Seymour Papert. 1990. Epistemological pluralism: Styles and voices within the computer culture. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16(1): 128. Vegh, Sandor. 2005. The media’s portrayal of hacking, hackers, and hacktivism before and after September 11. First Monday 10(2). http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_ 2/vegh/index.html. Verton, Dan. 2002. The Hacker Diaries: Confessions of Teenage Hackers. Berkeley, CA: McGraw-Hill Professional. Wall, David. 2007. Cybercrime: The Transformation of Crime in the Information Age. Cambridge: Polity. Yar, Majid. 2006. Cybercrime and Society. London: Sage.

CHAPTER 9

War and Militarism Daniel Burland

Abstract Critics have treated as “social problems” both war itself and militarism, the values and structures that organization for war leaves behind after the end of actual conflict. Yet while war and militarism are both capable of causing immense suffering and social disruption, approaching them as social problems in themselves is controversial among social scientists. This entry first describes the best-known social theory concerning the causes and motivations for war. In a second section, it offers a sampling of recent scholarship documenting the effects of war on members of warring societies and on large-scale social structures. The third section reviews the historical sources of the concepts and structures associated with the term “militarism” at the time it emerged in social science literature. The final section discusses a number of phenomena that may all be called forms of “militarism,” some clearly pro-social and others clearly destructive to social order and cohesion. Before considering war and militarism as social problems, it should be acknowledged that there has been some controversy among social scientists about whether war should be defined and addressed as a social problem in itself (Schneider 1959; Marullo and Hlavacek 1992). While few forces in the world can rival war for its potential to create new social problems and to aggravate those already in existence, treating war itself as a social problem overlooks a basic function of war: that of preserving the very existence of a society or social group under threat of destruction by another. War is a term

that can encompass many different types of group violence; traditionally viewed as open armed conflict between two distinct political states, it can also erupt between distinct regions or social groups within a single state (“civil war”), it can take the form of systematically working to undermine the exercise of power and influence by another state or group (as in the twentiethcentury “Cold War” between the United States and the USSR), or it can begin as a rebellion against a sitting ruler via terrorist attacks or the violent seizure of power, followed by continuing violent reprisals from

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opposing groups. Whatever form it may take according to particular circumstances, war is defined as occurring between social groups, with each group seeking to preserve or strengthen itself and to eliminate or reduce the power that the opposing group can use against it. Thus, war is an inherently social activity in that it occurs between distinct social groups, and an inherently paradoxical one in that it seeks social preservation or strengthening (for one’s own society or group) through attempted social destruction (of any and all members of another society or group hostile to one’s own). It is a clear threat to social welfare, like many other social problems, and yet at the same time it is a mechanism through which the autonomous existence of societies can be preserved. As long as distinct social groups exist, the possibility of war will exist; and the ethical decision of one social group to abstain from violence on principle could simply make it a more attractive target for another social group with no such ethical scruples.

Causes of War: Sociological Theory These considerations about the social benefits and threats of war have been the subject of philosophical, political and literary writings since writing began. Only since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century formulation of political demands by organized labor groups has peace been conceived of as a genuine possibility and as a desirable goal for humanity as a whole (Howard 1978, 2000). Some sociologists have asserted that peace has always existed alongside war as a force that shapes and preserves societies (Boulding 2000), but it is primarily in the context of large-scale modern peace movements, strengthened by the participation of large groups including women and working people, that war has come to be viewed as a social problem. This is not a view that has found universal acceptance among sociologists, however. A functionalist view of war was articulated just before the entry of the United

States into World War II by one of the leading sociologists of that era, Robert E. Park (1941), and the points he made remain a touchstone for social scientists who consider war to be an inescapable element of societies, particularly of large, industrialized societies such as the United States. Park focused on three main social functions of war: (1) it enhances social cohesion among the members of all warring societies, as they overcome differences among themselves in order to unite against a common threat from outside (see also Markides and Cohn 1982); (2) war resolves international disputes definitively when one country succeeds in forcing the other to concede defeat and thus end its resistance on the issues that could not be resolved successfully through peaceful negotiation; and (3) for centuries, war has enabled societies to become larger and more complex, which in turn has made possible modern technological advances that would not have occurred in smaller and simpler societies. War itself tends to stimulate technological advancement because of the pressure it exerts upon warring societies to develop a competitive technological advantage over their opponents. Functionalists like Park did not promote war, but rather endeavored to explain the benefits that cause societies to continue to choose it in spite of its obviously negative and destructive effects. Conflict theorists have emphasized, instead, that societies continue to engage in war because it further strengthens those who are already in power. This is a particularly frequent accusation leveled against the United States, for whom the industrial stimulus provided by World War II is widely considered to have been a net economic and political benefit. The enormous project of equipping US soldiers to fight in multiple foreign theaters of war simultaneously enabled the US corporations who produced all of those arms and equipment to expand and retain a lasting influence not only over economic markets but also over the political process. In his final speech before leaving office in 1960, President Eisenhower famously warned

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against allowing the enormous and recently developed “military-industrial complex” of that time to endanger American democracy. Even before the United States entered World War II, in the same issue of the American Journal of Sociology in which Park’s article on war appeared, Harold Lasswell (1941) had predicted that the leading industrialized countries in the world would soon become “garrison states” dominated socially, politically, and economically by soldiers and military industrialists. Although many specific features of Lasswell’s model were never realized, he was correct in foreseeing the lasting influence of US and some European corporations with ties to the military. He argued that militarism, once established, becomes self-renewing, because of its inherent appeal to the human psyche: The perpetuation of the garrison state will be favored by some of the psychological consequences of self-indulgence. When people who have been disciplined against selfindulgence increase their enjoyments, they often suffer from twinges of conscience. Such self-imposed anxieties signify that the conscience is ever vigilant to enforce the orthodox code of human conduct. Hence, drifts away from the established order of disciplined acquiescence in the proclaimed values of the garrison state will be selfcorrecting. The guilt generated by selfindulgence can be relieved through the orgiastic reinstatement of the established mores of disciplined sacrifice. (317n6)

For C. Wright Mills (1956), it was precisely the network of shared social ties between a small number of influential industrial, military and political leaders in the United States that posed the most sinister threat. Mills saw that the common interests of this “power elite,” and their relative isolation from people of other social classes, might cause them to devote the majority of the resources of the entire society to the pursuit of their own shared interests, to the detriment of society as a whole. Mills emphasized the convergence of interests among leaders in all three sectors, but also suggested that the military might have an over-

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whelming influence over the other two sectors when he described with the term “military metaphysic” the view of reality shared by the entire power elite: Mills believed that military values and organizational principles were as prevalent in the formation of political policy and business plans at that time as they were in the military itself. So acute was Mills’s concern about the undue influence of a militaristic view of reality over American policy makers that his next book after The Power Elite was The Causes of World War Three (Mills 1958), a mass-market paperback intended to warn the general population about the impending danger posed to them by the shared militarism among political and business leaders, as evidenced by the participation of all three sectors in the “arms race” and “space race” against the Soviet Union that demanded such a large proportion of America’s resources during this period. Mills’s theory and terminology remain well known among sociologists today because it is not difficult to see in the succeeding decades of US history examples of military actions that would seem to bear out his concerns. Ever since World War II, social scientists have regularly alleged that the shared social and economic investment of this small, powerful group of US leaders in an economic and political system dominated by corporations involved in military production has provided an economic incentive to treat military action in other countries as an attractive option rather than a last resort. In a more recent articulation of this position, Mark Worrell (2011) called the United States a “warfare state,” that is to say, its wardependent economy has created not only a permanent incentive but perhaps even a permanent need to engage in frequent military action in order to justify and bolster the still oversized portion of the US economy directly or indirectly linked to military production and technology. Other social scientists have added that the unmatched military power of the United States causes it to function as an empire, constantly extending its reach into other countries not only because it can but because it must in

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order to sustain its enormous defense industry and “permanent war economy” (Boggs 2011).

Social Effects of War While some social scientists have offered these different theories to explain why societies go to war, many more have sought to document the destructive effects of war on individuals, families, and societies. This documentation certainly provides evidence to support treating war as a social problem and promoting other methods of resolving conflicts between countries and social groups. The issue of the economic impact of war, the notion that war provides a needed economic stimulus, has been called into question by scholars who have documented the actual cost of waging war in terms of both financial expenditures and deaths and injuries sustained (Sivard 1996). In addition to deaths and injuries inflicted by actual combat, wars involving genocide greatly increase the death toll and transform the demographic makeup of entire populations for decades following the end of formal hostilities. Civilians anywhere near a combat zone are also liable to death, injury, disease, sexual victimization, property loss, displacement and psychological trauma (Grimsley and Rogers 2002). As technology advances and weapons become more destructive, the size of affected civilian areas near war zones continues to expand, a phenomenon often referenced by the term “total war” (Chickering and Forster 2000; Chickering, Forster, and Greiner 2005). Advanced military technology also has an immense and lasting impact on the environment, some of which may be deliberate (as in the well-known example of the strategic use of the herbicide Agent Orange during the Vietnam War for the purpose of reducing the cover offered by dense jungle foliage) (Austin and Bruch 2007). Social problems that already exist may become much worse in or near war zones where policing and other customary social controls have been weakened by war: obvious examples include slavery,

sex trafficking, and the illegal merchandising of drugs, stolen property and scarce commodities. The many forms of suffering associated with the experience of war have a lasting and widespread impact among the entire population of warring societies (Lary and MacKinnon 2001). Even those civilians who are sufficiently distant from the scene of actual combat to escape direct injury or displacement will experience disruption of families and other institutions that usually serve to strengthen support for individuals and cohesion for the society as a whole. This widespread social disruption caused by war has a tendency to lead to mass strikes or revolutionary movements following wars’ end, as the solidarity generated during wartime fades and people have a chance to assess the personal and societal damage inflicted by war (Skocpol 1979; Haimson and Tilly 1989). Psychological trauma among both veterans and civilians is a lasting legacy of war for which reliably effective treatments have proven to be elusive (Shephard 2001). It has been argued that military training itself damages the psyche of soldiers and has a negative effect on their entire society (Grossman 1995). Once a society has been mobilized for war and has lived under the threat of the level of danger and loss that modern military technology can cause, its culture may retain a permanent orientation toward war. Several scholars have claimed in different ways that the United States remains permanently predisposed toward war because of the cultural transformation that took place during the preparation for and recovery from the two World Wars (Mosse 1990; Sherry 1997). Social theorists have argued that the cultural transformation caused by war is likely to last a long time because of the way in which the wartime mechanisms of social organization perpetuate themselves and resist the return to a truly peaceful social state (Regan 1994). This large-scale predisposition of a society toward war is one important example of militarism, which may be considered a war-related social problem even in the absence of actual armed

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conflict. Yet the social effects of militarism are not all negative, and the term “militarism” has been used in many different ways in social science scholarship. Since militarism may function as a social force apart from actual war, its many meanings and its status as a social problem will be addressed in a separate section.

Sources of Militarism: Modern Militarism as Medieval Remnant and European Export In 1937, Alfred Vagts published his landmark study A History of Militarism, in which he distinguishes at the outset between “bellicosity,” on the one hand, and “militarism,” on the other. The former is a love of war; the latter is veneration of military order, accoutrements, and culture. In an era of standing armies, continual warfare, and unstable nation-states, the distinction between bellicosity and militarism creates a useful mosaic of concepts with which to chart individual and institutional relations to war and the military: one can be bellicose, militaristic, both, or neither. Vagts argued that militarism descended from the medieval knightly code of chivalry. The advent of modernity curtailed the economic and political power of the nobility (as capitalism replaced feudalism), but it also created a refuge for displaced noblemen in the ranks of military officer corps (as newly created nation-states replaced mercenaries and the private armies of nobility with more reliable national militaries). Squarely in the tradition of Vagts, Samuel P. Huntington (1957) focused on civil-military relations, particularly on the insularity and otherness of the professional officer corps, which he saw (again: following Vagts) as the most faithful preserver of chivalry into the modern age. He traced this descent through the following stages. Mercenary officers (entrepreneurs) were dominant during the Hundred Years War (1337–1453). During this time, adventurers of noble descent would occasionally lead forces into battle, for various polit-

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ical reasons, but forces-for-hire were the norm, and sometimes the mercenary leaders happened to be of noble descent. In the Thirty Years War (1618–48) and the English Civil War (1642–51), the disciplined, national armies of Gustavus Adolphus and Oliver Cromwell, respectively, defeated mercenary opponents consistently, putting an end to the mercenary era, as European Kings attempted to emulate such success by keeping professional, standing armies of their own. It was often the sons of noble families who became paid, military professionals in these new national armies. The precedent was set in the eighteenth century that combat officers (infantry and cavalry) would be drawn from the ranks of the nobility, while branches of a more technical nature (engineering, artillery, and logistics) would be officered by specially trained members of the bourgeoisie. Throughout the eighteenth century, officers of noble birth dominated in most nations, with bourgeois specialists serving in an adjunct role. In the nineteenth century, a professional, meritocratic officer ethos was created, first in Napoleonic France, then in Prussia. This practical reform (based on the principle of recruiting the best man for the job) did not, however, eradicate lingering medievalist principles from the officer corps; instead, those talented individuals who entered the military as officers would be socialized into playing the anachronistic role of gentlemen warriors, even while they performed duties of a modern nature. By the time the officer ranks were fully opened to talented commoners, the nobility had already formed the culture of the officer corps. However technologically advanced and intellectually challenging military work might have become, its officer practitioners were still gentlemen, addressed as “Sir,” and expressly forbidden from dueling, as if that would be their natural inclination and course of action, were not a specific prohibition in place to prevent such a wasteful and destabilizing custom. Culturally, those who order the launch of advanced antiaircraft missiles today continue to function as

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modern-day knights, no longer by birth, but by virtue of a college degree, a career choice, and the ability to pass a battery of tests (and to avoid the temptation of dueling). That is to say, while modern military officers are up-to-date in technology, tactics, and leadership skills, they are deliberately anachronistic in their customs, courtesies, and professional ethics (as evidenced, for example, by the well-known expression that continues to be used in modern military law to describe certain legal infractions by members of the officer corps: “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman”; Article 133, Uniform Code of Military Justice). Starting as early as the nineteenth century (Napoleonic France), and parallel to the meritocratic reforms in the officer corps, universal conscription became institutionalized in most European countries. National armies of mostly professional officers commanding mostly conscript common soldiers fought in Europe from the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth. This particular form of militarism was inadvertently exported throughout the world both by colonialism and by the long reach of World War I and the attendant commercial export of European military technology. Japanese, Nationalist Chinese, Burmese, Singaporean, and, in sum, nearly all the world’s militaries have adopted the essentials of European military organization: a distinct officer corps commanding a much larger body of enlisted soldiers, marching, titles, dress and duty uniforms, a distinct set of laws just for the military, a military divided into distinct but cooperating branches. A Singaporean infantry officer in full dress uniform, with white jacket, shoulder boards, colored cap, and saber at his side, would not look at all out of place if magically transported back to a Napoleonic battlefield, nor would he be at a loss to understand at an intuitive level the rivalries, hierarchies, and traditions giving shape to the mass violence around him. Such has been the success of the diffusion of European military culture. This is not to say that Europe was the world’s only contributor

to contemporary militarism; US and European militaries also have been influenced by non-European military traditions. Rational, scientific, well-funded, well-equipped militaries sometimes become interested in guerrilla tactics, especially when suffering defeats at the hands of guerrillas. Less rationally, modern militaries occasionally indulge in “orientalism,” such as the establishment of Zouave regiments (European and US soldiers dressed in stylized North African uniforms – a practice begun in the nineteenth century and lasting until World War I), or an unlikely interest on the part of military authority in training soldiers in East Asian hand-to-hand martial arts (ostensibly, this training is designed to foster ferocity or self-confidence). The fact remains, however, that most militaries throughout the world have had ample opportunity to observe and imitate other militaries, and the most popular model of all for militaries throughout the world is that of the industrial-age, European nation-state, complete with rank structure and an accompanying elite culture for the officer corps. When the term “militarism” is used with its original meaning in mind, then, it refers to this originally European form of military organization.

“Militarism” as a Pervasive Influence and Potential Social Problem in Contemporary Life As we have seen, scholars began in the 1930s to use the term “militarism” to refer to something specific and exclusive, usually European, usually modern but also vestigial from the medieval period, and thus anachronistic even at the moment when the term came into widespread usage. The widely understood sense of “militarism” was quickly expanded beyond this limited, historically grounded definition, however, to refer to a pervasive tendency of nineteenthand twentieth-century societies toward regimentation and hierarchy reinforced by social controls. These ordering tendencies can be seen both in contexts peripheral to

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Table 9.1. Familiar Examples of Militarism in American Culture and Their Customary Labels

Peripheral or ancillary (subcultures within societies)

Core (entire societies or large-scale, mainstream social groups)

Viewed negatively ........................................

Viewed positively A. SELF-IMPROVEMENT AND SERVICE (exemplary conformity): Boy Scouts, Salvation Army, Peace Corps C. COLLECTIVE, REASONABLE SELF-DEFENSE: “Peace through strength” “Si vis pacem, para bellum.”

government or society as a whole (such as in the Scouting movement or the Salvation Army) and at the core of modern civilization itself (hierarchy being as old as storable grain and written language, and the regimented ordering of people playing a significant role in such core modern non-military institutions as the factory assembly line). Ironically, because of its very pervasiveness as an approach to creating and enforcing social order, militarism of this more general type is easier to see in its peripheral contexts, where power has not yet integrated it into the unremarkable and widely accepted fabric of society. Table 9.1 charts the polyvalence of such militaristic tendencies as they are often described with reference to peripheral subcultures and then with reference to governments or entire societies. The dotted line between negative and positive viewpoints is present in order to emphasize that one man’s pro-social reformer is another’s bully or terrorist. For example, consider The Nation of Islam’s conspicuous paramilitary force, the “Fruit of Islam”: are they antifeminist, anti-Semitic bigots (Cell B)? Or are they self-disciplined, self-sacrificial exemplars, confronting racism with character (Cell A)? A closer look at each cell of Table 9.1 will help to convey the ambiguous value of militarism as a social force, one whose misuse certainly can cause or exacerbate social problems, but whose very essence fosters social cohesion and positive personal traits such as altruism, humility, and self-discipline.

B. DIFFERENTIATION and DESTABILIZATION (rebellion): Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, street gangs D. IMMORAL AGGRESSION: fascism, Stalinism, the arms industry seen as “Merchants of Death”

Peripheral or Ancillary Militarism, Viewed Positively Many artists working in a variety of media portray militarism (embracing military ideals) as a path to self-fulfillment, particularly as a path to achieving full-fledged masculinity. Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895) and the popular 1981 film An Officer and a Gentleman are two examples among countless others. These two stories, written nearly a century apart, are warrior Bildungsromane: the protagonist of the former overcomes his own cowardice in the course of a war, while the hero of the second surmounts his selfishness in the course of rigorous military training – youths becoming men, by embracing warrior ideals first. Enlistment posters (and television advertising), war-themed films, novels, and even documentaries often are organized around this theme of the positive transformational force of militarism: the military turns boys into men, and men into better men. War sometimes facilitates this transformation, but many films focus only on the deliberate militarization of the youthful protagonist, with perhaps only a perfunctory battle scene at the end of the film, in order to make the point that the militarization worked (The D.I. [1957], An Officer and a Gentleman, or Heartbreak Ridge [1986]). This familiar literary theme has a counterpart in academic scholarship. Gideon Aron (1974) explained military parachuting as a form of benign altruistic suicide (transcending one’s own instinct of self-preservation in order to benefit the collective). William

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Cockerham (1973) also wrote about paratroopers, but his focus was institutional rather than experiential: he documented how their transformation is manufactured during training through the usual means of superstition, tradition, and ritual. Cockerham and Aron are emblematic of one powerful (and continuing) current of sociology’s approach to the matter of military training: men become better men in the course of military training, but what is experienced on an individual level (the transformation) is planned deliberately and effectively by military authority. Moreover, one can receive this pro-social effect of military training without being a member of the military. The international Scouting Movement (for boys and girls) puts children in camouflaged (usually khaki, or olive drab) uniforms, assigns them ranks, teaches them modified salutes and other paramilitary customs, holds award ceremonies, and organizes honor guards. Occasionally skills are taught that have a potential military application (marksmanship, land navigation, or signaling). In addition to Scouting (a part-time activity), children are sometimes educated in military academies, and children adjudicated delinquent are sometimes rehabilitated with paramilitary training (a disciplinary technique often called “boot camp” in the United States). Further, adults can volunteer for pro-social militaristic activity. The Salvation Army is perhaps the best known of such non-military, paramilitary organizations, but altruism is not the only motivator for engaging in militaristic activity outside of the military. Those who can afford the tuition and the time occasionally volunteer for paramilitary fitness activities (sometimes led by veterans) as a way of enjoying the fitness benefits of doing chin-ups while being berated by an authority figure (and without the disadvantage of prolonged separation from family, civilian career derailment, psychological trauma, and exposure to greatly increased risk of mutilation and death). Within most militaries, there are marked second-class others: racial minorities, women, conscientious objectors, political

dissidents, or nonheterosexuals. Sometimes these minorities are set apart in specially designated units. For example, prior to 1948 (thus throughout the Second World War), African Americans served in “colored” units in a segregated military. Occasionally, the otherness of these set-apart units becomes a badge of distinction (e.g., the famed “Ghurkas”), but generally the otherness of these units is a mark of second-rate status, with ethnic units often being relegated to heavy labor (rather than combat). Parallel to this widespread institutional practice is the promise of widespread social acceptance that many contemporary militaries hold out to potential recruits. In the US Army, the current adage is “We [soldiers] are all green,” which is to say that serving in the same green Army uniform unifies soldiers of all skin colors. Just as the practice of militarism can transform a boy into a man, it also has the potential power to mainstream a person of marked gender, ethnicity, or orientation. Whether focused on juvenile character formation (Boy Scouts, Royal Rangers, reform schools, military academies), integration of the marginalized into the mainstream (the assimilative power of military training), an outlet for altruism (Salvation Army, Doctors without Borders), or adult character formation (paramilitary fitness camps, martial arts training), these various extramilitary organizations using militaristic techniques to further their aims of building character or bolstering altruistic social interventions have many supporters and participants and relatively few detractors. Far from being examples of social problems, they are actually used in the effort to ameliorate (“fight”) social problems. Peripheral or Ancillary Militarism, Viewed Negatively Terrorist organizations have used militaristic principles such as rank, ritualized deference to authority, uniforms, and awards ceremonies to bolster morale, develop recruits, and ensure focus on whatever missions they assign. It bears emphasis that there is not

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universal agreement on what constitutes a terrorist organization, nor even what differentiates a terrorist organization from a national military. The definition of terrorism is beyond the scope of this entry, but it is clear that there are many organizations, some given the official labels of racist, terrorist or criminal, that are seen by a majority of citizens as hateful, dangerous, and on the social fringe. Racist, violent and often unlawful organizations succeed in attracting and retaining young men as members in part because their paramilitary ethos appears to offer young recruits the same self-realizing, masculinizing effects as have been culturally associated with traditional military training (and described at length above). Their organization into formal ranks with a well-delineated chain of command makes them more difficult for law enforcement or legitimate military forces to defeat because the elimination (through killing or arrest) of prominent leaders does not succeed in dismantling their structure, as formally designated seconds in command usually have the authority to assume leadership and continue to carry out the organization’s collective mission with the cooperation of subordinates. Since these organizations do not have to earn or maintain widespread political support, as traditional armies must in a democratic society, they are free to use all the advantages of group cohesion and organization that a militaristic structure confers in service to a mission of social disruption through mass violence and intimidation, not only against particular enemies but also against the larger society in which they operate. In other words, the same social forces that may be marshaled by entire societies for the purpose of social preservation during a traditional war may also be used effectively by terrorist groups to ensure their own preservation and to harm targeted social groups they perceive as hostile to the alternative social agenda that unites them. Core Militarism, Viewed Positively Not all militarism is socially marginal or destructive. In addition to its capacity to

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strengthen overall social cohesion, collective militarism has had more specific large-scale positive effects. As noted in the section on war, many technological advances such as jet propulsion and space travel have military origins; military computer networks and global positioning satellites contributed greatly to the development of Internet and cellular phone technology, which have since been used effectively for every conceivable purpose, including that of promoting world peace and countless other positive social movements. George C. Homans (1946) argued long ago that military authority could be used as a model to teach leadership within the civilian sphere, and business coaches have proposed many versions of that militaristic model in the intervening decades since then. Beyond the advancement or renewal of soft, inefficient sectors of civilian society, elements of military culture can be seen as essential building blocks of society. Rank, ritual, division of labor, public awards, progressive hardening of boys into young men: these seem to be as old as other essential elements of civilization. Militarism can serve the causes of progressive social renewal as well as of nostalgic or fundamentalist social regression. Core Militarism, Viewed Negatively Core, collective militaristic values and structures can have positive effects such as those just mentioned, but they can also produce police states such as Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR. In both countries, even before the beginning of World War II, collective militarism itself, military readiness rather than an actual shooting war, led to the kinds of destructive social problems more typically found in war zones. When militarism becomes a recognizable guiding force in government or industry, the fact that that powerful and efficient apparatus could be used to harm people, even a government’s own citizens, arises quickly in the minds of modern people. Even when members of contemporary, industrialized nations express overall approval for militaristic organizations such as the Boy Scouts,

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they often say that the militaristic overtones of the organization are unfortunate and in need of updating, expressing the notion that humanity at this stage of history should have transcended militarism. War and militaristic structures are widely understood to be effective catalysts for social cohesion and the fostering of pro-social feelings among individuals, but few individuals and even fewer entire societies approve of war or of militarism as ends in themselves. If some level of militarism ensures the stability and safety of a state, we may appreciate the effect even as we regret the cause. It is this wariness of contemporary people toward militarism itself that has given the word an overwhelmingly negative connotation in today’s journalism and social science discourse, even as the nations that generate such discourse (the same nations that propagated the original, literal form of militarism in the form of the modern European military) continue to function from day to day within the militaristic structures found in their workplaces, their leisure and social service organizations, and in police departments and other institutions providing formal, positive social control. There is ample reason to justify calling war and militarism social problems, but alternative social structures will have to be identified and put into place before we can reasonably call for war and militarism to be eradicated.

Glossary Garrison state A state in which specialists of violence become the dominant political class. The term is from Harold Lasswell (1941). Militarism The use of military forms of organization even in non-military contexts. This term can be used with a positive, negative, or neutral connotation, but today is most frequently used negatively, to emphasize the notion that military cultural elements should rightfully be absent from civilian culture during peacetime. Alfred Vagts (1937) famously contrasted the term militarism with the term

bellicosity, by which he meant an eagerness to engage in actual warfare. Military-industrial complex A term coined by president Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961 to refer to cooperation between the military and producers of military equipment. The implication is that this alliance between such powerful agents influences public policy in such a way that preparation for war becomes more important than public interest. Military metaphysic A term used by C. Wright Mills (1956) in his book The Power Elite to describe the militaristic view of reality shared by American leaders of the 1950s in political and business institutions as well as in the military itself. Power elite The concentration of power in the hands of a very few high ranked military leaders, select political officials, and wealthy individuals. According to this pessimistic worldview, most ordinary individuals have no real power. The term was coined by C. Wright Mills (1956).

References Aran, Gideon. 1974. Parachuting. The American Journal of Sociology. 80(1):124–52. Austin, Jay, and Carl Bruch, eds. 2007. The Environmental Consequences of War: Legal, Economic, and Scientific Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boggs, Carl. 2011. Empire versus Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate and Military Power. New York: Routledge. Boulding, Elise. 2000. Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History. Ithaca, NY: Syracuse University Press. Chickering, Roger, and Stig Forster, eds. 2000. Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chickering, Roger, Stig Forster, and Bernd Greiner, eds. 2005. A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cockerham, William. 1973. Selective socialization: Airborne training as status passage. Journal of Political and Military Sociology 1:215–29.

war and militarism Grimsley, Mark, and Clifford J. Rogers, eds. 2002. Civilians in the Path of War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Grossman, Dave. 1995. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Little, Brown. Haimson, Leopold, and Charles Tilly, eds. 1989. Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in an International Perspective: Strike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Homans, George C. 1946. The small warship. American Sociological Review 11:294–300. Howard, Michael. 1978. War and the Liberal Conscience. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2000. The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 1957. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of CivilMilitary Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lary, Diana, and Stephen MacKinnon. 2001. Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Lasswell, Harold. 1941. The garrison state. The American Journal of Sociology 46:455–68. Mann, Michael. 1986–2013. The Sources of Social Power. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Markides, K. C., and S. F. Cohn. 1982. External conflict/internal cohesion: A reevaluation of an old theory. American Sociological Review 47:88–98. Marullo, Sam, and Jen Hlavacek. 1992. Sociologists on war as a social problem. Peace Review 4 (3):19–23.

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Marullo, Sam and Jim Hannon. 1992. War and Militarism as a Social Problem. In Teaching the Sociology of Peace and War: A Curriculum Guide. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. Mills, C. W. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. 1958. The Causes of World War Three. New York: Simon and Schuster. Mosse, George. 1990. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Park, R. E. 1941. The social function of war: Observations and notes. American Journal of Sociology 46:551–70. Regan, Patrick. 1994. Organizing Societies for War: The Process and Consequences of Social Militarism. Westport, CT: Praeger. Schneider, Joseph. 1959. Is war a social problem? The Journal of Conflict Resolution 3(4):353– 60. Shephard, Ben. 2001. A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sherry, Michael. 1997. In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sivard, Ruth. 1996. World Military and Social Expenditures. 16th ed. Washington, DC: World Priorities. Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vagts, Alfred. 1937. A History of Militarism: Romance and Realities of a Profession. New York: W. W. Norton. Worrell, M. P. 2011. Why Nations Go to War: A Sociology of Military Conflict. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 10

The Social Problem of Terrorism Pat Lauderdale and Annamarie Oliverio∗

Abstract Following the political examination of terrorism, this chapter suggests that the social problem task is not to expose or define the terrorist of the week – be it the Unabomber or the Islamic State organization (ISIS) threatening national security or the Central Intelligence Agency conducting covert actions – but to examine the political processes and practices that maintain, create, and change the definitions of certain actions as terrorist. Accordingly, we may be better able to understand the status of terrorism as either an act of defiance, deviance, social control, politics, and/or coercion and to understand it as part of a particular time and place.

The Social Problem of Terrorism Terrorism is a perplexing social problem. Emerging from the Enlightenment era, terrorism became an integral part of the state either to enforce obedience or to challenge authority. Terrorism as a social problem must therefore be examined within its political, social and economic contexts in order to explain the relationship between those who participate in or respond to terrorism and the world in which they live and act. This complex interaction between the ∗

We thank Karen Cook, Director of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, and Professor Morris Zelditch Jr. in sociology at Stanford University for their research support. This article is an extension of the continual research on power and deviance with Randall Amster, who helped initiate the ideas.

individual/group and structural issues calls for an analysis similar to C. Wright Mills’s ([1959] 2000, 9) suggestion for war, that is, analyzing the causes and impact of terrorism within its historical context. Terrorism challenges conceptualization because its context is highly subjective and often dependent on polemical or rhetorical conditions. Symbolic, perceptual and discursive factors also impact our understanding of terrorism. Consider, for example, the complexity involved in attempting to define terrorism as a useful analytical term (Hoffman 2006; Lutz and Lutz 2011; LaFree, Dugan, and Miller 2015). One approach is to view terrorism as violence and the threat of violence; however, terrorism obviously is not the only action that involves violence and the threat of violence. Coercive diplomacy, war and 155

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street fights can fit that definition. Even official definitions of terrorism in the United States among the State Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Defense (DOD) differ in their emphases. While the State Department emphasizes motives, the FBI emphasizes methods and the DOD emphasizes goals. Clearly, terrorism is embedded within the discourse used to represent it. Therefore, we will start with a definition from the United Nations in 1992 that underscores the most common aspects identified with terrorism: An anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-)clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination – the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The key elements of violence as well as fear and intimidation as inflicted upon “innocent” civilians provides the basis of most derivative definitions of terrorism, official or otherwise, though how these elements are highlighted and employed appear to change as historical reality changes. As a social problem then, what does terrorism involve? Who can be classified as a terrorist? What are terrorists trying to achieve? Who are the supporters of terrorism? Can there ever be an end to terrorist activity? Who are the key players: domestic sympathizers, foreign governments, diaspora movements, foreign sympathizers, cooperating terrorist groups, or criminal organizations (Henry and Milovanovic 1996)? Can the leader of a loose-knit band of hit-and-run killers of British soldiers be a terrorist? Or, is he a revolutionary hero or freedom fighter? Why are Eric Snowden or Julian Assange, both of whom leaked classified US military and diplomatic documents, perceived as either freedom fighters or terrorists? And, what about Nat Turner who executed Virginia slave owners and their families in 1830 (Lauderdale 2010)? How do we assess the difference in the reactions to South African leader Nelson Mandela over the decades? Ben-Yehuda (2006, 569) notes that

Nelson Mandela (is) only one example from the recent past. From a more neutral point of view, one needs to notice that the terms “terrorist” and “hero” themselves are relativistic and that Mandela was a heroic figure for nonwhites in South Africa when hegemonic whites defined him as a terrorist.

The social construction of self and identity is critical to understanding its impact on social change. The self as a dynamic social process is fluid, a transformative process of being. Basic to sociologist Erving Goffman’s work in his microanalysis of “the interaction order,” was the reciprocity found in interactions. The self is a transformative process and often critical to understanding the definition of terrorism. Following the political examination of terrorism and deviance, Oliverio (1998) suggests that the social problem task is not to expose or define the terrorist, whether it be the Unabomber (Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski) threatening national security or the CIA conducting covert actions, but to examine the political processes and practices that maintain, create, and change the definitions of certain actions as terrorist. Accordingly, we may be better able to question the status of terrorism as either an act of defiance, deviance, social control, politics, and/or coercion and to understand it as part of a particular time and place as a social problem (Ben-Yehuda 1985; Ferrell 2002; Gould 2002; Lauderdale and Amster 2008; Lauderdale 2011).

Terrorism and Political Structures Terrorism as an integral and instrumental part of the state has roots in the systematic killings during the Jacobin tribunals of late-eighteenth-century France that defined terror as nothing but justice – prompt, severe, inflexible – and thus, as an “emanation of virtue” (Burke 1790, 119). The state is conceptualized initially as the political apparatus that controls or attempts to control society without government, while

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government refers to a system of checks and balances that allows each of its governing branches to amend or veto acts of another branch. Capitalizing on displaying the brutality of the French Revolution, “British men of letters” employed the term terrorism to describe the governmental control of the masses. This response to the French Reign of Terror is exemplified in Edmund Burke’s work where he refers to the French revolutionaries as “zealots, fanatics, and terrorists” (Burke 1790, 219). His polemical strategy was to define terrorism as “violence from below,” resulting from radical thought and action. Burke, a member of the gentry, used the term terrorism to portray the masses’ depravity, hence their incompetence at governing. He also used it in reference to alternative or radical philosophies such as those of Voltaire and Rousseau. Terrorism, as integral to the construction of the state is presented not only as a crucial repressive instrument, but also as a polemical construction. Ironically, the period of the Enlightenment treats terrorism as symbiotic to the process of statebuilding. Over 200 years later, following Edmund Burke, many researchers continue to collect data for a political construct that was initially coined by the English gentry and aristocracy (cf. LaFree, Dugan, and Miller 2015). We need to remember the historical context from which the constructions of terror and terrorism emerged in order to understand its inextricable relationship to the state (Oliverio and Lauderdale 2005). Updating this line of analysis, Joseba Zulaika (2010) contends that at the twilight of the Cold War in the mid-1940s, political leaders and the media introduced a new vocabulary for describing foreign conflict. They noted the existence of a subtype of human being – “the terrorist” – who is characterized by a total absence of moral restraint, and the insatiable desire to kill, who acts without any clear and viable political goal in mind, and who celebrates their violent behavior. Yet, as he examined the case of Basque political activist and former ETA member, “Yoyes,” Zulaika discovered

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that real-world terrorists such as Yoyes, have political goals, are restrained in their use of violence, make moral decisions through painstaking reflection, and are capable of giving up the life of armed action and pursuing peaceful existence for the sake of other goals. Zulaika also contrasts the insight of Truman Capote’s novel In Cold Blood with The 9/11 Commission Report, examines the mindset of “terrorists” presented by Orianna Fallaci and Jean Genet, and explores the continuities between the cold war and the fight against terrorism. Zulaika further argues that although it lacks an empirical referent, the linguistic monster “terrorism” has captured the imagination of all political actors. He notes that the word first spread from one corner of the federal government, basically the directors of covert operation within the CIA, to other areas of the Executive Branch. Then, it was assimilated by members of the press, who were partly shamed, partly threatened, and often cajoled, by government officials into representing events as evidence of the presence of stereotypical terrorists (Oliverio 1998). The print and electronic media then framed the new threat via the speech and imagination of the public. He suggests that part of the reason the new vocabulary caught the public’s imagination is because it was fused with the longer-standing nightmare of nuclear war. Together, the two ideas create an emotionally powerful scenario about the inevitability of an apocalypse launched by intransigent terrorists, for example, with warheads at their disposal. The power of this scenario to scare millions of Americans – the conjoined ideas of terrorists and nuclear weapons – have made many of them supportive of the use of torture (in violation of international law), the blanket bombing of civilians, and government surveillance on the home front (Lee 2009). Fearful of being attacked by unprincipled terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction, many Americans supported invasions and military occupations of other lands, assassinations of foreign leaders, and overthrows of suspicious regimes. Ironically, Zulaika argues,

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in the name of self-protection, US citizens condone myriad cruel and unsavory actions that spawn rage toward the United States – as foreigners see their friends and family members arrested, demeaned, and mentally and physically destroyed by US military force. Wishing to eliminate imaginary monsters, the United States inadvertently creates the blind hatred and furious enemies that it wanted to avoid (cf. Baehr 2002). He concludes his research suggesting that the US government’s manufacturing of consent for violent policies of counterterrorism is counterproductive. And his critique of the “war on terrorism” argues for the ironic yet unavoidable conclusion that it is fundamentally a self-fulfilling prophecy in which those fighting the war on terror are the very ones responsible for creating it. Randal Law (2015) suggests that terrorism is a transnational phenomenon with a convoluted history that resists easy periodization and narrative treatment. From tyrannicide in the premodern world, including Ancient Greece, Rome and the Middle Ages, to the emergence of modern terrorism such as with the Irish Republican Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the rise of al-Qaeda, terror and terrorism emerged as a set of distinct strategies, tactics, and mindsets across time and place. Racial violence, urban guerrilla warfare and state terror in Latin America are also analyzed as forms of terrorism. Whether terrorism is used as a strategy of repression or as a form challenging the state, the relationship of the state to terrorism is clear. Though the term “terrorism” may not have been constructed in premodern times, when the terms tyrannicide or treason were used instead, there exists a continuity in strategy as a form of violence, fear and intimidation involving citizens (innocent or not).

Terrorism and Political Violence At this point, it is important to recognize that analyzing terrorism as a social problem invariably involves an analysis of its social construction which is relative to time, place

and historical context. Distinguishing terrorism from political violence is generally difficult. Accordingly, we need to consider those conditions in which defiant, deviant or violent actions are considered terrorism, as opposed to other forms of violence such as war, revolution or protest. Forms of ostensible terrorism challenging the state tend to reflect the society out of which they emerge (Oliverio 2007). The interconnectedness of European society in the 1960s and 1970s is one of the reasons groups such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigades, and the Irish Republican Army were difficult to control or suppress through state-sanctioned force. Relatively easy mobility from country to country within Europe made the different terrorist cells that coordinated with each other, effectively elusive. Nationality was less of a consideration than was ideology, and protesters helped protesters of different countries: communists supported communists, fascists supported fascists, and Catholics supported Catholics. Donatella della Porta (2013) notes in her comparative research on different forms of political violence, that striking similarities exist among the radicalization, development, maintenance and decline of violent movements that have been called terrorist. By examining how processes at the level of society, state, group and that of individual interest interact, important structural patterns can be gleaned in the development of terrorism that challenges the state. Comparing the political violence of left- and right-wing groups in Italy and Germany, ethnonationalist groups in Spain and religious fundamentalist organizations, della Porta creates a theoretical framework based on analyzing the similar processes involved with clandestine groups that resort to terrorist activity. She suggests that as activists become radicalized and develop clandestine organizations, there are specific, important interactions that occur with social movements, countermovements and the state (cf. McAdam and Su 2002). For example, disappointments and frustrations with nonviolent action, solidarity with the ideologies of other

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radicalized groups that employ violent strategies, psychological wounds (including the constructions of social reality by the participants), all work to compel challenge groups to resort to violence. della Porta’s extensive examination of the violence wielded by the left-wing Red Brigades (BR) in Italy during the 1970s illustrates the point (della Porta 1995, 2013). The BR emerged as a competing force to the rightwing violence produced by the “strategy of tension,” apparently facilitated by the Italian secret service. The Red Brigades formed when they felt that the Communist Party (of which they were a part) had forsaken and betrayed the working class. They viewed armed struggle as their only choice in supporting the Italian working class and preventing a right-wing coup d’état. The perceptions of challenge groups, such as the BR and others, of the role of the state appear also to be contingent on historical injuries as well as larger societal contexts. Left-wing Italian and German terrorist groups (such as the Baader-Meinholf), were shaped by their past opposition to fascism and aligned themselves with the fascist resistance of World War II. Past socialization along with the appropriate historical conditions such as social upheaval, economic decline and ideological activism, provided opportunities for clandestine groups to develop and garner support for their actions. However, politics and the state also allowed for the development of the language of terrorism, used to depict the radical, clandestine groups as extremists so as to preclude any compromise. Inevitably, the power of definition by those who felt threatened by the challenge groups helped lead to the former’s decline. Using Pape’s (2003; Pape and Feldman 2010) examination of suicide bombing, we can further explicate the interaction and processes evident among different levels of society. Examining 2,100 cases of suicide bombings throughout the world, Pape notes that, spanning from 1980 to 2009, fundamentalist religious ideologies are not the root cause of suicide terrorism, thus challenging dominant explanations. In fact, his seminal

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research suggests that nearly all suicide terrorism (98.5 percent of the 2,100 cases) follows a strategic logic specifically designed to compel or coerce modern democracies to withdraw their military forces from occupied countries. His data include eight of the largest suicide terrorism campaigns from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, al-Qaeda, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka. Indeed, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, a group that regards itself as secular and Marxist, emerges as having the greatest number of suicide bombings in their quest for independence. While his research primarily focuses upon examining the causes of suicide bombings, Pape notes that a number of variables such as religion, ideology, and class level (e.g., educated and middle class), may exacerbate the desire to act with violence, but by no means cause it. He offers a persuasive explanation for the political and social processes involved in the development of suicide terrorism, how these interface with personal offenses and/or belief systems as well as the role of state interests (foreign and national) and involvement. Hamm (2013) offers a provocative analysis of the radicalization of individuals and groups and their use of terrorism. The Madrid train bombings in 2004, shoebomber Richard Reid in 2001, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the 9/11 attacks – were all led by men radicalized behind prison bars. Created largely by governments, the very nature of prisons is to induce transformative experiences among inmates; yet today’s prisons are hotbeds for personal transformation toward terrorist beliefs and actions due to the increasingly chaotic nature of prison life caused by mass incarceration. Hamm demonstrates how prisoners use criminal cunning, collective resistance and nihilism to incite terrorism against Western targets. He examines the realities of day-to-day prison life and details how prisoners relate to the power of prison gangs – whether the Aryan Brotherhood or a radical type of the Muslim Brotherhood. He notes that while Islam is mainly a positive influence in prison, certain forces within the prison,

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such as the radical Muslim movements, are aligned with the efforts of al-Qaeda and its associates to inspire inmates in the United States and Europe to conduct terrorist attacks. His research draws from a wide range of sources – including his own participant observation, and historical case studies of prisoner radicalization reaching from Gandhi and Hitler to Malcolm X, Bobby Sands and the detainees of Guantánamo. The database of cases link prisoner radicalization with evolving terrorist threats ranging from police shootouts to suicide bombings. Hamm’s research details the texture of prisoners’ lives: their criminal thinking styles, the social networks that influenced them, and personal “turning points” that set them on the pathway to violent extremism. He provides a deep understanding of how prisoners can be radicalized, arguing that in order to understand the contemporary landscape of terrorism, we must come to terms with how inmates are treated in prison, especially in the context of radicalization and political violence. The protests and political violence in the Middle East beginning in 2010, which produced the revolutionary wave known as the “Arab Spring,” have increased the reach, depth, and potency of al-Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS. State sponsors of terrorism continue unabated, largely undeterred, and “lone wolf” terrorists emerge from a variety of influences. These influences are part of the globalizing processes that influence the upwardly mobile as well as the disenfranchised who sometimes resort to the political violence often labeled terrorism (Oliverio and Lauderdale 2015; Chew and Lauderdale 2010; Nassar 2010). In this respect, understanding terrorism as a phenomenon dependent on historical context–whether it is as an act of protest, domination, coercion, liberation or polemics–presents us with a number of difficulties in attempting to specify its unique qualities as compared with other forms of political violence (Bergesen and Han 2005). In this light, Primoratz’s (2013) discussion of state terrorism is particularly valuable. This work is a comprehensive study of the core philosophical questions

posed by terrorism such as: How should we define it? Is it morally distinct from other forms of violence? Can it be morally justified? Primoratz attempts to overcome relativism and the double standards that often plague the study of terrorism. He explicates the main ethical approaches to terrorism in terms of its consequences, rights and justice, “supreme emergency,” and the collective responsibility of citizens. Primoratz argues that resorting to terrorism is almost always absolutely wrong. It might be morally justified only when an entire population of people is facing a true moral disaster, and even then should only be understood in a highly restrictive way. His conceptual analysis and normative arguments about the use of the term terrorism are supported with case studies such as the terror-bombing of German cities during World War II and the role of terrorism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While certain structural patterns may emerge, researchers need to be cautious about terrorism’s subjective and pejorative nature. Context-specific analyses can also run the risk of being relativistic, especially in the historical moment when acts of violence are competing for political relevance and definition. In order to provide greater precision to the construct of terrorism and more heuristic research, the analysis of terrorism as a strategy that is employed at different levels and degrees of analysis provides a useful, empirically based approach (Lauderdale et al. 1990).

Terrorism as a Strategy After the events of terror during 9/11 in the United States, the use of the term “terrorism” to define political violence reached an all-time high. The attacks amplified prior events such as the World Trade Center bombings in 1993, the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995, the bombing of the US military headquarters in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the 1998 explosions in Kenya and Tanzania near the US embassies, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole Navy destroyer.

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Perpetrators were racially and religiously profiled in attempts to control further challenges to the United States and other symbols of capitalism, westernization and liberal democracy. Significant research was generated to validate the profiling of terrorists, which was aimed at providing some sort of predictability even though most terrorist experts were aware that unpredictability is one of terrorism’s essential features (Stern and Berger 2015; Weiss and Hassan 2015). Accordingly, Charles Tilly (2005, 25) proposes defining terrorism as a strategy “that involves interactions among political actors and that to explain the adoption of such a strategy we have no choice but to analyze it as part of political process.” Tilly is less concerned with defining than with explaining because the latter leads to concrete, often violent reactions and political responses by the state (Oliverio and Lauderdale 2005). For Tilly (2005, 26) terrorism is the “asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies.” Explanations of such action, however, have amounted to little more than dispositional accounts of the perpetrators that outline little more than individual intent (in trying to explain, Why did they do it?), the emotional state of the perpetrators, immediate incentives or opportunities and ideology (cf. Inverarity, Lauderdale, and Feld 1983). When we find available accounts of the orientations of the perpetrators preceding and ostensibly causing the action, whether told by the terrorists and/or terrorism experts, they become increasingly confusing or inadequate (Bauman 2010). “Mafiosi” and ruthless governments, for example, deploy terror against enemies and uncertain clients (Hamm 2013; Vertigans 2011). Major large-scale protection rackets and repressive governments frequently apply terror to threatening minorities. Yet, despite such inadequacies, research providing dispositional (beyond motivational) accounts of terrorism are most frequently employed because they point to concrete entities creating an us– them, good–evil dichotomy as well as a crude response to the prevailing question, “Why do they hate us?” Thus, Tilly’s (2005)

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dissatisfaction with dispositions as sufficient causes of anything as complex as terrorism is important here. He correctly proposes a relational perspective to bring analytical order in explaining the strategy of terrorism. He moves beyond who might be disposed to terrorism to consider relational explanations, including the consequences of actions. Relational explanations emphasize interactions among social entities – individuals, groups, social networks, organizations, states – and provide the departure point of analysis. Here is a summary of four steps involved in providing relational explanations: (1) examine a recurrent strategy of intimidation, a relation, not a propensity, that occurs in contentious politics and that corresponds to what many label as terror, which is to say, the asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies; (2) recognize and document that a variety of individuals, groups, and networks employ the strategy; (3) systematically connect and document the strategy to previous forms of political struggle in the same settings and populations; and (4) observe and document that specialists in coercion, ranging from the state to government employees to bandits, sometimes deploy terror under certain political circumstances, usually with far more devastating effects than the terror operations of non-specialists. The horrors of 9/11 in the United States should not blind us to systematic variation in the character and origins of terror. Viewing terrorism as a strategy is crucial for a relational explanation. The use of terrorism can be separated from competing strategies such as accommodation, retreatism, negotiation, subversion, infiltration, propaganda (disinformation), and open warfare. Whatever harm terrorism inflicts directly, it signals that the target may be vulnerable, that the perpetrators exist, and that they have the capacity to strike again. Tilly (2005) also stresses that the initial signals usually reach three different audiences: the targets, potential supporters of the perpetrators, and third parties that might cooperate with the targets or the perpetrators. Some ostensible “terrorists,”

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for example, believe that destruction of evil objects is a good in itself, and in this context most terror supports demands for recognition, redress, autonomy, or transfers of power. As a strategy, terror is most effective when it alters or inhibits the target’s disapproved behavior, fortifies the perpetrators’ standing with potential allies, and moves third parties toward greater cooperation with the perpetrators’ organization and announced program. Relational explanations of terrorism are more useful than dispositional or motivational explanations such as those related to official definitions by the US State Department or other authoritative organizations such as the United Nations. Tilly (2005) suggests that definitions that describe terrorist acts and actors provide pivotal opportunities to think through what it means to explain terror. His work focuses upon war-making and state-making (as well as protection and extraction) as crucial processes in understanding terrorism. Terrorism is viewed as a political “strategy” by those attempting to centralize and expand their power or those attempting to challenge the state in order to gain power and advantage via generalized fear. Thus, terrorism may be employed by an individual or a state. When seen as a strategy, we can explain its use at different levels of social and political processes. What becomes apparent in the diverse approaches to the analyses of terrorism is the symbiotic relationship between the state and terror. Terrorism is similar to covert military force of all sorts, except that military force usually has the advantage of being perceived as legitimate even when it is not, as is the case with many genocides. The intent of an individual, a group, or state, and the consequences of their actions, are important in understanding the processes and practices that are defined as terrorism. However, is it also possible to study the designation of terrorists or terrorism as one way of understanding social benefit or harm (Hamm 2007, especially for an incisive analysis of domestic issues)? This is not an easy question to answer (cf. Lutz and Lutz 2011) because, as Bruce Hoffman (2006) has explicated, terrorism is a pejora-

tive term. It is a concept with negative connotations that is used to label enemies and opponents of the state. The decision to negatively label an opponent or an organization as terrorist becomes unavoidably subjective, depending largely on whether one sympathizes with or opposes the action. Sympathizers with the victim of the violence will prefer to see the violent act as terrorism. However, those who sympathize with the perpetrator may view the act as a positive political action, seeing it an act of liberation, freedom, or even revolution. Hoffman notes that for such political reasons many global news sources avoid using the term, opting instead for less accusatory designations like “bombers” or “militants.” The confounding relationships among legitimacy, terror and the media are important in this context, specifically, in regard to how the process of presenting terror may be characterized as a method of challenging, negotiating and redrawing moral boundaries (Zelditch 2001; Erikson 2004). Though protest and political activism, even without the use of terrorist strategies, may serve as strategies of protest for individuals or groups, their definition is a crucial issue for research. Thus, the media’s role in defining certain actions as terrorism, as well as their dominant use of rhetoric and representation, is central to the political process of treating terrorism as a social problem.

Terrorism as a Polemical Construct In Terrorism and the Politics of Fear, David Altheide (2006) stresses that the political use of “fear symbols” has reached significant levels in the twenty-first century via the media. Altheide explores the militarymedia complex and how the social construction of “fear” is employed to guide public and foreign policy. He analyzes the rhetoric to explain how the politics of fear is constructed. He suggests that crime prevention projects and antiterrorism efforts were and continue to be pushed through on a wave of manipulated social fear that have led to broad social control systems, which don’t necessarily make us safer but

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invariably make us less free. Numerous surveillance systems monitor citizens more, but prevent crime less, demonstrating the danger of crime prevention, which can morph into citizen micro-management and social regulation that is divorced from more serious security concerns (Pfohl 2009). Altheide tracks the process by which inordinate fear in a society translates into an almost nonchalant surrendering of civil liberties and privacy. In essence, he demonstrates how politicians and other decision makers use the fear of terrorism to extend and intensify social control significantly beyond the threat of terrorism. Mass media formats and logics of fear fundamentally shape how people think about security, and lead them to engage in new forms of selfregulation. Are we now governed significantly through fear (Aaronson 2013)? The media only gives superficial treatment to the targeting of children, the elderly, women, civilians, the cognitively challenged, and mentally ill. Who claims that terrorists seek power while freedom fighters seek justice? Former US vice president Dick Cheney’s and his daughter Liz Cheney’s book Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America is one of the best sellers of all time on the topic of terrorism. Yet, did the use of terror on September 11, 2001, in the United States change the way the media constructs terrorist acts? Ben-Yehuda (2006) suggests that terror is a double-edged sword. Terrorism can refer to the violent means and intimidation used by a dominating group such as the state against those under its control, or it can refer to countermeasures used to react to state-initiated terror. This research raises important questions, such as, Are there significant differences among the Irish Republican Army, ISIS, and al-Qaeda that drive the media to depict those groups differently? Was the Abu Ghraib debacle of 2003 an example of an effective use of rhetoric by the US news media to portray the Iraqi prisoners being “abused” rather than “tortured”? How do terrorist groups use the media to disseminate the message that they are on the side of moral righteousness? How do citizens, the state and the

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international community reinterpret acts of terrorism? Now, let’s consider even more complex research as we try to address such questions. We will focus upon the politics of religion, the nature of religious violence, and ostensible terrorism. In Theocratic Democracy, Ben-Yehuda (2010) presents a study of dissident religious subcultures, focusing on Israel’s growing communities of ultraOrthodox Jews. The state of Israel was established in 1948 as a Jewish democracy, without a legal separation between religion and the state. Yet, serious tension exists between secular Jews and the fundamentalist Haredi community. What is the nature of this cultural conflict and how is it managed? Ben-Yehuda analyzes Israel’s ultraorthodox communities including their authoritarianism, deviant lifestyles, riotous violence, and political influence. He examines the secular and Haredi press to expose what some selfrighteous citizens take as their duty in the name of the Almighty, which is strikingly similar to the actions of the hate group known as the Westboro Baptist Church in the United States. He cogently presents the Haredi contempt with Israel’s laws as they follow their own code, being secretive as they cover up their crimes and protect their own members. Ben-Yehuda examines more than fifty years of media-reported unconventional and defiant behavior by members of the Haredi community. This behavior has increased over the years, but its most salient feature is violence. The violence is not random or precipitated by sudden emotional rage, but planned and aimed to achieve political goals. Ben-Yehuda examines verbal and nonverbal violence in the forms of curses, intimidation, threats, arson, stone-throwing, beatings, mass violations, as Haredi activists try to push Israel toward their version of a more theocratic society. Driven by a theological notion that all Jews are responsible and accountable to the Almighty, these activists (or protesters or terrorists) believe that the sins of the few are paid for by the majority. They believe that without the guidance of the Almighty, Israelis face

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the risk of transcendental penalties. In this context, everyday life in Israel if full of chronic negotiations, tensions, and accommodations; it is becoming an unstable structure. When viewed as Haredi terrorists with violent means, the secular society controls and suppresses the intimidation and numerous forms of violence, especially arson, leading to the social construction of the deviant or the “Other.” The tension of religious-secular coexistence is now managed by a combination of police control and negotiation, but the orthodox population and its influence continues to grow. Ben-Yehuda’s analysis explicates how Israel’s religious zealots dominate, fall, accommodate, or settle into perpetual conflict with secular society. The clash of tradition and modernity, whether inside or outside Israel, is critical to understanding the impact of the past on the present. Theocratic Democracy charts significant and enduring patterns of ultraorthodox religious violence in Israel. Ben-Yehuda thereby opens the door to a broad cultural and organizational analysis of religion in supposedly secular societies, even as he shows that the mainstream press constructs a religious minority. Why is this situation often presented as being terrorism? Advertising their cause is a crucial aspect for a group intent on using terrorism. Weiss and Hassan (2015, 219) examine how militants of the Islamic State organization, ISIS, have effectively used social media to increase its popularity and goals. Accordingly, ISIS has been capable of recruiting liaisons and affiliates not only from Iraq and Syria, but also from Libya, Yemen, Egypt, the United States, and Nigeria. Yards of newspaper copy and scores of pixels have been devoted to trying to chronicle and comprehend the group. The organization’s use of social media, its fueling of sectarian hatred and its combination of ultra-violence with civil governance provide some insights into its history and metastasis, and its modus operandi. Accordingly, Weiss and Hassan (2015, 119) portray ISIS not only as a terrorist organization but also as “a slick propaganda machine effective at

disseminating its message,” “a mafia adept at exploiting decades-old transnational gray markets for oil and arms trafficking,” a “conventional military that mobilizes and deploys foot soldiers” with professional acumen, and a “sophisticated intelligencegathering apparatus that infiltrates rival organizations and silently recruits within their ranks before taking them over.” They further note that many reluctant supporters regard the Islamic State as the only option for Sunni Muslims. In the 2000s, the Sunni’s lost control of Iraq to the Shia Muslims, suffered nationwide atrocities, which many equate to genocide in Syria such as beheadings, mass executions, the enslavement of women and children and the destruction of cultural antiques. Thus, the Islamic State justifies its use of terrorism as a necessary tool in the struggle against the Shia domination. The Islamic State exploits this sense of sectarian grievance by fanning the flames of civil war and inciting Shia militias to violence, proving the repressiveness that the Sunnis have endured. For example, the sectarianism of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki (a polarizing figure who increasingly moved to disenfranchise Sunnis and purge their prominent leaders from the government) served to push more Sunnis into embracing the Islamic State. The interplay among social media, traditional forms of news media, and the radicalized groups and states involved provide evidence of the importance of rhetoric and polemics in defining who and what constitutes the real or more threatening use of terrorism. Adding another layer of complexity, Stern and Berger (2015) offer recommendations on how the West should deal with the Islamic State: focus on containment and constriction rather than overwhelming military force, and exert more effective control of the digital battleground. They arrive at this conclusion by comparing ISIS and al-Qaeda, describing the latter group as an exclusive vanguard movement, a cabal that saw itself as the elite intellectual leaders of a global ideological revolution. Through the 1990s, they note that al-Qaeda developed into a corporation with a payroll and

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benefits department, and operatives who traveled around the world inserting themselves into local conflicts. ISIS, in contrast, is more of a populist start-up operation: “it amassed and empowered a ‘smart mob’ of supporters,” polling “its constituents and making shrewd calls about when to listen and who could safely be ignored.” AlQaeda’s vision for the restoration of the Islamic caliphate, they write, “is framed squarely in the long term” – an idealized future that its leaders did not expect to see realized in their lifetimes. Using “a classic extremist trope” (the defense of one’s own identity group against aggression), the authors assert that Osama bin Laden’s organization “framed its pitch to potential recruits in more relatable terms as doing the right thing” (Stern and Berger 2015, 19). By contrast, the Islamic State dispensed with such intellectual argumentation and instead emphasized horrific violence (which served to stimulate and attract disaffected, angry young men and some women) combined with the promise of a building a Muslim society with all the relevant infrastructure. This vision of ample food, industry, banks, schools, health care, and other social services is a call for noncombatants, men and women alike, to build a country alongside the warriors, with a role for engineers, doctors, filmmakers, administrators, and social control agents. They attempt to inspire a “government of the masses,” rather than a state led by elites claiming to understand what the masses want. The role and action taken by the United States is assessed as fueling the rise of the Islamic State and its antecedents and affiliates (Stern and Berger 2015; Weiss and Hassan 2015). Stern and Berger suggest that the 2003 US invasion of Iraq reinforced jihadi claims about America’s hegemonic designs on the Middle East, providing a recruiting windfall at a time when the terrorists needed it most. They add that “while some politicians wanted to see Iraq during the allied invasion as a roach motel, we see it more like a hornet’s nest with allied bombs and bullets spreading the hornets ever fur-

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ther,” spreading in the region and beyond (Stern and Berger 2015, 119). The occupation and postwar planning would prove equally disastrous. This research reminds us that decisions announced by L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian administrator in Iraq in 2003 – to dissolve the Iraqi Army and to ban Baath Party members from government – resulted in huge numbers of angry, unemployed Iraqis who were easily recruited into a burgeoning insurgency. In fact, Weiss and Hassan (2015, 54) contend that most of the Islamic State’s “top decision makers served in Saddam Hussein’s military or security services,” and in that sense, “‘secular’ Baathism has returned to Iraq under the guise of Islamic fundamentalism.” As these authors attempt to analyze the competition and negotiation among social and political processes by the entities involved in political violence and the use of terrorism in the Middle East, their polemical testaments via traditional and social media become the primary sources for explaining events as they unfold. Clearly future research needs to be combined with new insights into issues such as the definition of terrorism, the nature of the terrorist threat and counterterrorism strategies (Jackson et al. 2011). Explaining the methods we adopt as well as the material we study are vital for a clear understanding of the subject in order to go beyond traditional international-relations approaches in rethinking popular beliefs and assumptions about what is often mistermed as terrorism. Scholars from a social problems perspective have the formidable task of dissociating terrorism from its polemical construct to explicate terrorist action in a more precise and systematic way (Lauderdale 2011). Yet, the diverse manifestations of terrorism continue to inhibit scholars from discovering its logic and coherence from which to derive significant generalizations. Superficial stereotypes and categories still dominate the literature (Lutz and Lutz 2011; Saul 2012). Future research on terrorism as an analytical concept is most helpful when examined with respect to its symbiotic relationship to the state.

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Terrorism and the State Despite claims that terrorism is as old as history, we focus on how the concept was constructed during the Enlightenment and inextricably associated with nation-building. Claiming that terrorism has always existed is not only imprecise, it also denies scholars the ability to analyze it systematically in order to formulate theories and make predictions (Oliverio and Lauderdale 2015). In this context, from the fear of torture to the central processes of civil society, terrorism is invoked to inspire and mobilize the national state and (re)establish the sovereignty of political boundaries (Oliverio 2007). Thus, the construct of terrorism is inextricably related to domination, hierarchy and patriarchy (Scott 1992). The relatively paucity of research on women’s involvement in terrorism, for example, reveals this premise (Pape and Feldman 2010). Therefore, we propose to focus on a systematic political analysis of the definitions of terrorism and the production of hegemony in the art of statecraft. For heuristic reasons we study the strategy of terrorism as integral to war-making and state-making. As an analytical departure point for relating terrorism and the state, we suggest the striking view of the state as outlined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former US Army general, who in 1961 emphasized the power of the military-industrial complex. He was aware of the state’s inappropriate use of power in creating change, and also of the state’s ability to evade the checks and balances of government. The state has become the military-postindustrial complex, frequently operating through multinational corporations that are often beyond the control of moral or legal regulations. Again, the state is conceptualized here as the political apparatus that controls or attempts to control society. State torture, for example, is often employed as a means of social control. Postindustrial, liberal-democratic societies can use state torture because their

monopoly on violence is so sophisticated and efficient that large numbers of people can be wiped out in a matter of minutes. Such states often finance other states or organizations (in which the private sector may be competing) to do the dirty work of terror and torture. Such organizations in the private sector have been able to avoid laws outlined in international or even national charters, and such “private” companies are not fully regulated. Typically they are led by ex-military, former right-wing and left-wing tyrants. There has been a transformation in the nature of torture with the increased use of the privatization of torture. The increased delegation of state responsibilities in Iraq, such as the delegation of the oversight of Abu Ghraib Prison to nonstate actors, led to private contractors who did not have necessary guidelines, supervision, and accountability. These “private” non-state actors performed enhanced functions formerly conducted by the military. The private security firm, Blackwater, for example, was forced out of Iraq after some of its employees killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in 2007. It changed its company name three times in as many years as it continued to conduct business in Iraq. Changing its name was the firm’s way of demonstrating that it had become a new company. Yet, such privatization continues to lead to an increase in human rights abuses (Hamm 2013; Cummins 1994). This development is also referred to as state-sponsored terrorism when states finance organizations or individuals to carry out terror or torture. Was this state-sponsored process also evident in Russia, Israel, Great Britain, Bosnia and Serbia? Asafa Jalata (2005) focuses upon colonial political structures. These are a set of unequal relationships between colonists and the indigenous population, typically dominated by persons claiming superior ethnic descent who have emerged through massive cultural destruction and political violence (cf. Lauderdale 2008). He explicates how global connections and state terrorism have been used as the primary political tools in creating and maintaining the confluence

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of identity, religion, and political power (cf. Werlhof 2008). His research suggests that some states (typically economically underdeveloped ones) now are involved in the process of “ethnic” cleansing, disguised rhetorically as being part of the process of establishing national self-determination and democracy. Such varying definitions and understandings of violence, racialization, and marginalization depend on global connections (Oliverio and Lauderdale 2015; Rodriguez and Lauderdale 2014). As an apt example, US policy makers’ response to Ethiopia has been to maintain political order and enlist it in the fight against global terrorism. Jalata suggests that a basic reason why the United States is ineffective in its fight against global terrorism is that it ignores or condones the terrorism of “friendly” governments. The state increasingly possesses the legitimate means of coercion and violence, and what often changes is the degree to which such means are used. Since the construct of terrorism is not predictable but seen as legitimate, it is often worse for the victims, for their “terror” can potentially go unnoticed for a long time as in the case of Nazi Germany. Particular colonizers, for example, used the sword and religious documents to transform human beings into commodities. Such practices are similar to the observation that those who colonized the United States began with the sword and the Bible (Deloria 1992). Consider the conundrum in the observation that American Indians have been fighting terrorism since 1492 (Lauderdale 2008). Typically, the state has a multitude of resources to carry out terrorism as well as to maintain the covert nature of its actions, at least in terms of the statesponsored rhetoric. Various subnational groups sponsored by the United States and the former Soviet Union were able to undermine, threaten and destroy legitimate governments throughout the world. Prime examples were the Contras in Nicaragua and the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Less known examples include

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the use and encouragement of “vigilantes” such as the Esquadrao da Morte in Brazil, the Anti-Communist Alliance (Triple A) in Argentina, the social-group controls of the Northern Irish Protestants and the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. In important instances, law enforcement has worked clandestinely with such groups (Altheide 2006). Throughout history mercenaries and assassins have been hired by states to carry out their dirty work, which could be defined as terrorism. Saul (2012) notes that international antiterrorism measures existed long before September 11, 2001, in the United States, but have increased markedly since then. He presents the myriad laws that now are deployed to confront transnational and domestic terrorism. He also examines the body of other laws addressing terrorism such as those emerging from the United Nations, specialized international bodies, and regional organizations. His coverage of terrorism reveals the importance of how research is organized, e.g., thematically, organizationally, geographically, and temporally. His research extends beyond the traditional European, British, and American sources to include materials from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East (cf. Toggia, Lauderdale, and Zegeye 2000). The research is couched in evidence for the emerging field of international antiterrorism law. We usually do not learn of the machinations of the state unless there is a revelation in the form of a crisis. Media reports of crises of the state, for example, typically are presented as isolated events. Watergate, Iran-Contragate, the nefarious actions of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in foreign policy matters, and the mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq and Guantánamo are events that reveal crucial cracks in the hegemonic façade of the United States. They are intimately connected to the state and its attempts to dominate by raw power in the pursuit of profit at the expense of justice (cf. Henry and Milovanovic 1996).

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Conclusion and Suggestions for Future Research Treviño (2014) examines critical work on social problems and provides a contemporary, research introduction to the field (cf. Mills 1959). His approach focuses upon the three major themes of intersectionality: (1) the interplay of race, ethnicity, class, and gender; (2) the global scope of many social problems; and (3) why researchers should take an evidence-based approach to studying problems (cf. Rodriguez and Lauderdale 2014; Kelley 1996). Terrorism studies rely on knowledge and theory from different academic disciplines. With increasing evidence discrediting dispositional (motivational, even psychopathological) explanations, which treat terrorists as mentally ill, irrational and fundamentally different than other people, there has been a shift toward social process, group-based explanations. Stephen Vertigans (2011), for example, employs a distinctly sociological approach, which he uses to respond to the major questions, problems and theories surrounding terrorism. His research reveals that only a few people become terrorists despite the material and social conditions identified as root causes of terrorism, and other research usually neglects the role of women in terrorist violence, and problems with economic explanations, which typically are reductionist (Oliverio and Lauderdale 2015). That is, those explanations examining terrorist behavior can be divided into two main camps: the first employs rational choice theory and the second focuses upon social-psychological, emotional reactions. Rather than exploring these two approaches, Vertigans examines the historical legacy of political violence, such as how terrorists use narratives of the past to gain support and justification for violence in the present. He explains how a historical discourse might contribute to contemporary terrorist violence, such as re-presenting the past as a “dark age” (as may be the case with left-wing terrorists) or as a “golden age” (as may be the case with religious or right-wing terrorists).

Vertigans’ research reveals that the selection of targets is influenced by numerous emotional, historical, strategic and expressive factors, particularly framed against a targeted “other.” His research on those who cease terrorist activity explores both the group dynamics and counterterrorism strategies that often contribute to the demise of terrorist groups, and the individual choices to disengage from terrorism. Using Vertigans’ suggestions, we can examine past and present issues involving the United States and its role in the Middle East. Despite President Eisenhower’s warnings about the problems associated with the “military-industrial complex,” and those expressed by the US “founding fathers,” a number of analysts still maintain that occupation of foreign lands is necessary for political control and managing interests. For example, Cheney and Cheney (2015) believe that the United States has weakened its ability to defend itself from terrorism by withdrawing military occupation from Iraq and other areas of the Middle East. The Cheneys suggest that since 1939, the United States has been on a path of asserting itself as the most powerful nation on earth, for the good of all, via its military buildup and strength. The Cheneys accordingly believe that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the 2015 US–Iran nuclear agreement will facilitate the latter’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Yet, they neglect to mention the arsenal that Middle East countries (Iran and Iraq) had acquired covertly through arms deals with the United States. Furthermore, they disclaim that the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime paved the way for turmoil in the region and the rise of the Islamic State organization. Ostensibly Iraq was in “good shape” until US military forces were withdrawn by the Obama administration. Both Stern and Berger (2015) and Weiss and Hassan (2015) also suggest that the US withdrawal of troops and political disengagement from Iraq in 2011 led to more instability for Iraq. Examined as an unintended consequence of Western intervention in the removal of a brutal dictator

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from power, they note that Western powers left Iraq a broken state. They suggest that the West should have had the patience, the will, and the wisdom to build a new inclusive state. Stern and Berger note that King Abdullah II of Jordan maintains that the battle with ISIS will be a “generational fight.” Weiss and Hassan are somewhat more pessimistic concluding that ISIS will be around indefinitely. Yet, history suggests that the most effective ways to weaken the central authority and strength of a state is to spread it all over the world via military forces that require resources and support. Many an empire has seen its decline, from the Roman era to present day, as widespread control has been impossible to maintain when trying to negotiate cultural and physical distances as well as resentments expressed by those who are being occupied (Pape and Feldman 2010). Given that conditions of the Middle East were created in part by US military intervention, would the imposition of a standing army further exacerbate terrorism? Researchers and leaders (in the past and today) disagree on how to negotiate the role of the United States and how it can best protect its formidable political and economic preeminence, control the use of terrorism, and be a force for good. Social scientists are realizing that when levels of analysis and degrees of abstraction are employed properly, “personal troubles” become “public issues,” and transformed into a critical study of social problems (Mills 1959; Lauderdale, McLaughlin, and Oliveiro 1990). A comparative, critical social problems approach to terrorism can provide a window into the souls of all people struggling for collective-determination, equality and freedom.

Glossary Counterterrorism Violence used to suppress terrorism and/or political violence. Deviance Departure from social norms; traditionally defined by sociologists and psy-

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chologists as the violation or transgression of norms and expectations. Government A system of checks and balances by which a state or community is controlled and that allows each national branch to amend or veto acts of another branch. Power The ability or capacity to exercise social control; often conceived as the ability to define, categorize, or label; operates macroscopically as structural or systemic control and the preservation of interests and statuses over existing resistance or change relations. The state The military-postindustrial complex, frequently operating through multinational corporations that often are beyond the control of moral or legal regulations. State-sponsored terrorism States that finance other governments, organizations or individuals to carry out terror or torture. Terrorism A social problem that involves an analysis of its social construction that is relative to time, place and historical contexts. It is defined as either an act of defiance, deviance, social control, political violence, and/or coercion at a particular time and place.

References Aaronson, Trevor. 2013. The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. New York: Ig. Altheide, David. 2006. Terrorism and the Politics of Fear. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Baehr, Peter. 2002. Identifying the unprecedented: Hannah Arendt, total totalitarianism and the critique of sociology. American Sociological Review 67:804–31. Bauman, Zygmunt, 2010. Liquid Times. London: Polity Press. Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. 1985. Deviance and Moral Boundaries: Witchcraft, the Occult, Deviance Sciences and Scientists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006. Contextualizing deviance within social change and stability, morality, and power. Sociological Spectrum 26:559–80.

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Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. 2010. Theocratic Democracy: The Social Construction of Religious and Secular. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bergesen, Albert, and Yi Han. 2005. New directions for terrorism research. In Terrorism: A New Testament, edited by Annamarie Oliverio and Pat Lauderdale, 163–86. Whitby, ON: de Sitter. Burke, Edmund. 1790. Reflections on the revolution in France. London: J. Dodsley. Cheney, Dick, and Liz Cheney. 2015. Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America. New York: Threshold Editions. Chew, Sing, and Pat Lauderdale. 2010. Theory and Methodology of World Development: The Writings of Andre Gunder Frank. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cummins, Eric. 1994. The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. della Porta, Donatella. 1995. Social Movements, Political Violence and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. Clandestine Political Violence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1992. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Erikson, Kai T. 2004. Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance, Classic Edition. New York: Allyn & Bacon. Ferrell, Jeff. 2002. Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gould, Roger V. 2002. The origins of status hierarchies: A formal theory and empirical a test. American Journal of Sociology 107:1143– 78. Hamm, Mark. 2007. Terrorism as Crime: From Oklahoma City to Al-Qaeda and Beyond. New York: New York University Press. 2013. The Spectacular Few: Prisoner Radicalization and the Evolving Terrorist Threat. New York: New York University Press. Henry, Stuart, and Dragan Milovanovic. 1996. Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism. London: Sage. Hoffman, Bruce. 2006. Inside Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press. Inverarity, James, Pat Lauderdale, and Barry Feld. 1983. Law and Society. Boston: Little, Brown.

Jackson, Richard, Marie Smyth, and Jeroen Gunning. 2011. Terrorism: A Critical Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jalata, Asafa. 2005. State terrorism and globalization. In Terrorism: A New Testament, edited by Annamarie Oliverio and Pat Lauderdale, 96–125. Whitby, ON: de Sitter. Kelley, Robin. 1996. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press. LaFree, Gary, Laura Dugan, and Erin Miller. 2015. Putting Terrorism in Context: Lessons from the Global Terrorism. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Lauderdale, Pat. 2008. Indigenous peoples in the face of globalization. American Behavioral Scientist 51:1836–43. 2010. Political deviance. In The Routledge Handbook of Deviant Behavior, edited by Clifton Bryant, 119–33. London: Routledge. ed. 2011. A Political Analysis of Deviance, third edition. Whitby, ON: de Sitter. Lauderdale, Pat, and Randall Amster. 2008. Power and Deviance. In Violence, Peace and Conflict. 2nd ed., edited by Lester Kurtz, 91– 109. New York: Academic Press. Lauderdale, Pat, Steve McLaughlin, and Annamarie Oliverio. 1990. Levels of analysis, theoretical orientations and degrees of abstraction. The American Sociologist 21:29–40. Law, Randall David. 2015. The Routledge History of Terrorism. London: Abingdon. Lee, Charles. 2009. Suicide bombing as acts of deathly citizenship? A critical doublelayered inquiry. Critical Studies on Terrorism 2:147–63. Lutz, James, and Brenda Lutz. 2011. Terrorism: The Basics. New York: Routledge. McAdam, Doug, and Yang Su. 2002. The political impact of the war at home: Antiwar protests and congressional voting, 1965–1973. American Sociological Review 67:696–721. Mills, C. Wright. 2000. The Sociological Imagination. 40th Anniversary Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oliverio, Annamarie. 1998. The State of Terror. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2007. On being “frank” about terrorism. Journal of Developing Societies 24(1):13–29. Oliverio, Annamarie, and Pat Lauderdale. 2005. Terrorism: A New Testament. Whitby, ON: de Sitter.

the social problem of terrorism 2015. The world system according to Andre Gunder Frank: Hegemony and domination. Journal of World-Systems Research 21(1): 119–29. Nassar, Jamal R. 2010. Globalization and Terrorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Pape, Robert A. 2003. The strategic logic of suicide terrorism. American Political Science Review 97(3):343–61. Pape, Robert A., and James K. Feldman. 2010. Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Terrorism and How to Stop It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pfohl, Stephen. 2009. Images of Deviance and Social Control: A Sociological History. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Primoratz, Igor. 2013. Terrorism: A Philosophical Investigation. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rodriguez, Pedro, and Pat Lauderdale. 2014. Hegemony and Collective Memories: Japanese American Relocation and Imprisonment on American Indian “Land.” In Color behind Bars: Racism in the U.S. Prison System, edited by Scott Bowman, 119–133. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press. Saul, Ben. 2012. Terrorism. Oxford: Hart. Scott, James. 1992. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Stern, Jessica, and J.M. Berger. 2015. Isis: The State of Terror. New York: HarperCollins. Tilly, Charles. 2005. Terror as Strategy and Relational Process. In Terrorism: A New Testament, edited by Annamarie Oliverio and Pat Lauderdale, 12–38. Whitby, ON: de Sitter. Toggia, Pietro, Pat Lauderdale, and Abebe Zegeye. 2000. Crisis and Terror in the Horn of Africa: Autopsy of Democracy, Human Rights and Freedom. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Treviño, Javier A. 2014. Investigating Social Problems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Vertigans, Stephen. 2011. The Sociology of Terrorism: People, Places and Processes. New York: Routledge. von Werlhof, Claudia. 2008. The globalization of neoliberalism, its consequences and some of its basic alternatives. Capitalism Nature Socialism 3:94–117. Weiss, Michael, and Hassan Hassan. 2015. Isis: Inside the Army of Terror. Los Angeles, CA: Regan Arts. Zelditch, Morris. 2001. Processes of legitimating: Recent developments and new directions. Social Psychology Quarterly 64(1): 4–17. Zulaika, Joseph. 2010. Terrorism: The Self-fulfilling Prophecy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 11

Genocide Christopher Powell

Abstract Genocide is a political concept designed to guarantee cultural groups a right to life comparable to that guaranteed to individuals by human rights. Its meaning is essentially contested and ranges from restricted definitions which focus on deliberate physical extermination of ethnic or racial groups to broader definitions which include systematic cultural destruction and/or the annihilation of political and social groups. Genocide can be found throughout human history, and it has been practiced by groups of all cultural and ideological orientations. In the modern era, genocide has been implemented by socialist, fascist, and liberal governments and by Western and non-Western states. Contemporary theories of genocide focus on the interaction of power struggles involving processes of class, gender, culture, and social psychology. Effective prevention will require going beyond armed humanitarian intervention to address the fundamental procedures by which nation-states handle cultural difference.

Introduction Genocide is a political concept. Like human rights (Foucault 2000; Hunt 2007; Powell 2015) it was invented to change the balance of power between states and subjects. It was also intended to limit the exercise of state power and thereby affirm certain freedoms and securities. Conversely, the practice of genocide always has a political function. The ideological fervor of some who commit genocide can distract observers from the practical functions that genocide can have for its perpetrators.

Leo Kuper’s famous expression, “the word is new, the crime ancient” (Kuper 1981, 11) is misleading. An act is only criminal when it has been defined and instituted as such by a social authority (Durkheim 1982, 2002; Powell 2011b). Even if we allow that the practice of genocide is ancient, it has only been established as a crime since 1948, with the passage of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Genocide’s codification in international law and its circulation in political discourse is the result of an enormous campaign of 173

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moral entrepreneurship (Becker 1963, 147ff.) by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. This campaign responded to the coupling of state sovereignty with national identity. The invention of the concept of genocide was not the discovery of a universal moral truth; rather, it was a political maneuver. The prohibition of genocide was, and remains, a form of social struggle in which subjects without control over military and police force have endeavored to limit the choices of those who control such forces. This agonic quality reveals key features of genocide as a social problem: the intense controversies over its precise definition, the enormous difficulty in addressing it, and the potentially radical implications of solving it.

Origins Those who followed global politics at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries witnessed the zenith of world empires like those of Britain and France (Hobsbawm 1987). They also saw the explosion of a new mode of state power, ethnic nationalism (Anderson 1991). The ubiquity of ethnic nationalism today belies its relative novelty. Before this time, European elites had governed without claiming a cultural affinity with their subjects (Foucault 2003). Indeed, the word “culture” once designated, not the folkways which rulers claimed to share with those they ruled, but the cultivation that made aristocrats superior to and separate from the common folk (Williams 1976, 77). The Ottoman Empire, for example, governed a polyglot of peoples of different locales, folkways, faiths, and languages without requiring their conversion to Islam or the adoption of the Turkish language (Dadrian 1997). From 1453 to 1913 the Empire allowed religious freedom, and for most of that time benefited politically by doing so. But over the course of the nineteenth century, nationalist rebellions of Serbs, Greeks, and other ethnic minorities succeeded in calving off the Ottoman Empire’s outer holdings and compromising

the sovereignty of what remained. The massacres of Aegean Greeks in 1914 paved the way for genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian Greeks between 1915 and 1922 (Jones 2011, 154–66). These atrocities succeeded in bolstering the failing Turkish state (Powell 2011a, 37). Both nationalist separatism and the genocidal response to it tied state sovereignty to ethnic identity in a way that intensified both. Among those who noticed this connection was an idealistic young Pole, Raphael Lemkin, who devoted his life to institutionalizing a right to life for ethnic collectivities. Lemkin first attempted this in a 1933 proposal to the League of Nations’s International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law in Madrid. The proposal featured two new crimes: “barbarity,” defined as “action against the life, bodily integrity, liberty, dignity, or economic existence” of a person, that is taken “out of hatred towards a racial, religious, or social collectivity, or with a view to the extermination thereof,” and “vandalism,” defined as destruction of cultural or artistic works for the same reason (Lemkin 1947, 146). Lemkin acknowledged the Armenian holocaust and the antiSemitic pogroms as the direct inspiration for his proposal (Lemkin and Frieze 2013). The proposal was not adopted and Lemkin continued his work. After being wounded in the Polish Defensive War of 1939, Lemkin escaped to the United States, joined the law faculty at Duke University in 1941, and in 1944 published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Chapter 9 of which codified a new concept: genocide. Lemkin’s first published definition of genocide deserves being quoted at length: By “genocide” we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group [ . . . ] Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim

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of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. (Lemkin 1944, 79)

It is significant that Lemkin’s formulation of the concept combined two factors which had been treated separately in his 1933 League of Nations proposal: physical and cultural destruction of a group. This is not inadvertent. Lemkin discusses eight “fields” in which genocide is carried out: political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious, and moral (Lemkin 1944, 82–90). He treats these as different aspects of genocide rather than as different types of genocide. This multidimensional conception of genocide carries forward into Lemkin’s unpublished enclopedia study of genoicde. When discussing the destruction of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, for example, Lemkin distinguishes among three general forms of destruction: physical, biological (i.e., affecting reproduction), and cultural. This emphasis on cultural and physical destruction suggests that Lemkin conceptualized collectivities in terms borrowed from the functionalist tradition in social theory (Spencer 1971; Durkheim 1982; Parsons 1951). That is, he conceived of nations as having an organic life consisting not only of the physical lives and reproduction of their members, but of the distinctive social institutions and cultural practices that give them a common identity. This idea is alluded to in his explanation of the stakes of genocide: [N]ations are essential elements of the world community. The world represents only so much culture and intellectual vigor as are created by its component national groups [ . . . ] The destruction of a nation,

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therefore, results in the loss of its future contributions to the world. Moreover, such a destruction offends our feelings of morality and justice in much the same way as does the criminal killing of a human being: the crime in the one case as in the other is murder, though on a vastly greater scale. (Lemkin 1944, 91)

It is not clear whether Lemkin meant that cultural destruction alone could constitute genocide. Rather, his formulation implies that physical and cultural destruction go together in genocide, although the balance between the two may vary from one case to another. This attention to the cultural dimensions of genocide is almost entirely ignored, however, in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted in 1948 by the UN General Assembly after vigorous campaigning by Lemkin. Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (United Nations 1997)

This definition was the outcome of vigorous debate. For instance, political collectivities “were actually included within the enumaration [of designated groups] until an eleventh-hour compromise elimiated the reference” (Schabas 2009, 140). Regardless, the Convention expressed many of the elements of genocide that were important to Lemkin. Crucially, genocide was defined as a crime “whether committed in time of

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peace or in time of war,” and the responsibility for prevention and punishment fell on all signatories to the Convention. The Convention has provoked substantial controversy among scholars, but for better and for worse it is the canonical definition of the crime of genocide in international law.

Applications Outside of international law, there have been various attempts to both broaden and restrict the meaning of genocide. The first of these include attempts to diagnose genocide on the basis of widespread and severe repression of a group or of acts deemed morally objectionable. One example involves the claims made by Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and other civil rights activists that African Americans are victims of a genocide instituted by white Americans (Paino 2009, 54). This argument was rejected by the sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz (2002, 167) but continues to find advocates today (James 2009). More tenuous are claims that Canada’s treatment of its francophone population amounts to a cultural genocide (Anonymous 2010), or that legalized abortion is “genocide of the unborn” (Guenther 2012). However untenable these claims may be, they are not surprising given the expansionist tendency of all moral campaigns. Successful projects of moral entrepreneurship encourage wouldbe entrepreneurs to experiment with new applications of a concept at the margins of its previously accepted conceptualization. Promoting the expanded use of a concept takes work, but so too does restricting its use to prevent dilution of its meaning. Conversely some scholars have argued that the United Nations Genocide Convention is too broad, and have attempted to restrict its application to only the Nazi genocide of the Jews (Katz 2001; Fackenheim 1977). These attempts are extreme examples of a broader movement to assert the incomparable uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust,1 implying that treating it as part of a wider category of similar events explicable in terms of banal political motivations

is sacrilegious and anti-Semitic (Bauer 1978; Dawidowicz 1981, 11, 14; Lipstadt 1993, 213; Marrus 1987, 24). In some instances this position is explicitly tied to support for Israel as a Jewish state (Fackenheim 1977, 212; Alexander 1980, 1994) and also to an uncritical pro-Americanism (Dawidowicz 1981, 17). These arguments about the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust, or Shoah, have provoked equally polemical accusations that their proponents are deniers of the genocide of Indigenous peoples (Churchill 1998) and are complicit in a “holocaust industry” that serves the State of Israel (Finkelstein 2000). The question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust has concerned scholars greatly (Rosenbaum 2001), and influences some genocide scholarship that locates the causes of the Holocaust in qualities peculiar to German culture (Goldhagen 1997). Ultimately, however, a strong uniqueness thesis impedes the project of comparative genocide studies. Moderate genocide scholars have broadened the concept in four general ways. The first of these is a willingness to explore how Western liberal demoracies have been culpable of genocide through, for instance, support for genocidal regimes in Guatemala and Indonesia (Jones 2004b). Older genocide scholarship tended to ignore this culpability, selectively appropriating Hannah Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism (Arendt 2001) to imply that all genocides are the product of totalitarian Fascist or Communist governments. Late twentieth-century scholarship explained genocide as a product of illiberal ideologies (Rummel 1994), utopian revolutionary movements (Melson 1992), or societal breakdown (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Fein 1993). Rummel, for instance, argued, tautologically, that democratically enfranchised citizens cannot be victims of state-sponsored extermination. More recent scholarship, however, has explored the culpability of liberaldemocratic governments for mass killings of civilians outside their own borders, either directly, as in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Frey 2004), or through proxies, as in the anticommunist campaigns in Central America (Beristain 1998; Grandin 2009; LaFeber 1993) and

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Indonesia (Dwyer and Santikarma 2003). Coupled with this broadened empirical focus has been a theoretical shift from functionalism to conflict theory – that is, from explaining genocide as the product of genocidal values or ideologies to explaining it as a product of power struggles (see, e.g., Bloxham 2007; Feierstein 2014; Kiernan 2007; Levene 2005a, 2005b; Mamdani 2001; Mann 2005; Marchak 2003; Powell 2011a; Shaw 2007; Straus 2006). All governments, regardless of their ideological orientation, are engaged in internal and external power struggles. Attending to these power struggles explains why governments sometimes violate the principles to which they are nominally committed. Second, scholars have included social and political groups as potential victims of genocide. The most conspicuous example of this is the Cambodian genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979. Victims of the state violence were targeted, in principle at least, on ideological grounds rather than ethnicity, and the ultimate goal was class revolution. Political scientists Harff and Gurr have proposed the concept of “politicide” to refer to forms of state violence that “result in the deaths of a substantial portion of a group” where the group in question is defined by ideology or by opposition to the regime (Harff and Gurr 1988, 360). This term has been commonly applied to Khmer Rouge atrocities as well as to the slaughter of communists in Indonesia and Guatemala, and to the treatment of dissidents in the Soviet Union under Stalin (Jones 2011, 195–99). A third broadening of the genocide concept occurs when examining genocide under conditions of colonialism, including the colonization of the Americas and Oceania (Barta 1987; Moses 2000; Moses and Stone 2008; Stannard 1992; Woolford 2009; Woolford, Benvenuto, and Hinton 2014; Wright 1992). Genocide stretches as far back as colonization itself. Christopher Columbus and his followers, for example, inflicted rape, torture, massacre, and enslavement on the Taino people of Hispaniola. This violence, in combination with the introduction of European diseases, produced the

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virtual annihilation of the island’s population, such that only 60,000 people survived from a population of 3 million, after fourteen years of Columbus’s depradations (de Las Casas 1992). These cases, like the cases of massacre, forced marches, and internment committed by the United States during its Indian Wars (Churchill 1998; Thornton 1987) debunk the founding myths of settler societies that portray colonization as benign discovery and settlement rather than as invasion and dispossession. In addition, studies of colonial genocide have involved a recuperation of the cultural dimensions of Lemkin’s original formulation into scholars’ use of genocide. Although physical extermination of Indigenous peoples has become less common than in the days of Spanish and Portuguese conquest, Indigenous peoples still struggle against social policies aimed at eliminating their existence as distinct social groups. Such policies include the Indian Residential Schools, the privatization of collective property, and the continued theft of land and resources (Bodley 2015; Gibbon and Houston 2010; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a, 1– 21). Scholars have argued that recuperating the cultural dimensions of genocide, largely omitted from the United Nations Genocide Convention, restores Lemkin’s original vision and does justice to the distinctive experiences of Indigenous peoples under colonization (Powell 2007). A fourth broadening of the notion of genocide concerns the inclusion of structural violence among the means by which genocide may be committed (Davis 2001; Leech 2012). Structural violence refers to the suffering and harm inflicted on people by structures and institutions which prevent people from meeting their basic needs (Galtung 1969). Examples include institutionalized racism, sexism, and other forms of social exclusion based on ascriptive status. It also involves the creation of poverty through systemic inequities in the capitalist economy. Structural violence can contribute to genocide through the violent destruction of the social institutions which a group needs to survive. It may also be an important motivation for genocide, as denial of

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basic needs changes people’s perceptions and motivations (Jeffremovas 2002; Storey 2012). Several variations on the notion of genocide have been coined to address phenomena closely related to it. These include ethnocide, sociocide, and gendercide. Ethnocide refers to the deliberate destruction of a group’s culture (Jaulin 1970; Schabas 2009, 220). Sociocide refers to the eradication of social institutions with the aim of destroying a society’s capacity to reproduce itself (Doubt 2006; Galtung 2012; Portis 2011). Both of these phenomena can be treated as alternatives to, or as expressing particular aspects of, genocide. Gendercide is the systematic killing of members of a particular sex (Carpenter 2004; Jones 2004a; Warren 1985), including both gynocide and androcide (and, by logical extension, the selective killing of transgender or intersex persons). Gendercide may include non-genocidal practices, such as female infanticide, and may also address the gendered dimension of genocide, such as the different forms of violence inflicted on men and women during genocides.

Cases It is difficult to compile a comprehensive index of genocide cases. As the accepted definition of genocide broadens and shifts, the number of cases grows, and it is possible, as noted above, that some formerly included cases may be reconsidered. The survey that follows, therefore, is necessarily partial. The cases below are featured partly because of the attention they have attracted from scholars, and partly to give an indication of the breadth and scope of genocide as a global social problem.

Premodern Genocides The founding peoples of the Western cultural tradition – the Israelites, the ancient Greeks, and the Romans – all engaged in genocide. The Old Testament describes

the Israelites as waging extermination campaigns against a number of groups (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990, 61–64).2 Perhaps the first genocide for which reliable evidence exists is the Athenian destruction of Melos in 415 B.C.E (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990, 73; Kiernan 2007, 49). In retribution for Melos’s insistence on neutrality in the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians killed all Melian males capable of bearing arms and enslaved the women and children. To permanently end the political and military power of Carthage after its defeat in the Third Punic War, the Roman army under Scipio Aemilianus destroyed the city in 146 B.C.E by burning it, razing its buildings, and selling all 55,000 of its surviving inhabitants into slavery (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990, 88–92; Kiernan 2007, 51). Struggle for imperial power is one motive for genocide; struggle for ideological control is another. In the thirteenth century c.e., the Roman Catholic Church instigated a military campaign to eliminate the gnostic Christian sect called the Cathars. The Albigensian Crusade lasted twenty years and included the sack of the French city of Béziers in 1209, during which the entire population, some 15,000–20,000 people, were massacred (Barber 2000; Burl 2002). The Crusade was followed by nearly a century of Inquisition in which every surviving practitioner of Catharism was hunted down and executed. Similarly, the great European witch-hunts of the early modern period have attracted attention from genocide scholars (Behringer 2004; Chalk and Jonassohn 1990, 152). Genocide is not unique to the Western tradition. The Mongol empire under Genghis Khan used it as a weapon of intimidation to aid in the expansion of their empire (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990, 36). In the modern period between 1810 and 1828, the Zulu kingdom under Shaka Zulu massacred its enemies to ensure their total destruction (Jones 2011, 7). The Qing Dynasty’s conquest of the Dzungar Khanate in 1755–1757 is estimated to have destroyed 80 percent of the Dzungar population through warfare and disease (Levene 2008,

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188). Oppressed peoples fighting against colonization have also used genocide as a political weapon (Robins and Jones 2009). For example, the first postcolonial government of Haiti, under Jean-Jacques Dessalines, massacred the entire white population of the country in 1840 (Jones 2009). The repeated use of genocide throughout history suggests that its causes lie less in cultural or ethical beliefs than its pragmatic utility in violent struggles for political power.

Modern Colonial Genocides Historian David Stannard estimates that the pre-Columbian indigenous population of the Americas numbered about 120 million, and that it was reduced by 100 million through a combination of disease, massacre, enslavement, starvation, and exposure (Stannard 1992; see also Galeano 1997). Although cases of deliberate biological warfare appear to be few, the effect of accidentally introduced diseases were magnified by the violent practices of the colonizers. Stannard calls this the worst demographic disaster in the history of the human species. It was also a major ethnographic disaster. Prior to colonization, the Americas were inhabited by hundreds of distinct societies boasting a rich diversity of languages, spiritual practices, political institutions, modes of economic production, forms of kinship, sexuality, family life, and artistic accomplishments (Stannard 1992; see also Davis, Harrison, and Howell 2008). These included nomadic forager peoples capable of surviving extreme environments, settled peoples practicing agriculture and aquaculture, and the large civilizations of the Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs. All of these societies were damaged, and some annihilated, through European colonization. The nature of this extermination process depended on the motives of the colonizers. The mercantile economy of Europe relied on forced labor to the point of death (Galeano 1997). Massacre, military conquest, and forced relocation cleared

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land for plantations and for settlement (Stannard 1992; Ryan 1996), as did the mass slaughter of buffalo that caused imposed starvation (Daschuk 2013). Legislation and licensing policies kept Indigenous adults from competing with settlers in resource extraction industries such as commercial fishing (Lutz 2008) while residential schools and restrictions on Indigenous cultural practices assimilated the children into the lower classes of the settler economy (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a). Collectively held Indigenous lands and their resources were appropriated by governments and private business (Davis and Zannis 1973). Massacre during times of civil war, as in the cases of Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s, terrorized and traumatized a population suspected of opposing the incumbent regimes (Beristain 1998). Many of these genocides continue, although their intensity is muted and resistance is now possible. The genocide of colonized peoples is not confined to the Americas. Australian and Tasmanian Aborigines, devastated by European diseases, endured further tribulations at the hands of settlers seeking to appropriate their lands, including child removal practices (Commonwealth of Australia 1997) and denial of their very existence (Ryan 1996). One instrument of genocide that has drawn attention is the residential school. In Canada, Indian Residential Schools founded by Christian churches in the 1800s were funded by the federal government into the 1990s (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a, 3). Over time, their explicit purpose became that of severing all connections between Indigenous children and their parents and communities in order to erase all vestiges of their traditional cultures and to resocialize them as members of the settler society (Milloy 1999; Moore, Miller, and Lerchs 1978; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a). Many Indigenous children were subjected to emotional, physical, and even sexual abuse; some died from

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inadequate food, sanitation, and shelter, or workplace accidents, or from trying to run away. All told, at least 150,000 children passed through these schools (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a, 3). Many students were deeply traumatized, suffering depression, substance addiction, suicidal feelings, and other pathologies, and many of their children have suffered intergenerational trauma. The Canadian government has apologized for the abuses of the schools but not for their genocidal aims (Harper 2008). Similar schools operated in the United States (Churchill 1998) and in Australia (van Krieken 2004). In Canada at least, child removal extended beyond the Indian Residential School System and included the Sixties Scoop, from the 1960s until the late 1980s, in which Indigenous children were deliberately adopted out to nonIndigenous families. More recently, rates of child removal by child welfare caseworkers in Indigenous communities have been disproportionately high owing to the underfunding of social services in those communities (Bennett, Blackstock, and De La Ronde 2005; Blackstock, Trocme, and Bennet 2004; Johnson 1983; Powell and Peristerakis 2014, 82–83; Trocme, Knocke, and Blackstock 2004; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a, 186). The genocidal effects of European relations with Africa remain an area requiring further study. The Atlantic slave trade relocated some 12 million Africans to the Americas and claimed the lives of millions more (Lovejoy 1989). Some scholars have argued against classifying it as genocide since the intent of the perpetrators was to exploit Africans for their labor, not exterminate them (Drescher 2009). However, a closer look at the destruction of the institutions of the cultural groups victimized by the slave trade may prompt a revision of this view. Because the aim of the colonization of Africa was to exploit the local population as a supply of cheap labor rather than to clear the land for settlement, it is not usually classified as genocide, despite its enormously destructive effects (of which,

see, e.g., Rodney 1981). Two cases stand out. In the territory of the Congo, controlled by Leopold II of Belgium from 1884 to 1908, the violence used to force people into the rubber trade was so intense that it caused millions of deaths and cleared entire regions of their inhabitants (Hochschild 1999). Between 1904 and 1907, an estimated 80 percent of the Herero population and 50 percent of the Nama population were killed in a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign led by German General Lothar von Trotha (Bridgman and Worley 2009; Madley 2004). Whole populations were driven into the desert where they died en masse of thirst and exposure. Finally, historian Mike Davis has argued for treating the megafamines in British India of 1876–1879 and 1896–1902, which claimed tens of millions of lives, as “the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet” (Davis 2001, 22). Davis argues that the famines resulted from colonial attempts aimed at incorporating Indian agriculture into the capitalist economy, and that the starvation deaths could have been prevented by food relief which the colonial authorities refused to provide. Similar arguments have been made about the 1845–1852 famine in Ireland under British colonial rule (Kinealy 2002; McVeigh and Rolston 2009). These claims remain controversial.

Imperialism, Nationalism, and Genocide The cases in this section, which are well known and widely recognized as genocide, are situated in their broader context. The deliberate extermination of a well-defined ethnic or religious group by a state within its boundaries or imperial possessions, is the most familiar and uncontroversial type of genocide. However, such genocides become more comprehensible when compared to colonial genocides and to genocides where the main form of destruction is sociocultural rather than physical. As discussed above, the Ottoman genocides of Armenians, Assyrians, and

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Pontian Greeks occurred in the context of the Empire’s loss of territory to nationalist secessions and the repeated violation of its sovereignty by foreign powers. These genocides transformed the cosmopolitan and multicultural Ottoman Empire into the nationalist state of Turkey (Melson 1992, 170; Bloxham 2007; Dadrian 1997). The Armenian genocide began in 1915 with the execution of some 250 community leaders throughout the country (a type of act called “eliticide”), followed by the slaughter of approximately 200,000 Armenian men who had been conscripted into the Ottoman Army. Most of the remaining Armenians were then forced to march, through harsh mountain and desert terrain, to points at the Empire’s borders. Along the way, many died from hunger, exposure, and from officially sanctioned massacres committed by Kurdish tribespeople. Between 800,000 and 1,500,000 Armenians died, and the Armenian cultural presence in Turkey was reduced to a small vestige. One notable feature of this genocide is that the Turkish government vigorously denies its occurrence, insisting that the deaths were far fewer and were responses to Armenian treachery (Dadrian 1999; Lauer 2015). Ottoman forces also engaged in extermination campaigns against Assyrians during the First World War, slaughtering 7,000 to 8,000 of them, and killing approximately 350,000 Pontian Greeks between 1914 and 1922 (Jones 2011, 161–66). The Soviet Union under Stalin committed a number of atrocities that qualify as genocide and politicide. The most well known of these is the Ukrainian famine or Holodomor of 1932–33, in which several million Ukrainians died of hunger while Russian commissars seized crops, livestock, and seed grain for export and for strategic reserves (Conquest 1987; Hryn 2008). One goal of these actions was to smash Ukrainian nationalism by destroying its base in the class of prosperous independent farmers. Before and during World War II the Stalinist government ordered the deportation and massacre of several populations including Poles, ethnic Germans, Balkars, Chechens,

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and Crimean Tatars (Jones 2011, 202–4). The Stalinist government also attempted to violently and systematically eradicate enemies of the regime. In the Great Purge of 1937– 1938, over one and a half million suspected enemies of the regime were arrested, and at least 680,000 were executed (Werth 1999, 219, 264). Living conditions in the Gulag prison system were so harsh that hundreds of thousands perished. Given that the persecution of ethnic minorities and perceived dissidents was principally motivated by political regime-building, these events raise questions about the relationship between genocide and politicide. Communist regimes outside the Soviet Union have also committed or sponsored genocide. Two striking examples are the Cambodian genocide of 1975–1979 and the Chinese attack on Tibetan Buddhist culture during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The former is sometimes called an “autogenocide” (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990, 407), but it is more precise to say that the victims of Khmer Rouge violence were targeted as real or potential enemies of a regime that lacked political legitimacy. Victims included anyone who was not an ethic Khmer and the death toll reached between 1.7 and 1.9 million people, out of a pregenocide population of just under 8 million (Jones 2011, 293). In Tibet, between 1959 and 1976, the Peoples Republic of China suppressed Tibetan nationalism by systematically dismantling Buddhist culture, destroying monasteries and killing monks throughout the country. Tens of thousands of alleged enemies of the people were executed and hundreds of thousands were sent to forced labor camps (Central Tibetan Administration 2001). Of course, the historical event most strongly associated with the word “genocide” and that launched the moral career of the concept, is the Nazi extermination of European Jews. This event, which claimed 6 million Jewish lives, two-thirds of all Jews in Europe and one-third of all Jews in the world (Dawidowicz 1975, 403), is remarkable in several respects: in the seeming lack of any rational political objective; in its

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ideological connection to centuries of European anti-Semitism; in the cold bureaucratic efficiency with which the genocide was carried out. But putting too great a stress on the uniqueness of the Shoah denies the comparative analysis needed to explain its occurrence. The Shoah is one singularly intense part of a wider history of genocide in the modern world, and situating it in that history gives it an importance and a meaning that it would otherwise lack if treated as a unique event. The Shoah belongs to a wider context in at least three ways. First, it was part of a broader constellation of genocides committed by the Nazi regime and its allies. These included the attempted physical exterminations of Romani people, Communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and persons with certain disabilities (Jones 2011, 263–77). The largest category of victims were Slavs, also viewed as racially inferior by Nazi ideologies and occupants of the territory which Hitler desired for German Lebensraum. German forces slaughtered an estimated 18 million Soviet citizens and 6 million Poles (including 3 million Polish Jews). German forces also murdered some 3.3 million prisoners of war. Second, the Shoah is part of the wider history of European racism, much of which was directed at colonized peoples in the Americas and Africa (Lindqvist 1996). Beliefs which the Nazis held about Jews and other non-Aryans were consistent with assumptions educated Europeans and their descendants in the colonies held about Indigenous peoples and Africans, and massacres of these peoples had been celebrated in the salons of Europe. Hitler was particularly inspired by the genocidal achievements in the United States and saw German colonialism in eastern Europe as similar to the settling of the American West (Kakel 2013). Third, the Shoah drew upon cultural elements and social institutions common to Western modernity. Modern race science provided the justification for genocide, techniques of social engineering provided its end, and bureaucratic management pro-

vided its means (Bauman 1991). Viewed in these terms, the Shoah appears not as a rupture in history, a throwback to some past barbarism, but as a moment of terrible clarity in which the familiar institutions of modernity were cast in a new light.

Postcolonial and Neoimperial Genocides If most genocides in the modern era have some connection to European imperialism and colonialism, this should not be surprising considering how important European imperialism has been to the formation of the modern world (Wallerstein 1983). Even if we define modernity in terms of scientific rationality or secular humanism, it remains the case that these cultural projects have often been spread by colonial conquest and the violent imposition of the colonizers’ culture. The Algerian psychiatrist Franz Fanon (1963) observed that colonialism is an inherently violent process that reaches deep into the psyche of colonized and colonizer, transforming the identity of both. If this is correct, then genocide may be only the most extreme form of colonialism, in which the identity of the colonized subject is not so much transformed as obliterated. And nationalism, for its part, often emerges in reaction to colonial domination. It is difficult to find an example of genocide before 1945 that does not have some connection to imperialism or neoimperialism. Several post–World War II genocides have resulted from the political tensions that arise when a state is created by colonial conquest and then the colonizer is forced to withdraw. Many contemporary African states, for example, were deliberately constituted so that ethnic rivalries would make them politically unstable, thus making it easier for the colonial power to govern (Davidson 1992). In Burundi and Rwanda, for instance, Tutsis were used to govern on behalf of, first, German and then, Belgian colonial authorities (Lemarchand 1994, 2009; Mamdani 2001). Although

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nationalists from the Hutu and Tutsi communities have claimed that their tribal animosity is ancient, this animosity is largely a product of the colonial practice of making Hutu and Tutsi identity into different citizenship categories, with Tutsis having been given power and wealth through government jobs and Hutus being restricted to a subordinate position. After decolonization, the tensions in this arrangement led to antiTutsi persecution and three episodes of mass killing: an anti-Hutu killing by the Tutsidominated armed forces of Burundi in 1972 which claimed between 80,000 and 210,000 lives; the killing of up to 25,000 Tutsis in Burundi in reaction to the 1993 assassination of President Ndadaye; and the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which every Tutsi in the country was systematically targeted for extermination, which claimed between 500,000 and 1,000,000 lives. At the end of Rwandan genocide, the leaders of the massacres avoided capture by fleeing into eastern Zaire with thousands of supporters. Their presence and activity there led to the First and Second Congo Wars which claimed five and a half million lives between 1996 and 2003 (Prunier 2009). Postcolonial political instability is common in many countries: in the Partition of India, where anti-Muslim riots claimed between 200,000 and 500,000 lives in 1947 (Brass 2003); in the 1971 killing of 1 to 3 million Bengalis by Pakistani security forces in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) (Jahan 2012); in the violence against nonArab civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan, ongoing since 2003, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives (Prunier 2011); and, arguably, in the multiple episodes of genocidal violence in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1999 (Cigar 1995; Doubt 2006; Rohde 2012; Scharf and Schabas 2002),3 among other cases. Additionally, there are genocides that occur in connection to neocolonial politics (Nkrumah 1965; Sartre 2006). Whereas colonialism operates by direct occupation and governance of a region, in neocolonialism the foreign power uses economic, diplomatic, and military support to influence

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the internal and foreign policy of a country in ways favorable to its own interests. For instance, in 1965–66 the government of Indonesia conducted a systematic extermination of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), killing an estimated 500,000 persons and incarcerating hundreds of thousands more (Dwyer and Santikarma 2003). These murders were abetted by the United States, which provided lists of high-ranking PKI members (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2008). The United States provided more direct support for anticommunist politicides in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala during the 1970s as part of its Cold War struggle for global hegemony against the Soviet Union (Blum 1998; LaFeber 1993). The United States has also been implicated in genocide by means of structural violence (Edwards 2008; von Sponeck 2006). From 1991 to 2003 the United Nations at the urging of the US applied economic sanctions to Iraq with the aim of containing the regional influence of the Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein; the sanctions inflicted severe damage on the Iraqi economy, and as a result child mortality was in the hundreds of thousands (Ali, Blacker, and Jones 2003).

Understanding the Causes of Genocide Early attempts to explain the causes of genocide focused on the distinctive cultural and ideological attitudes of the genocidaires (Bauman 1991; Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Fein 1993; Goldhagen 1997; Melson 1992). Perhaps the most insightful observation is Helen Fein’s thesis that, for genocide to happen, the potential victims must be positioned outside of what Durkheim called the “universe of obligation,” defined as “the range of people to whom the common conscience extends: the people toward whom rules and obligations are binding, who must be taken into account, and by whom we can be held responsible for our actions” (Fein 1984, 4). Genocide, by

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definition and in practice, is fundamentally concerned with identity-difference (Powell 2011a, 12, 55), with who is Us and who is Them. More recent work, however, has examined the factors that genocides have in common with non-genocidal situations. This research has analyzed how social institutions and practices can change or combine in unusual ways to produce campaigns of group annihilation. With this in mind, we can think of genocide as involving five dimensions that take on particular forms in genocidal situations: power, class, gender, psychology, and culture. Power Whether committed through physical or cultural violence, genocide always involves the exercise of power, it always binds identity and power together in particularly intense ways, and it always results in a reconfiguration of power relations (see, e.g., Bloxham 2007; Feierstein 2014; Kiernan 2007; Levene 2005a, 2005b; Mamdani 2001; Mann 2005; Marchak 2003; Powell 2011a; Shaw 2007; Straus 2006). Not surprisingly, this reconfiguration is often anticipated by genocidaires and forms part of their motivation. Kuper proposed that genocide emerges out of the struggles among different ethnic groups over unequally distributed power and wealth (Kuper 1981). Mann theorizes that ethnic cleansing tends to emerge as a “Plan C” after other strategies for achieving ethnic dominance fail (Mann 2005). In his model, ethnic cleansing is the product of several contingent political processes: the formation of large movements representing two ethnic groups claiming the ancientness of both their identities and their grievances, the initiation of violence by either the weaker or the stronger party, and the subsumption of the state into one or more of the ethnic factions. Marchak relates genocide to the structure of the sovereign state: The state is an organization with a monopoly of the legitimate use of armed force in a given territory and with the mandate to reproduce a system that always

involves relationships of dominance and subordination. States that cannot reproduce the system have a high probability of committing human rights crimes. (Marchak 2003, 131)

Feierstein conceptualizes genocide as a “technology of power” that “not only annihilates people but also destroys and reorganizes social relations” (Feierstein 2014). In this view, even the Nazi genocide of the Jews, seemingly motivated by pure ideology divorced from practical considerations, can be understood as a pragmatic if ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reorganize German identity in ways favorable to imperial expansion. Powell, likewise, treats genocide as a power relation, arguing that it serves to expand, intensify, reconfigure, or defend the sovereignty of the state, and that it occurs wherever the right combination of “interest, impunity, and identity-difference” is present (Powell 2011a).

Class In addition to its political consequences, genocide often involves a substantial redistribution of wealth. Economic motives are clearly important in genocides against Indigenous peoples (Bodley 2015; Stannard 1992), and economic downturn was a contributing factor to the 1994 Rwandan genocide (Jeffremovas 2002; Prunier 1995). Kiernan proposes desire for land as a common motive for genocide (Kiernan 2007; see also Kakel 2013), but other forms of wealth can also be important. Karl Marx theorized class as a social relation, one defined by people’s relation to the means of the production of social wealth, and argued that all political phenomena could be understood as manifestations of class struggles in this sense of the term (Marx and Engels 1976). Sartre (1968) developed this line of thought in an analysis which ascribes modern genocide to the internal conflicts of the global capitalist class. Sartre’s analysis borrows Lenin’s theory of imperialism, in which the formation of global empires is driven by the use of

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state power to make particular territories and populations available for exploitation by capitalists affiliated with one or another state (Lenin 1988).4 Although an exclusive focus on class struggle is too narrow to capture all of the factors in the production of genocide, Sartre’s analysis suggests that economic interests are relevant as genocide always occurs within a system of economic relations. Gender Likewise, genocide always occurs in and through gender relations, specifically patriarchal relations which define gender identities in opposition to each other and which tend to assign males power and privilege over females. The violence of genocide unfolds in highly gendered ways. Some genocides involve the sex-selective killing of women (Warren 1985). In many others it is men, especially “battle-age” men, who are more likely to be killed, while women and feminized men are more likely to be raped (Jones 2004a). But genocide is gendered in more subtle ways as well. It can have non-intentional gendered consequences when a program of violence acts upon an already-gendered social structure: for instance, when an extermination campaign against sociopolitical elites disproportionately affects men (Carpenter 2004), or when sexual violence and efforts to tear apart family life disproportionately affect women (Smith 2005; Green 2007; Suzack et al. 2011), or when the imposition of a colonizers’ cultural norms undermines the social legitimacy of transgendered or two-spirited people (Beaver 1991). Gender identities can be a motive for violence, as when men act violently to fulfill normative expectations of masculinity, or when women are sexually violated as an indirect way of humiliating “their” men (Carpenter 2004). Psychology Power, class, and gender are social factors, arising from the dynamic interactions of large numbers of people. In order to have an

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effect on action, however, social dynamics must engage with individual’s psyches. The psychological literature on genocide analyzes the types of motivations and dispositions at work in individuals who lead, participate in, or support genocides. One of these is narcissism, including both the narcissism of small differences,5 evident in the Nazi anxiety about German Jews who were among the most secular and assimilated Jews in Europe, and narcissistic grandiosity, evident in colonial discourses of the White Man’s Burden (Jones 2011, 384–87; see also de Zavala et al. 2009; Shaw 1998). Other motives involved in genocide include greed (Levene 2005b, 241), fear for one’s physical survival (Waller 2007), projection (Semelin 2009), and shame or humiliation (Elias 1996; Powell 2011a). Situationally evoked psychological pressures include conformism and loyalty to the group (Browning 1992), obedience to established social authorities (Milgram 2009), and the power of an altered social context to redefine the bounds of permissible behavior (Grossman 2009; Zimbardo 2007). Crucially, genocidal violence mobilizes ingroup loyalties and outgroup antipathies which are a product of human evolution (Anderson and Anderson 2013; Waller 2007), but it mobilizes them on a scale that far exceeds, and in circumstances far removed from, the small nomadic bands in which that evolution took place. Culture Although genocide always occurs through the medium of local cultures, there need not be anything intrinsically genocidal about a cultural practice for it to be appropriated in the service of the destruction of a group. The traditional Rwandan practice of uburetwa or collective labor, for instance, was crucial to the carrying out of anti-Tutsi massacres (Hatzfeld 2005; Vansinia 2004). Hinton’s work on Cambodia shows the relationship between a cultural tradition legitimizing disproportionate retribution for past humiliations and Khmer Rouge participation in horrific acts of violence (Hinton 2005). Christian beliefs were crucial to

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legitimating the slaughter and enslavement of Indigenous peoples by Spanish and Portuguese conquerors in the Americas, even if some individual Christians protested against these atrocities (de Las Casas 1992; Stannard 1992). While it is a mistake to explain genocide as solely the product of cultural factors unique to perpetrators, it remains the case that local culture always plays a part in how genocide is carried out.

Beyond Genocide: Justice, Recovery, and Prevention As a lawyer, Raphael Lemkin invested his moral entrepreneurship in reforming international law. Ideally, law negatively sanctions crimes, brings justice to victims, and deters criminal acts. Lemkin’s initial effort at the League of Nations in 1933 was unsuccessful, but it broke a path toward fruitful reform. The United Nations Genocide Convention was established in 1948; international tribunals have been organized to address crimes of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, and in Cambodia; the International Criminal Court, formed in 2002, filed charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for actions taken by the government of Sudan. Even heads of state like Pol Pot in Cambodia, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, and Omar al-Bashir of Sudan have been criminally prosecuted for genocidal acts. In addition, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions have been established in many countries to address severe human rights abuses, which have sometimes included genocide (Beristain 1998; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2012). And some armed humanitarian intervention has been successful in preventing an outbreak of genocide, as was the case in 1975 when a UN-directed task force halted mass killings in East Timor following a vote in favor of independence from Indonesia (Robinson 2010). At the same time, international law and armed humanitarian intervention remain limited ways to address genocide as a social

problem. Armed humanitarian intervention in particular is susceptible to being blocked or hijacked by the geopolitical interests of the United States and other regionally or globally powerful actors (Dallaire and Beardsley 2003; Power 2002). Both armed humanitarian intervention and international criminal proceedings are open to the accusation of being vehicles of neoimperialism, thereby undermining the legitimacy which is crucial to their long-term success (Chomsky 2008; Davidson 2012). Even when criminal proceedings can be instituted, they do not necessarily bring justice or closure for the victims. Rwanda provides a case in point. There, genocide is the object of two criminal justice processes: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the gacaca courts established by the Rwandan government. The ICTR’s process has been lengthy and expensive, and has to date resulted in only ninety-three indictments and sixty-one convictions (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 2015). The gacaca courts, on the other hand, are plagued with procedural difficulties, and are not allowed to address crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (Rettig 2008). The official mandate of these courts is to bring about reconciliation, but for many survivors of the genocide the experience of confronting their persecutors in an adversarial court process can be retraumatizing (Funkeson et al. 2011; Staub 2004; for comparison with South Africa, see Krog 1998). Evidence from Germany (Hebert 2010), Rwanda (Rettig 2008), Latin America (Beristain 1998), and Canada (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015b) indicates that bringing perpetrators to justice or achieving reparations for cultural and structural harms requires a political will which is not always available. Moreover, criminal trials cannot convict all who were complicit in genocide through minor functionary roles or through political support given to the genocidal faction. True reconciliation between survivors and their erstwhile persecutors requires a social

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transformation that lies beyond the power of law courts. Part of this transformation involves recognizing genocidal events as atrocities and memorializing them so as to symbolize restoration of dignity for the victims and atonement by the guilty (see, e.g., Hinton and O’Neill 2009). Perhaps the most successful example of atonement is that of West Germany, symbolized by Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famous kneeling apology for Nazi atrocities during a 1970 visit to Poland and by the billions of deutschmarks paid in reparations to the State of Israel and to the World Jewish Congress (Jones 2011, 504). This recognition only began in earnest during the 1960s, after two decades of willful amnesia. Denial is the typical response of perpetrators in the aftermath of genocide. Jones (2011) lists nine claims typically made by genocide deniers: that hardly anybody died, that it was self-defense, that the violence was mutual, that the deaths weren’t intentional, that there was no central direction, that the victim group was small, that the acts in question do not fall under the terms of the Genocide Convention, that genocide is the sort of thing that “we” would never do, and that “we” were the real victims (Jones 2011, 518–20). To this we could add a tenth claim, put succinctly by Christopher Hitchens in an essay on the extermination of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: “it does happen to be the way that history is made, and to complain about it is as empty as complaint about climatic, geological or tectonic shift” (Hitchens 1992). Memory, whether individual or collective, is never a neutral representation of the past; what is remembered and how it is remembered are always political endeavors. Recognizing past atrocities and making restitution for it involves a willing subordination of self to an Other – and, in the case of genocide, to an Other previously defined as not deserving of existence. Overcoming genocide denial, therefore, requires a long and arduous labor of cultural activism, and entails a deep transformation in the selfimage of the perpetrator group.

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Ultimately, the goal of genocide scholarship is to eradicate genocide. The most prominent efforts at genocide prevention center on developing a reliable early warning system to predict the onset of genocidal violence, and mobilizing armed humanitarian intervention, preferably under United Nations auspices, to halt outbreaks of such violence (Chalk 2010; Marchak 2008; Stanton 2013; Totten 2011; see also Totten 2013). As mentioned above, these efforts are constrained by the geopolitical interests of the sponsoring nations and subject to the accusation of neoimperialism. Military intervention is also ineffective as a response to cultural genocide, especially the longterm “remorseless pressures of destruction” (Barta 1987, 239–40) to which Indigenous peoples are subjected in genocidal settler societies. However, efforts to protect and reaffirm Indigenous peoples suggest the kind of social transformation involved in making genocide an impossible event. The United Nation’s Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples specifically guarantees that “Indigenous peoples have the collective right to live in freedom, peace, and security as distinct peoples and shall not be subjected to any act of genocide or any other act of violence, including forcibly removing children of the group to another group” (United Nations 2007, Article 7.2). It also mentions the importance of lands, territories, and resources as a precondition and element of Indigenous rights, including “the right to participate in decision making in matters which would affect their rights, through representatives chosen by themselves in accordance with their own procedures, as well as to maintain and develop their own indigenous decision-making institutions” and “the right to determine and develop priorities and strategies for the development or use of their lands or territories and other resources” (United Nations 2007, Article 18, Article 32.1). In the same spirit, the 2009 Political Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia affirms the rights of Indigenous peoples to cultural identity and practice, including rights to

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self-determination and territoriality, respect for traditional knowledge, collective ownership of lands and territories and of intellectual property and knowledge, a healthy environment, protection of sacred spaces, inter- and intracultural education, and protection for peoples in danger of extinction. It also guarantees the right “to the practice of their political, juridical and economic systems in accord with their world view” (Plurinational State of Bolivia 2009, Article 30.II.14). These declarations go beyond prohibiting the worst excesses of state violence against helpless subjects. They also involve a radical rethinking of political sovereignty and its relation to national identity. Whereas in the normal exercise of sovereignty, decisions about collective goods, land, and resources are, in principle, legitimated by a single cultural worldview, serious recognition of Indigenous rights entails allowing multiple cultural value systems to operate within the same country. How to do this without merely adding to social conflicts is not obvious. This set of problems is grappled with by theorists of multiculturalism (Taylor et al. 1994) or polyculturalism (Schwarz and West-Pavlov 2007). What these deliberations make clear is that, for the task of abolishing genocide, its criminalization is only a beginning step. Genocide involves a pathologically intense coupling of power and identity. To transform genocidal societies (Barta 1987) into nongenocidal societies entails a relative decoupling of these two aspects of human practice. It is a task that will change not only how states treat their subjects, but how subjects define themselves. Abolishing genocide will change how we relate to each other, and to ourselves; not only what we do, but who we are.

Glossary Cultural genocide The destruction of a group through the deliberate suppression or destruction of the practices and institutions that give the members of

the group their shared common identity, such as religion, arts, family life, and so on. Genocide The destruction of a human group, usually defined in terms of ethnicity or race but also defined in terms of political or social identity. The destruction commonly involves physical extermination but may also include systematic eradication of a group’s cultural practices and social institutions. Identity-difference A dynamic social relation in which individuals or groups achieve an identity through interactions which differentiate them from other individuals or groups. Identity is always defined relative to difference and vice versa. Neocolonialism A relation between two technically sovereign states in which the dominant power uses economic, diplomatic, and military support for a regime to influence the internal and foreign policy of a country in ways favorable to its own interests. Physical genocide The annihilation of a group through measures that cause the deaths of all or most members of the group, including mass murder but also including such measures as the deliberate infliction of starvation, exposure, disease, and so on. Polyculturalism A version of multiculturalism which promotes the equal inclusion of multiple cultures within a single political jurisdiction, but which emphasizes the ways that different cultures change through mutual interactions and exchanges.

Notes 1. Although “Holocaust” is commonly used to refer specifically to the Nazi genocide of Jews, Jews were not the only or even the most numerous victims of Nazi genocide (see below). 2. The facticity of these events is open to question. They, like the atrocities claimed by the Hittites, Medes, Babylonians, and the Assyrians, may have been intentionally exaggerated

genocide to inspire fear in the perpetrators’ enemies (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990, 61). Circumstantial evidence, however, suggests that genocide may have been “relatively common” among the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean in antiquity (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990, 64; see also Kiernan 2007). 3. The latter instance is complicated because in Yugoslavia the Tito regime supported by Soviet imperial power had been committed to ethnic equality. 4. This theory applies even to genocides committed by the USSR and Communist regimes, understood as state monopoly capitalist regimes (Binns 1975) fully integrated into the capitalist world-system (Wallerstein 1983). 5. This term was coined by Sigmund Freud to refer to the tendency towards conflict found between groups who live close to each other and are distinguished by only minor differences (Freud 2002).

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Pa r t I I

PROBLEMS RELATED TO CRIME AND VIOLENCE



CHAPTER 12

The Problem of Crime Walter S. DeKeseredy

Abstract Crime is deemed by many, if not most, people to be one of the most disquieting social problems. However, most people are more familiar with myths about crime rather than about its realities. Furthermore, the general public tends to have a narrow conception of crime, one that is limited to acts of predatory “street crimes,” such as physical assaults and robberies that occur in public places. As well, there is widespread belief that “criminals” are fundamentally different from “noncriminals.” A key objective of this chapter is to challenge such conventional wisdom about crime. Special attention is also devoted to explicating the disagreement within the academic community over what behaviors, conditions (e.g., physical appearance), and people should and should not be labeled criminal.

The Problem of Crime What Friendly and Goldfarb (1968, 3) stated nearly fifty years ago still holds true today: People’s “fascination with news of crime is insatiable. The sensational crimes and their trials . . . engage public interest to a degree matched by little else.” Some evidence supporting this claim is that on any given evening, especially in North America, fictional crime shows are routinely shown on network and cable television. In fact, police dramas more than half fill prime-time North American television and have done so for decades (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 1996; Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2014;

West 1984). In the United States examples of such popular programs that aired during the 2016 television season include Blue Bloods, Hawaii Five-O, and NCIS: New Orleans. Although highly entertaining for thousands of viewers, these and other crime shows have some influence on people’s perceptions and opinions about crime, and about the criminal justice system’s response to it. For many people, fictional and nonfictional television shows, movies, and social media broadcasts constitute the major sources of information about crime and its control (Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2014). For instance, television viewing is the third most time-consuming activity for Americans, and

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the amount of crime programming available on television is today larger than ever. Definitely, fictional and non-fictional crime stories are highly profitable commodities (Surette 2015). Since much of its knowledge about crime and justice comes from the media, the general public has a narrow conception of crime, one that is limited to acts of predatory violence, such as physical assaults and robberies committed by strangers in public places. Further, it is commonly believed that “criminals” are fundamentally different from “non-criminals” (DeKeseredy 2013). For example, criminals are often deemed to be inherently evil, morally deficient, or “sick.” The main objective of this chapter is to challenge the conventional wisdom about crime. Considerable attention is devoted to making explicit the substantial disagreement within academic circles over which behaviors, conditions (e.g., physical appearance), and people should and should not be labeled criminal (DeKeseredy, Ellis, and Alvi 2005).

Defining Crime There is a vast criminological literature on many topics and scores of publications are generated every week. Though studies are conducted daily and new theories are constructed and tested, there is still no consensus on a definition of crime. Basically, definitions are based on three conceptual approaches: the legalistic, the societal reaction/labeling, and the critical. Legalistic Definitions Often referred to as objective or normative definitions (DeKeseredy, Ellis, and Alvi 2005), legalistic definitions of crime were accepted by most sociologists prior to the 1960s (Gibbs 1981), but a sizable number still employ them today. While he wrote over seventy years ago, Paul Tappan (1947) is still the most quoted advocate of the legalistic approach to defining crime. He asserted that “crime is an intentional action in violation of

criminal law . . . committed without defense or justification, and sanctioned by the state as a felony or misdemeanor” (100). This definition encompasses many street crimes that most people strongly disapprove of, such as murder, armed robbery, sexual assault, and automobile theft (Agnew 2011). This is why Hagan (1994) categorizes harms like these as consensus crimes. The basic idea is that people generally agree that a behavior is considered to be bad in and of itself, or mala in se, should be criminalized, and the legislators react by passing a law to prohibit it. Here, the process of enacting legislation is seen as consensus building: an individual or group increasingly acquires allies and confederates until it has enough popular support that the legislature is forced to act. Agnew (2011, 15) identifies the following practical advantages of legalistic definitions of crime: r They are reasonably precise and provide researchers with a ready-made list of crimes to study. r Government agencies, such as the US Department of Justice, collect extensive data on street crimes and fund research on their harms, thus facilitating the work of criminologists. r Many academic and research organizations are organized around the study of street crimes, which assists criminologists’ work through employment, research support, training, and the provision of publication outlets. There are, however, several major problems with legalistic definitions. For example, many behaviors and decisions that are harmful to society are exempt from the purview of criminal law. Generally dealt with by civil or administrative law and are not punishable by criminal penalties such as prison (Barak 2015; Reiman and Leighton 2013), these include corporate crimes like the dumping of toxic waste into fields and streams and the wrongdoings of government agencies (e.g., torturing political prisoners). Actually, there is a large body of data that

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show that harms done by corporate and political elites are much more socially injurious than are most street crimes. While many criminologists assert that what Pearce (1976) coins as “crimes of the powerful” should be criminalized, there are many others who contend that some male prohibita offenses should not be part of criminal law. Edwin Schur (1974, 6) refers to acts such as gambling, prostitution, narcotic use, and abortion as “victimless crimes” that do not involve a clear-cut victim or offender. Instead, drug deals, high-stakes poker games, and sexual relations with sex workers constitute: the exchange between willing partners of strongly desired goods and services. The “offense” in such a situation, then, consists of a consensual transaction – one person gives or sells another person something he or she wants.

Another way of examining the same issue, some criminologists argue, is that these social exchanges are matters of private morality rather than major threats to the conventional social order (Hagan 1985). As such, they should be exempt from criminal prosecution. Further, laws regarding socalled victimless crimes do not result from societal consensus. Rather, they “may have emerged out of conflict, with certain groups using their power to get acts defined as crimes” (Agnew 2011, 20). Those who want victimless crimes excluded from the criminal law warn about the dangers of overcriminalization (Shackelford 2014). In other words, they argue that applying criminal labels to drug use, prostitution, and similar vices creates more social problems. First, it gives a criminal record to the people who engage in these activities. People with criminal records are less likely to succeed in school, gain meaningful employment, or find paths to conventional careers. Worse, their criminalization can create new crimes, or new opportunities for crime. For example, drug laws often result in golden economic opportunities for organized crime groups that can make extraordinary amounts of money and

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gain tremendous influence by taking advantage of the fact that many popular drugs are illegal (Reiman and Leighton 2013). Some criminologists see this process of overcriminalization as amplifying crime because it increases crime (Cohen 1980; DeKeseredy and Schwartz 1996; Ellis 1987). Laws against “victimless crime” create situations in which laws and enforcement create more crime than would exist without the laws and enforcement. All of this occurs in an atmosphere in which already strained criminal justice resources are spread thin. Law enforcement agencies must decide what to make top priorities. No police department has the staff to pay equal attention to all laws. If a large percentage of policing time, energy, money, and personnel is devoted to drug use and other victimless crimes, then these resources cannot be devoted to more serious criminal activities, such as sexual assaults on college campuses, kidnapping, and child abuse. For these and other reasons, some criminologists argue that victimless crimes should be decriminalized. There are criminologists, however, who question whether prostitution, illicit drug use, and drug dealing are truly without victims (DeKeseredy, Ellis, and Alvi 2005). For example, in 2003, Gary Ridgeway, known as the Green River Killer, confessed to having strangled to death ninety Seattlearea women and to having “sex” with their corpses. Ridgeway stated: I picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught. (cited in Sprinkle 2008, 1)

It is beyond this chapter’s purview to review the research on violence against sex workers, but the Sex Workers Outreach Project – Chicago (2012, 1) confirms that “sex workers constitute a particularly vulnerable population in the experience of violence.” The same can be said about drug dealers.

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For example, Elijah Anderson (1999) interviewed a drug dealer who was shot in the stomach in an altercation that took place during “a misunderstood drug deal.” Drug dealing also creates numerous health and safety problems for rural, suburban, and urban communities. Consider that methamphetamine (meth), is now illegally produced throughout the United States. Those working in meth labs use toxic chemicals, such as iodine, cold tablets, and drain cleaner. The toxic manufacturing byproducts are generally dumped by “cooks” on the side of highways or in the woods (Garriott 2011). The production process is also dangerous, with a high risk of explosion. William Garriott (2011, 23) describes the negative consequences of meth use in his ethnographic study of a West Virginia town: Thus everything from a severe burn to psychosis to tooth loss to cardiac arrest can be a symptom of methamphetamine. Meth’s prevalence and potency, the risk it poses to users, their friends, family, and communities, and the “collateral damage” inflicted on legal, medical, and social services, led a Mayo-Clinic report to label meth a “perfect storm” of medical and social complications. (Lineberry and Bostwick 2006)

A woman living in rural Georgia (Brownstein, Mulcahy, and Huessy 2014, 15) personifies some of the health problems caused by meth use: I have a hard time remembering anything. My kidneys are messed up. My liver is messed up. I have really high liver enzymes. I had thyroid trouble since this. Sometimes I feel like I get real paranoid like somebody is trying to talk to me about stuff. I have been up so long that I’ve seen the Grim Reaper standing in the woods. And I have noticed some people that have done it, they see things and stuff. But then when they come back to reality, they still start having those visions and stuff, and they’re real paranoid, like schizophrenic people.

Because a critical mass of people does not regard a lifestyle, behavior, or condition as criminal does not mean that it is not harm-

ful. Moreover, as stated above, there are many harms done to individuals and society that are rarely designated as criminal. Thus, since the 1960s, cases such as corporations creating unsafe working conditions for their employees and being exempt from criminal prosecution led sociologists to seek alternative definitions such as those offered by the societal reaction/labeling approaches. Societal Reaction/Labeling Approaches These approaches, derived from symbolic interactionist theory, contend that “human beings are creative social actors who make the world around them in and through language and social interaction, and the meanings and understandings they attach to both” (Chamberlain 2015, 86). The most widely read and cited societal reaction/labeling conceptualization of crime is offered by Howard S. Becker (1973). Similar to formulations constructed by Erikson (1962), Kituse (1962), Lemert (1951), and Tannenbaum (1938), Becker asserts that no behavior is inherently criminal. Rather, crime is a label attached to a behavior during social interaction between law-breakers and law enforcers. As Becker puts it: [S]ocial groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an “offender.” The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label. (9)

The rationale for Becker’s argument is found in a large body of criminological research showing that crime is normative, yet a great number of offenders are never dealt with by the criminal justice system. One explanation is that many offenses never come to the attention of the public or police. Another account provided by societal reaction/labeling theorists is that

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physical appearance and identities based on social class, race, ethnicity, and sex and gender influence whether or not a person will be arrested, charged, and punished. For example, self-report surveys find that, in general, both working-class and middleclass youth commit the same crimes. However, lower-class youths are much more likely than middle- and upper-class youth to be arrested, charged, and convicted (DeKeseredy, Ellis, and Alvi 2005; Reiman and Leighton 2013). Moreover, the nature of crime and punishment is racialized. Consider that in the United States, blacks and Latinos are overrepresented in every component of the juvenile justice system (Kupchik 2006; Leiber 2002, Rios 2014) and in the adult justice system (Alexander 2012; Reiman and Leighton 2013). And, in the current era characterized by mass fear of terrorist attacks, people who are deemed to be Muslim or Middle Eastern are much more likely to be searched at airports than are those who are perceived to be of European descent (DeKeseredy, Ellis, and Alvi 2005). Related to the fear of terrorism is a moral panic about immigration in the United States and throughout Europe. Stanley Cohen (1980) developed this concept to describe how a condition, episode, person, or group of persons comes to be defined as a threat to society. At that point, the mass media describe the “threat” in detail, although not necessarily accurately, and various newspaper editors and politicians jump on the bandwagon with their own claims to be defending the “moral barricades.” Sociologists, lawyers, psychologists, and other experts quickly join the fray with diagnoses and solutions. Moral panics about immigration are problematic for several reasons. One is that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than natives (Nowrasteh 2015). Stowell et al. (2009) even found that violent crime rates decrease in metropolitan areas that have a large concentration of immigrants. More obvious is the fact, as noted by the popularity of 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, that these moral panics “encourage popular support

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for exclusionary policies” and “shape public views of the targeted group” (Flores 2015, 365). For instance, Santa Ana (2002) found that California politicians’ use of metaphors like “brown tide rising,” “army of invaders,” and “burdens” to describe Latin American immigrants hardened popular perceptions of these immigrants. Despite serious attempts to end racial profiling, the problem continues. The public conveniently neglects terrorist attacks committed by whites such as Timothy McVeigh, who, in 1995, bombed the Oklahoma City federal building killing almost 170 people including nineteen children. Additionally, thousands of young, racist white males are members of far-right organizations and daily threaten the physical and psychological well-being of US citizens (Ferber and Kimmel 2004; Kimmel 2013). For instance, in 2015, a group of white supremacists shot and critically injured five Black Lives Matter activists in Minneapolis while they were protesting the death of a black man shot by a Minneapolis police officer (Graham 2015). “Trusted criminals” (Friedrichs 2010) such as some police officers and politicians frequently break the law and violate ethical standards (Burns 2015; Corsianos 2015). Both affluent and poor people commit crimes, but there are significant differences in the social and legal responses to their actions. This is a reason for the title of Reiman and Leighton’s (2013) book The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. Ironically, Americans fear being victimized by strangers on the street (especially by blacks and Latinos), foreign terrorists, and immigrants, yet corporations that routinely harm or defraud their workers, consumers, the economy, and the environment garner much trust and respectability. These corporations work hard to ensure that people hold them in high regard (DeKeseredy 2013). Legalistic theorists endeavor to discern what makes criminals different from noncriminals. Societal reaction/labeling theorists maintain, by contrast, that any differences are the result of who was labeled criminal and who was not (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 1996). If most people have

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committed some type of crime in their lives (DeKeseredy 2013; Gabor 1994) why aren’t they defined as criminal? The study of crime statistics and criminal justice agencies, labeling theorists argue, may say something about the behavior of police and court personnel, but not necessarily about the behavior of criminals. What should be studied is how and why some people get defined as criminal. Societal reaction/labeling formulations sensitize us to the subjective nature of defining crime. Conservative critics in particular question the empirical validity of this school of thought, especially Lemert’s (1951) claim that labeling someone criminal can result in secondary deviance. He contends that most people occasionally engage in acts of primary deviance, which are relatively minor behaviors that are “rationalized and otherwise dealt with as functions of a socially acceptable role” (Lemert 1951, 75). Primary deviance may involve a university professor who sometimes shoplifts at the bookstore and feels guilty about it (Ellis 1987). After several arrests for larceny, his deviance becomes secondary because he comes to identify with the negative label attached to him. He subsequently goes on to become a career shoplifter. For Lemert, the process from primary to secondary deviance is a long one. Nonetheless, the process is complete when the individual internalizes the deviant label given to him or her by society. Unlike the traditional contention that crime leads to arrest and prosecution, Lemert argues the reverse. Conservatives assert that many people become career offenders without ever having been labeled criminal. For example, labeling has nothing to do with the atrocities committed by terrorists. Rather, their choice to join a terrorist network and massacre innocent people is shaped by their commitment to political, religious, or social ideals (Bell 1979; Ellis 1987; Rapaport 1984). What is more, terrorists are often secret deviants and thus no label is applied to them. Criticisms of labeling from the Left are sometimes difficult to understand. With

standard textbooks stating that the labeling approach opposes mainstream criminology, most students assume that it is a leftist perspective that is automatically embraced by critical criminology. Defining critical criminology is subject to debate, but here it is defined as a, the perspective that considers the major sources of crime to be class, race/ethnic, and gender inequalities (DeKeseredy 2011a). There are several critical criminologies, each with its own origins, methods, and political beliefs (see DeKeseredy and Dragiewicz 2012, 2014). All the same, as Friedrichs (2009) observes, “The unequal distribution of power and or of material resources within contemporary societies provides a unifying point of departure for all strains of critical criminology” (210). Another common feature critical criminologists share is the rejection of rigid crime measures such as zero-tolerance policing (e.g., criminalizing incivilities like panhandling), lengthy prison sentences, private prisons, coercive counseling therapy, and so on. Instead, critical criminologists see major political, economic, and cultural changes within society as necessary to reduce crime and promote social justice. A key criticism against labeling raised by critical criminologists is that the responses of police, prosecutors, judges, and legislators do not occur in a vacuum; they are influenced by a capitalist, patriarchal society that too often puts profit making above basic human rights. Critical theorists argue that labeling theorists such as Howard Becker (1973) do not explicitly consider the broader structural and cultural forces that influence the criminal justice system’s and various other social control agencies’ labeling processes. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young (1973, 168–69), for example, contend that societal reaction/labeling scholars do not “lay bare the structured inequalities in power and interest which underpin processes whereby laws are created.” Another strong criticism from the Left is that societal reaction/labeling theorists are often uninterested in political and economic factors; they prefer to study people who

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are considered criminal because they hold moral beliefs or engage in behaviors that offended the powerful segments of society. Societal reaction/labeling theorists are less interested in studying street crimes or the harmful actions of elites. Thus, critics claim that the societal reaction/labeling perspective focuses too much on so-called exotic people (e.g., homosexuals, drug users, prostitutes, and so on). Alex Liazos (1972) was one of the first to point out that many labeling theorists were more interested in wifeswapping, massage parlors, and prostitutes than they were in “the everyday oppression that affects a large number of persons” (Davis and Stasz 1990, 46). This oppression is the result of poverty, unemployment, and racism – issues of great concern to critical criminologists. Critical Approaches Critical criminologists criticize societal reaction/labeling theorists for ignoring structural and cultural factors, but concur with them that definitions of crime are the result of social negotiations and political interests. While both groups of criminologists oppose legalistic definitions, labeling theorists emphasize the negative reaction of the criminal justice system to “outsiders” (Becker 1973) or “underdogs.” Critical theorists tend to focus on the criminal justice system’s lack of interest in violations of human rights and crimes of the powerful. They desire to broaden the conceptualization of crime to include such socially injurious behaviors as racism, unemployment, poverty, sexism, imperialism, inadequate social services (such as housing, day care, education, and medical care), corporate wrongdoings, and state terrorism (such as torturing of inmates at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp) (DeKeseredy 2011a; Elias 1986; Reiman and Leighton 2013; Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1975). There are at least ten variants of critical criminological thought (DeKeseredy and Dragiewicz 2014). Given such a broad spectrum, it is not surprising that some critical theorists find sweeping definitions of crime

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to be too broad and vague (Bohm 1982) or that critical criminologists occasionally included too many harms in their “laundry list of crimes” (Lynch and Groves 1989). Not surprisingly, conservative criminologists, such as Wright and DeLisi (2016), reject much of the critical approach. Mainstream criminologists, who heavily rely on legalistic definitions, emphasize examining the extent, distribution, causes, and control of predatory street crime. Thus, some of these criminologists regard problems such as poverty and homelessness as moral rather than criminal issues (Hagan 1985). Others maintain that radical definitions promote political agendas rather than contribute to social scientific findings. For example, Tappan (1947) asserted that the rebel may enjoy a veritable orgy of delight in damning as criminal anyone he pleases; one imagines that some expert would thus consign to the criminal classes any successful capitalistic businessman . . . The result may be fine indoctrination or catharsis achieved through blustering broadsides against the existing system. It is not criminology. It is not social science. (44–45)

Tappan wanted to define as criminal only those defendants who had been officially convicted in a court of law. This is something that labeling criminologists and critical criminologists would never agree on. Nonetheless, today there are few criminologists within the critical tradition who employ all encompassing, “everything-butthe-kitchen sink” definitions (Turk 1975). Notwithstanding, critical formulations continue to take note of behaviors beyond predatory street crimes that are much more economically, socially, environmentally, and physically injurious (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 1996). Why is it that despite being major social threats, the criminal justice system only rarely criminalizes crimes committed by corporate and political elites? Michalowski (1985, 317) contends that we cannot adequately examine the law’s bias “unless we compare those things that are

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illegal with similar forms of social injury that are not.” Who should be the object of study for the critical criminologist? Early critical criminology made it plain that it was the ruling elite, the corporate criminal, the lawbreaking government official, and legislators and policy makers who determine what actions are to be criminalized. Current critical criminologists also study the relationship between inequality and street crime and are involved in feminist studies of violence against women in intimate relationships (see, e.g., DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2012).

Summary As Agnew (2011, 13) correctly points out, even though the discipline of criminology is built around the topic of crime, mainstream criminologists spend surprisingly little time discussing the actual definition of crime. The major criminology texts usually devote only one or a few pages to definitional issues, and crime is typically defined in terms of violations of the criminal law.

This chapter challenges what Friedrichs (2015) calls the “taken-for-granted approach” to crime (40) that is popular in the mass media, in the political arena, and among the general public. Again, Friedrichs states, “It is an illusion, surely, that the term ‘crime’ may be defined in only one way, and that any such definition would be universally acknowledged and adopted” (47). By contrast, Agnew (2011) offers a definition that unifies mainstream and critical approaches. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe and critique Agnew’s offering, but the fact is that choosing a definition of crime constitutes “a primal sociological act or decision” (Ellis 1987, 210). In other words, how a criminologist defines crime will determine the research method and the theoretical perspective used in the gathering of data and the analysis of findings.

Two Key Myths about Crime In the mid-1980s, Bohm (1986, 193) stated that “the task of debunking myths about crime, criminals, and crime policy has received only limited attention. Myths continue to be perpetuated.” Today, crime myths are still being perpetuated by a wide range of social groups, including large numbers of journalists and politicians, but criminologists and criminal justice officials are among the most responsible for promoting them (Bohm and Walker 2013a). Bohm and Walker’s (2013b) Demystifying Crime and Criminal Justice and Kappeler and Potter’s (2005) The Mythology of Crime and Criminal Justice are popular books that do not challenge criminology’s urban focus and, as such, support the notion that rural communities are much safer than urban ones. Myth One: Rural Crime Rates Are Always Lower than Those in Urban Places Popular images of rural communities portray a peaceful way of life with picturesque farms, Main Street businesses that give personal services to long-standing customers, little school houses with dedicated teachers and studious pupils, and a sheriff that knows everyone by their first name (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2009; Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2014; Hay and Basran 1992). Additionally, print and electronic media often characterize rural people as being friendlier than urban residents (Toughill 2007). Of course, the media also depict rural communities as remaining “somewhat behind the times” (Gray 2007, v). Moreover, Appalachian mountain residents and other rural people are commonly and negatively stereotyped as hillbillies. Television shows such as the 1960s situation comedy, The Beverly Hillbillies, comic strips like Li’l Abner, and joke books depict typical rural men as “wearing the obligatory floppy hat, ragged shirt, and tattered baggy overalls” (Foster and Hummel 1997, 160). They are also

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frequently portrayed as carrying muzzleloading rifles, and drinking moonshine or some illicitly produced intoxicant. They have names like Clem, Zeke, or Jethro that imply illiteracy (DeKeseredy, Muzzatti, and Donnermeyer 2014; Williamson 1995). These caricatures encourage the public to consider “southern mountaineers as backward, lazy, dumb, and unable to cope with the modern world” (Inge 1989, 915). As well, since the early 1970s, popular films have frequently portrayed rural areas as dangerous places where urban people (especially college students) are at high risk of being savagely killed and tortured by demented, in-bred locals without conscience or constraints. Further, on the Internet, rural women are depicted in a degrading, highly sexualized manner and pornographic videos of them are widely and freely available (DeKeseredy and Corsianos 2016). DeKeseredy, Muzzatti, and Donnermeyer (2014) found that these media are normalized, mainstreamed, and contribute to the horrification and pornification of rural culture, and by doing so, mask the real issues about crime, violence, and gender in the rural context. Most criminologists are also guilty of ignoring these issues (Donnermeyer 2012). As Donnermeyer, Jobes, and Barclay (2006) put it in their review of the rural crime literature: If rural crime was considered at all, it was a convenient “ideal type” contrasted with the criminogenic conditions assumed to exist exclusively in urban locations. Rural crime was rarely examined either comparatively with urban crime or as a subject worthy of investigation in its own right. (199)

There is now a growing group of critical criminologists who are mitigating criminology’s urban-centrism (DeKeseredy 2015). For instance, The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology (Donnermeyer 2016) consists of chapters on a variety of issues that urban criminologists are unacquainted with or typically ignore. One such issue is that rural rates of crime may be higher than urban rates at particular

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types of rural places and for specific kinds of crime. In Canada, for example, the rate of homicide in rural areas (1.9 per 100,000 population) is higher than the rate for urban areas (1.5 per 100,000 population), and has been for at least a decade (CBC News 2012; Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2014). Also, the violent crime rate in most rural counties of the United States is higher than in several dozen metropolitan areas, based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (Donnermeyer 2007). What is more, there is growing evidence that, in the United States, rural women are at much greater risk of experiencing intimate violence than are women living in more heavily populated areas. Using 1992–2009 National Crime Victimization Survey data, Rennison, DeKeseredy, and Dragiewicz (2012) found that exiting relationships is more dangerous for rural women than for their urban and suburban counterparts. In fact, rural separated women experience intimate rape and sexual assault at rates more than three times higher than their urban counterparts. Moreover, separated women are raped and sexually assaulted by an intimate partner at rates about 1.6 times higher than similarly situated suburban women. In addition, these researchers discovered that a higher percentage of rural females are victims of intimate violence than urban and suburban females. A review of the literature on intimate femicide reveals that the bulk of the studies conducted on this topic reveal the same geographic variations (DeKeseredy, Hall Sanchez, and Rennison 2016). This type of murder is “the killing of females by male partners with whom they have had, or want to have a sexual and/or emotional relationship” (Ellis and DeKeseredy 1997, 592). Some violent crimes are more common in rural areas. Certainly, farm operations have higher rates of burglary than do metropolitan businesses (Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2014; Donnermeyer, Barclay, and Mears 2011). Rural communities are also not immune from illegal drug use and distribution (Donnermeyer 2015), and vandalism and theft are endemic to the US

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heartland (Donnermeyer 2016). Moreover, environmental or “green” crimes, ranging from the illegal trafficking of fauna and flora, to violations of environmental regulations, and transgressions against hunting laws, frequently occur in rural locations (Brisman and South 2014; Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2014). The points to note are that rural communities are certainly untouched by serious crimes and that the rates of some types of crime are higher in rural areas than in urban and suburban communities. Myth Two: Criminals Are Fundamentally Different from Noncriminals Contrary to premodern times, most people today do not view crime as being caused by supernatural forces. Yet, most continue to see it as a property of the individual and research in biosocial criminology, which applies molecular genetics, epigenetics, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience to understanding crime (Walsh and Beaver 2009), is frequently used to support these beliefs. Unquestionably, biological and psychological factors do cause some people to commit some crimes. In fact, research shows that two of the most consistent correlates of crime are “biological” ones: age and sex (DeKeseredy 2013). To be sure, young (age) men (sex) tend to commit a disproportionate amount of street crime and intimate violence against women, but they are not generally those who suffer from mental illness. For instance, only 10 percent of all incidents of male-to-female intimate violence (e.g., date rape) result from mental disorders (DeKeseredy 2011b; Gelles and Straus 1998). If only a few men battered or raped women, it would easy to accept the assertion that they are disturbed individuals. However, worldwide rates of maleon-female violence are staggering. Every year, one in four North American female undergraduate students is sexually assaulted (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013). Moreover, the International Violence Against Women Survey found that the percentage of women

who revealed at least one act of physical or sexual violence by any man since the age of sixteen ranged from 20 percent in Hong Kong to between 50 to 60 percent in Australia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Mozambique. In most of the countries examined, rates of female victimization were above 35 percent (Johnson, Ollus, and Nevala 2008). Given the widespread nature of violent crimes by men against women, it is difficult to accept the claim that they are committed only by a few pathological males. Theories explaining predatory street crime as a constitutional property of the individual cannot adequately answer one important sociological question: If American young men living in inner-city neighborhoods commit high rates of armed robbery, theft, and murder, why don’t young men living in inner-city neighborhoods in Canada, Germany, and Japan have the same high rates? Biological and psychological theories cannot explain why the US crime rate is far greater than those in other social democratic countries (Currie 2013; Pratt and Eriksson 2013). An “American” crime gene has not yet been discovered. Such criticisms are rejected by policy makers, politicians, and journalists because, as Currie (2009) notes, for more than a hundred years, particularly in the United States, it has been popular off and on, to seek the causes of violent crime in the realm of biology. Today, the idea that the roots of crime are “in the genes” has once again become fashionable, especially in the mass media where we often read that practically every aspect of our behavior – from our sexual preferences to our propensity to break the law – is determined by our DNA. (41)

The struggle to define the “typical” criminal, often called by sociologists typification, is an essential one. The group that is most successful in casting the problem in terms that are recognized by politicians and the general public will likely determine the solution (Best 1990; DeKeseredy 2011b; Schwartz and DeKeseredy 1997). No matter the

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challenge to the myth of the essential criminal, it is not likely to disappear in the near future because it is so deeply engrained in popular culture and serves powerful political and economic interests, such as corporations that engage in the hurtful practices discussed previously (DeKeseredy 2013).

Conclusion Criminology provides a richer, more complex understanding of crime than do the media and politicians. Even so, most people have “myth-laden conceptions of crime and criminal justice” (Bohm and Walker 2013a, xxvii). Books have been written debunking myths about crime and its enforcement. For, the millions of women around the world who are physically and sexually abused by their current and former male partners, these crimes are not myths – they are hard realities. Furthermore, many rural communities are riddled with illegal drug use and distribution, which as noted previously, do considerable harm. One of criminology’s greatest challenges is to promote greater awareness about crimes committed by economic and political elites, which are much more injurious than all the street crimes put together (DeKeseredy, Ellis, and Alvi 2005). Nonetheless, as Friedrichs (2004) previously noted, “if major new terrorist attacks along the lines of 9/11 occur, or the occupation of Iraq becomes increasingly costly and chaotic, government and public attention (and resources) are proportionately less likely to focus on corporate cases” (129). Also, since most large-scale terrorist attacks occur in urban places, the plight of rural crime victims will continue to remain largely unnoticed.

Glossary Crimes of the powerful These are harmful acts committed by political and corporate elites, such as the dumping of toxic chemicals into fields and streams.

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Critical criminology A perspective that views the major sources of crime as the unequal class, race/ethnic, and gender relations that control our society. Intimate femicide The killing of females by male partners with whom they have, have had, or want to have, a sexual and/or emotional relationship. Legalistic definitions of crime These definitions only encompass behaviors that are officially or legally outlawed. Mala in se crimes Refers to crimes that are deemed to be bad in and of themselves, such as murder or rape. Mala prohibita crimes These crimes are deemed bad because they are prohibited and are often not harmful. Overcriminalization Applying criminal “labels” to “victimless crimes” such as drug abuse and gambling can create more trouble for society. They can actually create new crimes or new opportunities for crime. Secondary deviance The result of labeling someone who commits relatively minor offenses “criminal.” This person is, according to societal reaction/labeling theorists, at risk of becoming a “career criminal.” Societal reaction/labeling definitions These definitions are derived from symbolic interactionist theory and assert that nothing is inherently criminal. Rather, “crime” is a social construct or a label attached to a behavior during the course of social interaction between law-breakers and law enforcers.

References Agnew, R. 2011. Toward a Unified Criminology: Integrating Assumptions about Crime, People, and Society. New York: New York University Press. Alexander, M. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Anderson, E. 1999. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: W. W. Norton.

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Corsianos, M. 2015. Institutionalized abuse of police power: How public policing condones and legitimizes police corruption in North America. In The Routledge International Handbook of Crimes of the Powerful, edited by G. Barak, 412–26. London: Routledge. Currie, E. 2009. The Roots of Danger: Violent Crime in Global Perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 2013. The sustaining society. In Crime, Justice and Social Democracy: International Perspectives, edited by K. Carrington, M. Ball, E. O’Brien, and J. Tauri, 3–15. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Davis, N., and C. Stasz. 1990. Social Control of Deviance: A Critical Perspective. New York: McGraw-Hill. DeKeseredy, W. S. 2011a. Contemporary Critical Criminology. London: Routledge. 2011b. Violence Against Women: Myths, Facts, Controversies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2013. The myth that “criminals” are fundamentally different from “non-criminals.” In Demystifying Crime and Criminal Justice. 2nd ed., edited by R. M. Bohm and J. T. Walker, 13–24. New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. New directions in feminist understandings of rural crime. Journal of Rural Studies 39:180–87. DeKeseredy, W. S., and M. Corsianos. 2016. Violence Against Women in Pornography. London: Routledge. DeKeseredy, W. S., and M. Dragiewicz, eds. 2012. Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology. London: Routledge. eds. 2014. Critical Criminology. London: Routledge. DeKeseredy, W. S., D. Ellis, and S. Alvi. 2005. Deviance and Crime: Theory, Research and Policy. Cincinnati, OH: LexisNexis. DeKeseredy, W. S., M. Hall-Sanchez, M. Dragiewicz, and C. M. Rennison. 2016. Intimate violence against women in rural communities. In The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology, edited by J. F. Donnermeyer. London: Routledge. DeKeseredy, W. S., S. L. Muzzatti, and J. F. Donnermeyer. 2014. Mad men in bib overalls: Media’s horrification and pornification of rural culture. Critical Criminology, 22:179– 97.

the problem of crime DeKeseredy, W. S., and M. D. Schwartz. 1996. Contemporary Criminology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. 2009. Dangerous Exits: Escaping Abusive Relationships in Rural America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2012. Left realism. In Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology, edited by W. S. DeKeseredy and M. Dragiewicz, 105–16. London: Sage. 2013. Male Peer Support and Violence Against Women: The History and Verification of a Theory. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Donnermeyer, J. F. 2007. Rural crime: Roots and restoration. International Journal of Rural Crime 1:2–20. 2012. Rural crime and critical criminology. In Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology, edited by W. S. DeKeseredy and M. Dragiewicz, 290–302. London: Routledge. 2015. The social organization of rural crime in the United States: Conceptual considerations. Journal of Rural Studies 39:160–70. ed. 2016. The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology. London: Routledge. Donnermeyer, J. F., E. Barclay, and D. P. Mears. 2011. Policing agricultural crime. In Rural Policing and Policing the Rural: A Constable Countryside, edited by R. I. Mawby and R. Yarwood, 193–204. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Donnermeyer, J. F., and W. S. DeKeseredy. 2014. Rural Criminology. London: Routledge. Donnermeyer, J. F., P. Jobes, and E. Barclay. 2006. Rural crime, poverty, and community. In Advancing Critical Criminology: Theory and Application, edited by W. S. DeKeseredy and B. Perry, 199–218. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Elias, R. 1986. The Politics of Victimization: Victims, Victimology and Human Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Ellis, D. 1987. The Wrong Stuff: An Introduction to the Sociological Study of Deviance. Toronto: Macmillan. Ellis, D., and W. S. DeKeseredy. 1997. Rethinking estrangement, interventions and intimate femicide. Violence Against Women 3:590–609. Erikson, K. 1962. Notes on the sociology of deviance. Social Problems 9:307–14. Ferber, A. L., and M. S. Kimmel. 2004. “White men are this nation”: Right-wing militias and the restoration of rural America. In

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Pearce, F. 1976. Crimes of the powerful: Marxism, crime and deviance. London: Pluto Press. Pratt, J., and A. Eriksson. 2013. Penal policy and the social democratic image of society. In Crime, Justice and Social Democracy: International Perspectives, edited by K. Carrington, M. Ball, E. O’Brien, and J. Tauri, 51–69. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rapaport, A. 1984. Fear and trembling: Terrorism in three religious traditions. American Political Science Review 78:658–77. Reiman, J., and P. Leighton. 2013. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice. 10th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Rennison, C. M., W. S. DeKeseredy, and M. Dragiewicz. 2012. Urban, suburban, and rural variations in separation/divorce rape/sexual assault: Results from the National Crime Victimization Survey. Feminist Criminology 7:282–97. 2013. Intimate relationship status variations in violence against women: urban, suburban, and rural differences. Violence Against Women 19:1312–30. Rios, V. M. 2014. The consequences of the criminal justice pipeline on black and Latino masculinity. In Critical Criminology. Vol. 3. Edited by W. S. DeKeseredy and M. Dragiewicz, 305–16. London: Routledge. Santa Anna, O. 2002. Brown Tide Rising: Metaphoric Representations of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse. Austin: University of Texas Press. Schur, E. M. 1974. A sociologist’s view: The case for abolition. In Victimless Crimes: Two Sides of the Controversy, edited by E. M. Schur and H. A. Bedau, 3–52. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Schwartz, M. D., and W. S. DeKeseredy. 1997. Sexual Assault on the College Campus: The Role of Male Peer Support. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Schwendinger, H., and J. Schwendinger. 1975. Defenders of order or guardians of human rights? In Critical Criminology, edited by I. Taylor, P. Walton, and J. Young, 113–46. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sex Workers Outreach Project – Chicago. 2012. Draft Literature Review of Violence Against Sex Workers. Chicago: Sex Workers Outreach Project – Chicago.

the problem of crime Shackelford, K. L. 2014. Overcriminalization. In The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, edited by J. Albanese, 1–7. New York: Wiley. Sprinkle, A. 2008. Stopping the terror: A day to end violence against prostitutes. Rewire News. www.rewire.news/article/2008/12/08/ stopping-terror-a-day-to-end-violenceagainst-prostitutes/. Stowell, J. I., S. F. Messner, K. F. McGeever, and L. E. Raffalovich. 2009. Immigration and the recent violent crime drop in the United States: A pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of metropolitan areas. Criminology 47:889–928. Surette, R. 2015. Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice. 5th ed. Stamford, CT: Cenage Learning. Tannenbaum, F. 1938. Crime and Community. New York: Columbia University Press. Tappan, P. 1947. Who is the criminal? American Sociological Review 12:96–102.

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Taylor, I., P. Walton, and J. Young. 1973. The New Criminology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Toughill, K. 2007. StatsCan confirms: Small-town folks nicer. Toronto Star. June 9. Turk, A. 1975. Prospects and pitfalls for radical criminology: A critical response to Platt. Crime and Social Justice 4:41–42. Walsh, A., and K. M. Beaver. eds. 2009. Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research. London: Routledge. West, W. G. 1984. Young Offenders and the State: A Canadian Perspective on Delinquency. Toronto: Butterworths. Willamson, J. W. 1995. Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wright, J., and M. DeLisi. 2016. Conservative Criminology: A Call to Restore Balance to the Social Sciences. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 13

Corporate Malfeasance as a Social Problem Melissa Rorie∗

Abstract Single cases of corporate malfeasance often cause more financial and physical damage than an entire year’s worth of “conventional” crimes, yet systematic data collection on these behaviors is wanting. A cohesive body of knowledge is imperative to stimulate theory and policy making that will allow for the prevention of harm caused by powerful corporations. This chapter reviews what is known about corporate malfeasance from a criminological perspective. Specifically, we describe current issues in defining corporate behaviors as crime, explore four types of harm and the scope of harm caused by corporate crime, provide theoretical explanations for crime, and appraise current strategies used to prevent and intervene in cases of corporate malfeasance. We conclude with suggestions for improving research endeavors in this field and the importance of such research for policymaking efforts.

Introduction Corporate offending from Wall Street to Wal-Mart has demonstrated that a desire for profit over social responsibility causes incredible physical, social, and economic damage to citizens of the United States. Often, one case of corporate malfeasance can have a more serious economic impact than the entire number of street crimes in one year. An early 2000s accounting fraud

∗

The author would like to thank Evan C. Zoldan (The University of Toledo College of Law) for his insightful comments on an earlier draft.

by the energy company Enron, for example, has been estimated to have cost shareholders between $50 billion and $100 billion, while Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, perpetrated through his investment securities firm, cost victims anywhere from $17.5 billion to $76 billion (Cohn 2014; Maglich 2014; SEC 2008). Compare these figures to the most current available data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics about total victims’ losses due to street crimes in 2008 – about $17.5 billion (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2008, Table 82). The losses resulting from corporate crime are not just financial, though. The number of people who lose their lives each 215

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year as a result of occupational accidents or disease ranges from 30,000 to 76,000 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2014; Occupational Safety and Health 2015). In 2008, the number of consumer product-related deaths in the United States stood at 35,900, compared to 16,272 people killed in “street” homicides that year (US Census 2009). The 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion killed eleven workers on site and the ensuing oil spill resulted in unknown (and unprecedented) environmental damage (National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling 2011, 127, 174). Finally, we have seen serious social unrest during the 2010s resulting from corporate crime, as citizens question the ability of the government to effectively prevent harms caused by the prioritization of profit over social responsibility (see, e.g., the Occupy Wall Street Movement: http://occupywallst.org/; http://occupywallstreet.net/). Although corporate offending rarely receives widespread attention, research has shown that such behavior is prevalent among firms (see Clinard and Yeager 1980, 112–13; Simpson 1987, 962–63; Sutherland 1949, 20–28). Given its commonplace occurrence, the total damage caused by these crimes is likely staggering and warrants more attention by the public, by government agencies, and by scholars. Corporations have more power in developed societies than any other entity and they wield much influence over government agencies. In fact, many argue that corporate sway has promoted media portrayal of crime as a lower-class, directly violent phenomenon – which has deflected attention from the tremendous damage corporations cause to large swaths of society (see, e.g., Wright et al. 1995, 32–35). This chapter attempts to redirect our attention to corporate malfeasance as a social problem. To begin the discussion, we provide an explicit definition of “corporate malfeasance” while discussing the debates around this construct. We then provide more details on the types of harm resulting from corporate offending,

and describe theories that attempt to explain why such offending occurs. Following explanations of offending, we discuss prevention and intervention strategies. We conclude with a summary of what is known about corporate malfeasance and issues remaining future researchers and policy makers.

Definition of Corporate Malfeasance Although he was writing at a time, the 1930s, when others were exposing the abuses of corporations against their employees and their competitors, Edwin H. Sutherland was the first American academic to empirically examine corporate offending. What is interesting about Sutherland’s research is that, theoretically, he examined how individuals of “high social status” came to commit white-collar crimes. However, empirically, his seminal research collected information on crimes by corporations. This resulted in definitional ambiguity that plagues the study of corporate malfeasance to this day. To begin, it is important to note that the term “corporate malfeasance” (here, used interchangeably with the term “corporate crime”) is not the same as “whitecollar crime.” Most scholars agree that crimes by corporations are one subset of crimes under the broader umbrella term of “white-collar crime.” However, there are many disagreements about what corporate malfeasance entails, even within this narrower domain. Specifically, scholars have yet to resolve whether “corporate malfeasance”: (1) includes crimes by noncorporate organizations (e.g., unincorporated businesses, non-governmental organizations); (2) describes individual behaviors, corporate behaviors, or both; (3) allows for crimes committed by lower-level employees of the corporation; and (4) includes behaviors sanctioned in civil and administrative courts (as opposed to violations of criminal law; Rorie et al. 2015b). For the purposes of this review, we employ an oft-used definition of corporate

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crime from the criminological literature. Specifically, corporate crime is conceptualized as “the conduct of a corporation or employees acting on behalf of a corporation, which is proscribed and punishable by law” (Braithwaite 1984, 6). Note that this definition clearly describes the motivation for such behaviors as a desire to benefit the corporation (not to benefit the individual offenders or non-corporate entities).1 This definition also allows for individual-level decisions or corporate-level activities to be considered. Finally, although this definition clearly defines crime as violations of legal statutes, it allows for violations of regulatory or civil statutes to be included alongside criminal violations. Working from this definition, there remain a wide variety of behaviors that are classified as corporate crime. When thinking about corporate malfeasance as a social problem, it is useful to describe these activities in terms of their primary victims. As such, we adopt Friedrich’s (2010, 64–91) Typology of Corporate Crime. He breaks down corporate crimes by first examining two broad types of activity – “Corporate Violence” and “Corporate Abuse of Power, Fraud, and Economic Exploitation.” Within each of the two broad categories, he then specifies crimes by the primary victims and ultimately creates nine categories of corporate crime. Each category can include multiple behaviors. Within the category of “Corporate Violence,” there is corporate malfeasance that victimizes the public, victimizes consumers, and victimizes workers. Crimes that victimize the public include environmental offenses – air pollution, water pollution, improper hazardous waste disposal, etc. Violence against consumers includes those crimes where products are made that physically harm individuals – some examples include contaminated food, dangerous vehicles, and unnecessary medical devices. Finally, corporations may create unsafe working conditions that result in physical harm to their employees – especially in industries such as mining and manufacturing, where cost-cutting measures may result

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in inadequate safety equipment or a lack of safety training. There are six groups of victims specified in the “Corporate Abuse of Power, Fraud, and Economic Exploitation” category, including (1) Citizens and Taxpayers, (2) Consumers, (3) Employees, (4) Franchisers and Suppliers, (5) Competitors, and (6) Owners and Creditors. Crimes against citizens/taxpayers are those corporate behaviors that defraud the government (e.g., contract fraud) and corporate tax evasion. Economic crimes that victimize consumers include price fixing, price gouging, false advertising, and the misrepresentation of products. Non-violent abuses of employees include economic exploitation, corporate theft, unfair labor practices, and indiscriminate surveillance of employees. Crimes against a corporation’s own franchisers and suppliers include discount frauds and chargeback frauds, while crimes against corporate competitors include monopolistic practices and stealing trade secrets. Finally, corporations can commit crimes against their own owners and creditors in the form of managerial accounting fraud, self-dealing, and strategic bankruptcies.

Harm Caused by Corporate Malfeasance Our perceptions of harm caused by crime come from media portrayals of crime – which focus on the intentional, interpersonal, and immediate harms between individual offenders and victims. In contrast, harms by corporations are impersonal, not intentional, and are often due to a chain of events as opposed to one easily identifiable event. A common myth about corporate malfeasance is that such behaviors are “victimless” crimes. Price fixing, antitrust, tax evasion, etc., are thought to be greedy behaviors, but ultimately not harmful to individual citizens. Many victims of corporate crime are unaware that they are victims or may not perceive the

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event as criminal in nature (Croall 2007, 81–84). However, much scholarship in the corporate crime field has emphasized that corporate malfeasance causes more harm than “street crimes,” and even a single corporate crime can victimize large groups of people. In this section, we will discuss Payne’s (2012, 47–52) categories of harm: (1) individual economic losses, (2) societal economic losses, (3) emotional consequences, and (4) physical harm. We will provide a description of each type of harm and then will provide examples of corporate crimes resulting in such harms. Attempting to estimate the harm caused by all corporate crimes is not possible, since there is no central database that compiles information from the various regulatory agencies responsible for correcting corporate noncompliance (see Cohen 2015, 318; Simpson and Yeager 2015). That said, we demonstrate that the documented harm caused by even single instances of corporate malfeasance is more severe than that of street crime. Individual Economic Losses These are the monetary damages accrued by individual victims of offending. Estimates of overall victims’ losses due to all corporate crimes are unavailable, but (as described above) even one case of corporate malfeasance can have a more serious economic impact than the entire number of street crimes in one year.

Although some research has calculated the societal economic losses due to street crime, we are unable to estimate total societal economic losses as a result of corporate crime because we do not have an accurate count of corporate crimes (Cohen 2015, 318). We do know, however, that even single types or cases of corporate crime result in large indirect costs to the public (e.g., the cost of prosecuting a corporation in the criminal justice system, taxpayer bailouts of corporations). For example, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services estimated that about 10 percent ($60 billion) of their 2014 expenditures (totaling $554 billion) were “improper” (US GAO 2015, “Why GAO Did This Study”). Mortgage fraud has caused expenses far beyond those directly incurred by homeowners – neighboring houses dropped in value as a result of foreclosures, squatting, and property crime increases; financial markets globally struggled as consumer and investors withdrew trust and money; and US taxpayers were charged $25 billion to fund bailouts to large financial institutions (Cohen 2015, 307–8; Jordan 2011, 492, 506). Many corporate crimes are investigated and prosecuted under regulatory agency domains; the cost of running such agencies can be seen as analogous to Criminal Justice System expenditures for street crime. Estimated outlays for regulatory compliance efforts are $62.4 billion dollars in 2015 (Dudley and Warren 2015, 1).

Emotional Consequences Societal Economic Losses These are the economic losses to society as a whole. In 2007, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that the government spent approximately $228 billion dollars on maintaining criminal justice agencies (primarily focused on adjudicating street crime or low-level white-collar crimes; Bureau of Justice Statistics 2011). By 2010, the US Government had spent about $1 trillion dollars to fight our “War on Drugs” (www.foxnews .com/world/2010/05/13/ap-impact-yearstrillion-war-drugs-failed-meet-goals/).

The emotional fallout of corporate crime can be devastating to individuals and harmful to society as a whole. Victims who lose their financial security nets due to corporate financial fraud are emotionally distressed. Price and Norris (2009, 538) provide comments from one of Bernie Madoff’s victims that demonstrate the potential impact: Following the loss of much of his life savings in the Madoff scheme, one man in retirement described feeling a “deep depression . . . I had no desire to live, no

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prospect of earning a living, no way to pay the bills.”

Victims of corporate violence (such as workplace accidents) often experience posttraumatic stress symptoms, depression, and other emotional maladies (see, e.g., Matthiesen et al. 2011, 311–12; Shover et al. 1994, 83–88). Furthermore, large-scale corporate malfeasance leads to general public distrust in the government, corporations, and the capitalist market more generally. Serious social unrest in recent years has resulted from corporate crime; citizens question the ability of the government to effectively prevent harms caused by the emphasis of profit over social good (see, e.g., the Occupy Wall Street Movement: http://occupywallst.org/; http:// occupywallstreet.net/). Physical Harm Physical harms are the bodily injuries or deaths that results from corporate malfeasance. Payne includes both direct harm (e.g., bodily injuries that results from improperly marketing pharmaceuticals, illnesses resulting from contaminated food) as well as indirect harm (e.g., physical outcomes resulting from experiencing stress after suffering financial victimization). Lynch (2013, 46), using statistics from the National Crime Victimization Survey, notes that 9 million instances of violence from street crimes occur in the United States every year. He compares this to the amount of physical harm resulting from three forms of environmental offending – air pollution, water pollution, and proximity to hazardous waste sites. By his calculations, the number of violent victimization incidents per year is 31,500,000 times as many for air pollution, 29,200 times as many for water pollution, and 908 times as many for hazardous waste sites. Of course, not all air pollution, water pollution, or hazardous waste disposal are technically crimes – a company has to exceed permitted pollution levels or improperly dispose of waste in order to be considered in noncompliance. However, as

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discussed in the introduction, other studies and cases confirm that physical harm resulting from corporate crime is vast. Given that corporate offending has been found to be prevalent among firms (see Clinard and Yeager 1980, 112–13; Simpson 1987, 962–63; Sutherland 1949, 20–28), it is obvious that the total damage caused by these crimes is quite large and exceeds that from conventional crimes. The lack of systematic data collection on corporate malfeasance is a major impediment to understanding exactly why these offenses occur and, as a consequence, an obstacle to establishing effective prevention and deterrence strategies.

Theories Explaining Corporate Malfeasance In the criminological field, the most common approach to creating explanations for corporate crime is to take traditional theories of crime (e.g., Rational Choice Theory, Self-Control Theory, Strain Theory, Differential Association/Social Learning Theory, Techniques of Neutralization) and see how well they can explain corporate offending as well. However, all of these theories focus on explaining why individuals deviate from accepted norms; to explain corporate crime one needs to consider a group-level process. There are also explanations for why different societies have different forms and amounts of corporate crime. In this section, I will review (1) individual-level, (2) organizational-level, (3) macro-level, and (4) integrated theories of corporate crime.

Individual-Level Explanations of Corporate Crime Although corporations often consist of groups of individuals, we see that most explanations of corporate offending use traditional theories of crime that generally focus on why an individual offender decides to commit crime. The most commonly used theories include Sutherland’s (1939) Differential Association Theory, Sykes and

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Matza’s (1957) Techniques of Neutralizations, Merton’s (1938) Strain Theory, and Clarke and Cornish’s (1985) Rational Choice Theory. All of these theories will be briefly discussed in turn. In the early 1900s, American criminologists began to move the field away from biological explanations of crime and, instead, argued that offenders are the product of their environment – that is, poverty, immigration, and urban growth created conditions in which members of the lowest socioeconomic strata (1) either valued material goods and committed crimes because they had no legitimate means to achieve them, or (2) did not have informal social controls (e.g., parental monitoring) to quell their natural impulses for offending. Sutherland was concerned that these theories were based on data from the newly available Uniform Crime Reports – that is, scholars were only looking at data based on arrest records which (due to political agendas) overrepresented the crimes of people in the lower classes. He argued that high-status citizens, too, were committing crimes; any accurate theory of crime must explain both “conventional” and “whitecollar” crimes (Sutherland 1949, 3–10). Thus, he created Differential Association Theory. Instead of poverty or urbanization as an explanation, Sutherland postulated that crime is learned by associating with others who tolerate or encourage offending. He compared the learning of crime to the learning of a new job – just as you learn how and why the business does things a certain way, you learn how and why to commit crime. In fact, he argues that white-collar and corporate crime occurs because people are socialized into a corporate culture that encourages or tolerates unethical behavior (Sutherland 1949, 234–56). Later scholars would criticize Differential Association Theory for the idea that people/groups would actually “value” crime and encourage others to offend – they argued that such groups do not exist. If they did exist, these scholars suggested, social order would break down (Kornhauser 1978). Sykes and Matza (1957, 666–

67), in response to this criticism, argued that instead of learning “pro-crime” values, offenders instead learn how to neutralize potential guilt and shame that might arise from offending which then allows the offense to occur. They specify five “Techniques of Neutralization”: (1) denial of intent or responsibility, (2) denial of injury, (3) denial of the victim, (4) higher loyalties, and (5) condemning the condemners. The denial of intent basically claims that the offending was an accident. The denial of the victim occurs when the offender claims that the victims of the crime deserved what they got or could afford the loss. The denial of injury argues that no one was hurt by the offense. An appeal to higher loyalty is when the offender claims that he/she committed the crime to satisfy a larger good. Condemning the condemner occurs when the offender points out the hypocrisy of actors in the criminal justice system. Merton’s (1938) “Strain Theory” focuses on cultural values in certain societies and how they produce offending. Specifically, he argues that in a capitalist country such as the United States, citizens come to value material wealth as the metric of success and are told that anyone can be successful if they only try hard enough. However, opportunities for success are not evenly distributed – for example, a young adult with wealthy parents is more likely to have attended good schools, have good social connections, and thus be in a better position to achieve material wealth for him or herself. An individual in the lower socioeconomic strata has to work much harder to gain material wealth. Crime occurs when an individual still sees material wealth as a desired goal, but no longer values the use of legitimate means to achieve it. Although Merton’s theory emphasizes the role of poverty as a criminogenic force, other scholars (e.g., Keane 1993; Murphy and Robinson 2008, 512–16; Simpson and Koper 1997; Vaughan 1982, 1383; Wang and Holtfreter 2012) have used strain theory to explain corporate crime. In this formulation, material wealth has no limits – even if you are financially successful, you can always make more money. Corporate

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managers are perhaps more susceptible to this strain, as the entire purpose of the corporation is to make money – if the manager fails to continually turn a profit, the corporation ultimately ceases to exist. When a corporation is unable to make money legitimately, managers may offend in an effort to make a profit for the company. Finally, Clarke and Cornish’s (1985) “Rational Choice Theory” (RCT) takes the opposite view from the previous theories. Instead of social pressures creating a motivation for crime, RCT starts with the assumption that people are naturally motivated to offend – the question, therefore, is what prevents people from committing crime? According to RCT, the potential costs of the crime must exceed the potential benefits to prevent offending. This theory is thought to be especially useful for corporate crimes, whose offenders are engaging in the calculated decision making necessary to make a corporation successful and, it can be argued, are often engaged in formal or informal cost-benefit analyses when making those decisions. Also, the potential costs of offending for the corporation are fairly low – such crimes are not generally the focus of law enforcement (making criminal stigmatization unlikely), the civil fines are generally small compared to the potential profit (and fines can be passed on to consumers), and these crimes are very difficult to detect (Benson et al. 2009, 183–84; Benson and Simpson 2015, 116–17, 133–35; Coffee 1981, 386–407; Office of the Inspector General 1998, 7–30). Organizational-Level Theories of Corporate Crime Although individual-level theories of crime are useful in understanding decisions by individuals within corporations, many corporate malfeasance scholars argue that corporations are unique environments. The interactions among a group of people involve dynamics and motivate behavior in a very different way than at the individual level. The structure, culture, and specific policies of the entire corporation impact the

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decisions made by those within the organization. In this section, we discuss three theories that explain offending by the corporation as a whole: Criminogenic Tiers, Anomie Theory, and the License Framework. The Criminogenic Tiers approach explains why certain industries (“criminogenic markets”) promote offending by the corporations within them (Denzin 1977; Farberman 1975). Proponents of this approach argue that, within one industry, actors are both interdependent (i.e., they rely on one another for resources) as well as autonomous (acting as individuals). There are multiple levels – “criminogenic tiers” – within the market, and each tier impacts the other tiers above and below it. Most of the power is at the top tier of the distribution chain, and any pressures or constraints at that level are pushed downward throughout the industry (but not necessarily only in that direction). Basically, structural relationships affect and constrain individual companies as one moves up and down the market hierarchy – the pressures experienced by companies at the top of the industry may result in crime at lower levels of the industry as more powerful players threaten to withdraw resources from those lower-level players unless they turn a profit. Anomie Theory is similar to the individual-level Strain theory, but focuses more on the role of “anomie,” or normlessness, to explain corporate malfeasance. This ties back to Durkheim’s ([1897] 1951) argument that in times of changes in society, old rules that regulated behavior become obsolete and citizens are no longer sure of appropriate behavior. Merton (1938, 680– 82) argued that anomie is present in society because not everyone can obtain the desired goals through legitimate means – people reject the normative means of obtaining these goals and essentially become “normless.” Similar to how individuals commit crime in response to the inability to obtain goals legitimately, corporations also may offend as a response to this. Another difference between anomie theory and strain theory is that “norm erosion” plays a much

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larger role. At the organizational level, companies may set new goals in response to financial pressures – for example, companies that emphasized both compliance with regulations as well as profit may, when facing financial pressure, change their goals such that safety is not a high priority. When companies experience continued pressures, there may be a continual change in policies – over time, the moral code of the corporation erodes as illegitimate means replace legitimate ones and become integrated into the company’s culture (Simpson and Piquero 2002, 510–11; Vaughan 1982, 1382–83).2 Gunningham, Kagan, and Thornton’s (2003, 35) “license to operate” model focuses more on instrumental pressures that corporations face. Specifically, they argue that corporations operate under three external “licenses” – the social, the economic, and the legal. The social license includes pressures on corporations – or legitimization of corporate activities – stemming from community groups such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the media, or grassroots campaigns. The economic license encompasses the financial constraints/abundance that either allow the corporation to engage in beyond-compliance behavior or pressures them to cut corners and be in noncompliance. The legal license comprises pressures from regulatory agencies and law enforcement that serve to promote compliance. These external licenses do not act in isolation – they are thought to have both additive and interactive effects when influencing corporate behavior. Furthermore, these licenses are filtered through internal corporate culture and managerial attitudes. Corporate management reacts to these pressures and produces the final behavioral outcome. Macro-level Theories of Corporate Crime Macro-level theories attempt to explain why certain societies have more or less crime than other societies (i.e., differences in crime rates) as well as why behaviors considered to be crimes in one society are not

labeled as criminal in another society (i.e., the process of criminalization). Although criminalization is incredibly important,3 we focus on macro-level explanations for why some societies have more corporate crime than others. This section describes Political Economy theories as well as the macro-level version of Anomie Theory. Political Economy theories draw upon literature from economics, law, and political science to explain how political institutions, the political environment, and the economic system influence one another. One specific perspective falling under the Political Economy paradigm are Marxist theories of crime, which follow Karl Marx’s teachings and focus on how the power structure in capitalist societies are reinforced through the use of the law. This perspective also examines how individuals within socioeconomic strata respond to the conditions of a capitalist labor market. Specifically, Marxist theories argue that there are structural contradictions inherent to capitalist societies that promote crime. Capitalism requires mass consumption but also requires the presence of a lower class in which many people are unable to earn enough money to buy the things they want. Where capitalist processes produce social inequality, this social inequality leads to class conflict. With class conflict comes a need to control the working class, which is accomplished by keeping some people in poverty and also by creating laws that criminalize the behaviors of the working class – in other words, creating crime (Chambliss 1975, 150–51). Overall, scholars argue that capitalism demeans people, leads to commodification of tangible and intangible parts of the human experience, and encourages offending to obtain desired (but unaffordable) material goods (Friedrichs 2010, 240). While the lower class commits crime as a response to their oppression in this system (e.g., stealing to maintain a certain quality of life, committing violence as a response to demoralization), the upper class also commit crimes to maintain the power structure in society (e.g., corporate crimes that exploit and harm their workers, or bribery

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to manipulate legislation that benefits their business; Barnett 1981; Chambliss 1975, 154; Slapper and Tombs 1999; Vaughan 1982). It could also be argued that capitalist societies are particularly anomic, making a macro-level version of Anomie theory applicable to explaining why capitalist societies have more corporate crime. The inherent contradictions create blurred boundaries (normlessness) between what is considered to be acceptable business practices and which practices are defined as criminal. As Passas (1990, 157) states, “In an anomic environment, where there is a degree of uncertainty or confusion as to what is and is not acceptable, comparatively high rates of deviance can be expected.” One could argue that capitalist societies’ emphasis on profit maximization – not just making money, but making the most money one could possibly make – creates a “ceaseless striving for success” and undermines the value of achieving success through legitimate means (Passas 1990, 158). In a capitalist society, corporations are not only competing for the legitimate means by which to obtain financial success (e.g., access to supply chains, personnel, advertising space) but are also competing for the goal of endless profit maximization (Vaughan 1982, 1381–82). As mentioned above, such strains may actually impact corporations more than individuals because corporations’ reason for existing is to make a profit. The social structure creates the environment in which corporations operate, providing corporations with resources, opportunities, and pressures to make money. When resources are scarce, corporations may not be able to make money legitimately and may turn to offending. However, even when all corporations have access to legitimate means, not all corporations using legitimate means will be successful. The goal itself (material success) is distributed unevenly in capitalist societies (because of structural contradictions) and may lead to crime as companies seek to gain a competitive edge (Vaughan 1982, 1383). Furthermore, in societies where corporations are seen as integral to maintaining the societal structure (e.g., in the case of “Too

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Big to Fail” corporations; Pontell et al. 2014), enforcement for corporate crimes is not a priority for the criminal justice system and deviance is often dismissed as something to be expected in the course of normal activity. Passas (1990, 166) argues that when “business is business” is uttered in defence of law violations, the lines of what is legitimate and what is illegitimate get fuzzy. In anomic situations, offenders are in a better position to neutralize or rationalize their acts and at the same time preserve their self-esteem. With weakened support for lawful behavior, considerations of cost and profit take precedence over others.

Hence, by failing to stigmatize illegal corporate behaviors through criminal justice rituals, norm erosion continues and promotes further corporate malfeasance (see also Vaughan 1982). Integrated Theories of Corporate Crime In the 1980s, criminologists began to debate whether existing theories of crime were adequate while also noting that scholars were creating new theories rapidly (Bernard and Snipes 1996; Messner and Krohn 1989; Weisburd and Piquero 2008). Although many lauded the strengths of existing theories, they argued that the overall body of knowledge could be improved by either ridding the field of “falsified” theories or combining propositions from multiple theories to create more comprehensive explanations. A variety of integrated theories have attempted to explain corporate crime. Here, we describe one example – Braithwaite’s (1989) Reintegrative Shaming Theory. Reintegrative Shaming Theory (RST; Braithwaite 1989) is grounded in empirical research on corporate crime (Murphy and Harris 2007, 902; see, e.g., Fisse and Braithwaite 1983) and thus lends itself to explaining such behavior. RST integrates traditional criminological theories (including techniques of neutralization, social learning theory, labeling theory, and defiance theory) to explain the offending behavior of individuals and corporations as well as

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differences in crime rates between societies. The theory has been tested extensively (and supported) by Braithwaite and others in the corporate crime domain (e.g., Braithwaite 1989; Braithwaite and Drahos 2002; Makkai and Braithwaite 1994a, 1994b; van Erp 2011, 333–36; but see Levi 2002). This multilevel integration argues that societies high in communitarianism (i.e., characterized by strong social bonds and a connection around a common goal) are more likely to engage in “reintegrative” as opposed to “stigmatic” shaming in response to crime. At the corporate or individual level, people/ businesses who are treated with respect during the punishment process (i.e., reintegrative shaming) are more likely to comply with the law or regulatory expectations. Those people/businesses who are stigmatized during the punishment process are more likely to reject recommendations of law enforcement/regulatory agencies and continue to defy authority by offending. Braithwaite (2000, 290) argues that corporations are concerned about their reputations and are thus influenced by respectful shaming. If the corporations feel that regulators who inspect and sanction them are too harsh or disrespectful, they may be more likely to re-offend.

Strategies to Prevent and Respond to Corporate Malfeasance Theoretical explanations for corporate crime help simplify complex observations and identify predictors of malfeasance. With knowledge of important predictors, policies and programs can be designed to prevent initial cases of corporate malfeasance and also prevent its recurrence. This section outlines both preventive and intervention strategies together, since programs are often designed to both prevent and respond to offending. We will frame this discussion as moving from what happens inside the corporation to efforts by external parties. As such, we begin by discussing what corporations themselves do to promote compliance

among their employees and upper-level managers. We will then describe “informal” (i.e., non-governmental) mechanisms of control. Finally, we discuss “formal” controls – the actions of regulators, law enforcement, and legislators to address corporate malfeasance. Internal Compliance Programs (Self-Regulation) Self-regulation, or self-policing, occurs when the corporation takes steps to prevent and deter malfeasance within its own ranks. Within a company, an internal compliance program consists of strategies to monitor the behavior of employees and discipline discovered misconduct (Goldsmith and King 1997, 4–5; Huff 1996, 1252; Walsh and Pyrich 1994, 645–49). There are many instruments by which organizations monitor employee behavior and encourage compliance (e.g., ethics codes, trainings, internal audits, anonymous hotlines). Of course, it is imperative that the company actually implements those instruments and reacts when unethical behavior is discovered (Parker and Gilad 2011, 171; Parker and Nielsen 2008; Simpson 2002, 155). Top management is essential to any self-regulation program. Executives and upper-level managers may implicitly encourage noncompliance by emphasizing and rewarding profits over social responsibility – or may encourage overcompliance by rewarding innovative solutions to regulatory demands (Braithwaite 1982a, 727–31; Parker and Gilad 2011; Simpson 2002, 155). Many regulators and scholars express skepticism that corporations would actually develop and implement effective compliance programs – after all, what is the incentive to discover wrongdoing and expose oneself to potential sanctions? These skeptics assume that corporations are “amoral calculators” – that they offend based on a rational decision that prioritizes profit over other considerations. In fact, there is much evidence that corporations engage in preventive self-compliance programs because they feel ethically obligated to be in compliance (Gunningham et al. 2003, 101;

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Parker and Nielsen 2008, 4–8; Wu and Wirkkala 2009) and want to maintain a good reputation (Arora and Cason 1995, 285–86; Arora and Cason 1996, 431; Goldsmith and King 1997, 15; Gruner 1997, 1116–21; Wu and Wirkkala 2009). Of course, there may be an instrumental consideration as well – if a corporation demonstrates that its selfcompliance efforts are effective, they may be able to preempt more intrusive regulatory actions (Arora and Cason 1995, 284; Wu and Wirkkala 2009, 417). Furthermore, it is important to realize that regulatory agencies are severely constrained in the monitoring that they are capable of doing, given the enormity of the populations they are responsible for and the budget shortfalls they consistently experience (Friedrichs 2010, 289). Regulatory agencies need help from the corporations themselves, not just because their agents are overextended, but also because the corporations are in a better position to uncover wrongdoing. Self-monitoring can be more effective than agency inspections: employees are more knowledgeable about company procedures, the corporation has access to more employees for information gathering, and corporations can invoke more certain and fairly severe sanctions when noncompliance is detected (e.g., dismissal from work; Braithwaite 1982b, 1468–69). Of course, companies might implement a superficial internal compliance program to make it appear as though they are selfmonitoring, when in fact the compliance program is ineffective (Braithwaite 1982b, 1496–500). Thus, regulators remain important in ensuring that compliance programs are effective and are being implemented faithfully; they can also step in when noncompliance is detected to sanction parties more effectively (Braithwaite 1982b, 1501– 2; Simpson 2002, 100–102; Vaughan 1982, 1401–2). Gatekeepers One strategy that begins to bridge internal company dynamics and external environments is the use of “gatekeepers” – exter-

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nal parties who are often (but not always) hired by the companies themselves to assess corporate procedures and determine risks for (and actual occurrences of) noncompliance. Formally, gatekeepers are “private parties who are in a position to disrupt misconduct by withholding their cooperation from a wrongdoer” (Grabosky 1990, 74). The most obvious example is that of accounting firms in the financial services sector, although gatekeepers can be found in all industries (e.g., environmental consultants, corporate lawyers, health insurance companies). Gatekeepers serve in two main roles to promote compliance. First, they prevent corporate malfeasance by educating and advising the corporation. Second, they serve as “reputational intermediaries” that vouch for the company or the product based on their expert opinion – the public trusts their opinion because they think of gatekeepers as unbiased third parties. In addition to these services they provide for their clients, they may also be expected to report observed noncompliance to regulatory or enforcement authorities (Coffee 2006, 1–14; Kostant 2007, 537–48). Gatekeepers, therefore, are integral to the regulation of corporations as well as for the legitimation of corporations. When corporations themselves hire gatekeepers, it may be difficult for the gatekeeper to remain truly neutral. Monitoring a corporation in which one has a financial interest produces a “conflict of interest” whereby the gatekeeper may not adhere to high standards of practice because they fear losing business. The primary example is the role of the accounting firm, Arthur Andersen LLP, in the Enron accounting fraud – these accountants signed off on fraudulent reports and even shredded documents after discovery (Coffee 2006, 5–6; Eisenberg and Macey 2004, 289–93). Another problem is that social relationships develop when a gatekeeper works with the company for a long period of time. Finally, there has historically been little legal accountability for gatekeepers who fail to act on findings of noncompliance. One exception is the

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Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in the aftermath of the Enron scandal, which created penalties for gatekeepers who fail to disclose offending. However, in other gatekeeping industries, legal accountability is wanting or ambiguous (Coffee 2006, 366–74; Laby 2006, 140–63; Rodwin 1995). Informal and Formal Mechanisms of Corporate Control There are three primary domains of control that are fully external to (i.e., acting on) corporations. As conceptualized by Gunningham et al. (2003, 17) in their “license to operate” model, these include social controls, economic controls, and legal controls. Social controls and economic controls can be thought of as “informal” in the sense that they don’t employ legal sanctions to motivate compliance or punish noncompliance. Instead, these two domains work by manipulating the corporation’s reputation and/or financial incentives. Social controls are the constraints on the corporation from non-political groups such as the media, labeling programs, community members and NGOs. Note that these are different from gatekeepers because they are not paid to monitor corporations – they support or withdraw support from corporations because of a completely independent assessment. These groups can publicize a corporation’s noncompliance or, indeed, their overcompliance – the potential for reputational damage or promotion can greatly influence corporate behavior. Economic controls are the financial constraints or capabilities of the corporation – these are considered external because, often, the corporation faces financial constraints as a result of larger economic issues or external demands. Financial constraints (e.g., shareholder pressures, high costs of compliance, competitive pressures) may render a corporation unable or unwilling to comply with regulations, while an abundance of resources (or pressures from financial stakeholders) may allow a corporation to innovate and go above and beyond what is required (Gunningham et al. 2004,

320–24; Thornton et al. 2009, 419–31). The main take-away from Gunningham et al.’s line of research is that scholars must look at more than just legal deterrence – much research finds that legal considerations are often less salient to corporate managers than reputational and economic considerations (Gunningham et al. 2003, 145; Gunningham et al. 2004, 322, 336–37; Gunningham et al. 2005, 310–13; Kagan et al. 2003, 83; Thornton et al. 2007, 28). That is not to imply that legal considerations are not important. In fact, legal mandates can coerce compliance in the face of economic constraints and when social pressures are lacking (Thornton et al. 2009, 429). Legal controls over corporate malfeasance involve regulatory agencies as well as law enforcement agencies. These systems often work together and complement each other, but tend to operate under very different goals and assumptions about corporations. Specifically, regulatory agencies generally seek to “motivate compliance” while law enforcement agencies seek to “punish anti-social behaviors.” Again, though, both groups are part of the same legal system addressing corporate malfeasance and work together quite often – it may be more appropriate to think of regulation and enforcement as a continuum (Braithwaite et al. 1987, 344–45; Simpson 2002, 93–94, 95–97). Regulatory agencies are responsible for monitoring corporate behavior and promoting compliance within their particular domain – the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for monitoring environmental compliance, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for food and drug safety, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is responsible for worker safety, etc. Regulatory agents inspect companies and document deficiencies/violations. The agencies are responsible for creating rules that corporations must follow as well as the applicable sanctions when regulations are violated. Regulatory agencies can impose direct sanctions (e.g., cease and desist orders), civil fines, or can refer the case

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for criminal prosecution (Braithwaite et al. 1987, 325; Friedrichs 2010, 287). It is generally recognized that a completely “free market” is untenable – some regulation is necessary to promote social responsibility over profit maximization, decrease information asymmetry between businesses and the public, and actually benefit businesses by enhancing their legitimacy and certainty that they are doing the right thing (Henry 2008; McGarity 2013, 30–32; Rees 1997, 483–87; Snider 1987, 58). However, there are also limitations to regulatory processes that must be recognized. Some scholars argue that stringent regulations limit innovation and result in less hiring/growth. Others note that the US regulatory system drives companies out of the country to less-regulated territories. In addition to the regulatory system generally, regulatory agencies themselves are flawed – agency administrators are appointed by the current US president and therefore may bring certain ideological commitments that compromise neutrality. Agency administrators, being politically appointed, may also not have the expertise required for the domain in which they are working. The employees of these agencies are not paid as highly as similarly situated employees in the private sector, which makes it difficult for agencies to recruit top-tier experts. Perhaps most importantly, these agencies are understaffed and underfunded, yet have very broad mandates with many attendant responsibilities. Their ability to adequately monitor and respond to noncompliance is greatly compromised by the lack of funding and manpower (Friedrichs 2010, 289; Shapiro and Steinzor 2007, 1742; Steinzor 2013, 1147; Steinzor 2014, 21–26). Despite these flaws, it is obvious that regulators have successfully reduced rampant corporate malfeasance (Snider 1987, 54–57). They have done so, at the ground level at least, through a flexible approach involving both cooperation as well as coercion as the situation demands. Although it is recognized that punitive sanctions are a necessary part of controlling corporate malfea-

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sance, it is increasingly accepted that cooperation and persuasion is an important component (see, e.g., Rorie et al. 2015a, 18; Stafford 2012, 553–54; Toffel and Short 2011). This can best be conceptualized in terms of Ayres and Braithwaite’s (1992, 2002, 2011) “Responsive Regulation” approach, which recommends responding to initial corporate offending using persuasive approaches that attempt to educate and instill a normative desire to comply. Such approaches may include: assistance in designing an internal compliance program, issuing publicly available letters about the noncompliance, recruiting third parties to assist in problem solving or monitoring, and generally providing assistance to help fix problems leading to noncompliance. However, agencies must be able to legitimately threaten formal sanctions should noncompliance continue (what they call a “benign big gun”) as well as actually escalate sanctions. Part of such an escalation is the use of civil or criminal sanctions – including “parallel proceedings” (Longest 1987) where both types of sanctions are used in a single case. However, most corporate offending is punished through the administrative system, which has a lower burden of proof than the criminal justice system (Friedrichs 2010, 262, 353). There are many obstacles in pursuing a criminal case against a corporation: the corporation’s complex structure makes it difficult to assign responsibility; prosecutors lack resources to pursue these complicated, long, and intensive criminal cases; it is difficult to establish mens rea (a necessary component for most serious charges); corporate defendants are typically able to afford effective defense lawyers; police agencies tend to target conventional crimes/individual offenders because of their training; victims of corporate crime are less likely to realize they’ve been victimized or push for criminal prosecution; prosecutors may feel that criminal sanctions are unnecessary or undesirable because of the alternative sanctions available to punish corporate offenders; and, finally, corporations are often seen as a major contributor to the fiscal well-being of the community or society

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(Benson and Cullen 1998; Brown 2003, 526– 29; Simpson 2002, 73–75). Despite obstacles, prosecution of corporations is occurring more often as the public has become more aware of these crimes and has increasingly called for criminal sanctions. Public outrage results in increased resources for prosecutors to pursue such cases. There has also been increasing cooperation between regulators and prosecutors in the form of task forces (Benson and Cullen 1998, 195–226; Ramirez 2010). Cooperation is incredibly important to resolve corporate offending cases because such cases are disguised in routine legitimate activities. They are, by their nature, hidden and difficult to detect – especially by law enforcement personnel who may not have the training to identify corporate malfeasance. Most corporate malfeasance comes to the attention of law enforcement through whistleblowers within the company, regulatory inspections, or individual/other business complaints (Brown 2003, 530–34; Ermann and Lundman 1978, 62–64). Agencies other than law enforcement (e.g., professional associations, consumer groups, regulatory agencies) are in a better position to receive such complaints and pass them along for criminal prosecution when deemed necessary. However, there has been skepticism among scholars about a relatively recent strategy used by federal prosecutors – specifically, “Deferred Prosecution Agreements” (DPAs) or “Nonprosecution Agreements” (NPAs). When a DPA or an NPA is in place, the prosecutor lists requirements that the corporation must adopt as a part of coming back into compliance – if the company meets all of those requirements, the prosecutor will not pursue a criminal case. DPAs are approved by courts and subject to judicial review; with NPAs, no criminal complaint is filed (Alexander and Cohen 2015, 538–45; US GPO 2009, “Testimony of the Honorable David W. Nahmias”). Proponents of these alternatives to prosecution argue that these agreements promote compliance more effectively because corporations are not taking a defensive posi-

tion; allow corporations to avoid the stigma associated with criminal sanctioning; result in appropriately severe sanctions; and save taxpayers money by avoiding costly trials (Alexander and Cohen 2015, 538–45; Gallagher 2009, 460–62; Kaal and Lacine 2014, 3–4). Skeptics of these strategies argue that corporations are being treated differently by those in government because of their status in society (a belief that reduces legitimacy and increases mistrust of government); that stigma is appropriate and necessary to prevent future offending by both the specific corporation as well as other potential offenders; and that companies are not severely punished by the relatively small fines/costs of compliance accompanying such agreements (often far less than what was earned or saved by engaging in crime; Alexander and Cohen 2015, 538–45; Gallagher 2009, 471; Uhlmann 2013). In addition, when cases are settled out of court, there is no potential for case law to clarify existing legal ambiguities – clarification that may deter future offending. Prosecutions are more likely to occur in certain cases, such as those that involve more financial or physical harm; that involve more victims; and in which the prosecutor thinks the likelihood of trial success is higher (Benson and Cullen 1998, 153–71; Wray and Hur 2006, 1098–101). When a prosecution/indictment does occur, it implies that prosecution is particularly likely to serve as a deterrent to others and that the case against the corporation is particularly strong (Benson and Cullen 1998, 153–71). As such, there may be strong incentives to plead guilty in exchange for sentencing leniency – research estimates that 90– 95 percent of white-collar offenders plead guilty as opposed to going to trial, a similar proportion to that seen among conventional offenders (O’Hear 2004, 152). The literature indicates that most corporate crime cases do not go through a criminal trial – they are either handled through the civil or regulatory systems, settled through a non- or deferred prosecution agreement, or settled through a guilty plea. As such, there is not much information on

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how corporations are sentenced. As stated in Simpson (2013, 321–22), Few studies of corporate crime sentencing use data from across justice systems (e.g., criminal cases, regulatory agencies, and civil/administrative courts) to explore questions of sentencing disparity, and no research of which I am aware follows cases from initial point of contact with the justice system through sentencing outcomes. These studies are especially important for understanding how cases are moved forward and which cases are diverted from the justice process, but data limitations make this task difficult, if not impossible.

Despite such limitations, scholars have examined how the public views corporate sentencing (e.g., Cullen et al. 2009), whether corporate offenders received more lenient sentences than other types of offenders (e.g., Hagan 1982), the consequences of criminal sanctions for managers (e.g., Karpoff et al. 2008) and whether sentences for corporate offenders became more punitive after the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines were put in place (e.g., Parker and Atkins 1999). That said, the lack of data precludes strong conclusions about the effectiveness of criminal sentencing in reducing corporate malfeasance. Need for Multiple Prevention and Intervention Strategies One consistent finding in the literature is that legal enforcement is inadequate as an isolated control mechanism. The variability in characteristics of corporations and their behaviors makes it unlikely that a “one-size-fits-all” approach will work (see Schell-Busey et al. 2016). Corporate characteristics make it easier for some to be in compliance than others, different industries involve different incentives and pressures, and top managers in different companies are motivated by different factors. To address such heterogeneity, a comprehensive but flexible approach to preventing and punishing corporations is desirable. An example of such an approach is the

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“enforcement pyramid” paradigm initially put forth by Ayres and Braithwaite (1992, 35–41), but elaborated on by Gunningham et al. (1998, 398–421) and again by Braithwaite et al. (2007, 305–33). The initial conceptualization of the enforcement pyramid used Game Theory to demonstrate that cooperation in the face of an initial violation in turn promotes cooperation by the corporation and a normative desire to remain in compliance with regulations. However, should initial cooperation fail to promote compliance, the regulatory agency should become increasingly punitive (e.g., use a civil penalty, then a criminal penalty, and ultimately seek revocation of the corporation’s license; Ayres and Braithwaite 1992, 35–41). Gunningham et al. (1998, 398–421) elaborated on this idea to include third parties as well as strategies by the corporation itself – their three-dimensional model described how non-legal entities could escalate informal sanctions independently from or in conjunction with regulatory agencies. Finally, Braithwaite et al. (2007, 305– 33) modified the enforcement pyramid to account for empirical findings demonstrating that corporate compliance is not just impacted by sanctions, but by rewards as well. Their “dual pyramids” model recommends that sanctioning parties begin with a “strengths-based pyramid” (build on the corporation’s strengths) before engaging in sanctions to address continuing problems. With the strengths-based pyramid, the focus moves from fixing problems to rewarding innovative and dynamic solutions (for a more detailed review of Responsive Regulation, see Rorie 2015).

Conclusions It’s clear that, in an increasingly globalized economy characterized by transnational corporations, the power of corporations must be critically examined. The potential scope of harm resulting from unfettered profit maximization is ever expanding; the global society must work together to protect citizens, workers, consumers, and the

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environment. Such examination of corporate misbehavior requires rigorous study involving systematic and consistent data collection. At this point, such efforts have been inadequate even at a national level (Simpson and Yeager 2015), much less on an international scope. The research community has an obligation to push enforcement agencies and corporations to provide data to scholars. With such data, researchers will be better able to understand the conditions under which offending (or, conversely, socially responsible behavior) occurs. A key impediment to research on corporate malfeasance is definitional ambiguity. As discussed above, what is meant by “corporate malfeasance” remains a matter of debate. When scholars examine dissimilar behaviors from one study to the next, the discipline is unable to truly build knowledge. We recommend that corporate crime scholars adopt similar definitional components – or a specific definition – from which they can launch data collection efforts. Such a definition should clearly state that the purpose of the crime is to benefit the corporation and not solely for individual greed. Additionally, given that most corporate malfeasance is not processed in the criminal justice system, it is important that the definition include violations of regulatory or civil statutes as well as criminal violations. Only by improving research efforts can we promote change in corporate behaviors – currently, strategies and policies are often created as a reaction to specific, highly publicized, scandals. Such an approach fails to recognize that crimes being handled in the public eye are not representative of crimes generally and – in turn – fails to examine important considerations in regulation (e.g., whether regulatory agencies become less effective over time as corporate behaviors change, whether corporations act differently when considering long- versus shortterm outcomes). By reacting to only the most extreme cases, the policies created take a haphazard approach unlikely to be effective on corporate behavior generally.

By clarifying the behavior of interest, focusing on collecting original data, and using rigorous research methods, scholars will be able to better explain corporate crime and policy makers will be able to impact the unique characteristics that promote corporate malfeasance.

Glossary Corporate crime The conduct of a corporation or employees acting on behalf of a corporation, which is proscribed and punishable by law. Criminogenic tiers Levels within one industry creating/responding to pressures for financial gain that result in malfeasance. Economic license Financial constraints/ abundance that either allow the corporation to engage in beyond-compliance behavior or pressures them to cut corners and be in noncompliance. Individual economic losses Direct monetary damages accrued by individual victims of offending. Legal license Pressures from regulatory agencies and law enforcement that serve to promote compliance. Responsive regulation A regulatory strategy encouraging a persuasive/cooperative response to initial corporate offending and an escalation in sanctions as malfeasance continues. Social license Pressures on corporations stemming from community groups such as NGOs, the media, or grassroots campaigns. Societal economic losses Economic losses to society as a whole resulting from malfeasance.

Notes 1. A reviewer noted that all behaviors done to benefit corporations are generally done for personal benefit as well. While many corporate crimes might benefit the employees committing them (e.g., through

corporate malfeasance as a social problem promotion or salary enhancement), there are many cases where the employee making the offending decision does not directly benefit and does not expect to do so (e.g., where middle managers are instructed to behave a certain way by their supervisors). 2. A reviewer noted that the likelihood of corporate offending may differ depending on whether they prioritize a long-term financial outcome as opposed to short-term profit maximization. It may be that, instead of norm erosion, a focus on long-term outlooks (and a concurrent emphasis on quality products/services) to build one’s reputation can protect against the short-term pressure on corporate officers to constantly demonstrate their ability to produce earnings each quarter. Aside from a discussion about long- versus shortterm goals in Bardach and Kagan (1982, 64– 65) and Pearce and Tombs (1991, 420–24), the author is unaware of empirical research testing this assertion. 3. For an excellent Political Economy perspective on the criminalization of corporate crime, see Snider (1987).

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CHAPTER 14

The Construction of School Bullying as a Social Problem Jeffrey W. Cohen and Robert A. Brooks

Abstract During the early twenty-first century, school bullying emerged as a social problem of epidemic proportions within academic, news media, and public discourse in the United States. Bullying has been linked to other social problems, such as mass school shootings and youth suicide. In this chapter we trace the evolution of school bullying as a social problem within academia and news media. We identify how this discourse has expanded the conceptualization and domain of school bullying and has stirred public hysteria. We also discuss how conflicting explanations of school bullying have led to confused responses at the individual, institutional, and sociocultural levels. Finally, we argue that efforts to reduce school bullying have criminalized youth behavior. We offer suggestions for a more effective approach to bullying research and prevention.

Social problems of whatever perceived seriousness are socially constructed and thus arouse contention. One type of social problem consists of commonplace behaviors that result in limited harm or that are so widespread that they are thought to be intractable. School bullying is one such social problem. It poses special challenges to claimsmakers because they must problematize a widespread, frequently accepted (or tolerated) behavior, thus making it difficult to develop a “motivational frame,” that is, a “call to arms or a rationale for action” (Snow and Benford 1988, 202). It was initially difficult to build a social movement around school bullying, but eventually a series of

“moral shocks” (see Jasper and Poulsen 1995), including mass violence and suicides linked to bullying, created a shift in public consciousness. These moral shocks became self-perpetuating as news media framed the issue, drawing connections across multiple social problems (i.e., bullying, school shootings, and suicides) and creating the need “to actively seek out claimsmakers because the meaning of the world [was] challenged” (Loseke 2003, 59). The emergence of school bullying as a social problem may initially appear to be highly contingent but it was preceded by the activities of individuals within the news media who drew conclusions from

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academic research on the harms of bullying. Such evidence took time to be of concern to the general public. European scholars were first to acknowledge the harms associated with school bullying, following two bullying-related suicides that occurred in Norway in the 1970s. These suicides are widely regarded as the impetus for foundational studies of school bullying conducted by Dan Olweus in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see, e.g., Beaty and Alexeyev 2008; Griffin and Gross 2004; Hoover and Stenhjem 2003; Kochenderfer-Ladd and Troop-Gordon 2010; Schoen and Schoen 2010; Smith 2004; Stassen Berger 2007). The origin of scholarly interest in school bullying in the United States is linked to widespread news media attention following the mass shootings at Columbine High School in 1999. Not long after, Tonja Nansel and colleagues (2001) published the first national study of prevalence rates of bullying in the United States. This study continues to be cited as evidence of bullying as a social problem worthy of serious concern. Beginning with Olweus’s early work in Norway, the definition of bullying among scholars has coalesced around three elements: repetition, a power imbalance, and harm (see Carrera et al. 2011; Greene 2000; Griffin and Gross 2004; Stassen Berger 2007). For instance, in their later work Olweus and colleagues define bullying as “intentional, repeated, negative (unpleasant or hurtful) behavior by one or more persons directed against a person who has difficulty defending himself or herself” (Olweus and Limber 2010, 125). News media have relied on research studies and experts to provide evidence in support of school bullying as a serious and growing social problem. At the same time, these studies and experts have expanded and distorted Olweus’s definition. In this sense, the construction of school bullying as a social problem emerges at the nexus of scholarly, news media, and popular discourses. To analyze this nexus, we conducted a large-scale study of news media coverage of school bullying in the United States from 1992 to mid-2015 (Cohen

and Brooks 2014). This chapter presents a general overview of our findings and links them to other academic research on bullying.

The Rising Tide From its emergence as a topic of concern within the United States, news media have presented school bullying as a rapidly growing and increasingly harmful social problem. Evoking the language and imagery of epidemiology, many among the news media escalated fear of youth violence and bullying among school personnel, policy makers, and the public. Casting school bullying as a social problem required the creation of a motivational frame that solidified it as an epidemic. The first moral shock emerged as fears of bullied youth committing mass school shootings increased in the late 1990s. We refer to the linking of mass school shootings and bullying victimization as the “time bomb frame” because bullying victims were viewed as ticking time bombs whose prolonged victimization would soon cause them to explode through some form of mass violence. A second moral shock surfaced after a perceived wave of bullying-related suicides (referred to hereafter as “bullycides”) occurred. With each moral shock, impetus to address the epidemic of school bullying increased. The epidemic narrative elevated the discourse of school bullying to the critical point. News commentators who constructed the epidemic frame and those who challenged it drew from the same studies on the national prevalence of bullying in the United States. For example, early in our study news media reported that “160,000 children stay home from school every day because they’re – they’re fearful of going to school, either physically or – or scared that they’ll be teased and tormented” (NBC’s Today, April 16, 1997). Nearly two decades later, speaking on the O’Reilly Factor, a Fox News contributor made the same claim when discussing school bullying: “I agree it’s an absolute epidemic. Every day, 160,000

construction of school bullying as a social problem

kids skip school because they are bullied” (June 12, 2015). This statistic originated from one question on the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) annual Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey that asks middle and high school students, “During the past 30 days, on how many days did you not go to school because you felt you would be unsafe at school or on your way to or from school?” (emphasis in original). It is notable that responses to this question have remained relatively stable, leading the CDC (2013) to conclude, “Among students nationwide, the prevalence of having not gone to school because of safety concerns did not change significantly during 1993–2011” (9). Notwithstanding the CDC’s conclusion, news media and expert claimsmakers consistently presented this and other statistics as evidence of the growing epidemic of school bullying. When the 2011 CDC report indicated a decline in youth violence (including bullying) from 2003 levels, news media and experts diverted the discourse to support the existing narrative. For instance, in their report of the findings, the CBS Evening News identified something “even more concerning to researchers,” that “an estimated two hundred fifty thousand bullying victims were carrying guns, knives, and clubs to school within the last thirty days of the survey being conducted” (May 4, 2014). Other news outlets brought back fears of time bombs and maintaining the idea of an epidemic. That the news media constructed an exaggerated and misleading epidemic narrative should not discount the very real problem that bullying represents for individuals, schools, and society as a whole. School bullying has both short- and long-term effects that impact the lives of innumerable children and adults. However, as we point out later in this chapter, the persistent construction of school bullying as a growing epidemic has increased calls for problematic and ill-formed mechanisms of social control – such as zero tolerance and other exclusionary school discipline policies – that do more harm than good.

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School bullying as a social problem has been maintained through the expanding range of harms associated with bullying victimization. Early harms associated with school bullying were relatively muted in the US news media. While recognizing that some victims of bullying experience more serious trauma than others, the general message was that the majority of youth are able to deal with its “minimal and transitory” effects (New York Times, October 28, 1993). The earliest expansion of bullying’s harms occurred in conjunction with the first moral shock that propelled school bullying into the headlines – time bombs. The time bomb frame has become so entrenched in popular discourse that news media continue to evoke it in response to school shootings. For instance, in initial coverage of a 2014 school shooting in a New Mexico middle school, a CBS correspondent stated: “while the motive here is still unknown, police are investigating some claims that the student may have been the victim of bullying” (Evening News, January 14, 2014). Subsequent coverage of this shooting across multiple news outlets continued to draw on the time bomb narrative even though there had yet been no evidence of the shooter having been bullied. Initial coverage of a 2014 stabbing spree at a Pittsburgharea high school also drew on the time bomb frame and directly linked the spree to previous incidents that fit the narrative: “Police are investigating school yard rumors that he was bullied. This young assailant joins perpetrators of mass violence in the past. Columbine in Colorado; Paducah, Kentucky; Sandy Hook; Newtown, Connecticut” (ABC’s Weekly News, April 9, 2014). Even with these shooting and stabbing sprees, the time bomb frame was not enough to maintain the narrative of bullying as an epidemic. This was likely because mass school shootings, while increasing, remain rare occurrences. In early constructions of school bullying as a social problem, bullycides were also presented as uncommon occurrences. For instance, a reporter on ABC’s 20/20 said in 1995: “It is rare

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that a child commits suicide in response to being teased and harassed” (April 28, 1995). Less than fifteen years later, bullycides were widely reported, and the criminal justice system directly linked school bullying and youth suicide, giving significant momentum to constructing school bullying as an epidemic. In particular, the criminal prosecution of alleged bullies involved in the suicides of fifteen-year-old Phoebe Prince and college freshman Tyler Clementi in 2010 ignited widespread news media coverage and served to more fully entrench the bullycide discourse. Following the prolonged news media coverage of these incidents, bullycide became the new characterization of the bullying epidemic. Similar to the time bomb narrative, the purported increase in bullycides dominated the construction of school bullying as a social problem. Suicide was now consistently mentioned as an expected outcome of bullying victimization, leading a reporter to claim, “kids are being bullied literally to death” (CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, January 26, 2011). So accepted was the bullycide discourse that responses to suicide and bullying were often conflated. Concurrent with time bombs and bullycides, news media also expanded the range of types of individuals who were brought into the fold as potential victims of bullying. There was greater attention paid to secondary victims including individuals who were not directly victimized, schools, families, and communities. Witnesses to bullying were “more likely to skip school or abuse alcohol” (New York Times, March 1, 2012) and “suffer from the same type of morbidity and potential mortality” as direct victims (NPR’s Talk of the Nation, December 2, 2012). Schools were also regarded as secondary victims. For instance, the New York Times (March 1, 2012) cited a study that found “that when a school has a climate of bullying, it’s not just the targeted kids who suffer – the entire school lags academically.” Families were also considered victims. Emotional language was used when speaking with the families of bullying victims, especially those whose children allegedly died by

bullycide. Speaking to an uncle of alleged bullycide victim Paige Moravetz, a CNN anchor reported that the suicide occurred after Paige’s parents had left for a vacation in Hawaii and continued: “I can’t imagine what they are going through. It boggles my mind to end up in Hawaii and find out this horror happened to your own daughter. Can you tell us how they’re faring?” (Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell, April 21, 2011). The emergence of the bullycide epidemic in news media pointed to the long-term effects of school bullying. For example, a journalist stated: “researchers are just beginning to understand how the effects of abuse stay with victims into young adulthood, middle age, and even retirement” (NPR’s Talk of the Nation, December 2, 2010). Not only did news media and experts pay greater attention to the long-term effects of bullying, people frequently contacted news outlets to discuss how their bullying victimization continued to haunt them as adults. For example, one listener tweeted to CNN’s Sunday Morning (April 1, 2012), that he had developed PTSD, panic attacks, and depression, and asked: “Is there help and support for the adult survivors of bullying?” Research supports lingering long-term consequences of bullying (see, e.g., Lereya et al. 2015; Sigurdson et al. 2015; Sigurdson, Wallander, and Sund 2014; Ttofi et al. 2011; Wolke et al. 2013; Wolke and Lereya 2015). Expanding the definition and the harms associated with school bullying and linking them to time bombs and bullycides allowed school bullying to emerge as a serious social problem. Like a virus, bullying was purported to be spreading from community to community until no one was safe. The construction of school bullying as an epidemic evoked public fear. Once the epidemic frame was established, the discourse of school bullying began to expand.

Domain Expansion Everyday troubles must be seen as increasingly serious and harmful in order to be maintained as social problems. In the case

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of bullying, commentators urged schools to no longer accept bullying as merely a rite of passage (e.g., CBS’s Morning News, October 27, 2010). But they also declared that the rite of passage had become more dangerous. It was common to find claims such as this one: “Bullying is not what most of us remember, getting pushed around by a jerk once or twice[.] Bullying is torture, it’s daily, it goes on for years, it’s a systemic way of breaking down a human being and it’s very damaging” (ABC’s Good Morning America, June 14, 2008). Even President Barak Obama noted that bullying should no longer “be treated as an inevitable part of growing up . . . especially when it follows [students] from school to their phone to their computer screen” (CNN’s Newsroom, March 9, 2011). Domain expansion occurs when a troubling condition is redefined by claimsmakers to encompass a wider array of cases (e.g., Best 1987). For example, Weitzer (2007) demonstrated how the social problem of sex trafficking expanded to include prostitution – even when legally sanctioned – and then pornography. Best (1990) delineated the process by which the domain of the rather narrow “battered child” typification was expanded first to “child abuse” and then further to “child abuse and neglect.” This expansion brings more supporters to the cause. It also benefits advocates whose concerns have been newly incorporated because their concerns are given new legitimacy and more exposure. Bullying’s domain expanded by broadening its conceptualization. Bullying was expanded down to include mutual teasing and “roughhousing” and was expanded up to include serious criminal offenses. Bullying also was expanded out by including more students as potential bullies and victims. By the end of our study period in mid-2015 it was regularly being defined across many unrelated areas of social life, from the trivial to the tragic.

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power imbalance – to actual behavior creates challenges, including how to differentiate among teasing, aggressive play, fighting, hazing, and bullying. One often-cited guide to bullying prevention says: “It can be difficult to determine if a situation is rough-and-tumble play, real fighting, or bullying,” because a fight may be caused by a victim finally fighting back against prolonged bullying, and “an episode that both parties claim is ‘fun’ or ‘innocent play’ may actually be bullying” (Olweus Bullying Prevention Program 2007). To discern among these behaviors, school administrators and teachers could ask the students to explain their behavior, taking into account its context. Instead the guide recommends taking a general approach: “You may want to prohibit any of these behaviors in your school or on school grounds, whether they are actually rough-and-tumble play, fighting, or bullying.” The guide further recommends that it is “very important that you and other staff intervene immediately to stop any inappropriate or suspicious behavior, even though it sometimes may not be aggressive in nature but rather a somewhat noisy but basically friendly interaction” (7). The guide advocates for a universal response to quite disparate behaviors that dismisses the three elements that the guide’s creator, Dan Olweus, established. For instance, “consensual” fighting may not involve a power differential, and roughand-tumble play involves none of the three elements. The risk of conflation extends to other potentially unproblematic behaviors such as mutual teasing (which lacks all the elements of bullying) as well as arguments and “drama” that may lack a power differential and/or repeated behavior. A consequence of this downward definitional expansion is that behaviors not previously associated with bullying have been elevated in seriousness. Expanding Up

Expanding Down Applying the three elements of bullying – negative behavior, repetition, and a

As concerns about school bullying escalated, its conceptualization expanded up, by including serious behaviors that had

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previously been considered crimes. In doing so, news media expanded bullying’s harms by paradoxically de-physicalizing and hyperphysicalizing bullying. The media dephysicalized bullying by emphasizing the harm of verbal threats, social exclusion, and taunting by “mean girls.” Various mental health problems were tied to bullying, including anxiety, depression, and suicidality. Cyberbullying in particular emerged as a dominant frame through which school bullying was de-physicalized. Victims were said to be tormented or terrorized and unable to avoid the onslaught due to the ubiquity of social media. Paradoxically, the lack of a clear understanding of what constitutes cyberbullying allowed news media to expand cyberbullying up to include physical dangers such as predatory violent sex crimes. ABC’s Nightline warned of “serious criminals online” who posed risks of “sexual assaults, even murder” (April 20, 2010). Also encompassed under the concept of “cyberbullying” was the puzzling habit of kids posting videos of fistfights to social media sites (e.g., CNN’s Jane Velez-Mitchell, February 9, 2010), which also served to define bullying up and to re-physicalize it. A confusing assertion emerged that verbal bullying was more intense and harmful than physical bullying, but that physical bullying was taking on new and dangerous forms. In fact, news media sometimes labeled as bullying violence that occurred between youth who had shared no prior aggressive behavior or previous contact. Thus news media returned to their original focus on bullying as physical violence while also doing away with the definitional requirement of repetition. For instance, there was widespread coverage of an attack on Michael Brewer, a fifteen-year-old whom classmates doused with alcohol, set on fire, and left for dead. One reporter called the attack on Brewer “the bullying story that transfixed and horrified parents across the nation” (ABC’s Nightline, August 23, 2010) while a psychologist on another program claimed: “I don’t think this is new. To some extent this is an extreme form of bullying” (ABC’s Good Morning America, October 10, 2009). In combination with the trend

toward bullying expanding down, a wide range of behaviors including minor scuffles, mutual teasing, and verbal, emotional, and physical bullying, were elevated to the level of serious forms of violence. Expanding Out In the process of expanding out, news media discovered new classes of bullies and victims while also generalizing bullying so as to depict most school children as being involved in the behavior. The purported rise in bullying by so-called mean girls was a common theme. Also, the media’s reporting of bullying of sexual minority youth (SMY) dramatically increased in 2010 after the suicide of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi. Clementi, a freshman, leaped from a bridge after his roommate had streamed video of Clementi’s sexual encounter with another man. The media assembled several stories of SMY bullycides that occurred in the weeks and months before and after Clementi’s suicide, creating an epidemic narrative. Attention to sexual minority youth declined significantly by mid-2011, but beginning in 2013 reports began to focus on the particular troubles of transgender youth. New victims emerged. In 2008 there were reports of kids who were Muslim (or perceived to be) or from the Middle East, being bullied (CNN’s Newsroom, November 16, 2011; NBC’s Dateline, May 6, 2012). Stories about the bullying of kids with red hair – ginger abuse – ran in several media (e.g., ABC’s Primetime Live, February 22, 2011; CNN’s American Morning, March 24, 2011). Children with food allergies were also said to be at high risk of being bullied (e.g., New York Times, December 1, 2009; CNN’s American Morning, March 24, 2011). A study in 2013 that identified longterm harms in sibling bullying was widely reported (e.g., CNN’s Newsroom, June 17, 2013; CBS’s This Morning, June 22, 2013). At the same time that new types of victims were being constructed, the media also claimed that any young person that departed from the “stereotypical kid” and who had “even the slightest abnormalities” could be victimized (respectively, CNN’s

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The Joy Behar Show, May 13, 2010; and ABC’s Good Morning America, April 14, 2011). Similar claims were made in the academic literature. For instance, LiepeLevinson and Levinson (2005) wrote that “targets of bullies can be ‘large,’ ‘small,’ ‘bright,’ ‘not so bright,’ ‘attractive,’ ‘not so attractive,’ ‘popular,’ ‘unpopular,’ etc. What they all have in common is being the target of bullies” (7). The resultant tautology is that victims are students whom bullies target. There were also claims that any youth could be both a bully and a victim. Such sweeping assertions were bolstered by wide dissemination and misinterpretation of a study commissioned by CNN and conducted by Robert Faris and Diane Felmlee (2011a). The two sociologists concluded that peer aggression is a nearly universal, functional, and normative process by which students jockey for power and status, a finding that was similar to that of other research they had conducted in North Carolina (Faris and Felmlee 2011b). In discussing the CNN study’s findings, Faris noted: “A lot of these aggressive behaviors are really rooted in the desire for status. It’s about climbing these social hierarchies” (CNN special Bullying: It Stops Here, October 9, 2011). Faris acknowledged on the same show that there were two types of bullying patterns. One is where young people collectively torment “a vulnerable kid who’s a little bit different in some way, who’s kind of violated some of the unwritten codes of social life in a school.” The other is where “kids are using [bullying] a little more tactically to climb these social hierarchies.” Faris stated that: “We need to direct more attention to how aggression is interwoven into the social fabric of these schools” (New York Times, February 15, 2011). However, these two types of bullying require significantly different responses. Nevertheless, most media commentators blurred these differences in a kind of “diagnostic expansion” (see Fuller 2011) of school bullying. While this characterization of school bullying as competition over social status has some intuitive appeal, there are significant problems with labeling such widespread behavior as bullying. First, por-

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traying bullying as normative may quickly transition into normal behavior, giving children the sense that bullying is not problematic. Second, while this notion of bullying does consider the school context, it ignores the larger social contributors to bullying, such as the use of bullying to reinforce cultural discourse related to gender and sexuality. Third, this broadening of the conceptualization may neglect patterns of bullying and victimization that do not fit the social jockeying narrative. Finally, this construction of school bullying risks imploding. As we discussed elsewhere (Cohen and Brooks 2014), besides claiming that the majority of youth are bullies and victims, the media reported that kids can bully unconsciously and also through inaction, and can even bully themselves. The concept becomes everything and therefore means nothing. Expanding Across The news media have long reflected popular opinion in describing bullying as consisting of a variety of negative behaviors exhibited in sports, politics, business, and interpersonal relationships. It has even been applied to animal behavior and inanimate phenomena such as the weather. Bullying has long been a catch-all term for any perceived form of abuse of power, regardless of quality or quantity (see Horton 2006). What was different about the later news media coverage is that school bullying became the new standard by which to judge many forms of perceived injustices or unfairness. We found claims that the singing of Christmas carols in school constituted bullying. A backlash arose around bullying’s expanded conceptualization. In addition to the four types of domain expansion described here, the purported causes of school bullying also showed a pattern of collapse.

Shifting Explanations of Bullying Early causal explanations of school bullying focused on individual pathology with roots in psychological maladjustment and physical differences. Eventually explanations

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shifted to parental and institutional failure and broader sociocultural factors. Finally, the discourse of school bullying returned to individual-level explanations. As we will discuss later, the conflicting and contradictory articulation of causes has confused attempts to address school bullying as a social problem. Individual Explanations The news media and academics consistently espoused individual-level explanations that depicted bullies and their victims as inherently different from other children. Both bullies and victims were regarded as deviants – sufferers of biological and/or psychological pathologies that made them predatory or vulnerable – and as damaged. It was common for claimsmakers to point to physical characteristics, such as body weight, as the impetus for bullying victimization. Others pointed to research that suggested that youth with disabilities experienced a disproportionate rate of bullying. The conceptualization of victims as physically different led some parents who feared for their children’s safety to seek plastic surgery. During an interview with a physician who runs a foundation that provides free plastic surgery to children in need, a news host noted that the foundation receives “hundreds of requests a year from teens who say they’ve been bullied because of their looks” (NBC’s Today, January 3, 2014). The doctor stated: “We can’t go after the bully, but we can try and empower the children.” Both victims and bullies were also said to be suffering from low self-esteem or a poor self-image. Some bullies’ behavior was explained as lashing out at others as a way of combating their own sense of powerlessness or their struggles with low self-esteem. A school principal stated, “children with the greatest level of bravado are typically the ones who have the lowest self-esteem” (CNN’s Dr. Drew, January 4, 2012). Youth who engaged in bullying behaviors were also said to be coping with their own victimization experiences. Constructions of bullies

as damaged personalities evoked sympathy from news media and expert claimsmakers. These constructions even served as cautionary tales for parents, as illustrated by the mother of a child who was publicly shamed by his day care providers: “That’s how bullying starts, how children become bullies and insecure” (CNN’s New Day, August 20, 2013). While the explanation of victims and bullies as injured people differentiated them from other children, they were also positioned in opposition to one another. In particular, victims were presented as weak, while bullies were presented as predatory and powerful. News media and experts generally failed to acknowledge nuance. Because bully and victim had become dichotomized, bullies were framed as stronger and victims as weak, not weaker. Defining the power differential in absolute, individualistic terms belies the larger context within which bullying takes place, including the ways in which cultural and social discourses of gender and sexuality create power differentials and inequalities beyond those that exist at the individual level (e.g., body size, strength). There was also only infrequent recognition that the same child could be both a bully and a victim, even though research has long shown that this is not uncommon, and some research shows that bully victims have poorer psychosocial functioning than both bullies and victims (e.g., Haynie et al. 2001). Parental and Institutional Explanations Over time the causes of bullying were attributed to parental and institutional failure. Similar to individual-level explanations, a focus on parental and institutional failure resulted in conflicting advice that put parents and schools in a serious bind. In both cases parents and schools were criticized for being simultaneously too passive and too aggressive in their approaches to bullying prevention and response. Parents were blamed for teaching their children to be bullies through modeling inappropriate behaviors in the home. For instance, a

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psychologist claimed that bullies “come from parents who are bullies” (NBC’s Today, July 5, 2012). They were simultaneously accused of inaction, the problem “very often, not always, but very often, is lazy parenting” (Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor, September 25, 2014) and over-reaction: “instead of working out issues themselves during free play outside, children are micromanaged by parents who step in to resolve conflicts for them” (a Detroit school teacher quoted in the New York Times, October 10, 2010). Schools were also implicated for falling short of their responsibility to the students they serve. This was particularly true in instances of bullycide where pleas for help went unanswered, as was the case for twelve-year-old bullycide victim Rebecca Sedwick: “I think the school failed because they didn’t take it seriously when Becca kept coming to them and telling them” (CNN’s Newsroom, October 26, 2013). But like parents, schools were also subject to the ire of news media and others who believed school administrators were implementing ill-informed policies. For instance, the arrest of a seven-year-old in New York for stealing $5.00 of lunch money from a classmate was met with shock. The boy’s lawyer stated that the arrest was unconscionable and added: “This is such a travesty what occurred here. Heartbreaking” (Newsroom, January 31, 2013). A CNN anchor responded, “I think you could say travesty is an understatement.” Schools were also embroiled in the epidemic of bullying through the actions of their employees. In particular, news media showcased instances where teachers or other school employees were accused of bullying students. In one study, 70.4 percent of teachers in seven different schools reported that teachers bullied students in “isolated cases” and another 17.6 percent reported that it occurred “frequently” (Twemlow et al. 2006). In this study “a bullying teacher was defined as a teacher who uses his/her power to punish, manipulate, or disparage a student beyond what would be a reasonable disciplinary procedure” (191). This definition parallels much

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of the news media coverage of bullying teachers, especially when teachers shamed and punished students accused of bullying and others who had violated school norms. News media coverage focused on unusual and extreme cases, and ignored the majority of well-meaning teachers who endeavor to support students in an educational environment marked by perceived institutional failure. Such coverage also frames teachers as being too passive and too aggressive in their responses to bullying. Sociocultural Failure With the individual, parental, and institutional explanations in the background, the discourse on school bullying shifted again, this time to implicate broader sociocultural factors. These included culture of violence, exposure to violence, bullying in the popular media, and social media technologies. As these cultural factors were co-opted they were often connected to the individual, parental, and institutional explanations. This was perhaps most explicitly illustrated by conservative talk radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who noted on CNN’s Larry King Live (April 8, 2010): “what you hear on radio . . . on television, in music and on the Internet is all mean. We have raised our children to believe mean is the norm.” The purported connections between sociocultural explanations and parental and institutional failure pit schools against parents in an effort to curb media’s influence on young people. Sociocultural explanations of school bullying reached a fevered pitch with the emergence of cyberbullying. By expanding the reach of school bullying in terms of time and space, cyberbullying became the primary focus of news media and expert claimsmakers. It continues to haunt parents who fear social media technologies. Their fear was fueled by portrayals of cyberbullies as relentless, uncaring, anonymous, and dangerous: “School bullies are now armed with new weapons, apps, and a vast and often lawless internet. These cyberbullies can inflict enormous emotional pain

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and ruin reputations anonymously” (ABC’s Nightline, June 18, 2014). This led school districts and states to adopt new policies, such as an anticyberbullying “law in Illinois [that] allows schools to force students to hand over their social media passwords if the school suspects the child of bullying” (ABC’s The View, January 22, 2015). Unspoken Explanations Among the individual, parental, institutional, and sociocultural explanations of school bullying an unspoken discourse of underlying causes emerged. Specifically, our analysis suggests that news media discourse and academic research on school bullying construct stereotypically gendered norms concerning female chastity and nonviolence, and male heteromasculinity. These are reinforced through school bullying as a mechanism through which youth enforce cultural norms related to gender and sexuality. In terms of gender, researchers and news media established concrete sex differences by framing physical bullying as occurring only among boys and emotional/relational bullying occurring only among girls. Even in the academic literature, these essentialized notions of bullying often go unexamined (see Carrera et al. 2011). Youth who violate the gender norms of bullying are cast as more problematic than those who bully in traditionally expected ways. For instance, girls who engage in physical bullying may be charged with a crime. Moreover, youth bully other youth who violate gender norms. This practice was most apparent when young women defied norms of appearance and chastity. One example of this is “slut shaming,” which “involves harassing and humiliating girls by posting explicit photos or videos of them online” (NPR’s All Things Considered, January 7, 2013). Slut shaming also involves the bullying of young women who come forward after being sexually victimized and has resulted in a number of cases of attempted and completed bullycide. A similar pattern emerged in relation to the enforcement of heteromasculine norms.

News media and experts employed the bullying discourse to portray sexual minority youth (SMY) as mired in suffering and suicide. Drawing on the historical pathologizing of homosexuality, the discourse of school bullying framed SMY as fragile, vulnerable, and prone to suicide as a response to their bullying victimization. While coverage of SMY bullycides is important, the uncritical depiction of SMY as suffering and suicidal is problematic (Waidzunas 2012). It can lead some SMY to assume that their suffering and resultant suicide are inevitable. Constructions of SMY as suffering and suicidal are learned by youth who employ bullying as a way to police the boundaries of acceptable sexuality. This is particularly the case for boys who are perceived to have violated established heteromasculine expectations. Return to the Individual After a period where news media alternated between various explanations, they returned to individual causes and solutions. The focus on extreme cases led to blaming the “bad kids.” When criminal charges were filed against alleged bullies following several youth suicides, the news media devoted an inordinate amount of coverage to punitive responses. This return to the individual was reflected in many “feel good” stories that featured individual students combating bullying. For example, on Christmas Day in 2014 there was a heartwarming story of a student who helped find a bullied classmate a new pair of shoes (CNN’s New Day, December 25). There was also the story about a girl who wrote words of encouragement on sticky notes and placed them on school lockers after she had received a nasty note from a classmate (NBC’s Today, October 11, 2014). Many such stories were reported in the aftermath of bullycides or school shootings and seemed intended to provide an emotional counterbalance. Sometimes that purpose was made explicit, as in a CNN report on a high school student who started a web page where students could anonymously “share nice things about

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each other”; the reporter concluded that “we spend too much time dwelling in the facts of the horrible parts and not enough to fix it” (New Day, July 8, 2013). Wide coverage of the stories reinforced the notion that bullying is an individual-level phenomenon, with students being its sole cause and resolution. The shifting across explanatory levels led to a confusing media landscape and unintended consequences that made it difficult to craft and implement effective bullying prevention strategies.

Unintended Consequences of Media Coverage Knight (2004) noted the danger in overestimating the extent of bullying (by including statistics about teasing and social exclusion) and conflating “these exaggerated figures with the rare and tragic cases that make headlines,” resulting in “a scenario of highly risky school life” and “unnecessary worry and fear” (60). Knight’s concerns were realized in US media coverage that exaggerated the extent of bullying and focused on the most extreme cases. This created a heightened state of anxiety; what was lost was a realistic sense of risk and harm. CNN reported that after a mother’s infant son died, she said that at least “the child wouldn’t have to go through bullying and the misery she alluded to, that she went to [sic] in school,” as a television host paraphrased (CNN’s Dr. Drew, July 8, 2014). A journalist lamented that given hamstrung teachers and administrators, complacent parents, and social media, “it’s almost impossible to survive as a child these days” (CNN’s Erin Burnett Outfront, August 14, 2013). Such exaggerated bullying fears resulted in a number of negative consequences.

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lies and victims and claimed that bullying was the sole cause of youth suicides. The day after the district attorney’s press conference regarding Phoebe Prince’s suicide, a CNN correspondent claimed: “Hard to believe. Bullied to death, literally” (Newsroom, March 30, 2010). Similarly, after Tyler Clementi died by suicide, news media made a direct link between bullying and suicide among sexual minority youth: “bullying related to sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation [was] the cause of some of the recent suicides” (New York Times, May 29, 2011). Even though later reports on Prince and Clementi recognized that suicide is almost always the result of a number of intersecting factors, the simplified narrative continued nonetheless. Hypervigilance and Overresponse This heightened anxiety over bullying has led to hypervigilance, fear, and overresponse. Examples of desperate parents were easy to find. One mother, after getting no help from her daughter’s school, forced her crying, eight-year-old daughter to describe her victimization and then posted the video confessional on Facebook (CNN’s Dr. Drew, May 12, 2014). A father publicly shamed his son whom he accused of bullying by forcing him to stand on a street corner holding a pink sign that read: “I am a bully, honk if you hate bullies” (NBC’s Today, October 8, 2013). Official responses were no less irrational. Constant reporting on extreme outcomes combined with a fear of youth violence created a “kid crackdown” (Casella 2001) that criminalized bullies and denied children the opportunity to resolve their interpersonal conflicts. The result was a set of unreflective, general responses at all levels, from the individual to the societal. Enhanced Social Control

Oversimplification News media preferred a sweeping and conflated conceptualization of bullying rather than keeping to its traditional elements. As noted, news media dichotomized bul-

Children are easy to control because adults have the power to ignore their lived experiences. They are the ultimate “docile bodies” in that they “can be subjected, used, transferred, and improved” (Foucault 1977,

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136). Fueled by media reports about bullycides, state legislatures rushed to enact antibullying laws or to strengthen those laws by adding provisions about cyberbullying. Bullycides accelerated antibullying legislation that began in 2007. In 2013 only Montana had no antibullying statute, and nearly every state prohibited cyberbullying or electronic harassment in some form (Hinduja and Patchin 2013). Montana adopted antibullying legislation in 2015 (Billings Gazette, April 21, 2015). Felt (2015) demonstrated that the content of antibullying legislation in Canada was directly formed by the media framing bullying as a life-anddeath problem. Many statutes expanded the school system’s control beyond the physical boundaries of the campus. Schools rushed to enact zero tolerance policies that mandate the automatic suspension or expulsion of students who engage in bullying behaviors. This frequently includes bullying behavior that occurs on social media sites. For instance, in response to a videoed assault in Florida, a judge ordered that the alleged assaulter, a fourteen-yearold girl, be banned from all public schools in the county (CBS’s Evening News, May 12, 2013; CNN’s Newsroom, May 14, 2013). Criminal charges were filed against alleged bullies after the Prince, Clementi, and Sedwick suicides. Media commentators rushed to judgment after criminal charges were filed, demonizing youth accused of bullying. The news media exacted what Altheide (1992) calls “gonzo justice,” whereby they created a scenario of “‘out of control’ evil” and amplified formal systems of public punishment such as criminal trials through “a combination of public spectacle, moral authority, and news legitimacy” (65). Gonzo justice peaked in the case of Rebecca Sedwick, a twelve-year-old who leaped to her death from a cement plant tower after being bullied for a year by what the media reported to be fifteen girls, or as many as twenty according to her mother (CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, October 15, 2013). The county Sheriff ordered the unprecedented arrests of two of the girls, aged twelve and fourteen, for felony aggravated

stalking (ABC’s World News, October 15, 2013). Heightened fear of bullying also led to vigilante justice. A Tennessee mother was arrested, along with her son and two alleged bullies, after the mother got “into the middle of [a] teen altercation,” and then posted a video of the fight to Facebook (CNN’s Dr. Drew, June 3, 2014). Many news media commentators decried the situation. For instance, a co-host proclaimed, “The fact is that these punks don’t know anything else but physical retribution” (Fox’s The Five, April 3, 2012). Even school personnel were reported to have engaged in vigilantism. A kindergarten teacher was accused of having students line up and hit a boy who she thought had been bullying other children (ABC’s 20/20, October 4, 2013). In a climate of fear and helplessness children, parents, and teachers are willing to respond to bullying in problematic ways. And with the emergence of a growing antibullying industry, news media claimsmakers are ready and willing to contribute to the problem.

The Antibullying Industry In 2010, a Newsweek article stated that an “unregulated web of [antibullying] consultants, therapists, and coaches has sprung up” (October 4). The article quoted law professor David Yamada saying: “To a large degree, what we are seeing is a cottage industry.” By 2015, that cottage industry had moved into a mansion. The unregulated web had expanded to include celebrities, victim advocates, policy makers, media content creators, social media consultants, and corporate interests. For example, the pop singer Lady Gaga started a charitable foundation in part to reduce bullying. In an article titled “Publishers Revel in Youthful Cruelty,” the New York Times reported that publishing houses were “flooding the market with titles that tackle bullying” and that the number of books with the word “bullying” in the title had increased by 26 percent over the previous decade (March 27, 2013). A representative from the publishing house,

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Simon and Schuster was quoted as saying that while “the intention is service . . . at the same time it is definitely an opportunity for us to gather sales because it is such a hot topic.” During the coverage of the so-called epidemic of suicides by sexual minority youth in the fall of 2010, the media reported on various singers’ gay anthems that contained explicit or implicit antibullying messages (New York Times, November 7, 2010). The documentary Bully was released, and attempts to downgrade its “R” rating were covered by the media to a greater extent than the film’s content (e.g., CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, March 30, 2012). Antibullying phone apps and backpacks were marketed. The toy manufacturing company, Mattel introduced a bullied doll and later supported the antibullying film Finding Kind (New York Times, October 5, 2011). The office supply retailing company, Office Depot developed an annual antibullying promotion that worked with Lady Gaga’s foundation and then with the teen pop group One Direction. An episode of NBC’s Today (October 31, 2012) featured a clothing line that was “a cool way to support the bullying sort of efforts,” including t-shirts that read “I Don’t Date Bullies” and “Bullying Is Never Fashionable.” Antibullying had become a commodity and a cause, and distinguishing concern from exploitation became increasingly difficult. As the focus shifted from earnest attempts by researchers, educators, and policy makers to address the problems associated with bullying to a media-led firestorm of marketing, self-promotion, and exploitation, the antibullying movement risked disintegrating.

Avoiding Collapse Rescuing the antibullying movement from collapse requires adopting a much more nuanced and flexible approach. First, responses framed within a life-and-death connotation must end. Extreme outcomes related to bullying are rare, and bully-

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ing is but one of several factors related to youth suicides and retaliatory violence. Also required is the willingness to accept children’s complicated, messy relationships. Students’ allegiances and conflicts shift frequently, and they see relationships quite differently than do adults. For example, after the suicide of Jon Carmichael, which was tied to bullying, one of his classmates mentioned that he considered Jon a friend, saying: “You know, at times I did bully him. You know, it’s – but it was just both of us just messing around. You know, I never did it because I hated him” (CBS’s Early Show, April 2, 2010). Dealing with the messiness of relationships involves disentangling bullying from more and less problematic behaviors. This de-conflating of bullying from other problematic behaviors will help in understanding when children can settle their differences on their own and when adult intervention is required. This demands a nuanced response rather than a standard and draconian one. Because bullying must be situated in a particular social context an ecological approach is necessary to understand why it occurs and how to prevent it (e.g., Espelage et al. 2014). Accordingly, Pascoe (2013) calls for a sociology of bullying, noting that factors that provoke bullying “reflect larger structural inequalities” (95). Walton similarly notes that most analysis “tends not to emphasize the ways in which markers of social difference . . . inform the nature and reflect the characteristics of bullying among children” (2005, 112). One study among Columbian students found that socioeconomic inequalities were a factor that determined who was victimized (Chaux and Castellanos 2015). Thus, bullying may be a more extreme form of behaviors that are already accepted in schools (Payne and Smith 2013). Moreover, if the power differentials created by gender norms and heteromasculinity go unrecognized, it must be concluded that all victims of antigay bullying, all girls who have been sexually assaulted and mocked for that assault, and all children in poverty, are inherently weak. In addition, school cultures – such as

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hypercompetitiveness – can make bullying more likely. An ecological approach avoids placing all of the responsibility for bullying prevention on students. At the same time, schools must encourage students’ agency. This means that students must be listened to. The paucity of qualitative research studies suggests that researchers may not be listening well enough. McDougall and Vaillancourt (2015) note that some bullying victims experience long-lasting effects and others do not, and thus point to the need for research that identifies risk and protective factors. It’s also important to understand which prevention policies and programs work best. News media reported the passing of antibullying legislation as an end in itself, rather than determining if the legislation was effective. Here again, the scholarly literature has noted the need for more robust evaluation studies (e.g., Ttofi and Farrington 2011). In order to fully address school bullying as a social problem the dubious constructions described in this chapter must be avoided. Scholars, educators, and news media must acknowledge the need for antibullying initiatives that include individual and institutional involvement. They must also recognize school bullying as a microcosm of broader sociocultural ideologies associated with rigid norm enforcement.

Glossary Bullycide Instances of suicide that are retrospectively associated with prolonged bullying victimization. Domain expansion Occurs when a troubling condition is redefined by claimsmakers to encompass a wider array of cases not previously regarded as aspects of the problem. Heteromasculinity A construction of masculinity that positions men as superior to women and heterosexual men as superior to gay men. Moral shocks Unexpected events that cause public outrage and motivate people to join a social movement.

Motivational frame A rationale for action related to the construction and elevation of a social problem. Usually leads to increased public attention and calls for formal policy responses. Time bomb frame A narrative through which school bullying is linked to mass school shootings and other forms of retaliatory violence.

References Altheide, David L. 1992. Gonzo justice. Symbolic Interaction 15:69–86. Beaty, Lee A., and Erick B. Alexeyev. 2008. The problem of school Bullies: What the research tells us. Adolescence 43:1–11. Best, Joel. 1987. Rhetoric in claims-making: Constructing the missing children problem. Social Problems 34:101–21. 1990. Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern About Child-Victims. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Carrera, María Victoria, Renée DePalma, and María Lameiras. 2011. Toward a more comprehensive understanding of bullying in school settings. Educational Psychology Review 23:479–99. Casella, Ronnie. 2001. At Zero Tolerance: Punishment, Prevention, and School Violence. New York: Peter Lang. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 1995. Youth risk behavior surveillance – United States, 1993. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 44:1–55. 2012. Youth risk behavior surveillance – United States, 2011. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 61:1–168. Chaux, Enrique, and Melisa Castellanos. 2015. Money and age in schools: Bullying and power imbalances. Aggressive Behavior 41:280–93. Cohen, Jeffrey W., and Robert A. Brooks. 2014. Confronting School Bullying: Kids, Culture, and the Making of a Social Problem. Boulder, CO: Lynne-Rienner. Espelage, Dorothy L., Peter Goldblum, Joyce Chu, Bruce Bongar, Samantha Pflum, and Lisa De La Rue. 2014. Developing an ecological approach to address challenges of youth bullying and suicide. In Youth Suicide and Bullying: Challenges and Strategies for

construction of school bullying as a social problem Prevention and Intervention, edited by Peter Goldblum, Dorothy L. Espelage, Joyce Chu, and Bruce Bongar, 313–23. New York: Oxford University Press. Faris, Robert, and Diane Felmlee. 2011a. Social networks and aggression at the Wheatley School. http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2011/ images/10/10/findings.from.the.wheatley .school.pdf. 2011b. Status struggles: Network centrality and gender segregation in same- and crossgender aggression. American Sociological Review 76:48–73. Felt, Mylynn. 2015. The incessant image: How dominant news coverage shaped Canadian cyberbullying law. University of New Brunswick Law Journal 66:137–60. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Fuller, Paul C. 2011. Navigating professional knowledges: Lay techniques for the management of conflictual diagnosis in an AD/HD support group. Sociology of Diagnosis 12:211– 32. Greene, Michael. B. 2000. Bullying and harassment in schools. In Shocking Violence: Youth Perpetrators and Victims – A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Rosemarie Scolaro Moser and Corrine E. Frantz, 72–101. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Griffin, Rebecca S., and Alan M. Gross. 2004. Childhood bullying: Current empirical findings and future directions for research. Aggression and Violent Behavior 9:379– 400. Haynie, Denise L., Tonja Nansel, Patricia Eitel, Aria D. Crump, Keith Saylor, Kai Yu, and Bruce Simons-Morton. 2001. Bullies, victims, and bully/victims: Distinct groups of atrisk youth. The Journal of Early Adolescence 21:29–49. Hinduja, Sameer, and Justin W. Patchin. 2013. State cyberbullying laws: A brief review of state cyberbullying laws and policies. www.cyberbullying.us/Bullying_and_ Cyberbullying_Laws.pdf. Hoover, John H., and Pam Stenhjem. 2003. Bullying and teasing of youth with disabilities: Creating positive school environments for effective inclusion. Examining Current Challenges in Secondary Education and Transition 2:1–7.

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Horton, Paul. 2006. Bullies and the bullied: The construction of a discourse of blame. Paper presented at the annual conference of Nordic Youth Research Information Symposium (NYRIS), Stockholm, January 12–14. Jasper, James M., and Jane D. Poulsen. 1995. Recruiting strangers and friends: Moral shocks and social networks in animal rights and anti-nuclear protests. Social Problems 42:493–512. Knight, Simon. 2004. Anti-bullying strategies in the UK. In The RoutledgeFalmer Guide to Key Debates in Education, edited by Dennis Hayes, 60–63. Oxfordshire, UK: RoutledgeFalmer. Kochenderfer-Ladd, Becky, and Wendy TroopGordon. 2010. Introduction to the special issue: Contexts, causes, and consequences: New directions in peer victimization research. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 56: 221–30. Lereya, Suzet T., William E. Copeland, E. Jane Costello, and Dieter Wolke. 2015. Adult mental health consequences of peer bullying and maltreatment in childhood: Two cohorts in two countries. The Lancet Psychiatry 2:524–31. Liepe-Levenson, Katherine, and Martin H. Levinson. 2005. A general semantics approach to school-age bullying. ETC: A Review of General Semantics 62:4–16. Loseke, Donileen R. 2003. Thinking About Social Problems: An Introduction to Constructionist Perspectives. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. McDougall, Patricia, and Tracy Vaillancourt. 2015. Long-term adult outcomes of peer victimization in childhood and adolescence: Pathways to adjustment and maladjustment. American Psychologist 70:300–310. Nansel, Tanja R., Mary Overpeck, Ramani S. Pilla, W. June Ruan, Bruce Simons-Morton, and Peter Scheidt. 2001. Bullying behaviors among U.S. youth: Prevalence and association with psychosocial adjustment. Journal of the American Medical Association 285:2094–100. Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. 2007. Recognizing the many faces of bullying. Center City, MN: Hazeldon Foundation. Olweus, D., and Limber, S. P. 2010. Bullying in school: Evaluation and dissemination of the

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Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 80(1):124–34. Pascoe, C. J. 2013. Notes on a sociology of bullying: Young men’s homophobia as gender socialization. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Inaugural Issue 1:87–103. Payne, E., and Smith, M. 2013. LGBTQ kids, school safety, and missing the big picture: How the dominant bullying discourse prevents school professionals from thinking about systemic marginalization, or why we need to rethink LGBTQ bullying. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Inaugural Issue 1:1–36. Schoen, S., and A. Schoen. 2010. Bullying and harassment in the United States. The Clearing House 83:68–72. Sigurdson, J. F., A. M. Undheim, J. L. Wallander, S. Lydersen, and A. M. Sund. 2015. The long-term effects of being bullied or a bully in adolescence on externalizing and internalizing mental health problems in adulthood. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health 9(1):1–13. Sigurdson, J. F., J. Wallander, and A. M. Sund. 2014. Is involvement in school bullying associated with general health and psychosocial adjustment outcomes in adulthood? Child Abuse & Neglect 38(10):1607–17. Smith, P. K. 2004. Bullying: Recent developments. Child and Adolescent Health 9(3):98– 103. Snow, D. A., and R. D. Benford. 1988. Ideology, frame resonance and participant mobilization. In From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research across Cultures, edited by B. Klandermans, H. Kriesi, and S. Tarrow, 197–217. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Stassen Berger, K. 2007. Update on bullying at school: Science forgotten? Developmental Review 27:90–126. Ttofi, M. M., and D. P. Farrington. 2011. Effectiveness of school-based programs to reduce bullying: A systematic and meta-analytic review. Journal of Experimental Criminology 7(1):27–56. Ttofi, M. M., D. P. Farrington, F. Lösel, and R. Loeber. 2011. Do the victims of school bullies tend to become depressed later in life? A systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research 3(2):63–73. Twemlow, S. W., P. Fonagy, F. C. Sacco, and J. R. Brethour. 2006. Teachers who bully students: A hidden trauma. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 52(3):187–98. Waidzunas, T. 2012. Young, gay, and suicidal: Dynamic nominalism and the process of defining a social problem with statistics. Science, Technology, and Human Values 37(2):199–225. Walton, G. 2005. Bullying widespread: A critical analysis of research and public discourse on bullying. Journal of School Violence 4(1):91– 118. Weitzer, R. 2007. The social construction of sex trafficking: Ideology and institutionalization of a moral crusade. Politics & Society 35:447– 75. Wolke, D., W. E. Copeland, A. Angold, and E. J. Costello. 2013. Impact of bullying in childhood on adult health, wealth, crime, and social outcomes. Psychological Science 24(10):1958–70. Wolke, D., and S. T. Lereya. 2015. Long-term effects of bullying. Archives of Disease in Childhood 100(9):879–85.

CHAPTER 15

Rampage School Shootings Jack Levin and Eric Madfis

Abstract We introduce readers to the social problem of rampage school shootings and discuss the associated patterns, causes, and best practices for their prevention. While media coverage might suggest otherwise, rampage shootings at schools are extremely rare, even if they often yield much carnage and anxiety. At the individual level, some have focused on the mental illnesses or personality disorders of rampage killers. At the macro-sociological level, others have clarified the role that masculinity and widespread acceptance of gun culture play in reinforcing and legitimizing violence. Some scholars have recently attempted to achieve a more multifaceted, holistic, and cross-disciplinary understanding of the causes of school rampages. Moreover, the so-called copycat phenomenon is now recognized as a factor in a number of high-profile, high–body count murders. In order to avert future rampage attacks, schools must seek to forge genuinely positive school climates that encourage student bystanders to intervene in a responsible manner. Rampage school shootings are a phenomenon with a lengthy history, as welldocumented cases date back to the 1925 Wilno school massacre in what is now Lithuania and to Charles Whitman’s 1966 deadly attack on the campus of the University of Texas-Austin. However, many recent tragedies (such as those at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at Marysville Pilchuck High School in Washington State, and at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College) have led both the

media and the public to be increasingly aware of this particularly heinous crime. Because rampage shootings at schools are often highly publicized, it comes as no surprise that a great deal of empirical research has been conducted on the phenomenon in the last few decades (see Muschert 2007; Rocque 2012; Sommer et al. 2014 for reviews of the field). This chapter will introduce readers to the social problem of rampage school shootings and discuss the associated patterns, causes, and best practices for prevention of these events.

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While the term “school shooting” has been defined and operationalized in various ways by many different scholars, Newman and her colleagues (2004, 50) can be credited with delineating the fairly new descriptor of “rampage school shootings,” which “take place on a school-related public stage before an audience; involve multiple victims, some of whom are shot simply for their symbolic significance or at random; and involve one or more shooters who are students or former students of the school.” Though only a portion of school gun violence fits all of these criteria (and the overall majority of school homicides are single victim), the most highly publicized events during the last two decades tend to conform to these specifics. In addition to the aforementioned rampage shootings, Muschert (2007, 62) has filled in this typological picture to form the accompanying school shooting categories of “mass murders” committed by older non-student perpetrators, “terrorist attacks” engaged in by individuals or groups to advance their political or ideological goals, “targeted shootings” that involve only specific preplanned victims, and the “government shootings” of student protesters. For the purpose of this chapter, we will limit our discussion to rampage school shootings with multiple victims committed by former or current students.1

Prevalence and Patterns While extensive media coverage might suggest otherwise, rampage shootings at schools are extremely rare. Compared to their homes and the streets, schools are the safest places for young people, and the risk of homicide for school-age youth is roughly 226 times greater outside of school than at school (National School Safety Center 2006). More generally in terms of probability, “only about 1 in 2,000,000 school-age youth will die from homicide or suicide at school each year” (Muschert 2007, 61) and “any given school can expect to experience a student homicide about once every 6,000

years” (Borum et al. 2010, 27). Rare as these events may be, such incidents warrant serious concern, for when they do occur, they not only cause multiple casualties and physical injuries, but they leave many survivors and bystanders with posttraumatic stress (James 2009; Schwarz and Kowalski 1991) and create extensive fear among the larger public (Altheide 2009; Burns and Crawford 1999; Harding et al. 2002). While the majority of school gun violence in general occurs in urban areas, rampage school shootings typically occur at suburban and rural schools (Kimmel 2008; Kimmel and Mahler 2003; Madfis 2014a) in less populated homogeneous communities located in ideologically conservative districts (Kimmel and Mahler 2003; Newman et al. 2004). This has led various scholars to consider the role that a pervasive gun culture (Glassner 2010; HaiderMarkel and Joslyn 2001; Lawrence and Birkland 2004; Webber 2003) and the stultifying closeness and pressure to conform in small towns (Madfis and Levin 2013; Newman et al. 2004) play in contributing to the phenomenon. Likewise, rampage attacks tend to take place in the context of particular social circumstances, such as when the school staff and student body are intolerant of differences (especially regarding gender nonconformity) and when issues of bullying and marginalization are not addressed or taken seriously by teachers and administrators (Kimmel and Mahler 2003; Levin and Madfis 2009; Madfis and Levin 2013; Newman et al. 2004; Vossekuil et al. 2002). While school rampage perpetrators lack any single unifying profile (Vossekuil et al. 2002), they are in fact disproportionately white and male. Though it is certainly not the case that all school rampages have been committed by whites (for example, the rampage shooter on the campus of Oregon’s Umpqua Community College was bi-racial, the Red Lake Senior High School killer was Native American, and the Virginia Tech shooter was Korean American), the majority of rampage killers have in fact been white. As a result, some researchers (Madfis 2014c; Schiele and Stewart 2001;

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Wise 2001) have linked theoretically white racial identity and privilege to rampage killing. Similarly, there have been only five female school rampage shooting perpetrators in the history of the United States – Brenda Spencer, Laurie Dann, Jillian Spencer, Latina Williams, and Amy Bishop (though among these, only Brenda Spencer and Latina Williams ever attended the schools they attacked). This indicates that nearly all offenders have been boys and men (Danner and Carmody 2001; Kimmel and Mahler 2003; Mai and Alpert 2000). As a result, the role of masculine identity and gender socialization also bear serious consideration. This may also relate to the fact that females have been heavily overrepresented among the victims of school rampages (Klein 2005; Klein 2006a). Additionally, school rampage perpetrators tend to have experienced various troubling life experiences with myriad failures and to share common motivations (Levin and Madfis 2009; Madfis and Levin 2013). They are often animated by the desire to attain vengeance against those they perceive to have wronged them and for lasting recognition and significance via a provocative display of power asserting violence (Fox and Levin 2014; Larkin 2009; Kalish and Kimmel 2010; Kimmel and Mahler 2003; Klein 2006b; Madfis 2014c; Neroni 2000).

The Causes of School Rampages The etiology of school rampage shootings has been explored by a vast array of academics ranging from sociologists and criminologists to anthropologists, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Often, scholars have brought one particular causal factor to the fore, whether it is the mental deficiency of individual perpetrators, the school or community context, or the larger sociocultural background. At the individual-level, some have focused on the depression, mental illness, or personality disorders of said killers (Langman 2009a, 2009b; McGee and DeBernardo 1999). Others have stressed the role played

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by negative relationships with peers, such as victimization through bullying (Burgess et al. 2006; Fox and Levin 2014; Kimmel and Mahler 2003; Klein 2012; Larkin 2007; Leary et al. 2003; Levin and Madfis 2009; Meloy et al. 2001; Newman et al. 2004). Both the exclusionary nature of teenage cliques (Larkin 2007; Lickel et al. 2003) and the cohesion of intolerant homogeneous and tightly knit communities (Aronson 2004; Newman et al. 2004) have been implicated in previous rampage attacks. Finally, at the macro-sociological level, various researchers have clarified the role that masculinity (Kimmel and Mahler 2003; Mai and Alpert 2000) and the widespread accessibility and acceptance of gun culture (Glassner 2010; Haider-Markel and Joslyn 2001; Lawrence and Birkland 2004; Webber 2003) play in reinforcing and legitimizing violent solutions. As boys and men who have felt profoundly disempowered and emasculated, offenders often perceive that their commission of an infamous school shooting will regain their lost sense of masculinity, superiority, and power. Of late, scholars (such as Henry 2009; Hong et al. 2011; Levin and Madfis 2009) have attempted to fuse these disparate etiological concerns to achieve a more multifaceted, holistic, and cross-disciplinary understanding of the causes of school rampage across the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. Levin and Madfis’s (2009) cumulative strain theory proposed a fivestage integrated and sequential model in which several criminological theories (strain theory, control theory, and routine activities theory) were brought to bear collectively to demonstrate their cumulative effect. According to variables in the cumulative strain model, long-term frustrations (chronic strains) experienced early in life or in adolescence – at home and/or at school – lead to social isolation; and the resultant lack of pro-social support systems (uncontrolled strain) in turn allows a short-term negative event (acute strain), be it real or imagined, to be particularly devastating. As

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such, the acute strain initiates a planning stage, wherein a mass killing is fantasized about as a masculine solution to regain lost feelings of control; and actions are taken to ensure the fantasy can become reality. The planning process concludes in a massacre facilitated by weapons that enable large body counts in schoolrooms and on campuses, where students are closely packed together and therefore convenient to kill in large numbers. When Bonanno and Levenson (2014, 8) examined the life history of Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, they concluded that “[a]lthough there may not be a clear-cut concrete explanation for why Adam Lanza committed a school shooting, at present, analysis of the evidence gathered seems to fit within Levin and Madfis’s (2009) cumulative strain model and offer possible explanations.” Twentyyear-old Lanza had been a student at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he was ridiculed and/or ignored by his classmates on a regular basis. In the months prior to his rampage, Lanza had become almost totally isolated, playing violent video games and reading articles about previous mass killings while completely alone over long periods of time. He stopped speaking to his one and only friend over an argument about a motion picture. His only communication outside of a few disaffected cyber-friends was with his mother, and that was by e-mail alone. Lanza became increasingly despondent several months before the shooting when his mother prepared to relocate them away from Newtown. As Lanza suffered debilitating anxiety about merely leaving his own room, the notion of being forced to move far way likely amounted to a catastrophic last straw or acute strain for him. Not unlike many other school rampage shooters who plan their attacks far in advance and secure firearms from unsuspecting family members, Lanza took several semiautomatic weapons from his mother’s large collection. On the morning of December 14, 2012, he shot and killed his mother in their home before heading out to

attack Sandy Hook (Bonanno and Levenson 2014). Madfis and Levin (2013) discovered that, despite important international variations, the cumulative strain model applied remarkably well to international incidents of multiple-victim school shootings. Just as in the American context, the majority of school shootings outside of the United States involved long-term bullying as an expression of the killer’s chronic strain and long-standing desire to get even with schoolmates and teachers. In January 2003, for example, Edmar Freitas shot and injured eight people, mostly students, at the Colonel Benedito Ortiz High School in Taiuva, Brazil. The eighteen-year-old former student had been routinely teased and humiliated by his classmates since the age of seven for being overweight (Morena 2011). Bullying was not, however, the only form of long-term frustration which school rampage shooters in the international sample experienced. Chronic strain also took the form of persistent academic failure. For example, Robert Steinhäuser had a longstanding reputation as a lazy and underachieving student who had been repeatedly disciplined for truancy and negligent behavior by his teachers. This would explain why his primary targets were teachers rather than peers. During a period of high unemployment and few job prospects, Steinhäuser believed he had been robbed of his only opportunity to be accepted into a college and to have a viable career (Gasser et al. 2004). Much like their American counterparts, most international school rampages also occurred in small towns or villages with tightknit communities, and the majority of killers abroad were characterized as isolated or lacking in close connections to others (Madfis and Levin 2013). In addition, Madfis and Levin (2013) found, among their international sample, that school shooters were typically motivated to act after experiencing a short-term loss and extensive planning for these attacks was well documented (Madfis and Levin 2013).

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The Copycat Phenomenon The so-called copycat phenomenon has long been a factor in a number of highprofile, high–body count crimes (Levin and Reichelmann 2016). In September 1988, for example, nineteen-year-old James Wilson opened fire in an elementary school in Greenwood, South Carolina, taking the lives of two students and injuring another eight. When the police investigators went to Wilson’s apartment, they found on the wall over his bed the People magazine cover featuring his “role model,” Laurie Dann, the thirty-six-year-old resident of suburban Chicago who, some four months earlier, had walked into a Winnetka, Illinois, elementary school, and then shot six children, killing one of them. The man responsible for the shootings in Greenwood admitted in an interview with the police that he had imitated Laurie Dann’s rampage in Winnetka (Fox and Levin 2014). Since the April 1999 Columbine massacre, school shooters both within the United States and in countries around the world have turned to this infamous American case for their inspiration to kill (Larkin 2009). For example, in April 2002, nineteenyear-old Robert Steinhäuser shot to death thirteen faculty members, two students, and one police officer at the Johann-GutenbergGymnasium in Erfurt, Germany during its final exam period, before committing suicide. Upon searching the German killer’s home computer, police later located newspaper articles about Harris and Klebold and the Columbine massacre (Bondü and Scheithauer 2010). In September 2006, twenty-five-year-old Kimveer Gill shot to death one student and injured another nineteen, before committing suicide, at Dawson College in Montreal, Canada. During a police search of Gill’s home, police found a letter to his family praising the actions of Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Gill was known to spend his idle hours logging onto a website called VampireFreaks.com, where he listed the internet-based video

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game Super Columbine Massacre as one of his favorites and displayed fifty photos of himself carrying a rifle and wearing a black trench coat and combat boots reminiscent of the outfit worn by the Columbine killers (Travers 2006). Sebastian Bosse, who bombed and shot students and staff at his former school in Emsdetten, Germany on November 20, 2006, praised Columbine killer Eric Harris in his diary (Larkin 2009). According to court records, two British teenagers who were obsessed with the Columbine massacre planned, but never implemented, the bombing of their Manchester school in September 2009. Based on a tip from the girlfriend of one of the boys, police raided their homes and found military-style clothing, bomb-making materials, floor plans of their school, and contact lenses designed to make their eyes appear to be totally white, just like those worn by the Columbine killers (Tozer 2009). Through photographs or anecdotal stories involving a high-profile killer’s biography, the mass media often highlight the very characteristics shared by disgruntled workers, students, or family members who imitate one another (Fox and Burstein 2010; Newman et al. 2004; Sullivan and Guerette 2003). This effect has also been found by scholars studying other forms of violence (see Coleman 2004), including suicide and serial murder. The copycat phenomenon feeds on excessive publicity. Before the mid-1990s, a deadly attack on one victim would have received lots of publicity but only in the local community where it had occurred. Multiple-victim incidents are quite different. When thirteen or twenty or thirty-two lives are suddenly snuffed out by seemingly random gunfire, it is a sure thing that the incident will receive national, even international, attention. The possibility of imitation then expands dramatically. Rather than be inspired by a friend down the street, bullied and marginalized youth are just as likely to imitate someone hundreds of miles from home, such as a total stranger who lives in a small, obscure community like Littleton,

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Colorado, Roseburg, Oregon, or Newtown, Connecticut. When newspapers, magazines, and websites overflow with facts and opinions about a mass killing, the likelihood of imitation is vastly increased. As a result, some have recently called for the news media to alter the manner in which they cover these events by not glorifying the violent actions of perpetrators and by focusing more time reporting about victims. In the wake of the 2015 mass shooting at Umpqua Community College, Sheriff John Hanlin refused to state the killer’s name at a press conference so as to deny him the fame and lasting significance he so desired (Alteir 2015). Though our ratings-driven media are unlikely to follow Hanlin’s tactic, denying fame to school shooters in this fashion might have the potential to reduce copycats, if media outlets were to widely adopt the practice.

Averted School Rampage Shootings Despite the breadth of research and theorizing on school rampages, far fewer studies have addressed attacks which have been planned yet have not come to fruition. Whereas incidents of school violence that have resulted in multiple fatalities and injuries are often extensively investigated by numerous parties in the government, the justice system, and the media, far less information exists about “near misses” (Verlinden et al. 2000, 28). Though understudied, research on averted rampage has clear practical significance. By learning from the instances in which school rampage threats came to the attention of authorities and were thwarted, there exists potential for future interventions and policies to be modeled on prior successes. In one of the first studies exploring averted attacks, Daniels and his colleagues (2007) completed a news media content analysis of thirty school rampages which were thwarted in twenty-one states between 2001 and 2004. From newspaper accounts, the authors reported data on the details of the plot, how the plot was discov-

ered, what steps were taken by the school and law enforcement once the plot was revealed, and what the legal outcomes of the incidents were. They discovered that the majority of violent schemes occurred in public high schools, though several took place at elementary and middle schools, and one incident happened at a private school. A single student acting alone was implicated in half of the incidents, while two to six students were accused in the other half. Guns were the most frequent intended weapon for plotters, though bombs, knives, and swords were mentioned in other incidents. The majority of plotters communicated their plans to others, with 30 percent doing so via e-mail or paper notes, 20 percent verbally informing others, and 15 percent admitting guilt when questioned by police. Rampage plots were uncovered in a variety of ways. The most common method was other students coming forward to inform school or police officials. This was often a result of plotters’ informing, and in some cases unsuccessfully recruiting, their peers, but students who had overheard rumors or had been personally threatened also came forward. Other plots were averted by school administrators whose suspicions were aroused by rumors or irregular student behavior; staff who overheard the conversations of plotters; police who were alerted to rumors or found notes or emails which revealed the threat; and two events were avoided when plots were discovered as a result of the students’ being investigated for other crimes (Daniels et al. 2007). Schools responded to discovered plots in numerous ways. Students involved in plots were frequently suspended or expelled and also often arrested. Schools also responded by notifying parents and students, making counseling available, conducting internal investigations, calling the police, enhancing school security, and evacuating, searching, and/or closing down the school. Less common school responses were to consider banning trench coats and to avoid doing anything to change the school’s normal routine (ibid 2007).

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Additionally, Daniels and his colleagues (2010) later interviewed school personnel at four schools where rampages were averted. The goals of this research were to better understand what roles school officials felt they played in preventing the rampage, what reasons they attributed to the successful outcome, and what advice they would offer to other schools. In their analysis, the researchers concluded that antibullying programs were perceived to be the “most salient” method of preventing future rampages (88). Many school officials also believed that supportive and strong relationships between school staff and students encourages people to come forward with knowledge about threats, and formal crisis planning that dictates specific roles helps to both prevent and respond to such potentially dangerous incidents. In his interviews with school administrators, counselors, security and police officers, and teachers directly involved in thwarting rampage attacks at eleven Northeastern public schools, Madfis (2014a, 2014b) found that it was fellow students coming forward with knowledge about a potential school rampage that consistently preempted these nearly fatal occurrences. However, even in many of these successfully averted incidents, numerous student bystanders exposed to threats still did not come forward. Those students who did were often not close associates or confidants of the accused students, but were often acquaintances, targets, and even co-conspirators. Many of the adolescents exposed to vital information who were the closest to the students accused of plotting attacks did not in fact come forward to authorities. More generally, nearly all cases entailed far more students exposed to the leakage of their peers who did not ultimately come forward than the number of students who did in fact do so (Madfis 2014b). This represents a longstanding aversion on the part of young people to engage in positive bystander behavior, as, from an early age, children are urged not to be “tattletales,” not to “snitch” or to “rat” on their peers. However, by compar-

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ing the divergent disciplinary practices at these schools, Madfis (2014a) suggests that a persistent student code of silence may be explained in part due to the increasingly punitive nature of school environments (with zero tolerance policies and increased security and surveillance) wherein students lack trust in school officials and fear getting punished themselves for coming forward and exposing potential threats.

Prevention Since a dramatic series of mass killings took place in the late 1990s at several rural and suburban public middle and high schools across the United States (most notably the Columbine massacre of 1999), numerous shortsighted policies have rather consistently been proposed and implemented in an effort to satiate public concern and reduce the anxieties of parents, faculty, and students. In the United States, the response has largely been to increase punitive disciplinary measures such as zero tolerance policies which mandate strict penalties for student misbehavior, regardless of mitigating or aggravating individual or situational circumstances, and to augment security through target-hardening practices such as metal detectors and limited entrances (Madfis 2016). As a result, the current state of school discipline, security, and surveillance does not resemble the American public schools of even a few decades ago, and students are increasingly exposed to prisonlike regimes of control (Hirschfield 2008; Kupchik 2010; Monahan and Torres 2010). These solutions, however, lack empirical evidence confirming their preventive effectiveness and amount to shortsighted if politically expedient efforts which may alleviate anxiety but do little to prevent future incidents. For example, zero tolerance policies were embraced widely across the United States by as early as 1993 (Skiba 2000). However, they did nothing to curb the increased number of multiple-victim shootings that occurred in middle and high schools across the nation in the late 1990s. As Cornell and

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Sheras (2006; Cornell 2013) have indicated, excluding students from school through expulsions and suspensions does nothing to resolve student problems or deescalate conflicts, and such punishments have even exacerbated the existing isolation and anger of prior school shooters (Levin and Madfis 2009; Madfis and Levin 2013). Additionally, schools across the country continue to install security cameras and armed security guards specifically to prevent “another Columbine,” yet both of these measures were already in place at Columbine High School and did not deter or prevent the rampage there (Kupchik and Monahan 2006, 625). Schools now typically lock all but one of their external doors during school hours as a safety precaution, though Adam Lanza easily shot through the glass windows at a locked entrance in order to gain entry to Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School (Flegenheimer 2013). Similarly, rampage killer Jeffrey Weise walked right through the metal detector at Red Lake Senior High School’s front entrance. When a security officer confronted him, Weise promptly shot and killed the man (Meloy and O’Toole 2011). Prior attacks were not deterred due to the presence of metal detectors, locked doors, security cameras, or school resource officers, and, in fact, many of the student plotters in Madfis’s (2014b) study considered these developments to be minor stumbling blocks easily resolved through additional preparations among already detailed plans. In contrast, various studies that explore how prior incidents of school rampage have been averted (Daniels et al. 2007, 2010; Larkin 2009; Madfis 2014a, 2014b; Newman et al. 2004; Pollack et al. 2008) have generally located a common mechanism by which these potentially horrendous tragedies have been thwarted – students breaking through the code of silence to notify school and/or police officials about the violent intentions that prospective school shooters shared with their peers. Vossekuil et al. (2002, 25) discovered that at least one person had some previous knowledge about the plans of offenders in 81 percent of targeted school

shooting incidents, while numerous individuals were aware in 59 percent of their sample. Of those people who possessed this crucial knowledge, 93 percent were the peers of student perpetrators, such as siblings, schoolmates, or friends (25). While some schools have adopted bystander intervention programs and enacted anonymous tip lines, these solutions have largely taken a back seat to more punitive disciplinary policies and enhanced security measures. As zero tolerance policies, metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and other law enforcement solutions cannot be credited with deterring or preventing the crimes in these cases from being planned let alone committed (Madfis 2014a, 2014b), their utility and prevalence warrants serious reconsideration. Instead, as restorative justice approaches to school discipline have been shown not only to reduce violence but to improve school climate in a way which encourages students to come forward to authorities when they have been entrusted with crucial information about an impending attack, such alternatives warrant far more consideration if not widespread adoption. In order to prevent future attacks from occurring, schools must seek to improve on the means by which these tragic events are actually averted, by forging genuinely positive school climates that encourage student bystanders to intervene in a responsible manner. Numerous schools across the United States and internationally serve as positive examples of how to utilize the rapidly expanding knowledge from restorative justice in their everyday applications of school discipline through practices of group conferencing, peacemaking and sentencing circles, and victim/offender mediation. In these practices, the conventional goals of deterrence and punitive retribution are replaced by a focus on the restorative goals of reconciliation, reparation, and transformation (Van Ness and Strong 2010). In perhaps the most extensive text on the subject of restorative classroom discipline, Meyer and Evans (2012) describe its key characteristics as inclusive and encouraging

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learning communities that utilize positive behavior management to resolve conflicts, solve problems, and restore harms with clear definitions of appropriate behavior and a consistent application of consequences. Numerous studies have consistently found that restorative school practices have the ability to strengthen positive school relationships by fostering inclusive school climates, improving student perceptions about the fairness of punishments (i.e., procedural justice), and increasing student trust in school authority figures (McCluskey et al. 2008; Mirsky 2003; Morrison 2007; Sherman and Strang 2007; Sumner et al. 2010; Youth Justice Board 2004). These are precisely the sort of outcomes needed in order to minimize the likelihood that marginalized students will feel the extreme exclusion often necessary to build up a desire to initiate a rampage attack against their school (Levin and Madfis 2009). However, even if this improved school climate fails to prevent students from engaging in the planning of homicidal plots, the student peers in these school communities will be far more likely to report vital information about threats revealed to them. Thus, as it is crucial to adopt school policies and procedures that encourage positive bystander behavior on the part of students, it is important for schools to adopt restorative and ameliorative practices in place of the punitive forms of discipline and security that remain currently dominant in American educational institutions. When it comes to addressing the recent spate of mass killings on college campuses (and elsewhere), we must recognize that it is no coincidence that guns are the most common weapons used to commit multiple homicide (Fox and Levin 2014). In the aftermath of numerous recent mass murders in the United States, Americans have witnessed calls to arm students, teachers, and faculty members, either as a means of deterring future offenders from making an attempt or with the mindset that an armed populace would be able to more easily stop a rampaging killer. In fact, nearly twenty American states considered new legislation

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to permit students and faculty to carry firearms on college campuses in the wake of the January 8, 2011, massacre in which nineteen people, one of them US Representative Gabrielle Giffords, were shot in Tucson, Arizona (Gottesdiener 2011). Thus, in the face of strong support for the second amendment to the American Constitution, little focus has been placed on reducing the availability of firearms. By contrast, the most common reaction to incidents outside of the United States has been gun control measures, particularly those designed to reduce teenagers’ access to deadly weapons (Madfis and Levin 2013). Following the tragic December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Americans spent six months in conversation, via media as well as word of mouth, regarding the passage of more effective gun control legislation. Then, no new federal laws or social policies that would reduce the availability of firearms were implemented. In the aftermath of the massacre on the campus of Umpqua Community College in October 2015, Americans again debated the effectiveness of crime-fighting measures such as improved background checks and other gun control laws. The unfortunate reality is that, in terms of reducing mass shootings specifically, more extensive background checks would make little difference. Most school rampage shooters secure guns from their parents who have legitimately passed background checks. And school killers (including the twenty-sixyear-old gunman in Roseburg Oregon who took the lives of eight students and a professor) typically lack a criminal record or a formal psychiatric history that would prevent them from legally obtaining a firearm (Fox and DeLateur 2014). That does not mean, however, that various types of gun control would not be productive in reducing the devastation of mass casualty events. Recent incidents of school rampages in China, for example, prove useful as a basis for comparison. China’s strict gun control laws were instrumental in determining the choice of weapon in a recent string of school massacres, and their legal

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restrictions on firearm possession saved the lives of numerous Chinese citizens. In none of the eight horrific onslaughts committed from March 2010 through August 2011 was a firearm employed. Instead, the weapon was a knife, a box cutter, a hammer, or a cleaver. While causing unspeakable harm, the Chinese version of rampage has seemed to result in many injuries but far fewer fatalities (Madfis and Levin 2013). As Hilal et al. (2014, 96) recently noted: the same week as 20 children and 6 adults were shot at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, 22 children and 1 adult were knifed at Chenpeng Village Primary School in Henan Province in China . . . The difference is all 26 victims in Connecticut died, while all 23 in Henan Province survived. There is no way to know, but had Min Yingjun wielded a gun and not a knife, the attack outside Chenpeng Village Primary School might have been much worse, perhaps even the deadliest mass murder in China in a decade.

Similar attacks in Chinese schools certainly did their fair share of damage, but were unsuccessful as mass murder attempts. While gun control laws do nothing to sate appetites for vengeance and carnage (and thus, there can be no substitute for preventive and ameliorative measures), they certainly make lethal violence more difficult to commit en masse. In the same vein, we must consider ways to limit the shooter’s access to large amounts of ammunition. High capacity magazines have been employed in the majority of mass murders in recent history (Follman et al. 2013). In many cases, mass killers have been disarmed only when forced to reload (Ferraro 2013; Savidge 1998). Adam Lanza, the rampage shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School, reportedly fired some 154 rounds, switching his thirty-round clips several times in order to kill his twentysix victims in less than five minutes (Raff 2013). In the absence of high capacity magazines, Lanza would likely have taken far fewer lives. Reducing the size of semiautomatic magazines so that they hold no

more than ten rounds would make some difference in the carnage associated with mass murder. In eight states and the District of Columbia, large-capacity magazines have already been banned. A federal law would reduce the likelihood of a potential rampage shooter being able to secure a weapon of mass destruction. He might still take a life or two, but not multiple lives. To the extent that a killer receives national if not international coverage, one large-scale rampage massacre can inspire others. The shooter at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College recognized this all too well when he posted online that the “more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight” (Crilly and Morgan 2015). If the United States cannot muster the political will for the sort of comprehensive and meaningful gun control reforms that most other nations have enacted in the wake of mass shootings abroad, we can at least aim to limit the ensuing carnage that assures killers lasting infamy and enables them to inspire future rampage shooters.

Glossary Averted rampage shootings Potential student plots to kill multiple peers and/or faculty that are prevented, typically due to schools that forge genuinely positive school climates where student bystanders are encouraged to intervene in a responsible manner. Copycat phenomenon As a result of extensive national if not international media coverage, one large-scale rampage massacre inspires others. Cumulative strain theory An integrated and sequential model of rampage shootings in which several criminological theories are brought to bear collectively to demonstrate their cumulative effect. Relevant variables include long-term frustrations (chronic strains) experienced early in life or in adolescence, social isolation and a resultant lack of pro-social support systems (uncontrolled strain), and a shortterm negative event (acute strain), be it

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real or imagined, that is particularly devastating. Rampage school shootings Massacres of multiple victims by gunfire which take place in a school-related venue and involve one or more shooters who are students or former students of the school.

Note 1. That said, Madfis (2014a, 34) found among his sample of school rampage plots that most offenders “did in fact desire to target specific individuals or groups of people rather than, or in addition to, random victims and the school as a whole.” As a result, Muschert’s (2007) distinction between “targeted” and “rampage” shootings proves somewhat untenable. Similarly, by limiting the operational definition of school rampage to only those involving multiple deaths, numerous cases involving multiple injuries are unnecessarily removed, though these cases are often otherwise indistinguishable in terms of motives and goals. For that reason, we extend our exploration of school rampage to include targeted and random attacks of multiple people who were injured or killed.

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rampage school shootings 14. www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816, 1535046,00.html. Van Ness, Daniel W., and Karen Heetderks Strong. 2010. Restoring Justice: An Introduction to Restorative Justice. New Providence, NJ: Anderson. Verlinden, Stephanie, Michel Hersen, and Jay Thomas. 2000. Risk factors in school Shootings. Clinical Psychology Review 20(1):3–56. Vossekuil, Bryan, Robert Fein, Marissa Reddy, Randy Borum, and William Modzeleski. 2002. The final report and findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the

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prevention of school attacks in the United States. Washington, DC: US Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education. Webber, Julie A. 2003. Failure to Hold: The Politics of School Violence. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Wise, Tim. 2001. School shootings and white denial. Multicultural Perspectives 3(4):3–4. Youth Justice Board. 2004. National evaluation of the restorative justice in schools programme. www.restorativejustice.org.uk/ resource/national_evaluation_of_the_ restorative_justice_in_schools_programme/.

CHAPTER 16

Understanding Sexual Violence: The Role of Causal and Precipitating Factors in Sexual Offending Heng Choon (Oliver) Chan Abstract Sexual violence is a serious social problem and a growing concern worldwide. Research has been devoted to understanding the etiology of sexual violence. This chapter first reviews the outcome nature of sexual homicide, with particular emphasis given to the differences between homicidal and nonhomicidal sexual offenders. A comprehensive discussion on four widely cited causal and precipitating factors leading to violent sexual offending (i.e., childhood maltreatment, deviant sexual fantasies, pornography consumption, and alcohol and drug consumption) is provided. Regardless of the lethality outcome of the offense, these four risk factors play a key role in the commission of a sexual offense. In light of the empirical findings, implications for practice in the area of crime prevention are offered.

Introduction Sexual violence is a serious incident and widely regarded as both a violation of human rights and a public health concern worldwide. It is understood in reference to a power imbalance in the context of gender, family, and social relationships (Chan 2009). The terms “sexual violence,” “sexual offending,” “sexual assault,” “rape,” and “sexual abuse” often have overlapping meanings, and they are typically used interchangeably in the literature. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), sexual violence is referred to as “any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted

sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed, against a person’s sexuality using coercion [i.e., physical force, psychological intimidation, or threats of physical harm], by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home and work” (Krug et al. 2002, 149). The nature of sexual violence could be distinguished as being instrumental (i.e., is invoked when the individual is interested in possessing something that he or she presently lacks but which is possessed by another individual) or expressive (i.e., as a reaction to anger or provocation, and the eventual intention is to inflict pain on the

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victim, see Adjorlolo and Chan 2015 for a review). Typically, sexual violence is perpetrated in different circumstances and contexts, such as illegal/criminal sexual penetration (i.e., rape) and unwanted sexual contact (e.g., marital or date rape). Moreover, acts that are considered sexual violence often vary from country to country. Hence, in this review, only sexual activities that are regarded as criminal in most jurisdictions are examined. In the following section, different types of sexual offenders, both homicidal and nonhomicidal, are reviewed in terms of their significant differences. Explored next, are childhood maltreatment and deviant sexual fantasies as causal factors as well as pornography and alcohol and drug consumption as precipitating factors in sexual offending. On the whole, this chapter provides a comprehensive examination of how these oft-cited risk factors play a key role in influencing an individual to commit a violent sexual offense. The Outcome Nature of Sexual Offending: Differences between Homicidal and Nonhomicidal Sexual Offenders In a nutshell, in addition to the differences in the offender’s age and gender, and the victim’s age and gender, a sexual offense committed by the criminals could also be distinguished in terms of whether the offense is homicidal or nonhomicidal in nature (e.g., Chan and Beauregard 2016a; Chan and Frei 2013; Chan, Frei, and Myers 2013; Chan and Heide 2008; Chan, Heide, and Myers 2013; Chan, Myers, and Heide 2010; Heide et al. 2012; Heide et al. 2011; Khachatryan et al. 2014; Myers and Chan 2012; Myers, Chan, and Mariano 2014). Although a plethora of literature has been published on nonhomicidal sexual offenders and sexual murderers, little is known about the distinctions between sexual offenders who killed and those who did not kill. To date, only about seventeen empirical studies, published between 1988 and mid-2016, have been conducted to compare these two types

of sexual offenders (see Chan 2015; Chan and Heide 2017). Although mixed findings were noted by Chan and Heide (2017) in many aspects of the offenders and victims’ characteristics, due in part to different sampling procedures, several noteworthy differences were identified. Relative to nonhomicidal sexual offenders, the childhood and adolescence of homicidal sexual offenders are characterized as having more childhood disciplinary problems, more criminal gang involvement, early onset of criminal behavior, greater social isolation, and more frequent admissions to reform school (Grubin 1994; Koch et al. 2011; Langevin 2003; Oliver et al. 2007; Proulx, Beauregard, and Nicole 2002). Comparative studies indicate that sexual offenders who killed were more likely than their nonhomicidal counterparts to manifest different maladaptive personality traits, be clinically diagnosed with antisocial and schizoid personality disorders and sexual sadism, and engage in different paraphilic behaviors other than pedophilia (Chan and Beauregard 2016b; Firestone et al. 1998a; Koch et al. 2011; Langevin et al. 1988). Unlike sexual offenders who did not murder their victim, sexual murderers were more likely to reside alone, were less likely to be married at the time of the offense, and had fewer intimate relationship experiences (e.g., Milsom, Beech, and Webster 2003; Oliver et al. 2007). Moreover, homicidal sexual offenders were reported to have more sexually deviant fantasies and an erotic interest in sexual deviation (e.g., sadism, violent pedophilia, and tranvestism), especially prior to their offense (e.g., Firestone et al. 2000; Firestone et al. 1998b). Pertaining to the criminal process, sexual offenders who killed were less likely to target and select victims based on their attractiveness than those who did not kill (Healey, Lussier, and Beauregard 2013). Rather, homicidal sexual offenders targeted victims that met their unique needs (i.e., victim of choice rather than victim of opportunity), and frequently their victims who were older, lived alone, or were strangers to them (e.g., Chene and Cusson 2007; Koch et al. 2011).

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Alcohol use at the time of the offense was reported to be more common in homicidal than in nonhomicidal sexual offenders (Chan 2015). Relative to nonhomicidal sexual offenders, sexual offenders who murdered their victims were more likely to engage in noncontrolled violence and to inflict multiple wounds on their victim (i.e., overkill), with victim mutilation being more frequent (e.g., Chan 2015; Salfati and Taylor 2006). Irrespective of the differences between sexual offenders who killed and those who did not, there are a number of risk factors that not only predispose an individual to commit a sexual offense but also facilitate the individual to complete the sexual offense. These are (1) experiences of childhood maltreatment, (2) over-indulgence in deviant sexual fantasies, (3) consumption of pornographic materials, and (4) the use of alcohol and drugs, which are often cited as key causal and precipitating factors in violent sexual crime. In the following section, these causal and precipitating factors are discussed, in turn, in relation to their role in the commission of a sexual offense.

Causal and Precipitating Factors in Sexual Offending Childhood Maltreatment A plethora of literature has addressed the role of early traumatic experiences (e.g., various forms of abuse and neglect, and family disruption) in the origin of later sexual offending. Maltreated children are at increased risk for many adverse consequences and life outcomes. These include somatic pain and disorders (e.g., Paras et al. 2009; Wegman and Stetler 2009); psychosocial problems such as social withdrawal and low self-esteem (e.g., Kendall-Tackett, Williams, and Finkelhor 1993; Lansford et al. 2002); psychopathology such as psychotic symptoms, depression, anxiety disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder (e.g., Afifi et al. 2011; Arsenault et al. 2011; Hillberg, Hamilton-Giachritsis, and Dixon 2011; Jonas

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et al. 2011; Nanni, Uher, and Danese 2012); and delinquent and violent behavior (e.g., Chan 2015; Chan and Heide 2009; Chan, Heide, and Beauregard 2011; Chauhan and Widom 2012; Levenson, Willis, and Prescott 2015; Hartford, Yi, and Grant 2014; Pinto et al. 2015; Trabold et al. 2015). With relation to delinquent and violent behavior, animal and human research indicates that early traumatic experiences could impair serotonergic functioning (Crowell et al. 2008), which subsequently increases the potential for impulsive and aggressive behavior (Braquehais et al. 2010; Mann 2003). Childhood traumatic experiences, particularly child abuse, have been found to be one of the key risk factors for later violent sexual crime. There is strong empirical evidence to indicate an association between childhood maltreatment, particularly child sexual abuse, and subsequent sexually abusive or violent behavior (e.g., DeLisi et al. 2014; Forsman et al. 2015; Salter et al. 2003; Seto and Lalumière 2010; Seto et al. 2010; Vizard et al. 2007). The cycle of violence hypothesis explains the enduring adverse consequences of various forms of victimization (i.e., abuse and neglect) and the manner in which these victimization experiences enhance the risk for future offending (Dodge, Bates, and Pettit 1989; Widom 1989a, 1989b; Widom and Maxfield 2001). The cycle of violence hypothesis is especially relevant to childhood sexual abuse in which the maltreatment experiences cause immediate and prolonged physical, psychological, and developmental problems to the victims. In turn, these developmental defects may increase the propensity of these maltreated children to engage in similar behavior. Specifically, the sexually abused-sexual abuser hypothesis is proffered by Seto (2008) to explain that individuals who are victimized in childhood are more likely to perpetrate sexual abuse against children. There is ample empirical support for these two hypotheses. The prevalence of child sexual abuse among sexual offenders of children ranged from 0 percent up to 67 percent (Goldman and Padayachi

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2000); with the peak vulnerability occurring between the ages of seven and thirteen years (Finkelhor 1994). In Jespersen and colleagues’ (2009) meta-analysis, the presence of child sexual abuse was 3.4 times higher among adult sexual offenders than among non-sexual offenders. Similar findings were noted in Seto and Lalumière’s (2010) more comprehensive meta-analysis of fifty-nine studies involving 3,855 adolescent male sexual offenders and 13,393 male adolescent non-sexual offenders. Comparable findings of the significant association between childhood traumatic sexual experiences and later sexual misconduct or offending were also reported in a number of empirical studies (e.g., Burton, Duty, and Leibowitz 2011; DeLisi et al. 2010; Mallie et al. 2011; Sigurdsson et al. 2010; Stinson, Becker, and Sales 2008; Thomas et al. 2013; see for exceptions Maniglio 2009; Salter et al. 2003). Interestingly, childhood traumatic experiences also predict other forms of delinquent and criminal behavior beyond sexual offending, including illicit drug use (Chauhan and Widom 2012), violent offending (Fergusson et al. 2011; Lee et al. 2012), and generalized antisocial behavior (Burton et al. 2011). These criminogenic effects for childhood maltreatment and subsequent delinquent and criminal offending are in line with the literature on criminal careers (e.g., DeLisi 2005; DeLisi and Piquero 2011) and victim-offender overlap (e.g., Chan and Wong 2015a; Jennings, Piquero, and Reingle 2012). Deviant Sexual Fantasies The long-term sequelae of childhood maltreatment, especially child sexual abuse, also include serious difficulties in fostering and maintaining interpersonal relationships, such as insecure attachment in the parent-child relationship and, later, in adult relationships (DiLillo et al. 2001; Kwako et al. 2010). In addition to childhood maltreatment, domestic problems such as dysfunctional relationships, ineffective communication, and family conflict and dissatisfaction also play a pivotal role in

the development of subsequent generalized delinquent or criminal behavior (e.g., Chan and Chui 2013, 2015a; Chan and Wong 2015b; Chan, Lo, and Zhong 2016; Chan et al. 2015; Chui and Chan 2011, 2012), and also particularly in violent sexual behavior (e.g., Burk and Burkhart 2003; Maniglio 2010; Starzyk and Marshall 2003). Ineffective or problematic parenting styles, including low levels of supervision, care, support, consistency, and discipline; and high levels of neglect, control, coercion, and rejection, are commonly reported among sexual offenders (Marsa et al. 2014; McCormack, Hudson, and Ward 2002). Sexual offenders commonly describe their parents as uncaring, unsympathetic, cold, emotionally unattached, aggressive, hostile, and rejecting (Maniglio 2012; Smallbone and Dadds 1998). In turn, children of emotionally unattached parents are likely to develop a low level of self-control, which is a major factor in subsequent delinquency and violent crime (Chan and Chui 2015b; Chui and Chan 2013a, 2013b, 2015). Ineffective or problematic parenting styles impede these children from securing emotional attachments with other individuals. A number of theoretical models have proposed that insecure attachment during childhood or adolescence is one of the key risk factors for later sexual offending (e.g., Beech and Ward 2004; Marshall and Barbaree 1990; Marshall and Marshall 2000; Ward and Beech 2006). Consequent to the insecure childhood attachment with parents, psychosocial development breakdowns are not uncommon. Specifically, sexual offenders who reported being insecurely attached to their parents during childhood or adolescence are often introverted, socially isolated, emotional lonely, and lack assertiveness in their adulthood (Chan and Heide 2009). For these individuals who are socially isolated and emotionally lonely, erotic fantasies alleviate their sexual frustration or enhance their sexual pleasure in the absence of suitable partners (Langevin, Lang, and Curnoe 1998). These sexual fantasies, often deviant in nature, provide them with a sense of emotional closeness, personal relief,

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and social achievement that seems otherwise unattainable in real life. It therefore becomes much easier and more pleasurable for them to indulge predominantly in their imaginary world (MacCulloch et al. 1983). The need for indulgence in deviant sexual fantasies might persist or even increase over time. Overuse of sexual fantasies might promote more severe and chronic social isolation and emotional loneliness (Bartels and Gannon 2011; Looman 1995). Importantly, the inappropriate use or overuse of deviant sexual fantasies is likely to lead to a reduction in controlling sexual impulses (Neidigh and Tomiko 1991). It has been proposed that the longer one indulges in deviant sexual fantasies, the more violent the fantasies become, until they are sadistic in nature (MacCulloch, Gray, and Watt 2000). When the mere indulgence in deviant sexual fantasies is no longer sexually gratifying, these individuals seek alternatives. The acting out of their deviant sexual fantasies is one of the most common ways for them to attain sexual euphoria (Chan 2015). Many sexual offenders report having engaged in deviant sexual fantasies prior to their sexual attack. The nature of their fantasies largely depends on their psychosexual need; for instance, sexual fantasies involving power (Carabellese et al. 2010; Groth, Burgess, and Holmstrom 1977), control (Baumgartner, Scalora, and Huss 2002; Scully and Marolla 1993), and coercion (Abel et al. 1977; Barbaree, Baxter, and Marshall 1989; Earls 1988) over potential partners. Sexual offenders become motivated to enact their fantasies. Over time, their sexual fantasies may become sadistic and they will need to satisfy their sexual urges in this manner (Jones et al. 2013). Indeed, empirical studies indicate that frequent sadistic sexual fantasies are commonly reported among different types of sexual offenders, including child molesters and pedophiles (e.g., Curnoe and Langevin 2002; Looman 1995; Proulx, McKibben, and Lusignan 1996), juvenile sexual offenders (e.g., Myers et al. 2009; Smith et al. 2005), and nonhomicidal and homicidal sexual offenders (e.g., Beau-

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regard et al. 2008; Chan, Beauregard, and Myers 2015). Pornography Consumption Pornography, broadly speaking, involves the viewing of magazines, photos, and videos that depict people engaging in any type of sexual activity or posing partially or completely nude in which at least some of their genital areas are exposed. “Erotica” and “pornography” have sometimes been differentiated. Erotica involves sexually explicit material that illustrates consenting adults engaged in nonviolent, nondegrading, and pleasurable sexual interactions (Fisher and Barak 1989). Conversely, pornography refers to the depiction of sexual activity in which one of the participants is portrayed as nonconsenting and powerless in the presence or absence of physical violence or the threat of violence against the participant (Marshall and Barrett 1990). Violent pornography often refers to sexually explicit materials that portray sexual aggression; in many cases, such aggression is enacted by males against females (Fisher and Barak 1991). Degrading pornography, by contrast, involves sexually explicit materials that often depict females as submissive or hypersexual beings who experience sexual pleasure while in humiliating or degrading conditions (Fisher and Barak 1991). In general, pornography is used to satisfy sexual urges and fantasies and is commonly used by the general population. Often, its consumption compensates for the viewers’ social isolation and emotional loneliness. Nonetheless, detrimental effects from the consumption of pornographic materials have been documented, particularly regarding male assaultive behavior against females (Beech et al. 2008; Ferguson and Hartley 2009). Pornography is arguably associated with unprotected sexual activity (Danebeck et al. 2006) and infidelity (Stack et al. 2004). Specifically, its consumption has been consistently linked with violent sexual offending (Chan 2015; Chan et al. 2011; Fisher et al. 2013; Malamuth, Addison, and Koss 2000; Mancini, Reckdenwald, and

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Beauregard 2012; Marshall 2000; Seto, Maric, and Barbaree 2001). Some studies indicate that criminals draw on pornographic materials as a “training manual” for sexually abusing females (Bauserman 1996; Jensen 1995; Hald, Malamuth, and Yuen 2010). The social learning or imitation effect of pornography is suggested in that criminals become motivated to act out or recreate scenes from pornographic materials to satiate their deviant sexual urges (Kingston et al. 2008). A number of empirical studies on sexual offenders have found support for this contention. For instance, Marshall (1988), in a study of eighty-nine convicted rapists and child sexual abusers attending an outpatient treatment clinic, found that over one-third of the convicted sexual offenders admitted to viewing pornographic magazines or movies prior to at least one of their offenses. Moreover, 53 percent of the child molesters and 33 percent of the rapists reported frequent consumption of pornography as preparation for committing a sexual offense. In their study of extrafamilial sexual child molesters, Proulx and colleagues (1999) noted that pornography served as a disinhibitor (i.e., a factor that leads to the failure of deterring someone from acting out criminal impulses) for 25 percent of the sample during the last twelve hours prior to their last sexual offense. The pornography used by the criminals prior to the commission of their sexual offense is also reported in the study of rapists and child molesters by Carter and colleagues (1987). In Langevin’s (2003) study of thirty-three sexual murderers, nearly 40 percent of them admitted to having collected pornographic materials and their use influenced their offense commission. In a study by Mancini and colleagues (2012), adolescent exposure to pornography is associated with an increase in subsequent victim humiliation. Based on research from the victim’s perspective, Silbert and Pines (1984) noted that 22 percent of their sample of female victims of sexual offense recalled their offender commenting about pornography during the assault and nearly a quarter

of them reported that their offender perceived that pornography use justified their assault. In another study, Bergen and Bogle (2000) found that approximately 40 percent of their female respondents at a rape crisis center reported that their abusive incident was partly influenced by the pornographic material that was consumed by their abuser. In addition, 43 percent of their sample believed that their abuser’s use of pornography amplified the violence they experienced; while 21 percent and 14 percent of them believed that pornography increased the frequency of violence and level of violence they experienced, respectively. Despite these studies on the influence of pornography on sexual crime, some studies have found a minimal effect (e.g., Langevin and Curnoe 2004), or even a cathartic effect whereby the consumption of pornography could help to release sexual aggression, and in turn reduce the propensity to sexually offend (e.g., Neutze et al. 2011; Wortley and Smallbone 2006). Alcohol and Drug Consumption In the criminological literature, alcohol and drug consumption, commonly referred to as substance use or misuse, is often cited as one of the key risk factors to violent crime (e.g., Boles and Miotto 2003; Klostermann and Fals-Stewart 2006). Particularly, the association between alcohol and drug abuse and sexual aggression is relatively strong, in the convicted (e.g., Harsch et al. 2006; Johnson and Knight 2000; Peugh and Belenko 2001; Testa 2002) and nonconvicted populations (e.g., Abbey and McAuslan 2004; Abbey et al. 2006; Carr and VanDeusen 2004). Alcohol abuse, in particular, is asserted to be associated with negative emotionality (e.g., sadness, depression, and anger), which in turn increases the probability that the individual will engage in violent, criminal, or aggressive sexual behavior (Looman and Abracen 2011). Abbey and colleagues (2006), by contrast, proposed that heavy drinking is closely related to a desire for sexual dominance, which in turn is associated with positive attitudes toward casual sexual

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relationships (e.g., macho attitudes) and peer pressure to engage in sexual activities. These attitudes and behaviors are closely correlated with the number of sexual assaults committed. Moreover, evidence suggests that the effects of substance use on sexual offending are likely to be mediated by both substance expectancies (i.e., expected effect of the substance use) and cognitive myopia (i.e., cognitive impairment of perception and thought; Abbey et al. 2004). Davis (2010) argued that cognitive myopia results by focusing the offender’s attention on immediate and salient cues (e.g., the offender’s sexual arousal), and by limiting their attention to more abstract and inhibitory cues (e.g., potential negative consequences of sexual aggression). The physiological effects of substance use may further increase the propensity of the individual to commit sexually aggressive acts (Steele and Josephs 1990). Abracen and Looman (2004) argued that both psychological and physiological risk factors could act synergistically in the commission of a sexual offense. Specifically, in relation to sexual offending, Seto and Barbaree (1995) reviewed the role of alcohol in sexually aggressive behavior. Alcohol consumption may cause aggression directly by triggering the release of the criminal’s sexually aggressive impulses; or indirectly by activating the criminal’s expectancies about the alcohol disinhibiting effects, which in turn might lead to sexually aggressive behavior. Alcohol use may also be related to sexually aggressive behavior as a mediator of sexually aggressive intentions. For instance, the criminal’s intentions to engage in sexually aggressive behavior might further motivate his/her use of alcohol to mitigate his/her feelings of responsibility. Alternatively, alcohol consumption may be associated with sexually aggressive behavior in an interactive manner, in which sexually aggressive dispositions might interact with alcohol to produce sexually aggressive acts. Lastly, Knight and Sims-Knight (2011) asserted that alcohol use may be related to sexually aggressive behavior only because both are directly associated with sexually

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aggressive characteristics of the criminals. In other words, antisocial offenders are more likely to both consume alcohol and commit sexually aggressive acts. Although less studied in the context of drug consumption, Hamdi and Knight (2012) posited that many of these contributing factors are likely to explain the relationship between the offender’s drug use and sexually aggressive behavior. In addition to the frequency of sexual offending, alcohol and drug consumption is also related to the outcomes of sexual assault. Empirical evidence suggests that substance use by the criminal prior to the commission of a sexual offense predicts the criminal’s level of aggressiveness, extent of injury to the victim, and the likelihood of sexual penetration (Abbey et al. 2003; Testa et al. 2004). These studies indicate that the criminal’s aggressiveness and the odds of injury increase proportionally with the amount of alcohol and drugs consumed prior to the offense; while the odds of sexual penetration increase with low levels of substance use and decrease with high levels of substance use. The prevalence of lifetime substance abuse among sexual offenders, without distinguishing between alcohol and drug consumption, is relatively high, with the rate being between 23 percent and 57 percent (see Kraanen and Emmelkamp 2011 for a comprehensive review). To illustrate, Langevin and colleagues (2006) found that approximately 50 percent of sexual offenders and individuals with sexual disorders suffered from serious problems related to alcohol. Using CAGE, a four-item scale designed to measure the severity of alcohol abuse, Baltieri and Guerra de Andrade (2008) reported that between 30 percent and 43 percent of sexual offenders admitted to having problems with alcohol. Felson and colleagues (2007) have also noted that criminals were using alcohol in about 36 percent of sexual assault incidents. Based on the incarcerated sample of high-risk sexual offenders and violent nonsexual offenders, a number of studies conducted in Canada found that sexual offenders experienced

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significantly higher levels of alcohol abuse than violent nonsexual offenders (Abracen, Looman, and Anderson 2000; Abracen et al. 2006; Looman et al. 2004). Moreover, the study conducted by Hill and colleagues (2007) reported the lifetime prevalence rates of substance use disorders to be 50 percent and 48 percent for sexual murderers with one victim and multiple victims, respectively. In fact, the assertion that substance abuse is related to sexual offense recidivism is hardly novel (see Rada 1975; Testa 2002). Specifically, empirical evidence suggests that substance abuse could be an acute dynamic risk factor for sexual recidivism among sexual offenders (e.g., Begin, Weekes, and Thomas 2006; Douglas and Skeem 2005; Hanson 2006; Looman and Abracen 2011). Kingston and colleagues (2008) found that alcoholism was more of a problem for violent and criminal recidivists than for nonrecidivists. Additionally, Långström and colleagues (2004) noted that having a history of alcohol abuse doubled the risk of recidivism in their sample of criminals.

Conclusions This review has provided a comprehensive discussion on four widely cited causal and precipitating factors in committing violent sexual offenses: childhood maltreatment, deviant sexual fantasies, pornography consumption, and alcohol and drug consumption. Regardless of the differences between sexual offenders who killed and those who did not kill their victims, these four risk factors play a vital role in the commission of a sexual offense. In fact, studies reveal that the fatal outcome of a sexual offense relies on the characteristics of the victim and the crime at the time of the offense (Beauregard and Mieczkowski 2012; Mieczkowski and Beauregard 2010). In brief, the experience of early traumas such as various forms of abuse and neglect (e.g., physical, emotional, and sexual) and family disruption (e.g., domestic violence)

increase the risk that an individual will be involved in criminal activities. A strong association between childhood maltreatment, especially child sexual abuse, and subsequent sexually abusive or violent criminal behavior is well documented in the literature. This association is explained by the cycle of violence hypothesis for subsequent violent offending and the sexually abused-sexual abuser hypothesis particularly for subsequent sexual offending. In addition, over-indulgence in deviant sexual fantasies as a consequence of childhood maltreatment has also been noted as a factor that predisposes an individual to commit a sexual offense. As a result of the abusive experiences, particularly child sexual abuse, an individual is likely to have serious difficulties in fostering and maintaining interpersonal relationships (e.g., insecure parent-child attachment and later adult relationships), which in turn leads to a breakdown in psychosocial development. Individuals who are insecurely attached to their parents during childhood or adolescence are typically socially isolated, introverted, lonely, and lack assertiveness in adulthood (Chan and Heide 2009). To alleviate their sexual frustration or to enhance sexual pleasure in the absence of suitable partners, these individuals turn to deviant sexual fantasies for a sense of emotional closeness, personal relief, and social achievement that otherwise seem unachievable in real life. When indulging in deviant sexual fantasies is no longer gratifying, the acting out of their deviant sexual fantasies, often times on nonconsensual partners, allows them to achieve sexual euphoria. Empirical evidence indicates that precipitating factors, such as the consumption of pornography and of alcohol and drugs, particularly within forty-eight hours prior to the offense, influences individuals to commit a sexual crime. These precipitators lead sexual offenders to become (more) motivated to commit the offense (Chan 2015). Indeed, the association between pornography and violent sexual crime is well documented in the literature. The social learning or imitation effect of pornography suggests

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that sexual offenders often draw on pornographic materials as a “training manual” and become more motivated to act out or to recreate scenes from pornographic materials to gratify their deviant sexual urges. In addition to the influence of pornography on sexual crime, the criminals’ use of alcohol and drugs has also been found to strongly associate with subsequent sexual aggression or offending. Evidence suggests that the effects of substance use on sexual offending are likely to be mediated by both substance expectancies and cognitive myopia. Furthermore, the physiological effects of substance use may increase the propensity of the individual to engage in sexually aggressive acts, with both psychological and physiological factors acting synergistically in the commission of a sexual offense. In general, the consumption of pornography and of alcohol and drugs may exacerbate the motivation of an individual to engage in violent sexual crimes. In light of the empirical findings, a number of implications for practice in the area of crime prevention could be derived. As stated, a plethora of empirical evidence has demonstrated the adverse consequences and life outcomes of early traumatic experiences in the domestic setting, with one possibility of later sexual offending. Therefore, efforts should be initiated and maintained to ensure that children and adolescents to grow up in a healthy and safe environment. Family bonding, particularly secure parent-child attachments, is key to nurture the children and adolescents’ prosocial attitudes and behaviors (e.g., increased levels of self-control, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and empathy; Chan and Wong 2016). Healthy child-rearing practices, including adequate parental supervision and effective parentchild communication are important to promote a healthy psychosocial functioning of children and adolescents. Importantly, parents should portray as good role models to their children to prevent any imitation of inappropriate attitudes and behavior, particularly those sexual in nature. As such, children and adolescents are less likely to indulge in deviant sexual

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fantasies. With healthy family functioning, children and adolescents are taught to foster and maintain prosocial interpersonal relationships. Consequently, they may not seek to consume pornography and/or to indulge in deviant sexual fantasies to compensate for their social isolation and emotional loneliness. In addition, individuals with high self-control are less likely to engage in a deviant lifestyle or to be involved in delinquent activities (Chan and Chui 2015b). Hence, children and adolescents with high self-control may not misuse or abuse alcohol and drugs later in adulthood, which may in turn increase their propensity to engage in criminal activities. Most importantly, such preventive efforts should not only be carried out in a domestic setting. Parents or caregivers are encouraged to work closely with other relevant parties, such as the school and community to foster a healthy and prosocial psychosocial development of their children. The implications suggested may offer some insights to reduce the propensity of an individual to engage in sexual violence. Although this chapter provides a glimpse into understanding the widely cited causal and precipitating factors in sexual offending, more research is required to further investigate other contributing factors and dynamics in sexual offending.

Glossary Childhood maltreatment The abuse and/or neglect of a child under the age of eighteen by a parent, caregiver, or another individual in a custodial role. Deviant sexual fantasy An elaborated set of deviant erotica cognitions or thoughts, anchored in emotion, that is sexually arousing to the individual. Homicidal sexual offender An offender who commit a sexual offense and kills the victim. Nonhomicidal sexual offender An offender who commit a sexual offense but does not kill the victim.

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Sexual homicide An unlawful killing of another individual in a sexual manner.

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understanding sexual violence Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment 11:117–129. Rada, R. T. 1975. Alcohol and rape. Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality 9:48–65. Salfati, C. G., and P. Taylor. 2006. Differentiating sexual violence: A comparison of sexual homicide and rape. Psychology, Crime, and Law 12:107–25. Salter, D., D. McMillan, M. Richards, T. Talbot, J. Hodges, A. Bentovim, R. Hastings, J. Stevenson, and D. Skuse. 2003. Development of sexually abusive behaviour in sexually victimized males: A longitudinal study. The Lancet 361(9356):471–76. Scully, D., and J. Marolla. 1993. Riding the bull at Gilley’s: Convicted rapists describe the rewards of rape. In Violence Against Women: The Bloody Footprints, edited by P. B. Bart and E. G. Moran, 26–46. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Seto, M. C. 2008. Pedophilia and sexual offending against children: Theory, assessment, and intervention. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Seto, M. C., and H. E. Barbaree. 1995. The role of alcohol in sexual aggression. Clinical Psychology Review 15:545–66. Seto, M. C., and M. L. Lalumière. 2010. What is so special about male adolescent sexual offending? A review and test of explanations through meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 136:526–75. Seto, M. C., A. Maric, and H. E. Barbaree. 2001. The role of pornography in the etiology of sexual aggression. Aggression and Violent Behavior 6(1):35–53. Seto, M. C., C. Kjellgren, G. Priebe, S. Mossige, C. G. Svedin, and N. Långström. 2010. Sexual victimization and sexually coercive behavior: A population study of Swedish and Norwegian male youth. Child Maltreatment 15:219–28. Sigurdsson, J. F., G. Gudjonsson, B. B. Asgeirsdottir, and I. D. Sigfusdottir. 2010. Sexually abusive youth: What are the background factors that distinguish them from other youth? Psychology, Crime and Law 16:289– 303. Silbert, M. H., and A. M. Pines. 1984. Pornography and sexual abuse of women. Sex Roles 10, 857–68. Smallbone, S. W., and M. R. Dadds. 1998. Childhood attachment and adult attachment in

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CHAPTER 17

Critical and Intersectional Understandings of Campus Sexual Assault as a Social Problem Ashley C. Rondini

Abstract Sexual violence on college and university campuses raises multidimensional issues for public health, public safety, criminal justice, and civil rights. This chapter will examine the factors that complicate both measuring and effectively addressing campus sexual assault as a social problem, by outlining the challenges presented by defining (1) the terms used to measure prevalence rates, (2) the extremely low rates at which instances of campus sexual violence are reported to authorities, (3) the particular aspects of college and university contexts that are specifically associated with sexual assault risks, and (4) the sociohistorical legacies of contestation that inform broader contemporary understandings of sexual violence at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other social identity dynamics.

Campus sexual assault is not a new social problem, despite the unprecedented degree of public attention that has recently spotlighted the topic. Rather, it is a specific manifestation of the long-standing social problem of sexual violence, which has recently been addressed in a seemingly “new” way. Since second-wave feminist movement efforts to place “violence against women” on the public agenda in the United States during the mid- to late twentieth century, sexual violence has been variably conceptualized as an issue of public safety and crime, of health and medicalization, and of patriarchal power through several overlap-

ping theoretical frameworks that are still salient to our contemporary understandings and approaches (Messner 2016). These early efforts were critically engaged and enhanced by the work of black feminist, women of color, womanist, and queer scholars and theorists, who have advanced intersectional discursive and political analyses of sexual violence issues that moved beyond the limitations of the “violence against women” framing (see, e.g., Davis 1981; Hooks 1984; Crenshaw 1992, 1993; Roberts 1993; Paglia 1994; Harris 1993; Collins 1990, 2005; Scarce 1997; Spade 2006; Patterson 2016).

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Under the Obama administration in 2011, the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights integrated another conceptual frame into the public discourse surrounding campus sexual violence, by more proactively addressing campus sexual assault as an issue of civil rights. As such, colleges and universities were placed under heightened scrutiny regarding the extent to which their practices for sexual violence prevention, response, and adjudication comply with civil rights protections against sex discrimination guaranteed by Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments. Institutional accountability for colleges and universities in relation to sexual assault was “uniquely enforceable” by virtue of educational institutions being under the purview of federal civil rights protections (Rondini 2011). Nonetheless, the challenges to addressing campus sexual assault as a social problem have continued to be compounded by difficulty in measuring prevalence as a consequence of definitional variability, the extremely low rates at which sexual assaults are reported to authorities, and the historically informed cultural ideologies that shape – and often distort – limited understandings of why sexual assault occurs, who can be sexually assaulted, who can perpetrate a sexual assault, and what circumstances most frequently contextualize incidents of sexual assault on college campuses and beyond. This chapter will examine the factors that complicate both measuring and effectively addressing campus sexual assault as a social problem, by outlining the challenges presented by defining (1) the terms used to measure prevalence rates, (2) the extremely low rates at which campus sexual violence is reported to authorities, (3) the particular aspects of college and university contexts that are specifically associated with sexual assault risks, and (4) the sociohistorical legacies of contestation that inform broader contemporary understandings of sexual violence at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other social identity dynamics.

Naming the Problem: Sexual Violence as a Social Problem in (Contested) Sociohistorical and Political Contexts Discourses surrounding “violence against women,” and sexual violence more broadly, have undergone significant transformation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In some regards, these changes can be understood as a shift away from the historical ideological construction of sexual violence as a phenomenon comprising only what sociological theorist C. Wright Mills (1959) would refer to as personal, individuallevel, “troubles” relegated to the private sphere. The 1960s–1970s second-wave feminist claim that, “the personal is political” (see, e.g., Hanisch 1970) discursively transformed the focus on issues of violence against women as matters of public concern, reframing domestic and sexual violence as social “issues” reflective and symbolically representative of deeply embedded social and political inequalities between men and women. Second-wave feminist activism of the mid- and late twentieth century brought to light the ways in which societal patterns of “violence against women” reflected structural power inequities, rather than individual, isolated incidents perpetrated by deviant individuals (see, e.g., Brownmiller 1975; MacKinnon 1989) who were “strangers” to their victims. The term “violence against women” has since been critiqued for its essentialist implications of men as perpetrators, women as victims, gender as binary, and experiences of gender existing in a vacuum of other axes of social identity, power, and oppression, such as that which is structured in relation to race, class, and sexuality. Nonetheless, “violence against women” became the catchphrase that entered into public discourse and, ultimately, was represented in legislation upon the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994. The social meanings of this paradigmatic shift towards an understanding of the “public nature of private violence” (see Fineman and Mykitiuk 1994), however, were entangled within a more

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complicated history of the “mobilization of rape” (see Pascoe and Hollander 2016) in relation to social and political power. Prior to the successes of mid-twentiethcentury feminist organizing and advocacy in framing interpersonal and sexual violence against women as social problems rooted in the sexist oppression of women, the threat of rape had been historically mobilized in the public sphere not as an issue of women’s liberation and equality, but, rather, primarily in the interest of both sexist and racist social structures. In the early history of the United States, women’s status as the property of men was exemplified in legal understandings of rape as a crime against “the male estate” (Brownmiller 1975, 16); in other words, sexual assault against a women was illegal insofar as it constituted a crime against her husband, father, or brother. Implicit in this legal principle was the presumption that the only women against whom an assault could be perpetrated were white women. During much of the same historical period, black women’s bodies were considered the property of slave owners, and the owner/enslaved relational construct overrode any legally unrecognized marital or familial ties that black women may have had. Since the common law definition of rape throughout the nineteenth century was limited to a man’s engagement in “intercourse with a woman not his wife; by force or threat of force, against her will or without her consent” (Estrich 1987, 8), white middle- and upperclass men’s unlimited sexual access to their wives’ bodies was a foregone conclusion, and under the social mores surrounding white, middle- and upper-class respectability, sex outside of marriage was not permissible for women (see, e.g., Cott 1997; Bardaglio 1998) despite a double standard that allowed men more flexibility in their sexual behavior. For white middle- and upper-class women, exclusive and unrestricted sexual availability to one’s husband was viewed as a moral, legal, and social obligation; it was constructed as one’s marital “duty,” in exchange for a husband’s

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assumption of financial and physical responsibility for his wife’s well-being given the structural barriers to women’s financial and legal independence under the law. Rape within marriage was thus legally unrecognizable, precluding any association of rape with the sanctity and “safety” of one’s home. Accordingly, ideas about women’s vulnerability to sexual assault have long been used to justify their marginalization from public life and relegation to the “private sphere” of the home where they were purported to be “safe” from the ills of the outside world (Cott 1997). Although the social mores regarding sex outside of marriage became less restrictive over time, patriarchal assumptions about women’s sexual obligations to men with whom they were partnered have ideologically persisted through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contemporary accusations that cast women as “gold diggers” or “teases” are predicated on assumptions of heterosexual men’s sexual entitlement to the bodies of women in relation to whom they spend time and money. Contemporary renderings of women’s supposedly “appropriate place” in the “safety” of the private sphere are leveled in various ways. Feminist activists who have resisted women’s subjugation and marginalization and asserted their subjectivity in public spaces and institutions – from the marches of the suffrage movement to the contemporary feminist blogosphere of cyberspace and everyplace in between, throughout history – have met with harassment in the form of both sexualized degradation and rape threats, symbolically levied in protection of the very systemic oppression that they have opposed. Allegiance to patriarchal social traditions and systems is demonstrated through the actions and threats of misogynistic individuals and groups in ways that align closely with the heteronormative, binary view of sex, gender, and sexuality that has historically denigrated members of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. Homophobia has, in this way, been theorized to operate as a “weapon of

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sexism” (see Pharr 1997), and transphobia is predicated on related ideological processes deployed in the service of protecting binary notions of sex, gender, and sexuality that are espoused as moral imperatives. Rape and other forms of sexual assault against members of LGBTQ communities are often perpetrated in ways that are informed by homophobic and/or transphobic hatred or constructions of “punishment,” whereby victims are seen by perpetrators as “deserving” violence or “in need” of rape as a “corrective” enforcement of gender identity expression and/or sexuality (see, e.g., Herek and Berrill 1992; Patterson 2016) that complies with “compulsory heterosexuality” (see Rich 1980) and/or cisnormativity. Despite the significance of the theoretical and political gains that the antiviolence efforts of second-wave feminist activists and scholars achieved, a more complicated account comprises the social history that has shaped our contemporary perceptions of sexual violence, as well as the measures that have been implemented to address it as a social problem. Even some of the most canonical feminist scholarship on rape and sexual violence reified implicit assumptions of a cisgender, heterosexual, white, middle class female victim profile (see, e.g., Brownmiller 1975; Russell 1975). Third wave feminist and critical scholarship informed by intersectionality, critical race theory, and queer theory has since expanded understandings of sexual violence and the ways in which it is experienced in the context of multiple social identities at the intersecting axes of systems of power based on gender, race, sexuality, and socioeconomic class (see, e.g., Davis 1981; hooks 1984; Crenshaw 1987, 1992; Roberts 1993; Paglia 1994; Harris 1999; Collins 1990, 2005; Scarce 1997, 2006; Patterson 2016). Empirical research on sexual violence victimization, as well as historical scholarship, supports the arguments of these social and legal theorists. For example, racist ideas about black hypersexuality fueled the arguments deployed to “justify” the enslavement of African Americans for centuries, during which the rape of black women by white

slave owners was considered to simply reflect the prerogative that an owner of any property has regarding the use, or abuse, of what “belongs” to him (Davis 1981; Washington 2007). In the post–Civil War era, formal and informal white supremacist organizations including – but not limited to – the Ku Klux Klan invoked racist stereotypes of “animalistic” or “primitive” black sexuality that functioned to dismiss the experiences of women of color who had been victimized while demonizing men of color as “natural” perpetrators of sexual violence (see, e.g., McGuire 2010; Cunningham 2014; Stein 2015). Analogous processes characterized different groups of men of color as “innately” sexually deviant, untrustworthy, violent, and threatening to white women in different historical periods – whether as a rationalization for settler colonialist violence against Native Americans, virulent anti-Asian sentiment before, during, and immediately after World War II, or racialized anti-Latino rhetoric used to fuel support for nativist immigration restrictions throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In deploying racially sexualized (and sexually racialized) fear-mongering tactics to support the separation of racial groups through the mechanisms of de jure social, residential, educational, and occupational segregation, those espousing the “myth of the black male rapist” (see Davis 1983), the threats posed by the “Yellow Peril” (Espiritu 2000), the lustful “savagery” of Native American men (Harjo 2006), or the purportedly natural lasciviousness of Mexican “greasers” (Bender 2003) warned that men of color posed an inherent threat of sexual violence to the safety of “white womanhood”1 (Davis 1983; Collins 2005; Cunningham 2014). These views were “validated” by the presumed objectivity of white doctors and scientists for many years, and were rooted in the eugenic belief that people of color were innately more sexually driven and more violent than white people on the basis of a (long since debunked) supposed difference in their biological makeup. In fact, during the late nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries, some scientists went so far as to propose that the systematic castration of black men would be an appropriate preemptive measure to prevent rape (Stein 2015). The act of constructing black people as “naturally” hypersexual and animalistic functioned to provide a ideological support for vigilante forms of racist violence in the form of lynchings, in the supposed defense of “white womanhood,” while simultaneously obscuring white men’s sexual violence against both white women and women of color (Davis 1981). Denied bodily autonomy throughout centuries of chattel slavery, settler colonialism, orientalist exoticization, ideological dehumanization and objectification, and exploitative socioeconomic systems at the intersections of race, gender, class, and immigration, women of color have been subjected to the threat and perpetration of sexualized violence as simultaneously gendered and racialized mechanisms of oppression throughout US history (see, e.g., Heyes 2016; McGuire 2010). The “specter” of rape in public discourse has skewed understandings of these dynamics, by largely limiting the racially distorted perception that all men of color were likely perpetrators of sexual violence, while white women were believed to be [the only] possibly credible victims – so long as their assailants were racially or socioeconomically “othered” men. The specific phenomena of sexual violence around which there had been the most silence prior to when the rallying cry of “the personal is political” had taken root in public discourse were the forms of sexual violence perpetrated against women of color and/or by white men against women of all races, while the rhetorically constructed “threat” of men of color as rapists of white women had long been deployed in the service of white supremacist social and political structures. As perpetuated by some secondwave feminist scholarship, acknowledgment of sexual violence perpetrated by white men was typically limited to stereotypes of poor or working classes whites (see, e.g., Brownmiller 1975; Russell 1975), who were classifiable as inferior on the basis

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of their socioeconomic standing (Davis 1981). “Rapist” is thus a term that has come to be associated with the status of the “other”; the idea of the “stranger rapist” emerged within an ideological paradigm that positioned rapists as “outside of” civilized social life, despite the fact that the vast majority of sexual violence incidents are perpetrated by someone who is already known to the victim as a friend, acquaintance, date, or partner. Fears associated with the prevalence of the “stranger rapist” – which have proven to be ideologically durable despite evidence to the contrary of their central tenets concerning frequency – linked the image of the perpetrator with the “outsider” status of social deviants (often marked through racist and classist stereotypes) who were readily distinguishable from the “good men, normal men, especially white, middle class men” who, it was believed, “would not rape a woman” (Messner 2016, 58). Coinciding with dominant racial ideologies, socially validated “rape fears” have historically been disproportionately directed toward members of society who were already considered to be deviant and inferior to the white, heterosexual, middle- or upper-class men (Pascoe and Hollander 2016; Messner 2016) that have occupied the place of the “mythical norm” (see Lorde 1984) against which other members of society are measured and deemed inferior. Importantly for the topic of campus sexual assault, the imagery associated with these “good guys” – to whom the threat of sexual violence has not been widely attributed in the construction of the “stranger rapist” (see Messner 2016; Pascoe and Hollander 2016) – overlaps with the imagery of the “all-American” college student. It was these particular members of society – white, cisgender, heterosexual, Christian, middle- or upper-class men positioned in the social imagination as the antithesis of those who were classified as potential rapists – for whom, overwhelmingly, colleges and universities in the United States were designed, and by whom colleges and universities were predominantly (and,

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initially, exclusively in most cases) occupied throughout most of the history of American higher education. Up until the midtwentieth century, the explicit legal and social paradigm characterizing the relationship and obligations that colleges and universities had with students was based on the notion of in loco parentis – the idea that the institution would set rules, resolve disputes, and enforce consequences for violations of expected behavior internally, as if assuming the role of a “parent” (Stamatakos 1989). The contemporary legacies of this paradigm persist in the ongoing institutionalization of internal college and university judiciary processes, which may be utilized even in cases when the violation of university policy also constitutes a crime under state or federal law. This point is particularly salient when we consider the role of campus judiciary processes in addressing sexual violence; colleges and universities are empowered to adjudicate behavior that constitutes crime, in the absence of the power to impose sanctions that would yield criminal charges for perpetrators. As [predominantly white] women steadily gained greater access to higher education after World War II at single sex or coeducational institutions throughout the postwar era (see Eisenmann 2006), the same principles of in loco parentis were applied, albeit in more paternalistic ways: women were subject to more restrictive curfews and policies than were their male counterparts, and these discrepancies were justified through the ideological legacies of the “safety” in the “private sphere” rationale. The institutions that they attended thus offered the “protections” of home. Notably, the racial and socioeconomic demographics of the college and university campuses that white women attended have for most of the history of coeducation in the United States been relatively similar to that of their own households and neighborhoods. Notwithstanding historically black colleges and universities, the enrollment of students of color at institutions of higher education came about through the hardfought twentieth-century political struggle

against racialized educational segregation and exclusionary practices – practices which had been predicated, maintained, and bolstered through the same kinds of essentialist rhetoric denying people of color “civilized” capacities (of intellect, morality, the capacity to reason, etc.) that had long been used to support the racialized mythology that constructed men of color as inferior deviants and “natural rapists.” At historically and/or predominantly white institutions of higher education, it is still the case that students of color and/or poor and workingclass students experience the marginalization of “outsider” status throughout their college experiences (see, e.g., Stuber 2011; Aries 2008; Lee and Kramer 2013; Jack 2015), and that students of color may be disproportionately subject to suspicion of not being “actual” students within their campus communities and subsequently racially profiled by campus police officers (see, e.g., Smith et al. 2007; Holman 2015) – even as college and university student populations have become increasingly racially and socioeconomically diverse. Contemporary manifestations of the idea of the “other” on the campuses of predominantly white colleges and universities is historically grounded in racial and socioeconomic exclusion; these processes parallel the ways that ideas historically employed to “other” racially and socioeconomically oppressed populations have traditionally cast those populations as dangerous, violent, and sexually threatening. The in loco parentis frame functions to obscure dangers to female students posed by their male peers on college campuses by constructing threats to their safety as outside of the “home” of their built communities. As campus communities have diversified over time, cultural and structural practices that have continued to marginalize those who would have previously been literal “outsiders” or “strangers” in accordance with their race or class identities have been perpetuated in the context of these dynamics. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the idea of the “stranger rapist” – often assumed to be a threat posed by individuals outside of the campus

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community, since “good guys don’t rape” (Pascoe and Hollander 2016) – has remained salient for college women, complicating the processes through which they may struggle to name their experiences of sexual violence as such in the [far more likely] event that they are assaulted by an acquaintance, a friend, or a date. Defining the Problem: Operationalizing Concepts of Sex, Sexual Assault, and Rape The previously discussed feminist introduction of the “violence against women” framing into public discourse was emblematic of a paradigm shift in the understandings of sexual and intimate partner violence as social problems. Rape law reform efforts of feminist activists in the 1960s and 1970s also yielded – or at least furthered – other additions to the social and legal lexicon. Theses included the terms “marital rape” and “spousal rape” to name the sexual violence that was experienced in the context of marital relations but, like other forms of intimate partner violence, had traditionally been relegated to the private sphere of intimate and family life, beyond the reach of legal intervention. In fact, rape within the context of marriage was not legally recognized as a prosecutable crime until the late twentieth century. The social and legal recognition of rape within marriage was in some ways a watershed; these legislative developments reflected emergent understandings of rape and other acts of sexual assault being constituted by the actions of the perpetrator and the experience of the victim, rather than mitigated by the context of any association that they may have had with each other. Yet, “marital exemptions” from rape laws were not removed across all fifty states until 1993, and lesser legal charges and sentencing practices accorded to perpetrators of rape in the context of marriage as compared to rape in other contexts persist in several states. Feminists adopted the terms “date rape,” and “acquaintance rape” (see, e.g., Warshaw 1988), to assert recognition of rape when it is perpetrated by an acquaintance to whom

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the victim is not married (Martin 2016). The term “acquaintance rape,” first attributed in 1975 to South African feminist Diana E. H. Russell in her book The Politics of Rape, entered the public lexicon more widely during the late 1970s, naming a set of experiences that had previously been distorted by mainstream misperceptions of sexual violence based on “rape myths” which often misattributed causal factors for sexual violence and misplaced responsibility for sexual assault on the victims themselves. Robin Warshaw’s (1988) landmark publication I Never Called It Rape presented the findings of the feminist Ms. magazine report on women’s experiences of date and acquaintance rape. When, in 1991, an image of eighteen-yearold Katie Koestner on the cover of Time magazine was depicted alongside the words “Date Rape” in bold red font, her story of surviving a sexual assault in her dorm room at the College of William and Mary brought the dynamics of acquaintance rape on college campuses into the focus of what the text of the article blurb referred to as “an emotional national debate.” Around the same time, the US Congress passed the Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act of 1990 (20 USC Sec. 1092) as an amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965. This federal law represented an increase in accountability for institutions of higher education with regard to transparency in reporting campus crimes. In 1998 the law was later renamed The Jeanne Clery College Crime and Statistics Disclosure Act (hereafter “Clery Act”), in memory of Jeanne Clery, an eighteen-year-old first-year student at Lehigh University who was raped and murdered in her dorm room in 1986. Under the requirements of the Clery Act, colleges and universities receiving federal student aid funding are required to disseminate their campus security policies in writing, and to regularly publish, submit, and update reports containing all campus crime statistics from the previous three years. Yet, challenges remained regarding the significant underreporting rates of sexual assault, posing a substantial limitation to the Clery

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Act’s capacity to effectively illustrate the prevalence of sexual violence. In addition, the categorization system used by Clery to document crimes rates did not always match up with state and/or institutional definitions and delineations of what constituted different forms of sexual violence. In 1992, the Clery Act was amended with the addition of “The Campus Sexual Assault Victims Bill of Rights,” requiring schools to develop and implement sexual assault prevention programs, and to develop policies and procedures that effectively protect the rights of sexual assault victims. Shortly after that, in 1994, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was signed into law as Title IV of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (PL 103–322), semantically reflecting the extent to which the “violence against women” framing had become part of mainstream political and social discourse. After the initial addition of the “Campus Sexual Assault Victim’s Bill of Rights” to the Clery Act in 1992, the newly mandated implementation of sexual assault prevention programs at colleges and universities varied in comprehensiveness and focus. Some commonly adopted measures, however, reflected skewed reliance upon old ideas about the threat of “stranger” rape and images of the “other.” While “stranger rape” does account for a small number of sexual violence incidents (on and off college campuses), the commonplace distribution of “rape whistles” and guidance that advised young women not to walk alone at night represented important limitations to the conceptual frameworks within which understandings of campus sexual assault risks were addressed. Neither approach engaged the significantly greater likelihood that sexual assault could occur in the dorm room or at the party or on the date toward which the woman might be walking; nor does either approach address the greater likelihood of experiencing an assault perpetrated by a fellow student familiar enough to be asked to accompany her on the walk than by a stranger that she might encounter in the course of the journey. The circumstances

to which these rape prevention approaches are most relevant – sexual assaults committed at random, by strangers – comprise only an estimated 10 percent of campus sexual assaults (Fisher et al. 2000). And yet, these kinds of interventions align with students’ most common (albeit perhaps misplaced) fears about sexual assault. Scholarship on college women’s sexual violence fears and corresponding precautionary behaviors shows that women experience significantly more fear and engage in more precautionary behaviors regarding stranger rape, even when they estimate – and thus accurately recognize – that acquaintance rape occurs more frequently (Hickman and Muehlenhard 1997). Measuring the Problem: Of Contexts and Classifications One of the foundational challenges to studying the incidence rates and perceptions germane to campus sexual assault is inconsistency in the ways that terminology related to the topic is interpreted and operationalized by federal guidance, state law, college and university policies, and college students themselves. Within the academic literature on the subject, terminology referring to “rape,” “sexual assault,” and “sexual violence” may be operationalized to different degrees and in different ways from study to study; while some surveys may include questions in which the term “rape” is used without it being defined, others may ask whether students had experienced “nonconsensual sexual contact” without explicitly assigning a label to those experiences. Individuals participating in research studies may also utilize and understand different definitional criteria than that which is intended or assumed by the researcher. In the United States, legal definitions of what constitutes “sex,” “sexual assault,” “rape,” and “sexual battery” have changed throughout history and, despite some standardization of categorization at the federal level – continue to be defined variably from state to state, and, for colleges and universities, from institution to institution (Muehlenhard et al. 2016).

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At the federal level, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting definition of rape has historically been limited to the “forcible or threat of forcible vaginal penetration of a female by a male.” This past definition was precluded consideration of rape in several important contexts including, but not limited to, incapacitated rape (wherein the victim is not conscious or too impaired to effectively resist), coerced rape, rape involving penetration with an object, rape constituted by forcible anal or oral penetration, and the rape of male victims altogether (Marsil and McNamara 2015). This federal definition was in use until 2012, when it was rewritten to comprise “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim” (FBI 2012).2 This more inclusive definition is what is currently used to classify rates of rape on college campuses through the federally mandated reporting system under the Clery Act. Even with this broader definition, complications to collecting accurate data on sexual violence may be exacerbated by the inconsistencies with which student characterize their experiences of sexual violence. Importantly, these inconsistencies parallel those that characterize students’ classifications of consensual sexual experiences as well, making it difficult to disentangle the meanings and significance given to either. Colloquial and legal understandings of what it means to “have sex” or to participate in “consensual sexual acts” are contested, and range widely for reasons that may be social, cultural, historical, or, in some cases, seemingly idiosyncratic. College students participate in what is referred to as “hookup culture” wherein sexualized encounters (which might, but do not necessarily, include vaginal, anal, or oral sex) are navigated outside of the contexts of formal romantic partnerships or expectations of ongoing involvement beyond the encounter itself (Armstrong et al. 2012). Gendered double standards for sexual behavior may inform differing percep-

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tions of and/or consequences for men and women who “hookup” casually, but interpretive variations of sexual behavior are not limited to those divided by gendered social meanings. Research on college students’ perceptions of what constitutes “having sex” has highlighted variable – and sometimes seemingly contradictory – determinations in different contexts. A 1999 survey of college students in the Midwestern United States revealed that while “penile-vaginal intercourse” was almost universally (99.5 percent) considered to fit the definition of “having sex,” 59 percent of participants did not use a definition of “having sex” that included “oral-genital contact,” and 19 percent did not classify “penile-anal intercourse” as “having sex” (Sanders and Reinisch 1999). In another study of college students’ terminology for sexual behavior, survey respondents presented with hypothetical scenarios and asked to assess whether or which of the characters in the scenario would consider the act described to constitute “sex,” respondents rated characters who had either experienced an orgasm and/or had been the “receiver” of oral sex to be more likely to consider the act “sex” than the hypothetical characters who had not had an orgasm and/or had “performed” oral sex on the other person (Bogart et al. 2000). A 2003 study of Canadian college students indicated that only 25 percent of respondents believed that “oral-genital contact” constituted “having sex,” although more than 60 percent would consider the “giver or receiver of oral sex” to be a “sexual partner” (Randall and Byers 2003). More recent research has also taken into account the function of “motivated definitions” in the processes through which individuals label their own sexual behaviors and experiences; for example, definitions of what constitutes “having sex” may be excepted in favor of maintaining consistent accounts of the ways that one views one’s self as a virgin, a faithful partner, or identified with a particular sexual orientation. In these ways, sexual experiences that seem incongruent with one’s self-concept may be likely to be “relabelled” with phrases like “not really sex,”

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or “barely sex” (Peterson and Muehlenhard 2007). In addition to the variability with which college students classify their sexual experiences, there is also significant variability with regard to how the concept of “consent” is interpreted. In the legal sense, for sexual activity to be considered “consensual” all partied involved must be capable of actively and willingly agreeing to any contact that takes place. Consent is not “binding” and may be revoked at any time during a sexual encounter; a common misperception within “rape culture” is that one’s agreement to any sexual contact – whether with a current partner or a previous partner – during a specific encounter denotes implied consent in any encounter in the future. Another common myth regarding consent is that once it is given, it cannot be “revoked”; in reality, consent can be revoked at any point in a sexual encounter for any reason if a participant does not want the contact to continue (Harding 2015). Since any sexual contact with another person’s body in the absence of their consent constitutes a form of sexual assault, sexual contact with an individual who is incapacitated for any reason (whether as a consequence of alcohol use, drug use, injury-induced loss of consciousness, or even just sleep) is classifiable as sexual assault (Francis 1996). Research has indicated, however, that even when victims of incapacitated sexual assault on college campuses recognize and identity that they have been assaulted, they are less likely than victims of forcible sexual assault to come forward to report their experience to authorities our of fear of disciplinary or social consequences for their actual or perceived alcohol or drug use (Streng and Kamimura 2015). In efforts to confront the impact of rape myths in distorting understandings of “consent,” some colleges, universities, and state governments have implemented policies and/or passed legislation mandating an “affirmative consent” standard wherein active, verbal consent must be provided explicitly by all involved parties in any sexual encounter.

Importantly, experiences of sexual violence may be similarly accounted for through “motivated definitions” in which acts constituting sexual assault by legal, institutional, and/or commonly understood criteria may be not be labeled as such in circumstances that present various personal conflicts. Perpetrators, victims, outside parties, or institutions may have motivation to deny or minimize what has occurred in the interest of safeguarding an idea or image of the people involved or the context within which the assault occurred. Research has demonstrated that legal definitions of “rape” do not always correspond to the criteria that victims use to name their victimization as such. For example, even when an experience meets the legal criteria for the definition of rape, victims are less likely to use the term “rape” to characterize their experiences if the nonconsensual penetration was oral or anal (as opposed to vaginal) and/or if the perpetrator used coercion or threats (as opposed to physical force or incapacitation) to commit the assault (Marsil and McNamara 2015). As is the case with the term “rape,” there is often confusion or misinformation regarding the legal definition of other behaviors constituting “sexual assault” more broadly. The FBI UCR uses the term “forcible fondling” to refer to sexual assaults comprising nonconsensual touching of the genitals, buttocks, or anus (of men and women), or of a woman’s breasts. At the state level, similar behaviors may be specifically classified through other terms, such as “sexual battery,” while other states use “sexual battery” to describe rape as well. For survivors of an assault, exposure to rape myths and/or internalization of the ideologies informing “rape culture” may lead to self-blaming accounts of one’s assault. Survivors may be motivated to label the experience differently because of a desire to not see themselves as “victims” (Mardorossian 2014). When someone is sexually assaulted by a friend, a lover, a date, or a spouse, reluctance to name the experience as rape or assault may be influenced by preexisting ideas about the perpetrator or the relationship. For perpetrators, there

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is strong motivation to not label an experience as “assault” or “rape” in that doing so would otherwise be tantamount to admission of one’s criminality. Peer group dynamics can contribute to normalizing sexually violent behavior. Whether one is complicit through active encouragement and goading on of one’s peers, or displays silent complicity as a bystander to sexual violence, the message of approval – or, at least, the lack of disapproval – conveyed can encourage the continuation of the behavior. These social practices can be rationalized in peer group contexts by pigeonholing perceptions of what “kind” of person (“crazy,” “deviant,” etc.) commits rape, in ways that exempt members of one’s own group (Sanday 1994; Pascoe and Hollander 2016), while invoking the “scary stranger” image of who a “real rapist” is. As is discussed in the next section, such dynamics are further complicated when outside parties minimize incidents of sexual assault out of a desire to safeguard their concepts of the individuals involved, with whom they may personally identify in some way; research has demonstrated that the pseudo-familial context of fraternity “brotherhood” lends itself to this process in light of expected loyalties and allegiance to shared group identity (Kimmel 2008). Addressing the Problem: Examining Contexts and Responding to Consequences Residential college campuses have been shown to constitute environments within which incidents of sexual assault occur with particular frequency. The US Department of Justice reports that rape is the most common form of violence occurring at institutions of higher education, and has also found that women in college experience higher rates of sexual assault victimization than women of the same age who are not in college (Sampson 2003); research has indicated that college women are five times more likely to experience a sexual assault than their non-college-going peers (Carey et al. 2015). According to a report pub-

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lished by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Institutes of Justice, the victims knew their assailant in 90 percent of reported campus sexual assaults cases (Fisher et al. 2000). The National Institute of Justice estimates that between 18 and 20 percent of college women will experience actual or attempted sexual assault (Karjane et al. 2005). The Campus Sexual Assault Survey, cited by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, estimates that one in five female college students and one in sixteen male college students will experience an attempted or completed sexual assault while in college (Krebs et al. 2007). For many students, the first year in college also represents their first experiences with living away from their parents, and the boundaries and restrictions set for them by parental authority. The first year at college is considered by researchers to be a time of heightened vulnerability to experiences of sexual assault, with between 8 percent and 11 percent of college women experiencing a sexual assault within the first two semesters of their matriculation (McCauley 2015, 584), and risks decline with each subsequent year of enrollment (Muehlenhard et al. 2016). Findings from a 2015 study conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities indicated heightened risk for students with non-binary gender identities as compared to their cisgender peers; the percentage of undergraduate students in their senior year who reported having experienced “nonconsensual penetration” while in college 13.5 percent of women, 2.9 percent of men, and 15.2 percent of transgender, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, or questioning students (Cantor et al. 2015, 67). When assessing risks associated with sexuality, the same survey indicated that 9 percent of lesbian, gay, and bisexual identified students reported experiences of sexual assault at college (Budd et al. 2016, 5). Scholarship has identified particular social contexts within campus communities – such as all-male fraternities and collegiate athletic programs (see, e.g., Sanday 1994; McCray 2015; Martin 2016;

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Messner 2016) – wherein sexual assaults are more likely to occur. Members of genderexclusive, all-male social organizations such as fraternities and sports teams are overrepresented among those who are identified as perpetrators of sexual assault on college campuses (Frintner and Robinson 1993). Qualitative research has demonstrated that this dynamic is linked to the cultivation of “rape culture” and may be exacerbated by peer group–incentivized “over-conformity with masculinity” translated as the normalization of objectifying and/or dehumanizing women in ways that constitute complicity with sexual violence (Messner 2016). In addition, women who are involved with collegiate sororities have been found to experience higher risks of sexual assault than college women who do not participate in sororities (Budd et al. 2016). The typically heteronormative tenets of “rape culture” on college campuses often hearken back to historical ideologies about men’s presumed entitlement to women’s sexual availability in exchange for their time, attention, and financial resources. When all-male groups sponsor or host campus parties, this dynamic may take the form of perceived entitlement in exchange for hospitality, alcohol, and entertainment for women who are invited or admitted into male-controlled social spaces. In addition, the presumptions of heteronormativity and the privileging of heteronormative behavioral expectations that limit gender roles and scripts to traditional patriarchal patterns within campus rape culture contribute to further marginalizing LGBTQ students’ experiences. Despite the elevated rates of sexual assault victimization on college and university campuses that has been documented through existing scholarship, the Department of Justice Community Oriented Policing Service and Office on Violence Against Women indicate that 95 percent of either actual or attempted rapes of college women are not reported to the police or campus authorities (Sampson 2003). Deterrents to reporting sexual assault are numerous. Given that the vast majority of perpetrators

in campus sexual assault cases are known to their victims (Krebs et al. 2007; Budd et al. 2013), barriers to reporting may be exacerbated further by the ways in which the communities of residential college campuses operate as social systems unto themselves, wherein overlapping social ties may result in strained personal relationships if peers feel compelled to “choose a side.” Women who are victimized by men are more likely to display reluctance to report the assault in relation to fear of retaliation by the perpetrator, whereas, as was noted previously, while men who are assaulted by men are more likely to be influenced in their decision not to report the assault on the basis of fear of homophobic stigma (Sable et al. 2006). A study conducted by the US Department of Justice indicated that fear of being outcast as a “social pariah” was cited by 42 percent of campus sexual assault victims as the reason that they chose not to file a report (Budd et al. 2016, 7). Having a preexisting relationship and/or anticipating ongoing social contact with one’s assailant may also lead victims to second-guess the meanings of their experiences or the criteria by which they themselves “should” evaluate and act upon those experiences (Streng and Kamimura 2015). Additional barriers to reporting cited by survivors included uncertainty regarding what constituted the formal definition of sexual assault and/or uncertainty regarding the perpetrator’s intent to cause harm (35 percent), or, in the greatest number of cases, a lack of trust in the efficacy of the college’s reporting system and judiciary procedures (79 percent) (Budd et al. 2016, 7). Mistrust in institutional judiciary processes is often informed by awareness of the pervasive rape myths that misplace responsibility or blame for sexual assault on victims rather than perpetrators; the normalization of rape myth (see, e.g., Harding 2015) acceptance on college campuses thereby contributes to the silencing of sexual assault survivors. In addition, the social forces of sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia function in intersecting and simultaneous ways to inform both the specific

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vulnerabilities to sexual assault that individuals experience, and contribute to the barriers to reporting that prevent victims from reporting their experiences to authorities. Past research has demonstrated that young women often fear being labeled in sexually derogatory ways if their accounts of sexual assault are not believed. Reflecting gendered double standards in the social meanings attached to sexuality for men and women, the social consequences risked in reporting sexual assault for women and girls are not only that they may be labeled as liars, but also that they may be labeled and ostracized as “hos,” “sluts,” or “whores” (Van Roosmalen 2000; Phillips 2000; Hlvaka 2014). Gender, however, is not the only axis of social identity along which sexual assault experiences and barriers to reporting take on particular dimensions of social meaning. Women of color, men (white and of color), students of low socioeconomic status, and/or LGBTQ students report their experiences of sexual harassment in college to authorities with lesser frequency than do students who are white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class women (see, e.g., Kalof et al. 2001; Võ 2015; Menning and Holtzman 2014) even as those in the latter group only report their sexual harassment and assault experiences at extremely low rates. Sexual violence – on college campuses and beyond – is experienced by victims across every social identity category. While it is true that the vast majority of sexual violence is committed by male perpetrators against female victims, perpetrators and victims of sexual assault can be individuals of any gender, gender identity, or gender expression – as well as any race or socioeconomic class. While there is plentiful research to demonstrate the prevalence of heterosexual men’s violence against heterosexual women at colleges and universities, there is comparatively less literature on the experiences of sexual assault victims who identify as male, and/or on the experiences of sexual assault survivors of any gender or gender identity that identify as LGBTQ. Racialized hypersexualization that informs

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the “controlling images” (see Collins 2005) imposed upon women of color in popular consciousness contribute to the normalization of the sexual harassment and sexual violence enacted against them with greater frequency than that directed toward white women, and the resulting vulnerability is amplified for women of low socioeconomic status (DeFour 1996). Research has found, for example, that black women experience racially particular forms of sexual harassment in the form of references to the cultural stereotype of black women’s supposed promiscuity, and/or sexualized references to racially specific phenotypic characteristics (Kalof et al. 2001, 287). On and off college campuses, women of color who experience assault may be less likely to report their experiences for fear that hypersexualized racial stereotypes may negatively impact the probability that they will be believed. While cultural norms surrounding masculinity constitute significant barriers for all male survivors of sexual assault in naming their experiences and seeking support (Kalof et al. 2001), these barriers may be particularly pronounced for men of color who may report with even lesser frequency than other men for fear that the extent to which they are subject to being stereotyped as both hypersexual and innately violent (see, e.g., Davis 1981) will harm their perceived credibility in accounts of victimization. LGBTQ victims often fear that reporting incidents of date rape will subject them to homophobic and/or transphobic stigma and prejudice (Patterson 2016) and/or other repercussions associated with being “outed,” and men who are assaulted by other men – irrespective of their sexuality – are subject to stigma and shame (see Scarce 1997) concerning conventions associated with normative heteromasculinity and obligatory expectations of sexual bravado (Kalof et al. 2001; Pascoe and Hollander 2016). The persistence of these dynamics is contextualized by intersecting dimensions of the social meanings associated with ideas about sexual violence as a social problem in the United States, both in historical and contemporary context.

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The Complications of Trauma and Recovery Sexual assault constitutes one of the most severe forms of personal trauma that an individual can experience, comprising myriad negative mental and emotional health consequences (Jordan et al. 2010) in addition to the physical risks of bodily injury, exposure to sexually transmitted infections, and (in cases of opposite sex assailants and victims) the possibility of pregnancy. Survivors may experience “shock, fear, agitation, and confusion” (Eisenberg et al. 2016, 2) in the aftermath of a sexual assault. Survivors may also experience periods of dissociation and emotional detachment, interruptions to normal sleeping and eating patterns, and a significantly high risk of developing depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Campbell, Dworkin, and Cabral 2009; Jordan et al. 2010; Eisenberg et al. 2016), and are at higher risk for drug or alcohol abuse in the aftermath of an assault (Budd et al. 2016). Research on survivors’ mental health risks has also demonstrated that nearly one in five women who are sexually assaulted attempt suicide (Jordan et al. 2010). Students of color (see, e.g., BryantDavis et al. 2010) and/or LGBTQ students (see, e.g., Budd et al. 2016) may experience exacerbated mental health consequences as a result of sexual assault when compared to their white and/or heterosexual peers, intensified by group-specific barriers to accessing existing support structures in predominantly white, cisgender, heteronormative campus communities. For example, research has demonstrated that approaches to assessing sexual harassment experiences tend not to “generalize well beyond white women” (Kalof et al. 2001, 198); behaviors constituting the sexual harassment of women of color are often characterized differently by victims on the basis of racialized and gendered interpretive schemas for social cues. Returning to the idea of “motivated definitions,” male victims – irrespective of dynamics related to reporting an assault to authorities – are less likely to even self-identify their experiences as rape (even when they account for those experi-

ences in ways that are consistent with the legal definition of rape) because of fears that being perceived – correctly or incorrectly – as gay would subject them to homophobic social stigma (Scarce 1997; Sable et al. 2006). The circumstances through which sexual assaults are perpetrated may have specific consequences for trauma. The proportion of campus sexual assaults are perpetrated against victims who are incapacitated due to alcohol use has been estimated to be between 83 percent (Carey et al. 2015) and 89 percent (Krebs et al. 2007). Sexual assaults against incapacitated individuals occur with greater frequency within the social environments of college parties wherein binge drinking is normalized (see, e.g., Boswell and Spade 1996; Lippy and DeGue 2014). While it is important to note that alcohol use – by either a victim or a perpetrator – does not cause sexual assault to occur, the use of alcohol or drugs is “associated with elevated severity and increased vulnerability” to sexual assault (McCauley 2015, 584). The incapacitation of a sexual assault victim also increases their vulnerability to the possibility of the assault being filmed, photographed, and/or shared without their knowledge. Since the advent of social media and the incorporation of cameras into cellular phone technology, the psychological impact and negative repercussions of any victim’s already traumatic assault may be magnified through the rapid distribution of images and/or video recordings if witnesses to, or participants in, the assault choose to disseminate them (Heyes 2016). The continuing humiliation attached to the ongoing dissemination of images or recordings of one’s sexual assault and/or one’s exposed body can compound the initial trauma and exacerbate negative mental health consequences (including anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation) of the assault (Heyes 2016). LGBTQ students may face particular risks of subjection to homophobic or transphobic discrimination if photographic or video depictions of their assaults have the effect of “outing” them through “social media exposure” (Budd et al. 2016, 7).

campus sexual assault as a social problem

Perhaps unsurprisingly, victims of campus sexual assault are at higher risk for dropping out of school than their peers who have not experienced a sexual assault (Vladutiu, Martin, and Macy 2011; Streng and Kamimura 2015, 65). Ultimately, the extent of the potential harm inflicted upon victims of sexual assault can inhibit their capacities to persist in their educational pursuits. In college and university settings, this threat to participation in federally protected educational experiences is what places the issue of sexual violence squarely within the purview of Title IX, and the federal government more broadly. Looking Ahead In 2013, the Clery Act was amended through the passage of the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination (SAVE) Act, which mandated the implementation of extensive “primary prevention and awareness programs” addressing “sexual assault and related offenses,” such as relationship violence and stalking, at colleges and universities. Reporting requirements were included to add accountability for institutions through the Clery Act reporting system. By June of 2016, the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (DOEOCR) was actively investigating 315 colleges and universities in response to complaints that the institutions had mishandled cases of sexual harassment on campus; 246 of those cases pertained to sexual assault cases (Kingcade 2016). The number of schools under investigation – or, to put it in the terms commonly used to refer to those under investigation, the number of schools “on the list” – has grown steadily since the dissemination of a “Dear Colleague” letter from the DOEOCR in 2011. The letter outlined the ways in which all educational institutions that receive federal funding of any kind are responsible for working to prevent, and appropriately respond to, sexual harassment (within which framing sexual assault was definitionally subsumed as a particularly egregious form of harassment) under the purview of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibiting sex

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discrimination in education. As the ensuing investigations have multiplied, the topic of campus sexual assault has been propelled into the spotlight of national conversation and debate in the United States. In response to recommendations from the CDC3 regarding best practices, the executive branch of the federal government under President Obama launched social media campaigns and disseminated guidance advocating bystander intervention programs and efforts to change cultural norms on college campuses as sexual violence prevention measures. Recent political changes since the election of President Trump, however, have introduced uncertainty as to the future of these efforts. In September 2017, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced that the Department of Education would be rescinding the 2011 “Dear colleague” letter guidance and restructuring approaches to federal oversight concerning campus sexual violence. As of this writing, it is yet unclear what the full extent of these changes will be or what consequences they will yield. The significant focus on awareness and prevention in recent years has been a long time in the making; decades of feminist advocacy, social science and public health research, and crime data collection has led to this point. Yet, for the violent crime that is simultaneously the most pervasive and the most underreported on college and university campuses, an anomalous assessment paradox looms in relation to these efforts, as a function of several related dynamics. First, the distorted understandings of what constitutes rape and sexual assault that are reflected in commonly believed “rape myths” obscure the extent to which experiences of sexual violence may be identified as such by survivors themselves. Secondly, even when an experience of sexual violence is acknowledged as such by a victim, a wide range of overlapping social, historical, institutional, and intersectional factors may act as formidable disincentives to reporting sexual assault to authorities. Third, the fears that may prevent victims from coming forward are not unfounded. Victims of campus sexual assault who report sexual assault to authorities may be subjected to

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negative social consequences including peer group ostracization, retribution by assailants or the peer groups with whom assailants are affiliated, attacks on their credibility, misplaced blame for their attackers’ actions, and re-traumatization through participation in campus judiciary processes. Historical and contemporary manifestations of sexism, racism, classism, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity in relation to conceptualizations of sexual assault may exacerbate these risks further. These factors in combination necessitate that sexual assault awareness education address barriers to reporting, and that educational institutions work to create transparent, trauma-informed processes through which a culture of reporting and seeking support can be cultivated for survivors of sexual violence, across intersecting social identities. Herein lies the paradox: if sexual violence awareness programs are successful, institutions would hope to see reporting rates – as reflected in campus crime data – increase, given that all available survey data indicate that survivors confront significant barriers to coming forward to report their experiences of sexual violence victimization. However, if prevention programs are successful, institutions would hope to see rates of sexual violence incidents decrease. It is difficult to say, therefore, whether a school for which Clery Act campus crime data indicate low rates of sexual violence is actually achieving success with prevention measure, or whether that institution is failing to implement awareness programs that effectively cultivate a climate within which survivors are likely to report their experiences. Thus, while available mechanisms through which campus sexual assault is measured and addressed have expanded in new ways, the complex and multidimensional social problem that it constitutes remains.

relating to, or based on the attitude that heterosexuality is the only normal and natural expression of sexuality.” Heteronormativity has significant cultural, institutional, and structural dimensions, because it has been used to privilege heterosexuals and oppress groups of nonheterosexuals including those that identity as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and sexually fluid. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines PTSD as a traumaand stressor-related disorder that is triggered by “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violation,” and causes “clinically significant distress or impairment in the individual’s social interactions, capacity to work, or other important areas of functioning.” Symptoms may include intrusive flashbacks or recurrent dreams about the traumatic event and intense or prolonged periods of psychological distress. Rape culture Refers to a social, political, and cultural environment in which sexual violence is normalized, minimized, and, sometimes, glorified. In such an environment, socialization processes discourage the critique of sexual violence as a social phenomenon, the criminalization of perpetrators, and the cultivation of empathy toward victims/survivors. Rape myths Refers to commonly held misconceptions about sexual violence that function to support rape culture. Such myths include denial of the pervasiveness of sexual violence as a social problem and the erroneous belief that false reports of sexual assault are commonplace. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 Prohibits educational discrimination on the basis of sex, including sexual harassment and sexual violence.

Notes Glossary Heteronormative According to MerriamWebster Dictionary, something that is “of,

1. It should be noted that during the historical period surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, lower status European immigrant groups that have since been racially subsumed

campus sexual assault as a social problem within the category of “white” – such as Italians, Eastern European Jews, etc. – were for a time considered to be inferior races unto themselves, and were similarly characterized as innately lascivious and violent (see, e.g., Brodkin 2002; Guglielmo 2003). 2. It should be noted that this does not address the legal definition of statutory rape, which tends to be of lesser relevance in cases of campus sexual assault since most college students have already reached the age of consent. It also does not address sexual assault perpetrated by family members, which is classified as incest. 3. Centers for Disease Control, Sexual Violence: Prevention Strategies. Washington, DC: Centers for Disease Control: www.cdc.gov/ ViolencePrevention/sexualviolence/prevention .html.

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CHAPTER 18

Child Abuse and Neglect Mark A. Winton

Abstract The purpose of this chapter is to provide a review of several of the major findings and debates in the child abuse and neglect (CAN) field while framing CAN as a major social problem. The chapter begins with a brief historical review, and then moves to a discussion surrounding the definitions, recent epidemiological findings, and risk factors. Technology and sexual exploitation are examined and several sociological perspectives are compared and contrasted. A brief discussion of genocide and CAN is presented. Finally, the current status and debates surrounding interventions, prevention, and practices are explored along with a discussion of the risks of the criminalization and medicalization of CAN.

Introduction Despite the recent declines in several types of child abuse and neglect (CAN), and increases in evidence-based intervention and prevention programs, CAN continues to be a major social problem. This chapter comprises an overview of some of the major findings and debates in the CAN field to include a short historical review, definitions, epidemiology, and risk factors. Technology and sexual exploitation are examined and several theoretical perspectives are compared and contrasted. Genocide and CAN are briefly addressed and the current status and themes surrounding intervention and prevention policies are out-

lined. Finally, a brief discussion of the risks of medicalizing and criminalizing CAN is presented.

History and Framing the CAN Problem The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals identified CAN as a social problem in the United States during the late 1800s (Lazoritz and Shelman 1996; Money 1986). However, societal interest in CAN declined until the 1960s when pediatric radiologists, recognizing broken bones caused by abuse, “rediscovered” physical abuse (Pfohl 1977). Soon, other pediatricians and psychiatrists

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joined the pediatric radiologists and set the stage for the Federal funding of the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and expansion of the field (Pfohl 1977). After reviewing the then existing research, Gelles (1975) introduced a sociological view of CAN that analyzed how child abuse was socially constructed as social deviance. In his review, Gelles (1975) identified conflicting definitions, purposes, and practices of the various disciplines of professionals and agencies, to include medical, social service, and criminal justice professionals, responsible for addressing CAN cases. During the 1970s, both the women’s movement and child protection movement brought increased attention to the issue of child sexual abuse, and situated the problem within the family and society (Finkelhor 1982). As a result, there was increased public recognition of the extent of CAN and the acknowledgment of problematic social-structural factors (Daro and Donnelly 2002). In the 1980s, CAN professionals created multidisciplinary teams of caseworkers, mental health professionals, physicians, law enforcement officers, and attorneys to address the various forms of CAN (Winton and Mara 2001). This time period also included the introduction of prevention programs, new legislation, and new public awareness and education campaigns about sexual and emotional abuse (Daro and Donnelly 2002). In the 1990s, prevention research expanded to include program evaluation (Daro and Donnelly 2002). During this time period, CAN research proliferated and began to include cultural diversity, increased improvements in multidisciplinary approaches, and expanded research that focused on diagnosing, assessing, interviewing, and treating victims and perpetrators (Winton and Mara 2001). More recently, debates have emerged regarding sexting, child pornography, online sex offending, child sexual trafficking, and bullying. Also, there continues to be con-

flicts from adherents of biomedical, psychological, and sociological models as they compete for acceptance, resources, and the power to guide policy. Furthermore, specialization in specific types of CAN has increased divisions among professionals. We have made major advances; however, much more needs to be done.

Definitions of CAN Definitions of CAN often vary contributing to inconsistencies when comparing research studies. However, the definitions from The Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4; Sedlak et al. 2010) have been used as part of a large ongoing study with surveys conducted during 1979–80, 1986, 1993, and 2005–6. These definitions are outlined below. According to the NIS-4, physical abuse “includes shaking, throwing, purposefully dropping a child; hitting; pushing, grabbing, dragging or pulling; punching or kicking; and other physical abuse” (Sedlak et al. 2010, 3–6). Sexual abuse consists of “intrusion, child’s prostitution or involvement in pornography, genital molestation, exposure or voyeurism, providing sexually explicit materials, failure to supervise the child’s voluntary sexual activities, attempted or threatened sexual abuse with physical contact, and unspecified sexual abuse” (Sedlak et al. 2010, 3–7). Emotional abuse encompasses “close confinement, verbal or emotional assaults, threats of sexual abuse (without contact) and threats of other maltreatment, terrorizing, administering unprescribed substances, and other or nonspecific abuse” (Sedlak et al. 2010, 3–7). Physical neglect includes “abandonment; refusal of custody; illegal transfer of custody; unstable custody arrangements; medical neglect; inadequate supervision; inadequate attention to needs for food, clothing, shelter, or personal hygiene; and other disregard for the child’s physical needs or physical safety” (Sedlak et al. 2010, 3–8).

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Emotional neglect is defined as “inadequate nurturance or affection, chronic or extreme domestic violence in the child’s presence, knowingly permitting drug or alcohol abuse or other maladaptive behavior, failure or refusal to seek needed treatment for an emotional or behavioral problem, overprotective treatment, inappropriately advanced expectations, exposure to maladaptive behaviors and environments, and other inattention to the child’s developmental or emotional needs” (Sedlak et al. 2010, 3–9). Educational neglect is defined as “when their parent (or parent-substitute) knowingly permits their chronic truancy an average of at least five days per month; exhibits a pattern of keeping the child home without legitimate reason; fails to register or enroll a school-age child in school in violation of state law; or refuses to allow or provide needed attention for a diagnosed educational problem, learning disorder, or other special education need” (Sedlak et al. 2010, 3–10). The use of standardized definitions could aid communication among different professionals. Additionally, more specific and concise CAN definitions are needed to improve research studies and assess changes over time.

CAN Epidemiology The lack of standardized definitions and the vast differences in sampling procedures, selected populations, study duration, research questions, measurement tools, and the methods of analyzing and reporting findings have led to disparate outcomes that can often appear confusing and contradictory and makes it difficult to interpret and compare findings across studies (Goldman and Padayachi 2000; Tolan, GormanSmith, and Henry 2006; Winton and Mara 2013). However, more recent studies are addressing some of these limitations and are described below. One landmark epidemiological study was conducted by Straus and Gelles (1986, 469)

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who created the National Family Violence Surveys to measure violence between parent and child and between spouses. Comparing their studies from 1975 and 1985, they found that very severe violence toward children (child abuse) significantly declined from 36 to 19 per 1,000 children. The overall violence rate moved from 630 to 620 per 1,000 children and was not statistically significantly different. The Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4; Sedlak et al. 2010) provides various statistics obtained from child protective services and other community professionals. Children victimized by non-caretakers or strangers are excluded from the study. The NIS-4 study contains two different classifications of maltreatment. First, the Harm Standard “generally requires that an act or omission result in demonstrable harm . . . ” (Sedlak et al. 2010, 3). Second, the Endangerment Standard, “counts children who were not yet harmed by abuse or neglect if the sentinel thought that the maltreatment endangered the children or if a Child Protective Services (CPS) investigation substantiated or indicated their maltreatment” (Sedlak et al. 2010, 3). Using the broader Endangerment Standard of child maltreatment that includes children at risk for CAN, the NIS-4 data revealed the following rates for the 2005– 6 period (Sedlak et al. 2010, 3–15): 39.5 per 1,000 children for all maltreatment, 11.3 per 1,000 children for all abuse, 6.5 per 1,000 children for physical abuse, 2.4 per 1,000 children for sexual abuse, 4.1 per 1,000 children for emotional abuse, 30.6 per 1,000 children for all neglect, 16.2 per 1,000 children for physical neglect, 15.9 per 1,000 children for emotional neglect, and 4.9 per 1,000 children for educational neglect. It is important to remember that these rates represent reported cases of CAN from professionals thus representing a limited proportion of all cases of CAN. Using the Endangerment Standard to compare across studies, the findings indicate no overall statistically significant change in child maltreatment rates compared to the

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1993 NIS-3 study. There was a statistically significant decline in physical abuse, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse (p ࣘ .05). In regards to neglect, there was a statistically significant increase in emotional neglect (p ࣘ .05), and no significant change for physical and educational neglect. Of note is that the NIS-4 findings were significantly higher than the NIS-2 1986 study for overall child maltreatment. Using the Harm Standard to compare the NIS-3 and NIS-4 surveys, there was a statistically significant (p ࣘ .05) decline in sexual abuse, and a statistically marginal (.10 > p > .05) decline in physical and emotional abuse. There were no statistically significant changes for physical, emotional, and educational neglect (Sedlak et al. 2010, 3–4). Based on the data on child fatalities due to maltreatment obtained from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), 1,520 child fatalities were estimated to have occurred for federal fiscal year 2013 (US Department of Health and Human Services 2015, 54–57). Furthermore, 71.4 percent of these fatalities were due to neglect while 46.8 percent were from physical abuse (some cases contained more than one type of CAN). The NIS-4 (Sedlak et al. 2010) study indicated no statistically significant change in the number of child fatalities when comparing the 1993 and 2005–2006 time periods. Earlier research indicated that there had been a decline in both reported and substantiated cases of child sexual abuse (Jones and Finkelhor 2001). Using the more recent National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), Finkelhor, Saito, and Jones (2015) found a decline in both reported rates of sexual abuse and physical abuse since 1992, although the neglect rates slightly declined and remained high. But in reviewing multiple CAN surveys, Finkelhor and Jones (2012) reported inconsistent results for physical abuse, while the declining sexual abuse trend remained consistent. Explanations for these declines include a number of factors, such as expansion of professionals who investigate and treat CAN, increased incarceration of offend-

ers, greater public cognizance of CAN, and increased use of mental health care and medications (Finkelhor, Saito, and Jones 2015). But despite the lowered sexual and physical abuse reports, the neglect rates have remained high and there is a paucity of published research focusing on neglect (Stoltenborgh et al. 2015). This may be due to the ambiguous definitions of child neglect (Friedman and Billick 2015), and the failure to bring this problem into the public and professional domains legitimizing it as a social problem (Spector and Kitsuse 1987). Expanding on previous research, more recent epidemiological studies have integrated various forms of child maltreatment with exposure to other criminal victimizations. For example, the Developmental Victimization Survey program (Finkelhor et al. 2005) accounts for thirty-four different offenses including CAN, assaults and bullying, sexual victimizations, property victimizations, and witnessing victimization. The survey also controls for gender, age, and the relationship between perpetrator and victim. Using the National Survey of Children Exposed to Violence survey, Finkelhor et al. (2014, 1424), analyzed data collected in 2011 from a national sample of children and adolescents through telephone interviews. For children under ten years of age, the interview was conducted with a caregiver. Based on past year maltreatment by an adult caregiver, they found that 4 percent reported physical abuse, 5.6 percent reported emotional abuse, 0.1 percent reported sexual abuse, 4.7 percent reported neglect, and 1.2 percent reported custodial interference. Life time prevalence was 8.9 percent for physical abuse, 10.3 percent for emotional abuse, 0.7 percent for sexual abuse, 11.6 percent for neglect, and 4.8 percent for custodial interference. Of further note is that 23 percent of the maltreated respondents reported more than one type of maltreatment. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided an analysis of the 2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System examining adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in five states (Centers for

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Disease Control and Prevention 2010, 1611– 12). The findings indicated that 25.9 percent reported verbal abuse, 14.8 percent reported physical abuse, 12.2 percent reported sexual abuse, 19.4 percent reported a mentally ill household member, 7.2 percent reported a household member in prison, 29.1 percent reported a substance-abusing household member, 26.6 percent reported their parents separated/divorced, and 16.3 percent witnessed domestic violence. The study also analyzed the number of different types of ACEs and found zero for 40.6 percent, one for 22.4 percent, two for 13.1 percent, three for 8.8 percent, four for 6.5 percent, and five or more for 8.7 percent of respondents. Analyzing the epidemiological findings from several studies provides an examination of the extent of CAN from different perspectives. Some studies contain basic rates of CAN, while others focus on frequency, onset, duration, characteristics of victims and perpetrators and their relationships, and whether the rates of specific types have changed.

Risk Factors Risk factors for CAN are often discussed in the professional and public literature. Many of these risk factors are non-specific to CAN and may also be conceptualized as stressors or social disadvantages. Risk factors may be static (gender, race and ethnicity, and age at first abuse) or dynamic (living in poverty, exposure to family violence, access to therapy, and current level of social support) and caution should be used to avoid labeling individuals and families. One of the benefits of risk factor analysis is focusing attention on changeable factors, such as poverty and neighborhood crime rates that have been shown to perpetuate the CAN problem. Some of the risk factors reported in the literature for sexual abuse include: gender (females are more likely to be victims and males are more likely to be perpetrators), having a stepfather living in the home, substance abuse, and family conflict (Gonzalez and MacMillan 2008; Winton and Mara

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2013). Risk factors for physical abuse consists of living in a single parent home, presence of high family conflict or interpersonal violence, lower socioeconomic status, and having a caregiver with a mental or substance-abusing disorder (Finkelhor et al. 2014; Gonzalez and MacMillan 2008; Winton and Mara 2001). Neglect risk factors comprise lower socioeconomic status, having an infant or toddler in the home, having a caregiver with a substance abuse or mental disorder, and being a single parent (Finkelhor et al. 2014; Gonzalez and MacMillan 2008; Winton and Mara 2001). Risk factors for emotional abuse include lower socioeconomic status, and having an older child in the home (Finkelhor et al. 2014; Winton and Mara 2001). The 2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2010) of ACEs found that women were more likely than men to report sexual abuse, living with a mentally ill household member, and living with a substance-abusing family member. NonHispanic black respondents reported lower rates of ACEs except for having an incarcerated family member, parental separation or divorce, and witnessing domestic violence. Low education correlated with higher rates of physical abuse, having an incarcerated family member, living with a substanceabusing family member, and parental separation or divorce. The robust predictor from this study appeared to be low education that is linked with low socioeconomic status. Fetal exposure to alcohol and drugs has been extensively studied as a type of CAN demonstrating a variety of negative effects (Winton and Mara 2001). However, a more recent area that will probably warrant increased attention, policy, and legal changes involves exposure to secondhand smoke (Loue 2010), but whether secondhand smoke exposure becomes defined as a social problem or a major type of CAN remains to be seen. The highest groups at risk for death from maltreatment are children under one year of age, males, African Americans, and those living in families with financial problems

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and receiving public assistance (Department of Health and Human Services 2015). This has led some investigators to study specific child neglect risk factors related to death. For example, Brandon et al. (2014) used an ecological transactional approach combining individual, family, and community risk factors and found six different types of neglect related to a child fatality or serious injury. These included: deprivation of nourishment, medical neglect, accidents from unsafe conditions, unexplained deaths or injuries of infants due to neglect or dangerous environments, physical abuse combined with neglect, and neglect leading to suicide. They also noted that child protective service responses were often inadequate. Recently, researchers have begun addressing polyvictimization risk factors (Finkelhor et al. 2009). In their National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV), Finkelhor et al. (2011) identified four independent paths leading to polyvictimization: having a child who has emotional problems, residing with a violent family, living with a family that has multiple problems, and living in neighborhoods with a high rate of violence. This type of research is challenging some of our contemporary theories and treatment models to expand them to include multiple forms of maltreatment that can occur within the family as well as the community. Future research will continue to focus on the interrelationships between individual characteristics, family structure, and community environment with an emphasis on mental and substance abuse disorders, child maltreatment, intimate partner violence, poverty, and exposure to other types of violence and risks in the community.

Technology and Sexual Exploitation Technological changes in computing and communication have led to new ways of exploiting children and adolescents. Adult and child pornography are readily available through online sources and the rapid

pace of technological advancements has created a need for new research, laws, and preventive methods (Winton and Mara 2013). Online CAN is a relatively new phenomenon having caught researchers, criminal justice workers, and the general public off guard. Adults who use the Internet and other technologies to exploit children and adolescents have a variety of motivations such as: downloading for personal use, producing or distributing child pornography for profit, having sexually explicit online interactions with children or adolescents, arranging meetings to sexually abuse, and interacting with other sex offenders for support and information (Durkin 1997; Holmes and Holmes 2009; Merdian et al. 2013; Quayle and Taylor 2003). With the spread of online pornography, children and adolescents are at increased risk for exposure to violent pornography. This type of experience has been related to problematic sexual development and relationships, the development of deviant sexual scripts, and the promotion of sexist attitudes and violence toward women (Bryant 2010; Winton and Mara 2013). Research findings indicate that 93 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls have seen online pornography at some point in their adolescence (Sabina, Wolak, and Finkelhor 2008). Despite the proliferation of Internet and smart phone use, Mitchell et al. (2013) found a decline in online sexual solicitations of youth between 2000 and 2010. While parental supervision, digital monitoring, and the use of smart technology used to block sexual images may decrease this risk, further education for parents, children, and communities is still needed (Mitchell et al. 2013; Wolak, Mitchell, and Finkelhor 2007). Sexting, or sending digital sexual images, text, or video is a newly constructed social problem surrounded by ambiguity over what is legal in different jurisdictions. Based on Chalfen’s (2009) reporting that a majority of adolescents have engaged in sexting with text or images, Winton and Mara (2013) referred to sexting as a potential crime

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epidemic as this could mean that a large number of high school students could be arrested for distributing or receiving child pornography. Many argue that counseling and prevention would be more beneficial than criminalizing and processing children and adolescents through the juvenile justice system and labeling them as sex offenders (Winton and Mara 2013). Whether or not sexting becomes defined as a major social problem will depend on the reactions of the media, the public, and the child protection professionals and their abilities to understand the technology (Jenkins 2009). In sum, cyberspace and smart phone technology is a double-edged sword. The research on the effects of virtual reality on people’s personality and society is only recently being studied (Aboujaoude 2011; Blascovich and Bailenson 2011; Ogas and Gaddam 2011), and it is only a matter of time before new technology could be used to further exploit children and adolescents.

Theoretical Explanations The CAN field can be characterized as a multiple paradigm field with several dominant theories and many subordinate ones. According to Winton and Rash (2015), we are in the middle of a paradigm change in the CAN field. Part of this change relates to the interests, levels of support, and use of various theories to explain CAN. Focusing on sexual abuse, Winton and Mara (2013) divided their theoretical presentation into the psychiatric, medical, psychopathology, social-psychological, sociocultural, and specialized models. Space limitations preclude a full discussion of the biological, psychological, and sociological theories often applied to CAN. Therefore, the focus will be on several of the more popular theories that are based on the premise that CAN is embedded in social structure and interaction. These include: feminist, social learning, intergenerational transmission, strain, social disorganization, and violentization theories.

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The Feminist Approach Central to feminist theories is the belief that male dominance, control, and privilege are major sources of relationship conflict between men and women and children and adults. Power imbalances in relationships are replicated not only in the family, but also in the workplace and society. Patriarchy and social control are major themes used to address male sexual and physical violence against children and women (Gosselin 2014; Winton and Mara 2001, 2013). In addition to analyzing power relations and methods of social and interpersonal control between men and women, feminist approaches consider the relationships between gender, social class, race and ethnicity, and age (Lilly, Cullen, and Ball 2007; Winton and Rash 2015). While feminist models have been widely used in intervention programs to reduce and treat interpersonal violence between adults, recent challenges have been promoted by those who are more in line with a general theory of violence rather than one based on patriarchy (Corvo and Johnson 2013; Dutton 2008, 2012; Dutton and Corvo 2006; Felson 2006). In contrast, Hunnicutt (2009) has suggested that researchers analyze the varieties of patriarchy including violence between men and against children.

Social Learning Theory The basic assumption of social learning theory is that people learn from observing and interacting with others (Akers and Sellers 2009). In CAN cases, caregivers learn abusive behaviors through the same processes that they learn non-abusive behaviors. People learn through associating with others, imitating others, and obtaining social reinforcements through different social groups such as peers, family, and the educational system (Akers and Sellers 2009). People also learn methods of rationalizing their behavior. For example, Sykes and Matza (1957) described several techniques used by offenders to justify their behavior: denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial

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of a victim, condemnation of the condemners, and appeal to higher loyalties. Often, CAN offenders use these neutralization techniques to explain their abusive or neglectful behaviors. Intergenerational Transmission Theory In concert with the social learning theory, the intergenerational transmission theory has been used to examine how CAN is transmitted across familial generations. Abusive and neglectful parenting patterns are learned from one’s parents or caregivers (Gosselin 2014; Winton and Rash 2015). Researchers have found that abused and neglected children are at greater risk for juvenile and adult criminal offending and arrest (Widom 1989; Widom and Ames 1994; Widom and Maxfield 2001). Additionally, children who were abused or neglected or who witnessed parental violence are at greater risk for a host of psychological, physical, and social problems including the risk that they will engage in CAN as parents (Heyman and Slep 2002; McCord 1995; Norman et al. 2012; Teague et al. 2008; Widom 1989). Allwood and Widom (2013) found lower rates of high school graduation, employment, and marriage and higher rates of juvenile and adult arrests among a group who were maltreated as children as compared to a group without allegations of CAN. Widom, Czaja, and DuMont (2015) revisited the intergenerational hypothesis of CAN by using a prospective research design with a comparison group over a thirty-year period in order to evaluate the maltreatment status of children of the first group of maltreated victims. First, compared to parents who did not have a maltreatment history, they found that the parents who were maltreated in the original group were at an increased risk for being reported to child protective services for sexual abuse and neglect, but not physical abuse. Second, when self-reporting their own parenting practices, they found that parents who were maltreated were at an increased risk for neglect, but not sex-

ual or physical abuse. Third, the children of these parents were more likely to report sexual abuse and neglect, but not physical abuse. Therefore, the intergenerational hypothesis was supported for sexual abuse and neglect but not physical abuse. Despite this evidence, the authors caution the interpretation or generalization of the results due to the limitation that a lower socioeconomic sample was used. In sum, while there is support for the “cycle of abuse,” most abused and neglected victims do not maltreat their children or engage in other criminal activities. Identifying CAN victims as being at risk for abusing or neglecting their own children can create a negative label that could lead to a variety of biases when conducting research, investigating CAN allegations, or providing clinical interventions (Kaufman and Zigler 1993; Winton and Rash 2015). Corporal Punishment and the Transmission of Violence Adding to the intergenerational transmission theory are numerous studies on the effects of corporal punishment or the spanking of children and the relationship to future violence. Straus (2001) has published extensive research on the negative effects related to corporal punishment. Some of these effects include child antisocial behavior, increased fighting, aggression toward parents, dating violence, interpersonal violence, and impaired cognitive development. Fréchette, Zoratti, and Romano (2015) also reported a connection between corporal punishment frequency and parental impulsiveness, physical abuse, psychological aggression, and parental violence. Straus (2001) discovered declining support for the use of corporal punishment despite the reluctance of professionals, child advocates, and the public to support a ban. Straus (2010) also found that the rates of corporal punishment widely varied between countries with some countries, such as Sweden banning corporal punishment completely. Straus (2010) concluded that corporal punishment is “being redefined as a social

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problem – that is, as a behavior culturally defined as undesirable and to be changed if possible” (25). In sum, extensive research has demonstrated the negative effects of corporal punishment (Winton and Mara 2001; Straus 2010). Attempts to define corporal punishment as a social problem is ongoing and the evidence indicates support for corporal punishment is continuing to decline (Straus 2010). Strain and Social Disorganization Theories Strain theory originally focused on the negative outcomes and criminal behaviors that emerge when legitimate goals for economic success are blocked, creating anomie, a stressful situation in which group norms are conflicting or ambiguous (Merton 1968). Unclear norms regarding child discipline and caretaking within a highly strained environment can lead to higher rates of CAN and community violence. For example, using strain theory at a macro level, Linsky, Bachman, and Straus (1995) analyzed stress levels in each state and discovered that high levels of economic, family, and community stressors were associated with violent and self-destructive behavior, such as smoking and alcohol abuse, corporal punishment, rape, suicide, and homicide. Agnew (1992) expanded Merton’s strain theory with his general strain theory to include the strains of removal of positive stimuli, inclusion of negative stimuli, and blocked goals creating negative emotions, such as frustration, depression, and anger. Additionally, strains are more likely to lead to criminal behavior when they are viewed as unjust, strong, occur in the presence of little social control, and encourage coping through criminal behaviors (Agnew 2001). Agnew (2001) suggested that there is a connection between specific strains and CAN. For example, parental rejection is a strain that a child or adolescent could view as unjust and frustrating, possibly encouraging criminal behavior. Furthermore, the strains of harsh discipline, abusive peers, and

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being a victim of crime can lead to negative emotions and relationships and criminal behavior as a coping method. In support of general strain theory, Watts and McNulty (2013) used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and found that physically and sexually abused children reported higher rates of property and violent offending in adolescence. Additionally, they discovered that physical abuse was mediated by depression supporting the connections between abuse, strain, and delinquency. Their findings also provide support for the intergenerational transmission theory. Social disorganization theory focuses on the stresses and strains of living in disadvantaged and dangerous environments. For example, Sampson (1997) provided a multilevel analysis of how community disorganization leads to anomie, social isolation, school failure, juvenile delinquency, and increased crime and childhood adverse conditions. An impoverished and stressful living environment maintains the disorganization impacting the rates of juvenile and adult crime and CAN. Collective efficacy is the “process of informal control and social cohesion among residents” and lower levels of collective efficacy are related to higher levels of crime. (Sampson 2013, 18–19). Part of the problem is that there is not enough social control in the community to lower the crime rates. Using data from the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence, and focusing on ten- to seventeen-year-olds, Turner et al. (2013) examined the relationships between demographic variables, community disorder, distress, victimization, family support, and adverse life events. First, they found that disordered neighborhoods contained a higher percentage of black youth, single parent households, and lower socioeconomic status residents. Second, they tested a model to examine how victimization operates as a mediating variable between living in a highly disordered community and distress. They reported that, “significant indirect effects of community disorder on distress were found through

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increased exposure to property victimization, maltreatment by caregivers, sexual victimization, and peer-perpetrated assault and bullying” (270). In sum, these findings point to a model that focuses on how living in a disordered community increases the risk for exposure to polyvictimization and adverse life events that leads to lower family support and higher levels of psychological problems. This research suggests the importance of interventions at multiple levels by addressing the psychological and social needs of children and their families, parenting issues, adverse life events risk, and community violence and disorder. Violentization Theory Symbolic interactionist theory focuses on the development of the self, how people understand their societal roles, and how people make sense and interpret their ongoing interactions (Blumer 1969). Using symbolic interactionist theory, Lonnie Athens created violentization theory, a holistic and developmental perspective that addresses both agency, or the offender’s free will, and the structural constraints faced by the offender. In order to analyze how people become violent, Athens (2003, 2015) suggested we focus on the interpretations of the perpetrator, their self-image, and their reference groups and communities. Furthermore, Athens (2007) incorporated the concept of domination as a key theme. For Athens, domination “refers to the construction of complex social actions through some participants in the social act performing superordinate roles, others participants performing subordinate roles, and everyone assuming the attitudes of ‘others’” (141). Athens (2003, 2015) also developed a fivestage model to explain how people become violent offenders. The first stage, brutalization, involves the child experiencing violent acts or observing others engaging in violent behaviors (Athens 2003, 2015). Three substages include violent subjugation, personal horrification, and violent coaching. Caregivers make threats to the child or use phys-

ical violence in order to get them to comply. The child becomes horrified from experiencing victimization themselves or witnessing the maltreatment of others, while recognizing they lack the power to prevent it from occurring (Glasner 2013). The child may also experience emotional abuse and neglect. Furthermore, children experiencing brutalization or any of the following violentization stages may be at increased risk from a host of mental disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For example, Widom (2014) found several patterns of adult violence related to CAN victimization and PTSD. In some of the cases, PTSD occurred between child victimization and adult violence, while others experienced PTSD after being maltreated as a child and engaging in adult violence. The second stage, defiance, consists of the presentation of a belief system that supports violent behavior (Athens 2003, 2015). During this stage, caregivers justify their use of sexual or physical abuse. The child or adolescent learns that it is alright to use abusive behaviors and recognizes that in order to avoid becoming a victim, they must use violence. The child may demonstrate the aggressive behaviors they have learned from their caretakers or peers (Glasner 2013). The third stage, violent dominance engagement focuses on threatening others and carrying out violent acts (Athens 2003, 2015). The person tests out the outcomes by engaging in sexually or physically abusive behavior toward other children. In the fourth stage, virulency, the person defines themselves as a physically or sexually violent individual (Athens 2003, 2015). The goal is to instill high levels of fear, shame, and humiliation in the victim by demonstrating power and control over the victim. According to Glasner (2013), “the formerly brutalized has become the adult that brutalized them as a child” (283). The fifth stage, violent predation was recently added by Athens (2015) to describe “where the subject’s violence becomes completely unbound exceeding the outer limits of humanity” (631). Winton (2011) also

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referred to this stage as extreme virulency to describe the perpetrator engaging in torture, mutilation of bodies, and sexual trafficking and slavery. Athens (2015) also described three types of communities. The civil community is characterized by nonviolent interactions. In turbulent communities, neither violent nor nonviolent interactions dominate. In the malignant community, violent interactions dominate leading to higher rates of CAN. Some of the advantages of using this approach include: the theory may be applied cross-culturally, the theory can be used at micro or macro levels, and the theory explains several types of violence. Additionally, Athens’s theory can incorporate other approaches such as social learning, intergenerational transmission, feminist, and strain theories. Future research can focus on how violentization theory can explain different types of CAN and how it can be used to stop or reverse the violentization process. Additionally, it would be useful to examine how to move a community from a malignant or turbulent environment into a non-violent one.

Extreme Global CAN: Genocide Thousands of children have been abused, neglected, and murdered during genocides. Brief case studies are presented below to demonstrate the ongoing problem of CAN compounded by extremely virulent environments. The following two witness statements from the Rwandan genocide of 1994 describe group child sexual abuse perpetrated by the Interhamwe (a youth militia), child physical abuse, emotional abuse, torture, community and societal neglect, exposure to violence, teaching male teenagers how to rape, and homicide: Allegations of sexual violence first came to the attention of the Chamber through the testimony of Witness J, a Tutsi woman, who stated that her six year-old daugh-

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ter had been raped by three Interahamwe when they came to kill her father. On examination by the Chamber, Witness J also testified that she had heard that young girls were raped at the bureau communal. Subsequently, Witness H, a Tutsi woman, testified that she herself was raped in a sorghum field and that, just outside the compound of the bureau communal, she personally saw other Tutsi women being raped and knew of at least three such cases of rape by Interahamwe. Witness H testified initially that the Accused, as well as commune police officers, were present while this was happening and did nothing to prevent the rapes. (Prosecutor v. JeanPaul Akayesu 1998, para. 416)

According to the testimony of Witness NN, after these men left, two other men who were neighbours came and one of them raped her, while the other took her sister a little further away and raped her sister. She recalled that the neighbour said that marriage had been refused to them, but now they were going to sleep with the girls without penalty (peine). She said the men left afterwards, warning the girls that they would kill them if they did not stay where they were. That evening, she said two other younger men, around the age of 15 or 16, came and asked them to “teach them because they didn’t know how it was done.” (Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu 1998, para. 431)

The next witness statements are from the Bosnian genocide of 1995 and describe psychological abuse, neglect, and group rapes of teenage girls: Living conditions in Partizan were brutal. The detention was characterised by inhumane treatment, unhygienic facilities, overcrowding, starvation, physical and psychological torture, including sexual assaults. There were neither blankets nor towels provided for the detainees. Only a few mattresses were provided for sleeping. Food, allotted on an irregular basis, was meagre. Medical care for the detainees, either on a regular or on an emergency basis was not authorised. Some women were beaten and in need of urgent care. Women bled and suffered pain as a result of sexual abuse. Two women died in Partizan due to

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beatings inflicted upon them by Serb soldiers. (Prosecutor of the Tribunal Against Dragan Gagovic, Gojko Jankovic, Janko Janjic, Radomir Kovac, Zoran Vukovic, Dragan Zelenovic, Dragoljub Kunarac, Radovan Stankovic 1996, para. 7.4)

On one occasions, on or about 12 August 1992, the evening prior to the release of the detainees, two unidentified soldiers took FWS-95 and victim H. B. to the stadium in Foca, which is close to the Zelengora Hotel. There, a large group of soldiers, among them Montenegrins and soldiers from Serbia, stood waiting. That night, COUNTless soldiers gang-raped FWS-95 and H.B. on the benches in the stadium. Groups of soldiers raped FWS-95 and H.B. while other soldiers watched the scene. (Prosecutor of the Tribunal Against Dragan Gagovic, Gojko Jankovic, Janko Janjic, Radomir Kovac, Zoran Vukovic, Dragan Zelenovic, Dragoljub Kunarac, Radovan Stankovic 1996, para. 7.7)

More attention needs to be focused on the detrimental effects of CAN compounded by living in virulent environments during genocides and wars. Researchers could apply and evaluate current CAN theories to these situations to determine which theory or theories work best to understand, prevent, and intervene in these extreme cases.

Policies and Programs: Slowly Moving Ahead? Researchers and practitioners have advanced the field of CAN by addressing not only theories, epidemiology, and risk factors, but also prevention and intervention strategies. But, only a small number of programs have been critically evaluated for effectiveness. Additionally, more integrated approaches are needed that take into account the interlocking individual, family, and community factors related to CAN. Pecora et al. (2014) provided an extensive review of CAN programs and found that several programs, such as nurse home visitation, parenting classes, and cognitivebehavioral therapy demonstrated evidence-

based support. Despite these positive findings, the authors point out that there is still a need for more evidence-based research that addresses polyvictimization, effectiveness of interventions on other populations not included in the studies, and whether programs are implemented as planned. Gonzalez and MacMillan (2008) reviewed CAN prevention studies and found empirical support for nurse family partnership programs for socially disadvantaged first-time mothers. These prenatal and postnatal support services, such as health promotion and assistance obtaining community services, were related to lower maltreatment reports and better child health. Analyzing thirty-one parenting programs designed to prevent child maltreatment, Chen and Chan (2015) conducted a metaanalysis of randomized controlled trials and found “a small but positive effect in reducing the number of substantiated child maltreatment reports, psychological aggression, harsh discipline, corporal punishment, and neglect” (11). Although the parenting programs were related to reductions in risk factors, depression and stress levels remained problematic. Klevens et al. (2015) analyzed state level policies designed to reduce CAN and found that lower rates of CAN were related to access to subsidized child care and continuity of child health care insurance. Policy makers can use this information to examine local and state policies to investigate if local programs are meeting the community’s needs. Another systemic problem is that a majority of CAN cases are never reported to appropriate agencies. Schools are primary institutions that can support CAN prevention and intervention programs, but the NIS-4 study (Sedlak et al. 2010) showed that many cases discovered by the school system were not being reported. This is a problem within the school system and between the schools and child protection and law enforcement agencies. Changing policies to have school personnel report CAN allegations directly to the appropriate

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investigative agency would increase services to maltreated children (Duncan 2010; Winton and Mara 2013). An additional area for policy change is on CAN investigations. Campbell et al. (2010) analyzed modifiable risk factors such as social support, depression, poverty, and child mental health problems present during child protective services investigated cases and found no significant changes in these risk factors upon follow-up. They state that we need to address “broader household, caregiver, and child risk factors identified in the course of CPS involvement in the home” (948). A prime opportunity to work toward resolution and prevention of CAN was lost. In order to bridge research, practice, and policy, it is important to explain complex findings to the public and policy makers in meaningful ways. Developing better policies to determine appropriate distribution of services will involve coordination and cooperation of multiple agencies to avoid duplicating services or neglecting needed ones.

The Risk of Further Fragmentation: Medicalizing and Criminalizing CAN While CAN in general has been successfully defined as a social problem, specific types of CAN, such as neglect, have been given secondary status. In addition, professional and public values permeate the field with conflicts over the definitions, theories, policies and best practices. Best (2015) points out that “claims-makers may share a concern about a particular problem, but construct that problem in very different ways” (21). Researchers have reported an increase in medicalizing social problems (Conrad 2007). For example, Winton (2005) analyzed journal articles addressing sex offenders of children from 1993 to 2002 and found that the psychological model was the dominant one, although the medical and combined medical-psychological models were becoming more prevalent. Additionally, Eagleman (2011) believes that we are moving toward

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biological explanations of criminal offending, although social and psychological factors will still be relevant. As Conrad (2007) points out, treating social problems as medical problems presents several risks and conflicts. This is clearly an issue with CAN. First, defining CAN as a medical problem ignores how CAN is embedded in the social structure and connected to interlocking social problems, such as poverty, gun violence, and lack of health, educational, and social support. Second, while some abusive and neglectful parents or caretakers could benefit from counseling and medical treatment with psychiatric medications, many do not report having a major mental disorder. Treating those without a clinical diagnosis with psychiatric medications poses ethical and legal issues and again neglects social factors related to CAN. Third, the expansion of the biomedical model would indirectly connect CAN to the pharmaceutical industry and other health care industries creating a conflict of interest between profit and best practices (see Conrad 2007). Increasing criminalization of CAN by expanding definitions and behaviors deemed illegal, could lead to higher incarceration rates for longer periods of time and would create additional strains for many families by having an incarcerated family member. While there is certainly an important role for processing offenders who have engaged in chronic and high risk abusive or neglectful behaviors that have resulted in harm, many others would benefit from evidence-based psychological and social interventions within the community through diversion programs that support the family. Criminalization often treats victims as criminals. For example, Williams (2010) pointed out that youth forced into prostitution are often arrested. Williams (2010) identified a variety of problems these youth face such as CAN victimization, poverty, mental disorders, and lack of social and health support. Williams (2010) believes that arresting these youth and placing them in juvenile detention centers actually leads to further

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problems, such as their re-victimization and the failure to address the underlying factors that led them into prostitution. Terry and Dank (2010) also note the importance of providing much needed services for these youth, such as emergency shelter, health care, and job training, rather than prosecuting them. Criminalization of teenage prostitution expands criminal behaviors and crimes, while neglecting the victimization of these youth. There appears to be major ideological differences between those who view CAN as a social problem and those who support the medicalization or criminalization of CAN. This leads to turf battles between the supporters of each model with policy makers focusing on CAN as an illness in need of medical treatment, a punishable crime, or a problem embedded in the social structure of society. Additionally, there is the possibility of treating criminal behavior as an illness (Chriss 2013). The ideologies presented in these models are also applied to other social problems, such as bullying, Internet sexual exploitation, and teenage gun violence resulting in more fragmentation of the research.

Conclusions In sum, recent advances have been made in operationalizing the types of CAN and collecting more comprehensive and representative data by including other types of victimizations and integrating community variables. Continued research is slowly expanding sociological theoretical frameworks. An increasing number of interventions and prevention programs are being evaluated, although much more evaluation research is needed. New types of child maltreatment, such as cyber victimization are leading to new research and paradigms. But, many theoretical, research, policy, and practice debates will continue. Writing more than twenty years ago, Janko (1994) observed, “our society has constructed a definition of child maltreatment that is related to and influenced by

societal problems, but we have abdicated the responsibility for addressing the societal problems that mediate, influence, support, and perpetuate child maltreatment” (120). Addressing CAN within a social problems framework allows for the integration of micro and macro-level variables related to interlocking problems, such as interpersonal violence, poverty, sexism and racism, lack of adequate mental and physical health care, drug abuse, sexual violence, and violence in the community. There is much more room for interdisciplinary collaboration, cooperation, and innovation.

Glossary Emotional abuse Acts that negatively impact a child’s psychological development such as threatening, insulting, humiliating, or constant belittling a child. Neglect Omission of care that leads to harm, such as abandonment, failure to show affection, lack of appropriate supervision, lack of nutrition, exposing a child to interpersonal violence, failing to register a child in school, and withholding medical or mental health care. Physical abuse Hitting, kicking, slapping, burning, or otherwise causing a physical injury to a child. Polyvictimization Victimization occurring from several types of maltreatment. Sexual abuse Engaging in sexual interaction with a child such as genital fondling, exposing a child to sexually explicit communication or materials, exposing one’s genitals to the child, having sexual intercourse with a child, manufacturing or viewing child pornography, and forcing a child into prostitution.

References Aboujaoude, Elias. 2011. Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-personality. New York: W. W. Norton. Agnew, Robert. 1992. Foundation for a general strain theory of crime and delinquency. Criminology 30:47–87.

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based update. Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 54:280–86. Gosselin, Denise Kindschi. 2014. Heavy Hands: An Introduction to the Crimes of Intimate and Family Violence. 5th ed. Boston: Pearson. Heyman, Richard E., and Amy M. Smith Slep. 2002. Do child abuse and interparental violence lead to adult family violence? Journal of Marriage and Family 64:864–70. Holmes, Stephen T., and Ronald M. Holmes. 2009. Sex Crimes: Patterns and Behavior. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Sage. Hunnicutt, Gwen. 2009. Varieties of patriarchy and violence against women: Resurrecting patriarchy as a theoretical tool. Violence Against Women 15:553–73. Janko, Susan. 1994. Vulnerable Children, Vulnerable Families: The Social Construction of Child Abuse. New York: Teachers College Press. Jenkins, Philip. 2009. Failure to launch: Why do some social issues fail to detonate moral panics? British Journal of Criminology 49:35– 47. Jones, Lisa, and David Finkelhor. 2001. The Decline in Child Sexual Abuse Cases. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Kaufman, Joan, and Edward Zigler. 1993. The intergenerational transmission of abuse is overstated. In Current Controversies on Family Violence, edited by Richard J. Gelles and Donileen R. Loseke, 209–21. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Klevens, Joanne, Sarah Beth L. Barnett, Curtis Florence, and DeWayne Moore. 2015. Exploring policies for the reduction of child physical abuse and neglect. Child Abuse & Neglect 40:1–11. Lazoritz, Stephen, and Eric A. Shelman. 1996. Before Mary Ellen. Child Abuse & Neglect 20:235–37. Lilly, J. Robert, Francis T. Cullen, and Richard A. Ball. 2007. Criminological Theory: Context and Consequences. 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Linsky, Arnold S., Ronet Bachman, and Murray A. Straus. 1995. Stress, Culture, and Aggression. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Loue, Sana. 2010. Forensic Epidemiology: Integrating Public Health and Law Enforcement. Boston: Jones and Bartlett.

child abuse and neglect McCord, Joan, ed. 1995. Coercion and Punishment in Long-Term Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merdian, Hannah Lena, Cate Curtis, Jo Thakker, Nick Wilson, and Douglas Pieter Boer. 2013. The three dimensions of online child pornography offending. Journal of Sexual Aggression 19:121–32. Merton, Robert, K. 1968. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Mitchell, Kimberly J., Lisa M. Jones, David Finkelhor, and Janis Wolak. 2013. Understanding the decline in unwanted online sexual solicitations for youth 2000–2010: Findings from three youth internet safety surveys. Child Abuse & Neglect 37:1225–36. Money, John. 1986. Lovemaps. New York: Irvington. Norman, Rosana, E., Byambaa Munkhtsetseg, Rumna De, Alexander Butchart, James Scott, and Theo Vos. 2012. The long-term health consequences of child physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS Medicine 9:1–31. Ogas, Ogi, and Sai Gaddam. 2011. A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire. New York: Dutton. Pecora, Peter J., David Sanders, Dee Wilson, Diana English, Alan Puckett, and Kristen Rudlang-Perman. 2014. Addressing common forms of child maltreatment: Evidenceinformed interventions and gaps in current knowledge. Child & Family Social Work 19:321–32. Pfohl, Stephen, J. 1977. The “discovery” of child abuse. Social Problems 24:310–23. Prosecutor of the Tribunal Against Dragan Gagovic, Gojko Jankovic, Janko Janjic, Radomir Kovac, Zoran Vukovic, Dragan Zelenovic, Dragoljub Kunarac, and Radovan Stankovic. 1996 Indictment Case No. IT96–23. www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/ foc-ii960626e.htm. Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu. 1998. Judgement, Case No. ICTR-96–4-T. www .casebook.icrc.org/case-study/ictrprosecutor-v-jean-paul-akayesu. Quayle, Ethel, and Max Taylor. 2003. Model of problematic Internet use in people with a sexual interest in Children. CyberPsychology & Behavior 6:93–106.

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CHAPTER 19

Family Violence Claire M. Renzetti and Allison M. Adair

Abstract This chapter discusses the historical recognition of various forms of family violence – child abuse and neglect, intimate partner violence, and elder abuse – as serious social problems that require a public rather than a private, individual response. Research that examines the prevalence of as well as risk and protective factors for each type of abuse is also reviewed. The chapter concludes with an exploration of future directions for research and practice to better understand and address the problem of family violence.

Introduction Many members of the general public today are surprised to learn that various forms of family violence – i.e., child abuse and neglect, intimate partner violence, and elder abuse – have only fairly recently been labeled social problems. In contemporary industrialized societies at least, awareness of family violence as a serious social problem with negative physical, psychological and social consequences for victims is widespread, with strong public support for services for victims and the need to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions. That said, there remains considerable disagreement, even among researchers who study these problems, on how to best define each type of family violence (i.e., what “counts” as child abuse, intimate partner

violence, and elder abuse), the incidence of each type of abuse, and appropriate responses and remedies. This chapter will examine these issues and highlight some of the reasons for the disagreements. It is important to note at the outset, however, that these are not the only forms of family violence, although they are currently the types that have been most widely studied. The chapter does not address sibling abuse (i.e., the physical, emotional or sexual abuse of one sibling by another), and only considers the abuse of parents by children in the context of elder abuse. For more information on these two forms of family violence, consult Finkelhor, Turner, and Hamby (2012), Heide (2012), Hong et al. (2012), and Tucker et al. (2013). The first task of this chapter is to consider how child abuse, intimate partner violence,

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and elder abuse came to be regarded as social problems, rather than private problems affecting a small number of aberrant families.

A History of Family Violence: From “Private” Problem to Public Issue Child Abuse Today, children are commonly thought of as dependent, innocent creatures in need of protection, care and nurturance to thrive and grow into healthy adults. But this view did not begin to take hold in Western societies until the 1800s. Prior to this time, children were typically regarded as miniature adults at best, or wild creatures in need of taming at worst. Children who were not intentionally abandoned or killed shortly after birth were often put to work at as young an age as possible so they could contribute to, rather than be a drain on, family resources (deMause 1974). Children had no legal right to protection; in fact, English common law, which provides the foundation for American law, actually legitimized violence against children by upholding the right – indeed, the duty – of parents and guardians to “discipline” children in the manner they felt appropriate, necessary, and effective (Pfohl 1977). Sociologist Stephen Pfohl (1977), who has chronicled the historical “discovery” of child abuse as a social problem, notes that even during the 1800s, when various social reform movements such as the “House of Refuge” Movement (early 1800s), the moral campaigns of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (modeled on the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, late 1800s), and the establishment of the juvenile court system (early 1900s), called upon the state to take responsibility for neglected, abandoned, or abused children, the focus was not on unfit parents, but on the children themselves, who needed to be “saved” from becoming criminals. It was the children, Pfohl points out, who were institutionalized, supposedly for their own good, even though most of the institutions

to which they were confined were as abusive, if not more so, than their natal homes (see also Platt 1969). Pfohl’s research documents that until the 1960s, legal interventions into cases of child abuse were sporadic and usually involved only the most heinous incidents. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, pediatric radiologists doing research on bone fractures, skeletal trauma, and subdural hematomas in young children concluded that such problems were caused by deliberate assault and injury, a clinical condition they labeled battered child syndrome (Kempe et al. 1962). Pfohl (1977) discusses various factors that contributed to these physicians’ success in reframing child abuse as a social problem, but perhaps most important to the present discussion is the fact that their findings, published in prestigious medical journals, were taken up by the news media as well as various social welfare and voluntary organizations. The groundswell of public activism and lobbying for legislative reform that followed resulted in every US state by the end of the 1960s passing laws that mandated professionals to report suspected cases of child abuse to child welfare authorities. In 1974, the US Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), which allocated federal funding to the states to prevent and respond to child abuse (Barnett, Miller-Perrin, and Perrin 2011). Today, child maltreatment is recognized to include not only physical abuse and neglect, but also psychological or emotional abuse, although it was not until the 1990s that psychological maltreatment was clearly viewed as a distinct form of child abuse that may be perpetrated without actual physical abuse, but which has severe consequences for victims (Loring 1994). Intimate Partner Violence The modern view of children as innocent, helpless creatures in need of protection underlies the public abhorrence of child abuse and child abusers in contemporary industrial societies. But what about adults who experience abuse at the hands of their

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intimate partners? Historically, women, like children, were legally regarded as the property of the male heads of their households. Unmarried women were governed and controlled by their fathers; married women, by their husbands. Women, in fact, were considered similar to children in terms of their physical and intellectual capacities, and because of their immaturity, vanity, and “natural” churlishness were thought to be in need of periodic “correction” or chastisement, which included physical punishment. The law thus gave husbands substantial power over their wives, requiring women to obey their husbands’ demands, as long as they were within “reason,” which was quite liberally defined in favor of husbands. For example, a woman could not refuse to have sex with her husband, and if he used physical violence to force her to have sex with him, even if they were legally separated, he could not be charged with rape. The marriage license gave husbands unfettered sexual access to their wives (Dobash and Dobash 1979; Pleck 1987; Schechter 1982). In the 1800s, during what is often referred to as the “first wave” of feminism in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States, women’s rights advocates tried to draw attention to the problem of wife abuse, but failed to garner much sympathy or public support for this cause. Their claims were viewed by many as “antifamily” and too radical. It was during the “second wave” of feminism, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that feminists succeeded in drawing attention to and, more importantly, increasing public condemnation of, what was variously called domestic violence, wife abuse, woman abuse, and later in recognition of abuse in same-sex relationships, intimate partner violence (IPV). In small gatherings, known as consciousness-raising groups, women came together to share ideas and personal experiences, soon discovering that psychological degradation and physical abuse by boyfriends and husbands were not as uncommon as one might have assumed. Moreover, calls for help to the police and through the criminal justice system were

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either unhelpful or did more harm than good, sometimes resulting in women’s deaths (Schechter 1982). Women organized to provide services to women who needed assistance; in 1971, for instance, the first shelter for battered women was opened in London, and many more quickly followed throughout England, the rest of the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States (Pleck 1987; Schechter 1982). Today, intimate partner violence is internationally recognized as a serious social problem and a threat to public health, with calls for prevention and intervention issued by such entities as the United Nations and the World Health Organization. In little more than four decades, research on IPV has grown exponentially and includes the study of such violence in a multitude of contexts, including in the military, among refugees and immigrants, following natural disasters, and during war and in conflict zones. Political activism, lobbying, and lawsuits have produced legislative and criminal justice reforms, including the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), first enacted in 1994 and subsequently reauthorized (Goodmark 2012). All states also now have criminal statutes prohibiting forced sex between a husband and wife (i.e., marital rape), although the majority continue to exempt husbands from prosecution under specific circumstances, largely because of lingering doubts about proving nonconsent in a marital relationship (Bergen 1996; Caringella 2008). Researchers have studied the incidence and risk factors for IPV in different types of relationships (e.g., dating partners, same-sex partners) and across various social groups (e.g., racial and ethnic groups, social classes, people with disabilities). Before examining these findings, however, the emergence of one other type of family violence as a social problem warrants discussion. Elder Abuse In contrast to child abuse and intimate partner violence, the abuse of vulnerable older adults has not received extensive

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governmental, media, or public attention in the United States or other industrialized countries. In the 1960s, the US federal government began funding Adult Protective Services (APS) programs and by 1985, every state had an APS program. The majority of states had also enacted mandatory elder abuse reporting legislation by the close of the 1980s (Barnett et al. 2011). Nevertheless, it was not until 2010 that Congress passed the Elder Justice Act, analogous to CAPTA and VAWA, although without any monetary appropriations to accompany it. Moreover, as Jackson and Hafemeister (2013) point out, the field of elder abuse lacks a guiding theoretical framework, and rigorous empirical research on the problem has lagged well behind research on child abuse and IPV. They attribute the widespread public apathy toward elder abuse in part to ageism – i.e., unfavorably prejudicial attitudes toward the elderly. In addition, the muted attention to elder abuse has also been explained by the fact that there is no powerful interest group, professional organization, or social movement championing the cause and coalescing public and media support for calls to remedy it, as has occurred for child abuse and IPV (Jackson and Hafemeister 2013; Leroux and Petrunik 1990). Given increasing reports of elder abuse, which are still considered a gross underestimation of actual incidence, as well as the projected growth of the elderly population as baby boomers age, the situation could change dramatically in the next several years. The National Institute of Justice funds the Elder Mistreatment Research Program, which is supporting research on such topics as the collection and evaluation of forensic evidence of elder physical and sexual abuse, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics is developing a data collection instrument that will improve the analysis of the frequency, severity, and risk factors for elder abuse (Office of Justice Programs 2011). Of course, elder abuse may be perpetrated by anyone in a trust relationship with a senior citizen; however, in this chapter, the problem will be examined only in the context of family violence.

Overview of Current Knowledge on Forms of Family Violence As family violence shifted from an issue centered wholly in the domestic realm to one increasingly acknowledged as a serious social problem, greater efforts were made to gather data about the extent of the problem and, in turn, to enact policy, programming, and legislation that would protect those individuals most at risk. Researchers and practitioners representing an array of disciplines and professions have united in the goals of better understanding the problem and developing more effective solutions. This task, however, is not a simple one. On the contrary, family violence is such a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that it is difficult to adequately capture the nature of the problem with a simple set of numbers or statistics. The statistics discussed in this chapter are presented with some historical and situational context in order to provide as thorough a summary of the current knowledge of child abuse, intimate partner violence, and elder abuse possible, specifically in terms of prevalence, risk, and protective factors and responses. Child Abuse The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines child maltreatment as “any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or other caregiver (e.g., clergy, coach, teacher) that results in harm, potential for harm, or threat of harm to a child” (CDC 2015a). It may be physical, psychological, or sexual. The importance of this definition is that it highlights that child abuse encompasses not only physical actions that inflict injuries, but also includes neglect and non-physical forms of maltreatment, all of which may have longterm serious, negative consequences for victims. This aligns with the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect (1988), which recommends a definition of abuse that includes both a harm standard (i.e., a child is a victim of abuse if she or he has observable injuries that last at least forty-eight

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hours) and an endangerment standard (i.e., the child is a victim of abuse if she or he is substantially at risk of injury). The CDC has advocated for a uniform definition of child maltreatment because the definition of a problem guides how it is measured, and sound measurement is needed to determine how frequent and severe the problem is. These results then inform responses. For example, measures that include children at risk of harm will produce higher rates of child maltreatment than measures that only count children who have observable injuries. An additional challenge is a paucity of reliable data sources. Estimates from Child Protective Services (CPS), for instance, only account for cases that were reported to the agency, but many cases of child maltreatment go unreported to CPS. Self-report surveys are an alternative source of data, but their accuracy depends on the willingness of respondents to be truthful about their actions and experiences. These measurement issues should be kept in mind when considering the prevalence of child abuse. Prevalence, Risk Factors, and Consequences of Child Abuse There are a variety of organizations and agencies that attempt to measure the occurrence of child abuse. Official estimates collected by Child Protective Services agencies are gathered in the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). These data are reported in the Child Maltreatment series, which is one of the most widely used sources of information on risk factors for victimization, types of maltreatment, characteristics of perpetrators, and available services for both victims and perpetrators. The 2013 Child Maltreatment report estimated that in FFY 2013 there were 3.5 million referrals to CPS agencies regarding the alleged maltreatment of approximately 6.4 million children. The most common reporting sources were law enforcement officers and educational personnel, each making up 17.5 percent of reported cases. These two categories were

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followed by social services staff at 11 percent and medical personnel at 9 percent. The report estimates an abuse and neglect rate of almost 1 in 100 children in the population, with children aged birth to one year being the most vulnerable. The NCANDS report also shows that girls overall have a slightly higher rate of victimization than boys, although this may reflect the higher sexual abuse victimization rate of girls, and that African American children have higher rates of victimization than children in other racial groups, a point that will be discussed further later in the chapter. Among the children who had been mistreated, 79.5 percent had suffered neglect, 18 percent physical abuse, 9 percent sexual abuse, 8.7 percent psychological maltreatment, and 2.3 percent medical neglect. The two most significant risk factors identified were poverty and socioeconomic status. Other risk factors include caregivers experiencing financial difficulties, nonvictims receiving public assistance, and nonvictims exposed to domestic violence. Children with disabilities are also at high risk for abuse. According to Child Maltreatment, an estimated 1,520 children (mostly under the age of three) died in FFY 2013 as a result abuse and neglect, 46.8 percent specifically from physical abuse (US Department of Health and Human Services 2015). Another valuable source of data on child maltreatment is the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS). The NIS is a federally funded longterm research project designed to estimate national rates of child abuse and neglect. This study is unique in that it uses data from CPS, but also from community professionals, such as teachers, doctors, and law enforcement officials, who encounter cases of child abuse in their day-to-day activities. The fourth iteration of the study occurred in 2005–2006 and showed several marked differences from the data in the previous iterations. While the NIS-2 (completed in 1986) and the NIS-3 (completed in 1993) both reported a substantial increase in reported maltreatment rates, the NIS-4 found an overall decrease in the per capita rate of

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child maltreatment measured using the Harm Standard, but no change with regard to the Endangerment Standard. Specifically the NIS-4 found that the prevalence of child abuse dropped to a rate of 7.5 per 1,000 children, compared to 11.1 per 1,000 in 1993 and 8.1 per 1,000 in 1986 (National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges 2011; Sedlak et al. 2010). These findings suggest that child abuse and maltreatment rates shifts over time in relation to factors such as the health of the national economy, child welfare policy reform, and changes in welfare system practices (National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges 2011). Another key finding of the NIS-4 was “strong and pervasive” differences in maltreatment rates across racial and ethnic groups; of particular concern are the higher rates of maltreatment for black children compared to white and Hispanic children (Sedlak et al. 2010, 9). Nevertheless, these racial and ethnic differences may be due to other risk factors, such as low socioeconomic status. In fact, according to the National Council of Juvenile Court Judges (2011), racial and ethnic differences are no longer significant when economic differences across racial and ethnic groups are considered. The NIS-4 found that the strongest predictor of maltreatment is socioeconomic status (with the exception of a history of sexual abuse incidents in cases of child sexual abuse). Research on perpetrators of child abuse and maltreatment shows that women are slightly more likely than men to perpetrate some form of maltreatment than are men: 53.9 percent compared to 45 percent (US Department of Health and Human Services 2015). Some researchers, however, find that fathers or father substitutes are more likely to perpetrate violent crimes against children, whereas female caregivers are more likely to perpetrate neglect (Klevens and Leeb 2010). Moreover, given the significantly greater average time women, compared with men, spend caring for children, some observers dispute the claim that women are more likely than men to abuse children.

Victims of child maltreatment may experience a number of serious long-term consequences that include both physical and psychological health problems. Among the most common are developmental delays and learning problems, psychological disorders, substance abuse, and behavioral problems that may lead to involvement with the criminal justice system. Adults who were abused as children are also at greater risk of developing heart disease, liver disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and other serious physical ailments (Childhelp 2015). Given the potential severity and long-term nature of child maltreatment, it is clear that effective responses are critical for ensuring that children who have been victimized have opportunities for positive growth and development into healthy and engaged adults. Intimate Partner Violence Similar to child abuse, experts in the field of interpersonal violence have worked to develop comprehensive, uniform definitions of violence between adults to facilitate more accurate measurement, understanding, and response. Intimate partner violence (IPV) may be defined as any threatened or completed act of physical, sexual, or psychological abuse (including coercive acts) or stalking committed by a current or former intimate partner (e.g., current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend, dating partner, or sexual partner (Breiding et al. 2015). This definition encompasses an array of behaviors as well as types of relationships, and conceptualizes IPV on a continuum, ranging from one incident to chronic abuse occurring over many years. Although some researchers and advocates object to the gender-neutral nature of the term “intimate partner violence” because the majority of victims are female, its gender neutrality is important in that it includes same-sex as well as heterosexual partners. That it includes former as well as current partners is also significant in its recognition of the fact that ending a relationship does not necessarily end the abuse (see Fleury,

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Sullivan, and Bybee 2000; Orenstein and Rickne 2013; Parker et al. 2008). Because of the spectrum of organizations and agencies that are involved in working with victims of IPV and because of the variety of experiences of victims of IPV, efforts to form a comprehensive and universal definition of the concept have not been overwhelmingly successful. Despite the call for uniform definitions, however, disagreement persists over how to best measure IPV and what behaviors should “count” as IPV, with some researchers advocating for narrow definitions and measures, and others arguing in favor of broader definitions and measures (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2010). Discrepancies in measurement generate challenges for studying IPV and may produce inconsistencies in results regarding, for example, prevalence rates and risk for perpetration and victimization. One long-standing disagreement is referred to as the gender symmetry debate, in which some researchers maintain that women perpetrate as much or more IPV than men do (e.g., Archer 2000; Dutton, Corvo, and Hamel 2009; Straus 2007), whereas others have demonstrated that such findings stem largely from the way IPV is measured and the characteristics of study participants completing these measures (e.g., Johnson 2008; Kimmel 2002). Men also tend to underreport their abusive behavior and underestimate its seriousness (Kimmel 2002; Neighbors et al. 2010). But despite challenges, studies of the prevalence of IPV in the United States convincingly demonstrate that it is a serious and widespread social problem. Prevalence of and Risk Factors for Intimate Partner Violence National surveys estimate that from 7.6– 11.5 percent of men and 12–25 percent of women are physically and/or sexually assaulted by an intimate partner each year (Black et al. 2011; Tjaden and Thoennes 2000). The CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) collected data from a national random sample

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of US households and measured five types of intimate partner violence, including sexual violence, physical violence, stalking, psychological aggression, and control of reproductive health (Black et al. 2011). Among the survey’s most notable findings are those showing that more than one in three women and one in four men have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Women, however, are significantly more likely to experience multiple types of IPV and to be sexually victimized. Nearly one in ten women have been raped by an intimate partner in her lifetime, and about 16.9 percent of women and 8 percent of men have experienced some other form of sexual assault by an intimate partner. Women are also significantly more likely to be stalked by an intimate partner: 10.7 percent of women, but 2.1 percent of men have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime (Black et al. 2011). Additional research reveals other important gender differences in IPV perpetration and victimization. For example, studies show that women’s and men’s motivations for using violence against an intimate partner differ. Men are more likely to use violence when they perceive themselves losing control of the relationship or when they interpret their partner’s words or behavior as challenges to their authority. In contrast, women are more likely to use violence, especially severe physical violence, in self-defense, when they believe they are in imminent danger of being attacked, or in retaliation for being attacked (Barnett, Lee, and Thelan 1997; Dobash et al. 1998; Miller 2005; Rajan and McCloskey 2007). Moreover, men’s violence is typically more severe; women are more likely to be injured when they are assaulted by their male intimate partners, and their injuries are more serious and more likely to require medical treatment or hospitalization (Archer 2000; Hamberger and Guse 2002; Menard, Anderson, and Godboldt 2008; Tjaden and Thoennes 2000). And men are more likely than women to kill their intimate partners (Fox and Zawitz 2007).

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IPV prevalence also varies by race and ethnicity and social class. For example, the NISVS findings show significant racial and ethnic differences in lifetime IPV prevalence. Women who self-identified as multiracial and men who identified as American Indian or Native Alaskan reported the highest rates of physical violence, rape, and stalking. Importantly, however, not all racial and ethnic minorities had higher rates of IPV victimization than whites; Asian and Pacific Islander women and men had the lowest rates of reported IPV victimization than any other racial or ethnic group (Black et al. 2011). Researchers also report that social class and employment status are related to IPV perpetration, with lower socioeconomic status and poverty, as well as unemployment, being associated with an increased risk of IPV perpetration by men and IPV victimization of women (Black et al. 2011; Brush 2011; Martin, Taft, and Resick 2007; Renzetti 2009). Effects of Intimate Partner Violence As previously noted, the impact of intimate partner violence is gendered, with significantly more women than men being injured and requiring medical attention. Women who have been victimized also report greater fear of their abusive intimate partners (Hamberger and Guse 2002) and are more likely to miss work or school because of the abuse (Black et al. 2011). The negative consequences of IPV for victims are well documented in the empirical literature and include not only physical injuries, but also other physical and mental health problems: poor functional health, arthritis, asthma, high blood cholesterol, chronic pain, gynecological problems, heart disease (CDC 2008; Dillon et al. 2013), anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress, lowered self-esteem, and a diminished sense of selfefficacy (Perez, Johnson, and Wright, 2012; Sutherland, Bybee, and Sullivan 2002). Victims of IPV are also more likely than those who have not experience IPV to engage in risky behaviors, including smoking, heavy or binge drinking, and HIV/STI risk behaviors

(CDC 2008). Importantly, studies show that psychological abuse is more strongly associated with poor health than is physical IPV (Coker et al. 2002). In summary, both the prevalence data and the findings on the negative consequences of IPV victimization underline the severity of this social problem and the need to effectively address it. A variety of services are available to IPV victims, including crisis hotlines and shelters that provide temporary housing, counseling, and other programs, and victims who receive these services typically report that they are helpful (Allen, Bybee, and Sullivan 2004; Tutty, Weaver, and Rothery 1999). Nevertheless, it is clear that more attention must be given not only to assisting IPV victims, but also to preventing IPV, a point that will be addressed further later in the chapter. Elder Abuse As discussed earlier, the problem of elder abuse is arguably the most understudied form of family violence and, some would also maintain, the most underreported and under-prosecuted as well, even though those aged sixty-five and older make up the fastest growing segment of the US population (Caccamise and Mason 2004; Meloy and Cunningham, forthcoming). Elder abuse is any maltreatment or neglect of a person aged sixty or older by a caregiver or another person in a trust relationship with the elder (CDC 2015b). Notice that the CDC’s definition includes individuals as young as sixty years old. Obviously, the age demarcation affects the number of cases identified, such that the broader the age range, the more individuals may be included as potential victims. This disagreement over how to define “elder” represents one of the unresolved issues that has historically shaped the debate over elder abuse as a social problem. Most researchers and practitioners agree that elder abuse includes physical abuse, sexual abuse or abusive sexual contact, psychological or emotional abuse, neglect, abandonment, and financial abuse or exploitation (CDC 2015b), but the

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precise behaviors subsumed under these categories of abuse remain another point of debate. In addition, databases across states are inconsistent, and underreporting by the elderly as well as the failure by authorities to take reports seriously or investigate them fully make it very difficult to accurately study and measure elder abuse (Acierno et al. 2010; Meloy and Cunningham, forthcoming). Elder Abuse Prevalence and Risk Factors As a result of the aging of the Baby Boomer generation, the elderly population has and will continue to grow, creating a larger population of dependent, elderly Americans. Among the total US population, the percentage of persons age sixty-five or older increased from 12.4 percent in 2000 to 13 percent in 2010 and is predicted to reach over 16 percent by 2020 (Morgan and Mason 2014) – a trend not unique to the United States, but one that can be seen in industrial countries throughout the world (National Center for Health Statistics 2010). The most comprehensive study of elder abuse to date – the National Elder Mistreatment Study conducted in 2009 – found that about one in ten (11.4 percent) of the 5,777 elderly respondents (aged sixty to ninety-seven) had experienced physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, or neglect in the year preceding the survey (Acierno et al. 2010). Relatively few of these incidents, however, were reported to the police: approximately 31 percent of physical abuse incidents, 16 percent of sexual abuse incidents, and 7.9 percent of emotional abuse incidents were reported to police by respondents to this survey (Acierno et al. 2010). Other studies show even lower reporting rates (see, e.g., Pillemer and Finkelhor 1988). Women are at greater risk of elder abuse by virtue of simply having a longer average life expectancy than men. Elderly women are also significantly more likely than elderly men to experience sexual abuse, although studies specifically examining sexual abuse of the elderly are particularly few

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in number (Burgess 2006) and stereotypes of elders’ sexuality can impede successful prosecution of such cases (Hodell et al. 2009). Apart from gender, two of the strongest risk factors for victimization are low social support and high social isolation. The National Elder Mistreatment Study, for example, showed that low social support more than tripled the likelihood that any type of abuse had occurred (Acierno et al. 2010). As Acierno and colleagues (2010) state, it is likely that low social support and greater social isolation are both conducive to elder abuse and outcomes of elder abuse. Interestingly, physical and financial dependence on others are risk factors for all forms of elder abuse, not only financial abuse and exploitation (Meloy and Cunningham, forthcoming). It is important to note, however, that the financial dependence of other adults (e.g., family members) on the elderly individual is also a risk factor for all types of abuse (Paranjape et al. 2009). Among the non-institutionalized elderly, the popular idea that functional impairment increases risk of abuse has received limited research support. For instance, in the National Elder Mistreatment Study, functional impairment was correlated with verbal and financial abuse, but not with other forms of abuse (Acierno et al. 2010). Among the institutionalized elderly, however, cognitive impairment (e.g., dementia) appears to increase risk of abuse, particularly if there is a small number of skilled staff relative to the number of residents needing substantial care and attention (Bachman and Meloy 2008). Even among the institutionalized elderly, though, low social support and high social isolation increase risk: residents who have few or no regular visitors are more likely to experience abuse (Bachman and Meloy 2008). Research indicates that most perpetrators of elder abuse are family members, most of whom (76 percent in cases of physical abuse) are intimate partners (National Center on Elder Abuse 1998). Thus, as noted later in this chapter, the elder abuse may simply be a continuation of a history

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of intimate partner violence, or may be retaliation by one partner for abuse inflicted earlier in the intimate relationship. As is the case with sexual abuse generally, elders are more likely to be sexually assaulted by someone they know than by a stranger; in one study, 40 percent of sexual abuse perpetrators were intimate partners and 40 percent were an acquaintance of the victim (National Center on Elder Abuse 1998; see also Paranjape et al. 2009). Nevertheless, as previously discussed, these incidents are not likely to be reported for a variety of reasons, including lack of understanding of intimate partner violence as a crime, emotional commitment to the perpetrator, shame, fear of retaliation, and physical or financial dependency on the perpetrator (Paranjape et al. 2009; Zink et al. 2003). Effects of Elder Abuse Given that many elderly people already experience significant health problems and may be physically frail, it is not surprising that they are at greater risk of severe injury and death as a result of abuse (Dong et al. 2009; Mouton 2003). In addition, elderly victims of abuse experience high rates of depression and other mental health problems (Dyer et al. 2000). Elderly sexual abuse victims, in particular, experience severe psychological trauma, but they may also evidence more serious physical injuries than younger sexual assault victims, as research indicates that perpetrators may be especially brutal toward elderly victims and use far greater physical force than is necessary to subdue or restrain them (Jeary 2005). In summary, although greater attention is being given to elder abuse, it remains an understudied and widely misunderstood social problem. More research is clearly needed to improve knowledge of the frequency and severity of elder abuse, the risk factors for victimization and perpetration, consequences for victims and offenders, and improved responses and prevention strategies, particularly as the world’s elderly population continues to grow.

Future Directions for Improving Understanding of and Responses to Family Violence The word family derives from the Latin word famulus, which means “household servant or slave,” a phrase that is in stark contrast to the idyllic image of the family as a pillar of love, support, care, and nurturance. The research reviewed in this chapter shows that for millions of children and adults “home” is not a peaceful haven from the harsh reality of the “outside” world, but instead the center of ongoing neglect, maltreatment, and abuse. What is needed, then, to better understand and respond to family violence? The chapter concludes with a discussion of potentially fruitful directions for future research and practice. In efforts to raise public awareness of the extent and seriousness of family violence, a common refrain is that family violence affects all social groups; no race, ethnicity, age group, social class, and so on is immune from the problem. While this statement contains some truth, the research literature shows that risk for family violence is not equally distributed across social groups. For example, data on child maltreatment indicate that abuse decreases as children age, with children aged birth to one year at greatest risk. The data also indicate that boys and girls are at similar risk of maltreatment, but girls are significantly more likely than boys to be sexually abused. And although black and Hispanic children appear to be at higher risk for physical abuse, these differences, as noted previously, may be due to the disproportionate representation of black and Hispanic children among the poor (Sedlak et al. 2010). A similar relationship emerges from the IPV data: the relationship between race/ethnicity and risk for IPV victimization often disappears when social class is taken into account; economic disadvantage appears to be a stronger risk factor than race/ethnicity for IPV victimization (Benson and Fox 2004; Grossman and Lundy 2007; Rennison and Planty 2003; Renzetti 2009). These findings suggest that more research is needed that

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examines how these various social locating factors intersect to increase or reduce risk. Also needed are analyses of the intersection between victimization and perpetration. For instance, how do adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as child maltreatment or witnessing violence, increase risk of victimization and/or perpetration later in the life course (see, e.g., Anda et al. 2006; Farber and Miller-Cribbs 2014)? The gendered pathways studies of feminist criminologists provide a useful framework for this type of research (see, e.g., Gilfus 1993). It is telling that among the incarcerated population in the United States, 14 percent of men, but 36 percent of women report they were abused as children, figures twice the general population, but also indicators that the consequences of child maltreatment are likely gendered (Childhelp 2015). These negative outcomes, however, are not fait accompli. More research is also needed, then, on resilience and the factors that contribute to more positive outcomes for individuals who experience the trauma of victimization (see, e.g., Unger 2013). There are some groups for whom we still have little data. For example, people with disabilities are an understudied group within the family violence literature, although the research that is available indicates that people with disabilities, regardless of age, are at significantly greater risk for physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, and that some of this abuse is disabilityrelated (e.g., over- or undermedicating, depriving the disabled individual of assistive devices) (Shah, Woodin, and Tsitsou 2015). The violent victimization experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and especially transgender individuals are also understudied. Gay, lesbian, and transgender youth appear to be at high risk for victimization within families and intimate relationships, and this risk is related to homophobia, which not only contributes to the victimization itself, but also poses barriers to receiving help when victimization occurs (Gillum and DiFulvio 2012; Todahl et al. 2009). Research on abuse and neglect of LGBTQ elders is also sorely lacking.

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Careful research is needed to tease out the impact not only of intersecting social locations, but other risk factors as well. For instance, research shows that alcohol use, especially heavy or binge drinking, significantly increases the risk of IPV perpetration (Eckhardt, Parrot, and Sprunger 2015; Shorey, Stuart, and Cornelius 2011). But additional research suggests that other factors have an even greater impact on perpetration risk. Johnson (2001), for example, found that the alcohol – IPV relationship was no longer significant when indicators of male dominance were taken into account. Similarly, Renzetti, Lynch, and DeWall (2015) report that alcohol use interacts with sexist attitudes to influence risk of IPV perpetration. Sexist or patriarchal attitudes may be particularly important in understanding high rates of IPV among groups whose culture or religion prohibits alcohol use (Bennett and Bland 2008). Cross-cultural studies are also needed to better understand the differential risk and experiences of immigrant and refugee families, as well as different types of family violence. For example, research indicates that there is cross-cultural disagreement about which specific behaviors constitute child “discipline” and which are child “abuse.” Similar disagreement occurs with regard to neglect, especially medical neglect, of children (International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect 2008). Cross-cultural research can show how a particular type of family violence is defined and manifests in various societies. One example of such research is the collection of cross-cultural studies on marital rape edited by Kersti Yllö and Gabriela Torres (2016). Some types of violence against children and adults, such as honor killings (i.e., the killing of a woman or girl for engaging in behavior that brings dishonor or shame to her family, practiced primarily in Middle Eastern cultures) and dowry murders (i.e., the killing of a wife by her in-laws, often by setting her on fire, because of their dissatisfaction with the dowry provided to them by her parents, practiced primarily in India) are not well understood in Western societies

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(Ahmed-Ghosh 2004; Araji and Carlson 2001; Baker, Gregware, and Cassidy 1999). In studying these forms of family violence, it is important that researchers do not “exoticize” or “other” either the practices or the people who engage in them (Shier and Shor 2015). This is not to say that they should simply be accepted in the name of cultural relativism – there is, after all, an objective harm to those who are victimized – but rather to emphasize that an understanding of these types of violence in the cultural context in which they occur is necessary for developing effective prevention and intervention strategies. Responses to family violence may be characterized as uneven at best. Although child abuse is outlawed throughout the United States and some professional groups are mandated to report cases of suspected abuse, enforcement of these laws is hardly uniform and prosecution rates vary by type of abuse. Mandated reporters sometimes balk at going to authorities with their suspicions, and even cases that are investigated rarely go to trial and result in a conviction (about 10 percent) (Dissanaike et al. 2010). One exception is child sexual abuse perpetrated by strangers. Public outcry following highly publicized cases has contributed to the enactment of a series of laws, the most familiar being sex offender registries and restrictions on the liberties of individuals convicted of child sexual abuse. While many observers applaud these laws, findings from empirical studies call into question whether the laws actually prevent sexual abuse and make children safer (Letourneau et al. 2010; Meloy 2006). Additional research is needed to evaluate not only the effectiveness of legislative efforts to address child abuse, but also programs for both victims and offenders. The criminal legal system’s response to intimate partner violence has been directly influenced by efforts of battered women’s advocates, who showed how law enforcement’s and the courts’ historically weak response to domestic violence harmed women and their children and left men unaccountable for their abusive behavior.

Lawsuits against city governments for failing to protect women and their children from abuse (e.g., Thurman v. City of Torrington 1983) also prompted significant legal changes. One change, for instance, was the widespread adoption of mandatory arrest policies. Essentially, mandatory arrest takes away police officers’ discretionary power to decide whether or not to arrest an IPV perpetrator; instead, if probable cause exists, an arrest must be made (see Goodmark 2012 for an extensive discussion of mandatory arrest and other criminal legal reforms). But shortly after the adoption of mandatory arrest policies in jurisdictions throughout the United States, advocates and researchers began to notice some unintended consequences. One negative outcome was a dramatic increase in arrests of women for intimate partner violence. Women who fought back against their abuser were likely to be arrested along with male perpetrators; training first responders to identify the “primary aggressor” in these cases reduced, but did not fully remedy this problem. And some perpetrators learned to manipulate the policy by calling the police before their partners could or even by injuring themselves to ensure that their partners (i.e., the actual victims) would be arrested (Miller 2005). Mandatory arrest policies have also been criticized for denying agency and decision-making authority to women, especially minority women, who may not want to subject their partners to the vagaries of a criminal legal system that routinely treats men of color more harshly than white men (Smith 2010). Consequently, some activists, advocates, and researchers have called for alternative responses to intimate partner violence, including mediation and restorative justice models, particularly in immigrant communities and communities of color (Goodmark 2012; Miller 2011; Ptacek 2010). While such responses are more flexible than the criminal legal system and reduce the risk of “enforcement violence” – i.e., violence by the police, immigration officers, and corrections officers when responding to minority offenders – they are not without

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controversy (Ptacek 2010). There are several different types of restorative justice models, for example, but no rigorous empirical evaluations of any of these have been conducted to date. Moreover, evaluations of programs for perpetrators – most commonly, Batterer Intervention Programs (BIPs) – have shown mixed results in terms of “success” (i.e., reducing recidivism) (see, e.g., Klein and Crowe 2008; Klein and Tobin 2008; Gondolf 2012). Clearly, more research is needed to determine “what works” – for perpetrators and victims. As discussed previously, elder abuse is the most underdeveloped area of study in the family violence field. Jackson and Hafemeister’s (2013) research shows that there are various types of elder abuse and that the characteristics of the victim and the perpetrator, as well as the nature of their relationship, are critical for accurately understanding and effectively responding to elder maltreatment. For example, while financial abuse of elders may be perpetrated by family members or total strangers, physical abuse and neglect are typically perpetrated by a family member, often an adult child. The elderly victim is frequently aware she or he is being abused, but their commitment or sense of obligation to the abuser inhibits them from reporting the abuse or ending the relationship with the abuser. It may also be the case that the late-life abusive relationship is a continuation of earlier abuse, and sometimes the roles are reversed – the adult offspring is abusive or neglectful because their elderly parent was previously abusive or neglectful toward them, or an intimate partner is abusive because they were abused earlier in the relationship. These findings suggest very different types of responses to both victims and perpetrators, but more work is needed to develop innovative programs and to empirically evaluate them. Most efforts to date have been public awareness campaigns and home visitation programs, which have shown some promising results (Davis, Medina, and Avitabile 2001). Programs to increase elders’ social networks are also important, since social isolation has been

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identified as a risk factor for all types of elder abuse (Aday, Kehoe, and Farney 2006; Barnett et al. 2011; Teaster, Roberto, and Dugar 2006). And, as with programs addressing other types of family violence, all programs for elders should be culturally competent and address the specific needs and concerns of the populations being served. Partnerships between researchers and service providers will facilitate evaluation of these programs (Jackson and Hafemeister 2013). This discussion of future directions for family violence research and practice highlights one final, but nevertheless critically important issue: Most efforts to address family violence are reactive rather than proactive, focused on intervention after the abuse occurs, rather than preventing it from occurring. As the World Health Organization (WHO 2014) reports, however, there is growing empirical evidence that family violence is preventable. Research that documents the major risk and protective factors for different types of family violence is being used to develop and implement a variety of prevention programs, and evaluations are under way to assess their efficacy (see, e.g., Ball et al. 2012; Coker 2014; Renzetti, Follingstad, and Coker, forthcoming). Still, despite these efforts, substantial gaps in knowledge about family violence prevention remain, and prevention programming continues to be under-resourced (WHO 2014). As more evidence on the effectiveness of specific prevention efforts becomes available, it is hoped that more attention – and more resources – will be given to stopping family violence before it ever starts.

Glossary Child maltreatment Any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or other caregiver (e.g., clergy, coach, teacher) that results in harm, potential for harm, or threat of harm to a child. Elder abuse Any maltreatment or neglect of a person aged sixty or older by a

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caregiver or another person in a trust relationship with the elder. Intimate partner violence Any threatened or completed act of physical, sexual, or psychological abuse (including coercive acts) or stalking committed by a current or former intimate partner (e.g., current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend, dating partner, or sexual partner.

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Baker, Nancy V., Peter R. Gregware, and Margery A. Cassidy. 1999. Family killing fields. Violence Against Women 7:164–84. Ball, Barbara, A. T. Tharp, Rita K. Noonan, L. A. Valle, M. E. Hamburger, and B. Rosenbluth. 2012. Expect respect support groups: Preliminary evaluation of a dating violence prevention program for at-risk youth. Violence Against Women 18:746–62. Barnett, Ola W., Cheok Y. Lee, and Rose E. Thelan 1997. Gender differences in attributions of self-defense and control in interpartner aggression. Violence Against Women 3:462– 81. Barnett, Ola W., Cindy L. Miller-Perrin, and Robin D. Perrin. 2011. Family Violence Across the Lifespan: An Introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bennett, Larry, and Patricia Bland. 2008. Substance Abuse and Intimate Partner Violence. Harrisburg, PA: VAWnet. Benson, Michael L., and Greer L. Fox. 2004. When Violence Hits Home: How Economics and Neighborhood Play a Role. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice. Bergen, Raquel Kennedy. 1996. Wife Rape: Understanding the Response of Survivors and Service Providers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Black, Michele C., Kathleen C. Basile, Matthew J. Breiding, Sharon G. Smith, Mikel L. Walters, Melissa T. Merrick et al. 2011. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Summary Report. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Breiding, Matthew J., Kathleen C. Basile, Sharon G. Smith, Michele C. Black, and Reshma Mahendra. 2015. Intimate Partner Violence Surveillance: Uniform Definitions and Recommended Data Elements. Version 2.0. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Brush, Lisa D. 2011. Poverty, Battered Women and Work in U.S. Public Policy. New York: Oxford University Press. Burgess, Ann W. 2006. Elderly Victims of Sexual Abuse and Their Offenders. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice. Caccamise, Paul L., and Art Mason. 2004. Policy paper: New York state summit targets elder abuse, “The Time to Act is Now.” Journal of Elder Abuse & Neglect 16:41–62.

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CHAPTER 20

Juvenile Violence Kathleen M. Heide

Abstract Juvenile violence was recognized as a serious social and public health problem in the early 1990s, following ten years of increasing arrests of juveniles for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The proportionate involvement of juveniles in violent crime arrests was rising at a time when arrests of violent adult offenders were decreasing and when the youth population was declining. Experts predicted that the epidemic of youth violence would continue and worsen in the years ahead. This chapter discusses the historical background, defines terms associated with youth violence, and addresses developmental concerns. Analyses of twenty years of arrest data are presented with the aim of pinpointing youth involvement in different types of crimes, trends over time, and characteristics of violent juvenile arrestees. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the findings in relation to addressing the question of where juvenile violence stands today as a social problem.

Introduction In the summer of 1993, Janet Reno, the Attorney General of the United States, described youth violence as “the greatest single crime problem in America today” (Kantrowitz 1993). Reno’s remark was based on national crimes statistics indicating that arrests of juveniles (individuals under age eighteen) for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, as defined in Table 20.1, had been steadily increasing in the United

States since 1984. Even more unsettling were data that indicated that the percentages of juveniles among those arrested for all four types of violent crimes had been consistently rising during the preceding ten-year period. In 1984, for example, 7.3 percent (n = 1,004) of the 13,676 individuals arrested for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter (hereafter referred to as simply murder) were under age 18; in 1993, 16.2 percent (n = 3,284) of the 20,285 homicide arrestees were juveniles (Heide 1999).

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Table 20.1. Definitions of Violent Crimes (FBI, 2010, 2013) Crime

Definition

Attempts?

Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter

“The willful (nonnegligent) killing of one human being by another.” “Deaths caused by negligence, attempts to kill, assaults to kill, suicides, and accidental deaths are excluded.” “The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will. Rapes by force and attempts or assaults to rape, regardless of the age of the victim, are included.” “Statutory offenses (no force used–victim under age of consent) are excluded.” “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” “The taking or attempting to take anything of value from the care, custody, or control of a person or persons by force or threat of force or violence and/or by putting the victim in fear.” “An unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury. This type of assault usually is accompanied by the use of a weapon or by means likely to produce death or great bodily harm.” “Simple assaults are excluded.” This subtotal consists of the four violent crimes: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, (forcible) rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

excluded

Forcible rape (up to 2012)

Rape (definition adopted in 2013) Robbery

Aggravated assault

Violent crime subtotal

included

excluded

included

excluded

as per crime type

Note: Data are from FBI (2010, 2013).

Two co-current phenomena accentuated the seriousness of the rising involvement of youth in violent crime in the United States during the ten-year period 1984–93. First, the increase in arrests of juveniles for violent crime was occurring when arrests of their adult counterparts was declining. Second, and even more troubling, the rising trend in juvenile involvement in violent crime was occurring during a period when the population of those under age eighteen was declining (Fox 1996). During the mid-1990s crime experts forecasted that violent crime by juveniles would likely increase exponentially in the next few years because the youth population was growing (Fox 1996; Snyder and Sickmund 1995). Northeastern University Criminology Professor James A. Fox predicted “a bloodbath of violence” by youth as we approached the twenty-first century

if existing crime trends in the United States remained unchecked (Fox 1995). John Dilulio, a political science professor at Princeton, warned of continued violence spawned by young “superpredators” (Dilulio 1995) who were “so impulsive, so remorseless that they could kill, rape, maim without giving it a second thought” (New York Times 2014). The response in the United States to the perceived epidemic of youth violence was swift. During the period 1992 to 1995, the District of Columbia and forty-seven states made significant changes to their laws aimed at juveniles who committed violent or other serious crimes (Torbet et al. 1996; Heide 1999). These laws were designed to “get tough” with juveniles; they made it easier to transfer juveniles to adult court by lowering the age of majority for all youths or for those who committed certain crimes, and

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by adding or changing transfer procedures. Juveniles prosecuted in adult court, unlike those adjudicated in juvenile court, faced longer sentences and, up until 2010, could be sentenced to life without parole for violent crimes such as robbery, rape, and aggravated assault as well as murder. Up until 2005, juveniles convicted of murder could be sentenced to death; until 2012, they could be sentenced to mandatory life without the possibility of parole under prevailing state statutes (Heide 2015). Interestingly, the increase in violence by young people during this period was not strictly a US phenomenon. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, England and Wales, Italy, France, and Poland reported that youth involvement in violent crimes had risen by at least 50 percent in each of these countries and by more than 100 percent in most of them (Pfeiffer 1998; Travis 1997). Concern continued in Europe as the twentieth century came to an end. In October 2004, Queen Sofia of Spain invited scholars from Europe and the United States, including the author, to address the problem of youth violence at a conference held at the Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in Valencia, Spain. This chapter provides an overview of important issues related to youth violence. It begins by clarifying terms and briefly discussing developmental issues. Thereafter juvenile involvement in violent crime is examined by violent crime type over a twenty-year period using US arrest data. The United States, unlike other countries, has a national database of crime statistics spanning twenty years that is available online. Accordingly, correlates and trends related to youth violence can be systematically evaluated over time. These analyses enable us to determine whether youth violence remains as serious a social problem some twenty years after Attorney General Reno, James Fox, John Dilulio, and other informed parties sounded their cries of alarm.

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Terms Defined and Developmental Concepts The term juvenile is often used interchangeably in the academic and popular literature with youth, adolescent, child, and teenager. These terms, however, can be distinguished from one another. Juvenile has been interpreted to mean minority status and is based on age. In the United States, who is considered to be a minor in the eyes of the law is a legislative decision. The majority of states and the federal government have designated persons under age eighteen to be minors (National Conference on State Legislation 2014). The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which collects, analyzes, estimates, and disseminates statistics on crime in the US records arrests of individuals aged six through seventeen, referred to as “children 17 and under,” as juvenile arrests (FBI 2014). Youth, unlike the word juvenile, is a very fluid term and often varies in meaning depending on the source and the context. The United Nations (UN) considers youth to be “a period of transition from the dependence of childhood to adulthood’s independence.” For statistical purposes, the UN has defined youth since 1981 as a person between the ages of fifteen to twenty-four years old (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, n.d.). Unlike juvenile status, which is fixed by age, and youth, which is a very amorphous term, adolescence is based on biological development and varies across individuals. It commences with puberty, which generally happens by age twelve, but may occur sooner, and continues through the late teens or early twenties. Adolescence is a volatile period marked by growth spurts, hormonal changes, increase in intellectual abilities, refinement in motor skills, and psychological changes. Unlike juvenile status and adolescence, the term child is a nebulous term that is frequently used when referring to a prepubescent youth (Solomon et al. 2015). It

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can be used to refer to a two-year-old boy or a seventeen-year-old girl. Needless to say, the terms child, juvenile, and adolescent can be confusing given that precise boundaries are not defined. When talking about juvenile arrests in the United States, I find it useful to use the three terms – young children, preteens, and teenagers – because there are significant developmental differences among these groups. There is no precise line differentiating young children from preteens. I arguably define young children as ages nine and under and preteens as between ten and twelve. This demarcation works well because, in addition to reflecting broad developmental differences, the FBI categorizes arrests of younger children as “under age ten” and as “ages ten to twelve.” Needless to say, variation exists among individuals in the three aforementioned groups of young children, preteens, and teenagers. The discussion below, however, highlights differences in development that typically distinguish younger children (young children and preteens) from their older counterparts (teenagers) in the general population. As long recognized by child development experts, important differences exist between younger school-age children (ages six to twelve) and older schoolchildren (thirteen to seventeen years old) with respect to psychological and physical development (Erikson 1959; Heide et al. 2011; Hess, Magnuson, and Beeler 2012; Solomon et al. 2015), personality development (Harris 1983, 1988; Heide 2013), and moral development (Kohlberg 1981). Differences in risk factors and weapon use between younger and older school children have also been noted with respect to involvement in murder by criminologists (Shumaker and McGee 2001; Shumaker and Prinz 2000). The synthesis below is based on the literature on child development and my experience as a mental health professional evaluating more than 120 juveniles involved in committing violent crimes, as well as consulting on many additional cases of violent juveniles, some as young as eight years old.

Young Children Children aged six to nine are typically in the first through fourth grades. Young children are at the beginning stages of learning to control their impulses and to delay gratification. Accordingly, as a group, they are highly impulsive and frequently act without clear goals in mind. They often do not anticipate or intend the consequences of their behavior. Young children in particular do not grasp the finality of death. When involved in murder, they usually do not comprehend that the individual who has been “shot dead,” for example, is “forever gone” (Bender 1959; Bender and Curran 1940). They frequently expect that the deceased, much like a cartoon or videogame character, will reappear like he was before the shooting occurred. Family and teachers are the primary influence for children ages six through nine. Children at this age tend to think concretely. Their personality development is understandably generally low as they have not had the life experiences to mature at this young age. They typically have not reached the stage of development where they understand their feelings and those of others, recognize that they have choices, and see themselves as accountable for their behavior. Instead they tend to view people in stereotypic ways (e.g., mothers, grandmothers, and teachers are nice; coaches and fathers are strict and strong) and they look for ways to manipulate “bigger people” to get their needs met. For example, they learn to say “please” to get an ice cream cone and “I am sorry” to avoid getting punished for taking their younger brother’s toy away from him. Their moral development is similarly low given their age. In determining what to do, individuals age nine and under often look for the quid pro quo (e.g., “What’s in it for me if I help you or respond this way?”). Children at this age typically have not entered puberty so they are not impacted by significant hormonal changes. Children this young are rarely involved in violent crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, or aggravated assault. For example, in

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2014, only two of the 8,267 arrests for murder recorded by the FBI involved children under age ten. Their representation among arrestees for other violent crimes was also minuscule: 25 of 16,473 arrests for rape; 19 of 74,432 arrests for robbery; and 258 of 293,005 arrests for aggravated assault. Taken collectively, children under age ten represented 304 (0.08 percent) of the 392,177 arrests for violent crime that year. In other words, arrests of children ages nine and under constituted less than one-tenth of 1 percent of violent crime arrests in 2014. Young children who respond violently are often acting impulsively. They may hit another child because they are angry or take another child’s toy by force or threat simply because they want it. Because they are not particularly strong or skilled in weapon use, the injuries they inflict rarely cause death or serious bodily harm. Young children are highly susceptible to being influenced by others whom they perceive as more powerful. They are easily duped by older individuals who take advantage of their naiveté, including unstable, immoral, or mentally ill parents (Sargent 1962). In some cases, young children engage in serious violent crime because of severe pathology or overwhelming conflict (Bender 1959). Preteens The term preteen is often used to denote children who are ages ten and twelve. Many of these youths are in the beginning stage of adolescence; they are typically in fifth through seventh grades or middle school. Preteens have a more realistic concept of death than their younger counterparts. Although they still act impulsively, they are better able to delay their immediate response to gratification than younger children. Preteens continue to be influenced by family and teachers. However, they are also swayed significantly by their peers and the media. At these ages, they are typically beginning to reason deductively and to think hypothetically. Most youths at this age are becoming increasingly aware that they

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have choices regarding how they act. They often are starting to have some awareness of feelings and motives in themselves and others. Preteens, relative to younger children, have a stronger sense of right and wrong. Relationships and motives are more frequently part of their decision-process in determining what course of action to take than these factors were in their younger years. During the preteen years, hormones often surge. With the onset of puberty, secondary sexual characteristics begin to develop. Mood swings and growth spurts also occur for most eleven- and twelve-yearold children. Preteens who are involved in violent crime are frequently acting in concert with their peers. Arrests of preteens for robbery and aggravated assault are dramatically higher than for their younger counterparts. For example, in 2014, 373 juveniles aged ten to twelve were arrested for robbery; this is nearly twenty times greater than the nineteen children arrested who were under age ten. Arrests of preteens for aggravated assault were nearly eight times greater than they were for children aged nine and under (1,998 vs. 258). Not surprisingly, in light of hormonal changes, arrests of preteens for rape was more than eleven times higher than for younger children (280 vs. 25). Arrests for murder, however, remained very low for both younger children and preteens (2 and 3, respectively).

Teenagers The term teenager, unlike the terms young child and preteen, is easier to define. Technically, it includes individuals who are aged thirteen through nineteen and still going through their adolescent period. However, if the focus is on juveniles, the upper limit of the age range is most appropriately capped at age seventeen in light of existing state and federal definitions, as noted above. Youths aged thirteen to seventeen are typically in grades eight through twelve. These individuals generally have a much greater understanding of death and its finality, and an

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increasing ability to think before taking action. Although these teenagers are still involved with their parents, they are heavily influenced by their peers, media, social media, teachers, and coaches. Their cognitive ability develops rapidly during this period and they have an increased ability for abstract thinking. The majority of teenagers in non-delinquent populations appreciate that they make choices and are responsible for their actions. Most have an internalized value system and rigid codes of behavior based on their underlying values and self-concept. When they violate their values, they are capable of feeling remorse. They generally understand their feelings and the feelings of others like themselves, but typically cannot empathize with those who are different from them. Teenagers are better-positioned than their younger counterparts to compare their actions to society’s rules and expectations. During the teenage years, hormones continue to surge as puberty continues. In addition to the development of secondary sex characters, teenagers typically experience mood swings and may act impulsively based on emotion. They have strong sexual urges and often engage in sexual activity. Teenagers, particularly those who are fifteen through seventeen, as we shall see shortly, dominate among juveniles arrested for violent crimes. Teenagers often commit violent crimes, particularly murder and robbery, with other juveniles (Cheatwood and Block 1990; Clark 1995; Heide 1999; Juodis et al. 2009). Because they are physically stronger and more able to obtain weapons, they are more involved than younger groups in arrests for murder and aggravated assault. Teenagers are also more likely than their younger counterparts to participate in gangs and to engage in violence to further both instrumental ends (particularly robbery) and expressive ends (including aggravated assault and murder). Youths aged thirteen to seventeen, in contrast to younger youth, have more freedom and less supervision.

These conditions increase their opportunities to be involved in violent crime, including sexual assault. Developmental Differences in Context Teenagers, as we have seen, are unquestionably developmentally more mature than young children and preteens. However, it is important to note that the brain development of teenagers is not equivalent to that of adults. Research has established that the last area of the brain to develop is the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with thinking, deliberation, and judgment. This part of the brain is not completely developed until individuals typically are in their mid-twenties (Heide and Solomon 2006). Teenagers, even those in their late teens, are more likely to operate from the limbic system, often referred to as the emotional part of the brain. When experiencing strong emotions such as rage, jealousy, fear, conflict, or exhilaration, teenagers are far less equipped than adults to stop, think about their behavior, and alter their course of action (Heide and Solomon 2006). The immaturity of the adolescent brain was one of the factors that influenced the US Supreme Court to hold that sentencing juveniles to death, sentencing juveniles convicted of crimes other than homicide to life without parole, and allowing states to sentence juveniles convicted of murder to life without the possibility of parole under mandatory sentencing provisions were unlawful under the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment (Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, and Miller v. Alabama, respectively).

Juvenile Involvement in Violent Crime This section focuses on the involvement of juveniles by specific violent crime types over approximately a twenty-year period. Available national statistics on violent crime

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are examined using the Uniform Crime Reports (UCRs) for these five years: 1995, 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014. These years were selected as snapshots of violent crime to allow the examination of trends over time and to see if violent crime by juveniles skyrocketed as experts back in the mid1990s predicted it would. The year 1995 was selected as the beginning year because it is also the earliest year of UCRs available on line; 2014 is the most current data available. Age, race, and gender issues are addressed with respect to murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and the four violent crimes together. Comparisons are made across the violent crime types. Importantly, the definition of rape changed over this period. For the first four snapshot years, as noted in Table 20.1, rape was called “forcible rape” and involved sexual intercourse or attempted sexual intercourse with a female “forcibly and against her will.” Under this definition, which was adopted in the 1930s, males could not be the victims of forcible rape. The new definition of rape, adopted in 2013, is much broader than the original definition. Under the existing definition, males as well as females can be victims of rape. Penetration is not limited to a man’s penis and a female’s vagina. The use of force is no longer required; the focus is on consent. Rape now includes “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” Accordingly, under the new definition, victims who are incapacitated due to the ingestion of alcohol or drugs, whether voluntary or otherwise, are deemed incapable of consenting (FBI 2014). It is worth noting prior to the discussion of youth involvement that total arrests in the United States for each of the violent crimes showed a significant decreasing trend over the twenty-year period examined. Although there are snapshot fluctuations, a careful review of the data in Table 20.2 reveals that total arrests for mur-

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der, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault decreased substantially over the period from 1995 to 2014. What is important for our purposes is to examine the proportionate involvement of juveniles by various age groups in each of the violent crime types. As total arrests decreased, did the involvement of children twelve and under, fifteen and under, and eighteen and under increase, decrease, or remain the same over time? In addition, did the racial and gender distribution of juveniles arrested for each violent crime change over time? These questions are systematically addressed below. Murder Juvenile involvement in murder showed a decreasing trend over the twenty-year period. As depicted in Table 20.2, in 1995, approximately 15 percent of all individuals arrested for murder were under age eighteen. The percentage involvement of juveniles in murder arrests in 2014 was approximately 7 percent, less than half of what it had been twenty years earlier. Stated another way, in 1995, about one of every seven homicide arrestees was a juvenile; in 2014, the comparable figure was one out of fourteen. Inspection of Table 20.2 reveals that most juveniles arrested for murder were teens between fifteen and eighteen years old. The percentage of homicide arrestees who were in their childhood and preteen years was minuscule. It was highest at 0.5 percent (one-half of 1 percent) in 1995 and was 0.1 percent (one-tenth of 1 percent) or less during the remaining four time periods. When the age range of children was extended to include thirteen- to fourteen-year-olds, the percentage involvement remained low and steadily declined over the twenty-year period from a high of 2.1 percent in 1995 to a low of 0.6 percent in 2014. As depicted in Table 20.3, 96 percent or more of juveniles arrested for murder across the five year periods examined were white or black. The involvement of black

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Table 20.2. Juvenile Involvement in Total Arrests by Violent Crime Type YEAR

1995 % (N)

1999 % (N)

2004 % (N)

2009 % (N)

2014 % (N)

MURDER

TOTAL = 16,701 0.5 (82) 2.1 (346) 15.3 (2,560)

TOTAL = 9,727 0.1 (11) 1.2 (114) 9.4 (919)

TOTAL = 9,554 0.1 (10) 1.0 (91) 8.2 (784)

TOTAL = 9,775 0.1 (13) 0.9 (87) 9.6 (942)

TOTAL = 8,267 0.06 (5) 0.6 (47) 7.1 (590)

TOTAL = 26,561 1.7 (444) 5.8 (1,542) 15.8 (4,190)

TOTAL = 18,759 2.2 (413) 6.5 (1,221) 17.0 (3,182)

TOTAL = 18,542 1.7 (313) 6.1 (1,135) 16.2 (2,998)

TOTAL = 16,442 1.1 (180) 4.7 (766) 14.5 (2,385)

TOTAL = 16,473 1.9 (305) 6.1 (1,009) 15.6 (2,564)

TOTAL = 137,811 1.8 (2,543) 9.1 (12,501) 32.3 (44,508)

TOTAL = 73,619 1.6 (1,206) 6.6 (4,888) 25.4 (18,735)

TOTAL = 78,494 1.0 (806) 5.7 (4,457) 23.2 (18,247)

TOTAL = 100,702 0.6 (605) 4.6 (4,601) 25.1 (25,280)

TOTAL = 74,432 0.5 (392) 4.2 (3,120) 20.6 (15, 312)

TOTAL = 438, 157 1.3 (5,857) 4.7 (20,558) 14.7 (64,334)

TOTAL = 318,051 1.6 (5,122) 5.1 (16,139) 14.2 (45,080)

TOTAL = 313,579 1.4 (4,350) 4.8 (15,130) 13.8 (43,274)

TOTAL = 331,372 1.0 (3,379) 3.6 (11,946) 11.9 (39, 467)

TOTAL = 293,005 0.8 (2,256) 2.6 (7,671) 8.1 (23,657)

TOTAL = 619,230 1.4 (8,926) 5.6 (34,947) 18.7 (115,592)

TOTAL = 420,156 1.6 (6,752) 5.3 (22,362) 16.2 (67,916)

TOTAL = 420,169 1.3 (5,479) 5.0 (20,813) 15.5 (65,303)

TOTAL = 458,291 0.9 (4,177) 3.8 (17,400) 14.9 (68,074)

TOTAL = 392,177 0.8 (2,958) 3.0 (11,847) 10.7 (42,123)

12 and under Under 15 Under 18 FORCIBLE RAPE 12 and under Under 15 Under 18 ROBBERY 12 and under Under 15 Under 18 AGG. ASSAULT 12 and under Under 15 Under 18 VIOLENT CRIME 12 and under Under 15 Under 18

Note: Data extracted from Tables 38, Uniform Crime Reports 1995, 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014.

youth fluctuated from a low of 49 percent to a high of 58 percent across the time periods examined. The percentage involvement of black youth among juvenile homicide arrestees was disproportionately high given that blacks constitute approximately 13 percent of the US population. The involvement of white youth ranged from a high of 48 percent in 2004 to a low of 39 percent, which was disproportionately low, given that whites make up about 78 percent of the US population. The percentage of juvenile homicide arrestees who were American Indians (AI) or Alaskan Natives (AN) was less than 1 percent in four of the five time periods; in the anomalous year, it was 1.7 percent. The proportionate involvement of AI/AN among juvenile homicide arrestees did not differ meaningfully from their 1.2 percent representa-

tion in the US population. The percentage of juveniles arrested for murder who were Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander (A/NH/PI) fluctuated from a low of 0.7 percent in 2009 to a high of 2.3 percent in 1995, which was noticeably less than their 5.2 percent representation in the US population (US Census Bureau 2013).1 The percentage of females among juveniles arrested for murder fluctuated across the five time periods, never reaching as high as 10 percent. As shown in Table 20.4, females comprised a low of 6.2 percent in 1995 to a high of 9.3 percent in 2009 of juveniles arrested for murder during the twentyyear period. The proportionate involvement of females among juvenile homicide arrestees is disproportionately low, given that they comprise approximately 50 percent of the juvenile population.

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Table 20.3. Juvenile Involvement by Race by Violent Crime Type by Percentage of Juveniles Arrested YEAR

1995 % (N)

1999 % (N)

2004 % (N)

2009 % (N)

2014 % (N)

MURDER RACE Whites Blacks Am. Indian/Alaskan Native Asian/Native Hawaiian/PI

N = 2,558 39.4 (1,009) 57.7 (1,477) 0.9 (24) 1.9 (48)

N = 923 47.0 (434) 49.0 (452) 1.7 (16) 2.3 (21)

N = 782 47.6 (372) 50.4 (394) 0.6 (5) 1.4 (11)

N = 941 40.4 (380) 58.0 (546) 0.9 (8) 0.7 (7)

N = 588 41.2 (242) 57.0 (335) 0.9 (5) 1.0 (6)

FORCIBLE RAPE RACE Whites Blacks Am. Indian/Alaskan Native Asian/Native Hawaiian/PI

N = 4,184 53.8 (2,250) 44.6 (1,868) 0.7 (28) 0.9 (38)

N = 3,176 63.0 (2,001) 34.5 (1,096) 1.1 (35) 1.4 (44)

N = 2,992 63.8 (1,908) 34.0 (1,017) 1.4 (42) 0.8 (25)

N = 2,368 63.4 (1,501) 34.5 (818) 0.8 (19) 1.3 (30)

N = 2,542 65.6 (1,667) 33.2 (844) 0.7 (19) 0.4 (12)

ROBBERY RACE Whites Blacks Am. Indian/Alaskan Native Asian/Native Hawaiian/PI

N = 44,498 37.6 (16,725) 60.2 (26,799) 0.5 (239) 1.7 (735)

N = 18,709 43.3 (8,101) 54.4 (10,184) 0.7 (133) 1.6 (291)

N = 18,226 35.1 (6,398) 63.1 (11,503) 0.4 (64) 1.4 (261)

N = 25,226 31.1 (7,854) 67.3 (16,968) 0.4 (112) 1.2 (292)

N = 15,231 27.5 (4,191) 71.0 (10,184) 0.6 (85) 0.9 (141)

AGGRAVATED ASSAULT RACE Whites Blacks Am. Indian/Alaskan Native Asian/Native Hawaiian/PI

N = 64,255 56.0 (35,981) 41.7 (26,765) 1.0 (652) 1.3 (857)

N = 45,003 62.2 (27,993) 35.2 (15,819) 1.1 (486) 1.6 (705)

N = 43,163 58.8 (25,371) 38.9 (16,795) 1.1 (485) 1.2 (512)

N = 39,341 55.4 (21,790) 42.4 (16,694) 1.0 (394) 1.2 (463)

N = 23,508 55.3 (13,001) 42.4 (9,959) 1.1 (252) 1.3 (296)

VIOLENT CRIME RACE Whites Blacks Am. Indian/Alaskan Native Asian/Native Hawaiian/PI

N = 115,495 48.5 (55,965) 49.3 (56,909) 0.8 (943) 1.5 (1,678)

N = 67,811 56.8 (38,529) 40.6 (27,551) 1.0 (670) 1.6 (1,061)

N = 65,163 52.3 (34,049) 45.6 (27,709) 0.9 (596) 1.2 (809)

N = 67,876 46.4 (31,525) 51.6 (35,026) 0.8 (533) 1.2 (792)

N = 41, 869 45.6 (19,101) 52.4 (21,952) 0.9 (361) 1.1 (455)

Note: Extracted from Tables 43B, Uniform Crime Reports 1995, 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014.

Forcible Rape (1995–2013) and Rape (2014) The percentage involvement of juveniles in arrests for forcible rape in 1995 was nearly 16 percent and was very close to juvenile involvement in total arrests for murder that year. Unlike juvenile involvement in murder arrests, however, juvenile arrests for rape did not show a decreasing trend over the twenty-year time period. The proportionate representation of juveniles among rape arrestees fluctuated slightly, ranging from a high of 17 percent in 2000 to a low of 14.5 percent in 2010. Across the five-year

time frames, about one in every six or seven arrests for rape involved a juvenile. As depicted in Table 20.2, arrests of children twelve and under for rape fluctuated between 1 and 2 percent of the total rape arrests across the twenty-year period. When the age group is expanded to include early teens, the percentage involvement of rape arrestees who were under age fifteen was between 5 and 6 percent. Importantly, the percentage involvement of youth ages six to fourteen in total rape arrests was approximately three to ten times higher than their proportionate involvement in total murder arrests.

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kathleen m. heide Table 20.4. Female Involvement by Percentage of Total Juveniles Arrested by Violent Crime Type Crime type

Males under 18

Females under 18

Murder Forcible rape Robbery Agg. assault Violent crime

2,402 4,104 40,430 51,743 98,679

158 86 4,078 12,591 16,913

Murder Forcible rape Robbery Agg. assault Violent crime

849 3,120 17,108 34,995 56,072

70 62 1,627 10,085 11,844

Murder Forcible rape Robbery Agg. assault Violent crime

711 2,922 16,487 33,034 53,154

73 76 1,760 10,240 12,149

Murder Forcible rape Robbery Agg. assault Violent crime

873 2,340 22,757 29,720 55,690

69 45 2,523 9,747 12,384

Murder Forcible rape Robbery Agg. assault Violent crime

543 2,455 13,761 17,660 34,419

47 109 1,551 5,997 7,704

Total under 18

% female under 18

2,560 4,190 44,508 64,334 115,592

6.2% 2.1% 9.2% 19.6% 14.6%

919 3,182 18,735 45,080 67,916

7.6% 1.9% 8.7% 22.4% 17.4%

784 2,998 18,247 43,274 65,303

9.3% 2.5% 9.6% 23.7% 18.6%

942 2,385 25,280 39,467 68,074

7.3% 1.9% 10.0% 24.7% 18.2%

590 2,564 15,312 23,657 42,123

8.0% 4.3% 10.1% 25.3% 18.3%

1995

1999

2004

2009

2014

Note: Computed from Tables 39 and 40, Uniform Crime Reports 1995, 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014.

As depicted in Table 20.3, more than 97 percent of juveniles arrested for rape across the five year periods examined were white or black. The involvement of black youth was noticeably higher in 1995 than in the subsequent four-year time periods. In 1995, black youths comprised approximately 45 percent of all juveniles arrested for rape. In the four later periods, black youths constituted approximately 33–34 percent of all juvenile rape arrestees. Despite the decreasing trend, the percentage involvement of black youth among juvenile rape arrestees remained disproportionately high.

The involvement of white youth among juvenile rape arrestees showed an increasing trend, ranging from a low of 54 percent in 1995 to a high of 66 percent in 2014. Despite the increasing trend, the percentage involvement of white youth remained disproportionately low. The percentages of juvenile rape arrestees who were AI/AN or A/NH/PI fluctuated across the time frame and each constituted about 1 percent of total juvenile arrests. The percentage of juvenile rape arrestees who were female was approximately 2 percent for 1995, 1999, 2004, and 2009. Notably,

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the percentage involvement of females among juveniles, as shown in Table 20.4, arrested for rape doubled to 4 percent in 2014. The increase of females among juvenile rape arrestees was very likely the result of the change in the definition of rape adopted by the FBI in 2013. Robbery Juvenile involvement in robbery, similar to murder, showed a generally decreasing trend from 1995 to 2014. In 1995, juveniles under eighteen comprised nearly one out of every three arrests for robbery; in 2014, they comprised about one of nearly every five. As depicted in Table 20.2, most juveniles arrested for robbery, as for murder and rape, were fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen years old. The percentage of children and preteens involved in robbery was also very low and decreased from 1.8 percent of all robbery arrests in 1995 to 0.5 percent in 2014. When the age range of children was extended to include thirteen- and fourteenyear-olds, the percentage involvement was noteworthy at 9 percent in 1995. However, arrests of juveniles under age fifteen steadily decreased over the twenty-year period and was less than half of what it was in 2014 (4 percent). More than 97 percent or more of juveniles arrested from 1995 to 2014 for robbery were white or black. As can be seen in Table 20.3, the involvement of black youth among juvenile robbery arrestees generally increased over the twenty-year period. It ranged from a low of 60 percent in 1995 to a high of 71 percent in 2014. The proportion of black youth among robbery arrestees in 2014 was 5.5 times higher than their representation in the population. With the exception of 1999, the involvement of white youth among juveniles arrested for robbery declined. The percentage of juveniles arrested for robbery who were AI/AN or A/NH/PI fluctuated slightly over the period and never exceeded 1.0 percent or 2.0 percent, respectively. Importantly, the proportionate representation of both of these racial groups was less than would be expected.

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The percentage of females among juveniles arrested for robbery was 9.2 percent at the beginning of the period. It decreased slightly in 1999, but then increased slightly during the next three time periods, reaching a high of to 10.1 percent in 2014. The involvement of girls among juveniles arrested for robbery, similar to murder and rape, was very low given the makeup of the general population. Aggravated Assault The involvement of juveniles in aggravated assault arrests, similar to their involvement in murder and robbery, showed a decreasing trend over the twenty-year period. As depicted in Table 20.2, in 1995, nearly 15 percent of all individuals arrested for aggravated assault were under age eighteen. The percentage involvement of juveniles in aggravated arrests was lowest in 2014 at approximately 8 percent. In 1995, about one of seven individuals arrested for aggravated assault was a juvenile; in 2014, about one of twelve aggravated assault arrestees was under age eighteen. Consistent with other violent crimes examined above, most juveniles arrested for aggravated assault were teens between fifteen and eighteen years old. The percentage of juveniles who were age twelve and under was less than 2 percent over the twentyyear period and was lowest in 2014. When the analysis included thirteen- to fourteenyear-olds, as well as younger children, the percentage involvement remained low and decreased over the period under review from 5 percent to 3 percent. White and black youth comprised more than 97 percent of all juveniles arrested for aggravated assault. The racial distribution for this violent crime differed from those observed with respect to murder and robbery in that white youth comprised more than half of juveniles arrested for aggravated assault across the five time periods. The predominance of white youth among juvenile aggravated assault arrests was similar to the pattern observed with respect to rape arrests. White youth comprised between

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55 percent and 62 percent of all juveniles arrested for aggravated assault during the twenty-year period under review. The percentages of juveniles arrested for aggravated assault who were AI/AN or A/NH/PI across the time frame was approximately 1 percent and 1 percent to 2 percent, respectively. The percentage of juveniles arrested for aggravated assault who were female was noticeably higher than for the other violent crimes and steadily increased over the twenty-year time period. It ranged from a low of 20 percent in 1995 to a high of 25 percent in 2014. In 1995, one of every five juveniles arrested for aggravated assault was female; in 2014, the comparable figure was one of every four youths.

for the four violent crimes who were AI/AN or A/NH/PI across the time frame remained essentially the same and was approximately 1 percent and 1 percent to 2 percent, respectively. Female involvement in juvenile violent crime arrests increased slightly over the twenty-year period from a low of 14.6 percent to 18 percent in more recent years. The percentage involvement of girls in violent crime arrests is greatly affected by their representation among juveniles arrested for aggravated assault, which is consistently the largest violent crime arrest category across the five time periods.

Violent Crime

Juvenile Violence Today: Summing Up and Going Forward

The involvement of youth in violent crime over the twenty-year period becomes clearer when the four violent crimes are examined as a group. The percentage involvement of juveniles in murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault steadily decreased from a high of nearly 19 percent in 1995 to a low of 11 percent in 2014. Put another way, juveniles comprised nearly one of five arrests for violent crimes in 1995; in 2014, they comprised about one of nine arrests. Inspection of Table 20.2 reveals that the involvement of children and preteens, as well as youths under age fifteen, showed a decreasing trend over time. At the end of the twenty-year period, children twelve and under constituted less than 1 percent of all arrests for violent crime; youth under fifteen, constituted 3 percent of violent crime arrestees. The racial distribution of violent crime fluctuated over the twenty-year period and showed no trend. As discussed above, the proportionate involvement of white and black youth varied by crime type; combining all violent crimes obscures that white youth predominated in arrests for rape and aggravated assault. In contrast, black youth predominated in arrests for murder and robbery. The percentages of juveniles arrested

Eight conclusions can be drawn from the perusal of arrests of juveniles for violent crime from 1995 through 2014. First, generally speaking, juvenile violence has become a less serious problem since the 1990s. An examination of arrest data over the twenty-year period in the United States reveals that predictions of “a bloodbath of violence” fortunately did not materialize as Professor Fox had forecasted. It is noteworthy that as total arrests for violent crime decreased in the Unites States, so did the number of juveniles arrested for murder and nonnegligent murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. More importantly, the proportionate involvement of juveniles in total violent crime arrests, when viewed in the aggregate, declined steadily across the five snapshot years. From 1995 to 2014, the proportionate involvement of juveniles among all violent crime arrestees decreased by 45 percent. Second, the proportionate involvement of juveniles in total arrests decreased dramatically in three of the four violent crimes: murder, robbery, and aggravated assault. Perusal of arrest data over the twenty-year period indicated that juvenile involvement in murder decreased by 54 percent; in robbery, by 36 percent; and in aggravated assault, by 45 percent.

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Third, the one crime that did not show a decreasing proportionate involvement of juveniles in total arrests was rape. As noted above, there were minor fluctuations in the proportion of juveniles arrested over the snapshot years. However, the percentages of juveniles arrested of total rape arrests was approximately the same at the beginning and end of the twenty-year period. Fourth, juvenile arrests for violent crime were almost exclusively concentrated in the fifteen to seventeen age range group. The examination of violent crime arrests by age categories revealed that young children and preteens were arrested for violent crime types. However, their involvement was indeed minimal and showed a decreasing trend over the twenty-year period with the exception again of rape. This pattern continued when arrests of those under age fifteen were examined. The proportionate of juveniles under age fifteen arrested for rape across the twenty-year period, in contrast to the other violent crimes, remained fairly constant at between 5 and 6 percent of all rape arrestees. Racial Patterns Fifth, racial differences emerged over the twenty-year period by crime type. Black youth predominated in arrests for murder and robbery, generally constituting more than 50 percent of juvenile arrestees. Notably, the proportionate involvement of black youth among juvenile homicide arrestees was approximately the same at the beginning and end of the period at 57–58 percent. In contrast, the involvement of black juveniles in robbery increased over the time frame by about 16 percent to 71 percent in 2014. The involvement of black juveniles in murder and robbery arrests greatly exceeded their proportionate representation in the population. White youth predominated in juvenile arrests for aggravated assault. Notwithstanding some fluctuations in the data, the proportionate involvement of white youth over the twenty-year period was between 55 percent and 56 percent of juvenile arrests

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for aggravated assault. White youth also predominated among juveniles arrested for rape. However, in contrast to aggravated assault, the involvement of white youth in rape showed an increasing trend over time. Sixth, the percentage involvement of white juveniles among juvenile rape arrestees increased by 22 percent from 1995 to 2014. Gender Patterns Seventh, the twenty-year analysis revealed that the proportionate involvement of girls in violent crime was low and far less than their representation in the US population. Girls accounted for 9 percent or less of juveniles arrested for murder and about 10 percent of robbery arrestees during the twenty-year period. Interestingly, their proportionate involvement in juvenile rape arrests doubled from 2 percent in the first four time periods to 4 percent in the last. As noted above, the 100 percent increase is likely due to a change in the definition of rape adopted by the FBI in 2014. Eight, the proportionate involvement of females among juveniles arrested for aggravated assault rose dramatically over the twenty-year period. The percentage involvement of girls among juveniles arrested for aggravated assault rose by 29 percent from 19.6 percent to 25.3 percent. In 1995, girls comprised approximately one of five arrest; in 2014, about one of four arrests. Going Forward Overall, the results of the analyses indicating that the involvement of juveniles in violent crime has generally decreased are encouraging. However, three findings are alarming and warrant attention in a more refined discussion of juvenile violence as a social problem: (1) juvenile involvement in rape; (2) black youth involvement in violent crime; and (3) female juvenile involvement in aggravated assault. First, the proportionate involvement in rape arrests by youths under fifteen and under eighteen remained fairly constant from 1995 to 2014, in contrast to the

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decreasing trend evident in the three other violent crimes. It is disturbing that during the twenty-year period examined juveniles consistently constituted one of every five or six arrests for rape in the United States. Apparently the factors that propel individuals to sexually assault others are very different from the factors that influence others to murder, rob, or seriously physically assault another human being. These factors need to be identified and neutralized. Second, black youth were disproportionately involved in arrests for all violent crimes; they predominated in arrests for robbery and murder. The involvement of black youth in robbery arrests rose by 16 percent over the time frame. In 2014, the involvement of black youth in robbery arrests, at 71 percent, was 5.5 times greater than their proportionate representation in the US population. What are the factors that are influencing black juveniles, more than white juveniles, to rob others? Over the last twenty years, risk factors associated with violence have been identified at various developmental periods, ranging from infancy to adolescence (Howell 1995; Loeber and Farrington 1998, 2011; Widom 1989). These risk factors, as well as others, can be reduced through evidence-based intervention and prevention efforts (Andrews, Bonta, and Wormith 2011; Heide 2013; Lipsey, Wilson, and Cothern 2000; Loeber and Farrington 2011). Clearly there is evidence that some of the escalation in black youth involvement in robbery is due to poverty, child maltreatment, witnessing violence, the lack of employment opportunities, limited education, drug use, absent fathers, cultural scripts, and other risk factors reflective of inner-city culture (see, e.g., Anderson 1999; Garbarino 2015). Third, the consistently increasing proportionate involvement of girls in arrests for aggravated assault is troubling. Will the increasing trend continue? Several explanations for the significant increase in girls’ involvement in aggravated assault have been proposed. Some researchers have suggested that the rise in the number of girls arrested for assault may be due more to policy

changes by law enforcement than behavioral change by girls. Today, girls who act violently are more likely to be arrested, whereas in the past they were more likely to be seen as socially maladjusted and referred for mental health or social services (Steffensmeier and Schwartz 2009). Experts believe that increases in arrests of female juveniles in recent years are due to revised arrest policies with respect to simple assault (Zahn et al. 2008). In contrast, it is unlikely that the increase in aggravated assaults is simply due to reporting changes over the years. Recall that by definition aggravated assault, unlike simple assault, specifies that the purpose of the unlawful attack is to inflict “severe or aggravated bodily injury.” The definition further indicates that “This type of assault usually is accompanied by the use of a weapon or by means likely to produce death or great bodily harm.” It is unlikely that in 1995 behavior that was this serious, when committed by females under eighteen, would have been overlooked by law enforcement. Two other explanations seem more viable. As suggested by developmental psychologist James Garbarino, over the last generation, girls have been freed from some of the rigid stereotypes associated with female behavior (Garbarino 2006). At the same time, due to changes in culture and in the law, they have had more opportunities to participate in competitive sports and to learn to use their bodies in an aggressive manner. These cultural and legal changes have been coincident with changing images of girls in the media that portray females as strong, in control, and physically aggressive (Prothrow-Stith and Spivak 2005). Are there ways to enhance the positive messages of girls participating aggressively in sports, training their bodies, and using their strength in responsible and lawabiding ways? If media depictions of girls as strong and fighting back are contributing to this rise in aggression, should these messages be antidoted with education of girls, as well as boys, engaging in skilled negotiations? Evidence-base curricula exist that focus on social skills training, anger

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reduction techniques, and empathy building that are gender neutral (Goldstein 1988; Glick and Goldstein 1987). In closing, we can say that juvenile violence in general has become less of a social problem over time in the United States. However, now is not the time for complacence. As a result of the analyses presented, aspects of juvenile violence have come into sharp focus that need to be addressed as social problems. The challenges of today include reducing the proportionate involvement of juveniles in rape arrests, reducing the proportionate involvement of black youth among juveniles arrested for violent crime, and addressing the increase in the proportionate involvement of girls in aggravated assault.

Glossary Adolescence A period spanning several years that starts with puberty and is associated with biological (including sexual), psychological, cognitive, and motor development. It usually begins by age twelve and continues through the late teens or early twenties. Juvenile An individual under the age of majority; in the United States, typically refers to a person under age eighteen. Limbic system An action system of the brain involved in memory and in the regulation of emotion. The amygdala is the part of the limbic system that evaluates incoming information in terms of emotional needs and survival; regulates emotions including pleasure, fear, anger, and aggression (Solomon 2016). Prefrontal cortex Responsible for executive functions, including critical thinking, considering consequences of behavior, making decisions, and planning responses (Solomon 2016). Preteen Individuals aged ten to twelve. Teenager Individuals aged thirteen to nineteen. Violent crime Refers to murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

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Young child Individuals under the age of ten. Youth The United Nations uses this term to refer to a person between the ages of fifteen to twenty-four who is transitioning from childhood to adult independence.

Note 1. The FBI do not record ethnicity (e.g., Hispanic origin) in the Uniform Crime Reports.

References Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: W. W. Norton. Andrews, D. A., James Bonta, and J. Stephen Wormith. 2011. The risk-need responsivity (RNR) model: Does adding the good lives model contribute to effective crime prevention? Criminal Justice and Behavior 38:735– 55. Bender, Lauretta. 1959. Children and adolescents who have killed. American Journal of Psychiatry 116:510–13. Bender, Lauretta, and Frank J. Curran. 1940. Children and adolescents who kill. Criminal Psychopathology 1:297–321. Cheatwood, Derral, and Kathleen J. Block. 1990. Youth and homicide: An investigation of the age factor in criminal homicide. Justice Quarterly 7:265–92. Clark, Richard D. 1995. Lone versus multiple offending in homicide: Differences in situational context. Journal of Criminal Justice 23:451–60. Darrell, Steffensmeier, and Jennifer Schwartz. 2009. Trends in girls’ delinquency and the gender gap: Statistical assessment of diverse sources. In The Delinquent Girl, edited by Margaret Zahn, 50–83. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Dilulio, John J. 1995. The coming of the super-predators. The Weekly Standard. November 27. www.weeklystandard.com/ the-coming-of-the-super-predators/article/ 8160. Erikson, Erik H. 1959. Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: International University Press.

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Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2010. Crime in the United States. www.ucr.fbi.gov/crimein-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/ violent-crime/murdermain. 2013. Crime in the United States. www.ucr.fbi .gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.2013/violent-crime/murder-topic-page/ murdermain_final 2014. Crime in the United States: Persons Arrested. www.ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/ 2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/persons-arrested/ main. Fox, James A. 1995. The dean of death. USA Today. April 11. www.jfox.neu.edu/pdfs/ dean%20of%20death.pdf. 1996. Trends in Juvenile Violence. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Garbarino, James. 2006. See Jane Hit. New York: Penguin Books. 2015. Listening to Killers. Oakland: University of California Press. Glick, Barry, and Arnold P. Goldstein. 1987. Aggression replacement training. Journal of Counseling and Development 65: 356–62. Goldstein, Arnold P. 1988. The Prepare Curriculum. Champagne, IL: Research Press. 1987. Aggression Replacement Training: A Comprehensive Intervention for Aggressive Youth. Champagne, IL: Research Press. Graham v. Florida. 2010. Slip Opinion, decided, May 17. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/ 09pdf/08–7412.pdf Haberman, Clyde. 2014. The “Superpredator” Scare. New York Times. April 6. www .nytimes.com/2014/04/07/us/politics/killingon-bus-recalls-superpredator-threat-of-90s .html. Harris, Philip W. 1983. The interpersonal maturity of delinquents and nondelinquents. In Personality Theory, Moral Development and Criminal Behavior, edited by William S. Laufer, and James M. Day, 145–64. Toronto: Lexington Books. 1988. The interpersonal maturity level classification system: I-level. Criminal Justice and Behavior 15:58–77. Heide, Kathleen M. 1999. Young Killers: The Challenge of Juvenile Homicide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

2013. Understanding Parricide: When Sons and Daughters Kill Parents. New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. Juvenile homicide: Trends, correlates, causal factors, and outcomes. In Violent Offenders: Understanding and Assessment, edited by Christina A. Pietz and Curtis A. Mattson, 127–50. New York: Oxford University Press. Heide, Kathleen M., and Eldra P. Solomon. 2006. Biology, childhood trauma, and murder: Rethinking justice. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 29:220–33. Heide, Kathleen M., Eldra P. Solomon, Brian G. Sellers, and Heng Choon Chan. 2011. Male and female juvenile homicide offenders: An empirical analysis of U.S. arrests by offender age. Feminist Criminology 6:3–31. Hess, Robin S., Sandy Magnuson, and Linda Beeler. 2012. Counseling Children and Adolescents in Schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Howell, J. C., ed. 1995. Guide for Implementing the Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Juodis, Marcus, Michael Woodworth, Stephen Porter, and Leanne Ten Brinke. 2009. Partners in crime: A comparison of individual and multi-perpetrator homicides. Criminal Justice and Behavior 36:824–39. Kantrowitz, Barbara. 1993. Teen violence – Wild in the streets. Newsweek. August 2. Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1981. Essays on Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Lipsey, Mark W., David B. Wilson, and Lynn Cothern. 2000. Effective Intervention for Serious Juvenile Offenders. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile and Delinquency Prevention. Loeber, Rolf, and David P. Farrington, eds. 1998. Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders: Risk Factors and Successful Interventions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Loeber, Rolf and David P. Farrington. 2011. Young Homicide Offenders and Victims. New York: Springer. National Conference on State Legislation (NCSL). 2014. Juvenile age of jurisdiction and transfer to adult court laws. October 1.

juvenile violence www.ncsl.org/research/civil-and-criminaljustice/juvenile-age-of-jurisdiction-andtransfer-to-adult-court-laws.aspx. Pfeiffer, Christian. 1998. Trends in Juvenile Violence in European Countries. NIJ Research Preview. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. Piaget, Jean, and Barbel Inhelder. 2000. The Psychology of the Child. New York: Basic Books. Prothrow-Stith, Deborah, and Howard R. Spivak. 2005. Sugar & Spice and No Longer Nice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Sargent, Douglas. 1962. Children who kill: A family conspiracy? Social Work 7:35–42. Shumaker, David M., and Geoffrey R. McGee. 2001. Characteristics of homicidal and violent juveniles. Violence and Victims 16: 401–09. Shumaker, David M., and Ronald J. Prinz. 2000. Children who murder: A review. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review 3:97–115. Snyder, Howard N., and Melissa Sickmund. 1995. Juvenile Offenders and Victims: A Focus on Violence. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Solomon, Eldra P. 2016. Introduction to Human Anatomy and Physiology. 4th ed. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier. Solomon, Eldra P., Linda R. Berg, Diana W. Martin, and Charles E. Martin. 2015. Biology. 10th ed. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning. Torbet, Patricia, Richard Gable, Hunter Hurst, Imogene Montgomery, Linda Szymansky, and Douglas Thomas. 1996. State Responses to Serious and Violent Juvenile Crime. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice,

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Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Travis, Jeremy. 1997. National and comparative perspectives on juvenile violence. Speech at the 1997 meeting of the International Scientific and Professional Advisory Council of the United Nations Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Programme. Courmayeur, Italy, October 4. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA). N.d. Definition of youth. www.un.org/esa/socdev/ documents/youth/fact-sheets/youthdefinition.pdf. US Census Bureau. 2013. State and county quickfacts. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/ states/00000.html. Widom, Cathy S. 1989. Does violence beget violence? A critical examination of the literature. Psychological Bulletin 106:3–28. Zahn, Margaret A., Stephanie R. Hawkins, Janet Chiancone, and Ariel Whitworth. 2008. The girls study group – Charting the way to delinquency prevention. US Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. www.ncjrs.gov/ pdffiles1/ojjdp/223434.pdf.

Cases Cited Miller v. Alabama. 2010. (No. 10–9646), decided August 27. www.supremecourt.gov/Search .aspx?FileName=/docketfiles/10–9646.htm. Roper v. Simmons. 2005. 543 U.S. 551.

CHAPTER 21

Gangs and Gang Violence Erika Gebo

Abstract Gangs are a social problem because of the violence they cause in communities and because of the long-term deleterious effects that membership has on individuals who belong to gangs. There are no consensus definitions for gangs, gang members, and gang crimes, though the strengths and challenges of popular definitions are discussed in this chapter. Gangs develop from core structural problems and individuals join gangs as a result of a variety of socioecological factors. Meanwhile, gang violence occurs due to complex interplays between individuals and gangs. This chapter will delve into the historical development of gangs. Theoretical explanations for gang formation, gang joining, and gang desistence are examined along with the use of violence. Finally, attention is given to prevention of gangs, gang membership, and gang violence.

Gangs as a Social Problem Gangs are a social problem because of the violence they cause in communities and because of the deleterious effects of gang membership upon its members. At the aggregate level, gangs commit more violence and more serious violence than other delinquent youthful groups. Estimates of violence caused by gangs range from 13 percent to 80 percent in cities with gangs (National Gang Center, n.d.). It is likely to be on the lower side in European cities (see Esbensen and Maxson 2012) and on the higher side in Caribbean cities (see Harriott and Katz 2015). Gang-related homi-

cides are estimated to be over 20 percent in large cities in the United States (Pyrooz 2012). Approximately 86 percent of US cities with populations over 50,000 report gang activity, and 25 percent of cities with populations under 50,000 report gang activity (Howell et al. 2011). It is clear that reducing violence, particularly urban violence, involves addressing the problem of gangs. At the individual level, gang members cannot be ignored. Youth who join gangs become more delinquent and more violent while in gangs than they would otherwise be. This has been a robust finding of research internationally (Bendixen,

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Endersen, and Olweus 2006; Delisi et al. 2009; Pyrooz and Decker 2013). Gang members also are more likely to be victimized than their peers (Delisi et al. 2009); negatively impacting physical and mental health and quality of life, and increasing the use of public funds to address the multiple impacts of victimization (Coid et al. 2013; Hanson et al. 2010). Further, longitudinal examinations of former gang members show serious consequences of gang membership throughout the life course and subsequent problems into the next generation. Youth who join gangs – especially those who join for long periods of time and have greater involvement with the gang – are more likely to become parents at younger ages, drop out of school, have substance abuse and employment problems, and have continued arrests and incarcerations into adulthood (Gilman, Hill, and Hawkins 2014; Krohn et al. 2011). Further, former gang members have been found to be at a heighten risk for maltreating their own children (Augustyn, Thornberry, and Krohn 2014). Combining aggregate and individual-level findings demonstrate that gang violence as well as the negative effects of gang membership reverberate throughout communities, and gangs must be addressed. Social conditions such as inequality and marginalization are reasons gangs form. Individuals join gangs, participate in illegal and illicit activities, and desist from gangs due to a combination of factors across socioecological domains (individual, relational, community, and societal). Unfortunately, there has yet to be a clear longterm solution to the problems of gangs and gang violence; and amelioration of the structural causes of gangs is often left aside as intractable in preference for more convenient proximal causes. This chapter will delve into the problem of gangs; their development and various gang definitions; theoretical explanations for gang creation and gang joining and desistence; as well as what is known about how gangs operate, and gang responses. Included is a critical perspective on the positive functions that gangs have for their members. While most of the research

on gangs has been conducted in the United States, international comparisons also will be made.

Gang Definitions Gangs and gang members must first be defined in order to situate the problem of gangs. There is, however, no consensus on what either term means. The terms “youth gang” and “street gang” have been used interchangeably, with the recognition that gangs tend to be street-based and constituted by young people. Part of the difficulty in defining the concept of gangs stems from the fact that gangs are dynamic and varied across locations, though they have some enduring features (W. B. Miller 1990). Gang membership itself typically lasts a short period of time – less than two years – and there is no clear distinction between gang joining and gang exiting for many youth (Decker, Melde, and Pyrooz 2013). Further, commitment to the gang varies within and across individuals over time (Thornberry et al. 2003). Thus, who is in or out of a gang and how central individuals are to a gang is not always clear. Consensus definitions of gangs and gang members, however, are critical to working collaboratively to address problems caused by such groups (National Gang Center 2010). A host of gang definitions has been put forth by various practitioners and academics resulting in a patchwork of different descriptions in legislative codes and in the scholarly literature. The earliest scholarly definition depicted gangs as groups of youth who viewed themselves, and were viewed by others, as distinct groups, rooted in conflictual relations with others, but who did not necessarily engage in criminal activity (Thrasher 1927). Later definitions added criminal activity as a key definitional component. Klein (1971), for instance, defined gangs as any identifiable group of youngsters who were perceived as a distinct aggregation of individuals in a neighborhood, who recognized themselves as a distinct group, and who were involved in delinquent

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activity that called forth a consistent negative response from neighborhood residents and police. Klein’s definition remains popular today. Attention to the gang problem in Europe led to the formation of the Eurogang Network, which is an international group of scholars in the field of gang research working together to develop common theories, methods, and definitions of gangs. They define gangs, which they also call “troublesome youth groups,” as “any durable, streetoriented youth group whose own identity includes involvement in illegal activity” (Klein, Weerman, and Thornberry 2006, 418). Notably absent in this definition is others’ perception of the gang as a distinct group. Such scholarly definitions, however, may not be much of a guide for communities struggling to address gang problems. Howell (2012) put forth a broad, practical definition meant to help communities work together to address gang problems. The five components of the definition, which can be modified to fit the unique circumstances of individual communities, are as follows: (1) group consists of five or more members; (2) the members share an identity, such as a name and/or symbols; (3) the members view themselves and are acknowledged by others as a gang; (4) the group has some permanence as well as organization; and (5) the group takes part in criminal activity. This definition provides an avenue for professionals and activists to work collaboratively and respond collectively to gang violence in their cities. It may, however, not be specific enough for scholars to engage in valid comparisons across different locations and with diverse groups who take part in criminal activity. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in contrast, defines a gang as an association of three or more individuals who have a group identity and who engage in intimidation and criminal activity. This definition excludes terrorist groups, drug trafficking groups, and organized crime groups, as well as transnational gangs who cross international borders, such as MS-13 and 18th Street Gangs (FBI 2014). It is clear that depending upon the

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purpose of those defining gangs, the definition of “gang” changes (Gebo and Tobin 2012). Varied definitions must be acknowledged and taken into account when examining what is known about gangs and what can be done to address this social problem. Just as gang definitions vary across entities and locations, so too do designations of gang membership. Definitions of gang members rely on either self-identification or criteria checklists. Research has consistently shown that the self-nominating definition, in which youth self-identify as gang members, is a very strong indicator of actual gang membership (Matsuda, Esbensen, and Carson 2012). Criteria checklists include gang peer associations; criminal activity with gang members; parent/guardian admission of youth’s gang involvement; tattoos and/or use of gang insignia; and credible informant identification of a youth as a gang member (Matsuda et al. 2012; National Gang Center 2014). Once an individual meets a certain threshold on the checklist, s/he is considered a gang member. Whether and how definitions of “gang” differ from definitions of “crew” needs further exploration. Some entities use the terms interchangeably (i.e., Hansen 2005) while others, particularly youth, distinguish between the two. Youth see gangs as more violence-oriented and dangerous than crews, while crews are viewed as neighborhood-based cliques of friends (Amato and Cornell 2003; Lopez et al. 2006). Sometimes, however, the violence caused by crews may be just as much and just as damaging as that caused by gangs (see, e.g., Papachristos, Hureau, and Braga 2013). Distinctions may not be important from a behavioral standpoint, but they do matter in terms of comparing gangs across locations and in the pursuit of definitional consensus. Finally, there is a definitional issue with regard to the types of crimes involving gang members, which can be either gangrelated or gang-motivated. Gang-related crimes refer to those offenses committed by gang members, but that are not done for the benefit of the gang. Alternatively,

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gang-motivated crimes are committed on behalf of, or for the benefit of, the gang (Ehrensaft and Spergel 1991). Gang-related crime casts a broader net than gangmotivated crime. Yet, gang crime definitions are not consistent across law enforcement agencies (Barrows and Huff 2009), and it is sometimes unclear which definition, if any, should be invoked. Therefore, gang statistics must be treated with caution when definitions are not specified. Importantly, substantive implications also arise from gang crime distinctions. Research shows that differences between these categories are central for understanding motivations for violence in general as well as motivations for gang violence in particular (Rosenfeld, Bray, and Egley 1999). The strength of non-uniform definitions for gangs and designations for gang membership means that the diversity among gangs across locations can be better represented by the unique characteristics of those gangs in those areas (W. B. Miller 2001). The challenges of non-uniform definitions, however, are hard to overcome. It is difficult to develop large-scale policies and programs for gangs and gang members when it is unclear who belongs to those groups. Further, the success of interventions cannot accurately be assessed given that the participants across policy and program locations may not be similar in risk levels or in their amenability to treatment. Finally, lack of consensus definitions can lead to discrimination against certain youth groups (Durán 2013). Youth of color and youth from lowincome areas are more likely to be perceived as gang members (Rios 2011), and are more likely to be interrogated by police (Hagan, Shedd, and Payne 2005). Including representatives from communities of color in developing definitions can help guard against such unjust practices. Critical scholars view cliques of youth and gangs as a way to resist the dominant culture, to create their own agency, and to maintain self-respect (Durán 2013; Rios 2011). Gangs, in other words, provide an avenue to deal with structural and individual marginalization, racism, and ostracism.

The term “gang” may not even be used by critical scholars to describe groups of youth who band together and engage in crime or violence. Gangs provide support, loyalty, and respect that may be missing for these youth in key areas of their lives (Sharkey et al. 2011). Critical scholars point out that groups of youth in highly distressed neighborhoods, particularly youth of color, are frequently criminalized by agents of power, such as police and school officials, and given the label of “gang” as they go about their daily lives (Rios 2011). Dominant social control practices, such as hot-spot policing and zero-tolerance school policies, marginalize and criminalize these youth who are targeted for suppression efforts. These practices also contribute to the perpetuation of gangs and gang joining by causing youth to band together for support (Durán 2013; Vigil 2002). Gang violence must be addressed, and it behooves society and science to have consensus on definitions. At the same time, the critical perspective brings forward the point that labels matter. Police typically see youthful groups who may occasionally or frequently commit criminal activity as “gangs.” This becomes a master status where formal social control mechanisms including suppression techniques, such as arrest and detention, are used. Social service providers typically see a gang membership designation as part of needs assessment and use that information to ensure that individuals are appropriately placed in programming for safety and for the best personal growth experience, but it does not rise to the level of master status (Gebo and Tobin 2012). Communities and youth may actively resist these labels and challenge those who impose them. Acknowledging different orientations to gangs is an important step toward addressing the problem.

History of Gangs and Demographics The common theme running through the historical development of gangs is that

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structural conditions create gangs and facilitate their membership. An historical examination demonstrates that inequality, neglect, oppression, ostracism, and racism are at the core of gang formation. The history of US gang development is traced here as gang scholarship has been focused in that country. Gangs are believed to have existed in other nations prior to the twentieth century; however, they may have had their origins in feudal culture (Esbensen and Maxson 2012; Thrasher 1927). Gangs were first thought to develop in the United States in the late 1800s, coinciding with rapid immigration into urban industrial areas and the rise of the city. US gangs consisted mainly of immigrants, first German and Irish, later Italian, who were discriminated against in both employment and housing (Daniels 2002). The main gang activities of the time were fighting and thievery. The creation of jobs for immigrants – as police officers, firefighters, and sanitation workers – resulted in decreased gang activity. The first academic study of gangs was conducted in the early 1920s by Frederic Thrasher. His seminal book The Gang, first published in 1927, examined over 1,000 gangs in Chicago. He showed that neighborhoods with high population mobility and lack of economic and social stability were more likely to have gangs. He proposed that gangs were a subculture that produced their own moral codes different from the dominant society as a reaction to structural problems. During the first half of the 1900s the newest immigrants in the United States continued to be marginalized, and those groups were likely to form gangs. Many of those new immigrants were from Eastern Europe. Robbery and territorial wars were the main activities of gangs during this time. The demographic makeup of gangs in the United States shifted in the 1950s and 1960s. Latinos and blacks became dominant in gangs, as more Southern blacks moved North in search of better lives through economic opportunities, and Latinos migrated in larger numbers to the United States. Large city cores exploded with gang activ-

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ity and with more violence than had been seen in previous decades. National policies with regard to housing, education, and employment, contributed to the structural problems faced by immigrants and people of color. Nonwhites, for instance, were forbidden to purchase property in certain sections of cities (Massey and Denton 1998), effectively relegating them to the transitional neighborhoods that produced gangs. During this time, more academic and professional attention began to focus on gangs, and the first gang-centered policies were created emphasizing arrest and prosecution. The 1980s through the early 2000s were particularly violent times for warring gangs, in the United States and abroad. Gangs were at the center of the increase in firearm use during this time (Kennedy et al. 2001). The response to gangs pioneered in the United States was suppression strategies, including gang units in police departments and enhanced gang prosecution strategies, with fewer resources directed at gang prevention and intervention (Fearn, Decker, and Curry 2006). Even with the passage of civil rights legislation and antidiscrimination case law, many of the policies that excluded people of color continued to be practiced, such as housing and educational discrimination. New methods of exclusion, such as the development of zero-tolerance policies in schools which permanently expel students for first offenses, paved the way for youth of color to be closed off from traditional avenues for building conventional lifestyles (APA Task Force 2008). Los Angeles and Chicago were dubbed gang capitals for their consistently high gang violence rates and their stability in gangs across time periods, and often generations of families (Howell 2015). Smaller cities and even suburbs were not immune to gang activity. This was spurred by structural changes and the advent of gang culture in the popular media (W. B. Miller 2001), and not because of the migration of gang members (Maxson 1998). The social conditions that produced gangs had changed very little in the

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twenty-first century. Consistent with crime in the United States generally, gang violence today has ebbed since the 1980s, though much of the violence in cities, particularly large cities, is caused by gangs and gang members. Modern gang members in the United States are typically native-born youth, not new immigrants. Research has found that second-generation immigrants are more likely to be involved in gangs than first-generation immigrants. Reasons for this are put forth by international scholars who point to the major hurdles of assimilation experienced by second-generation youth (Lien 2014; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Vigil 1988), while other scholars discuss the concept of “regression to the mean,” wherein the children of immigrants take on the criminogenic patterns of native-born youth, who are most likely to be involved in gangs (Bersani 2014). In the United States, 60 percent of gang members are young adults over the age of eighteen (National Gang Center, n.d.). Female gang membership constitutes approximately one-third of gang members according to self-report studies, while law enforcement data show females constitute less than 15 percent of gang members (Panfil and Peterson 2015). The largest ethnic category of gang members in the United States are Hispanics, followed by blacks, whites, and Asians. Historically, gangs tended to be of one ethnic grouping all living in the same neighborhood. Today, it is still the norm that youths who join gangs gravitate toward their neighborhood gang, regardless of ethnicity. The term “hybrid gangs” has developed to describe shifts in gang membership and alliance. Modern gangs are more ethnically diverse than in the past; and they more quickly switch alliances or animosities with other gangs (Starbuck, Howell, and Lindquist 2001). Similarly, allegiances to symbols and colors may not always apply, and gang members may switch affiliations or be affiliated with more than one gang; thus complicating the understanding of gangs and remedies for gang violence.

Theories of Gangs and Gang Membership Few gang-specific theories exist for many plausible reasons. In part it may be because of myriad factors that create gangs and induce gang joining, which makes formulating a parsimonious theory complicated. It could also be that research funding has been directed toward responding to gang violence and not to theoretical endeavors. Another reason may be because gangs and gang violence are not necessarily distinct from youth violence and delinquency, but are viewed as a subset of those larger categories. Looking at explanations for gangs from a socioecological perspective, structural issues as well as individual, relational and community factors influence the likelihood of gang creation and gang joining. As evident from the history discussion, the key characteristic of urban areas with gangs is concentrated disadvantage. Communities that have high rates of poverty, ethnic heterogeneity, and population mobility in combination are more likely to have crime and gangs than areas where these factors collectively do not exist (Morenoff, Sampson, and Raudenbush 2001). Further, it is clear that an accumulation of risk factors across those socioecological domains (i.e., individual, relational, community) separates gang from non-gang youth, though there is no clear combination of risk factors that determines whether or not a youth will join a gang (Hill et al. 1999; Howell 2012). Many theories of crime can be applied to the gang phenomenon, but in the interest of space, key theories that have been examined specifically with regard to explaining gangs are discussed here. Concentrated disadvantage supports social disorganization theory as an explanation for the creation of gangs. Indeed, this theory has most clearly guided much of the understanding of gang formation. Under this theory, social institutions, such as families, schools, and civic groups, have broken down to the point where key conventional values are not transmitted to individuals to constrain them from

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committing crimes, or in this case, creating and joining gangs that engage in criminal activity and violence. Further theoretical insights point to the lack of collective efficacy in socially disorganized areas where community members, neighborhood associations, and government institutions are weak and thus unlikely to intervene informally to reduce gang involvement or gang activity (Bursik and Grasmick 1993). Social disorganization theory, however, cannot account for the fact that the vast majority of youth in highly distressed areas do not join gangs. Subcultural theory also addresses gang formation. Under this theory, groups develop values in opposition to the dominant culture as mechanisms of cultural adaptation. Thrasher (1927) saw gangs as producing their own set of values with goals that were reasonable to achieve. The concept of the “code of the street,” that presents violence as an acceptable means of attaining respect, is part of the neighborhood and gang culture (Anderson 1999; Matsuda et al. 2013). There is evidence to suggest that this street culture is indeed present in neighborhoods with gangs, but there is also research that points to the idea that gangs support the conventional values of achievement and success (Stewart and Simons 2010). An alternative view is that opportunities to achieve conventional goals may be blocked for lower-class youth, and a deviant subculture is one reaction to that strain (Cloward and Ohlin 1960). Social disorganization, subculture, and stain theories do not adequately explain gang joining. A comprehensive analysis of how well sociological and psychologicalbased theories account for gangs revealed major explanatory limitations in gang formation, gang joining and gang violence (Wood and Alleyne 2010). More interdisciplinary work was urged. Several theoretical developments rise to that challenge. A life course approach to gangs, taking child and adolescent development into account, has been proposed that can explain why most

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youth who live in distressed neighborhoods do not join gangs, though it does not amply address gang formation. Risk and protective factors change throughout the life course, and some of those factors predispose individuals to join gangs. Three conditions are clear from reviews of the risk factor literature: (1) there are no unique risk factors that predict gang membership separate from serious delinquency; (2) youth with many risk factors are typically those who join gangs; and (3) the accumulation of risk factors across developmental domains best predicts gang membership (Decker et al. 2013; Maxson 2011). Drawing on longitudinal findings from delinquency studies, Howell and Egley (2005) identify key risk factors from preschool through mid-adolescence that facilitate gang membership, noting that there is a need for more research on protective factors that buffer against gang joining. They present the case that integrated theories that combine macro- and micro-level factors can best explain gang formation and gang joining. Multiple marginality is an integrated theoretical framework developed by Vigil (1988). It combines macro perspectives about gang formation as a result of structural processes, with individual perspectives on why youth join gangs as a result of individual strain. In sum, discrimination and ostracism at the structural level lead to a lack of economic and social opportunities, as well as to weakened social institutions, especially schools and families. Youth do not feel welcome in schools that practice cultural repression and exclusion; and youth also are not supported to achieve goals through conventional means at home. These young people then find socialization in the streets, where gangs accept them, but do not place a high value on education or employment. This theory explains both why gangs form and why youth join gangs, though it does not delineate the developmental phases outlined by Howell and Egley (2005). There is growing support for multiple marginality as an explanation for gangs

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and gang joining (Freng and Esbensen 2007; Vigil 2002). Gangs cannot be discussed without underscoring the group process. Klein (1971) and Short and Strodtbeck (1965) brought the social process framework to the forefront. Gang violence is a group process, and while many theories address factors that “push” youth into gangs, such as weak social institutions and poor family and school support, few address factors that “pull” youth into gangs, such as group identity and respect (Decker et al. 2013). Further, explanations for why youth may join or leave gangs, as well as why they may or may not participate in gang activity, is a part of a dynamic process layered upon relatively static factors of physical and social location (McGloin and Decker 2010). Thus, there are multiple levels and multiple angles that can explain gangs and gang violence that must continue to be assessed.

Correlates and Characteristics of Gangs Gangs do not specialize in one type of criminal behavior. They commit expressive crimes borne out of emotion, such as when gang members feel they need to retaliate against a perceived wrong. They also engage in instrumental crimes that are a means to an end, such as drug dealing, prostitution, and gun selling to raise money for the gang. Both substance abuse and gun possession are highly correlated with gangs. Gang members use and sell drugs more than their nongang counterparts (Bellair and McNulty 2009). Guns are used for protection and retaliation (Papachristos, Braga, and Hureau 2012). Further, gangs drive much of the violence, especially serious violence in many cities. The realities of gang life, however, are far from the romanticized notions depicted in movies and books. Four points are clear: (1) gangs and the media both exaggerate their dangerousness; (2) gangs with the same name typically are not connected to each

other; (3) gangs usually do not pressure youth to join; and (4) gangs generally do not control the drug trade (Howell 2012). More can be said about each of these points. First, the most common activity of gangs involves congregating in places where communal drugs may be used as an escape (Thrasher 1927). Gangs tend to engage in groupthink in which they collectively agree and take action based on the code of the street. External conflict with agents of formal social control, such as schools and police, as well as with rival gangs, increases their group cohesion and their groupthink (Klein 1971). Discussions of violent incidents and future episodes of violence are a part of the gang culture (Decker and van Winkle 1996). Critical scholars point out that while gangs find ways to actively resist the oppressive dominant culture as a means of selfagency and self-respect, this does not usually involve violence (Durán 2013). Gangs vary from being loosely organized to being tightly structured, with most gangs falling toward the former level of organization (Decker and van Winkle 1996). Loosely structured gangs tend to either have shared responsibility and power in the gang or an influence model of leadership wherein charisma determines who leads. Tightly structured gangs have a vertical model of leadership where the president has the most power, with officers underneath him. Many sets of the Latin Kings, for instance, fall into the tightly structured vertical model of leadership, while local street gangs tend to fall in the loosely structured, horizontal model of leadership. At the same time, many nationally known gangs, such as MS13, the Bloods, or the Crips, while they share the same name, are not communicating and coordinating across sets, even if they are in geographically adjacent cities. Regardless of organizational structure, it is group solidarity and the interplay of relationships both between gang members and among different gangs that bond gang members and influence gang activities (Papachristos et al. 2013; Pyrooz, Sweeten, and Piquero 2013; Short and Strodtbeck 1965). Importantly, research shows a lack of support for the idea

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that street gangs are becoming more organized and radical (Decker and Pyrooz 2011). Consistent with the loosely structured organization of most gangs are loose strategies for recruitment, initiation, and exiting. Most youth who join gangs live in ganginfested neighborhoods with friends or family members already in gangs. Few youth are coerced to join. Coercion is employed infrequently, usually when gangs want to increase membership quickly to protect against rival gangs. Thus, some youth simply join gangs without any initiation ceremony, while others may have to commit criminal acts, or get beat up, “jumped in,” by fellow gang members to join. Occasionally, females may be “sexed in,” that is, they must have sex with several gang members in order to join. Though this procedure is not widely employed, it is a double-edged sword for females. They cannot join without being sexed in, yet they are not respected by gang members when they do engage in this type of initiation (J. Miller 2001). Exiting the gang is not typically a dramatic event. Some youth simply leave to pursue conventional activities, while others are “jumped out,” or beaten out. Death as a result of gang leaving is more myth than reality. Gangs and drugs are highly correlated, yet gangs are typically not in control of the drug trade in most locations. When they do sell drugs, gang members do so for their own benefit, not that of the gang (Decker and van Winkle 1996). The drug trade is often controlled by organized crime or criminal networks that use gang members as foot soldiers to deliver the product to the consumer on the street (Bunker and Sullivan 2010). Gangs profit from drug sales, but are at a heightened risk of police detection, while the largest profits and most protection from police detection are reserved for criminal drug networks. Female involvement in gangs and criminal activity depends on the number of females in the gang (Peterson, Miller, and Esbensen 2001) and their relationship with other gang members (Miller and Brunson 2000). There are few all-female gangs. Females tend to join and leave gangs ear-

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Figure 21.1. Traditional gang membership organization

lier than males. Their entrée to gangs is often spurred by boyfriends’ gang affiliations. They exhibit some of the same risk factors as males for joining, such as living in highly distressed neighborhoods and poor school performance, but females also join gangs to escape their home lives, where they may be subjected to victimization and/or be saddled with primary caregiving responsibilities for younger siblings. Females most often leave the gang to pursue a more conventional lifestyle or because of pregnancy or childbirth (J. Miller 2001). Gang membership can be illustrated as a series of concentric circles (see Figure 21.1). At the center are a few hardcore gang members who instigate much of the gang activity (Decker and van Winkle 1996). Life revolves around the gang for hardcore members, and it is difficult for them to transition out of the gang lifestyle. In the next circle are associates whose identities are less tied to the gang. Fringe members are peripherally involved in gangs. They do not solely identify with the gang and do not always participate in gang activity. They continue to engage in conventional activities and have non-gang friends. In the outer circle are gang wannabes who aspire to belong and who may commit criminal activities in an effort to show that they belong. Gang membership may consist of outward displays of symbols, signs, and colors designed to distinguish the gang from other groups and to create a sense of belonging for its members (W. B. Miller 1958). Efforts in gang detection and prosecution, however,

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have driven some of the overt gang identification underground. Once-visible gang tattoos, for example, are now either covered by clothing or eliminated. Traditional gang colors may be worn inconspicuously as necklaces and shoelaces. Colors also may be part of an elaborate scheme of color switching, in which clothing brand/sports team logos are worn at different times for different activities, making gang identification more difficult. Hand signals continue to be part of the core gang nomenclature, though again, they may not be overtly displayed. Graffiti is often used as both a territory marker and as a way to send messages to rival gangs and to the wider community. All these practices create identity and cohesion for gang members (Walsh 1996). Prison gangs may be qualitatively different from street gangs. Prison gangs, often termed “Security Threat Groups,” can coerce inmates to join. Inmates may join to receive protection and amenities not provided by the prison administration, such as cigarettes and toiletries. To a greater extent than prison gangs in other countries, those in the United States tend to be organized around economic enterprises that include trafficking in drugs and other illicit items, and smuggling material goods not available to inmates (Skarbek 2014). US prison gangs are typically more tightly organized with more control over their members than prison gangs in other countries (Phillips 2012). Prisons can play an important role in both gang joining and the maintenance of gangs. Individuals who join gangs while in prison can strengthen the gang upon leaving prison (Varano, Huebner, and Bynum 2011). This is especially true in some countries in South America and in the US states of California, Illinois, Texas, and New York. It is estimated that approximately 19 percent of US prisoners are gang members (Winterdyk and Ruddell 2010). Cross-national research shows that gang members are more likely to cause problems in the prisons than non-gang inmates (Gaes et al. 2002; Wood 2009). The most common strategy by which prison authorities control gang members is through suppression,

which includes prosecution, segregation, and transfer. Prison gang member communication and contact with the outside world may also be more tightly controlled than non-gang inmates. Intervention strategies with prison gang members are similar to those used with street gangs. These involve increasing pro-social bonds and addressing the individual needs of each gang member. Such strategies, however, are not prevalent in many correctional institutions (Winterdyk and Ruddell 2010). Addressing gangs and gang violence in the community must also include addressing gang problems in prisons as these can spill into neighborhoods once inmates are released into their communities (Pyrooz, Decker, and Fleisher 2011).

Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Prevention As previously discussed, it is widely understood that gangs develop from core macrolevel social inequalities (W. B. Miller 2001). As a result, strategies to prevent the creation of gangs must address those structural features of societies that produce inequalities. Policies and programs that provide equal access to institutions and opportunities and empowering marginalized communities are essential to eliminating the distal causes of gangs (Durán 2013). Further, the cultural code of the street where violence attains respect and protection and gangs are perceived as conduits to ensuring those needs, runs very strong in communities with gangs and among those who join gangs (Matsuda et al. 2013). Violence as a norm must be interrupted and replaced with prosocial conflict resolution and positive empowerment messages (see Skogan et al. 2009). Cross-cultural examinations of programs designed to address complex macro-level changes show that they are difficult to achieve, but not impossible (Donnelly and Ward 2014). Easier to address are the proximal causes of gang membership where midlevel

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interventions can take place within communities and institutions that diminish the chances of gang membership, and over time, may reduce the number of gangs and decrease gang violence. As noted, research shows that gangs have an enhancement effect on the criminal behavior of their members (Thornberry et al. 2003). This means that though individuals who join gangs have some criminal propensities, gangs amplify those propensities while also providing more opportunities to engage in criminal behavior. Preventing youth from joining gangs is a crucial point of intervention for reducing gangs and gang violence. Several programs have shown promise at the secondary prevention level where youth living in high-risk areas have been targeted for specific prevention strategies. Interestingly, with the exception of one program, they were not developed to exclusively address the problem of gang joining, suggesting that there are similarities between youth who are gang members and those who are not (Gebo and Sullivan 2014). Three programs are identified here. The Montreal Preventive Treatment Program targets boys who display antisocial behavior from kindergarten through middle school. The program addresses cognitive-behavioral training for youth along with parent training focusing on monitoring and positive reinforcement. Evaluations have shown that boys who completed the program were less likely to join gangs as teenagers than similarly situated boys who were not in the program (Gatti et al. 2005). The Perry Preschool Program in the US Midwest also targeted youth living in highly distressed neighborhoods for prevention programming. Youth and their parents engaged in a participatory learning process where they planned and carried out their own educational activities. A longitudinal evaluation showed that boys who participated in the program were less likely to join gangs and engage in fighting than boys who did not (Schweinhart et al. 2005). The successes of these programs in preventing gang membership point to the reality that most gang members are in many

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ways similar to other high-risk youth in terms of multiple problems across multiple domains of their lives. These youth often have mental health issues, family issues, substance abuse problems, criminal victimization, and school issues (Gebo and Sullivan 2014). Thus, the high needs of these youth must be addressed in order to effectively prevent problem behavior and gang joining. Developed specifically to address gang joining is the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) program administered in schools by trained police officers. Students are taught about the negative consequences of gang membership, and they engage in skill-building exercises to resist peer pressure to join. Based on evaluative feedback, GREAT was revised since its initial rollout in the 1990s. A longitudinal evaluation of the revised program showed that youth who went through the program were more likely to perceive gangs negatively and were less likely to join gangs (Esbensen et al. 2011). GREAT has been implemented throughout the Western Hemisphere. Evidence-based programs at both secondary and tertiary prevention levels are being examined with those at risk for gang membership and with those who are gang involved. Both Functional Family Therapy, which works with families to improve social support and communication, and Multisystemic Therapy, which provides counseling and support across the socioecological domains of a youth’s life, are being explored as methods to reduce gang involvement (see, e.g., Boxer et al. 2015; www.ccjs.umd.edu/ projectprofile/823). Unfortunately, research has shown that gang members may be more difficult to engage in treatment and more difficult to keep in treatment than non-gang members (Boxer et al. 2015). Further complicating the issue of engagement and treatment is the fact that the high needs and high risk of gang members requires more intensive services. Unsurprisingly, because of the low base rate of gang members and the difficulty with engagement and continuity of treatment for them, little is known about

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what programs and practices work best (see Engel, Tillyer, and Corsaro 2013; Howell 2012). Importantly, ethnographic studies point to the need for prosocial practices with youth and communities that focus on their strengths, rather than on their deficiencies or their connections to gangs, as critical to thwart both gang formation and gang membership (Durán 2013; Rios 2011). Scholarly attention in the twenty-first century has turned to the process of desistance from gangs. Understanding reasons why individuals leave gangs can help to craft prevention and intervention programs targeting those factors. Studies show that gang membership duration matters in longterm outcomes. Youth who spend less time in gangs are less likely to be involved in crime later in life and to have better work and personal relationships than those who are in gangs for longer periods of time (Sweeten, Pyrooz, and Piquero 2013). In part, this is due to fewer associations with antisocial peers. Which factors precipitate gang desistance is an important line of research that, so far, has uncovered a variety of variables, including parental supervision (Walker-Barnes and Mason 2001) and conventional turning points, such as parenthood or employment (Vigil 1988) as key elements, though much more research needs to be conducted. One prevention strategy that has been tried intermittently since the 1960s is the utilization of streetworkers, or street outreach workers, who engage gang members and those at the highest risk for gang membership in mentoring relationships and prosocial activities. Streetworkers are typically former gang members who grew up in the same neighborhoods as the gang members and who understand their struggles. Streetworker programs have had problems with reinforcing group identity (Klein 1971), lack of appropriate training, and streetworker involvement in criminal activities (Varano and Wolff 2012). The weight of evidence, however, demonstrates the ability of streetworkers to effectively engage these hard-to-reach youth, if proper training and support are provided (Varano and

Wolff 2012). As the knowledge of gangs, violence, and “what works” to prevent and intervene evolves, so too must the approach to addressing gang membership and gang violence.

Comprehensive Approaches to Preventing Gang Violence The traditional response to gang violence has been arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment. Not surprisingly, these suppression techniques have not been shown to be effective for long-term reduction and prevention of gangs or gang violence (Decker 2003). They do not address the distal causes of gangs, the group process, or the needs of individual gang members. Social service responses to gang members including counseling, employment training, and anger management have been implemented, but they have yet to show consistent positive outcomes (Gravel et al. 2013). Attempts to unravel the particular pieces and combinations of successful responses to gangs continue in spite of the lack of overwhelming success. Appropriate responses are further complicated by the dynamic and interweaving forces of group processes (Decker et al. 2013). There is a burgeoning body of literature on evidence-based policies, programs, and best practices with gangs and gang members. Little of this work is exclusive to gangs, with most of it addressing serious youth violence. Again, variations in gang definitions and the realities of limited duration of gang membership make it difficult to understand what is best for whom and under what circumstances. Thus, it seems logical to utilize the broader base of evidence-based programs and practices known about youth violence in combination with what we know about gangs for gang-prevention purposes. Collaborative and comprehensive approaches have been called upon as the best way to address gangs (National Gang Center 2010). One approach that has been tested in the United States and abroad is the

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Comprehensive Gang Model (CGM) (Totten 2009). The CGM is a policy consisting of five coordinated strategies: (1) suppression, as discussed above; (2) social intervention, which includes secondary prevention activities such as counseling and mentoring to those living in gang-ridden neighborhoods; (3) opportunities provision, which means offering opportunities to gang members to engage in education and job training; (4) community mobilization, which involves ensuring that neighborhood residents and grassroots groups are involved and empowered in gang-prevention efforts; and (5) organizational change and development, which involves organizations changing the way they do business in order to more effectively and efficiently address gangs and gang violence through cooperation, communication, and collaboration. Providing for the needs of incarcerated former gang members who are scheduled to reenter mainstream society is also an important component of the comprehensive approach (Braga, Piehl, and Hureau 2009). When implemented properly, the CGM has been shown to reduce gang crime and youth violence (Spergel, Wa, and Sosa 2006). Unfortunately, implementation of the CGM, like most large-scale complex initiatives, has been problematic for many locations (Gebo, Bond, and Campos 2015). The Pulling Levers focused deterrence strategy can be thought of as complimentary to the CGM (Braga and Hureau 2012), and is an evidence-based program that has been shown internationally to be successful in reducing serious violence by repeat offenders, including gang members, in highly distressed neighborhoods (Braga and Weisburd 2012). Deterrence theory stipulates that costs must outweigh benefits in order for behavior to change. Under this strategy, individuals who have been identified by public safety officials as high rate violent offenders are put “on notice” that violence will not be tolerated. If they continue to commit violent acts, they will be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. At the same time, offenders are presented with opportunities to engage in

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education, job training, and counseling, for those wishing to leave the violence behind. Prosecuted offenders are held up as examples of what can happen if one continues to engage in violence. Understanding the current dynamic relationships between gangs in terms of conflict and retaliation can help to identify those areas, groups, and individuals, most in need of the intervention (Papachristos et al. 2012). Significantly, the ways in which the Pulling Lever strategies are implemented are important. In order for this to be considered a comprehensive strategy, efforts need to ensure that the abilities of communities to take part in informal social control, and the ability of community members to feel a sense of procedural justice with the police, are not compromised through such practices.

Moving Forward Properly addressing a social problem involves an accurate understanding of the phenomenon. While there is still much to be learned about gangs, there are several important points about gangs and gang members that must be considered in discourse about gangs and gang violence. Gangs develop because of structural inequities. Thus, in order to ameliorate the social problem of gangs, attention must be paid to social-structural factors. Challenging such work is the fact that gangs are dynamic with fluctuating organization, engagement in violence, and affiliations and feuds with other gangs. Few youth in distressed areas join gangs, but those that do often do so for short periods of time. Gangs may indeed serve as a vehicle for those in the lower class to navigate the dominant culture, yet gang involvement can have long-term negative consequences on physical and mental health, employment, and the family system. Research shows that gang members are more difficult to engage and to keep engaged in treatment than other youth; and as of yet, there are no evidence-based programs that work with gang youth. Thus, taking what is known about best practices

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with youth and communities generally and evidence-based programs that work with youth in highly distressed neighborhoods, is the best course of action to reducing gangs and gang violence. Moving forward, preventing gangs and gang violence should not be the sole purview of criminal justice disciplines and organizations. Future work involves more interdisciplinary collaboration in research and practice. Borrowing techniques and methods from public health may be a step in that direction (Neville et al. 2015; Welsh, Braga, and Sullivan 2012). Research on poverty and urban environments can lead to insights that reduce the proliferation of gangs, while professionals working in hospitals and trauma-centered community clinics can help inform the practice of gang member programming. Gangs are a product of the interplay of various forces in society. The violence they cause cannot be ignored, as it has far-reaching effects, chief among them are the physical and mental health emotional costs of individuals, families, and communities. Amelioration of gangs and gang violence involves addressing multiple levels of problems within and across the ecological domains of individuals, families, peers, schools, workplaces, communities, and societies.

Glossary Comprehensive gang model A community approach to address problems of gangs, regarded as a promising approach by the US government’s crimesolutions.gov. Gang A group of individuals who band together and whose activities involve crime, though there is no consensus definition. Gang-motivated crime Crime committed on behalf of the gang. Gang-related crime Crime committed by a gang member, but not done on behalf of the gang. Hybrid gang Describes modern gang realities in terms of ethnic diversity, lack of loyalty, swift switching of animosities

among gangs, and youth who may be part of more than one gang. Multiple marginality An integrated theoretical framework of gang development and joining that specifically addresses racial and ethnic variations in gangs by examining structural, relational, and individuallevel factors. Pulling levers approach A deterrence-based strategy rooted in a problem-solving approach to reduce serious violence, shown to be successful in cross-national studies. Socioecological perspective A framework used to examine the influences on gang formation, gang joining, and gang desistence that takes into account individual, relational, community, and societal factors.

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ber. www.nationalgangcenter.gov/Content/ Documents/Definitions.pdf. National Gang Center. n.d. National Youth Gang Survey Analysis. www.nationalgangcenter .gov/survey-analysis/demographics. Neville, Fergus G., Christine A. Goodall, Anna J. Gavine, Damien J. Williams, and Peter Donnelly. 2015. Public health, youth violence, and perpetrator well-being. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 21:322–33. Panfil, Vanessa R., and Dana Peterson. 2015. Gender, sexuality, and gangs: Re-invisioning diversity. In The Handbook of Gangs, edited by Scott H. Decker and David C. Pyrooz, 208–34. New York: Wiley. Papachristos, Andrew V., Anthony A. Braga, and David Hureau. 2012. Social networks and the risk of gunshot injury. Journal of Urban Health 89:992–1003. Papachristos, Andrew V., David Hureau, and Anthony A. Braga. 2013. The corner and the crew: The influence of geography and social networks on gang violence. American Sociological Review 78:417–447. Peterson, Dana, Jody Miller, and Finn-Aage Esbensen. 2001. The impact of sex composition on gangs and gang member delinquency. Criminology 39:411–40. Phillips, Coretta. 2012. “It ain’t nothing like American with the Bloods and the Crips”: Gang narratives inside two English prisons. Punishment & Society 14:51–68. Portes, Alejandro, and Rubén G. Rumbaut. 2001. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pyrooz, David C. 2012. Structural covariates of gang homicide in large US cities. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 49:489– 518. Pyrooz, David C. and Scott H. Decker. 2013. Delinquent behavior, violence, and gang involvement in China. Journal of Quantitative Criminology 29:272–99. Pyrooz, David C., Scott H. Decker, and Mark S. Fleisher. 2011. From the street to the prison, from the prison to the street: Understanding and responding to prison gangs. Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research 3:12– 24. Pyrooz, David C., Gary Sweeten, and Alex R. Piquero. 2013. Continuity and change in gang membership and gang embeddedness.

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Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 50:239–71. Rios, Victor R. 2011. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York: New York University Press. Rosenfeld, Richard, Timothy M. Bray, and Arlen Egley, Jr. 1999. Facilitating violence: A comparison of gang-motivated, gang-affiliated, and nongang youth homicides. Journal of Quantitative Criminology 15:495–516. Schweinhart, Lawrence J., Jeanne Montie, Zongping Xiang, W. Steven Barnett, Clive R. Belfield, and Milagros Nores. 2005. Lifetime Effects: The HighScope Perry Preschool Study through Age 40. Ypsilanti, MI: HighScope Press. Sharkey, Jill D., Zhanna Shekhtmeyster, Lizbeth Chavez-Lopez, Elizabeth Norris, and Laura Sass. 2011. The protective influence of gangs: Can schools compensate? Aggression and Violent Behavior 16:45–54. Short, James F., and Fred L. Strodtbeck. 1965. Group Process and Gang Delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago. Skarbek, David. 2014. The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System. New York: Oxford University Press. Skogan, Wesley G., Susan M. Hartnett, Natalie Bump, and Jill Dubois. 2009. Evaluation of Chicago ceasefire. www.ipr.northwestern .edu/publications/papers/urban-policy-andcommunity-development/ceasefire/. Spergel, Irving A., Kwai M. Wa, and Rolando V. Sosa. 2006. The comprehensive communitywide gang program model: Success and failure. In Studying Youth Gangs, edited by James F. Short and Lorraine A. Hughes, 203– 24. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Starbuck, David, James C. Howell, and Donna J. Lindquist. 2001. Hybrid and other Modern Gangs. Washington, DC: OJJDP. Stewart, Eric A., and Ronald L. Simons. 2010. Race, code of the street, and violent delinquency: A multilevel investigation of neighborhood street culture and individual norms of violence. Criminology 48:569–605. Sweeten, Gary, David C. Pyrooz, and Alex R. Piquero. 2013. Disengaging from gangs and desistence from crime. Justice Quarterly 30:469–500. Thornberry, Terence P., Marvin D. Krohn, Alan J. Lizotte, Carolyn A. Smith, and Kim-

berly Tobin. 2003. Gangs and Delinquency in Developmental Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. Thrasher, Fredrick M. 1927. The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Totten, Mark. 2009. Aboriginal youth and violent gang involvement in Canada: Quality prevention strategies. Revue De L’ IPC Review 3:135–56. Varano, Sean P., Beth M. Huebner, and Timothy S. Bynum. 2011. Correlates and consequences of pre-incarceration gang involvement among incarcerated youthful felons. Journal of Criminal Justice 39:30–38. Varano, Sean P., and Russell Wolff. 2012. Street outreach as an intervention modality for atrisk and gang-involved youth. In Looking Beyond Suppression: Community Strategies to Reduce Gang Violence, edited by Erika Gebo and Brenda J. Bond, 83–104. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Vigil, James D. 1988. Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California. Austin: University of Texas Press. Vigil, James D. 2002. A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega-City. Austin: University of Texas Press. Walker-Barnes, Chanequa J., and Craig A. Mason. 2001. Ethnic differences in the effect of parenting on gang involvement and gang delinquency: A longitudinal, hierarchical linear modeling perspective. Child Development 72:1814–31. Walsh, Michael. 1996. Graffito. Berkley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Welsh, Brandon C., Anthony A. Braga, and Christopher J. Sullivan. 2012. Serious youth violence and innovative prevention: On the emerging link between public health and criminology. Justice Quarterly 31:500–523. Winterdyk, John, and Rick Ruddell. 2010. Managing prison gangs: Results from a survey of U.S. prison systems. Journal of Criminal Justice 38:730–36. Wood, Jane. 2009. Prisoners’ gang-related activity: The importance of bullying and moral disengagement. Psychology, Crime & Law 15:569–81. Wood, Jane, and Emma Alleyne. 2010. Street gang theory and research: Where are we now and where do we go from here? Aggression and Violent Behavior 15:100–111.

CHAPTER 22

State Violence M. Gabriela Torres

Abstract Social scientists define state violence broadly, ranging from direct political violence and genocide to the redefinition of state violence as the neoliberal exit of the state from the provision of social services and the covert use of new technologies of citizen surveillance. State violence, and sometimes the state in and of itself, is clearly a social problem shaping not only the structure of governance but also citizenship and the quality of life of individuals and communities. This chapter provides a guide to the literature on state violence using the much studied case of Guatemala as a focal example. The chapter presents competing concepts on the nature of violence, analyzes the different forms of state violence (genocide, political violence, and juridical violence), and suggests emerging trends in the literature of state violence that lead us to consider structural inequalities, the changing nature of the state, and the incorporation of new technologies of violent governance.

Social scientists define state violence broadly, ranging from direct political violence and genocide to the redefinition of state violence as the neoliberal exit of the state from the provision of social services and the covert use of new technologies of citizen surveillance. Scholars diverge widely in their understanding of the nature and practice of state violence for a number of reasons including their definition of violence, of the state as well as the disciplinary methodologies employed and the way that the impact of state violence is assessed. For the vast majority of scholars, state violence, and sometimes the state in and of itself, is

clearly a social problem shaping not only the structure of governance, citizenship, and the quality of life of individuals and communities but also importantly shaping the possibilities for subject formation (Bourdieu 1994; Wacquant 2010). This chapter provides a guide to the literature on state violence using the much studied case of Guatemala as a focal example. Given Guatemala’s extensive history of state violence including the use of torture and terror tactics, and ultimately genocide, it is a fitting example to explore the intermingling of different forms of state violence in a specific social context. Such a focus 381

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allows for a more nuanced understanding of why state violence is a social problem with enduring effects. The chapter first addresses how competing concepts on the nature of violence and the state shape the definition of state violence. This is followed by an outline of the thematic clusters of scholarship that are centered on the different forms that state violence takes: genocide, political violence, and juridical forms of state violence. As a complement to a survey of the exemplary forms of state violence, the chapter also suggests emerging trends in the literature of state violence that lead us to consider structural inequalities, the changing nature of the state, and the incorporation of new technologies of violent governance. To conclude, the chapter focuses on how the scholarship on state violence shapes social science. It considers in particular how the scholar’s choice of theoretical approach coupled with the focal point of study (resistance to state violence, violence workers, technologies of governance, postconflict societies and memory) frames the way that state violence is conceptualized and discussed as a social problem.

true for studies of postconflict or of the “ends” of state violence. Such studies typically outline how state violence engenders particular social worlds that can be understood through the workings of postconflict societies and/or the peace processes through which an end to conflict is attained (Koonings and Kruijt 1999; Nelson 2009; Payne 2008). Violence is in most current scholarship understood as a process or relationship that cannot be accounted for in incidences but rather through the analysis of its social and cultural dimensions (Nordstrom 1997). Studies of state violence, however, still run the range from straightforward documentation of incidences of force by state agents to the symbolic use of terror for statebuilding, and the study of how violence is remembered (Bilbija and Payne 2011; Jelin 2003; Lorey and Beezley 2002; Taylor 2003). This chapter primarily focuses on scholarship that understands violence as a social problem enmeshed in the institutions, structure, and practices of the state – a form of violence that is not strictly interpersonal and that produces palpable social and cultural consequences with broad impact in people’s everyday lives (Das 2007).

What Is Violence? Violence as a Tool of Governance The definition and bounds of what can be understood as violence is hotly debated. Popular notions that physicality is a necessary element of violence are not shared in the scholarly literature. In fact, increasingly scholars point to structural inequalities and its attendant forms of social suffering, of particular import to our study of the state’s role in violence, as an important form of violence (Bourgois and Schonberg 2009; Han 2012). Social scientists theorizing on this issue have focused on the ways that violence is productive and reproductive of society and personhood (Das and Kleinman 2000). In essence they have focused on Scarry’s (1984) idea that violence makes the social world. The focus on how the social and political world is made is particularly

Regardless of whether violence is political or structural in nature, scholars who focus on the strategies, technologies, and objectives of violence typically come to face the study of power as it wielded by the state (Coronil and Skurski 2006). This section traces the ways that scholars have defined the practice of violence as a part of governance. It is focused on the different forms of violence that states employ to both exert power and govern: political murder and terror orchestrated by its agents (Menjivar and Rodríguez 2005), disappearance and torture as terror tactics (Marchack 1999; Sluka 2000), genocide (Hinton 2002; Malkki 1995; Rummel 1994; Tottem and Parsons 2009), legal erasure (Sarat 2001; Zilberg 2011), and

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the purposeful entrenchment of structural inequalities (Holmes and Bourgois 2013; James 2010). Even though there is a general consensus that states regularly employ violence to govern, there is much debate on whether violence is a recourse of weak or strong states (Hall 1994; Nagengast 1994; Rummel 1994). This debate is not focused on the cultural and social production of violence but rather on whether violence, broadly conceived, is central to governance practices in war and peace. During the Cold War in particular, the practice of state violence was regularly analyzed as a tell-tale sign of a state’s health with much attention given to those states defined as totalitarian (Mazower 2002, 1174). While some argue that the use of violence by the state is inherent to the practices of modern states (Mazower 2002), the bulk of the scholarship is focused on the individual and social consequences of such violence. At the core of the debate lie competing conceptualizations of violence as deviance of human nature or social order or as the idea that it is simply part of the roster of social relationships that persons and institutions regularly access (Chenoweth and Lawrence 2010). Neither side of this debate questions the regularity of the use of violence by states. It is more a question of whether violence is intrinsic to the constitution of state practice or an exceptional act. More recent literature does not question whether states use violence but rather whether they do so intentionally, as part of coherently orchestrated plans or if the individuals that enact state violence do so simply to carry out institutional goals (Nordstrom 2004; Pugliese 2013; Weld 2014). States, as Bourdieu (1994, 9) suggested long ago, may be construed as a “field of power” that results from the processes, particularly juridical ones, through which power becomes concentrated. This literature questions the key assumption of most scholarship on state violence which understands states to be actor-entities that are homogeneous and organized in their exercise of power. Interestingly, analyses of how gender features into the study of

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state violence have for quite some time been at the center of rethinking state action and practice as heterogeneous (Browning 1998; Enloe 2000; Giles and Hyndman 2004; Hautzinger 2007; Huggins et al. 2002). Disentangling into neat categories the ways that states practice violence is unproductive and may in fact serve to, as Coronil and Skurski (2006, 2) suggest, reify violence itself. Political violence, terror, social exclusion, and structural inequalities are often used in tandem in the practice of governance. Scholarship has for practical and disciplinary reasons been focused on discrete forms or instances of state violence. The analysis that follows uses typical taxonomies of violence in order to stay true to the ways violence has come to be theorized and reified in scholarship. The chapter offers a roadmap into more recent scholarship on state violence focusing on new trends in the literature. Because it is an account of scholarship, it provides a sense of how state violence is theorized and framed, but not a record of how state violence is lived or understood by its victims and survivors. While the scholarship discussed in this chapter does in fact eloquently provide records of the social suffering that results from state violence, retelling those stories here would be a disservice to the people who experienced it. Political Violence and Repression Political violence by states, sometimes understood as repression, is the quintessential form of state violence. It is widely employed by states in war and peace despite much scholarship that demonstrates its ineffectiveness, particularly at higher levels, at reducing dissent (Brockett 2005; Herreros 2006). Scholarship on political violence is strongly slanted toward the analysis of the victims of such violence (Carmack 1988; Falla 1994; James 2010; Lorey and Beezley 2002; Taylor 1998) and the institutions that author and operationalize plans for repression (Sluka 2000; Menjivar and Rodríguez 2005). There are, however, a few studies

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focused on the particular persons who enact state violence that nuance what it means for a state to practice violence on the ground (Browning 1998; Hautzinger 2007; Huggins et al. 2002). Thus far, the bystanders of political violence – individuals not directly impacted by political violence in their midst but who have clear awareness of state violence – have received little scholarly attention as key supports to the successful practice of state violence (Carey and Torres 2010). Political violence is routinely focused on specific political, professional, and/or religious groups that the state perceives as threats. Whether it is Sikh nationalist (Axel 2001), Irish or Quebecois separatists (Feldman 1991; Hall 1994), or new immigrants (Falcon 2001; Zilberg 2011), the state employs political violence covertly or openly to eliminate the perceived threat to its authority and/or its exclusive right to the use of force. Though political violence employs the typical roster of assassinations, selective imprisonment, and other tangible terror tactics, it is in its most basic form a type of intimidation, Political violence changes much in society, individuals, and the institutions of the state and cannot be limited to incidences of violence that are too often just be measured in death tolls (Feldman 1991). Interestingly, to be effective, political violence needs to be tailored to and at least tacitly supported by the society in which it is applied (Menjivar and Rodríguez 2005). Its acceptance and specificity in the social milieu is key to understanding the pervasive social and cultural transformations yielded by the use of political violence. Cultures of fear, the persistent stigmatization of targeted groups, and different forms of social and institutional disarray all result from political violence. Researching working-class families in Chile decades after political violence, Clara Han (2012) shows how persons tortured by the Pinochet regime experience long-term mental health issues that limit their ability to form effective relationships and to gain consistent employment. The social disarray

that surrounded survivors of political violence and their families was compounded by the changes that the same violence left on the functioning of state institutions and further by citizens’ low expectations of the state that pervades after the dictatorship (Han 2012). Diane Nelson’s (2009) Reckoning, focused in the wake of political violence and genocide in Guatemala, explores another aspect of this by pointing out how such violence shapes every level of social interaction for all society members. In Guatemala, Nelson (2009), Posocco (2014), and others posit that social interactions are actively shaped by fears that are materialized in the specters of duplicity and volatile partial allegiances. Secrecy, Posocco suggests, is a hallmark of living through war and leaves a mark on interpersonal interactions. Regular secrecy and lies told in interpersonal relationships are not just attempts at misinformation but rather this social practice is the remnant of constructing obscured identities for survival in war. Posocco’s (2014) work demonstrates that such practices of purposeful misidentification are now regular elements of identity making in postconflict lives. Political Violence, Counterinsurgency, and Modernity in Guatemala Counterinsurgency policies are a useful example to show how political violence is used in tandem with other forms of state violence to enable social transformation. Counterinsurgency employs numerous forms of state violence in sequence and because of its cumulative effects it needs to be theorized beyond its parts. Traditionally US military counterinsurgency theorists, understood counterinsurgency programs in their simplest form to progress through three stages: preparatory, clearing, and holding. The preparatory phase included the imposition of emergency legislation, the development of a civilian registry and identity card system, special counterinsurgency training for regular forces, the centralization of intelligence gathering, and the organization of paramilitary or

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irregular forces with great freedom to follow counterinsurgency mandates (McClintock 1985, 62). The clearing phase was conceived of as the military removal of insurgents from the areas in which they traditionally operate (63). The holding phase of counterinsurgency policies included the use of co-opted civilian forces in cleared areas so as to ensure that armed insurgents do not re-root (63). Counterinsurgency so understood and illustrated in the Guatemalan example that follows is an excellent example of the ways that states incorporate violence as a form of governance. Expanding on US counterinsurgency doctrines, Guatemala adopted tactical measures of population control that had been used in other countries, thus taking some of the prescriptions in the holding phase of counterinsurgency theory to their logical extreme by creating model villages and the civil patrol system. Guatemala’s version of counterinsurgency was also strongly influenced by the experiences of military institutions in other Latin American countries. In addition to Cold War motives, Loveman and Davis (1989) suggest that the establishment of authoritarian military regimes throughout Latin America formed part of a regional trend to adhere to a modernization “politics” of “antipolitics.” Disillusioned with democratic regimes of the mid-twentieth century that failed to “modernize” Latin American countries because of increasingly polarized partisan politics, military leaders throughout the continent believed that only “antipolitical” (antipartisan) modernization drives could guarantee success in the long run (Loveman and Davies 1989, 3–7). The deployment of counterinsurgency policies in Guatemala occurred within the context of US Cold War interests in the region. US training in counterinsurgency, counterterror, and the establishment of “irregular forces” began in the early 1960s (McClintock 1985, 62). According to McClintock, US theories of counterinsurgency, elaborated at the US Army School of Special Warfare at Fort Bragg, were exported to Guatemala just after the emergence of an armed insurgency.

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Harvest of Violence, edited by Robert Carmack (1988), focuses on the political violence brought on by the implementation of counterinsurgency policies in Guatemala. It is an illustrative collection of ethnographic accounts that demonstrates the range of on-the-ground effects of state violence and the ways that such violence leverages already present cultural fissures. Paul and Demarest’s chapter in the volume, “The Operation of a Death Squad in San Pedro La Laguna,” is the mesmerizing story of how the “army’s recruitment of agents and spies had the effect of exploiting” cleavages and infighting that “were features of San Pedro life for decades before 1980 without producing violence” (154). Paul and Demarest detail the religious competition between Protestants and Catholics, personal vendettas, and political divisions that were aggravated to a fatal degree by the army’s sponsorship of a group of former army thugs that it designated as the town’s military commissioners. Endowing the commissioners with absolute discretionary powers to punish communist infiltrators in the town, the army supported and aided a series of assassinations of prominent town members whose role in the community had been to instill democratic principles. This was the local context: democratic leaders were branded as ‘communist’ by their political and personal enemies in town (Paul and Demarest 1988, 124). On their own, local animosities of this type may not have gone beyond a war of words but within the national counterinsurgency context they resulted in a string of assassinations. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the authors explain, the Guatemalan army had begun a policy of strengthening their physical and psychological control of the countryside in order to limit the spheres of action of guerrilla groups (Paul and Demarest 1988, 149). This was achieved by increasing its presence in small towns through military commissioners and the promotion of a “culture of fear” (Taylor 1998, 33) that would dissuade potential guerrilla sympathizers (Paul and Demarest 1988, 21). In their final analysis, Paul and Demarest note that San Pedro was caught between two currents: the

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democratic local current and the militarized undemocratic national tide. The divergence between the two tendencies led to the chaos in San Pedro that resulted “not for the sin of displaying divisiveness but for the virtue of practicing democracy” (Paul and Demarest 1988, 154). Interestingly, Paul and Demarest support with significant ethnographic detail the claim made by theorists that state violence is implicitly tied to the everyday practices of the modern state. Arturo Arias working in the same area also suggests that notions of modernity shaped the practice of governance through violence. In “Changing Indian Identity: Guatemala’s Violent Transition to Modernity” Arias presents accounts for the changes that led to the growth of the Comité de Unidad Campesina and the incorporation of indigenous people into the armed struggle (Arias 1990, 249–51). According to the author, indigenous participation with the guerrillas, following government-sponsored violence, was a necessary action, at least in the Ixil area (Arias 1990, 252). The chronology here is important: massacres happened first and then indigenous peoples sought to join the guerrillas, demonstrating that ”Indians” were perceived as a threat to the state and modernization prior to an involvement with insurgents. Carol Smith agrees with this assessment in her concluding chapter in the same volume noting that in the 1970s Guatemalan Indians were engaged in creating “a new role for themselves vis-à-vis the Guatemalan state” and that it was this factor that posed a threat to the traditional social order (Smith 1990, 265–66). Again as with Paul and Demarest’s chapter, Smith and Arias make a direct link between notions of modernity, the practice of political violence, and the state. Terror and Torture Terror and torture are particularly interesting to scholars who seek to document and theorize about the social and cultural impact of state violence. Both are strategic uses of state violence with the explicit

intention to alter the social fabric. Terror, in addition, actually requires the social spread of knowledge about state violence or its imminence. Enactments of terror employ technologies that simultaneously produce and are produced by the cultural contexts within which they arise. Enactments of terror in war and peace create subjectivities and are an “integral and sustaining (rather than destroying) part of sociocultural reproduction” (Whitehead and Finnström 2013, 13). This is true whether the technology involved is the media, print, social or online, or whether it is newer data-driven forms of surveillance and targeting (Laurence 2000). As it is understood by Feldman (1991), Malkki (1995), and Axel (2001), among others, terror also has pervasive counterinsurgency effects: it is meant simultaneously to threaten probable opponents, destabilize society and discourage even the possibility of opposition to the state in mind or action. Renate Siebert (1996, 75), in her study of gender in the Italian Mafia, discusses how this type of silence or immobility can be a key element in the maintenance of an enveloping power. The use of disappearances in Argentina in particular evidences the long-enduring power that the use of terror and its associated silences provides to the state (Marchack 1999; Taylor 2003). In my own work, which considers how tortured bodies were repeatedly publicized by the Guatemalan state, I propose that the records of torture were impossible to ignore: the enforced practice of both reading and seeing yet needing to not know about the state’s violent practice was an efficient way to manage survival in the volatile climate of the civil war. Paralleling the experience of the women in the mafia, Guatemalan readers of tortured cadaver accounts needed to practice not-knowing to show their loyalty to the state which was run on the popular mentality of “you are either with us or against us” (Torres 2005). The cadaver reports displayed in Guatemala were indeed fraught with intended political meaning that reified the state, prescribing citizen behavior and showing its audience the vast power the state holds. Yet, the same cadaver

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reports were also fraught with unintended meaning because they give clear insights into the identities, strategies, and motives of the perpetrators of violence while also evidencing the institutions and technologies that the state used to exercise and expand its power (Malkki 1995). The display of torture in Guatemala and beyond, is used by states to induce fear, naturalize political instability and violence, and disrupt the everyday social life through a constant display of power. Such displays of power stand as clear examples of what Scarry calls the “unmaking of the world” (Scarry 1984, 56). Scarry suggests that the process of torture and unmaking not only disrupt society but inevitably result in the reification and fetishization of state power. For Scarry, the state’s power is seen through the tortured body because it is through the very act of torture that a body’s political meaning is appropriated by the violent state (Scarry 1984). Allen Feldman challenges Scarry on her assumption that tortured bodies are robbed of their political meaning through torture (Feldman 1991, 143). He suggests that, in the case of Northern Ireland, violence does, in fact, serve to invest the tortured body with political meaning principally because these bodies become evidence (or “texts”) of both acts of defiling and acts of defilement (Feldman 1991, 144). As a result, Feldman suggests that tortured bodies must be seen as encoding the entanglements of power (exercised through varied combinations of violence wielding institutions, agents, and political technologies and rituals) and thus not merely representing the power that made them so, but also possessing a clear political meaning in and of themselves. Feldman’s (1991, 14) work on the social and cultural impact of state violence focuses on the bodily impact of torture and the rhetoric of the state both as narratives of violence that are “invested in material artefacts and relations that have a story telling capacity on their own.” Both the stories that are told by the necrographic maps – or inscriptions of torture on bodies – and the ways and means through which

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reports of violence become public, tell as much about the violent state as they tell about the state’s violence (Torres 2005). These inscriptions are not only signs that tell of the power relationship between the tortured and his/her victimizer, they are also signs or signatures that, because of their public nature in a context of state violence, seek a national audience and, furthermore, are telling of the social organization necessary to orchestrate public terror (Malkki 1995). Brian Keith Axel posits that tortured bodies created by states for nation-building purposes can be seen as fetishes both in the Marxian and Freudian senses (Axel 2001, 33). For Axel, in Marxian terms the tortured body acts to constitute the relationship between the state and its citizens, while in Freudian terms the tortured body as fetish highlights the viewer’s knowledge of the simultaneous difference and similarity between the reader/citizen and the non-citizen/object in his/her gaze (Axel 2001, 32). In fact, this back and forth between repulsion and attraction, similarity and difference, may be related to the impossibility of expressing pain and suffering in language, a point thoroughly explored in Scarry’s (1984) The Body in Pain. Genocide Genocide most simply defined is the denial of the right of existence to an entire human group and it is a form of state violence that carries specific though not actually enforceable international legal sanction (United Nations 1948). The literature on genocide is focused on spectacular examples of mass murder and suffering that have been extensively researched including well-known research on the Holocaust (Bergen 2009), Rwanda (Mamdani 2001; Malkki 1995), Armenia (Balakian 2004), the Balkans (Giles and Hyndman 2004), Cambodia (Hinton 2005) and Guatemala. As a form of state violence, it differs in its systematized intent to attain social change through the eradication a whole segment of a society. States that practice genocide view the target populations as irreconcilable with

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their self-conception. The genesis of the society that a genocidal state seeks can only begin through the total eradication of the group deemed offensive. Because genocide is so closely tied to nation-building, scholarship of genocides – more than any other scholarship on state violence – adheres to notions of the state and state action as homogenous and cohesive. It is clear in the same scholarship that the technologies and techniques of genocide differ but that its social supports – including messianic forms of ethnic aggrandizement and nationalism – remain constant crossculturally and through time (Mazower 2002; Tottem and Parsons 2009). Guatemala’s genocide is no exception. Genocide, Guatemala, and Legacy of the “Indian Question” The “Indian Question” in Guatemala – commonly understood as how Indians fit into the ‘imaginary’ of the Guatemalan nation – has shaped how dominant groups have limited the spaces within which indigenous peoples were permitted to participate in the ladino-state and is a key precursor to twentieth-century genocide (Anderson 1991, 169). Discussions of the Indian Question are closely tied to the task of making Guatemala into “an identical nation culturally, racially, linguistically, and economically” (Asturias 1977, 8). For Miguel Angel Asturias, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Guatemala was divided into two races: the Indian race of the past, reduced to its present degenerate state by poverty and slavery, and the promise of the ladino race defined as the only “living part of the Guatemalan nation” (Asturias 1977, 10). To “solve” the Indian Question, Asturias suggested a strategy with some demonstrated success in Argentina and Chile: miscegenation and immigration (48). The influx of “new blood,” hoped Asturias, would improve the ability of the Guatemalan nation to succeed beyond its Indian base that he deemed unredeemable (51). Asturias’s assessment was operationalized in development strategies established

in Guatemala in the 1970s which rested both on the continued exploitation of the Maya and their eventual erasure (Fischer and McKenna Brown 1996, 78). Ladinoelites, according to Fischer and McKenna Brown, “hold that the Maya are obstacles to the development of Guatemalan society and are better off becoming Ladinos” (77). In Crossing Borders, another Nobel prize winner, Rigoberta Menchú (1998, 192), has argued that the exclusion of indigenous persons is seen in elite circles as necessary to the maintenance of a proper and sanitized image of the Guatemalan nation. For many, the counterinsurgency policies of the 1970s and 1980s were just natural extensions of a long history of brutal exclusionary policies. The question of whether fear of the Maya influenced national policy has already been answered by the events of La Violencia that culminated in the 2015 conviction of the then dictator Efrain Ríos Montt for the genocide of Ixil Mayas. Beginning with court proceedings initiated in Spain in 2006 and later transferred to an unstable legal system in Guatemala, Montt was found responsible for the mass atrocities that destroyed close to 90 percent of Ixil Maya villages and 5.5 percent of the Ixil population. Rule of Law and State Violence Modern statecraft leverages the rule of law to enact violence. Giorgio Agamben (2005) in fact proposes that such moments of law’s violence are constitutive of a state’s sovereignty. The academic and/or legal definition of the rule of law is a hotly debated topic because of the implications that this concept has for theories of the state, democracy, reform, and legal theory itself. The rule of law developed as a key element of today’s modern state because socially defined notions of law and legality flourished alongside ideals of the modern state (Kriegel 1995, 11). The state is, after all, both the principal instrument and the primary object of the rule of law (Ungar 2002, 17). For most scholars, the rule of law is the very tool or system that enables democracy and

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civil and human rights to exist (Schonbohm 1994, 5; Ungar 2002, 17). In its simplest terms, belief in a rule of law implies a belief in the primacy of some type of morally legitimated legal system over both ruler and ruled equally (Domingo and Sieder 2001; Dyzenhaus 1999, 179; Méndez, O’Donnell, and Pinheiro 1999; Schonbohm 1994). Power imbalances are intrinsically involved in the development of any law or system of law and are reproduced in the practice of the law (Domingo and Sieder 2001; Dyzenhaus 1999, 66; Schonbohm 1994, 231). Yet, most scholarship on the rule of law and the state is based on the underlying belief that if tweaked enough, the rule of law embarks societies on the “right” – and for some the only conceivable – path (Ungar 2002, 22). Such a reliance on the rule of law and its accompanying democracy fails to analyze the processes through which both democracy and law are socially constructed and constrained. Sarat and Kearns (1992, 6) argue that violence is integral to the constitution of modern law itself (Pugliese 2013). Their view counters scholarship which claims that the equality and universality of an effectively practiced rule of law is conducive not only to democracy – in its strict definition as a political system – but, more importantly, to the potential of democracy as an agent of socioeconomic equality and justice (Domingo and Sieder 2001, 1). Guatemala and the Law’s Violence The Guatemalan example again provides support for Sarat and Kearn’s claim that violence, even in its extremes, may be engrained into law. The Guatemalan military legal framework developed and enacted in the early 1980s enabled the Guatemalan genocide to occur well within the rule of law. In such cases, what can we make of the relationship between democracy and the rule of law? Schirmer’s (1999) work has shown that the concept of the “rule of law” is fundamental to the discourse that the Guatemalan military used to justify its heavy-handed approach to social change.

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Understanding the way that the term rule of law or estado de derecho was used in Guatemala is pivotal to understanding the very definitions that the military made of both the modern state and counterinsurgency. As clearly seen in both contemporaneous (Sieder 2001) and post facto military discourse (Schirmer 1999), the rule of law was circularly defined as the basis of military action and the end toward which military action was oriented. Defining opposition (military or otherwise) as existing within the margins of the rule of law and contradictory or dissenting visions of Guatemala as actions against the “rule of law” allows the military to position its ideas about the “norm of the law” and “justice.” As a result, dissent comes to be constructed as illegal. Based on her analysis of postwar Guatemala, Rachel Sieder discusses the rule of law as a site for power struggles that take place through the development of a definition of who are included and excluded as beneficiaries of the law. Sieder notes that, in reforming the country’s legal framework, the Guatemalan peace process sought to define “a blueprint to overhaul the Guatemalan state, for decades dominated by an anticommunist counterinsurgency logic” (Sieder 2001, 205). She characterizes the judicial system during La Violencia as one that “singularly failed to defend even the most elementary of citizens’ rights or punish those responsible for gross violations” (205). Sieder suggests that a multicultural re-working of the concept of the democratic rule of law is needed as a way to remove the state’s monopoly over the regulation of legal definitions and procedures (211). In this analysis she locates the system of counterinsurgency in the practice and offices of governance rather than within the legal framework itself. I argue, however, that we must focus on the legal framework as a primary vessel within which the practices of counterinsurgency are naturalized and reproduced because re-working the legal system was a key part of the counterinsurgency machinery. The nearly unilateral redefinition of the Guatemalan legal system in the early 1980s naturalized

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the ideology behind the practice of counterinsurgency, and ultimately genocide, so that it became invisible, unquestionable and absolutely acceptable under the rule of law. Making visible the legal promotion of counterinsurgency will also enlighten us as to why the state’s monopoly over establishing legal definitions and procedures came to be socially supported (Torres 2015).

Framing the Study of State Violence: Theory and Subject In Violence in War and Peace, ScheperHughes and Bourgois (2004, 2) make an impassioned call to rethink the bounds of violence, noting that the “everyday violence of infant mortality, slow starvation, disease, despair, and humiliation destroys socially marginalized humans with even greater frequency [than state repression and] are usually invisible and misrecognized.” Their reframing of the bounds of state violence to include not-so-new plights resulting from inequity is part of a growing recognition among scholars that structural inequities fueled by actions and omissions of states are a more significant source of harm and suffering than the more spectacular instances of political violence (Farmer 2004). The neoliberal turn of state governance has focused scholarly work on the ways that the state’s exit from social services can be construed as a purposeful form of harm (Han 2012; James 2010; Zilberg 2011). While the state has exited from the provision of social services, scholars also point to the ways that the neoliberal state has invested itself in the social control of its own population (Zilberg 2011). As an accounting of emergent trends in the study of state violence, this section is organized into three parts. The first will address how the selective absence of the state has come to be construed a form of state violence in scholarship. The second part discusses how the rise of the neoliberal state and persistent structural inequalities coupled with the legacy of war enable new forms of state violence that go beyond

simple forms of neoliberal restructuring. The final part of this section suggests that as states transform themselves they also reinvent technologies of state violence. The Denial of Citizenship Rights to the Selective Absence of State Loїc Wacquant (2010) argues that social insecurity arising from the absence of the state in the provision of social services has given rise to new penal forms of state violence. This penal state is, following Bourdieu, a field of power through which the state comes to define itself as a regulating body and the rights of citizenship no longer include access to social services which garner social security but rather access to citizen security understood as public security (206). Such a neoliberal state is, according to Wacquant, reified by the particular forms of violence it employs: its engagement in proactive policing and incarceration regimes as the ultimate guarantee of citizen security (208). A case in point is Zilberg’s (2011) analysis which illustrates how the transnational gang crisis was created through the criminalization of immigrants in south central Los Angeles. In Space of Detention Zilberg traces the processes that conjured a Salvadorian refugee population in need of state support into a looming transnational gang threat to public security. Zilberg’s work shows the social suffering and ethnic targeting that results from the redirection of state power to the provision of public security: lives in detention and under surveillance, the denial of basic citizenship rights, the dissolution of families, and the export of insecurity and crime to El Salvador. The processes at play in the field of power of the state in this case included the use of popular news media, zoning regulations, legislation that favored easy incarceration, ethnically targeted mass incarceration and deportation of legal US residents and citizens to El Salvador. For Zilberg, the process through which poor Latino-Americans came to be defined as criminals-in-waiting exemplifies the ways that neoliberal states actively inflict violence

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within their borders and beyond. The social suffering that results – family separation, life imprisonment without due process, and exile, among others – is for Zilberg a form of violence that not only deprives a specific ethnic group of their rights but eventually also deprives them of their very citizenship. Clara Han (2012) also evidences how the neoliberal restructuring of the state provokes social suffering by reorienting social life above and beyond the mere absence of the state from the provision of services. Life in Debt documents the ways that neoliberalism encourages and enables citizen participation through consumption. Such forms of citizen engagement in Han’s account are supported by the legal practices of the state. Coupled with increasingly restricted economic futures and the loss of a social safety net, consumer model citizenship further entrenches the economic precariousness of life for Chileans and burdens entire families into oppressive forms of indebtedness. The trend in the literature to think of current governance models as forms of state violence challenges both earlier conceptions of the monolithic political state and stretches the bounds of what can come to constitute violence. Thinking of the degree of social suffering that state-supported incarceration, deportations, overextended ending schemes, and the lack of social welfare supports it is understandable that structural violence enabled by the state has come to be analyzed as a new form of state violence. The Ends of War, Democracy, and the Ends of Violence Elizabeth Jelin (2003) notes that as societies emerge from periods of conflict, their recall of state violence regularly conjures “master narratives of the nation” whose insight is grounded in the lives and interactions of the very people who make history. Such national memories are negotiated in popular discourse as well as in the interpersonal dealings and much scholarship on state violence actively engages with these “politics of recognition” (Axel 2001; Balakian 2004; Jelin 2003; Lorey and Beezley 2002; Malkki 1995).

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Such reckoning with the master narratives of the nation is part and parcel of the memory work that has taken place in other postconflict countries such as Argentina, South Africa, Peru, and Chile and constitutes a large new grouping of literature on state violence. Engaging with the construction of intentional memory sites does take many forms. Argentina, South Africa, Peru, and Chile reckoned with violence through the construction of contemplative civic sculpture parks, Truth Commissions, sponsored photographic installations or the repurposing of torture chambers into memory museums, respectively (Bilbija and Payne 2011). Analyses of how a past with violence is understood and defined allow us to understand the complexities of state violence as an enduring social problem. For example, the process of reckoning with state violence gives power to not-so-new forms of state violence as preexisting structural inequities regularly become exacerbated in postconflict. Erica James’s Democratic Insecurities focused on Haiti after war and natural disasters suggests that reckoning with state violence is not something that institutions or civil societies do in vacuums. Reckoning with violent pasts is embodied in the everyday violence in the lives of individuals living in societies weighed down by economic and political insecurity as well as histories of violation and oppression. Democratic Insecurities is focused on women who struggle to overcome the layers of state and interpersonal violence that deprive them of their loved ones, destroy family units and ravage their bodies, the state’s unwillingness or inability to provide the most basic social services (James 2010). The constant presence of past and current financial and political instability is presented by James as compounding the problems of a state crippled with meager resources and some truly difficult to overcome social and individual tragedies. Kristen Weld’s Paper Cadavers also shows how the unrelenting weight of past violence entraps the state into new forms of state violence in peacetime. Narrating the discovery of the largest collection of secret state documents in Latin American history,

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Weld’s work supports James’s assertion that reckoning with state violence in postconflict is always an interplay of violent interpersonal and national politics. Weld’s account of finding, saving, and incorporating the National Police Archives into Guatemala’s patrimony is particular not just because foreign involvement from the outset curtailed the control that the state had over the explosive records that were found but also because the same 80 million pages of records meticulously evidenced the state’s oft-denied role in the murder, sequestration, torture and disappearance of its own citizens. Uncovering the making of memory, Paper Cadavers revises the narrative of counterinsurgency operations in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, civilian informant rings long rumored to exist are now evidenced in oreja (spy) reports and their circulation not only within the National Police but with the Guatemalan Armed Forces and numerous paramilitary organizations. The involvement of civilian snitches to target, stalk, capture and ultimately eliminate potential subversives evidences the success of the Armed Forces’ social project. The National Police Archives show that Guatemalan civilians, and not just their state, enacted violence. Importantly both James and Weld work on postconflict societies to highlight that both state violence and its reckoning always involve the political and interpersonal actions of individual citizens. The Futures of State Violence Another trend in the state violence literature is the analysis of how new social technologies, emerging computational tools and developments in surveillance strategies are incorporated into modern governance practices of the state. Virtual War and Magical Death edited by Neil Whitehead and Svend Finnström (2013) is a pivotal text for understanding the ways that current states leverage new technologies for nation-building through terror. For the authors the magic in the mechanics of terror comes in defining what can be known, how knowledge cir-

culates and the scope of the unknowable. Whitehead and Finnström suggest that as technology and military mindsets mesh they create image-realities whose very positioning in the context of a life-and-death mindset regularly obscure social reality beyond the gaze of war even for states technically at peace. The magic of the narrative of war lies in the state’s ability to force society into particular ways of reasoning that are filtered through military logics (Pugliese 2013, 15). Virtual War and Magical Death looks in earnest at the productive power of violence focusing on the similitude between new technologies – such as video games, computational modeling, drone-led precision killing – and old social change technologies – such as narratives, music, and fear. It suggests that technologies of violence and terror-making may be more productive, pervasive, and culturally integrated than we ever realized. The embedding of social science – and anthropology in particular – into US military operations and intelligence is a focus of critique and study by the editors of Virtual War and Magical Death (Whitehead and Finnström 2013). Though this is not a new practice, computational advances and new field practices have made the use of social science much more influential and engrained in state violence. Exposing work and career trajectories of the public protagonists of anthropology’s entrapment within Human Terrain Systems, the authors argue that the collection of cultural knowledge within military operations betrays the very basic ethical standards for the protection of human subjects (59). Yet, anthropology is not the only culprit as other related disciplines, sociology and psychology in particular, are actively text-mined by those who seek to use computational methods to model human social cultural behavior. Whitehead and Finnström’s critique rests on a baseline rejection of the export of human subject data and social science theory into operational models aimed at predicting cultural interactions and individual behavior. Patterning the most effective insurgency predictive algorithms, the authors explain,

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requires large samples of quantitative data and the simultaneous quantification of qualitative human subject data. For the authors, models focused on the work of anthropologists are particularly problematic as they make cultural transformation the key target of counterinsurgency. Given the funding levels for predictive modeling efforts and the funds already allotted to continue to collect what the US military has termed “ethnographic intelligence,” the authors suggest that social science’s involvement in the US-military complex will only increase.

Beyond the Study of State Violence The literature on state violence not only highlights the mechanisms through which great suffering is inflicted on humanity but it also works to push us to rethink key assumptions about our social world. As I have outlined, concepts of violence, the state, law, and the dynamics of social change are all complicated by the literature on state violence. Additionally, the literature on state violence as a whole contributes to social science theory in particular ways. The work that social science has done on the nature and practice of violence and war is powerful because, as Nordstrom writes, it does not just illuminate the past but it also shapes the present and produces futures (Nordstrom 1997). One way that the literature on state violence does this is through its focus on the social construction and social practices of this type of brutality. Understanding the causes for state violence, the actors, and the role of violence in governance importantly also counters unproductive common conceptions that states kill or even that violence occurs because a culture or society may be hardwired for violence. Such popular accounts of state violence often appeal to ideas of “cultures of violence” or areas that are “violence prone” as explanations for atrocity (Das and Kleinman 2000). The literature on state violence exposes the complexity and the range of economic, political, and other relations that construct relations of violence within a par-

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ticular state at a particular point in time. Scholars of state violence show state violence to be both a social problem and a social construction and in doing so they draw our attention back to the agency of social actors involved in the contemporary construction of state violence. Further, the literature on state violence demands an engagement with the idea that violence is productive of subjectivities. Rape, deprivation of freedom, life, and citizenship all shape how victims, perpetrators, and bystanders come to understand their place in the world. Violence in this sense is a mechanism for making the social world in Scarry’s (1984) sense. Yet it is not just that violence makes the world, the types of violence inflicted and experienced as well as the context within which they occur compels certain forms of subjectification. In Violence and Subjectivity Das and Kleinman (2000, 7) make the obvious but important point that people live everyday lives in contexts of violence. Violence is embedded in the ordinary acts of living. Focused work on how violence shapes social practices in violent times but also that endure beyond state violence will greatly contribute to our understanding of how violence as a transformative social practice constructs certain kinds of ordinary selves (Nelson 2009). To conclude, scholars of state violence pose particular ethical and methodological challenges to their home disciplines. Huggins and Glebbeek (2003) point to the power imbalances that result from female scholars working with primarily male “violence workers” such as repressive police agencies or military personnel. For both researchers the gendered dynamics of field work as well as the proximity to still active violence workers placed them at risk of physical and emotional harm (Huggins and Glebbeek 2003). Strategies of collaborative research or efforts to privilege the voice of the informants were unproductive when researching individuals actively involved in state violence. An anthropology of war presents a challenge for social scientists to engage with the pressing social problems posed by state

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violence not just in a descriptive capacity and through the formulation of theoretical insight but also through public engagement and advocacy to point out the causal relationships that produce and are produced by state violence (Waterston 2009, 27). The work of scholars presented in this chapter clearly shows that state violence is a social problem because it is undoubtedly a tool for governance in war and peace. It is because of this that Waterston proses a future where scholarship on state violence as a social problem moves beyond the halls of academe and into policy and governance circles (Waterston 2009, 28).

Rule of law A juridical order that derives its legitimacy from the moral sustenance accrued to it by both ruler and ruled equally. State A territory organized to ostensibly represent a political community. State violence The use of force and/or other intimidation practices by state agents and state institutions typically for the purposes of state-building. Violence The imposition of harm on individuals or communities through the use of force, intimidation or structural impediments by individuals and/or institutions.

References Glossary Counterinsurgency State-sponsored actions taken to thwart the activities of guerrillas, revolutionaries and their sympathizers. Genocide The denial of the right of existence to an entire human group through the use of force, intimidation or structural impediments. Modernity A new sense of self, of subjectivity, of society and individuality that is brought about by the social changes that were first enabled through the processes of industrialization. Neoliberalism A cultural, political and economic project that is centered on the use of market-oriented reform policies and liberal ideologies that give primacy to the individual. Political violence The use of statesponsored assassinations, selective imprisonment, and other tangible terror tactics to ensure the erasure of elements deemed dangerous to the subsistence of the current political order. Postconflict A social, political and economic process that enables the attainment of key markers of peace such as the repatriation of populations, the cessation of military encounters, the disarmament of state and non-state forces, and the effective functioning of state institutions.

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Hall, John A. 1994. Coercion and Consent: Studies on the Modern State. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Han, Clara. 2012. Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hautzinger, Sarah J. 2007. Violence in the City of Women: Police and Batterers in Bahia, Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Herreros, Francisco. 2006. The full weight of the state: The logic of random state sponsored violence. Journal of Peace Studies 43(6)671– 89. Hinton, Alexander Laban, ed. 2002. Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2005. Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holmes, Zeth, and Phillippe Bougois. 2013. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farm Workers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Huggins, Martha Knisely, and Mary-Louise Glebbeek. 2003. Women studying violent male institutions: Cross-gendered dynamics in police research in secrecy and danger. Theoretical Criminology 7(3)363–87. Huggins, Martha Knisely, Mika HaritosFatouros, and Phillipe G. Zimbardo. 2002. Violence Workers: Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities. Berkeley: University of California Press. James, Erica. 2010. Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jelin, Elizabeth. 2003. State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Koonings, Kees, and Dirk Kruijt, eds. 1999. Societies of Fear: The Legacy of Civil War, Violence and Terror in Latin America. London: Zed Books. Kriegel, Blandine. 1995. The State and the Rule of Law. Translated by M. LePain and J. Cohen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laurence, Regina G. 2000. The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lorey, David E., and William H. Beezley, eds. 2002. Genocide, Collective Violence and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance

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state violence Smith, Carol A. ed. 1990. Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540–1988. Austin: University of Texas Press. Taylor, Clark. 1998. Return of Guatemala’s Refugees: Reweaving the Torn. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Torres, M. Gabriela. 2005. Bloody deeds/hechos sangrientos: Reading Guatemala’s record of political violence in cadaver reports. In When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror, edited by Cecilia Menjivar and Néstor Rodríguez, 143–69. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2015. Gender-based violence and the state in Guatemala’s genocide and beyond. In The Anthropology of Gender Based Violence, edited by Jennifer Wies and Hillary Haldane, 59–72. London: Lexington Books. Tottem, Samuel, and William S. Parsons, eds. 2009. A Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.

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Ungar, Mark. 2002. Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. United Nations. 1948. G. A. Res. 260 A (III), Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. December 9. Wacquant, Loїc. 2010. Crafting the neoliberal state: Workfare, prisonfare and social insecurity. Sociological Forum 25(2):197– 220. Waterston, Alisse, ed. 2009. An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline. New York: Berghahn Books. Weld, Kirsten. 2014. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Whitehead, Neil L., and Sverker Finnström, eds. 2013. Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zilberg, Elana. 2011. Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 23

Hate Crime Paul Iganski and Abe Sweiry

Abstract The notion of “hate crime” is well known across North America, Europe, and other parts of the Western world. Hate crimes are offenses recognized to be related to a particular aspect of the victim’s identity – her “race,” skin color, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, sexual identity, gender, or a disability she might have. Hate crime laws have been established to enhance the penalties of convicted offenders compared with those otherwise motivated. This chapter focuses on the significance of social movement activism in framing hate crime as a specific social problem needing to be recognized under criminal law. The significance of hate crime laws for a cultural politics – the construction of a counternarrative against the attitudes and values in which hate crime is predicated – is also considered.

The Meaning of Hate Crime The term “hate crime” has been adopted by a small number of nations and some supranational organizations primarily in the Western world. Hate crime laws impose harsher penalties on convicted hate crime offenders as compared with offenders in otherwise identical crimes, but where officially proscribed hatreds are absent. In this chapter we focus on the genesis of such laws and particularly on the role that social movements have played in framing hate crime as a social problem deserving of specific legislative intervention. We also critically analyze the purpose and function

of hate crime laws. We argue that these laws have been integral to a cultural politics that seeks to weaken the cultural foundations of the problem of hate crime. Because the term “hate crime” is characterized by confusion and conceptual disarray, it is instructive to review some of the ways that hate crime is officially defined and to try to bring some clarity to the matter. Such clarity is helpful for documenting the emergence of the concept of hate crime and its recognition as a social problem. The conceptualization of offenses considered to be hate crimes has its origins in the United States. Since 1992, the Federal

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Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been publishing hate crime statistics. The FBI defines hate crime as “a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias.” It notes that:

that responsibility was passed to the newly established Ministry of Justice in 2007) first used the word “hate” when it adopted the term hate crime. It defined hate crime on its website as

For the purposes of collecting statistics, Congress has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.”1

any criminal offence committed against a person or property that is motivated by an offender’s hatred of someone because of their race, colour, ethnic origin, nationality or national origins, religion, gender, or gender identity, sexual orientation, disability.

Most states in the United States have hate crime laws. And a federal law – the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act – passed in 2009, criminalizes willfully causing bodily injury (or attempting to do so with fire, firearm, or other dangerous weapon) when: (1) the crime was committed because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin of any person or (2) the crime was committed because of the actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of any person and the crime affected interstate or foreign commerce or occurred within federal special maritime and territorial jurisdiction.2

This definition does not use the word “bias” that is present in the US Congress definition cited by the FBI. Instead, it uses the phrase “because of,” as in “the crime was committed because of . . . ” Thus, in the United States, where the notion of hate crime was born, different official definitions are used. It is also of note that the word “hate” does not appear in either description. Its strange absence is similarly evident in official definitions of hate crime outside the United States. Contrary to federal and states legislation in the United States, in the United Kingdom, the term “hate crime” does not appear in the title or text of any laws. Nevertheless, the term has been embraced enthusiastically by the criminal justice system. The UK Home Office (the Ministry that formerly had lead responsibility for criminal justice;

But the word “hatred” was replaced with “hostility” and “prejudice.” Hate crime is now defined as “any criminal offence that is motivated by hostility or prejudice based upon the victim’s disability, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation, transgender” (the term “gender” in the initial definition has also been dropped).3 Elsewhere in Europe, at a cross-national level, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has led policy initiatives on monitoring and policing hate crime. On its web pages, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights defines hate crimes as criminal acts motivated by bias or prejudice towards particular groups of people. To be considered a hate crime, the offence must meet two criteria: first, the act must constitute an offence under criminal law; second, the act must have been motivated by bias.4

Again, the term “hate” is oddly absent from the indicated motivation, and “bias” and “prejudice” are preferred instead. Why the reluctance to use the word “hate” in defining so-called hate crime? Is it any more ambiguous than the words “prejudice” or “bias” that have been preferred? Arguably, this is not the case. It is perhaps the clarity of the meaning of the word “hate” that has led to its demise in conceptualizations of hate crime. Gordon Allport, in his highly influential book, The Nature of Prejudice, provided a clear operationalization of hate. He distinguished between hate and anger, comparing the two concepts. Anger, according to Allport, “is a transitory

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emotional state, aroused by thwarting some ongoing activity.” By comparison, hatred is a persistent state of mind, not a fleeting emotion. Allport defined hatred as an enduring organization of aggressive impulses toward a person or toward a class of persons. Since it is composed of habitual bitter feeling and accusatory thought, it constitutes a stubborn structure in the mental-emotional life of the individual. (Allport [1954] 1979, 363)

To emphasize the difference between anger and hate, following Allport’s conceptualization, we might think in terms of being in the heat of anger, and by contrast think of “cold hatred”; the latter is not a short-lived emotional condition, but an enduring state of mind. There is, of course, a problem in thinking about hatred in this way. If what is to be classed as hate crime is solely informed by Allport’s conceptualization of hatred, then hate crime offenders would be only the most extreme bigots – those with enduring aggressive impulses against particular social identities – who either deliberately victimize the targets of their hate or seize upon any opportunity to do so. While the limited research evidence indicates that there are such offenders – committing what Levin and McDevitt (1993) famously coined as “mission hate crimes” – they are arguably only a small proportion of those responsible for acts of hate crime. Instead, the majority of hate crime perpetrators are ordinary persons who express commonly held prejudices, stereotypes, and disparaging attitudes and who offend in the unfolding context of their everyday lives (Iganski 2008). Given that most hate crime offenders manifest sentiments other than hate there is a conceptual ambiguity at the very heart of the notion of hate crime. As a result, scholarly texts on the subject typically begin with a chapter exploring the concept and agonizing over the causal nexus between hate and crime.5 For instance, in opening their book Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics Jacobs and Potter argue that “‘Hate crime’ is not really about hate, but

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about bias or prejudice” (Jacobs and Potter 1998, 11). Early on in Punishing Hate Frederick Lawrence states that he prefers to use the term bias rather than hate to stress that “the key factor in a bias crime is not the perpetrator’s hatred of the victim per se, but rather his bias or prejudice toward that victim” (Lawrence 1999, 9). Nathan Hall – one of the foundational scholars in the field of hate crime studies in the United Kingdom – also prefers the label “prejudice,” stating in the introductory chapter to his book Hate Crime that “for the most part it is prejudice and not hate that we refer to when we talk about hate crime” (Hall 2013, 9). While there is agreement among these scholars that hate rarely makes an appearance in so-called hate crime, and that the perhaps more inclusive terms of “prejudice” and “bias” are preferred, ambiguities remain. Prejudice and bias are arguably no less-slippery to define than hate. They also introduce a problem not endemic to the notion of hate: prejudice and bias can either be for or against something. We can be prejudiced in favor of something and biased against something. There is a further problem with the notion of hate crime. Acts of direct violence are prohibited in all nations. However, only in a few of them are some such acts classified as hate crime – by law or by criminal justice agencies. Some scholars (cf. Iganski and Levin 2015) therefore prefer the term “hate violence,” especially when analyzing the problem across different jurisdictions where there has been variable adoption of the term ‘hate crime.’

Shaping Hate Crime as a Social Problem Given the reluctance to use the word hate in conceptualizations of hate crime, it seems pertinent to inquire as to how the term came about. The articulation of hate crime as a distinct type of social problem began in the United States in the late 1970s. The problem was publicized by advocacy and rights organizations dedicated to

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drawing attention, and seeking a response, to violence associated with particular social identities. Social movement activism, emerging from the civil rights, women’s, and the gay and lesbian movements, along with an emerging crime victims’ movement, was instrumental in framing hate crime as a specific social problem that required legislative intervention (Jenness and Broad 1997; Jenness and Grattet 1996, 2001). A number of prominent civil society organizations – including the AntiDefamation League (ADL), the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence (NIAVP), the Center for Democratic Renewal, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce (NGLTF) – demanded legal and civil remedies to identity-based violence (Jenness and Grattet 2001). These organizations initially approached the problem with partisan objectives in mind.6 However, their shared concerns for the recognition of identity-based violence and parallel drives for intervention, brought them together under the hate crime banner. The effect of the emerging hate crime movement was to announce the widespread nature of hate violence. It documented and publicized undetected and unreported violence – also strategically spotlighting cases of extreme violence – in order to leverage political and institutional support. (The spotlighting of cases of extreme hate violence has continued to be a key strategy of civil society activists within and beyond the United States.) Some critics, such as Jacobs and Henry (1996), disputed the assertion of hate crime as an accelerating and urgent social problem. They did, however, recognize that there was a “greater intolerance of prejudice” (391). Therefore, irrespective of their belief in its accuracy, critics also saw the developing notion of a hate crime “epidemic” as being instrumental in driving the clamor for “remedial actions, resources, and reparations” (391). If the successes of the burgeoning hate crime social movement are to be measured purely in terms of achieving recognition for the social problem and in getting the legis-

lature and criminal justice agencies to take it seriously, then the successes have been significant. At the state level hate crime laws spread rapidly. Though there were variations and inconsistencies concerning which social identities and characteristics afforded protection (Grattet, Jenness, and Curry 1998), the ADL’s model statute provided a consistent basis for over half of the hate crime legislation enacted by the states. Gains were also made at the Federal level. The expressive function of hate crime laws (Beale 2000) along with the symbolic significance of using civil litigation to target hate groups (Braithwaite 1996) signaled that a cultural and institutional shift had occurred (Maroney 1998, 568–69). Gaining recognition and acceptance of hate crime as a social problem was seen by some analysts as a success. McVeigh et al. (2003, 848), for example, argued that recorded hate crimes should be viewed as a successful social movement outcome and a validation by authorities of the “claims and demands asserted by various civil rights organizations.” Outside the United States the adoption of the notion of hate crime began in the United Kingdom in the late 1990s. Today the term has been fully adopted by many civil society activists and by the criminal justice system in the United Kingdom. Notably, though, it is not used in any legislation (Hall 2013, 8). Provisions against racially aggravated offenses were established by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. This has been coined as the United Kingdom’s “first bias crime law” (Lawrence 2002, 44) and as “the longeststanding British version of a hate crime law” (Iganski 2002, 2). Similar to hate crime laws in the United States, the Act provides for penalty enhancement in cases of racially aggravated offenses as compared with otherwise identical crimes without such aggravation. The 1998 provisions were the result of the convergence of a number of factors: a political will for action following a change from a Conservative to a Labour government the previous year; media publicity of some cases of extreme

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racist violence; and claims about criminal justice failures in the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black man who was the victim of a racially motivated attack in London in 1993. Antiracist organizations, campaigning groups, and victim rights organizations also played a key role in framing racist violence as a serious problem requiring action. A number of campaigning and community organizations helped to push the problem of racist violence onto the public and political agenda beginning in the 1970s. One such organization, the Joint Committee Against Racialism (JCAR), launched in 1978, represented a broad spectrum coalition that included church leaders, leading immigrant organizations, a number of ethnic minority organizations such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Commission for Racial Equality (a non-departmental public body), and the main political parties. The JCAR coalition proved to be influential, ensuring that “[r]acist violence no longer appeared to be a marginal issue that could be ignored” (Witte 1996, 58). In practical terms, by compiling data on racial attacks and lobbying the government to act, JCAR proved instrumental in establishing the first official study of racial attacks and harassment by the Home Office in 1981 (Home Office 1981). This began the path of establishing racist violence as a serious policy issue in the United Kingdom (Bowling 1998, 51, 151). Subsequently, the contours, scale, and significance of racial attacks and harassment became better understood during the 1980s and 1990s, slowly increasing the pressure for legislative action. Notably, however, recognition of the problem of racist violence was not framed in the language of hate crime. The term was not used in the 1998 legislative provisions for racially aggravated crimes. Likewise, it was not used in the key reports and public inquiries on racist violence in the two decades preceding the legislation. It was also absent from much of the scholarly analysis of racist violence in the United Kingdom at the time (see, e.g., Bowling 1998; Virdee 1995; Witte 1996).

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Subsequent adoption of the label “hate crime” for racially aggravated offenses appears to have been the product of parallel efforts by lobbyists, campaign groups, and rights advocates to press the case for action against other forms of social identity–based violence. From interviews with a number of “leading policy makers, senior management and criminal justice officials, and campaign group lobbyists” who were perceived to have a “role in formatting and developing hate crime policy,” Mason-Bish (2009, 302) concluded that “the role of social movement activists was central to how policy was defined and expanded to include other victim groups” and that “[t]ypically, this involved using the language of ‘hate crime’ as a symbolic and powerful term, which could gain serious attention” (303). In essence, the term served as a useful brand to attract attention to the problem. However, some antiracist activists, according to Mason-Bish, were not keen on using it for racist violence because it took the spotlight off the problem of racist attacks.7 Nevertheless, the term hate crime became increasingly used in news media reporting beginning in the late 1990s.8 The primary focus of such news reports though was on homophobic violence. Parallel to the increasing use of the term by those seeking legislative intervention against homophobic violence in the United Kingdom, the police made a noticeable contribution to the adoption of the concept. Today, most police forces in the United Kingdom have specialist hate crime officers, the College of Policing which leads professional practice has published hate crime operational guidance (College of Policing 2014), and the Association of Chief Police Officers has its own online hate crime reporting site – True Vision. Finally, in taking this overview of social movement activism and the contribution made by state actors in framing hate crime as a social problem on both sides of the Atlantic, it might be proposed that the promotion of hate crime laws has involved a process of the legislation of morality, which according to Gail Mason (2014)

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seeks to use the criminal law to challenge “the norms and moral boundaries” (on this point, see also Iganski 2008), or in other words, the cultural contexts, in which hate crime is nested. Mason has proposed that the potential success of “the moral work of hate crime laws,” and more broadly of cultural politics, depends on the capacity of the targeted groups to “engender compassionate thinking that challenges prejudiced values and attitudes towards them” (Mason 2014, 2). Given this perspective, it might be concluded that the anti–hate crime movement has been successful not only in framing hate crime as a social problem, but in presenting victims as morally deserving of particular attention under criminal law and by criminal justice systems.

Contribution of the Academy to Framing Hate Crime as a Social Problem A number of academics who have embraced and utilized hate crime as a concept have also been instrumental in constructing hate crime victims as being particularly deserving of protection under the law. Arguably, Robert J. Kelly’s (1991) edited volume Bias Crime: American Law Enforcement and Legal Responses, Gregory Herek and Kevin Berrill’s (1992) edited work Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence against Lesbians and Gay Men, and Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt’s (1993) Hate Crime: A Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed provided the foundational scholarly works for the framing of hate crime as a social problem in the United States. In the United Kingdom, informed by hate crime scholarship in the United States, first-generation foundations for a field of hate crime studies was provided by Paul Iganski’s (2002) edited volume The Hate Debate, Nathan Hall’s (2005) Hate Crime, Iganski’s (2008) Hate Crime and the City, and Neil Chakraborti and Jon Garland’s (2009) Hate Crime: Impact Causes and Responses. Herek and Berrill’s book, along with work by Howard Ehrlich and colleagues,

set a path of research documenting the impact and consequences of hate crime victimization – and notably, a potentially more pronounced emotional and psychological impact compared with non-hate crimes. Since that time, understanding about the postvictimization emotional and psychological trauma of hate crime has been accumulating. It has helped shape the articulation of hate crime as a distinct social problem worthy of concern. Early pioneering work on the impact and consequences of hate crime victimization was undertaken by Howard Ehrlich and colleagues in the United States in the late 1980s. In one project they conducted a national telephone interview survey with a stratified random sample of 2,078 respondents. Over 6.5 percent of respondents reported at least one experience in the past year of what Ehrlich and colleagues referred to as “ethnoviolence” rather than hate crime. Notably, the notion of harm to victims lay at the core of their conceptualization of ethnoviolence, which they defined as “prejudiced behaviour which causes, or is intended to cause, physical and psychological harm to its victims” (Ehrlich et al. 1994, 153). It was striking that victims of ethnoviolence were more likely than victims of other violence in the survey to report psychophysiological symptoms. The evident pattern of difference between ethnoviolence victims and victims of otherwise motivated violence was replicated in a 1991 survey by Ehrlich and colleagues of violence in the corporate workplace. They note that “the trauma took its toll on interpersonal relations as well: the loss of friends, anger with family members, and difficulties with significant others” (163). Other pioneering research on the emotional and psychological impact of hate crime was undertaken by Gregory Herek et al. in the late 1990s. From a questionnaire survey of 2,259 lesbian, gay men, and bisexual respondents in the Sacramento area of California, Herek, Gillis, and Cogan (1999) showed that recent hate crime victimization (which they categorized as within five years prior to the survey) appeared to be “associated with greater psychological

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distress for gay men and lesbians” and negative world views, compared with victimization in non-hate motivated crime. Research findings about the greater likelihood of hate crime victims to report emotional and psychological distress were subsequently confirmed by other researchers in the United States. Notably, McDevitt and colleagues (2001), with the cooperation of the Boston police department, conducted a mail survey of all victims of bias-motivated aggravated assault between 1992 and 1997 along with a random sample of victims of non-bias assaults. The study found that hate crime victims reported negative “psychological sequelae more often than the non-bias control group on every item we measured” (McDevitt et al. 2001, 709). However, the researchers cautioned that their limited sample size and consequently non-representative sample raised questions about generalizability. Later research conducted in Britain overcame these methodological limitations by using large random samples of victims, multivariate analyses, and multiple controls, with British Crime Survey data, and demonstrated that hate crime victims are more likely to report postvictimization emotional and psychological impacts – even when controlling for the type of crime (Iganski 2008; Botcherby et al. 2011). This body of research also extended the analysis to the impacts suffered by victims of disablist crime (cf. Nocon et al. 2011). Parallel with this field of research that has framed hate crime as a distinct social problem by evidencing its potentially differential impact upon victims, a significant amount of research has been undertaken on both sides of the Atlantic drawing out the qualitative dimensions of the impact. In the United Kingdom, the Leicester Hate Crime Project has provided some further substantial qualitative evidence about the impact of hate crime (Chakraborti et al. 2014). In total, the scholarly research, which has evidenced the potentially greater impact of victimization on hate crime victims compared with victims of otherwise motivated crime, has also contributed, to again apply

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Gail Mason’s (2014) analysis, to the construction of hate crime victims as morally deserving of special attention under criminal law and by criminal justice agencies.

Discussion and Conclusion: Hate Crime Law as Cultural Politics The success of the hate crime movement in influencing the criminalization of hate crime has not been without its critics – even among those who have shared concerns about the urgency of the problem. Some have considered as unacceptable or problematic the alliance of advocates for the marginalized, disenfranchised and discriminated-against social groups with those promoting a punitive approach to societal problems. Maroney (1998), for instance, maintained that “[b]y becoming too wedded to the institutions of criminal justice, the movement loses both its power and its potential” and should “revisit its initial impulse: to challenge systemic bias against hate crime victims and target communities” (617). Addressing the fundamental question of whether a punitive approach was appropriate, Petersen challenged the LGBT movement’s focus on hate crime legislation rather than on prevention and addressing the underlying cultural causes which she believed generated “queer-bashers” (Petersen 1991, 251). Petersen questioned whether a retributive response could realistically provide an effective deterrent. She highlighted the reluctance of many victims of homophobic hate crimes to report their victimization to the police and expressed concerns about police and judicial responses that had included trivialization, indifference, and even brutality against victims of hate violence. Petersen (1991, 252) proposed that “[d]econstructing the foundations of cultural heterosexism may be an arduous and slow process, but it will ultimately be more effective and less dangerous than attempting simply to legislate against hate.” Activists working for victims of hate violence also have divergent views about the

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value of hate crime laws. In a UK study (Gill and Mason-Bish 2013) of grassroots workers supporting and advocating for female victims of male violence, some respondents stressed the symbolic significance of hate crime law. They highlighted the structural inequalities underpinning violence against women, and the possibility that inclusion in hate crime law might carry “rhetorical power,” sending a message to society challenging patriarchy and the widespread misogyny that helps to perpetuate violence against women (Gill and Mason-Bish 2013, 9). On balance, inclusion of violence against women under hate crime law was favored by a majority of participants in the study – despite expressed concerns about problems of practical implementation of the law. Consequently, Gill and Mason-Bish (2013), pointing to the communicative function of hate crime law, concluded that this “finding speaks forcefully to the premium placed on the power of hate crime legislation to challenge many forms of inequality and discrimination still endemic in British society” (17). The symbolic communicative function of hate crime law and its potential cannot be overstated. This is because of the cultural context that underpins hate violence. Such violence is nested in cultures of bigotry, prejudice, stereotypes, and narratives about difference – real or imagined. There is arguably a common denominator to hate violence. It is spawned in cultures of endemic attitudes and values about particular social identities which socially construct them as different or the “other” in an extremely negative manner. The attitudes and sentiments manifest in hate violence are based on what Perry (2001, 46) has called “deeply embedded notions of difference”: widespread denigration of the communities that are commonly the targets of the violence – people from minority ethnic, religious and national communities, asylum seekers, migrants, LGBTQ and transgender people, women, and people with disabilities. Perry has influentially conceptualized such violence as “doing difference” (cf. Perry 2001, 41).

The presence of cultural attitudes of denigration on the basis of social identity appears to be pervasive and universal, although the precise targets differ according to the local contexts. These cultural attitudes and values encourage and support, sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously, oppressive social practices ranging from unequal respect to unequal opportunity, to discriminatory treatment, to emotional and verbal abuse, to direct acts of physical violence. Such practices are not only the visible expression of the underlying values that inform them, the practices themselves sustain and reinforce the cultural context by rendering it visible, by drawing attention to the prevalence of attitudes and values which underpin violence and other oppressive practices. There is, therefore, a symbiotic, mutually reinforcing, relationship between culture and action (Perry 2001, 53). Given the cultural contexts in which hate violence is nested, it is not a matter of psychological pathology. Perpetrators are entirely rational given the denigration of the victim’s identity (Perry 2005, 125–26). Hate violence is an act of power: the perpetrators are asserting their place above the victim. They are acting out cultural values which they have internalized. It might be more comforting to characterize offenders’ actions as deviant, irrational, and pathological behavior – as the domain of a few “extremists” on the margins of society. However, the violence is part of the culture – the way of life – of the society in which it is expressed. Challenging hate violence necessitates challenging the cultural values that spawned it. In this context, the law can potentially play a crucial role in constructing resistant narratives against the attitudes and values, or in other words the cultures, on which hate violence is predicated. Law and culture are deeply interwoven. Law can provide a narrative of how a society visualizes itself and envisions relations between its members. Law therefore not only sends a message of condemnation of hateful behavior, it is itself the message. Laws against hate crime are a vital

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component of the counternarrative against the cultural values in which hate violence is nested.

Glossary Bias An inclination for or against someone or something. Cultural politics Action aimed at transforming social attitudes and values. Hatred Persistent and intense disdain and accusatory thought. Prejudice Preconceived inaccurate attitudes and views not based on evidence or experience.

Notes 1. www.fbi.gov/investigate/civil-rights/hatecrimes#Definition. 2. www.justice.gov/crt/matthew-shepard-andjames-byrd-jr-hate-crimes-prevention-act -2009-0. 3. http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ +//www.homeoffice.gov.uk/crime-victims/ reducing-crime/hate-crime/. 4. http://hatecrime.osce.org/what-hate-crime. 5. A particularly helpful discussion with greater depth than can be offered in these introductory comments is provided by Nathan Hall (2013, 1–18). 6. The ADL for example, had the primary concern that anti-Semitic crimes were on the rise and that “[s]omething new was needed” as the “traditional responsive components – media exposure, education, and more effective law enforcement – were not proving sufficient” (Freeman 1992, 581). 7. There is absence of any major evidence in the UK press in the 1990s to suggest that antiracist activists had adopted the term “hate crime.” This supports the contention of Mason-Bish on the basis of her interviews with policy makers, criminal justice officials and lobbyists that while antiracist organizations may have had a clear role in supporting, if not driving, a legislative response to racist attacks, they were not at the forefront of applying the term “hate crime” as a descriptor or at the forefront of initial attempts to take an inclusive approach to identity violence that brought together dif-

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ferent strands of victimization under the banner of “hate crime.” 8. We conducted an analysis for this chapter of UK national newspaper articles that contained the term “hate crime” from its first apparent appearance in the press in 1990 until the end of 2001, the year when legal provisions were extended to include religiously aggravated offenses. Seemingly the first instance of the term “hate crime” by the UK media discussed a campaign by gay rights activists, “spurred” by the US Federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act, to have “queer bashing” and their wider concerns for equality taken more seriously by authorities (Mills 1990). Later, other news pieces used the term “hate crimes,” or in one case “sex hate crimes,” in discussions of homophobic murders and violence or in discussions of social activism around specific cases and the problem in general.

References Allport, Gordon W. [1954] 1979. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Beale, Sara Sun. 2000. Federalizing hate crimes: Symbolic politics, expressive law, or tool for criminal enforcement. Boston University Law Review 80:1227–81. Botcherby, Susan, Fiona Glen, Paul Iganski, Karen Jochelson, and Spyridoula Lagou. 2011. Equality Groups’ Perceptions and Experience of Crime. Analysis of the British Crime Survey 2007–08, 2008–09 and 2009–10. Briefing Paper 4. London: Equality and Human Rights Commission. Bowling, Benjamin. 1998. Violent Racism: Victimization, Policing and Social Context. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Braithwaite, David G. 1996. Combatting hate crimes: The use of civil alternatives to criminal prosecutions. Boston University Public Interest Law Journal 6:243. Chakraborti, Neil, and Jon Garland. 2009. Hate Crime. Impact, Causes and Responses. London: Sage. Chakraborti, Neil, Jon Garland, and StevieJade Hardy. 2014. The Leicester Hate Crime Project. Findings and Conclusions. Leicester, UK: University of Leicester. College of Policing. 2014. Hate Crime Operational Guidance. Coventry, UK: College of Policing.

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Ehrlich, Howard J., Barbara E. K. Larcom, and Robert D. Purvis. 1994. The traumatic effects of ethnoviolence. Reprinted in Hate and Bias Crime. A Reader, edited by Barbara Perry, 153–70. New York: Routledge. Freeman, Steven M. 1992. Hate crime laws: Punishment which fits the crime. Annual Survey of American Law 581–85. Gill, Aisha K., and Hannah Mason-Bish. 2013. Addressing violence against women as a form of hate crime: Limitations and possibilities. Feminist Review 105:1–20. Grattet, Ryken, Valerie Jenness, and Theodore R. Curry. 1998. The homogenization and differentiation of hate crime law in the United States, 1978 to 1995: Innovation and diffusion in the criminalization of bigotry. American Sociological Review 63(2):286–307. Hall, Nathan. 2005. Hate Crime. Cullompton, UK: Willan. 2013. Hate Crime. 2nd ed. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Herek, Gregory M., and Kevin T. Berrill, eds. 1992. Hate Crimes. Confronting Violence against Lesbians and Gay Men. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Herek, Gregory M., J. Roy Gillis, and Jeanine C. Cogan. 1999. Psychological sequelae of hate crime victimization among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology 67:945–51. Home Office. 1981. Racial attacks. Report of a Home Office study. London: Home Office. Iganski, Paul, ed. 2002. The Hate Debate. London: Profile. 2008. Hate Crime and the City. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Iganski, Paul, and Jack Levin. 2015. Hate Crime. A Global Perspective. New York: Routledge. Jacobs, James B., and Kimberly Potter. 1998. Hate Crimes. Criminal Law and Identity Politics, New York: Oxford University Press. Jacobs, James B., and Jessica S. Henry. 1996. The social construction of a hate crime epidemic. The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 86(2):366–91. Jenness, Valerie, and Kendal Broad. 1997. Hate Crimes: New Social Movements and the Politics of Violence. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Jenness, Valerie, and Ryken Grattet. 1996. The criminalization of hate: A comparison of

structural and polity influences on the passage of bias-crime legislation in the United States. Sociological Perspectives 39(1):129–54. 2001. Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement. New York: Russell Sage. Kelly, Robert J., ed. 1991. Bias Crime. American Law Enforcement and Legal Responses. Chicago: Office of International Criminal Justice, at the University of Illinois Chicago. Lawrence, Frederick M. 1999. Punishing Hate. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2002. Racial violence on a “small island”: Bias crime in a multicultural society. In The Hate Debate, edited by Paul Iganski, 36–53. London: Profile. Levin, Jack, and Jack McDevitt. 1993. Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed. New York: Plenum. Maroney, Terry A. 1998. Struggle against hate crime: Movement at a crossroads. NYU Law Review 73:564–620. Mason, Gail. 2014. The symbolic purpose of hate crime law: Ideal victims and emotion. Theoretical Criminology 18(1):75–92. Mason-Bish, Hannah. 2009. Hate crime in Great Britain: Establishing, expanding and exploring a policy domain. PhD thesis, University of Essex, UK. McDevitt, Jack., Jennifer Balboni, Luis Garcia, and Joann Gu. 2001. Consequences for victims: A comparison of bias and nonbias motivated assaults. American Behavioral Scientist 45(4):697–713. McVeigh, Rory, Michael R. Welch, and Thoroddur Bjarnason. 2003. Hate crime reporting as a successful social movement outcome. American Sociological Review 68(6):843–67. Mills, Heather. 1990. A recent London street killing has heightened concerns over “queerbashing.” The Independent. May 14. Moran, Leslie J., and Andrew N. Sharpe. 2004. Violence, identity and policing: The case of violence against transgender people. Criminal Justice 4(4):395–417. Nocon, Andrew, Paul Iganski, and Spyridoula Lagou. 2011. Disabled People’s Experiences and Concerns about Crime. Briefing Paper 4. Manchester, UK: Equality and Human Rights Commission. Perry, Barbara. 2001. In the Name of Hate. New York: Routledge.

hate crime 2005. A crime by any other name: The semantics of “hate.” Journal of Hate Studies 4(1): 121–37. Petersen, Cynthia. 1991. A queer response to bashing: Legislating against hate. Queen’s Law Journal 16:237–60. Shenk, Alyssa H. 2001. Victim-offender mediation: The road to repairing hate crime injustice. Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution 17:185–217. Spade, Jane, and Craig Willse. 2000. Confronting the limits of gay hate crimes activism: A radical critique. Chicano-Latino Law Review 21:38–52.

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Taylor, Damon Henderson. 1999. Civil litigation against hate groups hitting the wallets of the nation’s hate-mongers. Buffalo Public Interest Interest Law Journal 18:95–145. Virdee, Satnam. 1995. Racial Violence and Harassment. London: Policy Studies Institute. Waxman, Barbara Faye. 1991. Hatred: The unacknowledged dimension in violence against disabled people. Sexuality and Disability 9(3):185–99. Witte, Rob. 1996. Racist Violence and the State. London: Longman.

CHAPTER 24

Police Brutality Malcolm D. Holmes∗

Abstract Police brutality (excessive force) causes significant physical and psychological harm to victims, entails considerable financial costs to communities, and undermines the legitimacy of the institution of policing. The victims of police brutality in the United States are disproportionately black or Hispanic. Attempts to explain the relationship of race/ethnicity to police brutality have relied on two distinct theoretical approaches. Traditional perspectives locate the causes of police brutality primarily in the institution of policing, whereas conflict perspectives maintain that police brutality reflects racial/ethnic divisions of the larger society. This chapter explicates these theoretical perspectives, reviews the empirical evidence regarding their predictions about race/ethnicity and police brutality, and discusses the policy implications of research findings. Extant studies provide stronger support for the conflict argument. Yet recommendations to reduce police brutality have focused on changing police agencies and practices in line with the traditional approach. Broader social changes that alleviate the socioeconomic disadvantages experienced by many black and Hispanic citizens, in conjunction with meaningful efforts to improve policing, may ultimately mitigate the problem.

Introduction Maintaining social order demands that societies employ coercion to control law violators and dissidents who challenge ∗

The author thanks Rod Brunson and Christopher Holmes for helpful comments on a draft of this chapter. He remains fully responsible for the analyses and interpretations presented herein.

existing social arrangements (Weber [1922] 1968). Complex societies entrust the police with a major part in the exercise of coercive control. In modern democracies the core of the police role is the legitimate ability to use force to protect citizens and officers from the dangerous people in their midst (Bittner 1970). At the same time, when a substantial degree of social inequality exists, such as in the United States, policing

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implicitly entails protecting social arrangements that advantage privileged segments of the society. Groups perceived as special threats to the status quo, especially racial and ethnic minorities, may bear the brunt of coercive control by the police (Holmes and Smith 2008). Certainly many black and Hispanic citizens believe they are treated unfairly by the police (e.g., Brunson 2007), and police brutality is at the heart of their concerns (e.g., National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School [NAACP] 1995). While citizens often apply the term loosely to various types of improper police behavior (e.g., use of racial epithets, searches without cause), from the standpoint of law excessive force most clearly constitutes police brutality (Locke 1996). Occurring “under color of authority, without lawful necessity” (Locke 1996, 130), such force ranges from relatively minor infractions, such as “roughing up” uncooperative or disrespectful suspects, to unjustifiable homicides. Excessive force may cause serious physical and psychological harm to individual victims, and it may also damage police-minority relations in the larger community. Allegations of excessive force involving citizens of color may be relatively commonplace in the United States, but usually the nation takes notice only after they ignite civil disorder. These high-profile cases typically elicit competing claims about the lawfulness of the police action, heighten racial/ethnic tensions in the community, undermine police legitimacy, and drain government resources (Holmes and Smith 2008). The deaths of black citizens at the hands of police in Baltimore, Maryland, Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City, during 2014–15, exemplify this pattern. Each of these cases involved questionable circumstances and allegations of impropriety, and black and white citizens were sharply divided on the question of whether the killings were justifiable (e.g., New York Times 2014). A number citizens took to the streets to demonstrate their anger over the police killings in Baltimore and Ferguson,

resulting in significant damage to the communities (e.g., Huffington Post 2015). While not triggering major civil unrest, the case in New York City resulted in a settlement of 5.9 million dollars in the lawsuit filed by the victim’s family (Goodman 2015). Every year cities pay out many millions of dollars to settle lawsuits alleging police use of excessive force. Clearly police brutality poses a serious, albeit controversial, social problem in US society. Yet, in stark contrast to the vast literature on crime in minority communities, surprisingly little systematic empirical research has focused on this issue. This chapter critically reviews the available social scientific evidence to assess what we know about police brutality involving blacks and Hispanics, who are thought to be disproportionately targeted by police. Several key issues are addressed. What are the historical roots of police brutality? What are the causes of police brutality in contemporary society? Are minority citizens in fact systematically targeted by the police today? If so, what are the prospects for ameliorating the problem?

Historical Context of Police Brutality The homogeneous communities of early colonial America relied on interpersonal relations to build informal systems of social control to maintain order and deal with criminals (Walker 1998). With the growth of towns and development of cities, informal means of control gave way to somewhat more formal mechanisms, such as constabularies and night watches, that relied on part-time, voluntary participation by citizens. Such systems persisted well into the nineteenth century, when accelerating industrialization, urbanization, and immigration began fundamentally changing life in US cities. An enormous influx of immigrants created intergroup tensions, which were fueled by historic enmities among various ethnic groups and competition over scarce resources in densely populated

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urban neighborhoods. Large-scale disorder and riots were commonplace during the mid-1800s (Monkkonen 2002; Walker 1998). Existing systems of social control could not adequately respond to problems of urban disorder, leading to calls for the creation of a more effective system backed by the coercive power of the state (Silver 1967). Increasing concern among business elites and more affluent urban citizens about the “dangerous classes” of the poor, ethnic immigrants, and blacks provided the political impetus that culminated in the formation of big-city police departments (Silver 1967; Hahn and Jefferies 2003). Before long, however, local political machines had ensnared big-city police (see, e.g., Haller 1976). In early departments police officer jobs were awarded through a system of patronage (Walker 1977). Prospective officers were often recruited from the neighborhoods in which they would work, and the geographically and administratively decentralized structure of police departments allowed them to become involved in neighborhood affairs and serve the politicians who controlled precinct appointments. Police chiefs were left with little meaningful administrative power over officers on the beat (Fogelson 1977). Police officer qualifications, training and supervision were often minimal, and officers had considerable freedom in carrying out their duties (Haller 1976; Walker 1998). Even so, police officers were expected to maintain order on their beats, but police tactics reflected the racial and ethnic composition of neighborhoods (Walker 1998). Lack of training and supervision, combined with public hostility and ethnic tensions, compelled the police to rely heavily on personal authority to obtain compliance and respect. The police routinely resorted to brute force to establish control in the neighborhoods of the so-called dangerous classes, who often openly challenged police authority. Calls for change began during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when various forms of police brutality and corruption captured public attention. In

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1931, the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (the Wickersham Commission) harshly condemned the use of police brutality in its widely publicized report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement (Walker 1998). Such publicity fostered a movement to improve policing, which was spearheaded by a coalition of political progressives and reform-minded police chiefs. As reform initiatives slowly took hold, the police began to concentrate more on law enforcement and crime control, and less on maintaining order (Fogelson 1977). The structure of police organizations became more centralized, giving greater control to the police chief. Civil service systems for hiring and promotion were implemented, and formal training programs were created to teach recruits how to perform their jobs. Greater supervision and accountability measures were put into place to ensure that officers carried out their duties professionally. In addition to these changes, technological innovations (e.g., patrol cars, two-way radios) significantly altered policing (Walker 1998). For example, motorized patrol eliminated much of the casual contact between police officers and law-abiding citizens. The professional police of the modern era had emerged by the late 1950s. Although the movement toward professionalism profoundly changed US policing, events of the 1960s prompted public scrutiny of the police once again (Uchida 2001). Notably, police were called upon to deal with widespread civil unrest, including civil rights protests and urban riots that brought them into direct conflict with black citizens. In their detailed investigation of the urban unrest that swept through US cities in the late 1960s, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968), better known as the Kerner Commission, identified problems seen throughout the history of policing. These included police brutality and other forms of police misconduct, as well as endemic social and economic disadvantages experienced by blacks in urban neighborhoods. Clearly, the reforms of the early twentieth century were not enough to

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eliminate the most pernicious problems of urban life and policing. Ironically, the trend toward professionalism may have increased the insularity of the police and fostered a distinct occupational subculture embodying their unique interests (Uchida 2001). The primary concern of the police has always been the challenges they face in their day-to-day work on the streets (e.g., Skolnick 1975; Crank 1998), and the movement toward professionalism did little to ameliorate the problems of policing the “dangerous classes.” Today, many blacks and Hispanics reside in inner-city neighborhoods characterized by severe social and economic disadvantages (Massey and Denton 1993; Peterson and Krivo 2010). Policing these neighborhoods poses many challenges, and the coercive strategies employed by police often provoke tension between officers and citizens (Holmes and Smith 2008). Since the 1960s a new reform movement that aims to ameliorate police-minority tensions has taken hold. This round of reforms, which originated from the recommendations of the Kerner Commission, focuses on breaking down the insularity of the police and making them more accountable to the communities they serve (Holmes and Smith 2008). Popular proposals include increasing racial/ethnic diversity in police agencies, developing community policing programs, and establishing civilian review procedures for complaints against police officers. While police agencies have increasingly implemented such policies, high-profile incidents of police brutality involving minority citizens continue to occur. Perhaps the most vexing question regarding police brutality is: Why do highly trained, professional police continue to engage in the behavior? They control the legitimate means of coercion and possess a sophisticated arsenal of non-lethal and lethal weaponry – they need not rely on extralegal force to protect themselves from the dangers they confront on the job. Moreover, severe sanctions may await officers who violate departmental regulations and/or criminal statutes prohibiting the use

of excessive force. It appears police officers have little to gain and much to lose when they turn to police brutality. Scholarly efforts to explain police brutality have taken two distinct approaches. Traditional explanations locate the causes of police brutality primarily in the institution of policing. Alternative conflict explanations maintain police brutality is deeply rooted in a social structure that separates racial/ethnic groups and produces intergroup conflict.

Traditional Perspectives on Police Brutality Research seeking to identify the causes of police brutality first appeared more than a half-century ago (Westley 1953). That work identified police organization as the central cause of racial disparities. Since then scholars have considered how the characteristics of police officers, police encounters with citizens, and police agencies influence its use (e.g., Friedrich 1980; Worden 1996). Conceptual Approaches The first of the traditional explanations of police brutality maintains that individual (psychological) variations among police officers produce different responses to similar situations (Worden 1996). The focus is on individual attributes, particularly factors such as personality traits and background characteristics, that may predict the use of excessive force. Rather than representing a systemic problem of police organization, it is thought that certain types of police officers (e.g., those who are less educated or prejudiced) are prone to using excessive force. The second perspective emphasizes situational (sociological) aspects of policecitizen encounters. This approach focuses on how police behavior is influenced by the situational dynamics of police-citizen interactions and the situational cues officers rely on when deciding how to handle encounters with citizens. Situational exigencies such as

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the race and demeanor of suspects are said to predict the use of excessive force. The third approach focuses on organizational properties of police departments that may encourage the use of excessive force. In this view, formal and informal characteristics of police organizations shape officers’ street-level behavior. For example, the quasi-military structure of police agencies and the occupational subculture of policing may promote police brutality (e.g., Skolnick and Fyfe 1993). Westley’s (1953, 1970) pioneering work on police violence was highly influential in the development of these perspectives. Relying on observations and interviews conducted during 1949–50, Westley studied a police department located in a medium-size industrial city with a large “slum” area and a large black population. Police behavior in the community reflected officers’ concerns about maintaining authority and respect in a hostile work environment. Informal norms of the police subculture shaped their concerns, as well as their responses to citizens. In particular, the police believed that blacks are innately prone to criminality and that they pose a special threat to police authority. Situations eliciting police brutality often involved blacks perceived as being disrespectful to officers. Police felt immune from being sanctioned for relying on gratuitous violence because they saw blacks as lacking the political power to do anything about it. Subsequent scholarship has emphasized characteristics of police organization that contribute to the use of excessive force in minority neighborhoods (e.g., Skolnick and Fyfe 1993). The informal subculture of policing has been an especially prominent focus of research. Oft-noted features of the occupational culture include: solidarity and group loyalty; an “us vs. them” view of the public; suspiciousness and secrecy; intense concern with danger and personal safety; a singular emphasis on crime fighting; and a tendency to stereotype citizens (see, e.g., Crank 1998; Skolnick 1975; Skolnick and Fyfe 1993; Westley 1970). The idea that the police perceive minority attitudes and

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actions as particularly threatening is a pervasive theme in the literature on the police subculture (e.g., Chevigny 1969; Skolnick and Fyfe 1993). A characteristic “working personality” is said to develop among police officers in response to the dangerous and hostile work environments that they confront (Skolnick 1975). They develop a perceptual shorthand that identifies certain kinds of people, those whose demeanor warns of the possibility of violence, as “symbolic assailants.” Such stereotypical imagery broadly portrays minority citizens, particularly those encountered in disadvantaged neighborhoods, as criminally inclined and violent (Holmes and Smith 2008). Given that police behavior is characterized by a high degree of discretion and a low degree of visibility, it is open to being influenced extralegally by such conceptions. Police may mete out informal punishments defined as appropriate in the subculture, including excessive force, to those who fit the stereotype of dangerous people (Skolnick and Fyfe 1993). The ability to use force comprises a central element of police culture (Crank 1998). Both formally and informally, the culture of policing encourages the use of violence to resolve problematic situations. Learning the appropriate situations and means of violence permeates police academy training, which highlights the dangers of the occupation and focuses heavily on self-defense. The use of lethal and non-lethal weapons and techniques consumes a large portion of formal training, and in-service training reemphasizes that instruction. The informal culture stresses the necessity of physical force in police work and encourages its use in situations where it is legally questionable (Bayley and Bittner 1984; Crank 1998; Hunt 1985). Excessive force may be seen as a normal and essential tool for handling citizens who are perceived as threats or are otherwise discredited (Hunt 1985; Skolnick and Fyfe 1993; Westley 1970). The clandestine nature of the behavior and the strict code of secrecy of the police subculture help shield officers from detection when they employ excessive force.

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Research Researchers have relied on the traditional explanations to examine various types of police behavior (e.g., arrest) and have extrapolated from those findings to make predictions about excessive force (e.g., Smith and Holmes 2003; Worden 1996). There is limited research, however, that directly applies these approaches to police brutality. Early research on these explanations of police brutality relied on observational data, which provided the most systematic and reliable evidence until recently. The first large-scale study employed observers to accompany police officers on patrol in high-crime precincts in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, DC, during the summer of 1966 (Black and Reiss 1967). These data revealed that whites were more likely than blacks to be victims of police brutality, and victims were more likely to be assaulted by an officer of their own race (at the time most police officers were white) (Reiss 1968, 1971). Individuals seen as occupying deviant offender roles or who challenged police authority were also more likely to experience police brutality. These findings were inconclusive, however, as the statistical analyses relied on rudimentary cross-classification techniques. A subsequent reanalysis of the data relied on multivariate models that included individual, situational, and organizational predictor variables (Friedrich 1980). The distinction between reasonable and excessive force was treated as a matter of degree, as there were very few observations of excessive force in the data set. The findings showed that prejudice toward blacks had a small effect on the use of force by white officers, as suggested by the individual perspective. Neither the suspect’s nor the officer’s race affected the use of force, although other situational variables indicating citizens’ demeanor toward the police did influence its use. The organizational measure simply involved categorizing the three cities in the study as having traditional, professional, or transitional police departments. The use of force varied only

slightly across the cities after controlling the other predictor variables. Another important observational data set was collected during the summer of 1977 for the Police Services Study (PSS), which examined police use of force in twenty-four police departments located in the Rochester, New York, St. Louis, Missouri, and Tampa-St. Petersburg, Florida, metropolitan areas. Using these data, Smith (1986) analyzed police use of coercive authority (non-dangerous encounters involving use of physical force or threat of force, arrest, or surveillance), a dependent variable that captured both excessive force and lesser police abuses. Of considerable relevance to the situational perspective and the place hypothesis (a conflict perspective discussed below), police were most likely to use coercive authority against black suspects encountered in neighborhoods that were primarily black. Other situational factors, such as suspect antagonism, were also related to the use of coercive authority. Another analysis using the PSS data distinguished between reasonable and improper (excessive or unnecessary) police use of force (Worden 1996). Again consistent with the situational perspective, the findings showed that black and antagonistic suspects were more likely to be targets of improper force. The analysis also included several measures of individual and organizational characteristics, but the results provided little evidence that those factors predicted the use of improper force. Taken together, these studies provide support for the situational explanation of police brutality but not the individual and organizational perspectives. Findings regarding race are, however, somewhat mixed. The susceptibility of observational studies to reactivity effects, the very small number of observed police brutality incidents, and the variations in the measurement of (excessive) force may explain the different findings about race in studies of observational data. Findings from survey research (e.g., Son and Rome 2004; Weitzer 1999; Weitzer and Tuch 2006) and investigations of various independent commissions

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(e.g., Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department 1991; NAACP 1995) more consistently indicate that minority citizens are disproportionately the victims of police brutality, but these data sources are problematic methodologically (Holmes 2000). Survey questions about police brutality are of questionable validity because few citizens possess the legal expertise to recognize the distinction between reasonable and excessive uses of force. Independent commissions have generated a great deal of descriptive evidence, but their lack of systematic research procedures preclude reliable generalizations. Apart from these issues, research relying on the traditional explanations of police brutality has paid little heed to the possibility that socialstructural characteristics of communities may influence the use of excessive force.

Conflict Perspectives on Police Brutality The conflict theory of law maintains that coercive strategies of crime control aim to minimize threats to the interests of powerful segments of society (e.g., Chambliss 2001; Turk 1969). In this view, the experience of economic oppression and legal injustice long shared by blacks and those of Mexican origin make them particularly troublesome populations in the eyes of the dominant group and the police, who perceive them as potential threats to their personal safety and the social order (Holmes and Smith 2008). Conceptual Approaches Widely shared stereotypes associate blacks and those of Mexican origin with serious criminality and violent proclivities (e.g., Bender 2003; Chiricos, Welch, and Gertz 2004; Quillian and Pager 2001). The presence (actual or perceived) of relatively large minority populations may intensify fear/perceived risk of crime victimization among whites (e.g., Chiricos, Hogan, and Gertz 1997; Chiricos, McEntire, and Gertz 2001; Liska, Lawrence, and Sanchirico 1982),

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and police authorities may perceive relative large subordinate minority groups as a substantial problem of social control (Liska and Yu 1992; Turk 1969). Given their shared concerns about minority threat, white citizens and police authorities in cities with relatively large black and Hispanic populations may attempt to use their political influence to promote coercive mechanisms of social control (Smith and Holmes 2003). Mobilization of coercive police control not only helps safeguard existing social arrangements that benefit the powerful–it may also serve the interests of police officers on the street who must deal with citizens perceived as threats to their safety (Holmes 2000; Jacobs and O’Brien 1998; Liska and Yu 1992; Smith and Holmes 2003). In this way, the structural divisions of the larger society, manifested in the formal and informal organization of policed departments, are said to produce a greater propensity for the misuse of force against minority citizens (Chambliss 2001). Empirical research relying on the conflict approach is broadly grounded in terms of the threat hypothesis (Holmes 2000; Smith and Holmes 2003), which stipulates that “the greater the number of acts or people threatening to the interests of the powerful, the greater the level of deviance and crime control” (Liska 1992, 18). Tests of the hypothesis have relied on city-level data to examine how the percentage of minorities in the population influence the use of various legal and extralegal coercive controls by the police. An important conceptual and analytical issue posed by this approach concerns whose interests are served by the use of excessive force. One variant of the approach is the powerthreat hypothesis, which maintains that the dominant group will increasingly use its political influence to mobilize resources of social control as a minority group becomes relatively larger and is seen as an increasing threat (Blalock 1967). However, in cities where blacks or Hispanics represent numerical majorities (e.g., Detroit, Michigan, El Paso, Texas, Miami, Florida, Washington, DC), they may become capable of effectively mobilizing resources on their own

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behalf. Their greater political power would be expected to reduce police the use of excessive force (Smith and Holmes 2014), which black and Hispanic citizens see as supporting dominant interests (NAACP 1995). Therefore, an initially positive relationship between the percentage of blacks or Hispanics in the population and the incidence of excessive force should exist, which will turn negative at approximately 50 percent minority population. Conversely, the minority threat hypothesis maintains a linear relationship between percentage of minorities in the population and the incidence of excessive force would be expected if streetlevel police behavior reflects primarily the concerns of the police (Smith and Holmes 2014). The police constitute a distinct social group with unique interests that do not always coincide with, nor can be dictated by, the interests of politically powerful groups in the larger community. If the police perceive minority citizens as proximate threats to their well-being, relatively large black or Hispanic populations may amplify their perception of risk and increase their willingness to employ excessive force irrespective of political opposition from minority citizens. While the presence of relatively large minority populations in cities predicts a higher incidence of excessive force, ecological characteristics of cities may also determine police responses to minority citizens. The place hypothesis maintains that residential segregation of black and Hispanic (especially Mexican-origin) populations increases police officers’ proclivity to employ excessive force (Holmes and Smith 2008, 2012; Smith and Holmes 2014). Disadvantaged black and Hispanic populations are heavily concentrated in segregated neighborhoods in US cities (e.g., Peterson and Krivo 2010). Whites may perceive disadvantaged minorities residing in segregated neighborhoods as special threats to the social order (see Wooldredge 2007), and the control and containment of citizens residing in such neighborhoods may thus serve dominant interests (e.g., Spitzer 1975). Perhaps more importantly, the use of coercive control serves the interests of police who patrol

those neighborhoods. The social isolation, poverty, crime, weapon availability, violence, and social disorder/incivilities characteristic of those locales may pose objective threats to police officers (see, e.g., Anderson 1999; Massey and Denton 1993; Peterson and Krivo 2010; Skogan 1990). Insofar as it can be used relatively freely with little exposure to detection and punishment, excessive force may be an efficacious tool for policing disadvantaged minority neighborhoods. Most of the time these actions carry little risk for officers, as they are usually employed clandestinely, involve less serious uses of force, and leave little evidence after the fact. On occasion, however, police use of excessive force cannot be easily covered up and officers may face severe sanctions. Why would the police risk openly engaging in behavior that has the potential to result in harsh punishment if there is little personal gain to be realized? Integrating social-psychological perspectives on intergroup discrimination with insights from conflict theory may shed light on this conundrum (Holmes and Smith 2008, 2012). This approach maintains that micro dynamics of intergroup relations interact with structural disadvantage to produce a higher incidence of excessive force in disadvantaged minority locales. Subcultural conflicts of interests between police and minority citizens play out in these neighborhoods and create a normative divide between them. Citizens want the police to solve chronic problems of crime and social disorder, while the police seek to deal quickly with the routine calls that make up the bulk of their day-to-day work (Van Maanen 1978). Furthermore, the police demand respect for their authority and expect citizens to obey their commands. But some minority citizens see the police as representatives of an oppressive white power structure and hold them in contempt (Anderson 1999; NAACP 1995), and they may seek to evade or resist the police (Weitzer and Brunson 2009). Shared perceptions of distrust and threat among police and citizens in disadvantaged neighborhoods may simultaneously

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generate ingroup solidarity and intergroup conflict. These processes that may be explained in part by group conflict theory, an approach that sees humans as rational actors whose behavior is motivated by enlightened selfinterest (Holmes and Smith 2008). In light of that assumption, it seems unlikely that violations of competing group norms occurring during police-citizen encounters would instigate unwarranted violence by either party, as the potential cost of its use would outweigh any possible benefit (see, e.g., Brunson and Miller 2006). While group conflict theory offers important insights into the background tensions that may make the use of excessive force more likely, alone it cannot provide an adequate explanation. Other social-psychological aspects of intergroup relations may supply the proximate activators eliciting the use of excessive force. Simply entering disadvantaged neighborhoods may activate emotional and cognitive mental processes among police officers that can trigger the use of excessive force. Dayto-day work in these neighborhoods exposes police officers to the most difficult conditions of urban life (Holmes and Smith 2008). Potentially hostile citizens may challenge not only their authority but sometimes threaten their personal safety. For example, cities with a high degree of black segregation have more homicides of police officers compared with less segregated cities (Kent 2010). Police officers are highly cognizant of the violence that plagues many inner-city neighborhoods. They become conditioned to associate disadvantaged locales, as well as certain types of people (typically young males), with criminality and danger (e.g., Bayley and Mendelsohn 1968; Crank 1998; Herbert 1997; Meehan and Ponder 2002). Unconscious mechanisms for acquiring, storing, and retrieving emotional memories may generate fear and anger among officers as they patrol disadvantaged neighborhoods (Holmes and Smith 2008, 2012). Conscious apprehension may also arise from emotionladen memories, a response police officers may learn personally from encounters with

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threatening citizens, as well as vicariously from other officers’ war stories. Everyone encountered in disadvantage locales may be perceived as a potential threat until proven otherwise (Anderson 1990; Smith 1986). Heightened fear of citizens primes the police officer for defensive action in the face of perceived threats, whether real or imagined. Cognitive processes involved in the stereotyping of outgroup members may amplify emotional responses. Stereotypes are socially constructed and collectively shared characterizations about a social group. Racial/ethnic stereotypes embody essentialist beliefs (Levy, Stroessner, and Dweck 1998; Maddox 2004) and anecdotal (illusory) generalizations (Hamilton 1981). Stereotypic attributions about outgroup members’ behavior involve normal “cognitive shortcuts” that preserve mental resources and facilitate routine day-to-day interactions in situations that tax cognitive resources (e.g., when there are time constraints or complex and competing stimuli) (Fiske 1998; Macrae and Bodenhausen 2000). While simplifying complex social environments and interactions, stereotypes can also foster gross misperceptions and discriminatory responses. Police stereotypes of minority citizens, which conflate race and violent criminality, parallel those of the larger society and may be continually reinforced by selective personal experience and departmental folklore (e.g., Bolton and Feagin 2004; NAACP 1995; Smith and Alpert 2007). The factors that activate the stereotypes may be especially prevalent in encounters between police and citizens in disadvantaged neighborhoods. For example, an experiment using a national sample of police officers found that the participants made video game shoot/don’t shoot decisions more rapidly for stereotypecongruent targets – unarmed whites and armed blacks – than for stereotype incongruent targets – armed whites and unarmed blacks (Correll et al. 2007). This pattern of bias was most pronounced among officers who worked in areas with large populations, high rates of violent crime, and greater

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concentrations of minority citizens. Although it was found that police officers were not more likely to mistakenly “shoot” unarmed blacks, the video game format did not entail the fatigue, stress, and real dangers of street-level work. Complex demands and time constraints typify street-level policing in areas of concentrated disadvantage. These conditions may stress officers’ cognitive resources and habitually elicit automatic stereotypic responses to citizens encountered in such locales (Holmes and Smith 2008, 2012). These interrelated emotional and cognitive mental processes may produce behavior at odds with self-interest. Although the intentional use of excessive force can sometimes serve instrumental ends (e.g., reestablishing authority or sending a message to the community), the activation of emotions and stereotypes may elicit acts of excessive force that lack conscious deliberation or clear benefit. Moreover, complementary emotional and cognitive processes also subconsciously activate prosocial responses that undergird the police subculture and further fuel intergroup tensions (Holmes and Smith 2008, 2012). Research Studies of the relationship between minority threat and police brutality have examined the effects of percentage of minorities in the population (denoted as percentage black and percentage Hispanic) on official complaints alleging police use of excessive force in large cities. The first focused specifically on the minority threat hypothesis, analyzing civil rights criminal complaints alleging police brutality that were investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and reported to the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) (Holmes 2000). A descriptive analysis of these data by the DOJ (1991) revealed no discernible pattern of police brutality complaints in cities with an average of two or more complaints annually during the period 1985–90. Extending the DOJ data to include all cities of 150,000 or more population and minority

threat variables produced rather different findings (Holmes 2000). Percent black did not affect civil rights criminal complaints in the cities contained in the original DOJ data set, which included only those with two or more complaints annually, but it had a strong positive effect in the data for all cities of 150,000 or more population. The different findings resulted from sample-selection bias in the original DOJ data set. On average, cities with two or more complaints annually had an appreciably larger percentage of blacks in the population than did those with fewer than two complaints, which suppressed the effect of percentage black in the model for two or more complaints cities. In addition to the findings for percentage black, percentage Hispanic (in the Southwest), and majority/minority income inequality were related positively to civil rights criminal complaints in both samples of cities (Holmes 2000). The findings for percentage Hispanic are particularly noteworthy, as historic tensions between whites and Hispanics (largely of Mexican origin) continue to persist in the Southwest, where the Mexican-origin population may be seen as a special threat to dominant interests (see Holmes et al. 2008). Inclusion of non-linear terms to test the predictions of the powerthreat hypothesis provided no evidence of the parabolic relationship specified by that model, consistent with the possibility that threat perceived directly by police is most relevant to their street-level behavior. While providing evidence consistent with the minority threat hypothesis, this study did not consider alternative explanations. To begin addressing that issue, a subsequent analysis of the civil rights criminal complaints added organizational variables to test community accountability hypothesis (Smith and Holmes 2003). The organizational variables indicated the existence of departmental characteristics and policies designed to make the police more accountable to the communities they serve. The community accountability viewpoint is critical to the organizational perspective because it underlies leading policy recommendations designed to improve

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police-minority relations and reduce the use of police brutality (see, e.g., National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder 1968; NAACP 1995; US Department of Justice 2001). Despite the inclusion of five community accountability indicators, the findings for the minority threat variables remained virtually unchanged from the earlier study. Among the community accountability variables, just the ratio of percentage Hispanic citizens to percentage Hispanic officers and the presence of a citizen complaint review board had statistically significant relationships to civil rights criminal complaints consistent with community accountability hypotheses. On balance, the study provided greater support for the minority threat hypothesis, given that the effects of the threat variables were largely unchanged by inclusion of community accountability predictor variables. Although providing the first systematic tests of minority threat hypotheses, the investigations of civil rights criminal complaints included only the small number of severe excessive force complaints that came to the attention of federal authorities, not the bulk of complaints that were adjudicated within local police agencies. Moreover, the effects of place were not considered, and the second study did not include community policing, an accountability policy that had not been widely implemented during the late 1980s. To address these issues, Smith and Holmes (2014) analyzed sustained excessive force complaints filed with police departments in cities of 100,000 or more population and adjudicated departmentally in 2003. In addition to percentage black, percentage Hispanic, and several community accountability variables, the analysis included indexes of dissimilarity (residential segregation) that served as indicators of place. The minority threat hypothesis was clearly supported in this study, with both percentage black and percentage Hispanic related positively to the incidence of sustained excessive force complaints. The effects of the non-linear terms included to test the predictions of the power-threat

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hypothesis were not statistically significant. While substantial, the effect of percentage Hispanic was smaller than that of percentage black, which may be a function of greater diversity and varying experiences with social control among the Hispanic population. The percentage Hispanic effect was not restricted to the Southwest in this study, perhaps reflecting the growth of the Hispanic (particularly the Mexican-origin) population outside that region. A striking finding was observed for the black segregation variable. The analysis revealed that the level of sustained complaints was dramatically higher in the most segregated cities compared with those that were less segregated. Cities with highly segregated black populations contain the severely disadvantaged neighborhoods (see Massey and Denton 1993) that the place hypothesis predicts will trigger police brutality. However, there was not a significant effect for Hispanic dissimilarity, perhaps because Hispanic segregation was appreciably less pronounced than black segregation in the cities under study. The degree of Hispanic neighborhood disadvantage is also less severe compared with black neighborhoods (see Peterson and Krivo 2010). Findings for the community accountability variables were largely inconsistent with the predictions of that organizational perspective. Although departments with officers more representative of the black community had a lower average incidence of sustained excessive force complaints, the effects of percentage black and black segregation remained quite large. Unexpectedly, greater Hispanic representation in police departments of the Southwest was positively related to the incidence of police brutality. The challenging conditions of disadvantaged barrios, combined with hostility toward recent immigrants from Mexico who often reside there, may produce harsh responses to some Hispanic citizens by Hispanic police officers. Another unexpected community accountability finding concerned community policing, which was positively related to the incidence of excessive force. Apparently some aggressive

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order-maintenance strategies employed under the guise of community policing, such as “weed and seed” programs, expand confrontational strategies of policing and increase the degree of coercive control in locales perceived as problematic. Official complaints filed against police departments are the only currently available data that permit aggregate-level analyses of patterns of excessive force across cities, but these data have limitations. Notably, while studies of complaints have provided consistent evidence of racial/ethnic disadvantage, it is not possible to empirically verify that complaints accurately represent the underlying incidence of excessive force in cities. Various factors may, however, create systematic barriers to the filing of complaints by minority citizens (e.g., NAACP 1995), which would tend to suppress the effects of percentage minority and minority segregation variables on excessive force complaints. Therefore, findings from complaints data may well provide conservative estimates of the relationships of race/ethnicity and place to excessive force.

Patterns of Police Brutality At this juncture we must ask: Does the extant literature clearly establish a link between race/ethnicity and police use of excessive force? Given inherent problems with data on excessive force and other methodological limitations of existing studies, we must also consider what needs to be addressed in future research. What We Know Although positing different causal mechanisms, both the traditional and conflict perspectives predict that racial/ethnic minorities will be disproportionately targeted for police brutality. Research supports that general prediction, indicating that blacks and Hispanics experience a disproportionate incidence of excessive force. Moreover, cities with relatively large minority populations have an especially high

incidence of excessive force. It also appears that the presence of highly segregated black populations may substantially increase its incidence. Beyond these broad generalizations, do existing studies allow a reasonably definitive conclusion about which theoretical perspective(s) best explains these patterns? The question of which theory is best supported has important implications for developing effective policies to ameliorate the problem of police brutality. Among the traditional approaches, the idea that individual variations among police officers contribute to the use of police brutality against minority citizens has received little empirical attention and not much can be concluded about that explanation. Certainly individual variations among officers bear some relationship to their proclivity to use force. Not all officers adhere to the attitudes, values and norms embodied in traditional police culture, which may reduce the degree of force they employ in encounters with suspects (Terrill et al. 2003). Moreover, it is possible that a relatively small number of problem officers account for a disproportionate share of excessive force complaints (e.g., Harris 2011). It remains unclear, however, how such individual variations among officers within departments would translate into the systematic differences between departments observed in analyses of city-level data. The situational perspective maintains that characteristics of suspects, particularly their racial/ethnic identity, influence police responses to citizens. With a couple of exceptions from early studies, research consistently indicates that blacks experience a higher incidence of excessive force. There is less evidence on Hispanics, but it appears they too are disproportionately victimized. Although ostensibly supported by these findings, the situational perspective is little more than an empirical generalization about the targets of excessive force that fails to adequately specify or test how suspect race/ethnicity affects police-citizen interactions. One clear implication of this argument is that the racial/ethnic identity of the officer(s) and citizen(s) involved in the

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situation should matter. Presumably more tension would occur in encounters involving white officers and black or Hispanics citizens than in those involving officers and citizens of the same race/ethnicity. The available evidence suggests, however, that the presence (situationally or in aggregate) of minority officers has little effect on the use of excessive force or other aggressive strategies of policing (Brunson and Miller 2006; Cao and Huang 2000; Hickman and Piquero 2009; Pate and Fridell 1993; Smith and Holmes 2003, 2014). Minority officers may perceive disadvantaged citizens as threats to their personal well-being and authority much the same as white officers do. The organizational perspective receives little support in existing studies, but many organizational factors have not been included in research on race/ethnicity and excessive force. One exception is Worden’s (1996) analysis of the PSS data that incorporated individual, situational, and organizational predictors. The study included three indicators of formal and informal departmental characteristics, which had little effect on improper use of force. Studies of citizen complaints likewise show that community accountability variables had little influence on the incidence of excessive force or the effects of race/ethnicity on its incidence (Smith and Holmes 2003, 2014). Some research indicates that factors such as departmental structure and professionalism may affect excessive force patterns (e.g., Cao and Huang 2000; Hickman and Piquero 2009), but these studies did not consider the racial/ethnic composition of communities. Turning to conflict perspectives, it appears that the available research provides consistent support for the minority threat hypothesis (Holmes 2000; Smith and Holmes 2003, 2014). The place hypothesis has received less attention, but black segregation appears to have a substantial impact on the incidence of excessive force in the most highly segregated cities (Smith and Holmes 2014). The linear effects of percentage black and percentage Hispanic variables, as well as the effect of the black segregation variable, support the argument

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that the use of excessive force reflects the concerns of the police more than those of the dominant group. Several considerations suggest the results of studies using aggregated complaints data provide the best evidence to date on how race/ethnicity affects the use of excessive force. First, findings for percentage of minority variables are similar in studies of federal civil rights criminal complaints (Holmes 2000; Smith and Holmes 2003) and studies of sustained complaints filed at the local level (Smith and Holmes 2014). Second, these findings are consistent with studies showing that percentage black (or nonwhite) is related positively to police killings of felons (e.g., Jacobs and O’Brien 1998; Smith 2003). Third, the results for black segregation mirror patterns of aggressive policing observed in studies of minority neighborhoods in various cities (e.g., Brunson and Miller 2006; Chambliss 1994; Herbert 1997; Smith 1986; Weitzer 1999). These strengths notwithstanding, further research will be necessary to address gaps in current knowledge and theory about the link between race/ethnicity and police brutality. What We Need to Know While the available evidence is clearly suggestive, there are important limitations of past research that caution against overly broad conclusions. Measuring excessive force is inherently difficult because of the clandestine nature of the behavior, and the key question about any data source is the degree to which it accurately captures excessive force. The police subculture maintains a strict code of secrecy to ensure that outsiders do not become privy to police practices that may cause trouble for officers. Moreover, police administrators may be reluctant to provide detailed data on excessive force incidents to protect their departments from embarrassment and potential political fallout. Inevitably, then, investigations of excessive force must rely on imperfect data. It is essential, therefore, that researchers strive to compile data from a variety of sources.

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One priority for future research is incorporating multiple data sources (e.g., citizen complaints and surveys) into studies. Consistent results obtained with different data from the same population would provide greater confidence in the reliability of findings. Notably, studies employing city-level data have provided robust findings, but we cannot definitively conclude that relatively large minority populations are disproportionately the targets of excessive force because that inference could rest on an ecological fallacy. Given what we know about police-minority relations, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that whites would be disproportionately victimized in cities with relatively large black or Hispanic populations, but this has yet to be demonstrated conclusively. Quantitative studies that examine multiple data sources will be necessary to confirm that police brutality occurs disproportionately in economically marginalized and segregated minority neighborhoods within cities. This will require multiple studies, as the findings from a single city, or even a few cities, cannot be generalized to the nation. Research in multiple research sites will be needed to make broader generalizations and is an essential step toward a more complete understanding of the use of excessive force by the police. Another issue requiring attention is a more comprehensive examination of organizational influences on the connection of race and police brutality. With the exception of the two aggregate-level analyses including community accountability variables (Smith and Holmes 2003, 2014), there is very limited evidence on the issue (Friedrich 1980; Worden 1996). None of these studies provides evidence that organizational variables moderate the relationship of race/ethnicity and police brutality. Some research has shown that certain organizational characteristics of police departments affect rates of excessive force (Cao and Huang 2000; Hickman and Piquero 2009), but these studies failed to incorporate the racial/ethnic composition of the population into the analyses. Given the emphasis placed on the subculture

of policing as a cause of police brutality in minority communities from early on, it is somewhat surprising that there is so little research systematically examining how police subculture influences the use of police brutality. Although a number of core themes characterize the occupational culture, different aspects of it may be more pronounced in some agencies (Crank 1998). Given that individual adherence to the traditional police subculture increases officers’ proclivity to use force (Terrill, Paoline, and Manning 2003), subcultural variations across agencies merit further consideration. Measuring variations in subcultural dimensions–such as the strength of the “us vs. them” view of the world or of the code of secrecy – in a sufficient number of agencies to permit multivariate analyses will pose significant challenges for researchers. Nonetheless, such research is essential not only for theory testing but also for understanding the prospects of policies that seek to ameliorate police brutality through organizational change. Certainly other issues also merit attention. Notably, there is a dearth of research on the use of excessive force in contexts other than large US cities. Police brutality involving other minorities and contexts, such as American Indians in rural areas, has been largely overlooked. Research on the linkage of race/ethnicity and police brutality in other countries is virtually nonexistent, but a study conducted in Australia suggests that racial/ethnic disadvantage at the hands of police is not confined to the United States (Chan 1997). Considerable research will be necessary to determine whether the patterns of excessive force observed in extant studies are limited primarily to blacks and Hispanics residing in large US cities, but it seems implausible that would be the case given the existence of serious racial/ethnic tensions in various regions of the world. While such concerns demand attention from researchers, existing studies are informative with respect to evaluating policies that aim to reduce police brutality. These policy recommendations focus on policing in the urban areas where excessive force

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commonly occurs in the United States (NAACP 1995; Pate and Fridell 1993).

Implications for Social Policy Given the physical and psychological pain suffered by citizens of color and the immense financial cost to cities associated with police use of excessive force, we must ask: What policies, when properly implemented, may ameliorate the problem? Professionalism initiatives of the past century have increased the educational levels of police officers, improved the process of screening prospective officers, and enhanced the training of officers (Holmes and Smith 2008). Police bureaucracies have also sought to control officers on the street by developing clearer rules to guide behavior, improving internal oversight mechanisms, and moving toward stricter enforcement of regulations. And since the 1960s, many big-city departments have implemented various organizational changes and policies that aim to increase police accountability to the public. Policies such as increasing diversity, implementing citizen oversight processes, and establishing community policing remain immensely popular reform initiatives. Unquestionably the various reforms have helped open historically closed police agencies and improved policing in important ways. Despite the many benefits accruing to the various reform initiatives, it appears that they do not offer a panacea for the problem of police brutality. To the contrary, the unintended consequences of some initiatives include producing contexts that reinforce the intergroup dynamics that create the problem. For example, the movement toward professionalism helped establish the police as a distinct interest group and may have cultivated a police subculture that sustains social distance between officers and minority citizens. Policies to make the police more accountable to the communities they serve would seem to have the potential to break down such barriers and improve intergroup relation-

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ships, yet the available evidence suggests otherwise (Smith and Holmes 2003, 2014). In reality, these policies may create a veneer of improved relations without the underlying substance necessary to actually bring about meaningful change. Community policing, which would seem to provide a nuanced and potentially effective solution to improving relationships between police and the citizens of disadvantaged neighborhoods, is less effective than reformers had hoped. No matter how genuine departmental efforts may be (and often they are not), many street-level officers do not see community policing initiatives as involving real police work, and they seek to remain involved in more traditional crimefighting strategies (Herbert 2006). More problematically, the community policing movement obfuscates the fact that the police serve as the social mechanism for the distribution and control of nonnegotiable coercive authority (Klockars 1988). Even the most sweeping proposals for organizational change (e.g., Chambliss 2001) cannot change this fundamental reality. Selective social control by the police inevitably alienates minority citizens, whereas the conditions of impoverished neighborhoods and the hostility of some citizens may intensify the perception of immediate and ongoing threat among the police. The resulting tensions may well amplify the incidence of excessive force (Smith and Holmes 2014). Although the organizational structure and informal culture of policing may influence the use of excessive force, the behavior may be far more deeply rooted in the interaction of social structure and ordinary social-psychological processes. An especially problematic issue is that the social-psychological processes underlying conflicts between police and minority citizens are not readily amenable to manipulation via organizational change. Currently fashionable proposals to address the problem rely on a popular social psychology that oversimplifies the mental processes that underlie intergroup conflict. An implicit assumption of these recommendations is that human behavior is highly malleable

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and can be modified with relative ease. To the contrary, research on biological bases of threat response and the dynamics of intergroup relations provides a robust body of evidence that humans come “programmed” to automatically detect and respond defensively to outgroup members perceived as threatening, even when they pose no actual danger (Holmes 2015). At the same time, even the most basic fear responses may be influenced by environmental factors such as close interracial contact (e.g., Olsson et al. 2005). Moreover, automatic activation of racial stereotypes may be conditioned by social context (e.g., Wittenbrink et al. 2001), and activated stereotypes may be overridden by conscious beliefs (e.g., Devine 1989). Unfortunately, the ingroup/outgroup dynamics of police-minority relations are characterized by an asymmetrical distribution of resources and power, and they are often played out in socially disadvantaged contexts that reinforce fear and racial stereotyping. In sharp contrast to these circumstances, improvements in intergroup relations may depend on factors such as equal-status contact between groups, the existence of common group goals, and intergroup cooperation (e.g., Allport 1954; Fiske 2003). It appears the dynamics of police-minority tensions will not be altered easily in the social milieu of contemporary US society. A popular alternative to community accountability policies aims to exert greater control over police officers on the street. The work activities of police officers involve limited supervision and considerable discretion, and it is thought that monitoring officers and punishing those who violate regulations will deter the use of excessive force (Smith and Holmes 2008). A plethora of problems may limit the effectiveness of many such policies, but the most recent proposal may offer some promise. Many police departments now require police officers to routinely use body-worn cameras (President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing 2015). When an allegation of police brutality arises, video evidence will be available to adjudicate the claim. A police shooting of

a black citizen by a white officer in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2015, resulted in a murder indictment being returned in short order, largely on the basis of the officer’s body camera recording (Pérez-Peña 2015). Such recordings may have immense investigative value in cases involving allegations of serious excessive force. A broader issue concerns whether body-worn cameras deter police misconduct. A study conducted in Rialto, California, employed a randomized-controltrial design to determine whether the use of body-worn cameras reduced police use of force and citizens’ complaints (Ariel, Farrar, and Sutherland 2014). Significant reductions were observed in both the use of force and in citizens’ complaints. These findings are promising, but more research is needed to determine whether these outcomes will be obtained in big-city police departments and, specifically, for the use of excessive force. There is also concern that the use of bodyworn cameras may have other unintended, potentially adverse, consequences for police officers’ performance and police-citizen relations (President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing 2015). While technological innovations such as the use of body-worn cameras add another dimension to efforts to reform policing, major obstacles to meaningful change remain.

Conclusion The professional police departments of US cities may impose significant punishments for violations of departmental regulations regarding the proper use of force, and more severe cases may result in criminal prosecution. Still, police interactions with black and Hispanic citizens periodically culminate in the police using excessive force. Numerous organizational changes have sought to improve police personnel, change the structure of departments, break down the subculture of policing, and exert greater oversight over officers on patrol. Yet, the available evidence indicates these policies have been largely ineffective in reducing police use of excessive force against

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minority citizens. Perhaps police departments and officers are not sufficiently committed to existing policies or those policies do not go far enough to mitigate the use of police brutality, but even greater efforts to improve police-minority relations may not substantially diminish tensions. Conspicuously ignored in most popular and scholarly discourse about policeminority relations is the fundamental reality that organizational changes in police departments cannot ameliorate the larger problems experienced by disadvantaged minority communities. Notably, the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (2015) mentioned those problems in just a couple of sentences but provided a detailed laundry list of policy recommendations for improving police-citizen relations through organizational reforms. Although police brutality poses a significant social problem in its own right, it is symptomatic of a much larger pattern of racial and ethnic inequality in the United States. Meaningfully addressing the problems of police-minority relations, as well as the many other afflictions of poverty, will require a broad commitment to alleviating the immense disadvantages experienced in many inner-city neighborhoods. Should the political will of the country continue to ignore deeply entrenched inequalities and resist the transformation of the inner-city, the problem of police brutality (and myriad others) will undoubtedly persist. As the Kerner Commission recognized a half-century ago, effective programs to create jobs, improve quality of life, and reduce crime in disadvantaged communities will be necessary to eventually alleviate the disadvantages and tensions that underlie police brutality. Even a massive commitment to achieving greater equality cannot rapidly change existing conditions, but in the interim a renewed commitment to meaningfully changing the structure and culture of police agencies may begin improving relations between police and citizens. While the ultimate cause of police brutality may be located in the interaction of ordinary social-psychological processes and social-structural context, there is still

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ample room for altering policing in ways that may improve relations with citizens of color.

Glossary Community accountability hypothesis A set of closely related propositions, derived from the organizational perspective on excessive force, that maintain formal and, especially, informal characteristics of police agencies insulate police and make them less accountable to minority communities, which increases the likelihood of excessive force occurring during encounters with minority citizens. Community policing An array of policing strategies that aim to develop consultative partnerships with citizens and draw upon community resources to provide a better quality of service and reduce tensions between police and citizens. Ecological fallacy An incorrect inference from a relationship between properties of groups or geographical areas to the behaviors of the individuals within the groups or areas. Excessive force Defined under the objective reasonableness standard of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution as police use of more force than is necessary under the circumstances to accomplish a lawful objective (Graham v. Connor, 490 US 386, 1989). Group conflict theory Maintains that complex societies comprise numerous interest groups and that conflict is an inevitable social process that occurs when group interests encroach on or compete with each other. Minority threat hypothesis Stipulates that as minority groups become relatively larger, they are seen as a greater criminal threat by the dominant group and are increasingly targeted for coercive social control. Place hypothesis Maintains that the spatial organization of cities (racial/ethnic segregation and concentrated disadvantage) influences perceptions of minority threat,

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predicting that the police perceive disadvantaged, segregated minority locales as special threats and, consequently, are more likely to employ excessive force in such areas. Power-threat hypothesis Predicts that as minority groups becomes relatively larger, they are seen as a greater criminal threat by the dominant group and are increasingly targeted for coercive social control; however, when minority groups represent a numerical majority they become capable of effectively mobilizing political power on their own behalf use it to reduce the coercive control of minority citizens.

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Liska, Allen E., and Jiang Yu. 1992. Specifying and testing the threat hypothesis: Police use of deadly force. In Social Threat and Social Control, edited by A. E. Liska, 53–68. Albany: State University of New York Press Locke, Hubert G. 1996. The color of law and the issue of color: Race and the abuse of police power. In Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force, edited by W. A. Geller and H. Toch, 129–49. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Macrae, C. Neil, and Galen V. Bodenhausen. 2000. Social cognition: Thinking categorically about others. Annual Review of Psychology 51:93–120. Maddox, Karl B. 2004. Perspective on racial phenotypicality bias. Personality and Social Psychology Review 8:383–401. Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Meehan, Albert J. and Michael C. Ponder. 2002. Race and place: The ecology of racial profiling African American motorists. Justice Quarterly 19:399–430. Monkkonen, Eric H. 2002. Crime, Justice, History. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. 1968. Report of the National Advisory Commission Civil Disorders. New York: Bantam Books. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School. 1995. Beyond the Rodney King Story: An Investigation of Police Conduct in Minority Communities. Boston: Northeastern University Press. New York Times. 2014. Reactions to the shooting in Ferguson, Mo., have sharp racial divides. New York Times. August 21. www.nytimes .com/interactive/2014/08/21/us/ferguson-poll .html. Olsson, Andreas, Jeffery P. Ebert, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Elizabeth A. Phelps. 2005. The role of social groups in the persistence of learned fear. Science 309:785–87. Pate, Anthony N., and Lorie A. Fridell. 1993. Police Use of Force: Official Reports, Citizen Complaints, and Legal Consequences. Washington, DC: Police Foundation. Pérez-Peña, Richard. 2015. University of Cincinnati officer indicted in shooting death of

Samuel Dubose. New York Times. July 29. www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/us/universityof-cincinnati-officer-indicted-in-shootingdeath-of-motorist.html?_r=0. Peterson, Ruth D., and Lauren Krivo. 2010. Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. 2015. Interim Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. Quillian, Lincoln, and Devah Pager. 2001. Black neighbors, higher crime? The role of racial stereotypes in evaluations of neighborhood crime. American Journal of Sociology 107:717– 67. Reiss, Albert. J. 1968. Police brutality-answers to key questions. Transaction 5:10–19. 1971. The Police and the Public. New Haven, CT: Yale University. Silver, Allan. 1967. The demand for order in civil society: A review of some themes in the history of urban crime, police, and riot. In The Police: Six Sociological Essays, edited by D. J. Bordura, 1–24. New York: John Wiley. Skogan, Wesley G. 1990. Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods. New York: Free Press. Skolnick, Jerome H. 1975. Justice without Trial: Law Enforcement in a Democratic Society. 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley. Skolnick, Jerome H., and James J. Fyfe. 1993. Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force. New York: Free Press. Smith, Brad W. 2003. The impact of police officer diversity on police-caused homicides. The Policy Studies Journal 31:147–62. Smith, Brad W., and Malcolm D. Holmes. 2003. Community accountability, minority threat, and police brutality: An examination of civil rights criminal complaints. Criminology 41:1035–63. 2014. Police use of excessive force in minority communities: A test of the minority threat, place, and community accountability hypotheses. Social Problems 61:83–104. Smith, Douglas A. 1986. The neighborhood context of police behavior. In Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. 8, edited by A. J. Reiss Jr. and M. Tonry, 313–41. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

police brutality Smith, Michael R., and Geoffrey P. Alpert. 2007. Explaining police bias: A theory of social conditioning and illusory correlation. Criminal Justice and Behavior 34:1262–83. Son, In Soo, and Dennis M. Rome. 2004. The prevalence and visibility of police misconduct: A survey of citizens and police officers. Police Quarterly 7:179–204. Spitzer, Steven. 1975. Toward a Marxian theory of deviance. Social Problems 22:638–51. Terrill, William, Eugene A. Paoline III, and Peter K. Manning. 2003. Police culture and coercion. Criminology 41:1003–34. Turk, A. 1969. Criminality and the Legal Order. Chicago: Rand McNally. Uchida, Craig. D. 2001. The development of the American police: An historical overview. In Critical Issues in Policing: Contemporary Readings, 6th ed., edited by R. G. Dunham and G. P. Alpert, 17–36. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Criminal Section. 1991. Police Brutality Study FY 1985-FY 1990. Unpublished report. U.S. Department of Justice. 2001. Principles for Promoting Police Integrity: Examples of Promising Police Practices and Policies. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Van Maanen, John. 1978. Kinsmen in repose: Occupational perspectives of patrolmen. In Policing: A View from the Street, edited by P. K. Manning and J. Van Maanen, 115–28. Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear. Walker, Samuel. 1977. A Critical History of Police Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

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1998. Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society. Translated by E. Fischoff et al. 3 vols. New York: Bedminster Press. Weitzer, Ronald. 1999. Citizens’ perceptions of police misconduct: Race and neighborhood context. Justice Quarterly 16:819–46. Weitzer, Ronald, and Rod K. Brunson. 2009. Strategic responses to the police among inner city youth. Sociological Quarterly 50:235–56. Weitzer, Ronald, and Steven A. Tuch. 2006. Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press. Westley, William A. 1953. Violence and the police. American Journal of Sociology 59:34– 41. 1970. Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wittenbrink, Bernd, Charles M. Judd, and Bernadette Park. 2001. Spontaneous prejudice in context: Variability in automatically activated attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81:815–27. Wooldredge, John. 2007. Neighborhood effects on felony sentencing. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 44:238–63. Worden, Robert E. 1996. The causes of police brutality: Theory and evidence on police use of force. In Police Violence: Understanding and ControllingPolice Abuse of Force, edited by W. A. Geller and H. Toch. New Haven, 23–51. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 25

Capital Punishment/Death Penalty Michael L. Radelet and Scott Phillips

Abstract By any measure, the death penalty is in steep decline worldwide. In 1977, only 16 countries had abolished the death penalty, but that figure had increased to 140 by 2016. In this chapter we focus on the United States, where, as of mid-2015, the death penalty was authorized in thirty-two states and approximately 2,900 men and women are housed on death row. While a dwindling number of Americans view the death penalty as a social problem because they want to expand its use, a growing number are seeing it as a social problem because they believe it is no longer justified and want it to be restricted or even abolished. In this chapter we describe the arguments used by both sides, and conclude that the long-term trend away from the death penalty is unidirectional and further eroding of its use is inevitable.

The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty as a Social Problem While executions mandated by legitimate state or national governments have occurred with regularity throughout human history, it has only been in the past 300 years or so that the death penalty has been recognized, at least by some, as a serious “social problem” (Beccaria [1764] 1963; Bessler 2014). Today those who most enthusiastically support it see capital punishment as a social problem only when arguing that it should be more frequently employed, while, on the other side of the coin, the more vocal death penalty opponents view executions as a social problem that needs to be outlawed.

Understanding both perspectives is necessary. In recent years it has been death penalty opponents who have been more successful in making the death penalty a social problem, thereby putting advocates on the defense. As the debate over whether to view the death penalty as a social problem has emerged, one point of agreement on all sides is that the “burden of proof” is on those who support its use. Everyone agrees that the death penalty involves taking the lives of living breathing human beings, and as such we should not use it unless there are compelling reasons to do so. It is up to the pro–death penalty advocates to convince the public that the compelling reasons 433

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do in fact exist, and that these goals cannot be achieved by nonlethal punishments. Because of this, citizens who are undecided about the wisdom of the death penalty should be counted as opposed, since their indecision means that the pro–death penalty forces have not made a convincing case. As the debate about whether or not capital punishment should be viewed as a social problem has continued, there is no question that there is a strong longterm trend, both internationally and in the United States, away from its use. For example, in 1820 the “Bloody Codes” authorized the death penalty for approximately 230 capital offenses in England (Koestler 1956, 13), but in 1964 England carried out its last executions (E. Jones 1966). In 1977 there were only 16 countries from around the world that had abolished the death penalty, but by 2016, there were 140 countries that had abolished the death penalty in law or in practice. Just fifty-eight countries remain today that actively employ executioners (Amnesty International 2016; Hood and Hoyle 2014, 16). Indeed, the number of countries that can be described as “active retentionists” (i.e., those that retain the death penalty in their legal codes, have hosted at least one execution in the preceding ten years, and that have not enacted a moratorium) decreased from fifty-one in December 2007 to only thirty-nine at the end of April 2014 (Hood and Hoyle 2014, 5). In 2015, executions were held in “only” twenty-five countries. The countries that executed the most prisoners were China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States (Amnesty International 2016). This chapter will focus on the period 1975–2016 in the United States, over which time the move away from the death penalty was especially visible. In the United States, the “modern era” of the death penalty began in 1977, when a ten-year moratorium on executions ended (Amnesty International 2015).1 In mid-2016, there were some 2,900 prisoners on America’s death rows, and thirtytwo states, the federal government, and

the military authorized the death penalty (NAACP Legal Defense Fund 2016). While worldwide tallies are only approximations (due largely to the fact that China, the world’s leading executioner, keeps its numbers a state secret), it is likely that the most common capital crimes worldwide deal with drugs (Harm Reduction International 2012). In the United States, the only people on death row are there for murder. The largest death row in mid-2016 was in California, with nearly 741 prisoners, followed by Florida (396) and Texas (254). 1,442 inmates were executed between 1977 and the end of 2016, with over 1/3 of these in Texas alone, and 80 percent in the Southern states. Is the death penalty a “social problem?” Obviously it is for the inmates on death row, their families, attorneys, and ministers, and the countless additional defendants who are involved in cases where the death penalty is considered but not imposed, the court personnel, and the families of the victims in the relevant crimes. It is seen as a social problem by those who want to abolish it, and to a much lesser extent, by those who want to expand it. A person’s opinion about the death penalty necessarily requires considering the options, so that people may support the death penalty given the alternative of a relatively short prison sentence (not uncommon through the 1980s), but who would not if they believed that life imprisonment without parole (LWOP) is sufficient to achieve the death penalty’s legitimate penological goals. In fact, in all thirty-two death penalty states, those convicted of a capital offense but not condemned to death are sentenced to LWOP. Thus, central to today’s disagreements about whether to consider the death penalty a major social problem focus on its (alleged) relative or marginal benefits over the next most stringent sentence, LWOP. Alternatively, we might look at public opinion polls to determine whether or not a particular issue warrants consideration as a “social problem.” To be sure, there are some issues that are not widely regarded as social problems that arguably should be

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(e.g., overuse of pesticides on food), and some issues regarded as social problems at one time or another that turn out to be red herrings (e.g., the fear of communists in the 1950s). In Europe, public opposition to the death penalty is strong, every country (with the exception of Belarus) has outlawed the punishment, and there are no significant calls for its reintroduction. In short, abolition is a non-issue. All European countries and others such as Canada, Mexico, and South Africa prohibit extradition of offenders to countries where they might face the death penalty (Hood and Hoyle 2014, 35–38). With the leadership of a Britishbased non-governmental organization called Reprieve, efforts have been and are being made to ensure that drugs used in lethal injections are not exported to the United States or to any other country that would use them to take human life. Because of their work, more than twenty pharmaceutical companies have prohibited the export of their products to the United States of any drugs for use in executions (Reprieve 2016). If we look at public opinion polls, we can see that opinions about the death penalty in the twenty-first century in the United States have arguably shifted more than those on any other major social topic, save opinions on same-sex relationships and perhaps recreational marijuana. A 1994 Gallup Poll found that 80 percent of Americans voiced support for the death penalty, a level of support that dropped to 60 percent in 2015 (J. M. Jones 2015). Such polls, however, are too simplistic to be meaningful, since they do not ask respondents to compare their support or opposition given a specific alternative. A June 2014 ABC/Washington Post poll found that 42 percent of the population supported the death penalty, while 52 percent supported LWOP (Washington Post 2014). A June 2015 by Quinnipiac University found only 43 percent of Americans supported the death penalty, while 48 percent support LWOP (Quinnipiac University 2015). And so, why is the proportion of Americans who see the death penalty as a

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social problem that needs to be abandoned unquestionably increasing? Deterrence Through the 1980s, the deterrence argument was the top pro–death penalty argument in the United States, but since then it has been so thoroughly discredited that it has lost much of its appeal to the public. Among virtually all criminologists, the prodeterrence arguments today are dismissed as totally unsupported by the data, and even as irresponsible. In 1996, Ronald Akers and Michael Radelet surveyed sixty-seven past presidents of America’s top Criminology professional societies. The respondents were not asked their opinion about the death penalty, but instead were asked their opinion on the empirical research that had been conducted on the deterrent effect of the death penalty. All agreed that the statement “The death penalty significantly reduces the number of homicides” was largely or totally inaccurate (Radelet and Akers 1996). A 2009 replication of that study with a somewhat different sample found comparable results: 90 percent of the world’s top criminologists believe that the research fails to show that the death penalty is a better deterrent than LWOP (Radelet and Lacock 2009). The latest word on the issue came in 2012 when a comprehensive report on the deterrent effect of the death penalty was released by the National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences. By any measure, the National Academy of Sciences is composed of the nation’s most distinguished scholars and researchers. The Study Panel concluded that the existing research on deterrence “is not informative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates” (Nagin and Pepper 2012; see also Apel, DeWitt, and Bellandi 2014). The deterrent effect of a punishment depends on its certainty, severity, and celerity (the time between the commission of the offense and the administration of the punishment). Few crimes would be

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committed if punishment was certain (it would be prudent to slow down while driving if one saw a police car in the rear view mirror, regardless of whether one knew the severity of the punishment). The issue of severity raises the question of whether the death penalty discourages more homicides than LWOP (“marginal deterrence”). Since death and LWOP are the only options in retentionist states, the question today is whether an offender would commit a crime knowing that he or she faces Life without Parole, but would not do so if she or he were facing execution. In fact, increases in the severity of punishment have decreasing incremental deterrent effects. For example, if a person wants to discourage someone from sitting on a stove, medium heat works just as well as high heat. After a while, further increases in severity do not add to the deterrent effects. In assessing the deterrent power of a punishment, the certainty of apprehension is more effective than its severity. No customer would shoplift in a store if a clerk was standing right next to her and watching closely (certainty), even if the penalty (severity) for shoplifting is unknown. Students might be warned that they will fail a class if they cheat on an exam, but some would still cheat if the exam was unproctored. They would not do so, regardless of the severity of the sanction, if the teacher stood right next to the student and looked at him during the entire exam. And so if we really wanted to decrease the homicide rate, we would invest in programs that would increase the probability of arrest for those who have committed homicides. As will be elaborated below, since nearly 40 percent of homicides do not result in an arrest, increasing the probability of arrest is also paramount in the needs expressed by families of homicide victims. The basic theory underlying the deterrence argument is “rational choice,” or the idea humans carefully weigh the costs and benefits of different choices, and the threat of execution theoretically outweighs any benefit that the offender anticipates from committing a murder. The negative of fac-

ing execution is significantly stronger than the negative of facing LWOP. In practice, however, this approach would need to identify people who would kill if the “only” punishment were LWOP, but who would not if the punishment was death. Although rational choice is a staple in the field of Economics and may help explain why a person buys a Honda instead of a Ford (after careful research), can the same idea be extended to murder? After all, murders tend to be committed by offenders who are young, shortsighted, plagued by low selfcontrol, clouded by addiction, and struggling with mental illness. Surely the vast majority of murders are not comparable to behaviors done after thoughtfully weighing the pros and cons of buying one model of a car over another and other similar acts done after conscious rational aforethought. If that were the case then the murder rate between the years 2000 and 2016 should have increased as executions plummeted, but instead the murder rate decreased. Retribution In prestate societies, killers were often killed by the victim’s family. These were acts of pure vengeance, or retaliation or revenge directed at the offender without official authorization by the state. The initial killing might even spur a cycle of interfamilial feuding. But with the rise of the state, the responsibility for punishment gradually shifted from aggrieved families to legal officials; private vengeance was largely replaced by officially sanctioned state retribution (Cooney 2009). The central tenet of retribution is “proportional punishment.” In the case of murder, proponents of the death penalty argue that only an execution can balance the scales of justice: a death for a death (although even retribution has its limits – there is only one death for multiple murderers, and the offenders are usually not physically tortured before being put to death). For retributivists, punishment is moral rather than utilitarian – the offender deserves to be punished in a manner that

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is proportional to the crime regardless of whether the punishment produces any subsequent benefit for society (such as preventing the offender from killing again or deterring others) (van den Haag 1986, 2014). Of course, in practice we rarely punish even murderers by taking their lives: between January 1973 and December 2015 there were nearly 820,000 murders in the United States (Disaster Center 2016), but only 1,422 executions. Restated, only 1 in 576 murders during that period was avenged by an execution. Clearly, in practice, lethal retribution through the death penalty is exceptionally rare. Recent research in Yale University’s “baby lab” suggests that the human desire for retribution runs deep and might even be innate, as infants want to see bad actors punished. But research also suggests that infants divide the world into “us versus them” (preferring similar others, such as those of the same race) (Bloom 2010). Such findings encapsulate the debate over lethal retribution. For supporters of the death penalty, execution is the epitome of justice. Someone who commits murder deserves to die – plain and simple. For opponents of the death penalty, execution is the epitome of injustice. Why? Because the human tendency to divide the world into “us versus them” means that the death penalty turns on the race and social status of the defendant and victim. In a landmark study of capital punishment in Georgia, for example, Baldus, Woodworth, and Pulaski (1990) found that the odds of a death sentence for those who killed whites were over four times higher than the odds of a death sentence for those who killed blacks, even for similar homicides. Such racial disparities have been documented in numerous places and time periods (for reviews, see Baldus and Woodworth 2003; Grosso et al. 2014; Paternoster, Brame, and Bacon 2008; US General Accounting Office 1990). In fact, while African Americans are about half the homicide victims in the United States, not one of the twenty inmates executed in the United States in 2016 was sent to death row for murdering a black victim. Examining the

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intersection of race and gender reveals that killing a white female is the express lane to death row (see, e.g., Phillips, Potter, and Coverdill 2012). Whether execution as an act of retribution is just or unjust has been hotly debated by numerous scholars (e.g., McDermott 2001; van den Haag 1986, 2014). Van den Haag, who justifies retribution, simply defines “justice” as the punishment an offender deserves. Each case must be considered in isolation, solely on its own merits, to determine whether the offender deserves death. But defining justice on a case-by-case basis has a crucial implication – comparisons across cases become irrelevant. Indeed, van den Haag maintains that even persistent racial disparities in the administration of capital punishment do not undermine justice in an individual case. Posing a hypothetical, he argues that the death penalty would remain just even if the state only executed black offenders. Consider van den Haag’s logic. If a black defendant is executed for a heinous murder, and a white defendant is spared for an identical murder, the execution remains just – the black defendant deserved to die. Indeed, the only injustice is the mere incarceration of the white defendant who also deserved to die. Executing both would be ideal, but only executing the black defendant is better than executing neither: Some justice is better than no justice. The logic of van den Haag’s argument would remain the same even if the racial pattern were repeated across an infinite number of cases. Equal treatment is simply not part of his definition of justice. McDermott (2001) insists that van den Haag is wrong. To begin, McDermott argues that justice requires punishment from a legitimate authority – a state agency that is invested with the authority to punish (if inmate A on death row kills inmate B on death row, then inmate A has committed a crime regardless of whether inmate B deserved to die). McDermott notes, What retributivist justifications of capital punishment such as that put forward by Ernest van den Haag fail to consider is the

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crucial role that the right to punish plays in moral desert claims . . . in order for a particular punishment to be morally legitimate, the institution inflicting that punishment must also be morally legitimate. (318)

Next, McDermott argues that a criminal justice system which discriminates is not a legitimate authority: To say that an institution is morally legitimate is to say that its rule is just. And if racial discrimination is unjust, then any institution that practices racial discrimination is illegitimate, even if in the particular case in question racial discrimination is not the motive for its action. (328)

Thus, an execution imposed by a criminal justice system which discriminates is an act of injustice: It is not enough to observe, as van den Haag does, that any particular person deserved to be executed in order to conclude that his execution was just. When someone deserves punishment, he deserves a particular form of treatment, for a particular reason, from a particular authority. If the harm that the person receives does not satisfy these requirements – if, that is, it is the wrong form of harm, or is given for the wrong reason, or is inflicted by someone without the right to do so – then the punishment is unjust and cannot be justified by an appeal to retribution. (318, emphasis original)

McDermott’s argument turns van den Haag’s logic upside down. Given persistent racial disparities and other inequities in the administration of capital punishment, the death penalty can be seen as an act of injustice. Retribution imposed unfairly transforms justice into injustice. Ultimately, the philosophical debate between van den Haag and McDermott cannot be settled. No empirical data can be brought to bear on the true meaning of justice. But one conclusion seems certain: the imposition of death sentences always contains inequities. If the findings from the “baby lab” are correct, then the human desire for retribution, coupled with the human tendency to divide the world

into “us versus them,” means that states which retain capital punishment also retain disparate treatment. For opponents of the death penalty, that is a disquieting reality – particularly in a nation with a troubled racial history that includes slave codes (capital crimes reserved for slaves), lynching, Jim Crow laws, and, more recently, protesting in the streets after unarmed black men are shot by the police or die from abuse and/or neglect in police custody. Recently, the traditional retribution argument has been recast as an issue of “closure” (Armour and Umbreit 2012). Does the death penalty help “survivors” – the family members and friends of homicide victims – reach emotional closure? Consider the evolution of the argument. Zimring (2003) submits that capital punishment has been transformed from a government function to a victim services program, as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s approval of so-called Victim Impact Statements in the 1991 case of Payne v. Tennessee. Such statements allow survivors to describe the terrible consequences of the crime, often focusing on the social worth of the victim. Yet focusing on the plight of these survivors presents what might be called “an optical problem.” If defendants are executed to serve the personal interests of survivors, then state retribution comes very close to private vengeance. Reframing retribution as closure solves the optical problem. In fact, Zimring (2003, 58) notes that “the evocative term ‘closure’ was a public relations godsend.” But branding success and emotional healing are not interchangeable, prompting the key empirical question: Does the death penalty actually facilitate closure? In the only study on the topic, researchers compared “grief scores” over time for survivors in Texas (where defendants had been sentenced to death) and Minnesota (a jurisdiction that does not authorize the death penalty and therefore where defendants had been sentenced to life without parole). Ironically, the researchers found that death sentences often did more harm than good: survivors’ grief scores declined in Minnesota, but

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increased slightly in Texas (Armour and Umbreit 2012). The main problem is the appellate process. Appeals in a case with a life sentence tend to be relatively expeditious, concluding within two years in Minnesota. But appeals in a death case can seem interminable. Strikingly, the average time from a death sentence to an execution in Texas during the time period in question was eleven years (the wait is longer nationwide and only increasing – the twenty inmates executed in 2016 spent an average of eighteen and a half years on death row). That means survivors in Texas had to deal with the murder case more than five times longer than survivors in Minnesota, reliving the crime not just on birthdays and holidays but with each hearing, appellate decision, and story in the local news. Moreover, convictions and death sentences are often overturned (Liebman et al. 2000), leaving survivors who have longed for an execution empty-handed or forced to start again at square one with a retrial. The research concludes that rather than closing wounds, capital punishment tends to prolong the pain (Armour and Umbreit 2012).2 Before concluding the discussion of retribution (and retribution recast as closure), it is important to mention one final point. In the past, capital jurors had to choose between death and life with the possibility of parole. That is no longer true; capital jurors now only choose between death and life without the possibility of parole. Either way, the defendant will die in prison. Although “death is different,” life without parole is nonetheless a severe punishment and a substantial form of retribution. Incapacitation The incapacitation argument is simple: executions save lives because dead murderers cannot kill again. But whether executions actually save lives depends on whether the condemned would have killed again had they not been executed, a more complicated question. What is the evidence? In the landmark 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court invali-

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dated all existing state and federal death penalty statutes. Because of the decision, 629 inmates who were on death rows at the time were transferred to the general prison population (some were later released because states had not yet enacted life without parole statutes). A follow-up study found that six inmates killed again in prison during the subsequent fifteen-year period (Marquart and Sorensen 1989).3 Thus, about 1 percent killed again in prison (additional studies have reached the same conclusion; see Cunningham and Sorensen 2014; Sorensen and Marquart 2003).4 Remaining mindful of the “1 percenters,” consider another key number: the percentage of condemned inmates who are actually executed in the modern era. Between 1977 and 2000, a total of 6,146 people were sentenced to death in the United States (Death Penalty Information Center 2016b). Allowing ample time for executions to occur, just 1,442 inmates had been executed from 1977 through the end of 2016 (Death Penalty Information Center 2016c). Thus, only about 23 percent of condemned inmates were executed. Are the “1 percenters” who would kill again among the “23 percenters” who are actually executed? The answer is unknown and unknowable, but it is possible to estimate. Based on past research, assume that 61 of the 6,146 condemned inmates would kill again. It is possible that all of the “repeaters” have been executed, just as it is possible that none of the “repeaters” have been executed. But following the general pattern, the most reasonable assumption is that 23 percent of the “repeaters” have been executed – meaning fourteen. Certainly, saving fourteen lives is important (assuming each “repeater” would have killed a single victim if not for the execution). But such a number – which could go up or down – must be put in context. Rob Warden (2009, 239– 49 and n. 166), the former Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, provides a list of more than forty inmates who have been executed in the modern era despite serious doubts about guilt. Obviously, precise estimates are

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impossible on both sides of the equation. In broad strokes, though, the available evidence suggests that the number of innocent lives saved through incapacitation is small, and could be equaled or surpassed by the number of innocent lives lost through wrongful execution. Even if one believed that the net effect of execution was to save lives – a belief that is not substantiated by the evidence – there are more cost-effective ways to reduce murder rates. Police chiefs, for example, rank capital punishment last among public policies that might reduce violent crime. Instead, police chiefs argue that scarce resources should be devoted to hiring more officers, reducing drug and alcohol abuse, reducing unemployment, and providing more services for the mentally ill (Death Penalty Information Center 2009). Building on the police chiefs’ call for more officers, consider an option that would unquestionably reduce homicide rates: more cold-case units (Radelet and Stanley 2006). These are highly specialized groups of detectives and support staff that have special training to reinvestigate homicides from a year or more in the past, when most leads are “cold.” One of the most alarming trends in modern criminal justice is the plummeting “clearance rate” for murder (the percentage of murders resolved through the arrest of the suspected perpetrator). In 1961, the clearance rate for murder stood at 94 percent (Wellford and Cronin 2000). By 2012, it had tumbled to 63 percent (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2013). That means that roughly 5,000 murders went unsolved in 2012, leaving killers on the streets who remain free to kill again. Cold-case units would allow a core group of detectives to remain on the trail long after the original investigators have moved on to more recent murder cases. Occasionally they can discover untested DNA, a previously silent witness, an original suspect who has bragged about the crime, and the like. Moreover, cold-case units would bring justice to a greater number of survivors (a topic considered above in our discussion of retribution and closure). If just 2 percent

of the 5,000 unsolved murders were solved, then justice would be secured for the groups of co-victims (primarily relatives and close friends) of 100 murder victims – more than the eighty-two cases in which a death sentence was imposed in 2012. In the end, the incapacitation argument is seductively simple, yet hopelessly complicated. The dead cannot kill. But are those who would have killed again among those who are executed? If so, is the number of innocent lives saved through incapacitation greater than the number of innocent lives lost through wrongful execution? Even if the balance sheet favored execution – an eternal unknown – the evidence suggests that alternative public policies would save more lives. Cost As counterintuitive as it may seem at first glance, the modern death penalty is more expensive than life without parole. A 2009 report from the Death Penalty Information Center explains why the financial cost of capital punishment is so high and approximately how much each execution actually costs (Death Penalty Information Center 2009). The meter starts running when the prosecutor decides to seek the death penalty. Immediately, multiple prosecutors and defense attorneys begin working on the case. Since virtually all capital defendants are indigent, the state almost always ends up picking up the tab for both sides. Experts are needed to assess complicated issues, from forensics (e.g., ballistics, DNA) to mental health (e.g., mental retardation, sanity, future dangerousness, childhood victimization from abuse). Indeed, a capital defendant’s entire life must be investigated so that prosecutors and defense attorneys can present aggravating and mitigating evidence at trial. Developing a complete portrait of a person’s life – from birth (or prebirth if fetal alcohol syndrome is at issue, for example) to the time of the crime – requires interviews with a wide range of people from family members to teachers, school

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administrators, coaches, employers, coworkers, and clergy. Jury selection takes much longer in a death case, in part because anyone standing opposed to the death penalty is automatically excused from service. Trials are the legal equivalent of complex brain surgery. In fact, they have two phases – a guilt phase and a penalty phase. Though rare, the jurors might be sequestered. Moreover, the trial is followed by lengthy and complex appeals, which in 2016 averaged eighteen and a half years (Death Penalty Information Center 2016d). Even housing a death row inmate amplifies the cost, as heightened security is expensive and the inmate cannot work to help pay for his upkeep (Death Penalty Information Center 2009). Still, many erroneously believe that the death penalty is cheaper than life without parole. After all, incarcerating someone for life – perhaps forty years or longer – is no bargain. Of course, if all death row inmates were executed soon after their trials the costs would be much lower, but that is not what happens. Instead, most death sentences are eventually commuted to life without parole (Liebman et al. 2000). After studying all death sentences in the United States from 1977 to 2013, Baumgartner and Dietrich concluded: “But by far the most likely outcome of a U.S. death sentence is that it will eventually be reversed and the inmate will remain in prison with a different form of death sentence: life without the possibility of parole” (Baumgartner and Dietrich 2015). In a landmark study, Liebman et al. (2000) explained how this happens: 68 percent of death sentences are overturned on appeal (primarily because the defendant had inadequate legal counsel or the prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence), and 82 percent of the defendants whose death sentences have been overturned are then sentenced to life without parole. Condemned defendants also avoid execution in other ways – the state statute is declared unconstitutional or the Supreme Court issues a ruling that precludes execution (such as barring the execution of juveniles and the mentally disabled). One way

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or another, most defendants who are sentenced to death end up serving life. Obviously, paying for a death penalty trial and life imprisonment is much more expensive than just paying for life imprisonment. Importantly, the additional cost of the death penalty is not trivial. Consider a few examples. In Maryland, the death penalty cost taxpayers $186 million between 1978 and 1999 – so the state’s five executions cost $37 million each. Combined, New York and New Jersey spent $400 million on capital cases without a single execution (both states have recently abandoned the death penalty, in part because of cost). California spent an astonishing $4 billion for its thirteen executions that occurred after 1990. In North Carolina, research by Philip Cook (2009) revealed that the death penalty costs taxpayers an extra $11 million per year. Cost estimates differ substantially by state – each state has a different capital punishment apparatus, each state has a different probability of actually executing those who are sent to death row, and different researchers use different methodologies to estimate cost. But all studies reach the same basic conclusion: the death penalty is more expensive than life without parole (Death Penalty Information Center 2009). The only potentially complicating factor is that if the death penalty were abolished then the threat of execution could not be used to induce the defendant to plead guilty in exchange for a LWOP sentence. Putting aside the question of whether such coercion is ethical, Cook (2009) reports that a plea bargain in a capital case actually costs twice as much as a trial in cases in which LWOP is the maximum sentence. Because prosecutors cannot simply bluff, the time and resources needed to mount a credible threat of death outweigh the time and resources needed to go to trial when the death penalty is not sought. Some might wonder if the system could be overhauled to cut costs. Could states slash funding for experts, investigators, and defense attorneys? Could states execute all defendants who have been sentenced to death within, say, five years? Theoretically,

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yes. But to do so would drastically increase the number of innocent defendants who are sentenced to death and even executed. The financial costs of the existing system would arguably pale in comparison to the human costs of such an overhaul. It is exceedingly unlikely that even an ultra-conservative US Supreme Court would approve this.

So Why Is the Death Penalty a Social Problem? Above we have argued that the death penalty is costly and provides little, if any, advantages in achieving the deterrent, incapacitative, or retributive goals of punishment. In addition to those considerations, all of which speak to the lack of tangible benefits, there is growing recognition by most parties in the debate that the death penalty holds significant disadvantages. In this section we will briefly touch on several. An initial disadvantage concerns the basic morality of intentionally taking human life when there are available alternatives to punish and protect. The growing concern by leaders of the vast majority of major religious denominations about the death penalty in the United States feeds into this attitude (Death Penalty Information Center 2016e). In the words of Father Robert Drinan (a Jesuit priest and former member of Congress), “The amazing convergence of opinion on the death penalty among America’s religious organizations is probably stronger, deeper, and broader than the consensus on any other topic in the religious community in America” (Drinan 1991, 207). Those who accept this viewpoint see any execution as morally unjustified, and seek to make the issue a social problem that can be debated and eventually eliminated. For this group, it does not make any difference if the death penalty is racist or arbitrary, or the condemned prisoner is innocent or guilty: in their view it is flat out immoral. The view has been energized by what has become the most successful death penalty book of recent decades, Dead Man Walking,

an autobiographical account of the “spiritual journey” of a Catholic nun who ministers to death row inmates (Prejean 1993). The Catholic Church’s position on the death penalty has traditionally been to say that it should be reserved for only the worst cases, but in 2015 Pope Francis made it clear that Today the death penalty is inadmissible, no matter how serious the crime of the condemned. It is an offense against the inviolability of life and the dignity of the human person that contradicts God’s plan for man and society and His merciful justice, and it impedes fulfilling the just end of the punishments. It does not do justice to the victims, but foments vengeance. (Zenit 2015)

As this message is spread in the future, it is likely that the death penalty will increasingly be seen as a social problem that needs to be eliminated. Of course, some who oppose the death penalty do not find it objectionable in theory, but instead see it as a social problem because of the way it is applied. According to this line of thought, if we are to have the death penalty, it needs to be applied fairly and to only the worst of the worst. Yet, there is ample evidence that some of the worst are not executed, and some of those whose murders are not among the worst of the worst end up on death row. Some of the disparities are regional – 80 percent of the executions in the United States since 1977 have been in the South (with 65 percent in former confederate states). Indeed, the death penalty truly operates at the county level, as just 2 percent of US counties account for 52 percent of all executions (meaning the elected District Attorney is the quintessential actor in the system) (Death Penalty Information Center 2013). Some of the disparities are racial, with numerous studies showing that for similar homicides, those convicted of killing whites are (usually) three or four times more likely to be sentenced to death than those convicted of killing blacks (for reviews, see Baldus and Woodworth 2003; Grosso et al. 2014; Paternoster, Brame, and Bacon 2008; US General Accounting Office 1990).

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In keeping with the goal of executing only the worst of the worst, the most horrible nightmare in the eyes of all Americans, regardless of their ultimate stand on capital punishment, is when innocent defendants are wrongly convicted, sent to death row, and even executed. States have now acknowledged the executions of at least seven innocent inmates who were put to death in the past century (Sterbenz 2014). In addition, as of the end of 2016, 156 men and women have been released from America’s death rows since 1972 when it was discovered that they were innocent. In almost all the cases, the prisoners were released not because the “system” worked – instead they were released only because of pure luck (e.g., a previously silent witness comes forward, DNA was available and preserved, a witness admits perjured testimony; Radelet and Bedau 2014). Remarkably, and in a stunning counter to those who argue that we need to reduce the time on death row before execution, the seven inmates released in 2014 spent an average of thirty years on death row before their innocence was acknowledged, and the six exonerated in 2015 averaged nineteen years on death row before being released (Death Penalty Information Center 2016f). Finally, in recent years more attention has been focused on yet another imperfection in the administration of capital punishment: the regular occurrences of botched executions (Borg and Radelet 2004). Sarat contends that 3 percent of all US executions from 1890 to 2010 were botched (Sarat 2014). Similarly, a list that one of the present authors (MLR) has been compiling for the past thirty years now includes forty-nine examples (through the end of 2016) in which executions caused unnecessary pain, were prolonged, or resulted in other unanticipated problems (Death Penalty Information Center 2016g). Botched hangings, asphyxiations, and electrocutions in the 1980s and 1990s were in part responsible for the shift to lethal injection as the preferred method of execution in all death penalty states, but the continuing problems with lethal injections have added to the fuel of the abolitionist

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perspective. Recent high-profile cases such as the botched executions of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma and Joseph Wood in Arizona have caused many to ask whether such bungled executions amount to torture.

Conclusion Is the death penalty a “social problem?” No doubt many Americans know or care little about it, and (perhaps consequently) most do not have any strong feelings about whether we should use it more often, about the same as we currently use it, less often, or not at all. There is little or no evidence that those who might want to expand its use are attracting large numbers of supporters among either the general public or in legislatures. The last two states to authorize the death penalty were Kansas in 1994 and New York in 1995, and Kansas has not executed anyone since 1965 and New York has already returned to the abolitionist ranks. Nineteen other states do not permit new death sentences. We therefore conclude that the idea that we are not using the death penalty enough is not seen as a major problem by any large segments of our society. Instead, the contemporary battle is between those who like things as they are (and therefore do not see this as a social problem), and those who want to restrict or eliminate it. Over the past two decades Americans have seen a precipitous move away from the use of the death penalty. Support for the penalty is the lowest seen in the past forty years, especially when respondents are given an option of life imprisonment without parole, which is already available in all death penalty states. In the past decade, seven states have abolished the death penalty, and several other states appear to be moving in that direction. The number of new death sentences nationwide has plummeted from more than 300 a year in the mid-1990s to one-tenth that figure – only thirty – in 2016; the number of executions nationwide has plummeted from almost 100 in 1999 to only 20 in 2016 (Death Penalty Information Center 2016a). Even some prominent

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conservatives have turned against the death penalty (Will 2015). When one takes the long-term view, there is no question that supporters of the death penalty are losing ground. Ultimately the question of whether to consider the death penalty a social problem is a political one. In countries and states that have abolished it, the death penalty usually disappears from legislative debates and editorial pages of newspapers, perhaps after simmering for a varying length of time. In those countries and states that still retain its use, the abolitionists are so numerous and strong that they will not go away until the death rows are closed for good. Without question, the direction of history in the past 300 years tells us that those days are approaching.

Glossary Clearance rate The proportion of crimes (or of a specific crime, such as murder) that is known to the police and is resolved by the arrest of the suspected offender. General deterrence To punish one wrongdoer with a goal of sending a message to those thinking about committing similar wrongs that if they do so, they, too, will be similarly punished. Incapacitation To immobilize offenders so that they will be unable to repeat their crimes or prevent new ones. The most common method of incapacitation used by modern criminal justice systems is imprisonment, but the death penalty, through its rendering of the criminal unable to commit new crimes, is the ultimate incapacitator. Marginal deterrence The additional number of crimes prevented by each unit increase in the severity of punishment. Retribution To punish the offender by official state authority because we want the offender to suffer in proportion to the amount of harm that she or he caused. Vengeance An act of retaliation or revenge directed at the offender without official authorization by the state.

Notes 1. In early 1965, there were eleven countries that had completely abolished the death penalty, and fourteen others that had abolished it for ordinary crimes during peacetime (Hood and Hoyle 2014, 14). 2. Capital punishment also opens deep wounds for a different group of survivors, although their experiences are often shrouded from public exposure – those whose relatives are executed (Vandiver 2014). 3. The authors obtained data on 558 of the 629 inmates. Although the authors could not obtain data on the remaining seventy-one inmates, it seems safe to assume that if one of them had committed murder then that fact would have come to the authors’ attention. 4. Kenneth Allen McDuff was originally sentenced to death for three murders that occurred in the mid-1960s, but after his death sentence was commuted he was paroled. Thereafter he was suspected of killing several additional victims (Sorensen and Pilgrim 2006). He was convicted of one murder and executed in 1998. This would not happen under modern death penalty statutes, however, since all those convicted of capital crimes in the United States but not sentenced to death are instead sentenced to LWOP. Thus, we only count the offenders who killed again in prison because that is the relevant comparison group under current sentencing practices.

References Amnesty International. 2015. Death sentences and executions in 2015. www.amnesty.org/ en/latest/research/2016/04/death-sentencesexecutions-2015/. 2016. Death penalty 2015: Facts and figures. www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/04/ death-penalty-2015-facts-and-figures/. Apel, R., S. E. DeWitt, and R. Bellandi. 2014. Is capital punishment an effective deterrent for murder? An updated review of research and theory. In America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment, 3rd ed., edited by J. R. Acker, R. M. Bohm, and C. S. Lanier, 271–88. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

capital punishment/death penalty Armour, M. P., and M. S. Umbreit. 2012. Assessing the impact of the ultimate penal sanction on homicide survivors: A two state comparison. Marquette Law Review 96: 1–131. Baldus, D. C., G. Woodworth, and C. A. Pulaski. 1990. Equal Justice and the Death Penalty: A Legal and Empirical Analysis. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Baldus, D. C., and G. Woodworth, 2003. Race discrimination in the administration of the death penalty: An overview of the empirical evidence with special emphasis on the post1990 research. Criminal Law Bulletin 39: 194–226. Baumgartner, F. R., and A. W. Dietrich. 2015. Most death sentences are overturned. Here’s why that matters. Washington Post. March 17. www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/17/most-deathpenalty-sentences-are-overturned-hereswhy-that-matters/. Beccaria, C. 1963. On Crimes and Punishments. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Bessler, J. 2014. The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Bloom, P. 2010. The moral life of babies. New York Times Magazine. May 5. www.nytimes.com/ 2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html. Borg, M. J., and M. L. Radelet. 2004. On botched executions. In Capital Punishment: Strategies for Abolition, edited by P. Hodgkinson and W. Schabas, 143–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, P. J. 2009. Potential savings from abolition of the death penalty in North Carolina. American Law and Economics Review 10:1–32. Cooney, M. 2009. Is Killing Wrong? A Study in Pure Sociology. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Cunningham, M. D., and J. R. Sorensen. 2014. Future dangerousness. In America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment, 3rd ed., edited by J. R. Acker, R. M. Bohm, and C. S. Lanier, 289–307. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Death Penalty Information Center. 2009. Smart on crime: Reconsidering the death penalty in a time of economic crisis. www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/ CostsRptFinal.pdf.

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2013. The 2% death penalty: How a minority of counties produce most death cases at enormous costs to us all. www.deathpenaltyinfo .org/documents/TwoPercentReport.pdf. 2016a. The death penalty in 2016: Year end report. deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/ 2016YrEnd.pdf. 2016b. Death sentences in the U.S. from 1977 by state and year. www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/ death-sentences-united-states-1977-present. 2016c. Executions by year since 1976. www .deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions-year. 2016d. Execution list 2016. www .deathpenaltyinfo.org/execution-list-2016. 2016e. Religion and the death penalty. www .deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php%3Fdid %3D2249. 2016f. Innocence: List of those freed from death row. www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/ innocence-list-those-freed-death-row?scid= 6&did=110. 2016g. Some examples of post-Furman botched executions. www.deathpenaltyinfo .org/some-examples-post-furman-botchedexecutions?scid=8&did=478. Disaster Center. 2016. United States crime rates, 1960–2015. www.disastercenter.com/crime/ uscrime.htm. Drinan, R. R. 1991. The Fractured Dream: America’s Moral Choices. New York: Crossroads. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2013. Crime in the United States 2012, clearances. www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-inthe-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/offensesknown-to-law-enforcement/clearances. Grosso, C. M., B. O’Brien, A. Taylor, and G. Woodworth. 2014. Race discrimination and the death penalty: An empirical and legal overview. In America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment, 3rd ed., edited by J. R. Acker, R. M. Bohm, and C. S. Lanier, 525–76. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Harm Reduction International. 2012. The death penalty for drug offenses: Global overview 2012. International Harm Reduction Association. Hood, R., and C. Hoyle. 2014. The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, E. 1966. The Last Two to Hang. London: Macmillan.

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Jones, J. M. 2015. U.S. death penalty support at 60%. October 25. www.gallup.com/poll/ 196676/death-penalty-support.aspx?g_ source=Death%20penalty&g_medium= search&g_campaign=tiles. Koestler, A. 1956. Reflections on Hanging. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. Liebman, J. S., J. Fagan, V. West, and J. Lloyd. 2000. Capital attrition: Error rates in capital cases, 1973–1995. Texas Law Review 78:1839– 65. Marquart, J. W., and J. R. Sorensen. 1989. A national study of the Furman-commuted inmates: Assessing the threat to society from capital offenders. Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 23:5–28. McDermott, D. 2001. A retributivist argument against capital punishment. Journal of Social Philosophy 32:317–33. NAACP Legal Defense Fund. 2016. Death row USA. www.naacpldf.org/files/publications/ DRUSA_Summer_2016.pdf. Nagin, D. S., and J. V. Pepper. 2012. Deterrence and the Death Penalty. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Paternoster, R., R. Brame, and S. Bacon. 2008. The Death Penalty: America’s Experience with Capital Punishment. New York: Oxford University Press. Phillips, S., L. Potter, and J. E. Coverdill. 2012. Disentangling victim gender and capital punishment: The role of media. Feminist Criminology 7:130–45. Prejean, H. 1993. Dead Man Walking. New York: Random House. Quinnipiac University. 2015. Quinnipiac University poll. http://poll.qu.edu/national/ release-detail?ReleaseID=2229. Radelet, M. L., and R. L. Akers. 1996. Deterrence and the death penalty: The views of the experts. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 87:1–16. Radelet, M. L., and H. A. Bedau. 2014. The execution of the innocent. In America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment, 3rd ed., edited by J. R. Acker, R. M. Bohm, and C. S. Lanier, 357–72. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Radelet, M. L., and T. Lacock. 2009. Do executions lower homicide rates: The views of leading criminologists. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 99:489–508.

Radelet, M. L., and D. Stanley. 2006. Learning from homicide co-victims: A universitybased project. In Wounds That Do Not Bind: Victim-based Perspectives on the Death Penalty, edited by J. R. Acker and D. Karp, 397–410. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Reprieve. 2016. Lethal injection. www.reprieve .org.uk/topic/lethal-injection/. Sarat, A. 2014. Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sorensen, J., and J. Marquart. 2003. Future dangerousness and incapacitation. In America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment, 2nd ed., edited by J. R. Acker, R. M. Bohm, and C. S. Lanier, 283–300. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Sorensen, J., and R. L. Pilgrim. 2006. Lethal Injection: Capital Punishment in Texas during the Modern Era. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sterbenz, C. 2014. These are the only 7 people in the US pardoned AFTER they were executed. Business Insider. May 19. www.businessinsider.com/people-pardonedafter-their-executions-2014–5. U.S. General Accounting Office. 1990. Death penalty sentencing: Research indicates pattern of racial disparities. GGD-90–57. US General Accounting Office. Van den Haag, E. 1986. The ultimate punishment: A defense. Harvard Law Review 99:1662–69. 2014. Justice, deterrence, and the death penalty. In America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment, 3rd ed., edited by J. R. Acker, R. M. Bohm, and C. S. Lanier, 229–42. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Vandiver, M. 2014. The impact of the death penalty on the families of homicide victims and of condemned prisoners. In America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment, 3rd ed., edited by J. R. Acker, R. M. Bohm, and C. S. Lanier, 627–60. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Warden, R. 2009. Reflections on capital punishment. Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy 4:329–59. Washington Post. 2014. Americans prefer life imprisonment to death penalty. Washington

capital punishment/death penalty Post. June 7. www.washingtonpost.com/ politics/polling/americans-prefer-lifeimprisonment-death-penalty/2014/06/08/ 46f0a056-eca0–11e3-b10e-5090cf3b5958_ page.html. Wellford, C., and J. Cronin. 2000. Clearing up homicide clearance rates. National Institute of Justice Journal, June, 3–7. Will, G. 2015. Capital punishment’s slow death. Washington Post. May 20. www. washingtonpost.com/opinions/capitalpunishments-slow-death/2015/05/20/ f3c14d32-fe4f-11e4–8b6c-0dcce21e223d_ story.html.

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Zenit 2015. Pope’s letter to international commission against the death penalty – justice will never be reached by killing a human being. March 20. www.zenit.org/en/articles/ pope-s-letter-to-international-commissionagainst-the-death-penalty. Zimring, F. E. 2003. The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cases Cited Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). Payne v. Tennessee 501 U.S. 808 (1991).

CHAPTER 26

Wrongful Convictions: Comparative Perspectives Marvin Zalman∗

Abstract Wrongful conviction becomes a social problem when innocence consciousness arises, meaning that a significant number of people view miscarriages of justice as caused by correctible systemic factors, and not as inevitable failures of courts. The term “wrongful conviction” encompasses procedurally flawed court convictions and the convictions of factually innocent defendants (i.e., false convictions). There is no definitive way to measure the incidence of false convictions, but American experts estimate plausible rates of from 1 to 3 percent, which translates to tens of thousands falsely convicted each year. Three case studies – the United States, England, and China – demonstrate that innocence consciousness occurred at different times, subject to different social stimuli, leading to different citizen and governmental responses in each country. Wrongful convictions are now viewed as a social problem globally. Wrongful conviction research, conducted mostly by psychologists and lawyers, would benefit from studies by social scientists.

Introduction Miscarriages of justice – failing to accurately separate the guilty from the innocent – are deemed moral and technical failures wherever courts are established. The trials and executions of Socrates in ancient Athens and the Salem “witches” in colonial America were soon after recognized as hysteria-driven errors of justice by their own societies (Hughes 2011, 354; Starkey ∗

Thanks to Greta Zalman for her helpful editorial suggestions.

1961, 267–68). Intertestamental literature (third century b.c.e. to first century c.e.) narrated a miscarriage of justice arising from privileged status and perjury (Susanna 1957). The Roman Emperor Trajan admonished against conviction on suspicion alone (Killias 2015, 57–58). Song Ci, a medieval Chinese justice official, edited a volume in 1247 c.e. on the Correction of Wrongful Convictions (He and He 2013, 74). Voltaire, the essential Enlightenment philosophe, “devoted much of his later life, at times almost exclusively, to the exposure of miscarriages of justice” (Langwallner 2015, 154). 449

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And the medieval English common law admonition that better ten guilty go free than one innocent be convicted reflects the deepest anxiety that has always troubled thoughtful jurists (Blackstone 1979, 352). Despite ancient concerns, wrongful conviction has only recently become a social problem as understood in sociology, or a public problem as understood in policy studies. This thesis rests on the sociological definition of a social problem as an objective aspect of society that can be measured or is subjectively experienced as a problem, by “a significant number of people (or a number of significant people)” (Henslin and Fowler 2010, 6). The transformation of “miscarriage of justice” from a traditional legal concern into a social problem occurred, according to a noted Canadian legal scholar, when “awareness of the alarming reality of wrongful convictions in both Canada and other criminal justice systems” led the Supreme Court of Canada in 2001 to overrule prior jurisprudence and prevent the extradition of fugitives to the United States where they might “face the death penalty” (Roach 2012, 1465). To expand on this thesis, traditional juridical concern about errors of justice becomes a social problem when the concern generates an innocence movement, defined, for the United States, as “a related set of activities by lawyers, cognitive and social psychologists, other social scientists, legal scholars, government personnel, journalists, documentarians, freelance writers, and citizen-activists who, since the mid-1990s, have worked to free innocent prisoners and rectify perceived causes of miscarriages of justice” (Zalman 2010/2011, 1468). From the policy studies perspective the concept of wrongful conviction as a social problem applies when a problem shifts from the personal to the public – “when people interpret events, as a result of changed conditions and understandings, as something for which government relief is possible” (Zalman 2005, 173). This thesis is supported and amplified by analyzing innocence movements in

the United States, England, and Wales (hereafter, England), and China. Each country’s innocence movement arose at different times, responded to different political and social circumstances, took different forms and actions, and generated different official responses. National variations are brought into sharp relief by noting that DNA exonerations, which were critical to the rise of America’s innocence movement, had almost nothing to do with innocence concerns in England or China (Lewis 2011b, 671). Still, each country’s innocence movement can be traced to a definable period when innocence consciousness arose. Innocence consciousness is defined as “the idea that innocent people are convicted in sufficiently large numbers as a result of systemic justice system problems to require efforts to exonerate them, and to advance structural reforms to reduce such errors in the first place” (Zalman 2010/2011, 1468). This chapter will deconstruct the definition of “wrongful conviction” and then show that definitional variations shape the way different countries perceive and address wrongful convictions as a social problem. Following that, the contours of the innocence movements in the United States, England, and China are described and compared. The chapter ends by briefly sketching the global spread of innocence consciousness, as innocence organizations (“projects”) are formed in many countries and some attempt is made to network them. Avenues of wrongful conviction research that social scientists might pursue are suggested.

Definitions and Related Issues The term “wrongful conviction” is inherently ambiguous; it can refer to convictions that are procedurally flawed or to the conviction of people who are “actually innocent” (i.e., factually innocent) either because another person committed the crime (a “wrong person” case) or because no crime was committed (a “no crime” case). The terms “miscarriage of justice” or

wrongful convictions

“error of justice” can have broader meanings, including the erroneous acquittals of factually guilty defendants, defendants who are subjected to excessively harsh sentences, and the like (Forst 2004). The term “false conviction” unambiguously means factual wrongful convictions, but the term has not caught on. The Chinese and American innocence movements focus almost exclusively on actual innocence (i.e., false convictions), but in England official response to factual innocence and procedurally flawed convictions has generated controversy, discussed later. Exploring definitional refinements in detail is beyond the scope of this chapter. It is worth noting, however, that some sociologists distinguish between wrongful convictions generated more or less inadvertently or negligently by justice system personnel in contrast to quite a few resulting from misconduct – even criminal behavior – by police, prosecutors, and forensic examiners (Moran 2007; Naughton 2014). Much wrongful conviction scholarship categorizes “causes” of miscarriages of justice according to procedural errors and wrongs (e.g., improper identification procedures; psychologically coercive interrogations), rather than by the motivations of system-actors (Gross 2008; Zalman and Carrano 2014). This is not to say that official misconduct is or should be ignored. The National Registry of Exonerations (n.d.) includes official misconduct as one of six “contributing factors” of exonerations, and close to half of all exonerations include official misconduct. What remains uncertain and controversial is whether defining wrongful convictions by “criminologizing” them, a construct drawn from critical criminology, is methodologically sound and helpful to reform efforts (Naughton 2014; see Bandes 2008). Although the focus of contemporary wrongful conviction analysis and action is on false convictions, and some may dismiss the importance of procedurally flawed convictions, the latter category poses intensely significant challenges to any legal system that seeks to remain true to its stature as a system of law (Siegel 2005). A conviction

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is the verdict of a court that brands a person as a criminal in accordance with the law of the state. A legal process that aspires to be true to ideals of law is one of the most significant emblems of human civilization, and procedural rights are now accounted as fundamental human rights (Fromkin 1998, 149–51; United Nations, n.d., Articles 6–11). From early on in the development of human societies it was understood that what distinguishes legitimate sanctioning in the name of a collectivity rests not so much on a “correct” outcome as on procedural regularity (Whitman 2008). In criminal law theory a conviction is legitimate only if the state has proven all the elements of a crime in a trial that meets due process requirements. If the trial is significantly flawed the state has not met its obligation to impose its power to punish in a way that comports with the principle of legality (Hall 1961). A state that does not act within the rule of law in this way has failed a basic test of legitimacy; if “lawless” trials become the norm, the government is little more than an organized criminal gang, even if organized on a mass scale (Müller 1991). In addition, in the common law family of legal systems that operate in England and many former colonies including the United States, guilt must be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt.” An acquittal based on insufficient evidence (resulting in a “not guilty” rather than “innocent” verdict) is an essential element of America’s due process constitutional foundation and of the rule of law which characterizes the English state. Such an acquittal “does not mean that [a defendant] is in fact innocent” (Pattenden 1996, 57), although it may (Givelber and Farrell 2012). Nevertheless, a “lapse from due process may not only expose a defendant to the risk of wrongful conviction, but threatens the integrity of the criminal justice system” (Pattenden 1996, 57). Still, uneasiness about undermining due process and the rule of law pales into abstraction when compared to the distress felt about an innocent person rotting away in prison or facing execution. Attention to actual innocence is justified because

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freeing the innocent calls on society’s deepest moral sense and because wrongful convictions are indicators of correctible defects in the justice system. Thus, the main innocence movement goals are to exonerate factually innocent prisoners and create reforms to prevent wrongful convictions where possible. The movement is, additionally, concerned with compensating and assisting exonerees (see, e.g., Norris 2014), and, for law school innocence clinics, instructing law students how to fight for exonerations in the courts. Defining wrongful conviction abstractly is one thing. Devising a sound methodology for identifying a defendant who is factually innocent is far more confounding because a wrongful conviction is invisible when it occurs; otherwise a prosecutor would dismiss an indictment or a jury would acquit (Gross 2008, 175; see Gould et al. 2014). Proof of factual innocence is clear in rare cases when the murder “victim” shows up years after a conviction (or execution!) or, where proof of guilt is linked to biological evidence and postconviction DNA testing proves that the evidence did not come from the (wrongfully) convicted person. Beyond these clear examples, it is necessary to grapple with exoneration and the various legal and political processes by which exonerations are achieved. Most of what we know about wrongful convictions is in fact derived from exonerations. An exoneration “is an official act declaring a defendant not guilty of a crime” (Gross et al. 2005, 524). A jury’s “not guilty” verdict exonerates the defendant; but under the common law reasonable doubt standard, residual doubt about factual guilt may linger over an acquittal, although research supports the rationality of jury acquittals (Givelber and Farrell 2012). Innocence organizations, however, are not concerned with “initial” exonerations, but with the official clearing of a person’s name “of a crime for which he or she had previously been convicted” (Gross et al. 2005, 524, emphasis added). Exonerations occur in various ways. The classic American study identified four meth-

ods: (1) a pardon based on evidence of innocence; (2) a court dismissal of charges after new evidence of innocence emerged; (3) acquittal on retrial based on evidence that the defendant had no role in the crime; and (4) a state’s posthumous acknowledgment that a prisoner who died while incarcerated was innocent (Gross et al. 2005, 524). These four modes do not exhaust exoneration methods. Innocence movement activism has expanded the number of American states compensating exonerated prisoners by legislation that requires a released prisoner to prove innocence, in accord with various legal standards, to a court or administrative officer. Florida, for example, requires “verifiable and substantial evidence of innocence” established by clear and convincing evidence. This standard was not met by James Richardson, who was previously exonerated for the 1967 murder of his children. He was released from prison in 1989 after his case was nolle prossed by a court following a hearing conducted by special state prosecutor Janet Reno (before becoming US Attorney General). Richardson’s case shows that a person can be exonerated in one legal sense but not in another (Zalman 2012, 252– 54). In the United States the most rigorous list of exonerations, based on a conservative definition of exoneration, is maintained by the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) (n.d.). An important question is the size of the problem. The incidence of wrongful convictions cannot be measured in any standardized way, as, for example, crime is measured in the United States by comparing an ongoing government household survey and a census of crimes reported to police. Wrongful convictions are, as noted, invisible when they occur and are typically not discovered during normal legal appeals (Garrett 2008), but often by chance. Once a prisoner or her allies discover exonerating evidence they must proceed through dense and tortuous postconviction procedures in the United States or a special postappeal process in England that has been criticized as less-than-fully effective. The difficulty of being exonerated means that lists

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of known exonerees sharply undercount wrongful convictions. The NRE lists about 1,800 individual exonerations in America since 1989 (as of May 2016), and this number could easily be doubled if “group exonerations” are added, where corrupt police plant evidence on innocent people leading to exonerations of a large group when the story comes to light (Gross and Shaffer 2012, 78–90; Covey 2013). This is a trivial number compared to the 1 million felons convicted annually. Indeed, conservative jurists have either blasted innocence organizations for over blowing a virtually non-existent problem (Hoffman 2007) or have soft-pedaled the problem (Cassell 2011/2012). Although there is no way of knowing if exonerations are a random sample of wrongful convictions (Webster and Miller 2014/2015, 986n85), from the outset scholars soundly surmised that exonerations must be a very small percentage of wrongful convictions (Gross et al. 2005). Post-1973 death sentences provide the most precise data. The raw death penalty exoneration rate, based on precise numbers of the sentenced, the executed, and the exonerated, is above 2 percent. However, a statistical analysis estimating a rate for prisoners who remained on death row and those whose sentences were commuted to life imprisonment over a twenty-year period estimated a shocking error rate of 4.1 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 2.8–5.2 percent (Gross et al. 2014). On the basis of death penalty studies and other scholarship, most innocence scholars believe the most plausible wrongful conviction rates range from one-half of 1 percent to 2 percent or 3 percent. Even the lowest plausible qualitative estimate amounts to thousands wrongfully convicted of felonies, and about 40 percent of them sent to prison, every year (Zalman 2014). Wrongful conviction research and analysis is dominated by studies of “causes” and “remedies.” The literature is enormous. Although social scientists explain that the inductively derived sources or factors correlated with wrongful convictions are not scientific causes (Gould and Leo 2010; Leo

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and Gould 2009; Gould et al. 2014) the term “cause” continues to be used. The “canonical list” of causes (Gross 2008, 186) – labeled the innocence paradigm (Zalman 2010/2011, 1500–1504) – is in part socially constructed. Nevertheless, as they do contribute to most wrongful convictions, careful attention to their dynamics offers the best path to better understanding and reducing the number of wrongful convictions. These causes include: (1) false statements and perjury by all justice system participants, not only so-called jailhouse snitches involved in many notorious wrongful convictions; (2) cognitive biases by system participants – often called tunnel vision – that generate hasty and inaccurate decisions; (3) eyewitness misidentification and faulty identification procedures that exacerbate this human failing; (4) police misconduct and even corruptly planting false evidence; (5) unreliable forensic science evidence, much of it exposed by DNA profiling; (6) false confessions, typically generated by excessive police pressure during interrogation; (7) prosecutorial misconduct, most notably failing to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense; (8) ineffective legal defense, with defense attorneys often believing that innocent clients are guilty; and (9) judicial process weaknesses with juries, trial judges, appellate judges and judges in habeas corpus and postconviction procedures failing to perceive wrongful indictments or convictions (Armbrust and Friedman 2014; Belloni and Hodgson 2000; Borchard 1932; Garrett 2008, 2011; He and He 2012; Kozinski 2015; Naughton 2013, 34– 110; Redlich et al. 2014; Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer 2000). The largest number of cause studies have been conducted by psychologists (Cutler 2012), but the issues have been analyzed by legal scholars, forensic scientists, social scientists, and journalists and writers. The wrongful conviction reform process is also studied from a public policy perspective (e.g., Zalman and Carrano 2014). Other research areas include the psychological consequences of wrongful convictions (Grounds 2004; Westervelt and Cook 2012), women exonerees (Konvisser 2012), racial and gender stereotypes (Webster and

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Miller 2014/2015) and state compensation for exonerees (Norris 2014). This chapter, in contrast, elucidates an understanding of wrongful conviction as a social problem by focusing on how the issue has been addressed by different countries when the traditional judicial concern with miscarriages of justice ceased to be an internal legal matter and emerged as a major social and political concern. We now explore national variations to demonstrate that responses to wrongful convictions are shaped by varying legal, social and political factors in different countries.

United States The rise of the American innocence movement in the 1990s seems anomalous; that decade was the high point of America’s “tough-on-crime,” mass-incarceration era. No public officials and very few scholars thought that wrongful conviction was a systemic problem rather than an episodic phenomenon in 1990 (Findley 2010/2011, 1159). By 2000 a nascent innocence movement was under way, growing steadily to occupy a recognized, if minor, place in American criminal justice. The prime institutions representing the innocence movement in America are more than fifty innocence organizations, which are better known as “innocence projects,” taking that name from the Innocence Project (n.d.) founded in 1992 as a clinical program at Cardozo Law School by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld (Scheck et al. 2000). Most are law school clinical programs or non-profit organizations, with a smaller number of public defenders’ offices and exoneree organizations (Findley 2008, 2014; Findley and Golden 2014; McMurtrie 2014; Zalman 2010/2011). The Innocence Project was not the first American attempt to institutionalize a wrongful conviction reform program. Edwin Borchard, the first wrongful conviction scholar who advocated compensating the innocent from his first essay in 1913 (used to lobby the US Senate) to his 1932 book, which he used to successfully cam-

paign for the first federal exoneree compensation law in 1938, was ahead of his time (Borchard 1913, 1932; see Zalman 2013). The same structural conditions that limited Borchard’s reform efforts (unprofessional and politicized police; early-stage forensic science; overly adversarial prosecution; courts unable to initiate structural reforms; and the lack of law school clinical programs) also led to the quick demise of Earl Stanley Gardner’s Court of Last Resort (1952). More recently, Centurion Ministries (n.d.), founded in 1983 by Jim McCloskey, has had more staying power and plays a valuable role in exonerating the innocent. However, a critical element that defines the innocence movement is innocence consciousness and the central goal of reforming those justice system practices and procedures that produce wrongful convictions. Several factors and individuals contributed to America’s innocence movement. Most prominent was the news that DNA profiling helped exonerate innocent prisoners, which electrified the thinking of jurists, scholars, documentarians, the news media, and the public. It upset a complacent belief in the system’s near perfect accuracy and raised the likelihood that a significant proportion of convictions were false. That the Innocence Project (n.d.) played a central role in generating newsworthy DNA exonerations was not happenstance; Neufeld and Scheck had, through earlier litigation, become the leading defense DNA experts and were well positioned to exploit the power of DNA exonerations (Aronson 2007). DNA exonerations were noticed by Attorney General Janet Reno, who was sensitized to actual innocence as James Richardson’s special prosecutor in Florida. She authorized a study that placed the DNA exoneration issue on the government’s policy agenda (Connors et al. 1996). Scheck and Neufeld, in a preface to the report, asserted that DNA exonerations were the tip of a wrongful conviction iceberg and that false convictions were caused by many justice system flaws identified by Borchard (1932) decades before. Other factors, alongside news of DNA exonerations, fed the growing interest in

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wrongful convictions. The Death Penalty Information Center (n.d.), founded in 1990, reported a growing number of death penalty exonerations. Although wrongful convictions are not limited to capital cases the thought of executing innocent prisoners catalyzed the innocence movement (Acker and Bellandi 2014). Lawyers and journalists at Northwestern University organized a death penalty exoneree conference and created the Center on Wrongful Conviction (n.d.), another well-resourced innocence organization, which persuaded Illinois Governor George Ryan to place a moratorium on executions in 2001. He established a commission to study the issue and commuted all death row prisoners before leaving office in 2003. In these and other ways, the death penalty-innocence link helped galvanize the innocence movement (Marshall 2004; Warden 2005). Since the early 1970s a substantial body of psychological research explored the problem of mistaken eyewitness identification, which came to be seen as a leading source of wrongful convictions. Psychological research on false confessions and the malleability of child witnesses also contributed to scientific knowledge about wrongful convictions (Leo 2005). By the early 1990s psychological researchers became confident that decades of research produced a body of scientific knowledge both about the causes of mistaken eyewitness identifications and low-cost errorreducing lineup procedures. Leading cognitive psychologists published a white paper on the topic (Wells et al. 1998) that brought them to the attention of Attorney General Reno. She initiated a process – a working group of psychologists, prosecutors, and police – that created practical guides for police lineups which incorporated the psychological research (Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence 1999; Doyle 2005). This psychological research generated theories of wrongful conviction production (e.g., manipulated child witnesses; pressured false confessions; mistaken eyewitness identification) and concomitant measures to reduce the likelihood of error (e.g., child witness protocols; videotaped inter-

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rogations; double blind sequential lineups). This in turn gave the innocence movement a scientific foundation and has led to substantial reform efforts (e.g., Police Executive Research Forum 2013). Media reporting was essential to shift public opinion and raise innocence consciousness. The compelling nature of exoneration stories – suffused with pathos – helped change news reporter attitudes away from a pro-prosecution reflex (Warden 2003). This change in media frames was the most significant factor in the decline of procapital punishment public opinion from the 1980s to 2005, and the drop in death sentences (Baumgartner, DeBoef, and Boydstun 2008). These years saw a steady stream of news about exonerations and death penalty moratoria, including high-profile stories like the Central Park Five exonerations and Gov. Ryan’s commutations (Burns 2011). The issue was explored in many documentaries spearheaded by Frontline productions. Popular films like The Hurricane (1999), starring Denzel Washington, about the wrongful conviction of prizefighter Rubin Carter and the play The Exonerated (Blank and Jensen 2004) raised the issue’s public profile. Communications and public media are essential to the perception of social problems as movements; this was true of the innocence movement in its formative period and continues to be an issue as traditional forms of news media face unprecedented change (Warden 2014; Zalman, Larson, and Smith 2012). The American innocence movement is not a mass movement. Its primary institutional manifestation and its driving force are fifty-four innocence organizations linked into the Innocence Network (n.d.), which also includes thirteen non-US innocence organizations. As of April 2016, thirty of the US organizations are law school or university-based innocence clinics (one specializes in exoneree assistance), sixteen are non-profit organizations, six are units of governmental legal defender or appellate defender organizations, and two are exoneree-led organizations that provide public information and service to exonerees. Around this core of activist lawyer and

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law-student organizations, the innocence movement is joined by many forensic scientists, journalists, documentarians, academics, and to an important and growing degree, justice system officials in law enforcement, prosecution and the judiciary (e.g., Kozinski 2015), who recognize the importance of the issue. The federal government has supported the innocence movement by limited financial support through grants and support of reform efforts such as Sentinel Event analysis (National Institute of Justice 2014). To sum up, the American innocence movement is a characteristically civil society phenomenon. In this regard the innocence movement, centered in the Innocence Network, follows the American path by which ideological interests, whether of the right or left (e.g., CATO Institute; ACLU) or representing segments of the population (e.g., National Organization for Women, NAACP), are represented by thousands of civil society interest groups rather than by parliamentary parties (Zalman 2005, 188–89). It operates in a polity distinguished by federalism and political fragmentation, is organized primarily at the state or local level, and utilizes a variety of levers to advance its policy goals including strategic litigation, legislative lobbying, coalitionbuilding with justice agencies and membership organizations, and public relations.

England Innocence consciousness arose in Victorian England as a movement to add regular appellate procedures following trial court verdicts, after “six cases of improper conviction in capital cases were discovered” by the Sheriff of London in 1827 and later brought to the attention of Parliament (Pattenden 1996, 6–7). This liberal reform idea roiled Parliament for more than a halfcentury, kept alive by occasional miscarriage of justice stories and royal pardons generated by the Home Office. But reform bills continued to fail, despite growing popular support, blocked by the opposition of mostly conservative jurists who believed that English criminal law was humane and

larded with defendants’ rights (McCartney and Roberts 2012, 1335; Nobles and Schiff 2000, 39–47; Pattenden 1996, 6–27). The dam broke in 1907 when Parliament created the Court of Criminal Appeal (since 1966, the Court of Appeal, Criminal Division, or CACD) on the heels of huge public outcry in the notorious wrongful convictions of Adolf Beck and George Edalji, the latter championed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (McCartney and Roberts 2012, 1336; Nobles and Schiff 2000, 48–50; Pattenden 1996, 27–33). The Court of Criminal Appeal (CCA) did not become an engine for discovering and rectifying false convictions. For one thing, the 1907 statute did not authorize new trials based on “fresh evidence,” making the new judicial body a standard appellate court that reviewed procedural error rather than a court to rehear evidence. In addition, low caseloads, irregular staffing, high turnover of temporarily assigned trial judges, and conservative judicial deference to jury verdicts diminished the Court’s capability and reputation. The Court heard far more cases involving procedural error and excessive sentencing than false convictions. Equally important, rectification of wrongful convictions came not only from defendants’ direct appeals to the CCA but more from executive branch action via the Home Secretary’s power “to refer a case back to the CCA at any time” (Pattenden 1996, 346, 359–67). This power was exercised through a bureau known as “C3, a small and poorly resourced Division of the Home Office” (Zander 2010, xvi; Pattenden 1996, 348–53). Thus, public concern about miscarriages of justice focused on the Home Office as well as the CCA; it was generally concluded that the Home Office played a less-than-vigorous role in investigating and correcting false convictions (Naughton 2013, 140–61; Nobles and Schiff 2000, 50–61; Pattenden 1996, 34–37). Some of these defects were corrected in the 1960s along with the creation of the Court of Appeals, Criminal Division (CACD), but, on the whole, academic observers and many in the legal community found these reforms disappointing, especially in correcting jury

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errors based on fact (Belloni and Hodgson 2000, 178–81; Naughton 2010; Nobles and Schiff 2000, 62–82; Pattenden 1996, 37–43, 69–79; McCartney and Roberts 2012, 1335– 42). Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, wrongful conviction was seen intermittently as a social problem in England. As a journalist colorfully noted, “Throughout my lifetime there always seems to have been at least one rumoured miscarriage of justice nagging away at the public conscience” (Woffinden 1987, xi). But what is also revealing about the intersection of wrongful convictions and England’s political culture is that public pressure generated by notorious wrongful convictions has motivated significant justice system reforms. Beyond establishing the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907, the mid-twentieth century wrongful execution of Timothy Evans and others contributed significantly to the campaign to abolish capital punishment. The false confessions and wrongful convictions of three teens in the Maxwell Confait affair created pressure to reform the law regarding interrogation and identification, resulting in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 (Naughton 2007, 79–83; Naughton 2013, 1–5, 143–51; Pattenden 1996, 79–80, 353–59; Woffinden 1987, 3–27). The perceived inability of the criminal appeals process to adequately correct wrongful convictions created momentum for greater reform in the guise of an independent review body. Nevertheless, Court of Appeals’s hostility to the Home Office referring cases for review deflected reform to the late 1980s. “The real catalyst for change proved to be the cases of the Guilford Four and the Birmingham Six” (McCartney and Roberts 2012, 1345). Lethal Irish Republican Army terrorism in the 1970s unsettled England and unleashed draconian police power sanctioned by Parliament. Horrific bombings led to high pressure police investigations marked by brutal interrogations, false confessions, erroneous forensic evidence and the wrongful convictions of entirely innocent Irish residents, a tale made famous by Gerry Conlon’s In the Name of the Father (1989) and a film by that name starring Daniel Day-Lewis (In the

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Name of the Father, 1993; see Belloni and Hodgson 2000, 6–7; Nobles and Schiff 2000, 111–70; Woffinden 1987, 213–320). Once again the English government responded to intense public criticism with a structural reform. The debate included a significant governmental report (Royal Commission on Criminal Justice 1993, 162– 87), which proposed a major change in methods for correcting miscarriages of justice. The report, echoing the views of many critics, led Parliament to create the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) which began to function in 1997. The CCRC is “a body corporate separate from the Crown, with powers to investigate possible miscarriages of justice and refer them back to the CACD” (Pattenden 1996, 417). Any hopes that the CCRC would bring wrongful convictions to light and have the courts exonerate all identifiable false confessions has not come to fruition. The CCRC is less a radically new agency than an extension of the Home Office C3 committee that had for a century performed this task, albeit with increased resources and powers. The CCRC’s statutory framework channels its inquiry to examine “unsafe” convictions and to refer those to the CACD where there is fresh evidence and a “real possibility” that the original verdict will be overturned. The agency thus reviews procedural errors and excessive sentences as well as false convictions, and makes its decisions with an eye to what the CACD is likely to do. A detailed review of the substantial debate over the CCRC’s effectiveness is beyond the scope of this chapter (see Naughton 2010). What is significant for understanding how national culture shapes an innocence movement is that despite the attempt to create a lively civil society response in England related to wrongful convictions, including the formation and work of the Innocence Network UK (INUK, n.d.), the head of that organization and leading wrongful conviction scholar, Michael Naughton, has proposed yet another governmental body to focus specifically on “alleged innocent victims of wrongful conviction . . . not bound to the criteria of the appeals courts” (Naughton

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2010, 225). Whether this is wise policy is again beyond the scope of this chapter. Even if the criticism assembled by Naughton (2010) and colleagues is accurate – that the statutory framework and relationship of the CCRC and CACD fails to exonerate enough wrongfully convicted prisoners – as it very likely may be, there are weighty counterarguments. McCartney and Roberts argue that procedural errors are more readily apparent than false convictions to appellate courts, meaning that the current appellate “unsafe verdict” standard will lead to the release of more prisoners, including many factual innocence cases along with those resulting solely from procedural error. Further, “[d]owngrading the importance of due process arguments would be unworkable in practice” for an appellate court (McCartney and Roberts 2012, 1352). From the American perspective, an “unsafe verdict” appellate standard of review appears more defendant-friendly than the “against-the-weight-of-theevidence” standard (Risinger 2004, 1316–33). Thus we see that ambiguity regarding the meaning of wrongful conviction or miscarriage of justice has created a good deal of controversy in England over the scope and focus of innocence reforms. Moreover, it appears the English attempt to emulate the American Innocence Network has encountered fiscal and structural barriers that have truncated its existence. In 2004 Dr. Michael Naughton, a sociologist, founded the University of Bristol innocence project as a pro bono legal clinic “and also set up INUK which facilitated the establishment of innocence projects across the UK” (Greenwood 2015, 164; see also INUK, n.d., “History”). In 2014 the INUK “folded” by announcing that it would “no longer be renewing or taking memberships from universities and/or law firms.” In the decade of its existence INUK expanded to thirtyfive university-based organizations and one based in a law firm. In that time INUK referred 100 cases, from about 1,500 applications, to member organizations for further work. However, in that period, only one member, Cardiff University, succeeded

in overturning a client’s conviction, and Bristol University succeeded in getting only two clients before the Court of Appeals, which denied their appeals. A number of problems described in INUK’s website and by Greenwood (2015) led to the ultimate disbanding of INUK as a network. These included the low rate of successful appeals; the lack of experienced criminal litigation practitioners at some projects; the inability to liaise with overburdened criminal law practitioners at a time of “huge legal aid funding cuts” (Greenwood 2015, 186); the inadequate staffing of some projects by full-time academics; student interns only working on small parts of lengthy cases; and lack of external funding. Some of the projects relied excessively on Dr. Naughton at Bristol for support services rather than establishing more robust organizations and failed to properly utilize student interns. At present, it appears that some of the projects continue to operate but that INUK no longer seeks new members. The fact that only one former INUK member (Innocence Project London) is a member of the Innocence Network suggests that other English projects may not meet the rigorous staffing requirements for Innocence Network membership. Despite the collapse of INUK, the disbanding of some former members, and changes in the names and functions of others, about five or six university programs have attached to the Centre for Criminal Appeals, a practitioner-operated non-profit organization. From this it appears that some level of civil society innocence movement activity will continue in England (Greenwood 2015, 187–91). Yet, the major focus of efforts to exonerate actually innocent prisoners in the United Kingdom resides in its judicial system, fulfilling a reform agenda first envisioned when Victoria was a young Queen.

China Around 2000, wrongful conviction was “recognized as an important issue by both the political and legal community” in

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China, i.e., mainland China or the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Unlike the United States where DNA exonerations were critical to shaking official complacency about the justice system’s near perfection, the rise of innocence consciousness in China was similar to the English experience in that “high-profile cases [] have . . . aroused widespread public anger, undermined public confidence in the justice system and caught political leaders’ attention” (Wu and Zalman 2013, 3; see Belkin 2011; Lan 2010; Lewis 2011b; Minas 2009). According to leading Chinese wrongful conviction scholars, “In recent years as the media has disclosed the wrongful convictions of Shi Dongyu, Du Peiwu, Li Jiuming, She Xianglin, and Zhao Zuohai, wrongful convictions have become a growing and sad topic for the general public in Mainland China” (He and He 2012, 1277). Hard-to-identify corpses in some of these homicide cases were mistaken for the victim; in others no body was ever produced. Exonerations occurred either because the alleged victims appeared several years later or the real killers were subsequently identified. Prisoners Du Peiwu, She Xianglin, and Zhao Zuohai were released from prison and compensated. The effect of these cases cannot be overstated. A spate of widely reported wrongful convictions have “shocked society” in China. The issue exploded into public discussion in 2005 when She Xianglin’s wife, whom he allegedly murdered a decade earlier, returned to her home village alive and well. That same year, a murder suspect confessed to a previous killing with a level of detail indicating that he indeed was the actual murderer. However, in 1994, another man named Nie Shubin had already been executed for the crime. (Lewis 2011b, 668)

These and other cases were the immediate cause of the rise of innocence consciousness in China. As in England, the Chinese government responded to public opinion, in large measure to uphold governmental legitimacy, by making changes to legal rules or

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institutions. The differences between China and England, however, were pronounced. Understanding China’s response to the public outcry against wrongful convictions requires a basic knowledge of its political and sociocultural structure, ideals, and practices. Such contextual knowledge is necessary to appreciate any country’s criminal justice system. Readers are assumed to understand English parliamentary democracy, American federalism and its checksand-balances governing system, the reach of the Rule of Law, the roles of courts and political parties, how civil society mediates individual-state relations, and the like. China’s governing and legal system may not be as well understood, especially given its authoritarian (but not dictatorial) nature. A very limited and selective review will set the stage for appreciating China’s response to wrongful convictions. China’s turn-around is well known. Led by Deng Xiaoping, beginning in 1978, China leaped from a poor, underdeveloped state which experienced tumultuous and tragic consequences of Mao Zedong’s “permanent revolution,” to a country open to world commerce that has become a global economic and diplomatic power in a few decades, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. This enormous economic growth and transition to a “socialist market economy” was accompanied by major shifts in China’s mode of governance. China is a party state; political authority is executive authority, centered in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders at the national, provincial and local levels selected from among those with family ties (i.e., so-called princelings) and others based on merit. Legislatures and courts do not offer checks and balances; courts are more extensions of executive power. The actual exercise of power is opaque but at the national level comes out of a system of relationships and influence among a group of perhaps 4,000 Party leaders who have risen up the ranks of government and Party leadership posts. The CCP is the only political authority; no rival parties are allowed any power. A remarkable feature of the system is that since 1992 the

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leaders in power have been replaced peacefully every ten years by a new, younger, group through some kind of internal consensus mechanism. Much about Chinese policy in many different areas can be understood as the CCP working to retain its legitimacy. Although political authority appears monolithic, it is fragmented not only by internal debate within the politically influential elite, but by enormous regional diversity and local concerns. China is a huge country with thirtyfour provinces or provincial-level subpolities; about 1,500 county-level units, about 1,300 cities (and 160 with populations exceeding one million people) and citylike units, 14,000 townships, 20,000 towns, and up to 1 million villages. Although CCP dominates governmental decisions, the relations between the central government and provincial, county and municipal governments are governed more by bargaining and custom than by law (although regulations have become key governing elements) and the center does not have the capacity to minutely control all action by local officers (see Christensen 2015; Feldman 2013; Jia 2006; Schell and Delury 2013; Starr 2010; Suli 2010; van Rooij 2014). By 1978 China had virtually nothing resembling a court system and no place for lawyers. To help develop its market system, China established seventy new law schools which graduated more than 150,000 lawyers. The criminal justice system consists of courts, prosecutors, and police who cooperate under the coordination of national, provincial, county, or municipal CCP Political and Legal Affairs Committees. The presumption of innocence was not a feature of this system and police decisions to arrest after initial detention and investigation were assumed to be correct. Police interrogation methods are rough and the use of torture to obtain confessions is widespread. Convictions in court are based primarily on police and prosecutorial dossiers; the testimony of witnesses is not always required and cross-examination, when it occurs, is not always effective. Trials are really more in the nature of sentencing hearings and

confessions lead to more lenient treatment, similar to America’s plea bargaining system. Defense lawyers, relatively few in number, play limited roles. Overly vigorous defense has led in some cases to the jailing of defense counsel (Belkin 2011; Lan 2010; Ma 2003; Lu and Miethe 2003; McConville et al. 2011; Peerenboom 2002, 2007; Zalman and Wu 2016). Finally, China’s response to wrongful convictions is a part of its strategy to maintain its authoritarian, one-party system. Legitimacy in democratic states is achieved by electoral competition, which makes voters ultimately responsible for leaders’ decisions and provides opportunities to change them. Opposition parties can speak to matters that rouse popular discontent and promise to rectify them. Political party competition, representing various interests, creates pressure for ameliorative legislation and compromise. In addition, robust civil society activity provides many avenues to influence policy. The Deng legacy does not include elements of western political democracy; Xi Jinping, President of the PRC, is outspoken against it and has moved forcefully to limit democratic or civil society initiatives. An authoritarian state, like a monarchy, maintains legitimacy by listening and responding to complaints of the people. China experiences perhaps from 10,000 to 100,000 demonstrations a year over a host of grievances. China also closely monitors internet traffic and listens in on a large volume of criticism of the government and the Party. In the broadest terms, the party state’s response is, after quelling demonstrations, to act harshly against criticism believed to undermine the party state, either by separatist groups or by those who would inject the bacillus of democratic competition and thus destroy the central role of the CCP. However, for a range of other complaints like economic stability and growth, official corruption, pollution, illicit land acquisition, tainted food, traffic, health care, education reform and more, the government responds in a variety of ways to correct the problems. Xi’s current and huge campaign

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against CCP and government corruption, although apparently weighted against his opposing interests, is an attempt to correct a pervasive issue that, along with a severe economic decline, could wreck CCP legitimacy. It is worth emphasizing that while there is much that is opaque in Chinese policy making and governance, the state openly acknowledges many problems and seeks legislative and expert (including academic) input in solving them (Belkin and Cohen 2015; Buckley 2015b, 2015c; Buckley and Jacobs 2015; Feldman 2013, 55–98; Fu 2014; Jacobs 2015a, 2015b; Jacobs and Buckley 2015a, 2015b; King, Pan, and Roberts 2013; Krugman 2015; van Rooij 2014; Trevaskes et al. 2014; Wong 2015a, 2015b; Wong and Buckley 2015). In this light, a well-publicized public apology in the notorious Zhou Zuohai case – a poor farmer tortured into confessing and wrongfully convicted in 2001, but released in 2010 when the murder “victim” returned to their hometown seeking welfare support – makes sense. The chief judge of the provincial high court went to Zhou’s remote peasant village to personally apologize, and “in front of national television cameras [] bowed deeply three times” (Belkin 2011, 274). This action demonstrates that China’s general approach to public and social problems also applies to crime and criminal justice issues. A commentator addressing the tension between responsiveness to public concerns and bureaucratic production pressures that generate uneven policy responses, noted with greater nuance: From a political standpoint, it is understandable that the government and courts take the public’s opinion, particularly their outrage, very seriously, even at the cost of compromising the rule of law. As a regime not established on genuine democracy, the CCP needs public confidence to maintain its legitimacy, power and governance. Addressing the public’s needs and responding to public outrage are important for establishing and maintaining public confidence. However, as there is not a system of democratic representation, judges and governmental officials are all part of

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bureaucracies. Thus, they are most sensitive to and responsive to the needs of their respective superiors, rather than to those of the public. This results in judges frequently disregarding the public’s needs in their own pursuit of efficiency and convenience . . . Only when significant public outrage triggers threats to social stability, or stubborn individuals continue to petition higher authorities and discredit local agencies, are responses initiated to address the demands of the public. (Lan 2010, 189, footnotes omitted)

Thus, the government response to public opinion can be seen as conflicted, as is the public’s, in which tough-on-crime and pro–death penalty opinion alternates with outrage over wrongful convictions and a tempering of capital punishment (Trevaskes 2014). China experienced substantial increases in serious violent, theft, and white-collar crimes as it has modernized. Its response was harsh (Cao and Dai 2001; Liu 2005). Although China passed a criminal procedure code with many due process features, influenced by thousands of lawyers who returned from the west with graduate legal degrees, the code was superimposed on a very tough and inquisitorial criminal justice system (Guo 2014; McConville et al. 2011; Trevaskes 2007). Wrongful convictions are intertwined with China’s extensive use of the death penalty and the widespread and government-acknowledged use of torture to obtain confessions in routine criminal cases. Interrogation is required by law in all police investigations; torture to obtain confessions is estimated in half of all interrogations, due in part to the inquisitorial reliance on dossiers, the limited ability or unwillingness of courts to sanction such misconduct, and pressure to deal with expanding crime rates. Instead of suppressing information about the problems of police torture and wrongful convictions, the government responded by acknowledging these problems and responding to them. Police torture, believed to be the leading cause of wrongful convictions, was forbidden in the penal and criminal procedure codes and exclusionary rules were enacted to enforce them.

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To date, this remedy has proved ineffective as the Chinese government has not significantly changed the culture or function of the police, prosecutors or judges throughout the country (Zalman and Wu 2016; Ouyang 2015; Chen 2011b). China has responded to notorious wrongful convictions in several ways. One has been to open the door to significant academic research, including surveys of citizens and criminal justice officers with the approval of justice ministries. This substantial research, summarized in Wu and Zalman (2013), detailed scores of false conviction cases, disclosing many of the same causes found in American research. Respondents who provided information to the researchers, including prosecutors and court officers, agreed with many proposals to improve trials. An examination of cases found a strong correlation between false confessions and wrongful convictions (He and He 2013; see Belkin 2011, 275; Lewis 2011b, 670). Another governmental response in capital cases has been to introduce more careful procedures, including beefed-up appellate review, thought to be related to wrongful convictions (Lewis 2011a; Minas 2009). A “mass” response occurred in 1997–98, when the government openly acknowledged the use of torture and the problem of wrongful convictions. The prosecution ministry ordered a review of 500,000 cases processed in 1997, identifying 1,454 cases and ordering rectification of 1,255 of them. Not to be outdone, the Supreme People’s Court reversed 8,110 wrongful conviction cases decided in 1997 and punished 4,701 officers (Wu and Zalman 2013, 11). The most significant response has been passing legislative exclusionary rules to prevent the use of coerced confessions in trials (Chen 2011a). “In particular, the outcry surrounding Zhao Zuohai’s case served as a tipping point that reportedly expedited release of the 2010 Evidence Rules. Zhao’s wrongful conviction prompted a renewed look at prior cases and reflections on how to reform the system to avoid similar cases in the future” (Lewis 2011b, 670). This response

has paradoxical elements. On the one hand, Judicial reform has been a major component of the modernization of the PRC’s [People Republic of China] legal system. This modernization programme ultimately serves the CCP goal of maintaining its legitimacy to govern. The CCP initiated the first five-year plan for the judiciary in 1999, with the aim of formalizing trial processes and improving the professionalism of judges. The plan emphasized judicial fairness and efficiency over judicial independence, keeping the courts subject to “populism-orientated Party leadership.” (Minas 2009, 49, footnotes omitted)

Yet, despite some moves toward liberalization in the 1990s and 2000s, China’s criminal trials are not balanced contests purporting to grant defendants fair trials. The primary focus on achieving substantive correctness in verdicts has conflicted with and too often overwhelmed any fairness in the trial process created by CPL-1996 [Criminal Procedure Law]. On the one hand, to uncover factual truth, prosecutors and judges are generously empowered to employ all necessary investigation methods, even violating the defendants’ procedural rights, with only a few impediments imposed by the law. The trial framework is thus structurally unfair. On the other hand, to maintain political legitimacy, strict internal supervision and the evidence rule of mutual corroboration have been established. Unfortunately both can still easily be overwhelmed and result in false convictions. For the defendant, the trial itself is still too frequently little more than a formality . . . “[T]he reality is that these manipulated trials often result in wrongful convictions and acquittals, or sentences which are disproportionate to the crime. Occasionally, innocent defendants have been sentenced to death and executed.” (Lan 2010, 168, 183–84)

This may still be the case given the failure to change the underlying dossier-based inquisitorial criminal justice and trial system (Chen 2011b; Ouyang 2015). Wrongful conviction remains a deep and abiding concern. Within the past year the Inner

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Mongolia High Court posthumously exonerated a teen who had been executed for a 1996 rape and murder he did not commit, with compensation and an apology to his parents (Yu 2014). A farmer was released after serving sixteen years because his murder conviction was based only on a confession obtained by torture (Guo 2015). More significantly, a number of structural changes have been ordered by the central government. The CCP ordered courts to put an end to arrest and conviction quotas which promoted conviction rates of close to 100 percent and led to coerced confessions and false convictions (Buckley 2015a; Jacobs 2015b). In early 2015 “the president of the Supreme People’s Court,” in his annual report to the National People’s Congress, “renewed a call to cut back on wrongful convictions, which are epidemic in a legal system that provides almost none of the rights or protections to accused people that are taken for granted in much of the world” (Editorial 2015). China’s cabinet, the State Council, asked local governments to expand legal services for the indigent, although it is not clear whether the funding for this problem, which also dogs the American legal system, will be forthcoming (Zhao 2015). The most optimistic and perhaps realistic assessment is offered by Chinese law professor Guo Zhiyuan, who in assessing the new 2012 Criminal Procedure Law, asserts that the new, toughened, exclusionary rules will be effective because as the idea that tortureproduced confessions lead to wrongful convictions takes hold, the exclusionary rules will be enforced as they are consistent with the results (rather than procedural justice) orientation of Chinese law in upholding crime fighting and societal stability.1

Conclusion: The Innocence Movement Worldwide and Further Research Avenues The case studies show that China, England, and the United States experienced innocence consciousness at different times and

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responded to different social stimuli. Each country’s innocence movement has different characteristics shaped by national norms and the historical relationship between the States and their citizens. China’s innocence movement is a State-directed program responding to public opinion and motivated by the goals of insuring justice and preserving the one-party state. England, following a path laid down almost two centuries ago, derives its definition of wrongful conviction from procedural law and appellate court jurisdiction; its innocence movement focuses on action by official bodies: the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) and the Court of Appeals, Criminal Division (CACD). Although there is a civil society response to wrongful conviction in England, the inability of INUK to match the robustness of America’s innocence organizations provides an object lesson to the power of national norms and histories to shape justice institutions. American innocence consciousness was stimulated by the evidentiary power of DNA exonerations and a fortuitous convergence of action by non-state groups at university law schools and a concerned attorney general. The US innocence movement is essentially a small civil society group of motivated elites in innocence organizations, spread across the fifty states, cooperating in the Innocence Network, who have defined the innocence agenda in terms of the innocence paradigm, and are working to influence a range of public policies to reduce false convictions. To sum up, the American innocence movement is mostly an extragovernmental phenomenon sharply focused on actual innocence; the Chinese innocence movement is a governmental undertaking sharply focused on actual innocence; and the English innocence movement takes a governmental and judicial approach supplemented by civil society activism and is diffuse in that it inquires into procedurally flawed convictions and improper sentences as well as false convictions. These conclusions should not be over-generalized. Professor Lupária (2015b, 4–5) suggests that innocence consciousness is not as

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well developed in Europe as in the United States, perhaps due to the “lack of a wide bottom-up approach” among the general population, in innocence clinics and in workgroups that include the full array of justice practitioners. While the present essay’s national culture hypothesis might seem to support Lupária’s insight, it is worth recalling that public opinion was more important to starting England and China’s innocence movements than was the case in the United States, and that the American “bottom-up” Innocence Project gained recognition from the Attorney General and was bolstered by the federal government’s investment in DNA profiling technology. These variations, and others, can be applied by scholars studying wrongful convictions in other nations or comparatively. Global information about wrongful conviction problems in other countries is found in excellent descriptive chapters in edited volumes (Huff and Killias 2008, 2013; Lupária 2015a)2 and in articles in the University of Cincinnati Law Review’s “International Exploration of Wrongful Conviction” Symposium (volume 80, no. 4, Summer 2012 issue) which were presented at the Innocence Network’s 2011 meeting, attended by representatives from every continent. In some countries, such as Poland after Communism fell, or in Latin America, wrongful convictions are intertwined with sensitive issues of national reconstruction or redefinition. Chile is an interesting case in point as it had restructured its justice system from an inquisitorial to an adversarial model. As for Poland in more recent years, innocence lawyers are now concerned with the kinds of procedural legal questions that arise in mature legal systems than with moral and legal fallout of a prior regime’s wrongful political convictions. In the Netherlands, France, and Germany few wrongful convictions are announced, but in some instances notorious cases shocked lawyers and raised innocence consciousness. In Switzerland, wrongful convictions appear limited to relatively minor offenses. In Japan, wrongful convictions shook up a

complacent system, opening a previously closed and very harsh criminal justice system to scrutiny. As in common law countries, inquisitorial systems grapple with the dilemma of when to allow new evidence to upset final verdicts. A discussion of the Irish Innocence Project discloses the degree to which European national justice systems are subject to review by the European Commission on Human Rights. Endemic wrongful convictions in Nigeria are attributed to a weak and poorly resourced legal system. In South Africa, the problem seems to be terrible pretrial detention conditions, which can last for years before a detained innocent defendant is released. The role of national political culture (and courage) was raised in Spanish cases where citizens voluntarily confessed, falsely, to involvement in abortions and euthanasia as a way of protesting repressive laws, while others falsely confessed to protect fellow gang members or terrorists. Studies of wrongful conviction in Canada and Australia raise the specter of racial bias in the treatment of indigenous people. Tunnel vision is a problem in every system. Singapore handles wrongful conviction appeals with pro bono legal representation. This “anonymized” sketch of many excellent descriptive reports provides a flavor of the number of intriguing questions opened up by the comparative study of wrongful convictions. Of the thirteen non-US innocence organization members of the Innocence Network (n.d.), seven are from common law countries (Canada – 3, Australia – 2, England,3 and New Zealand) and others from Argentina, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, and Taiwan. Unaffiliated innocence projects exist in France, Poland and South Africa and perhaps several other countries. Aside from non-governmental innocence organizations, the English CCRC innovation has been adopted by Scotland (the SCCRC) and Norway (the NCCRC), which has led to rectifying several miscarriages of justice and also provides data for system analysis. Sessions at annual Innocence Network (n.d.) conferences include representatives of non-US innocence projects;

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as innocence organizations are formed in more countries, attendees have been discussing paths toward greater recognition, information sharing, and interactions, possibly within in regional (e.g., Latin American) settings. Whatever path led different countries to discover wrongful conviction as a social problem at different times, the issue is now of global interest. Perhaps a contagion effect is at work, especially as the high visibility of the innocence movement in the United States is noticed abroad. This hypothesis could be explored by sociologists, criminologists and other social scientists. As already noted, the bulk of wrongful conviction research has been conducted by psychologists, lawyers, forensic scientists, and journalists. Social scientists are beginning to explore such issues as postexoneration offending, exoneree coping mechanisms, public opinion about wrongful convictions, the experience of women exonerees, race and gender stereotypes, and more (Clow et al. 2011/2012; Konvisser 2012; Mandery et al. 2013; Webster and Miller 2014/2015). Explorations of wrongful convictions and innocence movements as social problems need the input of comparative and international social scientists. Many intriguing questions are ripe for analysis. Is the rise of innocence consciousness related to measurable social indicators? What roles do race and gender play in causing wrongful convictions and in the institution response to miscarriages of justice? How are institutional responses to wrongful convictions shaped by a nation’s culture or legal system? Do police investigation methods in different countries affect the tendency toward tunnel vision? How do traditions of prosecutors in different countries and different systems shape their responses to wrongful convictions? How does the public in different countries evaluate wrongful conviction stories? Does China’s response mean that autocratic states could vigorously deal with miscarriages of justice without making their justice systems more rights-oriented? What biographical and social factors correlate with innocence movement involve-

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ment? How are exonerees integrated into the innocence movement? Does a country’s concern with actual innocence weaken its crime control abilities as some conservative critics claim? Or, does innocence policy increase the professionalism and effectiveness of a State’s criminal justice system, as some innocence advocates claim? Research on these and other interesting questions by social scientists will help better understand wrongful conviction as a social problem.

Glossary Exoneration An official declaration relieving a previously convicted defendant of criminal liability; achieved by an executive pardon based on evidence of innocence; a court’s dismissal of charges after new evidence of innocence emerged; acquittal on retrial based on evidence that the defendant had no role in the crime; a state’s posthumous acknowledgment that a prisoner who died while incarcerated was innocent; or award of a certificate of innocence or compensation by a state court or administrative officer on sufficient proof of innocence. False conviction A criminal conviction by a court of a person who is factually innocent of the crime either because it was committed by another person or because a crime never occurred. Innocence consciousness The idea that innocent people are convicted in sufficiently large numbers as a result of systemic justice system problems to require efforts to exonerate them, and to advance structural reforms to reduce such errors in the first place. Innocence paradigm A standard list of factors that are thought to be the causes of false convictions, including mistaken eyewitness identification, false confessions, false statements by “jailhouse snitches,” official “tunnel vision,” official misconduct, and ineffective legal counsel. Innocence project An organization, typically a law school legal clinic or a unit of a public defender’s organization, that

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seeks to exonerate falsely convicted persons, to promote policies to reduce the incidence of wrongful convictions, and to assist exonerees. In the United States, the original Innocence Project is a non-profit organization affiliated with Cardozo Law School with rights to that title; other organizations affiliated in the Innocence Network use the generic term innocence organization. Innocence Network An affiliation of organizations that provides pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove innocence of crimes for which they have been convicted, and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions; includes fifty-five US and fourteen non-US innocence organizations. Innocence organization A generic name for organizations that are more commonly known as innocence projects. Miscarriage of justice A broader term than wrongful conviction that encompasses procedurally flawed convictions, false convictions and excessive sentences. No crime case A false convictions in which a conviction occurred although no crime was committed; includes arson convictions for fires caused by accident, convictions for the injury or death of an infant based on so-called shaken baby syndrome, where the injury or death was the result of a misdiagnosed medical condition; white-collar convictions or self-defense cases where prosecutors misapprehended innocent facts as constituting violations of the criminal law; and other cases where criminal liability was attached. Wrongful acquittal Occurs when a jury fails to convict a person who, according to external observers, committed the facts and had the requisite mental state that constitute guilt and sufficient evidence existed so that there was no reasonable doubt of guilt. Wrongful conviction A term that encompasses procedurally flawed criminal convictions, convictions of defendants where reasonable doubt existed, or the convic-

tions of persons who are factually innocent; the latter meaning is conventionally applied to the term wrongful conviction and is coterminous with “false conviction”; see “miscarriage of justice.”

Notes 1. He (2016), a full-length English language analysis of wrongful convictions in China by the leading Chinese scholar on the topic, was published after this chapter went to press and the chapter does not reflect its content. However, a quick skim of the book makes it clear that it is an indispensable source for understanding this subject. 2. Lupária (2015a) came to my attention after this chapter went to press; the sketch of other innocence organizations does not draw on it. 3. The English organization, Innocence Project London, is a “fully independent project” located at the University of Greenwich School of Law in London, and was a member of “the now disbanded INUK.” http:// innocenceprojectlondon.org/.

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Pa r t I I I

PROBLEMS OF GLOBAL IMPACT



CHAPTER 27

Urbanism and Urbanization Ranita Ray and Michael Ian Borer

Abstract The social problems that arise specifically from the way people live in cities (i.e., urbanism) and the ways that cities grow (i.e., urbanization) echo many of the same issues that concern scholars of social problems in general. What makes “the city” unique, however, is that it plays host to many social problems that overlap, that merge, and that are connected within and between specific geographical places. The shift from rural, traditional human settlements to increasingly urban, industrial ones generated a great deal of fear and anxiety in both early urban studies scholars and early urban inhabitants. Here, we focus on a few of the main contemporary urban social problems related to race relations and other inequalities. Of particular interest to students and scholars investigating today’s cities in the United States and around the world are the changing built environments and their urban populations. As such, we explore the role of gentrification and its effects on neighborhood demographics and the consistently shifting urbanism.

Introduction Cities have been a part of human life for thousands of years, but their massive global expansion means that they are now a dominant part of many people’s everyday lives. The process by which cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas develop and grow over time is called urbanization. This long-term development is coupled with urbanism – the ways of life within cities. Louis Wirth (1938) of the seminal early-twentieth-century Chicago School of Sociology described urbanism as a way of

life that is impersonal, transient, contractual, and based on principles of anonymity and division of labor. Of course, urbanism looks different across places and times, but there are some similar features that can be problematic for various populations living, working, or recreating in or near cities. In 1800, a mere 3 percent of the world’s population lived in cities. In 2007, half the world’s population lived in cities. Moreover, demographers estimate this number will increase to 75 percent by 2050. Importantly, this boom in urbanization will not be evenly distributed across the globe. For 475

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example, since the early twenty-first century the percentage of people living in cities in less developed regions of the world – in parts of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America – has been growing closer to that of more developed countries in North America and Europe. Since the midtwentieth century the number of people in less developed regions living in cities has outpaced more developed regions, and this trend is expected to continue indefinitely into the future. This global demographic shift is quite evident in the United States. In 1860, 20 percent of the US population resided in urban areas. Fifty years later that number doubled to 40 percent. By 2014 more than 250 million Americans – nearly 80 percent of the population – lived in cities (Monti et al. 2014). A salient feature of most cities is heterogeneity. In most cities individuals with varying economic and political powers, racial and ethnic identities, sexual identities, beliefs, and interests, establish residency and go to work in close proximity to one another. The spatial integration of a diverse range of individuals into compressed environments has implications for how communities are imagined, formed, and threatened. Problematizing urbanization means thinking about how heterogeneity and its accompanying inequalities impact our lives and society as a whole. A number of social problems occur in cities, partly because a large proportion of the world population lives there. One way to problematize urbanization is to understand how the uneven distribution of power influences how different groups experience urbanism and how various inequalities shape the process of urbanization. In this chapter, we discuss urbanization and urbanism through three broad categories of inequalities: race, class, and sexuality. Though our discussions and examples focus primarily on US cities, similar outcomes are found in many cities in so-called developed societies. We begin by looking at how racial inequalities shaped the formation and development of American cities. Next, we discuss how class

inequalities influence the urban experience through gentrification, urban poverty, food insecurity, and the urban labor market. Last, we end with a discussion of the rise and fall of Gayborhoods as an urban phenomenon. We hope to show how different forces affect the formation, growth, and decline of American cities, and the power relations embedded in them.

Racializing American Cities and Suburbs The Legacy of Residential Segregation The shifting color line in the United States is one of the more apparent ways to see and understand the historical transformation of American cities (Charles 2003). Neighborhoods are frequently residentially and racially segregated. This is largely due to past racist national practices that had lasting effects through the decades. For example, in 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted the National Housing Act to help the country economically recover from the ruins of the Great Depression. Homeownership was used as a means to attain and cultivate wealth through assets. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) originated from within this Act and fostered a program for government-issued loans for homebuyers in order to encourage homeownership. These loans, backed federally, had relatively low and fixed interest rates, which could be paid off over an extended period of time. However, instead of granting approval to all loans, Roosevelt asked banks to only approve loans in specific areas of various American cities. Communities inhabited mainly by black citizens or by people from various racial/ethnic backgrounds (integrated neighborhoods), were excluded from obtaining these loans. This practice, known as “redlining,” deemed some neighborhoods as too risky an investment, thus banks wouldn’t approve loans in these areas. Over the next four decades, white homebuyers received 90 percent of the loans through the

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FHA. Besides influencing the massive accumulations of wealth among white Americans and withholding the same from black Americans, redlining began a powerful process of residential segregation in American cities that continues today. As white residents moved out of cities and into suburban homes – a phenomenon known as “white flight” (Johnson 2011; US Census Bureau 2014) – that were financed in large part with FHA loans, blacks and Hispanics remained in the cities and outside of the mortgage market. After redlining became illegal in the 1970s, blacks and other racial minorities followed their white counterparts by moving into suburban neighborhoods in large numbers. Instead of integrating these neighborhoods, however, many whites abandoned their neighborhoods to move into more racially homogenous white neighborhoods. Real estate agents preyed on the racial anxiety and prejudice of the white homeowners, encouraging them to sell their houses before the newcomers would supposedly lower the value of their house. Many white people sold their houses, which were then resold to minorities at inflated prices. Although racial segregation became illegal in the 1960s, it persisted in practice. For example, experiments conducted by social justice organizations reveal that banks, real estate agents, and landlords continued to discriminate against prospective renters and homeowners based on their race (Massey and Denton 1993; Massey and Lundy 2001; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Roscigno, Karafin, and Tester 2009; Yinger 1995). Persistent racism and prejudice by bankers, realtors, and landlords influenced and perpetuated potential residents’ anxiety about living in cities. This, in turn, regulates who lives in which parts of the city and how cities develop. Many of America’s largest cities experienced white depopulation due to natural decline and relocation to the suburbs. While white flight along with deindustrialization influenced the decay of some US cities – Detroit is a stark example – poverty has also seeped into suburban neighborhoods. Many

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people of color and recent immigrants move to suburban areas close to the central city and to poor and working-class communities with subpar infrastructures and older housing stocks. In the late-twentieth-century suburban communities started experiencing higher rates of poverty due to the migration of historically marginalized racial and ethnic minorities into what was once white suburbia (Howell and Timberlake 2014). Suburban poverty has become an intriguing topic for social scientists, in part, because it is a contemporary trend that debunks many early theories about suburban life. Neighborhood Integration Since the late twentieth century there has been a decrease in the overall level of racial and ethnic segregation in US cities (Rugh and Massey 2013). More specifically, black and white neighborhood segregation decreased between 1970 and 2010 in about fifty major cities (Logan and Stults 2011). The decline in black and white neighborhood segregation and overwhelming white flight have been occurring simultaneously. The story of racial and ethnic desegregation is by no means a simple one. As blacks and Hispanic and Asian immigrants moved into large cities during the early twenty-first century, whites moved to the suburbs and beyond. In 1950, Detroit had a population of 1.5 million white residents. In 2010, only around 76,000 whites still lived in Detroit. Even as neighborhoods became more integrated, some of the largest cities, like Los Angeles and Atlanta, remain majorityminority populations. In 2011 Detroit was 80 percent black – an increase from 62 percent in 1980 (Logan and Stults 2011). While black and white segregation has slightly decreased in some urban neighborhoods, other cities remain racially homogenous. Research shows that although isolation of black residents declined, it is not primarily due to black-white integration. Rather, black residents continue to remain segregated from whites, especially in comparison to Asian and Hispanic populations (Logan and Stults 2011; Tienda and Fuentes 2014).

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Hispanic segregation presents a unique story of its own. While there has been a decrease in Hispanic segregation at the neighborhood level, it has been offset by the movement of Hispanics into non-metropolitan destinations that, in turn, maintains persistent patterns of segregation (Fischer and Tienda 2006; Hall 2013). Similarly, new Asian ethnoburbs – suburban districts and commercial regions with a high ratio of any specific ethnic minority population – have emerged outside cities since the early twenty-first century (Li 1998). While some cities have become increasingly diverse – producing “global communities” – other places have become racially homogenous (Logan and Zhang 2010). Several suburban neighborhoods also have majority-minority populations (Lichter 2013) – majority black, majority Asian, or majority Hispanic (Lee, Iceland, and Farrell 2014; Logan and Zhang 2010). For example, Dover, New Jersey, about thirty miles from New York City, has a population of about 18,000. Hispanics made up 25 percent of its total population in 1980, but in 2015 Dover was 70 percent Hispanic. Similarly, Milpitas, a community outside San Jose, California was 62.2 percent Asian (Lichter et al. 2015). Moreover, as minorities move into white neighborhoods, white residents are moving further, often to places that are majority white and mainly located in the fringes of metropolitan areas while abandoning cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Houston (South et al. 2011). Thus, integration of whites and people of color is happening concomitantly with the larger spatial isolation of whites, especially of wealthier whites, who are relocating to places like all-white affluent gated communities. A 2015 study conducted by social scientists from Cornell and Mississippi State University challenges the general trends of racial integration in US metropolitan areas observed over the previous decades (Fischer et al. 2004; Parisi et al. 2015). This study demonstrates that while neighborhood-to-neighborhood segregation

may have declined, suburb-to-suburb and city-to-city segregation was on the rise. This new trend in neighborhood formations signaled a new type of macrosegregation where racial segregation within cities exists at higher geographic levels. This means that neighborhood-to-neighborhood differences that point to micro-segregation (Lee et al. 2008; Reardon et al. 2008) have been replaced by racial differences between central cities and suburban and fringe areas such as housing developments that are unincorporated or gated communities (Lichter et al. 2015). For example, white, black, Asian, and Hispanic residents live in close proximity to each other in some neighborhoods in Las Vegas (one of the most diverse cities in America), yet large numbers of affluent whites increasingly move into gated communities and unincorporated housing developments (Hall 2013). The main point is that segregation between city and suburb is accelerating while neighborhood segregation within cities is declining. Urban areas continue to remain segregated even though they grew as a mosaic of cultures, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. One account is that when making residential choices, neighborhoods with majority white residents tend to be most preferred and neighborhoods with a high proportion of black residents are least favored, while Latino and Asian neighborhoods are somewhere in between (Charles 2000). One study conducted in 2000 shows that after controlling for socioeconomic status, quality of schools, home value, and crime rates, whites preferred to live apart from black and Latino residents. Rather than demonstrating obvious racial prejudice, whites regard integrated neighborhoods as less desirable due to their perceived low quality (Ellen 2000). White people tend to want to live in exclusively white neighborhoods, which explains residential segregation significantly more than any other racial groups’ wish to reside in areas with people of similar racial/ethnic backgrounds (Krysan et al. 2009; Lewis et al. 2011).

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Furthermore, the deep legacy of antiblack racism and racial stereotypes in the United States continue to fuel pervasive urban segregation. For instance, a neighborhood that may not be majority black due to the influx of recent immigrants continues to be viewed as a “black ghetto” (Anderson 2012). Moreover, perceptions rather than objective indicators characterize neighborhoods and this influences neighborhood outcomes. Scholars call this definitional phenomenon the “looking-glass neighborhood” because people abandon neighborhoods they regard as risky and blighted, thus causing them to further deteriorate. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (Sampson 2012).

Urbanization and Class Inequality Urban Poverty as a Persistent Social Problem Urban poverty, as a distinct phenomenon, has historically been central to the study of urbanization. American cities that developed rapidly as a consequence of industrialization deteriorated with deindustrialization and the disappearance of the manufacturing sector. Consequently, this led to the exodus of whites from cities into the suburbs. The tax base and infrastructures of cities deteriorated significantly. The urban ghetto, with its concentration of multiple forms of inequality, grew as a symbol of urban poverty. In ghettos, more than 40 percent of residents were economically and racially marginalized (Jargowsky 2007). Various urban scholars have theorized about the perseverance of poverty in these neighborhoods. Two of the most popular sociological perspectives that explain why some urban neighborhoods remain poor across generations are social disorganization theory and social isolation theory. Social disorganization theory states that absence of social resources combined with neighborhood instability in marginalized neighborhoods shapes weaker social ties which then result

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in decreased social control (Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1925; Shaw and McKay 1969). This reduced social control shapes the lack of resourceful local institutions, which lessens opportunities for success (Sampson et al. 1999). Social disorganization theorists argue that residents of poor urban neighborhoods do not have strong familial bonds, and that these neighborhoods lack collective efficacy and community organizations. Because residents do not feel tied to their neighbors or their neighborhoods, these neighborhoods have higher rates of street crimes. Recent scholars argue that mass incarceration of poor black and Latino men have further deteriorated conditions in these communities (Western 2006). By contrast, others argue that residents of poor urban neighborhoods, in fact, have stronger ties to their neighbors and families, and that these ties enable them to overcome the lack of resources through a system of exchange where family members, friends, and neighbors often depend on one another to fulfill everyday needs (Stack 1974; Newman 1999). Social isolation theory states that economically marginalized neighborhoods are detached from the middle class and hence do not have access to societal resources or middle-class networks (Wilson 1987). For example, poor urban neighborhoods may have schools lacking in books, computers, or college access programs that facilitate academic success. Additionally, high school students in a poor urban neighborhood who desire to attend college may not know influential and resourceful professionals who can guide them through the college application process, connect them to college alumni, or offer them an internship to help with college admission. Social connections and networks are helpful in navigating institutions such as schools, colleges, and work places. The lack of these connections is a major obstacle. It must be noted, however, that while structural conditions impede mobility, several studies demonstrate that poor individuals also manifest different outcomes (Newman 1999; Elliott 2007; Ray 2015).

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While structuralists focus on organizations and networks, cultural theorists of urban poverty seek to uncover the lived realities of social phenomenon. The “culture of poverty” debate, which occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, alleged that poverty was transmitted from one generation to another. But scholars disagreed among themselves on whether this was due to structural impediments and discrimination the urban poor faced or because of their “cultural inadequacies” that lead them to disvalue education or become parents early on in their lives. Proponents of the culture of poverty thesis claimed that the poor had a common culture that differed from that of the middle class and that was “familial and intergenerational” (Patterson 1986, 119). Oscar Lewis (1968, 50) noted that “once it [the culture of poverty] comes into existence, it tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation because of its effects on children.” Others, like Eliot Liebow (1967), denounced the culture of poverty notion and demonstrated how limited opportunities and racial discrimination affected poor individuals in each new generation. Still others argued for the presence of a “ghetto specific” culture in poor neighborhoods as a means of reacting to the constraints of poverty (Hannerz 1969; Ogbu 1974, 1978, 1988). Prevalent are such myths and stereotypes as the lazy urban poor who depend on welfare despite having access to employment opportunities and the Welfare Queen who wastes the taxpayer’s resources. Arguments over the intergenerational transmission of poverty subsided when quantitative studies found negligible evidence supporting a vicious cycle of poverty (Blau and Duncan 1967). But the issue surfaced again when scholars began focusing on the emergence of an underclass and on intergenerational welfare dependency (e.g., Wilson 1987; Jencks and Peterson 1991). William Julius Wilson’s structural model of neighborhood isolation gained popularity owing to the fact that it identified key structural factors that restricted upward mobility. Wilson states that a decrease in the number of blue collar or manufacturing positions com-

bined with the flight of the middle class from cities led to the development of an “underclass.” This created a smaller pool of marriageable men, which in turn led to single parent households, and out-migration weakened important socializing institutions, like the church, thus isolating the poor from the networks of the middle class. Wilson’s model allows for structure and culture to intersect. Demographic changes isolate the inner-city poor and, in turn, tend to affect the organization of their family and community life. In 2010 The New York Times featured the article “Culture of Poverty Makes a Comeback” (Cohen 2010). Culture is indeed back. A new generation of urban poverty scholars has begun to explain variations in educational and occupational outcomes as well as parenting practices among the poor by focusing on culture (e.g., Small 2004; Carter 2005; Harding 2007; Small et al. 2010). These scholars propose sophisticated definitions of culture to understand diverse responses to poverty; at the same time, they distance themselves from the victim-blaming theories. They view culture and structure as interactive in explaining outcomes of poverty. Within this theoretical model, culture is not an umbrella concept used to explain poverty, rather it is a measurable and falsifiable concept (Small et al. 2010). Drawing on conceptualizations of culture from social scientists such as Ann Swidler (1986), these urban theorists view culture as “tool kits” or “repertoires” of available resources required to enact a particular educational or occupational trajectory, rather than as a cohesive system of values (Borer 2006). For example, they might argue that if students from urban schools don’t apply to college it is not because they don’t value education, but because they lack the tools – such as knowledge about the admission process, computers, resources to prepare for Standardized Aptitude Tests – needed to understand the value of education, to form higher educational goals, or to apply to college. Further, studies have established the presence of distinct “street” and “decent”

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cultures in urban neighborhoods (Anderson 1999). While there are some “street” residents who do not work or attend school, and who belong to gangs, the majority of a neighborhood’s members are “decent”; they go to work, attend school, and avoid gangs or violence. Additionally, scholars have critiqued this dichotomy between two types of culture. In fact, the presence of an oppositional culture is questionable since innercity residents receive a steady influx of mainstream American values having to do with consumerism, violence, and masculinity (Nightingale 1993; Carter 2005). Most importantly, scholars argue that inner-city residents are confronted with multiple cultural frames (Swidler 1986; Duneier 1992; Newman 1999; Harding 2007). The Urban Labor Market Since the late twentieth century the wealthiest Americans have become richer while the income of those at the bottom has plunged and conditions of the urban poor worsened. Deindustrialization (Wilson 1996), decline in the number of labor unions and their membership (Milkman and Voss 2004), and tax policies benefiting the wealthy (Krugman 2003) are some reasons for the worsening conditions of the urban poor. William Julius Wilson’s (1987) argument about the shift from manufacturing to service industry leading to a decline in the demand for low-skilled jobs is one of the most influential explanations for the growing unemployment of urban residents. He maintained that racial segregation as well as the disappearance of manufacturing jobs led the middle class to abandon inner-city neighborhoods thus leaving the economically marginalized without middleclass resources or networks (Massey and Denton 1993; Wacquant 2008). Traditional families were dismantled and the drug trade provided an avenue and model for economic success. The global recession of 2007 saw the collapse of the stock market and declining real estate values together with rising unemployment rates. Wage growth and labor mar-

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ket conditions were also adversely affected. The number of Americans in poverty rose from 32 million in 2000 to 46.2 million in 2010 (DeNavas-Walt et al. 2011). At about 15 percent, the United States experienced the highest rate of poverty since the early 1990s, with about 58 percent of the poor being racial and ethnic minorities (DeNavas-Walt et al. 2011). Simultaneously, there were also substantial cut backs in public assistance to the needy (Wacquant 2008) combined with rising rates of eviction and incarceration (Western 2006; Desmond 2012). This means that the urban poor were struggling like never before to remain employed. The decline of work opportunities does not mean that poor urban residents depend solely on welfare. Most of them compete aggressively for limited jobs in the lowwage labor market because they connect economic independence to dignity and personal responsibility (Edin and Lein 1997; Newman 1999). For example, Katherine S. Newman (1999) explains that the working poor of Harlem live on a minimum wage and are required to balance school with work. They depend on a web of social and familial support to make ends meet. Edin and Lein (1997) elaborate how and why single mothers move in and out of welfare. Mothers who rely either on work or on welfare alone face hardships in providing for their families. As a result, some women resort to illegal and semilegal ways of earning money while receiving welfare. Sudhir Venkatesh (2009) explains how residents in a Chicago neighborhood attempt to make ends meet within an underground economy consisting of illegal and semilegal jobs (see also Anderson 1999; Duneier 2000 for other examples of how urban residents subsist in the face of economic and racial marginalization). Urbanization and Food Insecurity Access to food is another issue that is significant and unique to understanding urbanization and urban development. Although not as pronounced as in the developing or

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underdeveloped parts of the world, food as a cause of concern is rising in the global north, especially in cities. In 2009 there were 35 million food insecure households in the United States (BFW 2009). The food crisis is especially apparent among low-income people of color living in inner-city neighborhoods. There is a high prevalence of food insecurity in these neighborhoods due to poverty and lack of access to grocery stores and farms (Gottlieb 2001; Poppendieck 1998; Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999). Since the early twenty-first century, many urban communities have become food deserts due to middle-class families moving to the suburbs and the subsequent abandonment of innercity neighborhoods by supermarket chains (Short et al. 2007). Several researchers have documented both the paucity of supermarkets and higher prices of food in poor urban areas compared to suburban areas and wealthier neighborhoods (Hendrickson et al. 2006). Additionally, urban residents are isolated from fertile land. This is particularly the case with people with lower incomes or who live in apartment buildings; they do not have access to land to grow their own food. Given soaring fuel and food prices and with approximately 80 percent of the US population living in urban areas (Community Food Security Coalition 2003), it is critical to analyze food access and availability as an urban social problem. How do the urban poor overcome pervasive food insecurity? Urban sociologists have begun to recognize the significance of local organizations – including nonprofits, churches, after-school care centers, and community supported agriculture coops – in the study of urban food insecurity and urban poverty (Small 2004; McQuarrie 2007). Local organizations are significant since they often provide resources, either directly or indirectly, to economically marginalized urban residents. Moreover, they also offer access to connections and networks through their organizational ties (Chaskin et al. 2001). For instance, a local church may have ties to an after-school care center that is connected to a college admission program.

Gentrifying Cities While impoverished communities represent the ugly face of urbanization, several blighted neighborhoods have undergone economic rejuvenation. For example, in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and New York, affluent young white residents have moved into poor neighborhoods, forcing their residents to move out into even poorer neighborhoods. These cities rebuild some of their infrastructure through a process of urban renewal. Though landowners and developers often claim that urban development and renewal projects are essential for the welfare of city residents, growth does not affect all city residents in the same way. For example, working-class and poor underclass residents of neighborhoods that are demolished and replaced with highways, malls, and luxury condominiums are routinely displaced from their homes. Families who rely on social services suffer when these services are eliminated due to changes in tax-structures that are intended to help some city dwellers. Social scientists call this profound transformation of cities gentrification – a process that involves the investment of capital in dilapidated inner-city neighborhoods to renovate them for the upwardly mobile middle class. Gentrification has costs and benefits for neighborhoods and their residents. Though difficult to quantify and identify, gentrification generally involves the renovation of the visible urban landscape, an increase in median household income, and the displacement of poor and working-class residents. Neil Smith (1998, 198) describes gentrification as “the process by which central urban neighborhoods that have undergone disinvestments and economic decline experience a reversal, reinvestment, and the in-migration of a relatively well-off middle- and upper middle-class population.” When neighborhoods transform due to reinvestment, neighborhood identities shift as they become more palatable to the middle class. Irrespective of whether neighborhood revival is steered by individual residents, large corporations, developers, or

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policies, it has significant implications for a neighborhood’s life. In the beginning stages the gentrifiers tend to be young white, upwardly mobile professionals who are more tolerant toward racial integration and are culturally attracted to so-called bohemian settings (Zukin 1987; Brown-Saracino 2009). They are members of what Richard Florida has called the “creative class.” People of color prefer to settle in gentrifying neighborhoods because, at least initially, these neighborhoods tend to be more racially diverse. White gentrifiers, however, tend to be attracted to housing aesthetics and the physical proximity to cultural amenities over racial integration (Bader 2011). As a whole gentrifies are not a homogenous group. There are different kinds of gentrifiers – those who desire racially integrated neighborhoods, those who intend to revitalize neighborhoods that may displace its economically marginalized residents, and those who intend to preserve the culture of the neighborhood they move into (Clay 1979; Brown-Saracino 2009). In general, the process of gentrification involves the moving of middle- and uppermiddle-class whites into poor and racially diverse neighborhoods. Gentrification, Gayborhoods, and Urban Sexuality Cities have long been a destination for sexually marginalized populations because they allow for the expression of new social and cultural identities and possibilities. In this section, we look at the rise and fall of American “Gayborhoods” – neighborhoods that have a large number of queer residents or are frequented by queer people. Gayborhoods emerged as a response to post-1960s sexual liberation in the United States (Harry 1974). Martin P. Levine (1979) characterized “gay ghettos” as the special clustering of gay residents, the institutions serving them, and cultural zones. This spatial cluster shaped both community and identity and guaranteed some degree of safety for the sexually marginalized (Miller 2005). The visible presence of Gayborhoods as part

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of the urban mosaic challenged the almost complete absence of nonheteronormative identities (Binnie 2004). Gayborhoods rose as visible neighborhoods that included financial, political, and social activities for their inhabitants (Hindle 1994). British sociologist Alan Collins (2004) provides a four-step explanation of how Gayborhoods become part of the urban mosaic. First, a gay bar may emerge in a blighted neighborhood. This neighborhood may then draw other services such as convenient stores, hotels, or restaurants that attract more gay customers. Consequently, the services further grow to meet the needs of the customers, which encourage gay residents to move into the neighborhood. Eventually, more heterosexuals start to patronize these services and integrate the Gayborhoods. This may then cause gay residents to move out. Some scholars understand gayborhoods as a case of gentrification. When the sexually marginalized residents moved in, they pushed working-class and poor residents out of the neighborhoods (Bouthillette 1997) leading to displacement of its residents (Knopp 1997). Gay settlers either rose in social class, or upper-middle-class and upper-class gay men moved into Gayborhoods. This raised rents and housing prices and displaced the poor and working class. The historical Gayborhoods in New York and San Francisco started as a gay-friendly space, but have become some of the most expensive places to live in, thus often excluding certain populations such as working-class lesbians (Adler and Brenner 1992; Taylor 2008). Scholars have documented how the class inequality and patriarchal structuring of queer-friendly urban environments exclude trans folks and queer people of color (Doan 2007). Owing to the gentrification of Gayborhoods and the rise in housing costs, LGBTQ residents have been pushed out and dispersed. Sociologist Amin Ghaziani (2014) argues that gay and lesbian couples now feel safe and comfortable in various neighborhoods and are integrating into heterosexual suburbs and rural neighborhoods.

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The loss of community ties has also impacted sexual minorities living in cities. Urban sociologist Japonica Brown-Saracino (2011) finds that even though a large number of queer women lived in Ithaca, New York, many of them reported that they did not feel a sense of community based on their political identity as queer women. Instead, they developed ties based on shared tastes and activities, such as music or politics, with both heterosexual and queer residents.

Conclusion While the urban population in less developed regions of the world grows at rates much higher than in more developed regions, rural populations will be larger in less developed regions. Whereas in more developed regions urbanization was accompanied by an overall drop in population growth, in less developed regions, urban populations continue to boom. This will have a major impact on how cities grow in these regions, and it will also affect their ability to accommodate the increasing numbers of urban residents. Under these conditions, if the history of urbanization in more developed regions is similar to that in less developed regions, the policies established to address problems associated with growth will need to be applied faster and more broadly to urbanizing less developed regions. Globalization describes the uneven development of social, political, and economic relationships across the globe. The accelerated flow of capital across international borders is the defining attribute of globalization. In an increasingly global economy, some cities fare better than others, and the most successful are those with financial institutions (e.g., financial trading and international banking headquarters) critical for the functioning of the global economy, advanced telecommunication infrastructures, and a good business climate (e.g., low real estate, payroll, revenue, and other taxes) (Friedmann 1986). These global cities

become central organizing nodes of the global economy (Sassen 2010). As central locations within the global economy, global cities attract high numbers of people from their poorer hinterlands and from developing countries. Accordingly, multiculturalism is as much a part of globalization as the flow of capital (Sassen 2010). As such, the social problem of heterogeneity is now a global phenomenon, and the effects of heterogeneity on inter- and intrarace relations, housing and labor markets, and the disinvestment and redevelopment of urban neighborhoods will continue.

Glossary Food desert A geographic area that lacks grocery stores and supermarkets that sell fresh produce and healthy food options. Gentrification A process of community and neighborhood change where housing in older neighborhoods is restored, often resulting in higher rents and the displacement of previous tenants who can no longer afford to live there. Globalization The often uneven development of extensive worldwide patterns of economic, political, and cultural relationships between nations. Residential segregation The practice of physically separating the occupants of some social statuses from the occupants of others. Urbanism The ways of life or cultures of people in cities; the myths, symbols, and rituals of urbanites. Urbanization The movement of populations from rural to urban areas; the growth and development, and redevelopment, of cities.

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Taylor, Yvette. 2008. That’s not really my scene. Sexualities 11:523–46. Tienda, Marta, and Norma Fuentes. 2014. Hispanics in metropolitan America: New realities and old debates. Annual Review of Sociology 40:499–520. US Census Bureau. 2014. American factfinder. http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/ pages/index.xhtml. Venkatesh, Sudhir. 2009. Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wacquant, Loïc. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Wilson, William J. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wirth, Louis. 1938. Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology 44(1):1–24. Yinger, John. 1995. Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost: The Continuing Costs of Housing Discrimination. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 1987. Gentrification: Culture and capital in the urban core. Annual Review of Sociology 13:129–47.

CHAPTER 28

Technology and Social Problems Govert Valkenburg and Harro van Lente

Abstract Many social problems have important technological aspects. At the same time, it is usually impossible to identify a single, purely technological cause for the problem, nor is it in most cases possible to identify a single technological solution. In practice, such problems can best be understood by conceptualizing the social and the technical as mutually constitutive. It then follows that specific technologies can help reproduce and exacerbate social inequalities, and that unjust social relations can be conducive to the emergence of “bad” technologies. Social exclusion, offshoring, and humankind’s proliferating ecological footprint are exemplary problems that have significant social as well as technological aspects. In addition, it is important to realize that technological change in general comes together with social change, and that these at a deeper level correlate with changing moralities, epistemologies, and ontologies. By consequence, technological societies are highly dynamic and reflexive, and the ensuing complexity might itself become socially problematic.

Social Life Is Technological Life Social life today is fundamentally also a technological life. Technologies of many sorts are all around us, and it is hard to think of how relations, interactions, and negotiations would be possible without them. Technologies enable certain social interactions and close off others. Technologies are mobilized strategically by individuals, groups, companies, and states, so as to realize specific possibilities. In the end, technologies are a quintessential part of the infrastructures upon which social, economic, and (geo)political lives are lived.

From recognizing the technological character of social life it is only one step to suggesting that social problems might also be technological problems. Socioeconomic inequality, for example, might be exacerbated if the resource-rich can acquire or use a technology in a way that gives them even more economic advantage over the resource-poor. It has been shown that the resource-rich are better at using the internet to advance their careers than the resource-poor (Hargittai and Hinnant 2008). A similar amplification of social injustice, or at least of questionable justice, is found in the practices of security technologies. States 489

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have a huge power advantage over their citizens, both because of their prerogative of employing legitimate violence and because their power is consolidated in institutional structures (e.g., law, the economy) and relatively independent of the capacities of individual persons. Such power differences can be intensified if security regimes, for example at airports, are executed not only by bureaucrats but also by technologies. These technologies potentially determine “who is vetted as secure and who is not” with even more rigor and fewer possibilities for protest and contestation (Van der Ploeg 2005) than do mere bureaucratic structures. (It would be an interesting thought experiment to devise a “mere” bureaucratic structure without technologies of any sort!) While the previous examples are based on forms of social injustice that exist prior to the technologies in question and which are aggravated by the emergence of a technology, technologies may also give rise to social problems. For example, it has been suggested that, even though genocides have always been part of human history, the rigor and extent of the Jewish Holocaust can largely be explained by the development of a railway infrastructure, which became more than a means to a particular end but by itself helped create these atrocities (Hilberg [1976] 1998). At the same time, this raises the question of why today’s railway systems apparently do not induce a new holocaust. Finally, even if technologies appear as largely benign, they still can have socially problematic consequences – even if seemingly remote and unconnected. For example, presuming for the sake of argument that climate change is real and chiefly caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission, the use of energy-intensive technologies – e.g., cars, air planes, and data centers – de facto burdens the resource-poor populations living in delta regions such as Bangladesh. It is expected that those regions will be hit comparably hard by rising sea levels (World Bank 2013). This problem is not only about the unintended side effects of technologies,

but also about the fact that such effects potentially expand globally, and that the distribution of such effects is likely to be a matter of social justice, in this case even of global social justice. At the same time, we should not consider technology, or individual technologies, to be the sole explanation of how exactly social life is arranged, let alone how social life becomes problematic. There is more than the nuts and bolts of technologies to consider in explaining how society’s institutions and structures are settled, how social injustice comes about, or how individuals shape and live their lives. Even if technology at times appears as a machination gone wild, people have free choice, moral accountability, and political agency (or so we presume here; the debate about free will is a different one). What is more, technologies have greatly expanded our abilities to shape our lives as desired, and indeed have highly improved the quality of our lives. Today’s average life avails of some conveniences that were not even available to kings and queens in the Middle Ages: anesthesia, sewerage, and electric lighting, and the list is endless. It is this paradox that, on the one hand, technology seems to provide the structure of our lives, while, on the other hand, technology also appears as a source or as an amplifier of social problems, which merits further attention if we want to understand social problems related to technology. Chapter Outlook This chapter is divided into three parts, related to aspects of the paradox that technology appears both as source and as solution of social problem. We first discuss how problems appear as consequences of technologies, and how these point to general principles that determine how technologies can become socially problematic. Then, the opposite mechanism is attended to: how technologies also often enter the scene as solutions for social problems, as promises of a better life, of health, harmony or even the harbingers of world peace. We critically

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discuss these promises and how they are part of the social imagination. In the third part, we seek to connect the two faces of technology and connect to recent scholarship, which offers theories to analyze the intricacies of the paradox.

The Problem of Technology Is Technology a Problem? Prior to discussing how technology may relate to social problems, it is key to have a clear view of what we mean by technology, and whether there is something particularly problematic about technology, even if this problematic is not distinctly social. Technology both refers to artifacts and systems, as well as to the knowledge to produce and use these. Technology, as Rip and Kemp (1998) phrased it, is a “configuration that works.” As a broad concept “technology” is much like the grand concepts “justice,” “dignity,” or “nature,” which are in need of further specification to gain meaning. It is more appropriate to refer to “technologies” as specific instances that bring out specific relations to social problems. Yet, there are ways in which technology as an undefined category remains relevant as a grand narrative: first, it appears as a topic in public and political debate, and second it appears as a category to be distinguished from “the social” and “the natural,” even if scholars have extensively challenged the boundaries between those categories (Latour 1993; Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009; Feenberg 2002). One example of such a narrative is the traditional critique that “modern technology” – understood as a broad, unspecified phenomenon and movement – corrupts social interaction. Real friendships are traded without scruples for surrogate Facebook friendships, deliberation is reduced to tweeting one-liners on Twitter, and entire retail sectors are bankrupted by web shops like Amazon.com Inc. Arguably, these are one-sided perspectives that are in need of more study. Many real friendships seem

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to survive through the Facebook era and are even enriched and deepened by social media, new ways of building friendship and attachment emerge, and among online retailers some very interesting innovative enterprises are developing. In general, arguments against “technology” writ large often suffer from what could be called the historical fallacy: comparing those technologies to an insufficiently explained, ill-defined, or even unknown past, which on closer inspection becomes questionable whether life was really that much better. While the intrinsic harmfulness of technologies or technology in general is hard to prove, many studies stress that technologies may deliberately be arranged in socially unjust ways. A famous example in the debate on whether technologies “do or do not have politics” comes from Langdon Winner (1988). Winner observed that bridges over the parkways in Long Island, New York, were built so low that only cars, not busses could drive under them. Combining this with the documented racism of the city planner, Robert Moses, who was responsible for the low bridges, Winner argues that the bridges were purposely built low to allow only white people – traveling by car – and not black people – traveling by bus – to reach the beaches to which the parkways connected. Hence, artifacts can have politics. It needs pointing out, though, as Winner does himself (Winner 1993), that these bridges can only produce detrimental social effects in a broader context: a context that already includes segregated underprivileged groups, specific technologies such as cars and busses to make the discrimination effective, a consensus on the valuation of beaches and their treatment as a scarce space from which some people should be excluded. Thus, the question remains whether it is really the artifacts that have politics, or just the people and their misfortunate societal structures. The empirical validity of the Long Island bridges has been widely debated. It has been argued that bus services did in fact connect to the beach, and that the

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overpasses were in reality no hindrance at all (Joerges 1999). Nevertheless, the example is relevant to understanding how social problems might relate to technologies. It shows, at least in potential, how technologies can be deliberately designed in such a way that social problems are reproduced and even exacerbated. The example has become an instructive urban legend in science and technology studies (Woolgar and Cooper 1999) to stress that technologies can indeed have politics – and ruinous politics at that – and that such politics remain tightly connected to the stakeholders involved. Technology and (Social) Control The idea of technology facilitating social control has a long history and harks back to Karl Marx’s ([1867] 2013) Capital, which holds that the owners of productive capital, i.e., factories and production machines, and not the laborers working in those factories, are entitled to the profits made by the production process. By involuntarily cooperating with this system, laborers contribute to the perpetuation of this unequal distribution. The material arrangements of factories thus reproduce the economic inequities that exist between owners and laborers. While Marx’s critique of capitalism is no longer the touchstone for conceptualizing technology, his intellectual legacy can hardly be overestimated. Importantly through the works of Michel Foucault (Foucault [1963] 1973, 1990, [1975] 1995, [1978] 2003), Marxian concepts have become the inspiration for social scientists studying technology. Notably Foucault’s idea of “discipline” suggests that arrangements such as architecture, clocks, and medical practices enact particular “ideal citizens” and reproduce the power relations in which such citizens are entangled. As these power relations are embedded in material arrangements, power is no longer held in a clearly recognizable sovereign. Instead, it becomes internalized in citizens. One contemporary and important technology-related area where this concept of discipline is fundamental is in the

problematics of surveillance (Lyon 1994; Monahan 2006, 2011; Haggerty and Ericson 2000). In order to maintain their functioning modern states have always depended on regulating and correcting their citizens’ behavior, as opposed to the punishment and removal from social life that were the primary modes of control in premodern societies (Foucault [1975] 1995, 135–228). At face value, it seems efficient for technologies to facilitate such soft steering. However, surveillance studies have revealed numerous perverse side effects of such technologies. For example, people may experience severe difficulties from erroneous information that circulates about them in “the system” that are virtually impossible to correct, such as when data-mining technologies identify innocent citizens as terrorists, or when fraudulent license plates are used to evade persecution for traffic offenses and have them blamed on others (Solove 2007). Also, surveillance systems automate the discrimination between citizens who are considered trusted and those who are deemed untrusted. This distinction is necessarily based on particular understandings, which may introduce implicit sexist and racist presumptions of what makes a trusted citizen. Three Problems of Technology The issues discussed so far provide some general insights into how technology can be seen as a source of social problems. In addition, many specific examples have been studied of problems that are seen as endemic to technological societies, like pollution, nuclear arms or unemployment. We highlight three examples to show the mechanisms that bring the social problems of technology.

social exclusion As already mentioned, technology may have the effect of exacerbating the disadvantaged position of marginalized social groups. Social exclusion is increasingly related to people’s use of modern technologies. A straightforward example is the so-called

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digital divide (Van Dijk 2005): when people do not have access to the Internet, they are de facto cut off from job opportunities, sources of information and other social goods on which they may depend for their economic prosperity. In a general sense, technologies have the capacity to virtually and literally “displace” social interaction to other sites. If people cannot follow suit and fail to adapt to the new situation, they may in effect become excluded from that social interaction. Exclusion becomes even more severe if it is explicitly implemented by technologies. Think of airport security that is increasingly “executed” by technologies such as body scanners, advance passenger information (API) systems, and highly automated surveillance camera systems. These together determine whether a passenger is allowed to board a plane. If our bodies are checked in an automated way, this typically has unfortunate consequences for people whose body departs from the “normal body” (Valkenburg and Van der Ploeg 2015): today’s body scanners cannot distinguish between medical devices (stomas, pacemakers) and weapons. More generally, decisions about whether someone can be granted access to something are increasingly dependent on information systems. The API system forms a case in point, as do for example student registrations at universities, or medical insurance databases that act as a gatekeeper at hospitals. Technologies execute mechanisms of exclusion even more rigidly than would human bureaucrats. And finally, social exclusion results when technological designs intentionally or unintentionally advantage some groups over others. For example facial recognition software that works better with Caucasian faces than with African ones (BBC 2009), or when automated photo tagging software identified black persons “ape” or “gorilla” (Lee 2015). Even if this latter example does not constitute a physical exclusion, it nonetheless imposes a discursively powerful exclusion of black people from the class of “people that matter.”

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offshoring Technologies may bring about the exclusion from access to goods, services, and information, but also from equal justice. In Offshoring, John Urry (2014) discusses a global economy in which production processes are located in developing countries, where people are made dependent on a labor market that exploits them. Grave forms of social injustice are hidden from view by relocating production processes to remote territories. Thus, they are outside the scope of Western legal systems, human rights watchdogs, parliaments etc. The local counterparts of these institutions in the remote territories typically lack the power or will to do something about it. This results in injustice at a global level, and no governance structure to counter it seems to be in place. Underlying the phenomenon of offshoring are a number of technological changes related to globalization. Financial markets have moved to online and realtime trading and capital flows evade public scrutiny. The internet has enabled communication at unprecedented speeds and volumes. The global movement of goods, not least enabled by the invention of sea containers and their multimodal transport possibilities, has facilitated the relocation and concealment of production processes. Human labor is relocated at the desire of multinational corporations, which in turn relocate themselves in order to evade tax regimes (Urry 2014, 9). The example shows that technoscientific social problems are the outcome of many different interlinked developments. While it is hard to argue that container shipping, internet communication, and free trade are essentially detrimental, we may concede with Urry that their ensemble provides advantaged people and nations the means to fortify their position.

ecological footprint A third example is how technologies contribute to environmental problems. Technological societies consume energy and natural resources at an unprecedented pace. If technology increases efficiency

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of productivity, it does so at the cost of consuming more and more energy. More specifically, the average citizen of an industrialized country consumes considerably more energy and resources than is sustainable in the long run for all world citizens (Hoekstra and Wiedmann 2014). The consequences of this overconsumption are largely external: they do not directly affect consumers, but rather appear at a different time and place. Many of the consequences are in the future, which raises the question of what claim future generations can make on us today. Second, closely related to the problem of offshoring, many environmental burdens are placed on countries that have less clout in international negotiations, or that simply cannot do without the income generated by the processes that produce these environmental difficulties. The social problems of technologies, thus, may be distant in time and place, and, for that same reason, difficult to address.

Utopia: Technology as Promise Technology is not all about trouble. Quite the contrary, technology at large as well as specific technologies bring solutions and appear as hopes for a better future. Sarewitz (2013) discerns three ways in which technologies embody some form of progress. First, if truth is conducive to happiness, and if scientific inquiry continues to provide truths which are then embodied in technologies, then technologies are likely to contribute to increasing happiness, which is perhaps the purest form of progress. Second, technologies can be thought of as ameliorating the human condition: virtues are better cultivated and social goods are better realized if technologies serve us better. And finally, it can be argued that technologies are conducive to concrete benefits that seem independent of any specific context: mortality, famine, and disease probably qualify as universal detriments, and they can be quantified and shown to decline in industrialized countries. While the first form of progress requires a philosophical debate on happiness and is beyond the scope of this chap-

ter, and the third requires too many separate empirical cases, the second kind of progress deserves further exploration. It is worth asking whether and how technologies mitigate human suffering. In general, the question whether technology ameliorates the human condition can be addressed at two levels: improvement of individual human life, and improvement of life at the level of society at large. Examples of technologies that improve individuals lives abound: heating and cooling of houses, means of transport, convenient energy provision, and information and communication technologies. In this perspective, technologies can be understood as amplifiers: we get more done with less effort than we would without those technologies. At the level of society, similar amplification is visible. Communication and transport infrastructures support the integration of societies, and societies simply could not be as efficient if we had to travel on foot (or horseback for the rich), and communicate by letters. Future visions always have provided inspiration to technology development. For example, people have always dreamed of reducing labor by creating technologies that can do more of our work with less effort. It has always been a dream to live a life without the need for labor, and when robots were available to do all the work for a convenient life: providing food, building our houses, providing medical care, etc. In the first place, there is something to say about the realism of such dreams. Typically, such dreams are not located in the in the near future. Rather, each step forward typically sheds light on a dozen additional difficulties we had not anticipated. Second, such dreams have always come with concerns about whether such automation would deprive us of the things that make life meaningful: it is through our work that we engage with our world, and if we delegate this to technologies, no genuine engagement is left for us (Borgmann 1984). Yet, such dreams continue and scientists and engineers have always been granted relative freedom to develop new scientific insights and new technological

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applications – what could be called the engineer’s mandate (Van Lente 2000). The concomitant assumption is that scientists and engineers are themselves best equipped to govern their practices, and that science and technology are in themselves neutral domains, which only become beneficial or detrimental in their specific applications, as a consequence of political decisions outside the realms of science and innovation. This position, technological instrumentalism, which sees technology as a neutral instrument, is highly questionable and will be discussed as such in the next section. Nevertheless, the idea that technology development as such is positive (or at least not negative) because it further enables us, is prominent in how technology is appreciated. It is undeniable that technologies and scientific approaches have changed agriculture beyond recognition over the past centuries, leading to a vastly increased capacity to provide nutrition. Similarly, the increased extraction of fossil energy has led to an increased sustenance capacity in the industrialized world. Since current rates of consumption in the industrialized world cannot be provided to industrializing societies given the present production capacity of the Earth at large, it is hoped that further innovation will help feed the whole world at a level currently only available to the rich. Obesity and ruthless extraction of fossil fuels are of course cynical downsides of this picture. Nicely fitting into the vision of unproblematic consumption is the dream of “free energy.” Nuclear fusion, in which hydrogen and tritium atoms are fused into helium atoms, has long been presented as the beneficent alternative to nuclear fission. Contrary to fission, the argument goes, fusion does not trigger a chain reaction so there is no hazard of a nuclear meltdown. In addition, the primary fuels of fusion are forms of hydrogen that are available abundantly. And fusion does not produce radioactive waste. Yet, controlled forms of fusion, apt for practical conversion into electrical energy, have hitherto not been achieved. What is more, the achievement of such processes has, for

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a few decades, been projected at “fifty years from now.” Technologies to improve the health and performance of human bodies also continue to arouse hope and dreams. The pacemaker and the artificial joint, for instance, are hailed as improving the quality of life. The dream continues with proposals to implant technologies that not only restore functionalities our bodies have lost, but that improve our functions and even add new ones (Roco and Bainbridge 2004). This is the dream, or the nightmare according to some, of human enhancement, envisioned along genetic, pharmaceutical, micro-electronic, and nano-technological pathways. While different in their underlying mechanisms, the concerns these promises raise are fairly coherent, for instance that human life would lose its “naturalness.” It is for reasons of fairness and an appreciation of perseverance that we want to keep sports competitions free of doping. But what if people become “genetically engineered” for such purposes (Miah 2003; Van Hilvoorde, Vos, and De Wert 2007)? Proponents of enhancement argue that life and our relation to our bodies has been unnatural from the day humans started using tools (Agar 2004). A second class of concerns is that enhancement would exacerbate social inequality much along the same lines as discussed before. In the movie Gattacca comes the non-enhanced but ambitious Vincent Freeman is put at impassable disadvantage to the enhanced but morbid and unambitious Jerome Eugene Morrow. Jerome sells his genetic identity to Vincent and thereby helps him realize his ambitions. The bottom line is that ultimately character is what counts, or as the subtitle reads: “There is no gene for the human spirit.” But the world depicted in the film makes for an interesting thought experiment of how human enhancement may intensify or even cause social inequality. Dystopia as a Realized Utopia Many technological dreams are of a utopian nature: they represent perfect realities that are likely to remain confined to the realm

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of imagination. Yet, the opposing genre of dystopias, ideas of a horrific life under the command of (usually technocratic) totalitarian regimes, can frequently be read as realized utopias. Indeed, both utopia and dystopia share the presumption of a “malleable society” (Achterhuis 1998). Even if it is hard to argue in a universalist way that all utopian thinking will inevitably lead to totalitarian regimes, there is at least a strong resonance between the thought of a malleable society and the aforementioned engineer’s mandate to ensure technological progress. The dystopian fear points to technologies running out of control, technologies dominating us rather than the other way around, and evil geniuses ruling us through technologies, possibly even without us knowing (Nordmann 2007). An example of the painful ambiguity of hope and fear of promising technology is the issue of homosexuality. It is, in the light of current understanding of human genetics, highly unlikely that we will find a biological basis for homosexuality. Nonetheless, the very idea of it, extended into the possibility of preventing such a genetic combination to occur, offers an interesting thought experiment. For it depends on what exactly is seen as the “problem” with homosexuality and whether “solving” it by genetic means is appropriate. Insofar as homosexuality is problematic, this is exclusively the consequence of cultural values being unable to accommodate this sexuality. That the problem is merely social in origin does not, however, take away the possibility of solving it along technological lines. In other words, if we prevent homosexuality, for example by selecting out embryos with this genetic disposition, we do in fact eliminate the social problem of homophobia? Would is ‘solve’ the problem, or would it just eliminate the victim of the problem by technological means? Three Benefits of Technology

less suffering Whenever people refer to a past when life was more “real” than today’s technol-

ogized version, they typically neglect the fact that those times were also when the flu was generally a deadly disease, when dental surgery was downright torture because of an absence of anesthesia, and when infant mortality was high. Perhaps it is in considering the everyday horrors of the past that scientific and technological progress shows its most benign face. It seems plausible without further evidence that this progress has in a general sense alleviated human suffering.

amplification and delegation A general feature of technology seems to be that it allows to accomplish more with less effort and the huge shifts in agricultural productivity are a case in point. What is more, technologies in a general sense are able to convey knowledges and abilities even if the (human) creators of those knowledges and abilities are no longer present. For example, a pocket calculator allows us to perform algorithms without actually understanding the higher mathematics behind it. And in our electronic communication, we can use cryptographic instruments to secure our private content, without actually understanding the cryptography ourselves. This mechanism of delegation (Latour 1993) is an important factor in how technologies make our lives easier: they incorporate a gamut of skills, crafts, knowledges, and routines in order to perform jobs that would take tremendous efforts for us to accomplish without technology.

novelty In a very mundane sense, new technologies usually present some sort of novelty, which is often at the basis of their very attractiveness. Yet, even if mundane, this appeal connects to a deeper mechanism that justifies technological progress. New technologies enable new ways of looking at the world, intervening in the world, and connecting to the world. If drive for exploration is reckoned a virtue and if we recognize that “going to new places” is not so different from “going to places in new ways,” then it logically follows that technological innovation is largely reckoned

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beneficial. It can of course be questioned whether the novelty of technologies is always sufficiently critically approached: it is a known phenomenon that people abandon their cars, smart phones, and televisions in favor of newer ones just to have a newer one, and the same might hold for technologies with a claimed social benefit. And it can indeed be questioned whether the downsides of technological developments are worth it. Yet, even without further empirical corroboration, it seems plausible that in practice, the notion of novelty serves as a legitimation for technological development.

Co-construction of Technology and Society In the previous sections we discussed how technology can be seen as either the cause of social problems, or as their solution. They may seem to be opposite, yet the two perspectives share two implicit notions. The first is known as technological determinism: the idea that technology offers the prime explanation for the state of a certain society, where technology itself is ultimately determined by its own logic (Bimber 1990). While this view has largely been rejected in academic circles for its disregard of the social processes that provide irreducible parts of the explanation of how specific technologies emerge and what they achieve (Bijker 1995; Latour 1987; Feenberg 1995), it does still provide an important conceptual resource in everyday parlance. Even social studies of science and technology often covertly endorse a technological determinism of some sort, because scholars of science and technology usually start their inquiries at specific technologies, on the presumption that they will find “something particular” there (Wyatt 2008). The second hidden premise, equally untenable, is the notion of technological instrumentalism. This is the idea that technology is literally just a neutral instrument at our disposal that helps amplify our actions. This view presumes that technologies have no particular moral content, or

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no content with respect to how society is to be organized. Society is organized politically and technology follows suit, so the argument runs. A strong expression of technological instrumentalism is the unofficial slogan of the National Rifle Association, stating that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” The slogan suggests that guns are innocent tools, and that only the people that use them can be bad – thus denying that also the easy availability of guns can be bad. In general, instrumentalism denies the fact that technological change has brought about important social and moral change in the past centuries. ICT, for instance, is much more than facilitating existing forms of communication, they create new interactions and interdependencies. The possibility of birth control has deeply changed gender relations. Cars are not just enabling people to travel from A to B, they have reshaped societies. Technologies, therefore, are never innocent but bring along new possibilities and new views. The problem is that, while the ideas of technological determinism and instrumentalism are untenable, there is some appeal and even some truth to them. In some cases, technology is just the tool we use. In other cases, technology is a major cause for radical social change. Yet, key to understanding social problems of technology is that we pay critical attention to either side of the relationship: indeed, technology may be the cause of both advantages and liabilities that accrue to society; but technology is itself undeniably a social product. Whether technologies cause social problems or whether technologies are only mobilized in the perpetuation of preexisting social problems, often remains a matter of the chicken or the egg. Symmetry between the Social and the Technological The recognition that technologies are highly constitutive of society, as well as themselves predicated upon the possibilities offered by society, informs how we conceive of the relation between technology and social

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problems. Our contention is that a fundamental symmetry between “the social” and “the technological” should be assumed. In what follows, we first discuss how such a symmetrical relation could be conceived, and what its intricacies are. We then zoom in on how technology relates to ways of knowing the world, or epistemology, and to ways of engaging with the world, or morality. If there is anything to be said in general terms about how technologies influence social life, it must be that technologies make a difference by imposing constraints and offering affordances. Affordances are perceived properties of an artifact that suggest how it should be used (Pfaffenberger 1992, 284; Gibson 1977; Norman 1988). For example, having running water from the kitchen tap suggests that we can use water at no cost and no effort, as opposed to the drudge of having to collect it at the village pump. Constraints consist of the absence of possible uses, or even the explicit blocking of any options of action. A car, for example, allows steering and braking from only one seat – and thus creates a distinction between a “driver” and “passengers.” Clearly, new technologies will offer new affordances as well as new constraints. Yet, influential actors are better able to shape technologies according to their interests, thus deciding which constraints and affordances will obtain. This is one way in which structuration, or the consolidation and institutionalization of social relations, takes place (Giddens 1984). A sociotechnical infrastructure thus emerges that reflects and reproduces both social and technical relations in such a way that a distinction between the technical and the social becomes increasingly arbitrary. Epistemology Another way technologies influence our daily lives is by their ability to shape our perception, and how we think about issues. The development of the contraceptive pill, for instance, has had an immense influence on the idea of reproduction. Tradi-

tionally, reproduction is seen part of the natural course of life, a divine gift, a fact that ties man and woman together in particular ways. Now, reproduction has become a matter of choice, and with choice comes responsibility – family planning has become a new responsibility. In addition, reproduction has become a medical matter, because the choice of whether or not to have children is now connected to the doctor and to the pharmaceutical industry (Oudshoorn 1995). That such epistemologies are not neutral, is shown by how the pill has contributed to the emancipation of homosexuality, as sex has become decoupled from reproduction, and hence nonreproductive homosexual sex has become less of an anomaly (Mol 2005). However, it has also helped sustain heteronormative structures: since the burden of child birth and rearing is now off the table, the woman can and should be “available” for the man at any time (Chapman and Gordon 1998). More generally, “the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it” (Jasanoff 2004, 2). Much like the constraints and affordances that technologies put to choices and actions, technologies and scientific methodologies prioritize particular perspectives over others. Modern media make possible for us to see atrocities in distant places, and we may even think of those events as more important than how our neighbours may suffer. Similarly, the ubiquity of digital devices means that various aspects of our lives can be measured, registered, and calculated. This has become so natural that we are seldom aware that this is in fact a very specific way of evaluating our lives. Yet, this digital gaze on our identities (Van der Ploeg and Pridmore 2016) provides a key explanation to many social problems of our age: issues of surveillance, privacy, and social exclusion, to name only a few. This condition has generally come to be known as the co-production (Jasanoff 2004) of social, technical and natural orders.

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Morality From technologies influencing how we see things, it takes only a small step to technologies influencing how we think our world should be arranged. Moral principles are always construed as answers to specific problems, situated in specific times and places (Nauta 1984). Thus, a change in the technological “furniture” of our life world will affect the way we perceive problems and their potential solutions. Consequently, our moral frameworks may start to adapt. This becomes especially pressing if novel technologies destabilize the moral principles through which we assess those same novel technologies (Keulartz et al. 2004; Swierstra, Van Est, and Boenink 2009). Examples of moral change in relation to technological change have already been given: the contraceptive pill influencing the morality of reproduction, and human enhancement fundamentally altering the meaning of human life. Whenever technological developments are assessed, whether anxiously or placidly, it is important to articulate both sides of the symmetry that technology and society are shaped together, rather than stepping into the pitfalls – and inferential shortcuts – of technological determinism and technological instrumentalism. Rather than asking which social problems a given technology might cause, it is more interesting to inquire into underlying mechanisms. Which social interactions and relations are prioritized or impeded by this technology? Who is driving the development of this technology, and whose interests are underrepresented? How will this technology make us think and judge differently? Which perspectives does it enable, and which does it suppress? These questions usher us into the politics of technology. In addition to keeping the two shortcuts at bay, another general inference merits critical scrutiny. As the critical theory of technology, most notably associated with the works of Andrew Feenberg (1991, 1995, 2002, 2005), argues, technological choices are typically justified and defended by an appeal to general principles of efficiency.

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Those technologies are best that render the most productive or least capital-intensive outcomes. The first reason for looking critically at such justifications is that it circumvents political and moral deliberation about technological choices, and suppresses arguments in favor of competing values such as charity or social justice. Second, it is problematic because even if efficiency would be neutral from some abstract mathematical perspective, its application in practice is not. It never determines all of a technical design, and the remaining design freedom is best exploited by those in power. Thus, the resulting technological design is typically supportive of existing power relations, reproducing prevailing social injustice.

Conclusion This chapter has advanced three important points about technology in relation to social problems. The first is that modern social life is technological life, and that therefore social problems will have technological aspects. Nonetheless, explaining social problems in merely technological terms – or explaining technological phenomena only in terms of the social context – will largely be inadequate. Second, since technologies have social consequences, they can be at the root of social problems. This might be because they are deliberately designed to disadvantage specific persons or groups; it might be because they are exclusively available to those who are already advantaged and thereby improve their relative position and increase social inequities; or it might be because the technology in question has unintended harmful consequences. Third, technologies often appear as solutions to particular problems, including social problems. Technologies have helped to acquire more resources, feed more people, work more efficiently, be more productive, and improve health. At the same time, the equation of “technology” with “progress” has led to an uncritical welcome to any

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novelty and a privileged mandate to engineers to solve problems. In the final part of the chapter we discussed how the social and the technical are mutually constitutive, how both are results of the same developments of sociotechnical change. This co-construction is not just about social action and social organization, but also about how we know what we know, and about what we think is good, right and virtuous to do (or not). Future Research Much research into technologies in relation to social problems is being conducted, and specifying a comprehensive agenda is impossible. This chapter cannot do justice to the range of issues and approaches that are relevant for this broad theme. Nonetheless, two themes are likely to remain topics of research for years to come. First, socially responsible innovation is acquiring momentum as an avenue for research. This thematic is not only about determining which technologies will be beneficial and which will not. It is also about establishing novel, multidisciplinary research and innovation practices where relations between the technical and the social are actively engaged with during the whole trajectory of innovation. This new avenue seeks to find an alternative to the traditional scheme of engineers designing something, and then ethicists and politicians deciding whether we really want it. A second theme that will continue to get attention is the issue of participation, democratization, and public engagement. If one of the negative consequences of technologies is the reproduction of social injustice, and if it is recognized that technologies are socially constructed, then it makes sense to give greater involvement to relevant social groups in governing a technological society. If the interests of various groups are included in the process of innovation, it is more likely that the technological reproduction of social inequality can be reduced and that more aspects of social problems will be

addressed, which in the end also leads to better technologies.

Glossary Co-production The idea that social, technological and natural orders are produced at once and are not existent independently of one another. Digital divide The observation that someone’s relative social position is dependent on their access to digital technologies, and a lack of access disproportionately deteriorates the social position. Offshoring Displacing production processes to remote places, where questionable labor circumstances and environmental behavior can go by unnoticed. Technological determinism The idea that technology determines the structure and development of society, while technology develops according to its own logic. Technological instrumentalism The idea that technology only provides neutral tools to be used for whatever cause; hence technology cannot be blamed for any consequences.

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Body: Essays on Biometrics and the Informatization of the Body, edited by Irma Van der Ploeg, 15–36. Maastricht, Netherlands: Shaker. Van der Ploeg, Irma, and Jason Pridmore, eds. 2016. Digitizing Identities: Doing Identity in a Networked World. New York: Routledge. Van Dijk, J.A.G.M. 2005. The Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society. London: Sage. Van Hilvoorde, Ivo, Rein Vos, and Guido De Wert. 2007. Flopping, klapping and gene doping: Dichotomies between “natural” and “artificial” in elite sport. Social Studies of Science 37(2):173–200. Van Lente, Harro. 2000. Forceful futures: From promise to requirement. In Contested Futures. A Sociology of Prospective Technoscience, edited by Nik Brown, Brian Rappert, and Andrew Webster, 43–64. London: Ashgate. Winner, Langdon. 1988. Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus 109(1):121–36. 1993. Upon opening the black box and finding it empty: Social constructivism and the philosophy of technology. Science, Technology & Human Values 18(3):362–78. Woolgar, Steve, and Geoff Cooper. 1999. Do artefacts have ambivalence? Moses’ bridges, winner’s bridges and other urban legends in S&TS. Social Studies of Science 29(3):433–49. World Bank. 2013. Warming climate to hit Bangladesh hard with sea level rise, more floods and cyclones, World Bank report says. www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/ 2013/06/19/warming-climate-to-hitbangladesh-hard-with-sea-level-rise-morefloods-and-cyclones-world-bank-report-says. Wyatt, Sally. 2008. Technological determinism is dead; Long live technological determinism. In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J. Hacket, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy Wajcman, 165–80. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 29

Population and Contemporary Social Problems Fred M. Shelley∗

Abstract Many of the world’s contemporary social problems are linked to issues associated with population, including birthrates, death rates, and migration. These issues are especially important in that the global population continues to grow by about 2 percent, or 140 million persons, each year. In this chapter, basic concepts of demography and population geography are reviewed. The review begins with birth and death rates, followed by discussion of issues associated with international migration. These concepts are then discussed in the context of population control policy, gender, and illegal immigration. Most significantly, the question of whether the population will be able to feed itself in the future as it continues to increase is addressed.

Introduction Many of the world’s major social problems today, and those in the foreseeable future, are centered on questions involving population. Global population increases and large-scale movements of people have resulted in social problems worldwide, affecting places locally as well as the entire world. The purpose of this chapter is to describe and analyze global population trends and their impacts on social problems in the

contemporary world. Population-related questions involve two major components – the growth of the world’s populace and its distribution, and the migration of people between places. The first two sections of this chapter describe each of these components. These sections are followed by discussion and analysis of the relationships between population change, growth, and movement and contemporary social problems.

Demography and Population Change ∗

The valuable comments of Reagan Metz on an earlier draft of this chapter are gratefully acknowledged.

As of early 2017, the number of people that inhabit the world was about 7.4 billion. 503

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The website at www.worldometers.info/ world-population/ provides up-to-date estimates of world population calculated on a continuous basis. The world’s population is estimated to be increasing by more than 125 million persons per year. In other words, it increases by about 1.7 percent annually. Should this rate continue into the foreseeable future, the planet will reach 8 billion before 2025 and may approach 10 billion people by 2050. A fundamental question associated with population growth is whether the Earth has sufficient resources to support all its inhabitants. Population Density Although the population continues to increase, by no means are people evenly distributed across the surface of the planet. Large numbers are crowded into some geographical areas, whereas other areas have few or no inhabitants. To examine the distribution of population, analysts calculate population density, which refers to the number of people per unit of land area. In the United States, population density is expressed in terms of the number of people per square mile. As of 2016, the world’s population density was estimated at about 127 people per square mile of land surface area, excluding Antarctica. However, population densities vary widely throughout the world (United Nations Division of Economic and Social Affairs 2015). Some places are much more densely populated and others are much more sparsely populated. In 2015, the most densely populated large countries in the world were Bangladesh with nearly 2,900 people per square mile followed by Taiwan with 1,676 per square mile, South Korea (1,303), Lebanon (1,261), and Rwanda (1,153). The Netherlands, Haiti, and India also have populations estimated at more than 1,000 people per square mile. (Note that this list does not include very small but completely urbanized and very densely populated states such as Monaco, Singapore, and Hong Kong.)

However, some countries have very sparse populations. As of 2015, the least densely populated countries in the world are Mongolia (5 persons per square mile), Namibia (6.63), Australia (8.07), Iceland (8.31), and Suriname (8.44). Mauritania, Botswana, Libya, and Canada also reported less than ten people per square mile (United Nations Division of Economic and Social Affairs 2015). Many of these countries have large amounts of uninhabitable territory. This list excludes Greenland, most of which is covered by ice. The most populated and most densely populated countries can be grouped into population clusters, or groups of adjacent countries or regions with high population densities. The two largest contiguous countries in the world by population are China with nearly 1.4 billion persons and India with nearly 1.3 billion. More than a third of all human beings live in one of these countries. Each is located at the center of a major population cluster. The East Asian cluster includes eastern China (which contains 90 percent of China’s total population) along with nearby Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. India is at the center of the South Asian cluster that also includes Bangladesh and Pakistan. Together, these clusters account for more than 40 percent of the world’s people. Two other significant population clusters are located in Southeast Asia (including Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, and the Philippines), and in Western Europe (including England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium). More than half of all people in the world live in one of these population clusters. Population density data on a country-bycountry basis overlook the fact that some parts of the world are largely unsuitable for human habitation. Since ancient times, people have tended to be concentrated on arable land, or land that is suitable for agriculture. Only about 11 percent of the earth’s land surface is arable, whereas many other areas such as deserts, mountains and mountain slopes, and very cold portions of Siberia and northern Canada are not arable.

population and contemporary social problems

Thus, a more effective measure of population density is the number of people per unit land area of arable land. This measure is known as physiological density. Half or more of the land surface of some countries including Ukraine, Bangladesh, and Denmark is suitable for farming. However, in some countries only a very small percentage of the land is arable. These countries include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Peru, and Norway. In such countries, physiological density is much greater than population density (Nationmaster 2012). The divergence between physiological density and population density is illustrated by the example of Egypt. Most of Egypt is located in the extremely arid Sahara Desert, which is exceedingly dry and unsuitable for agriculture except when the land can be irrigated. Thus, only about 3 percent of Egypt’s land surface is arable, including the valley of the Nile River and a few scattered oases. This means that the physiological density of Egypt is more than thirty times its actual population density. Egypt’s population density is slightly more than 200 persons per square mile whereas its physiological density is nearly 7,000 persons per square mile, or more than twice as great as Bangladesh’s density of population. More than 90 percent of Egypt’s people live in the Nile River valley whereas many other parts of Egypt are uninhabited. Hence Egypt can be regarded as a crowded country, even though its overall population density is relatively low. Population Change Throughout history, population densities change. In today’s world, the populations of most places are increasing, although a few are losing population. In order to assess and analyze populations in particular places over time, demographers examine and compare numbers of births, numbers of deaths, and numbers of people who move into and out of such places. Here, we examine the numbers of births and deaths. For the time

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being we ignore migration, which is covered in the following section. In general, whether population increases or decreases in a place can be examined by comparing that place’s crude birthrate and its crude death rate. The crude birthrate is the ratio of the number of babies born in a given place and year to the overall population of that place. Demographers frequently express this ratio as the annual number of newborn infants per 1,000 people. Likewise, the crude death rate is the ratio of deaths to the overall population at the beginning of that year. Birthrates vary considerably among countries. In general, places with high birthrates are impoverished and less developed whereas wealthy and developed countries have much lower birthrates. Africa reports the highest birthrates in the world. As of 2014, the countries with the highest birthrates were Niger with 46.1 births per 1,000 population, followed by Mali (45.3), Uganda (44.2), Zambia (42.5), and Burkina Faso (42.4). The countries with the lowest birthrates were Japan with 8.1 births per 1,000 people, Singapore (8.1), South Korea (8.3), Germany (8.4), and Slovenia (8.5) (CIA World Factbook 2014). The 2014 birthrate in the United States was 13.4 per 1,000 people and the worldwide birthrate was about 19 per 1,000 people. Crude death rates also vary worldwide and are linked to levels of economic development, although they vary less dramatically than do crude birthrates. Comparison of crude birthrates and crude death rates allows us to estimate the degree to which populations increase or decrease over time. The difference between the crude birthrate and the crude death rate is the rate of natural increase. If the crude birthrate and the crude death are equal to each other, then the rate of natural increase is zero. In this case, the population remains constant (not taking migration into account). If the crude birthrate is greater than the crude death rate, the rate of natural increase is positive and the population increases. Similarly, a negative rate of

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natural increase implies that the crude death rate is greater than the crude birthrate. Rates of natural increase are often expressed as percentages. For example, a country with a crude birthrate of 20 per 1,000 population and a crude death rate of 12 per 1,000 would have a rate of natural increase of 8 per 1,000 or 0.8 percent. This implies that that country’s population is growing by 0.8 percent each year. Rates of natural increase, like crude birthrates and crude death rates, are higher in less developed countries than in developed countries. According to 2014 estimates reported in the CIA World Factbook, the highest rates of natural increase in the world were located in South Sudan (4.02 percent per year) followed by Malawi (3.32 percent per year), Niger (3.25 percent), Uganda (3.24 percent), and Qatar (3.16 percent). Wealthy Qatar is an exception to the general relationship between a country’s level of development and its rate of natural growth. Many people living in Qatar are young expatriates and therefore its crude death rate is very low. The countries with the lowest rates of natural increase were the former Soviet republics and satellites of Latvia (−1.06 percent per year) followed by Lithuania (−1.04 percent), Bulgaria (−0.58 percent), Estonia (−0.55 percent), and Hungary (−0.30 percent). The rate of natural increase is related to the total fertility rate, which is defined as the average number of children that a woman bears during her lifetime. A rate of natural increase is associated with a total fertility rate of 2, and in such cases the crude birthrate equals the crude death rate and the rate of natural increase is zero. A total fertility rate of two is associated with replacement-level fertility, in which the population remains stable over the long run. Positive rates of natural increase are associated with total fertility rates of greater than two, and negative rates of natural increase are associated with total fertility rates of less than two. The highest total fertility rates are found in those countries with very high crude birthrates. Niger, which has the

world’s highest crude birthrate, also has the world’s highest total fertility rate. The average woman in Niger gives birth to more than seven children during her lifetime. The median age of a population is that age at which half of the people are younger and half are older. Median ages are related closely to rates of natural increase and to total fertility rates. The populations of places in which total fertility rates and rates of natural increase are high include large numbers of young people, and hence such places have low median ages. On the other hand, places with lower birthrates and lower death rates have high median ages. According to the CIA World Factbook, the median age of the population of the United States in 2014 was approximately 37.6 years. The median age of the majority of European countries as well as in Canada and Japan exceed forty years. As of 2014, the highest median ages in the world were reported from Germany and Japan, with median ages of 46.1 years of age. They were followed by Italy (44.6), Austria (44.3), and Greece (43.5). The median ages of many less developed countries, however, are less than twenty years. In 2014, the lowest median ages in the world were found in Niger (15.1 years), Uganda (15.5), Mali (16.0), Malawi (16.3), and Zambia (16.7). All of these countries have very low per capita incomes and very high birthrates. Demographic Transition and Global Population Change It is difficult to determine what the global population may have been in ancient and medieval times. However, contemporary demographers have estimated that 2,000 years ago, or in the first century a.d., there were probably between 180 and 250 million people worldwide. Populations rose slowly but steadily over the next 1,800 years. It is thought that the planet’s population reached one billion shortly after 1800. In other words, the Earth’s population is believed to have increased by an average of 0.4 percent per year between year 0 and 1800.

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At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the world’s population began to increase much more rapidly. It doubled to more than two million by 1925 and reached three million around 1960. It doubled to six billion around 1999 and reached seven billion in 2011. In other words, the number of years needed to add an additional billion persons has declined from more than 100 years in the nineteenth century to only twelve years in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Since 1800, the number of people worldwide has increased by an average of more than 3 percent per year. Why has the world’s population increased at higher rates during the past 200 years, relative to earlier eras? This question can be addressed by comparing birthrates, death rates, rates of natural increase, and total fertility rates as they have changed over time. In general, birth and death rates have declined over the course of history. Birthrates in the last 200 years have been considerably higher than death rates, with the result that rates of natural increase are high and populations increase. Changes in birth and death rates over time reflect the process of demographic transition. The demographic transition model is used by demographers and other analysts to show changes in birthrates and death rates and the impacts of these changes on populations over time (Davis 1945; Kirk 1966). Analysis and interpretation of birth and death records kept in ancient and medieval societies illustrate that crude birthrates and crude death rates in these societies were much higher than is the case today. Over time, death rates fluctuated dramatically because the leading causes of death in preindustrial societies were famines and outbreaks of epidemic diseases. For example, the population of Europe was decimated twice during the fourteenth century by the Great Famine of 1315–1317 (Jordan 1996) and by the pandemic of bubonic plague known as the Black Death in the late 1340s (Herlihy and Cohn 1997). Each of these events is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of as much as a quarter of the pop-

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ulation of Western Europe. However, over the long run birthrates were slightly higher than death rates and the world’s population increased slowly. This situation began to change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and transformations coincided with the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. At this time, death rates began to decline rapidly. Declining birthrates were the result of the development of modern medical science and technology. Scientists and physicians were able to identify the causes of various diseases and to learn how they could be treated or prevented. Thus, medicines and other treatments could be used to cure patients who contracted smallpox and tuberculosis who would likely have died in previous eras. Scientific knowledge of diseases and their causes also enabled the development of public health measures to prevent the spread of these diseases. For example, awareness that malaria and yellow fever are spread by mosquitos led to programs to drain swamps and eliminate standing water in which these mosquitos breed. Public health programs were particularly successful in reducing infant mortality, and thus a larger percentage of newborn infants survived to adulthood. While developments in medical science and technology caused rapid declines in death rates, birthrates nonetheless remained high for many years thereafter. Historically, in many preindustrial societies children were regarded as social security. Especially in agricultural societies, more children meant more labor on the farm and children were expected to care for elderly parents in their old age. As well, many persons faced cultural and/or religious pressure to marry early and bear large numbers of children. As birthrates remained high and death rates dropped quickly, rates of natural increase rose and populations grew rapidly. Later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, birthrates began to decline. Children were less apt to be viewed as social security, especially in developed countries including the United States in which

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government began to take a more active role in providing for the elderly. Especially in Europe and the United States, women were provided with more alternatives to marrying at an early age and giving birth to large families. Birthrates declined and population growth began to decrease. Birthrates have continued to decline to the point that some countries now have negative rates of natural increase. Thus, demographic transition can be divided into four stages. At the first stage, birthrates and death rates were high. This stage characterized ancient, medieval, and preindustrial societies. At the second stage, which coincided with the onset of industrialization, death rates dropped quickly while birthrates remained high. This stage began in the nineteenth century in the developed world, and in the twentieth century outside Europe and North America. At the third stage, death rates were relatively low and birthrates were declining. In less developed countries, this did not begin until the second half of the twentieth century. At the fourth stage, both birthrates and death rates were low. Populations are stable at the first and fourth stages but increase quickly at the second and third stages. Today, highly developed countries such as the United States are at the fourth stage of demographic transition whereas less developed countries remain in the second and third stages. The model can be viewed interactively in an article by Morgan (2011), who also postulated the likelihood of a fifth stage at which death rates were considerably higher than birthrates. In fact, many countries today have higher death rates than birthrates, including several European countries and Japan.

International Migration In addition to births and deaths, the second major component of population change, is migration. Populations of some countries in Europe and North America are increasing only because of immigration. For exam-

ple, the United States’s total fertility rate is about 2.03, which means that the number of births is approximately equal to the number of deaths. As a consequence, contemporary population growth in the United States is the result of migration. In this section, we focus on international migration, or population movement between different countries. However, it should be noted that international moves account for only a small percentage of all moves between places. Over 95 percent of persons born in most countries continue to live in these countries as adults. According to a United Nations estimate, in 2015 about 244 million people, or about 3.3 percent of the world’s population, were living in countries other than those in which they had been born. At a large scale, international migrants tend to flow from less developed countries to developed countries. The UN report pointed out that about 10 percent of the residents of Europe, North America, and Oceania including, Australia and New Zealand, were international migrants, as compared to only about 2 percent in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (United Nations 2016). International Labor Migration There are three broad categories of international migrants: international labor migrants, brain-drain migrants, and refugees. The largest of these, international labor migrants, move between countries in search of employment opportunities. They are often motivated by poverty or lack of opportunity in their home countries. Once having migrated, many work at unskilled or semiskilled jobs including agricultural labor, manufacturing, construction, or domestic service. The large majority of international labor migrants are persons who move from less developed to more developed countries. International labor migrants make up over half of the population of a few countries, notably the oil-rich but sparsely populated countries of Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

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The degree to which international labor migrants are welcomed in their destination countries varies. They may be valued as sources of labor. Many work at low-paying, unskilled, or semiskilled jobs that can be dangerous, dirty, or unpleasant. However, native-born residents of developed countries sometimes regard international labor migrants as competitors for scarce jobs. International labor migrants also require health care, education, and other public services in their new countries. As well, in some cases immigrants may have cultural values that differ from those of the majority population, and these immigrants may be criticized for their inability or unwillingness to conform to the majority values. International labor migration can affect countries and places of origin as well as destination countries. Most international migrants are young adults, often in their late teens, twenties, or thirties, and many are relatively better educated. The departure of these immigrants means that a disproportionate number of those who do not move are the elderly, children, and the disabled. Their absence reduces the potential of those left behind to generate income to support themselves. Difficulties faced by those left behind, however, can be alleviated by remittances, or the transfers of money between migrants and their relatives and friends in their countries of origin. In 2014, the World Bank estimated that about $436 billion was remitted to developing countries throughout the world (World Bank 2014). India with $70 billion, China with $60 billion, and the Philippines with $25 billion received the largest amounts of remittance income. Estimates also suggest that the amount of money remitted is increasing by more than 7 percent per year. Remittances not only provide support for family members and friends, but in some countries they are a major source of income and foreign capital (Escudos 2011). In the Central Asian republics of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, more than 30 percent of total national income in 2013 came from remittances (Ria Financial Blog 2015).

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The Brain Drain The term “brain drain” is used to describe the movement of well-educated and highincome people from less developed to more developed countries. Many of these migrants are physicians, teachers, scientists, engineers, lawyers, and other professionals. Others are business owners or business executives. These highly educated persons choose to leave their countries of origin for several reasons, including the fact that professional opportunities are much greater in developed countries. Some companies such as information technology firms actively recruit highly trained specialists from other countries. As well, educated persons may be subject to persecution in their home countries, especially in dictatorships in which they are seen as threats to the autocratic regimes. Frequently, migration of these persons away from less developed countries of origin deprives these countries of needed income, although these migrants tend to prosper and many also provide remittances to friends and relatives in their native places. According to one estimate, more than 10 percent of Africans who have college degrees live and work abroad. In some countries, the percentage of university graduates who leave their countries of origin is even greater (Kigotho 2013).

Privileging High-Skilled Immigrants over International Labor Migrants Some developed countries that receive large numbers of international migrants sometimes encourage the movement of highly skilled workers, who are regarded as human capital. However, other developed countries discourage international labor migrants who lack education and professional qualifications. The laws of some countries distinguish between these classes of migrants. Singapore, for instance, maintains strict immigration laws that distinguish foreign workers from foreign talents. In this wealthy Southeast Asian country, international labor

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migrants are categorized as foreign workers, most of whom have menial, unskilled, and semiskilled jobs. They work as construction labors, janitors and trash collectors, stevedores and dock workers, and domestic servants. Most come from poor countries such as India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Many of these foreign workers are recruited on fixed labor contracts and are required to leave Singapore when their contracts have expired. Generally, these foreign workers have few or no legal rights. In the early twenty-first century, the situation faced by domestic servants working in Singapore attracted international attention. An estimated 200,000 foreigners, mostly women, work in Singapore as domestic servants. Although Singapore enacted a law guaranteeing at least one day off per week to its domestic servants, many continue to be at the mercy of their employers and may be beaten, abused, or forced to work long hours for very little pay (O’Brien 2015). Refugees While many international migrants move voluntarily in search of opportunity, many others are refugees. A refugee is a person who is forced to migrate to a different country due to religious and/or political persecution. Most refugees come from less developed countries and often migrate to nearby and often less developed nations. Some move to the United States and the European Union In 1950, the United Nations established the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The following year, the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was drafted under the auspices of UNHCR. According to the Convention, a refugee is “[a] person who is outside his/her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of

that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution.” Originally, this definition only applied to the more than 1 million Europeans who were displaced during World War II. In 1967, however, the definition was extended to apply to all refugees worldwide. According to UNHCR estimates, there were about 18 million refugees around the world in the early 1990s. This number dropped to about 10 million by 2006. In 2015, it was estimated that about 15 million persons worldwide could be classified as refugees (UNHCR 2015). Most of them come from less developed countries that are facing civil or international war, with a rapid increase between 2012 and 2015. This increase is in large part the result of the civil war in Syria, including the actions of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which have forced millions of people into refugee status. As of mid-2015 nearly 4.2 million Syrians had been displaced as refugees. More than 2.6 million refugees also came from Afghanistan, which led the world in overall number of refugees displaced until 2013 with the escalation of the Syrian conflict. Other countries with more than 400,000 refugees, each in mid-2015, included the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan. Although some refugees migrate to the United States, the countries of the European Union, and other developed countries, the majority resettle in nearby countries, in large part because many have little or no money to travel longer distances. As of mid-2015, the country with the largest number of refugees was Turkey, which shares a long border with Syria, with more than 1.8 million refugees (UNHCR 2015). Turkey was followed by Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan, with more than 1.5 million refugees. Other countries hosting more than 500,000 refugees included Iran, Jordan, and Lebanon – all of which border Syria, along with Kenya and Ethiopia, which border Somalia. Finding housing for these large numbers of refugees is often problematic, because

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many of the countries to which they flee are poor and lack the resources to provide adequate shelter, food, and services for them. Many refugees are resettled in makeshift camps that lack electricity, running water, and waste and sewage disposal facilities. They often do not have access to medical care, schools, and jobs. Generally, these camps are regarded as temporary shelters for refugees who are to be repatriated once hostilities have ended. However, some have evolved into permanent settlements.

Social Problems and Population Many social problems are linked, directly or indirectly, to population. How do countries address issues involving population growth and population movement? In this section, we consider this question, giving examples illustrating their significance. Approaches to Population Policy Throughout the world, countries have considered and enacted policies intended to address population-related questions. A fundamental question underlying any such policies is whether increases in populations and/or rates of natural increase are deemed to be desirable or undesirable. The question concerning the desirability of population growth for society was first addressed in the late eighteenth century by the British economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). Writing during the Industrial Revolution, when Britain was entering the second stage of demographic transition and its population was increasing rapidly, Malthus cautioned that population growth could not be sustained over the long run (Petersen 1979). His most important work, Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, remains highly influential today. In his Essay, Malthus identified what he considered to be “laws” of population. Essentially, he argued that population growth would be constrained by lack of

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resources, or what he called “means of subsistence.” In Malthus’s view, as the population of a society continued to increase, the amount of resources available to support each person would decrease. The long-run result would be disease, famine, and war, or what Malthus described as “misery and vice.” Malthus’s theory concerning relationships between population and resources has long been known as the Malthusian view of population. Malthus’s ideas have been criticized, both during his lifetime and ever since. In particular, his critics have disputed the notion that lack of available resources is a necessary constraint on population increases. Some have argued that technology is an important factor that increases a society’s resource base. In effect, it has been argued that resources can be created through technology, the division of labor, and the development of human capital. Those supporting the resources-creation view point to the example of population growth in the United States. In 1900, the US population was approximately 76 million whereas in 2010 it was roughly 310 million, or about four times greater. Life expectancy in 1900 was fifty-two years, whereas in 2010 it was seventy-eight years. Given population growth and increased life expectancy, sustaining the US population today requires about six times as much food as in 1900. However, the amount of food consumed per capita in the contemporary United States is considerably greater than in 1900, to the point that obesity has become a greater problem than malnutrition. Moreover, far more food is exported by American farmers today as compared to the early twentieth century. Thus, contrary to Malthus, Americans today have far more resources on a per capita basis than they did a century ago, despite the large increase in the country’s total population. Population Policies and Resources Population policies involving birthrates and migration are based generally on a government’s view of this relationship between

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population and resources. Over the course of history, many countries have adopted policies intended to reduce fertility and lower birthrates. For example, in 1979 China adopted a controversial policy intended to lower fertility by limiting couples to have only one child. The goal of this policy, discussed in detail below, was to reduce the rate of population growth. Other countries have implemented policies intended to increase their populations. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s population has declined from about 148 million to about 143 million due to several causes. The Soviet government had promoted population growth, but incentives to increase fertility were abandoned in post-Soviet Russia and birthrates declined considerably. As well, many Russians emigrated to other countries while death rates trended upward as a result of an aging population, poor medical care, environmental degradation left over from the Soviet regime, and an epidemic of alcoholism (Aleshkovski 2012). As Russia’s population continues to age, some scholars have predicted that its population could decrease to as few as 107 million by 2050, if current trends continue. This combination of factors not only caused Russia’s population to decline, but some Russian leaders became concerned that the country’s declining economy would result in a loss of global political power and influence. In response, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Russian government began to enact policies intended to encourage increased population growth (Berman 2015). These policies included cash payments to parents who bear three or more children, an aggressive campaign to discourage drug and alcohol abuse, and encouraging immigrants to move to Russia. Since about 2008, Russia’s population has begun to increase once again and in 2013 life expectancy increased to seventy-one years, the highest in Russian history. In 2012, the number of births exceeded the number of deaths for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Gender and Population Efforts to limit population growth have resulted in significant social problems in various parts of the world. One of the most controversial of these efforts was China’s one-child population policy, which took effect in 1979. China’s population grew rapidly during much of the twentieth century. According to Chinese government statistics, the country’s population nearly doubled from 582 million in 1953 to over a billion in 1982. Population growth was encouraged by China’s ruler Mao Zedong (1893–1976), who argued that “to every stomach is attached two hands.” In other words, Mao was a strong proponent of the idea that people create resources. After Mao died, however, Chinese officials became concerned that continuing population growth was straining China’s ability to feed and support its growing population. In response to these concerns, in 1979 the Chinese government implemented policies that restricted Chinese couples of Han ethnicity to having only one child. Tibetans, Uighurs, and other minority groups, who make up less than 10 percent of China’s population, were exempted from the policy. Han Chinese couples who had a second child without government permission were subjected to heavy fines and other penalties; there were also reports of women who became pregnant with a second child being forced to have abortions. After the one-child policy went into effect, birthrates and rates of natural increase declined as expected. China’s total fertility rate dropped to 1.4, or well below replacement-level fertility, by the first decade of the twenty-first century. However, the policy had far-reaching effects far beyond these numbers. For thousands of years, Chinese culture has been characterized by a preference for sons over daughters, because sons carry on the family name and inherit property while daughters marry into other families. After the one-child policy went into effect, many couples chose to abort a female fetus rather than give birth to

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a daughter. Other baby girls were given up for adoption. Over 95 percent of babies born in China and adopted by American parents are girls. As well, it became recognized that strict compliance with the one-child policy would eliminate extended families. A child whose parents are both only children will grow up without aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, or nephews. Lack of an extended family also put pressure on young adults to support their aging parents and grandparents. Young Chinese have used the term “4-2-1” to describe a situation in which a person is responsible for supporting his or her two parents and four grandparents. The world’s population includes about 96 males for every 100 females. The larger number of females relative to the number of males is the result of life expectancy among women being greater than life expectancy among men. By 2010, however, it was estimated that China’s population contained about 119 males for every 100 females, with the imbalance especially high among young adults who were born in the 1980s and 1990s. The one-child policy has remained highly controversial, both within and outside China. Some Chinese government officials believe that the country’s population is about 300 to 400 million people less than might have been the case without the policy. China’s total fertility rate has dropped to about 1.4, or well under replacementlevel fertility. However, some observers have argued that the total fertility rate dropped below replacement level, regardless of the existence of the policy. Human rights activists have continued to call attention to forced abortion, forced sterilization, and infanticide associated with strict adherence to the policy. In part because of these controversies, China officially abandoned its one-child policy in 2015. Although the issue of gender and population has been most significant in China, it has also arisen in other areas of the world, most notably in Asia. For example, Indian law prohibits physicians from disclosing the sex of unborn children to their parents. “The Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques

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(Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act of 1994, was enacted and brought into operation from 1996, in order to check female feticide. Rules have also been framed under the Act. The Act prohibits determination and disclosure of the sex of the fetus. It also prohibits any advertisements relating to prenatal determination of sex and prescribes punishment for its contravention. The person who contravenes the provisions of this Act is punishable with imprisonment and fine” (quoted by Darnovsky 2009). However, one study of the effectiveness of the Act undertaken several years after its implementation concluded that it had had little effect on gender imbalance within India (Subramanian and Selvaraj 2009). Misuse of techniques to determine the sex of an unborn child along with the possibility of bribery have been cited as reasons why the Act has proven to be less than successful. Immigration Policy Concerns about the relationship between population and resources have also influenced policies concerning international migration. Throughout history, and today, national leaders have debated the desirability of immigration. Policies intended to encourage immigration, as in Russia, and those intended to limit or forestall immigration are predicated on whether immigration is seen as positive or negative. As in the case of Singapore, some countries have adopted policies that privilege some immigrants at the expense of others who are regarded as less desirable. Countries have given various reasons in support of, or against, increased immigration. Some of these involve potential impacts of immigrants on local economies. Many international labor migrants take jobs that are shunned by native-born citizens of the countries to which they have moved. Highly educated immigrants, often valued as human capital, are generally part of the brain drain and use their educations and professional skills to aid the economies of their new countries. On the other hand, immigrants have often been

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seen as competition for scarce jobs. This is especially true in circumstances in which immigrant workers are paid less than are native-born workers, providing employers with incentives to privilege the hiring of immigrants. A related question involves the degree to which immigrants require various social services. As indicated earlier, a disproportionate number of immigrants are young working adults. As such, they require fewer medical and welfare services than do children or the elderly, although their children require educations. In the 1970s, the US Supreme Court ruled that local school districts could not deny children of illegal immigrants the right to attend public schools. Immigration is also justified on humanitarian grounds. Many people in developed countries are sympathetic to refugees or others who are clearly victimized by discrimination, physical abuse, and poverty in their home countries. However, nativeborn citizens of destination countries also express concern about how large influxes of immigrants will affect their cultures. In some countries, local residents fear that immigrants will refuse to adopt the values and customs of their new countries, or will have great difficulty doing so. In the United States there were concerns about assimilation on the part of large numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century. This led to the enactment of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which strictly limited immigration into the country. Today, similar criticisms of immigrants from non-Western societies have been raised in Europe and the United States, to which many people from developed countries have been moving. Illustrations of Immigration Controversies Two contemporary examples serve to illustrate the controversy surrounding immigration to the United States. Mexico has been the largest source of immigrants into the United States for many years. In 2013, it was estimated that about 11.6 million immigrants from Mexico were residing in the United

States. These Mexican-born immigrants represented about 28 percent of all immigrants in the country (Zong and Batalova 2014). The overall number of Mexican-born immigrants living in the United States has nearly tripled from 4.3 million in 1980. The largest numbers of Mexican immigrants live in California or Texas along the US-Mexico border, although increasing numbers have been migrating elsewhere. Most Mexican immigrants into the United States are international labor migrants. The United States is a magnet for them because of its proximity and because it has a much higher per capita income than does Mexico. One of the major concerns involves the issue of illegal immigration. The overall number of Mexican immigrants who have moved across the border illegally is difficult to determine with any precision, but government estimates as of 2015 put that number at about 5.6 million persons (Gonzalez-Barrera and Krogstad 2015). The question of illegal immigration, especially from Mexico, has become a major political issue. The United States and Mexico share a border nearly 2,000 miles in length, much of which crosses rugged, isolated terrain that is difficult to monitor by border patrol agents. Hence it is easy for migrants, who are sometimes aided by locals with intimate knowledge of the topography, to sneak across the border. Concerns about the difficulty of patrolling the boundary extended also to the trafficking of prostitutes, drugs, and other illegal goods into the United States. In response, the US Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2006. Fence construction began shortly thereafter. As of mid-2015, border fences had been built along about 670 miles of the border, or roughly one-third of its overall length (Billups 2015). The fence project remains controversial on several grounds, including humanitarian reasons. As well, the fence route crosses lands occupied by several Native American tribes, and it may have environmental effects including blocking the natural migration routes of wild animals.

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Similar border fencing projects have been initiated by other countries along their international boundaries. For example, Botswana has constructed a 300-mile-long electric fence along its border with Zimbabwe and in 2016 Hungary was building border fences along its boundaries with Croatia and Serbia. In these and other countries, border fences have been constructed to restrict illegal immigration from neighboring nations. Border fences are not only intended to prevent migration from poorer neighboring countries, but are also seen as means by which destination countries can keep terrorists out (Jones 2012). Another controversy involving the migration of illegal immigrants into the United States involves potential eligibility for citizenship. Should illegal immigrants who are already in the United States be allowed to stay and eventually become US citizens? One concern is that allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the United States penalizes legal immigrants who have abided by US law. However, others argue that illegal immigrants should be given pathways to citizenship, especially if they obtain educations and/or serve in the Armed Forces. The question of family unification has also arisen on both sides of the border. Some, including President Barack Obama, have argued that deportation should not separate family members. The status of refugees is also a significant concern. As indicated earlier, Syria now generates more refugees than any other country in the world. Since 2011, Syria has been involved in a multifaceted civil war that began when pro-democracy rebels attempted to overthrow the dictatorial regime of Bashar al-Assad. Armed conflict also broke out between Syrian Arabs and the minority Kurdish population, who live primarily in the northeastern part of the country near its boundaries with Turkey and Iraq. In 2013, a rebel group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seized control of many parts of northern and eastern Syria and portions of neighboring Iraq, establishing an especially harsh and brutal regime that has been guilty of numerous,

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egregious violations of human rights. As of early 2016, more than 250,000 Syrians had lost their lives in the civil war (BBC News 2016a). The ongoing civil war along with the excesses of ISIS and the al-Assad regime have forced hundreds of thousands of Syrians to flee the country. Many have been resettled in neighboring countries, but by late 2015, as many as a million Syrian refugees were believed to have moved to the European Union, including more than 300,000 in Germany alone (BBC News 2016b). The status of these refugees has become a major political issue in the United States and Europe, in large part because of concerns about whether they will be able to contribute productively to the destination countries’ economies and because of concerns about whether these refugees will be willing to adapt to the destination countries’ cultural values. Moreover, some in both the United States and in the European Union have expressed concern that some persons claiming refugee status might be terrorists associated with ISIS or other radical Islamist groups. Early in 2016, a series of attacks on German citizens by persons of Middle Eastern ancestry claiming to be Syrian refugees resulted in increased opposition to further Syrian refugee resettlement throughout Europe.

Can the World Feed Itself? Perhaps the most fundamental question involving population is whether the world can continue to feed and provide adequate resources to support its growing numbers of people. As indicated earlier, some predict that the global population will reach 10 billion by 2050. Will there be enough food to feed all these people by that time? Addressing this question requires revisiting the basic issues associated with the relationships between population and resources originally postulated by Malthus more than two centuries ago. Malthus’s basic argument is that population growth will be limited

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by a scarcity of resources. The question can then be phrased in terms of whether and when this limit will be reached. Another way to examine this question is by analyzing carrying capacity or the maximum population that can survive given long-run constraints on available resources (Sayre 2008). Demographers have long debated the size of the world’s human carrying capacity. Looking at the problem historically, most agree that it has not yet been reached at a global level. Malthus wrote at a time when the earth’s population contained about 1 billion people. Today, it contains more than 7.4 billion. Although hunger and malnutrition remain major problems in some global regions, the average person has access to considerably more food than was the case during Malthus’s time. Worldwide, food production has increased more than eightfold during the last 200 years. Much of this increase has been associated with the application of technology. During and after World War II there were severe food shortages in various less developed countries. For example, a famine in present-day eastern India and Bangladesh is believed to have resulted in as many as 3 million deaths between 1942 and 1945 (Greenough 1982). After World War II ended in 1945, strenuous efforts to apply technology to increase food production began. Agronomists developed hybrid varieties of rice, wheat, corn, and other grains that produced much higher yields of food per acre. Fertilizers and pesticides were used in large quantities to promote crop production. In combination, these efforts are known as the Green Revolution (Jain 2010). As a result of the Green Revolution, crop yields increased rapidly in Latin America, India, Africa, and other less developed regions. The resulting increase in the food supply averted famines and prevented starvation for millions of people. Critics of the Green Revolution have called attention to its ecological effects and to the increasing imbalance between wealthier farmers and corporations that can afford the new tech-

nologies and poorer farmers who cannot afford them. However, there is little doubt that the Green Revolution has contributed greatly to an overall increase in food supplies worldwide. Since the 1960s, the global rate of food production has increased faster than has the rate of population growth. Famines continue in some areas, but they are often associated with war, political conflict, natural disasters, and inadequate means to supply food to affected populations. Despite the fact that the food supply has increased more rapidly than population, some have cautioned that this trend is not sustainable. For example, Ray et al. (2013) argued that the world’s overall grain production will need to double by 2050 if levels are to keep pace with population growth. Their arguments were based in part on the fact that not all grain is grown for human consumption; a considerable portion of it is fed to livestock or used to produce biofuels. Nevertheless, their research provides a perspective on the degree to which food supplies must increase in order to feed a growing population. Other factors may also influence the world’s carrying capacity. For example, increased food production has resulted in the conversion of large amounts of formerly pristine land into agricultural lands, with considerable impacts on local environments including the destruction of habitats for various species of animals and birds. As well, human-induced climate change is likely to affect food production capacity in many areas of the world. Conflicts over access to water, which is critical to food production, are likely to increase. This has already happened in densely populated and arid areas including South Asia and the Middle East (Michel and Pandya 2009). All these factors call into question whether the global population can continue to expand indefinitely without serious ramifications for the quality of human life and for the planet’s environment. However, some experts predict that the planet’s population may be peaking and will decline in the years ahead if birthrates continue to drop (Wise 2013).

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Conclusion Questions concerning population, its size, and its location and movement underlie many contemporary social problems. Frequently, social and economic conflict is associated with issues involving population growth and decline, population change, and migration. As the Earth’s population increases, it is likely that these problems will intensify. Ultimately, relationships between population, social problems, and the environment will pertain to whether the planet can continue to sustain its population at an adequate level of sustenance.

Glossary Brain drain The movement of welleducated and high-income people from less developed to more developed countries. Crude birthrate Ratio of the number of babies born in a given place and year to the overall population of that place. Crude death rate Ratio of deaths in a given year to the overall population at the beginning of that year. Demographic transition model A model used by demographers and other analysts to show changes in birthrates and death rates and the impacts of these changes on populations over time. Physiological density The number of people per unit land area of arable land. Population density The number of people per unit of land area. Rate of natural increase The difference between the crude birthrate and the crude death rate. Total fertility rate The average number of children that a woman bears during her lifetime.

References Aleshkovski. Ivan A. 2012. International migration, globalization, and demographic devel-

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opment of the Russian Federation. Journal of Globalization Studies 3:95–110 BBC News. 2016a. Syria: The story of the conflict. BBC.com. January 27. www.bbc.com/news/ world-middle-east-26116868. 2016b. Migrant crisis: Migration to Europe explained in graphics. BBC.com. January 28. www.bbc.com/news/world-europe34131911. Berman, Ilan. 2015 Moscow’s baby bust? Birth rates in Russia are up, but the demographic crisis is far from over. Foreign Affairs. July 8. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ russian-federation/2015–07–08/moscowsbaby-bust. Billups, Andrea. 2015. Illegal immigration: Current length of US-Mexico border wall. Newsmax.com. September 4. www .newsmax.com/FastFeatures/U-SMexicoborder-wall/2015/09/04/id/673637/. Darnovsky, Marcy. 2009. Countries with laws or policies on sex selection. Center for Genetics and Society. http://geneticsandsociety .org/downloads/200904_sex_selection_ memo.pdf. Davis, Kingsley. 1945. World population in transition. Annals 237:1–11. Escudos, Jacinta. 2011. El Salvador depending on remittances for its economic survival. Future Challenges. July 1. http:// futurechallenges.org/local/el-salvadordepending-on-remittances-for-its-economicsurvival/. Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana, and Jens Miguel Krogstad. 2015. What we know about illegal immigration from Mexico. Pew Research Center. November 20. www.pewresearch .org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/what-we-knowabout-illegal-immigration-from-mexico/. Greenough, P. R. 1982. Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–1944. New York: Oxford University Press. Herlihy, David, and Samuel K. Cohn. 1997. The Black Death and the Transformation of the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jain, H. K. 2010. Green Revolution: History, Impact, and Future. Houston, TX: Studium Press. Jones, Reece. 2012. Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, Israel, and India. London: Zed Books.

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Jordan, William C. 1996. The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kigotho, Wachira. 2013. Migration and brain drain from Africa acute – Report. University World News. October 11. www .universityworldnews.com/article.php?story= 20131011121316706. Kirk, Dudley. 1996. The demographic transition. Population Studies 50:361–87. Malthus, Thomas Robert. 2007. An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: Dover. Michel, David, and Amit Pandya, eds. 2009. Troubled waters: Climate change, hydropolitics, and transboundary resources. www .globalpolicy.org/images/pdfs/troubled_ waters-complete.pdf. Morgan, Robert. 2011. Looking at the new demography. December 27. www .newgeography.com/content/002591looking-new-demography. Nationmaster.com. 2012. Geographic statistics: Arable land (most recent) by country. www .nationmaster.com/graph/geo_lan_use_ara_ lan-geography-land-use-arable. O’Brien, Bob. 2015. Singapore’s domestic workers routinely exploited and often abused in the service of rich nationals. The Independent. July 28. www.independent.co .uk/news/world/asia/singapores-domesticworkers-routinely-exploited-and-oftenabused-in-the-service-of-rich-nationals10422589.html. Petersen, William. 1979. Malthus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ray, Deepak K., Nathaniel D. Mueller, Paul C. West, and Jonathan A. Foley. 2013. Yield trends are insufficient to double global crop production by 2050. PLoS ONE 8. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/ article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0066428. Ria Financial Blog. 2015. Top 10 countries most dependent on remittances. January 26. http://riafinancialblog.com/2015/01/26/top10-countries-most-dependent-on-remittances/.

Sayre, Nathan F. 2008. The genesis, history, and limits of carrying capacity. Annals 98:120– 34. Subramanian, S. V., and S. Selvaraj. 2009. Social analysis of sex imbalance in India: Before and after the implementation of the PreNatal Diagnostic Techniques (PNDT) Act. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 63:245–52. United Nations. 2016. 244 million international migrants living abroad worldwide, UN statistics reveal. January 12. www.un.org/ sustainabledevelopment/blog/2016/01/244million-international-migrants-livingabroad-worldwide-new-un-statistics-reveal/. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division. 2015. World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision. New York: United Nations. http://esa .un.org/unpd/wpp/publications/files/key_ findings_wpp_2015.pdf. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 2015. UNHCR mid-year report 2015. www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/ home/opendocPDFViewer.html?docid= 56701b969&query=mid-2015. United States Central Intelligence Agency. 2014. CIA World Factbook 2014. www.cia.gov/ library/publications/the-world-factbook/. Wise. Jeff. 2013. About that overpopulation problem. Slate. January 9. www.slate.com/ articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/ world_population_may_actually_start_ declining_not_exploding.html. World Bank. 2014. Remittances to developing countries to stay robust this year, despite increased deportations of migrant workers, says WB. www.worldbank.org/en/ news/press-release/2014/04/11/remittancesdeveloping-countries-deportationsmigrant-workers-wb. Zong, Jie, and Jeanne Batalova. 2014. Mexican immigrants in the United States. Migration Policy Institute. October 9. www .migrationpolicy.org/article/mexicanimmigrants-united-states.

CHAPTER 30

Environmental Problems Kayla Stover

Abstract This chapter examines environmental problems from a sociological perspective. It traces the evolution of the two most prominent sociological approaches to conceptualizing environmental problems: realism and constructivism. Realists analyze environmental problems in terms of material changes to the environment that disrupt biophysical and social processes. Constructivists focus on the ways in which social, cultural, and political forces produce shared subjective perceptions of environmental problems. In comparing these two perspectives, this chapter illustrates the need for both realist and constructivist conceptualizations to account for the dialectical relationship between the social and biophysical forces that constitute environmental problems. This is further complicated in the examination of environmental problems in a global context. The chapter concludes by suggesting an approach to studying environmental problems that accounts for the relationship between local and global dynamics of socioenvironmental dialectics: a place-based sociology of environmental problems.

Introduction During the last 200 years societies have experienced unprecedented population growth, technological advancement, and economic development. This expansion was made possible by a series of energy transitions, replacing human energy with nonhuman energy sources (Bunker 1984). Energy sources like coal, petroleum, and natural gas have facilitated higher rates of production and in the last 100 years the growth of the physical economy has

outpaced population growth (Krausmann et al. 2009). As a result, human societies are using more natural resources than necessary, producing more goods than required, and creating excessive amounts of waste. These are unsustainable trends in a finite world, resulting in extensive environmental degradation. In the industrialized nations of the West, the environmental consequences of intensifying material expansion did not generate widespread concern until the middle of the twentieth century when the

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slow degradation of the natural environment began to affect human societies. Scientists, government officials, and citizens started to make connections between poor environmental conditions and human health. Several prominent environmental and technological disasters punctuated this growing awareness: the Love Canal chemical waste tragedy in New York (1978), the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in Pennsylvania (1979), the Seveso industrial accident in Italy (1976), the Bhopal gas tragedy in India (1984), and the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine (1986). Environmental concern was supported by several important publications such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Garrett Hardin’s article “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968), and the Club of Rome’s report The Limits to Growth (1972). This burgeoning environmentalism crystalized into the modern environmental movement, and environmental concern became a familiar and legitimate part of modern society. Societal awareness of environmental problems was not a direct response to changes in the biophysical environment, it emerged out of a particular social and historical context. Similarly, the environmental problems that human societies face cannot be understood independent of the social forces that drive them and the social processes that problematize them. This is the purview of environmental sociology. The Sociology of Environmental Problems Environmental sociology emerged in the 1970s, inspired by rising societal awareness of environmental problems and the corresponding growth of the environmental movement (Dunlap 1997). Initially, sociologists were resistant to incorporating environmental issues into the discipline, given that much of its early boundary-work constructed a barrier between the study of society and the study of nature (Freudenberg et al. 1995; Macnaghten and Urry 1995; Dunlap 1997; Foster 1999). As a result,

sociological theories and empirical research overemphasized the division between social processes the physical environment (Buttel 1996). Sociology’s reluctance to examine socioenvironmental relationships is also a product of its historical context (Catton and Dunlap 1978; Macnaghten and Urry 1995). The discipline emerged in Western society during a time of economic prosperity, resource abundance, and urbanization. In this milieu, it appeared that human society was becoming increasingly independent of its biophysical environment. Consequently, much of environmental sociology’s work has been to move beyond what Catton and Dunlap (1978) famously labeled the Human Exemptionalist Paradigm (HEP). They argued that all sociological research and theories were encompassed within this fundamentally anthropocentric paradigm. The HEP, they claimed, limited the discipline’s ability to “deal meaningfully with the social implications of ecological problems and constraints” (Catton and Dunlap 1978, 42). The HEP presumed human society’s independence from the biophysical environment. Sociologists studied societies without accounting for the ways in which they were shaped by and dependent upon environmental conditions like weather patterns, soil and water quality, and animal populations. To challenge this paradigm, Catton and Dunlap (1978) proposed a New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) that acknowledged the connections between society and the biophysical environment. In the decades since its establishment, environmental sociology has produced a robust literature of empirical and theoretical analyses of socioenvironmental dynamics. In particular, the discipline has sought to determine which aspects of society drive the creation of anthropogenic environmental problems. In doing so, environmental sociology amassed a variety of conceptual approaches and theoretical tools for the interrelated study of society, environment, and environmental problems.

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Conceptualizing Environmental Problems: The Real and the Constructed There are two prominent sociological approaches to conceptualizing environmental problems: realist and constructivist. These approaches diverge in their conceptualization of environmental problems, environmental injustice, and the social forces that create these problems.

environmental problems as violations of ecological parameters: the real Realist conceptualizations of environmental problems reflect the push among early environmental sociologists to combat the effects of the HEP by embracing the NEP and incorporating the biophysical environment into their analyses. The realist position emphasizes the material nature of socioenvironmental dynamics and incorporates physical, biological, and ecological variables into sociological analyses (Lidskog 2001). This approach is exemplified in the work of Dunlap and Catton (2002) and Schnaiberg and Gould (1994) who treat environmental problems as violations of ecological parameters, which are limits on the use of natural resources that maintain ecological, hydrological, and geochemical cycles necessary for life on the planet. Schnaiberg and Gould (1994) draw upon the first and second laws of thermodynamics to conceptualize environmental problems in terms of “additions” and “withdrawals.” The first law imparts that “matter cannot be created or destroyed: essentially matter cycles through the global environment” (Schnaiberg and Gould 1994, 5). This ecological reality is problematized through environmental “additions,” which refer to the inappropriate disposal of materials into environments where they continue to cycle and disrupt the regional ecosystem. The second law of thermodynamics holds that “as energy is transformed from its potential energy form . . . to more socially useful forms of kinetic energy . . . a loss of organization or an increase in entropy occurs . . . energy gets reduced from orga-

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nized chemical forms into randomized heat which is less readily usable in social production” (Schnaiberg and Gould 1994, 5). This law is made manifest and problematized through environmental “withdrawals,” which refer to the unsustainable removal and utilization of energy resources from ecosystems. Global climate change can be understood in terms of both additions and withdrawals. The withdrawal of fossil fuels from the earth has sustained the growth of modern societies, but it is a nonrenewable energy source. In the case of oil, most researchers agree that we are rapidly approaching or have already reached peak oil production. The rate of global oil production grew exponentially up until the 1970s, but has been declining since then (Day et al. 2009). Excessive carbon additions from the combustion of fossil fuels have disrupted the global carbon cycle, leading to an accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and to an increase in global temperatures as it absorbs radiation from the sun. In 2013, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 40 percent higher than preindustrial levels (IPCC 2013). Between 1880 and 2012 average combined land and ocean surface temperatures have warmed by about .85 degrees Celsius (IPCC 2013). As a result, rates of ice loss from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have increased, rates of sea level rise are higher than ever before, and the extreme weather events like droughts, floods, and heat waves are occurring more frequently (IPCC 2013). Similarly, Dunlap and Catton (2002) identify three ways human societies depend upon the biophysical environment: as a source, as a sink, and as a habitat. Environmental problems occur when human activities “overuse an environment’s ability to fulfill these three functions” (Dunlap and Catton 2002, 243). Upon reaching these “ecological limits” of depletion, anthropogenic changes to the environment, such as air pollution, deforestation, and wetland loss, affect the social world in direct and indirect ways (Dunlap 2010).

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Human society depends on the biophysical environment as a source for all its material needs: food, clothing, shelter, and more. Environmental problems emerge when societies overuse finite resources like fossil fuels, use renewable resources like fresh water faster than they can be replenished, or diminish an ecosystem’s capacity to create necessary resources like food and other vegetation. Freshwater only comprises around 3 percent of global water resources (Feldman 2012). Without significant changes, both the overuse of supplies and the effects of climate change on global hydrologic cycles will likely result in a precipitous decline in the per capita availability of freshwater (Grafton et al. 2013). Globally approximately 1.4 billion people already live in “water stressed” areas and United Nations predictions suggest that number could increase to 7 billion by 2050 (Moriarty and Honnery 2011). Easily accessible groundwater sources are pumped faster than they can be replenished. Globally, researchers estimate that rainfall replaces less than 1 percent of the freshwater stored in underground aquifers, which is far less than the amount used by human activities (Pearce 2006). Even in the United States, a relatively “water rich” country, the volume of snowpack, a primary source of freshwater in the West, continues to decrease and has begun to melt earlier than ever before (Feldman 2012). Across the country large underground aquifers that supply water for drinking and agriculture are being depleted at a rate faster than they can be replenished (Famiglietti and Rodell 2013). The environment also serves as a sink for the waste and by-products created by human activities. These wastes are stored or released into the natural environment where they are absorbed into the ecosystem. Environmental problems emerge when the volume of waste stored or released exceeds the natural capacity for absorption and excess waste disrupts natural cycles, degrades the environment, or damages human health.

The human health and environmental impacts of poor air quality indicate that society continues to exceed the biosphere’s capacity to absorb anthropogenic air emissions. Globally it is estimated that air pollution results in around 7 million premature deaths each year (Schmale et al. 2014). Cities north of the Huai River in China have life expectancies that are about 5.5 years shorter than those in the South because the concentration of total suspended solids in the air from coal combustion are 55 percent higher in the North (Chen et al. 2013). In Mexico City urbanization, population growth, industrialization, and local geographic features have resulted in high concentrations of particulate matter and ozone in the air; both are linked to high rates of respiratory illness (Romieu et al. 1996) and increased neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative risk among children (Calderon-Garciduenas and Torres-Jardon 2012). Beyond its functions as a source and a sink, the natural environment also functions as a habitat in that it provides a physical space for human beings to live in, “like other species, humans must also have a place to live, and the environment provides our home – where we live, work, play, travel, and spend our lives” (Dunlap and Catton 2002, 243). An environmental problem develops when a local ecosystem is no longer able to provide a livable space for human populations. While this may result from a region’s diminished capacity to act as a source or a sink, in the cases of sea level rise, desertification, and extreme weather events, the problem cannot be wholly subsumed under those categories. Populations forced to migrate because of physical changes in their home environments are considered environmental refugees: “people who could no longer gain a secure livelihood in their homelands because of drought, soil erosion, desertification, deforestation and other environmental problems” (Myers 2002, 609). Although temporary environmental migration after a technological or a natural disaster, like the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan or

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the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, is more common, permanent migration in response to irreversible physical deterioration of local environments is increasing (Massey et al. 2010, 110). For example, in 2011 almost 20 percent of the people born in Ghana’s arid northern region had relocated to the southern part of the country. This migration has continued and is largely driven by the increasing scarcity of fertile land in the North (van der Geest 2011). Short distance migration in rural Nepal is connected to declines in agricultural productivity, decreases in land cover, and scarcity of available firewood (Massey et al. 2010). Similarly, increases in local mobility and internal migration within Peru are linked to changes in agrarian and environmental conditions (Gray 2009). The impacts of global climate change are likely to contribute to global environmental migration. As of 2013, small island nations like the Maldives, Kiribati, and Tuvalu had already begun planning for population relocation if sea levels continue rising (Martin 2013). As the frequency of extreme weather events increases with global climate change it is likely that the correlation between acute events and temporary migration will be weakened. In an examination of the cumulative effects of a series of disastrous flooding events in Central Mozambique, Stal (2011) finds that the repeated experience of acute weather events may lead to permanent rather than temporary population migration: “the interviewed people at the resettlement areas point out that they do not want to return to their places of origin because of the recurring floods that destroy their livelihoods” (139). Dunlap and Catton’s (2002) environmental functions of source, sink, and habitat are ideal types. Many environmental problems do not fit neatly into these categories, illustrating the complex interconnections present in local and global ecosystem dynamics. Deforestation, for example, presents a problem in which human society is rapidly depleting an important natural resource, destroying a crucial carbon sink, and fundamentally altering human habi-

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tats (Ambrose-Oji 2010). Also, Hannigan (2006) adds that these functions are typically competing for space and resources, “in recent years, the overlap, and therefore conflict, among these three competing functions of the environment has grown considerably . . . problems such as global warming are said to stem from competition among all three functions simultaneously” (19). Realist conceptualizations also provide empirical analyses of the ways in which environmental problems disproportionately affect disadvantaged segments of the population. This unequal distribution of environmental problems creates environmental injustice (Brulle and Pellow 2006). Across the United States, low-income and minority populations are disproportionately represented in communities located near hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (Mohai and Saha 2007). In Scotland, municipal landfills are likely to be located near low-income communities (Richardson et al. 2010). In Britain concentrations of nitrogen dioxide in the air are highest in the poorest communities (Gordon and Danny 2003). And in France, communities with high immigrant populations are more likely than others to have environmentally hazardous facilities nearby (Laurian 2008). Researchers have also begun to establish a link between the unequal distribution of environmental problems and health inequalities (Brulle and Pellow 2006; Cushing et al. 2015). In Southern California race is a strong predictor of proximity to environmental dangers, hazardous waste facilities and air pollution, and cancer-risk (MorelloFrosch et al. 2002). Clark et al. (2014) find that people of color in the United States are exposed to significantly higher concentrations of outdoor nitrogen dioxide than white people. They contend that if exposure levels for people of color were lowered to that of white people, the mortality rate for Ischemic Heart Disease would be reduced by around 7,000 deaths per year. Internationally, Dominguez-Cortinas et al. (2012) find a correlation between poverty,

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regional environmental conditions and children’s morbidity rates, and IQ levels. Although they provide important insights, realist approaches on their own are problematic and inadequate for theorizing socioenvironmental dynamics. Conceptualizing environmental problems exclusively in terms of biophysical conditions and ecological limits obscures the complex ways in which the relationship between humans and their environment is mediated by social forces. Realists cannot explain, for example, why two people perceive the clearing of an old growth forest in different ways: one is saddened by the loss of trees while the other is excited that a new shopping mall will be built in its place. Exclusively realist approaches also ignore the political nature of environmental knowledge. As Lidskog (2001) puts it, realists are too optimistic regarding “the ability of natural science to provide unquestionable and reliable knowledge on environmental problems” (121). This optimism leaves little room for acknowledging the fallibility of science or the inherent biases of researchers.

environmental problems as subjective, political spaces: the constructed Amidst the cultural turn of the social sciences in the 1990s, environmental sociologists began to take more seriously the symbolic and ideational nature of socioenvironmental interactions. They began to empirically and theoretically examine the subjective nature of environmental problems (Dunlap 2010). Out of this effort emerged constructivist conceptualizations that explore how perceptions of environmental problems are created and shaped by sociocultural forces. A constructivist approach “heavily emphasizes that what we know about environmental risks does not simply spring up out of reality itself, since our knowledge – whether it concerns the natural or the social world – does not derive from a simple and neutral recognition of reality” (Lidskog 2001, 119). Sociological analyses of environmental problem framing, media constructions of environ-

mental problems, and processes of environmental knowledge production and destruction exemplify the constructivist approach. The constructivist approach contends that interpretations of changes to the biophysical environment are products of their social, cultural, and historical context (Williams 1998). It opposes strictly objective conceptualizations that assume that biophysical conditions alone define an environmental problem: Dying forests do not contain in themselves the reason for public attention and concern they receive. The fact that they do receive this attention at a specific place and time cannot be deduced from a naturalscientific analysis of its urgency, but from the symbols and experiences that govern the way people think and act. (Hajer and Versteeg 2005, 176)

Constructivist conceptualizations are supported by survey data that show significant variation in awareness and perception of environmental problems across regional, national, and global populations. This variation is only partially explained by geographic differences, like proximity to environmental dangers. It can also be predicted using social variables, like age, race, class, and gender, on an individual level as well as cultural variables, like dominant beliefs or values, and institutional variables, like government structure and economic policies, on a regional or national level (Jones and Dunlap 1992; Marquart-Pyatt 2012). Awareness and perceptions of environmental problems affect participation in pro-environmental behavior (Baldassare and Katz 1992) and support for potential solutions (Safford et al. 2013; Krogman 1996; Kahneman and Tversky 1984). Constructivists, therefore, examine environmental problems in terms of subjective perceptions that are influenced by a social context. Because of the variation in these subjective perceptions, environmental problems become dynamic, ideational spaces of contestation (Taylor 2000). Various stakeholders compete to define the environmental issue as either problematic or

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non-problematic according to their interests, shifting and shaping collective perceptions of that issue. The process of definition occurs in public discourse, media, and social interactions through environmental problem framing. “Problem framing” refers to how the attributes of a particular issue, such as potential positive or negative impacts, are emphasized or marginalized within media or public discourse (Scheufele 2000). Those attributes are used to create a “scheme of interpretation” (Taylor 2000, 511) or frame, essentially a set of images, phrases, or ideas used to talk about or conceptualize the issue in question. Stakeholders often use particular frames strategically to guide or influence the perceptions of others, swaying public or political opinions to benefit their interests. Scholars researching problem framing, therefore, study how an issue is presented: what words or phrases are used, what information is included or omitted, and whose perspectives are represented. Frames can control public perceptions of an issue in order to direct or motivate political actions. For example, Krogman’s (1996) comparison of framing techniques among three interest groups in a dispute over wetland regulation in Louisiana demonstrates the power of strong framing techniques in rallying public support. Local businesses and industries that would have been adversely affected by legal regulation were more effective than the regulators or concerned citizens in framing the dispute to advance their interests. As a result, the public supported weakening regulation to protect wetlands in their area. The media plays a crucial role in shaping public perceptions of environmental issues and in defining environmental problems (Stamm et al. 2000). Consequently, it also has an agenda-setting influence. The media directs public concern and influences political action depending on how it depicts environmental problems (Mazur and Lee 1993; Kahneman and Tversky 1984). Even the visualizations used in print media affect public perceptions of environmental problems. In a cross-national study of visual

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imagery used in climate change coverage from national newspapers O’Neill (2013) finds the use of two prominent frames. The “contesting” frame presents climate change as a political, rather than a scientific issue by using images of political figures and protesters. The “distancing” frame presents it as an issue that is geographically and psychologically distant from viewers’ everyday lives by using generic images of industrial pollution, landscapes, and nature. Together these frames present climate change as an abstract political issue, rather than as an urgent and real environmental problem. Media coverage of environmental problems does not necessarily correlate with their biophysical development or with the scientific evidence of their existence (Mazur 1998). For example, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), or facilities sometimes known as factory farms, are a significant contributor to global climate change because of associated transportation emissions, deforestation rates, and emissions of nitrous oxide and methane from animal wastes. Despite this evidence, media coverage has not reflected this concern. For example, between 1999 and 2010 only 5 percent of news articles on livestock related issues in the Los Angeles Times discussed possible connections between CAFOs and climate change (Lee et al. 2014). The presentation of environmental problems in the media also tends to favor politicians and economic actors, like representatives from businesses or industry coalitions, as legitimate sources of environmental knowledge. Economic actors and industry representatives are more likely than other stakeholders to be quoted or cited in news reports about environmental problems (Jarrell 2007; Hansen 1990). Trumbo’s (1996) analysis of national newspaper articles about climate change shows that the number of scientists quoted or used as sources decreased over a ten-year period, while the number of politicians or special interest groups increased. He suggests that this trend could be linked to the increasing polarization and controversy that often develops around environmental issues.

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Powerful political and economic actors are able to mobilize their resources around strategic processes of knowledge construction and knowledge destruction. Bonds (2011) finds evidence of a deliberate and organized “knowledge shaping process” in the regulation of ammonium perchlorate, an essential chemical in solid rocket fuel. He describes how the US Department of Defense and chemical production companies allied to create the Perchlorate Study Group, a think tank where they could centralize funds and resources for research, plan and implement public relations strategies, and develop favorable policy recommendations. The Group advocated a higher “safe” concentration of perchlorate for soil than what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had suggested, funded at least sixteen studies on the health impacts of perchlorate, contested opposing studies, provided favorable scientific claims for its beneficiaries to use in public debates, and lobbied then President George W. Bush. Ultimately, the EPA settled on a “safe” level of perchlorate that was nearly twentyfive times higher than what their studies had originally recommended (Bonds 2011). Think tanks and private research centers are used by political and economic actors to sway public opinions and policy decisions in their favor via the production of publications and research (Mirowski 2011; Nik-Khah 2014). In the environmental policy arena, corporate or business interests often use think tanks to depict environmental issues as non-problems, rendering protective environmental policies and strict regulations unnecessary. For example, in their examination of global warming publications from conservative think tanks issued between 1990 and 1997, McCright and Dunlap (2000) identify three strategies used to frame global warming as a nonproblem: criticism of scientific evidence of anthropogenic global warming, emphasis on potential benefits of global warming, and claims that action taken to combat global warming would have negative consequences.

The efforts of these industry- and business-funded think tanks are increasingly used to challenge or discredit research that supports increased regulation and policy (Rich 2004; Oreskes and Conway 2010). Between 1972 and 2005 there were 141 books published that espoused environmental skepticism, 92 percent are connected with think tanks through their authors or press companies (Jaques et al. 2008). Funding and fomenting skepticism has become common in environmental politics. According to internal memos from ExxonMobil, between 1998 and 2005 the company donated $16 million to think tanks and policy organizations to fund research and public relations campaigns specifically for the purpose of challenging the scientific community’s evidence that fossil fuels caused global warming (Faber 2009). McCright and Dunlap (2002) argue that the failure of the US Congress to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, was influenced by conservative think tanks through extensive campaigns, political networking, and strategic presentation of climate change skeptics as experts. By shedding light on the politics of environmental problem framing, especially as it relates to the creation of environmental policy, constructivist analyses also critically examine the sociocultural processes that create and perpetuate environmental injustices. Interrogating the social construction of environmental problems is a crucial component of environmental justice research and activism. It reveals how the corporate and political actors that create environmental inequalities also have the power to shape public perceptions of environmental risk and inhibit protective or ameliorative policies (Pellow and Brulle 2005). Environmental justice activism differs from other forms of mobilization against environmental degradation in that it is concerned specifically with the ways in which environmental harms disproportionately affect marginalized and disadvantaged populations. In the United States, for example, the environmental justice

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movement began with the 1978 mobilization of residents in Love Canal, a workingclass community in upstate New York, that brought attention to a leaking petrochemical waste landfill underneath their neighborhood (Levine 1982). In 1982 the protests of African American residents in Warren County, North Carolina, claimed that the state’s decision to construct a landfill for petrochemical contaminated soil in their predominately black county was racially discriminatory (Bullard 1990). The leaders and constituents of environmental justice organizations come from affected communities, mobilizing out of necessity when government agencies and professional environmental organizations, like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, do not acknowledge or respond to the problems they face (Seager 1996). Activists must prove that an environmental injustice has occurred in order to demand solutions, but as members of relatively powerless communities they face institutional and cultural barriers that limit their ability to effectively control public and political perceptions of the environmental problems they face. In many cases, federal regulatory agencies do not effectively monitor environmental conditions in these communities and activists lack the resources to pay for professional, scientific studies. As a result, they must rely on their own observations and experiences as evidence of environmental problems. Their claims, however, are often dismissed because they are based on personal experience or lay observations (Lambert et al. 2006; Culley and Angelique 2003). For example, claims of environmental injustice from First Nations tribes in Ontario are regularly dismissed as illegitimate (Mascarenhas 2007). This experience is illustrated by one activist’s description of his experience testifying against the petrochemical producer Imperial Chemical International (ICI) at a hearing on water contamination in a First Nations tribe: “I was the only community expert that was allowed to give testimony. But the ICI lawyers decided to attack me personally on my credentials and my evidence . . . they

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asked me a lot of technical questions and I couldn’t answer them. But that was their point” (Mascarenhas 2007, 572). Similarly, Lois Gibbs (2006), the working-class mother who spearheaded the mobilization of Love Canal citizens in 1978, describes the way in which women activists are politically dismissed: “The anger builds as they wait with overtired children while paid professionals speak. When they are finally allowed to speak, their lay testimony is dismissed as unsupported or unscientific” (8). Activists are at a disadvantage because their knowledge of environmental problems is not considered as valid as the professional, scientific knowledge of corporate or government researchers. They generally have little power over the public and political framing of environmental problems that affect them. As a result, much of their activism involved strategic and long-term efforts to assert the validity of their own environmental knowledge. Constructivist analyses offer significant insights into the political and subjective nature of environmental problems. However, in focusing primarily on the social they can fall into the old trap of marginalizing the biophysical environment in which social processes take place. As a result, environmental problems lose their significance and urgency. As Dunlap and Catton (1994) note, if an environmental problem “is seen primarily as a social construction rather than an objective (albeit imperfectly understood) condition, then it poses little threat to the future of our species” (7). In focusing solely on subjective socially constructed perceptions of environmental problems, hardline constructivist approaches risk minimizing the dangers of unsustainable environmental degradation.

environmental problems as the dialectics of the social and the natural: integrating the real and the constructed While there are significant ontological differences on the extreme ends of the realist/constructivist divide, the two approaches are not fundamentally incompatible. The

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differences between realist and constructivist frameworks have been over emphasized by critiques that focus primarily on their most dogmatic forms: social relativism and material determinism. As Burningham and Cooper (1999) point out, many realist critiques of constructivist approaches are not applicable to the moderate constructivism used by most empirical studies of environmental problems. The same could be said for constructivist critiques of realists. Fortunately, many environmental sociologists are eager to move beyond this debate (Murdoch 2001). More sophisticated and nuanced approaches have begun to populate the environmental problems literature, many of which have been developed and employed in explicit efforts to break down the nature/society dichotomy that plagues environmental sociology, limiting the study of environmental problems. For example, Woodgate and Redclift (1998) put forward a conceptualization of the coevolution of social and environmental systems. They describe coevolution as the ongoing dialectical interactions of social and environmental processes, the ways in which society and the biophysical environment shape one another. Similarly, Rice (2013) advocates a co-constructionist approach that would be “sensitive to the tenets of social constructionism and yet cognizant that individual and collective social action does not occur in a vacuum, unencumbered by the influence of the biophysical environment” (Rice 2013, 256). York and Clark (2010), however, target the ontological foundations of environmental sociology. They promote critical materialism, an ontological approach that “stresses the importance of natural science for helping us understand the world while also recognizing the social embeddedness of the scientific establishment and the need to challenge the manipulation of science by the elite” (491). Critical materialism takes a unique approach to science, one that is ontologically concrete but epistemologically flexible, acknowledging that environmental conditions are objectively real while being critical of the ways in which social forces

affect perceptions of them (Benton and Craib 2011). The aforementioned approaches conceptualize socioenvironmental reality as multidimensional, complex, and dynamic. They also emphasize the need for reflexivity and self-critique in sociology’s efforts to examine it. Integrated approaches are necessary for a holistic and adequate examination of environmental problems as they are biophysical arrangements embedded in a social context that both shapes and responds to them. The need for an integrated approach becomes especially apparent in global analyses of environmental problems. Environmental Problems in a Global Context: The Global and the Local Processes of globalization, the increasing interdependence of global society, have been present throughout human history: from regional interactions among newly stabilized agricultural civilizations in the prehistoric period to the colonialism of European imperialism (Steger 2013). Contemporary forces of globalization, however, have facilitated an unprecedented expansion and acceleration of the material, political, and cultural interdependence of societies throughout the world. The driving forces and impacts of globalization are both social and biophysical. It is driven by the need for material resources that physically alter local ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole. It is also driven by sociopolitical forces, changing the character of social life on a macro and micro scale. Although globalization was traditionally conceptualized in terms of economic interdependence, global environmental problems, like climate change and ozone depletion, have shifted the conversation to include ecological interdependence as well (Biermann and Dingwerth 2004). Sociological analyses of environmental problems increasingly reflect this shift, examining socioenvironmental dynamics on multiple scales: local, regional, national, and global. Within sociology, global analyses of environmental problems primarily fall

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into two categories: (1) the examination of global environmental problems and/or (2) the examination of localized environmental problems in a global context.

global environmental problems By definition, the impacts of global environmental problems are felt worldwide and their solutions require international cooperation and governance. Climate change and ozone depletion are global in scope because their negative impacts are fundamentally ubiquitous, requiring international solutions. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, and water scarcity, are made global by their accumulated regional effect and their impacts are felt worldwide. In examining global environmental problems, sociological research has considered the differences among nations’ vulnerability, responsibility, and capacity to enact solutions. Even though environmental problems have impacts worldwide, the timing and intensity of those impacts vary across the planet, leading to environmental injustice. Climate change will create disproportionately more harm in developing nations and among disadvantaged or marginalized populations. These climate injustices are caused by geographic, biophysical, and social variables that create vulnerability. Indigenous Inuit communities in arctic and subarctic regions of North America, for example, will be disproportionately affected by climate change because impacts are expected to be most severe in northern latitudes and their traditional way of life, particularly their reliance on the local environment for material subsistence, will be compromised (Trainor et al. 2007). Climate change vulnerability is also determined by variations in national and regional capacity for adaptation in response to environmental changes. Both material and social variables contribute to climate change vulnerability (Brooks et al. 2005). Material variables, like quality of infrastructure or level of food security, determine instantaneous vulnerability as they indicate physical conditions that will either limit or exacerbate harm in the wake of envi-

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ronmental changes. Social variables, like political stability or literacy rates, determine adaptability over time as they provide resources for managing environmental changes. These indicators illustrate why developing nations and regions, like subSaharan Africa, are likely to be most negatively impacted by climate change. The nations and regions most negatively affected by environmental problems are typically those least responsible for their creation. Conversely, the nations and regions most responsible are often the least affected. For example, developed nations in the Global North are among the least vulnerable to the impacts of climate change but they are the primary forces creating it. The United States and the European Union produce 45 percent of global carbon dioxide emission, but represent only 10 percent of the world’s population (Bachram 2004). Similarly, developing nations consume very few forest products, like paper and wooden furniture, but have high deforestation rates, while developed nations consume large amounts of forest products but have very low rates of deforestation (Austin 2010). An ecological footprint is a measure used to quantify production and consumption demands in terms of the energy and natural resources required to meet them (McKinney 2012). Developed nations typically have larger ecological footprints because they consume more materials and energy but they do not, generally, experience more environmental problems than those countries with smaller footprints. In fact, it is often the opposite. For example, national per capita ecological footprints are negatively correlated with deforestation rates and water pollution (Jorgenson 2003). This indicates that environmental problems within a nation do not simply reflect domestic production and consumption demands. For many developed nations, comparing their ecological footprint with measures of domestic natural resources illustrates the extent to which they depend on other nations to sustain their consumption rates (McKinney 2012; Rees 1996).

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Global environmental injustice presents challenges for international cooperation in response to global environmental problems. Developing countries often do not have material and economic resources to invest in solution strategies and, in many cases, the urgency of development needs, like providing clean water and basic health care, are prioritized over environmental concerns. As a result, developing countries must rely on developed countries to enact solutions, but because the latter are significantly less vulnerable to the impacts of global environmental problems they are less motivated to act. These dynamics are especially evident in international climate change negotiations. The United Nations hosts an annual conference for those nations that are signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a treaty that provides an official structure for international climate negotiations. To advance shared interests, participating countries form negotiating blocs that reflect similarities in terms of responsibility for climate change, vulnerability to its impacts, and capability to enact solutions (Roberts 2011). For example, the G-77 is a coalition of developing countries that have not contributed significantly to global emissions of greenhouse gases, are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and have very few resources available for mitigation strategies like providing energyefficient public transportation or shifting to low-carbon, renewable energy sources (Bannaga 2016). Within UN climate negotiations, the G77 lobby for climate solutions in which developed countries assume a larger share of mitigation requirements for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and provide financial assistance to developing countries for projects that promote sustainability and adaptability (Roberts and Parks 2009). Their position focuses especially on the mitigation responsibility of developed countries that contributed most to historic greenhouse gas emissions. Conversely, developed countries lobby for solutions that focus more on contemporary and future greenhouse

gas emissions as a measure of responsibility (Brunnée and Streck 2013). Officially, the UNFCCC supports the G77’s position. The treaty explicitly mandates that international climate solutions account for “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and . . . social and economic conditions” among countries (Brunnée and Streck 2013, 590). Countries have been unable to agree on how that principle should be actualized in climate agreements and tensions over the distribution of responsibility for funding and enacting solutions have derailed negotiations and rendered agreements, like the Kyoto Protocol, ineffective (Morgan and Waskow 2014). The United States, with the support of allies like Canada, Japan, and Russia, has been particularly unwilling to significantly curtail greenhouse gas emissions (Brenton 2013). They object to the lack of mitigation requirements for developing nations, like China and Brazil, that are rapidly industrializing and account for an increasingly large share of global greenhouse gas emissions (Brunnée and Streck 2013). As a result, the United States and other developed countries have refused to ratify and follow UNFCCC treaties (Bannaga 2016). Without commitments from these powerful and wealthy countries that contribute a large share of greenhouse gas emissions, these treaties are destined for failure. Despite international negotiations that span over a decade, global climate change solutions have been ineffective. The concentration of carbon in the atmosphere continues to rise as neither developed nor developing nations have significantly curbed emissions (Bannaga 2016). Per capita emissions from developed countries remain much higher than in developing countries, but absolute emissions from developing countries have now surpassed those of developed countries (Geck et al. 2013). Global environmental injustice, in terms of varying degrees of vulnerability, responsibility, and capacity to enact solutions, illustrates the interaction of social and biophysical processes that create environmental problems on a macro, global scale.

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However, it is also important to consider the connection between global processes and local environmental conditions.

local environmental problems in a global context Analyses of local environmental problems in a global context examine the ways in which worldwide political and economic forces influence regional and local environments. More specifically, they are concerned with the social and material processes that link local environments to global systems. This is exemplified in conceptualizations of ecologically unequal exchange and ecological debt. Ecologically unequal exchange theory draws on World Systems Theory (WST), a theoretical framework that conceptualizes global society as a stratified system in which global economic processes, like the international division of labor and unequal power dynamics, shape development conditions within countries (Klak 2014). Using this framework, ecologically unequal exchange theory examines two interrelated processes: (1) how extractive industries and environmentally hazardous production in developing regions of the world erode the potential for future development and (2) how the local impacts of those industries and production processes are driven by the demands of the global economic system. Ecologically unequal exchange describes an exploitative trade system that creates environmental injustice by concentrating hazardous waste repositories, environmentally destructive manufacturing, and extractive industries in developing countries. Through these trade systems, valuable energy and resources are transferred from developing countries to developed countries (Jorgenson 2012). The latter benefit from these arrangements because they gain materials and energy without the associated environmental costs, while the former suffer because they lose the resources necessary for political, economic, and social development (Bunker 1984). Through trade, external demands from developed countries cause material changes

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in local environmental conditions and increase environmental risks for local populations in developing countries. For example, among developing countries the amount of forest product exports sent to developed countries has been found to be a better predictor of deforestation rates than overall volume of exports (Shandra et al. 2009). Similarly, developing countries that are economically dependent on foreign investment are more likely than other countries to engage in environmentally risky agricultural practices that require large amounts of pesticides and herbicides (Jorgenson and Kuykendall 2008). Analysis of global commodity chains reveals that even ostensibly sustainable “green” technologies used in developed countries contribute to ecologically unequal exchange. In the automotive industry, for example, catalytic converters require platinum group metals from South Africa where mining displaces people and contaminates local water resources and biofuel crop cultivation in tropical countries utilizes destructive monocropping techniques, drives deforestation, and displaces indigenous peoples (Bonds and Downey 2012). Sustainability, natural resources preservation, and safe environmental conditions in developed countries often depend upon exploitation and environmental degradation in the developing world. Ecologically unequal exchange also includes trade relations that facilitate the flow of ecological hazards, like toxic waste and environmentally harmful production activities, from developed countries into developing countries (Bunker and Ciccantell 2005). An increasingly significant example of this is the international transportation of electronic waste, or e-waste. Although the use of technology is growing worldwide, the vast majority of e-waste comes from the developed countries of the European Union and North America and is transported to developing countries in Asia and West Africa for recycling (Wong et al. 2007) or as donations, which often prove to be unusable (Nnorom and Osibanjo 2008).

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Unregulated e-waste recycling in developing countries is harmful to local environments and human health. Dangerous methods are used to extract any remaining valuable materials from the e-waste: stripping metals in open-pit acid baths, chipping and melting plastics in poorly ventilated spaces, burning cables to recover metals (Wong et al. 2007). In Guiya, a rural town in China, e-waste dumping and recycling has produced dangerously high concentrations of persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals in the local air, soil, and river sediments (Wong et al. 2007). Landfills for discarded e-waste in Nigeria are increasingly using up valuable land and resources, creating environmental hazards and inhibiting future development (Nnorom and Osibanjo 2008). In response to the injustice of ecologically unequal exchange, environmental activists from developing countries created and utilized the concept of “ecological debt” to mobilize against exploitative trade relations and demand reparations (Foster and Clark 2004). It refers to the debt accumulated by developed countries for past and present ecological exploitation, including social and ecological damage in developing countries and appropriation of globally shared resources, like the atmosphere or oceans (Foster and Clark 2004). The concept of ecological debt was introduced at the Rio de Janeiro 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (Rice 2009). Grassroots organizations and international NGOs at the Rio conference adopted the Debt Treaty, an agreement to focus their efforts on pressuring international organizations to quantify the debt owed by developed countries for historical and ongoing environmental damage (Warlenius et al. 2015). Since then, it has been embraced and utilized by environmental NGOs, activists, and researchers around the world. As a concept, ecological debt challenges the traditional global narrative in which developed countries are generous lenders who support indebted developing countries (Rice 2009). The use of this discourse is a

powerful reframing technique for activists and NGOs in opposition to dominant discourses about development and responsibility for environmental degradation that focus exclusively on the economic debt owed by developing countries. The concept of ecological debt, instead, emphasizes how developed countries owe developing countries for the natural resources, raw materials, energy, labor, and other valuable commodities they have taken freely or with very little remuneration (Khatua and Stanley 2006). At the 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen developing countries used ecological debt as part of their negotiations for the first time and employed the language of compensation and liability to support climate solutions that put the onus of mitigation and funding on developed countries (Warlenius et al. 2015). With Bolivia leading the way, developing countries from Latin America and Asia demanded reparations for the climate debt owed by developed nations for exploiting the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases. Although developed countries are dismissive of the notion of ecological debt and developing countries struggle to define what form repayments should take, ecological debt remains a significant tool for developing countries in climate negotiations (Warlenius et al. 2015). Ecologically unequal exchange and ecological debt illustrate how material conditions, political and economic forces, and subjective perspectives converge within environmental problems on a global level. While the idea of ecologically unequal exchange is primarily a realist conceptualization of environmental problems, the development of the discourse of ecological debt that emerged from those relations illustrates how material conditions shape subjective understandings. Ecological debt represents a strategic reframing of a socioenvironmental problem. It also challenges unidirectional models of global-local relations that only consider the impact of the global on the local. The use of ecological debt in international climate negotiations reveal how the local can also shape the global.

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Conclusions: Toward a Place-Based Sociology of Environmental Problems The study of contemporary environmental problems requires the integration of realist and constructivist approaches and a means of theorizing the dynamics of the global and the local. Realists examine environmental problems in terms of material changes to the environment that disrupt biophysical and social processes. Constructivists focus on the ways in which social, cultural, and political forces produce shared subjective perceptions of environmental problems. On their own, these approaches reify an artificial social/natural divide that obscures the complex ways in which social and biophysical forces act upon one another. This is especially evident on a global level, where international political and economic processes determine the flow of materials and energy across national boundaries, producing environmental problems that are both local and global. In conclusion, I suggest one possible direction for future research: a place-based sociology of environmental problems. As an analytical concept place refers to both the physical form and subjective meaning of a particular geographic location (Gieryn 2000). It integrates the material and ideational components of socioenvironmental dynamics and offers an important venue for integrating realist and constructivist approaches to environmental problems. Unfortunately, while many sociologists have considered the significance of built and natural environments for society, they have not traditionally considered a “sociology of place” (Gieryn 2000). The theoretical and empirical examination of place has a long history in geography and environmental psychology. The latter has focused on “sense of place,” which describes the subjective meaning attached to a particular location by an individual or group. It incorporates several components: place attachment, place dependence, and place identity (Jorgensen and Stedman 2001). Place attachment refers to the positive bond that develops between

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groups or individuals and their environment. It depends on subjective perceptions, but research indicates that the physical characteristics of local built and natural environments also significantly affect levels of attachment (Scannell and Gifford 2010; Uzzell et al. 2002; Stedman 2001; Mesch and Manor 1998; Cantrill 1998). Place identity refers to the personal connection between individuals and their environment: values, ideals, preferences, and behavioral tendencies shaped by a relationship with material surroundings (Kyle et al. 2004). Levels of place identity depend on proximity and time spent in a particular place (Budruk et al. 2011). Place dependence describes the physical, functional relationship between humans and their environment (Kyle et al. 2004). Sense of place and its components represent several ways in which biophysical and social forces intersect, affecting perceptions of environmental problems and informing human behavior. Measures of place attachment (Vorkinn and Riese 2001) and place identity (Kyle et al. 2004) have been shown to have a positive correlation with local environmental concern. Place dependence, however, is negatively correlated with environmental concern (Vaske and Kobrin 2001; Halpenny 2010). As place dependence increases, individuals are less likely to identify environmental conditions as problems (Kyle et al. 2004). Sense of place is a conceptual tool for understanding the dialectical relationship between the material and the ideational components of socioenvironmental interactions. A physical environment is associated with subjective meanings according to its physical characteristics and the social significance of those characteristics. Those meanings guide human activities that have physical impacts on that environment and evolve as the environment changes. Essentially, the meanings associated with physical places are constantly in flux, but they are also consistently grounded in the biophysical environment. Examinations of place traditionally focus on local environments, but it can also be a

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tool for connecting local and global socioenvironmental dynamics. Massey (1995), for example, contends that particularity and significance of a local place is, in part, constituted by its linkages to the outside world. Similarly, Urry (2004) argues that strictly local and static definitions of place are insufficient because “places are constituted through networks of movement” (14). Globalization and technological advances have accelerated the movement of people, ideas, and materials across the planet. These global, external processes continually shape and reshape local places in significant social, cultural, and ecological ways. Examining environmental problems through the concepts of place and sense of place offers a promising direction for environmental sociology. Environmental problems are co-constituted by social and biophysical forces acting upon one another and they are experienced and perceived on a local level, but are often driven by national and global forces. A place-based analysis examines environmental problems as localized disruptions of place: changes to the biophysical environment that challenge or threaten the social meaning of that place, or changes to the social meaning that threaten the biophysical environment. Although the changes are local, external social and biophysical forces prompt the disruptions.

Glossary Ecological debt The accumulated debt owed by developed countries for contemporary and historical exploitation and overuse of global natural resources. Ecologically unequal exchange Exploitative trade system in which valuable energy and resources are transferred from developing regions to developed regions while environmental hazards and environmental degradation are transferred from developed regions to developing regions.

Environmental injustice The unequal distribution of environmental hazards within a society. Environmentalism Individual or collective concern about environmental degradation and/or advocacy for environmental protection, remediation of environmental hazards, and conservation of natural resources. Environmental realism A theoretical and philosophical perspective that conceptualizes the environment and environmental conditions in terms of an objective, material reality independent of human perceptions. Environmental social constructivism A theoretical and philosophical perspective that conceptualizes the environment and environmental conditions in terms of an intersubjective, ideational reality created and shared within a society. Globalization Ongoing processes of global integration that intensify the economic, cultural, political, and ecological interdependence of global society.

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Index

Abu Ghraib Prison, 163, 166 Abuse. See Child abuse; Sexual abuse ACA (Affordable Care Act), 12–15. See also Health care; Health insurance health insurance requirements under, 12–13 implementation of, 13–14, 15 Medicaid and, 13 need for, 4 repeal effort, 12, 15, 16 Actor-network theory (ANT), 65–66, 73, 74 Adolescence, 347, 350. See also Juvenile violence Adult Protective Services (APS) programs, 330 Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE), 34, 312–313, 337 African Americans. See also Race and racism and drug arrests, 51, 52 and health disparities, 5, 6–7 juvenile violence by, 351–353, 354, 355–356, 357, 358 in police brutality, 412, 413–414, 415, 416, 417, 420–422 and segregated neighborhoods, 7–9, 421, 423, 476–479 and use of death penalty, 437 in use of technology, 491–492, 493 Aggravated assault by juveniles, 355–356 Agnew, Robert, 206, 317 Aguirre, Benigno, 87 AIDS, 66–67, 70 Akers, Ronald L., 435 Al-Assad, Bashar, 515 Alcohol consumption health problems and benefits of, 47 as risk factor for sexual violence, 274–276, 277 violence and, 26, 337 Alcoholics Anonymous, 50, 54

Alcoholism genetic role in, 49 as mental disorder, 26, 64 treatments for, 50, 54 Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, 111 Allport, Gordon W., 400–401 Al-Qaeda, 164–165. See also Islamic State (ISIS) Altheide, David, 162–163 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 102, 116, 123 American Journal of Sociology, 145 American Psychiatric Association, 24 Amphetamines, 43, 46 Anarchy, 133, 137 Animals and disasters, 88 Anomie, 317 Anomie theory for corporate crime, 221–222, 223 vs. strain theory, 221–222 for substance use, 50 Anonymous (hacking group), 136 Antibullying efforts, 248–249, 250, 259. See also School bullying Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 402 Antidepressants, 48–49 Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986), 51–52 Apple iPhone 6, 105 Arias, Arturo, 386 Aron, Gideon, 149–150 Art of War, The (Sun Tzu), 96 Asian Americans, residential segregation of, 478 Asian population clusters, 504 Assange, Julian, 136

541

542 Association of Chief Police Officers (UK), 403 Asturias, Miguel A., 388 Athens, Lonnie, 318–319 Axel, Brian Keith, 387 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Lemkin), 174–175 Ayres, Ian, 227, 229 Barbaree, H. E., 275 Barbiturates, 47 Bath salts, 46 Battered child syndrome, 241, 328 Batterer Intervention Programs (BIPs), 339 Baumgartner, F. R., 441 Becker, Howard S., 61, 202, 204 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 312–313 Bentham, Jeremy, 104 Ben-Yehuda, Nachman, 163–164 Bereavement, 26 Bergen, R. K., 274 Berger, J. M., 164–165, 168–169 Berrill, Kevin T., 404 Best, Joel, 60–61, 62 Biosocial criminology, 208–209 Birkland, Thomas A., 82–83 Birth rates, 505–506, 507–508 Black Americans. See African Americans Blackwater, 166 Body in Pain, The (Scarry), 387 Bogle, K. A., 274 Bonanno, C., 256 Bonds, Eric, 526 Borchard, Edwin, 454 Bosk, Charles L., 82 Bourgois, Philippe, 390 Bowlby, John, 34 Boy Scouts, 150 Brain development and juvenile violence, 350 Brain drain and migration, 509, 513–514 Braithwaite, John, 223–224, 227, 229 Britain. See United Kingdom British Crime Survey (BCS) data, 405 Brown, George W., 33 Brown, Hannah, 71 Built environment, 8 Bullycides. See also School bullying and antibullying legislation, 248 as failure of school, 245 of sexual minority youth, 242, 246, 247, 249 as social problem, 238, 239–240 Bullying. See School bullying Bureau of Investigation (FBI). See Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 297, 330 Burke, Edmund, 157 Bush, George W., 110, 115, 116, 122, 514, 526 Bystander behavior and school shootings, 259, 260, 261 Cadavers as “texts,” 387 Caffeine, 45 Cambodian genocide, 177 Campbell, Kristine A., 321

index Campus sexual assault. See Sexual assault, campus Campus Sexual Assault Survey, 297 Campus Sexual Assault Victims Bill of Rights, The (Clery Act), 294, 301 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination (SAVE) Act, 301 Canada, 71, 116–117, 179–180, 450 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), 116–117 Capitalism as cause for genocide, 184–185 as contributing factor to crime, 220–221, 222–223 and structural violence, 177 technoanarchist hostility toward, 137 Capital punishment. See Death penalty Cardazo Law School, 454 Carmack, Robert, 385–386 Carrying capacity, 516 Catton, William R., Jr., 520, 521–523, 527 Caucasians. See White Americans Causes of World War Three, The (Mills), 145 CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 47, 68, 70, 239, 312–313, 330–331, 333 Center on Wrongful Conviction, 455 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 112, 113–114 Centre for Criminal Appeals, 458 Centres of calculation, 66, 73 Centurion Ministries, 454 Chan, Ko Ling, 320 “Changing Indian Identity: Guatemala’s Violent Transition to Modernity” (Arias), 386 Chen, Mengtong, 320 Cheney, Dick, 163, 168 Cheney, Liz, 163, 168 Chicago heat wave (1995), 84 Child abuse, 309–322, 330–332 Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) and, 34, 312–313, 337 consequences of, 272, 332 definitions of, 310–311, 330–331 fatalities from, 312, 313–314 during genocides, 319–320 history of efforts against, 309–310, 328 overview of, 330–332 as predictor of criminal behavior, 271–272, 276 prevalence of, 34–35, 311–313, 331–332 prevention of, 320, 321, 338 reporting of, 320–321, 331, 338 research challenges, 312, 331 risk factors for, 313–314, 331, 332, 336 sexual, 271–272, 276, 310, 312, 313, 314–315 as social problem, 309, 321–322 theoretical explanations for, 315–319 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (1974), 309–310 Child maltreatment. See Child abuse Child Maltreatment series on child abuse, 331 Child Protective Services (CPS), 313–314, 321, 331 Children. See Youth Chile, 384 China air pollution in, 522 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in, 459–460

index gun control and school attacks in, 261–262 population growth in, 504, 512–513 wrongful convictions reform in, 458–463 CIA World Factbook, 506 Civil liberties. See Privacy rights Civil Rights Division of US Department of Justice, 420 Clandestine hackers, 131–136. See also Hacking Clark, Brett, 528 Clark, Ronald V., 221 Clearance rate for murder, 440 Clementi, Tyler, 240, 242, 247, 248 Clery Act, 293–294, 301 Climate change. See also Environmental problems as “additions” and “withdrawals” from environment, 521 and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), 525 consequences of, 89, 490, 516 denial of, 85 developing nations and, 529–530 environmental refugees from, 523 global warming, 526 media “framing” of, 525 UNFCCC on, 530 Cocaine crack vs. powder, 46, 51–52 history of, 45–46 prevalence of use of, 43 Cockerham, William, 149–150 Cogan, Jeanine C., 404–405 Cognitive myopia, 275, 277 COINTELPRO, 101, 113 Collective efficacy, 317 College of Policing (UK), 403 Collins, Alan, 483 Colonization as genocide, 177, 179–180, 182–183 Columbine High School massacre (1999), 238, 257, 259, 260 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), 101 Community accountability hypothesis of police brutality, 420–422, 423 Community Oriented Policing Service (COPS), 298 Community policing programs, 414 Community types and violence, 317–318, 319 Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI), 30 Comprehensive Gang Model (CGM), 374–375 Computer hacking. See Hacking Conflict theory, 144–145, 177 Conlon, Gerry, 457 Conrad, Peter, 27, 63–64, 321 Consensual sex, 296, 351. See also Rape; Sexual assault, campus Consensus crimes, 200, 201 Constructionism, 61–63. See also Social constructionism Consumerism as state violence, 391 Containment strategies for epidemics, 67–69, 73–74 Controlled Substances Act (CSA), 44, 48, 56–57 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 510 Coproduction, 498

543

Copycat phenomenon in school shootings, 257–258 Cornish, Derek B., 221 Corporal punishment, 316–317 Corporate crime, 215–230. See also Crimes and criminal behavior under criminal justice system, 200–201, 202, 205–206, 223, 227–229, 230 definition of, 216–217, 230 explanations (theories) for, 219–224 harms from, 215–216, 217–219 lack of consequences for, 203, 216, 221, 223 lack of data and research on, 218, 219, 228–229, 230 law enforcement for, 221, 222, 223, 226, 228 “license to operate” model for, 222, 226 prevention and intervention strategies for, 224–229 prosecution of, 227–229 regulatory agencies as control on, 225, 226–227, 229 vs. street crimes, 200–201, 205–206, 209, 215–216, 218, 219 victims of, 217–218 Corporations environmental problems from, 219, 525–526 self-regulation of, 224–225 and war economy, 144–146, 166 Counterinsurgencies, 384–386, 389–390 Counterterrorism, 99, 100–102, 105, 122, 123 Court of Appeals, Criminal Division (CACD), 456–457, 458, 463 Court of Criminal Appeal (1907), 456–457 Cracking (hacking), 127, 133. See also Hacking Crane, Stephen, 149 Crime and Disorder Act (UK), 402–403 Crimes and criminal behavior, 199–209. See also Death penalty; Law enforcement; Wrongful convictions; specific types of criminal behavior child abuse as predictor of, 271–272, 276 critical criminologist approaches to, 204–206 definitions of, 200–206 legalistic approaches to, 200–202, 203, 205 media portrayal of, 199–200, 206–207, 216 myths about, 206–209 “of the powerful,” 200–201, 205–206, 209 public expectations for, 200, 203–204, 208–209 rural vs. urban environments for, 206–208 societal reaction or labeling approaches to, 202–205 socioeconomic and racial factors in, 51, 52, 202–203 victimless, 201–202, 217–218 Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), 457, 458, 463, 464 Criminalization of child abuse victims, 321–322 definition of, 222 of gang members, 366, 390–391 of hate crimes, 399–401, 403–404, 405 of immigrants, 203, 390–391 and overcriminalization, 201, 390–391 Criminal justice system. See also Death penalty; Law enforcement; Substance use and abuse clearance rate for murders in, 440 and corporate crime, 200–201, 202, 205–206, 223, 230 net-widening in, 55

544

index

Criminal Procedure Law (China), 463 Criminogenic tiers theory, 221 Criminology, 204–206 Critical materialism, 528 Critical theory, 61, 499 Crossing Borders (Menchú), 388 CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service), 116–117 Cultural vs. structural theories on urban poverty, 480–481 Culture of poverty debate, 480 Cumulative strain theory, 255–256 Cyberbullying, 242, 245–246, 248 Cyberpunk science fiction, 128 Cyberterrorism, 134–135 Cyberutopians vs. technoanarchists, 137 Cycle of violence hypothesis, 271–272 Czaja, Sally J., 316 Daniels, Jeffrey A., 258–259 Darknet and computer hacking, 133. See also Hacking Das, Veena, 393 Dauber, Michelle Landis, 88 Davis, Mike, 180 Dead Man Walking (Prejean), 442 Death penalty, 433–444. See also Crimes and criminal behavior; Law enforcement; Wrongful convictions alternatives to, 440 appeals process for, 438–439 Catholic Church position on, 442 as “closure” for survivors, 438–439 costs of administration of, 440–442 decrease in use internationally, 434, 435 deterrence argument for, 435–436 executions under, 439–440, 441, 443 export ban on drugs for, 435 as incapacitation, 439–440 life without parole vs., 435, 436, 439, 440–441 moral questions about, 437–438, 442 regional and racial disparities in, 437, 442 as retribution, 436–439 as social problem, 433–435, 443–444 US inmates under (2016), 434 US public opinion against, 435, 443–444 Death Penalty Information Center, 440–441, 455 Death rates, 505–506, 507–508 Deferred Prosecution Agreements, 228 della Porta, Donatella, 158–159 Dello Buono, Ricardo, 62–63 Demarest, W., 385–386 Democratic Insecurities (James), 391 Demographics, population. See Population and social problems Demographic transition model, 507–508 Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, 288 Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 101–102, 105, 114 Depoliticization and deviancy, 27 Depressants, 43, 46–47 Depression. See also Mental health vs. bereavement, 26 prevalence of, 23, 31, 34–35

stressful events as cause of, 33 treatment of, 49 Detroit, 477 Developmental Victimization Survey program, 312 Deviant behavior perspective, 61 Deviant behaviors. See also specific types of behaviors depoliticization of, 27 and hacking, 130–131 as labels by social groups, 202 and medicalization, 63 vs. mental illness, 24, 26, 27 in portrayal of bullies and victims, 244 primary vs. secondary in, 204 sexual fantasies, 272–273, 276 terrorism as, 156 DGSI (General Directorate for Internal Security), 118 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) “clinical significance” addition to, 30 diagnostic criteria in, 28, 30 on drug abuse and dependence, 44–45 editions one and two vs. three, 25 expansion of included disorders in, 26 mental disorders, history of classification in, 25–26 mental illness defined in, 24 PTSD in, 87 Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS), 28, 29 Differential association theory, 220 Digital divide, 492–493 Disabilities, people with, 331, 337 Disasters, 79–89. See also Environmental problems causes of, 85–86 Fukushima Daiichi disaster (2011), 86, 88 Haiti earthquake (2010), 86 hazards of, 84–85 health impacts of, 87–88 Hurricane Katrina (2005), 85–86, 88, 89 as “nonroutine social problems,” 81–83 public response to, 79–80 research theories on, 80–81 resilience against, 88–89 risks of, 83–84, 89 social construction of, 80, 81, 83–89 victims of, 86–88 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 68, 104 Discrimination, racial. See Race and racism Diseases, 59–74. See also Health care industry; Mental illness; Substance use and abuse actor-network theory (ANT) and, 65–66, 73, 74 containment of, 67–69 definitions of, 59–60 governmentality approach to, 65–66, 74 materiality of, 62–63, 66, 67, 71, 74 medicalization of, 63–64, 66 outbreak narratives of, 69–70 public health efforts in context of, 71–74 as social problems, 66–67, 74 social problems theory overview for, 60–66 stigmatization and marginalization with, 69–70 structural inequalities and violence with, 71 substance use and abuse as, 49–50

index Dispositional approach to terrorism, 161, 162, 168 DNA profiling, 454 Domain expansion for school bullying, 241–243 Donnermeyer, J. F., 207 Downs, Anthony, 82 Drabek, Thomas E., 81–82 Drinan, Robert, 442 Drug abuse. See Substance use and abuse Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, 52–53 Drug courts (treatment option), 54–55 Drugs. See Psychoactive drugs Drug schedules of abuse potential, 56–57 DSM. See Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) Due process and surveillance, 99, 100. See also Surveillance DuMont, Kimberly A., 316 Dunlap, Riley E., 520, 521–523, 526, 527 Durkheim, Emile, xi, 221 Earthquake threat as social construct, 83 East of Eden (Steinbeck), 98 Ebola epidemic, 67–68 Ecological debt, 532 Ecological fallacies, 424 Ecological footprints of developed vs. developing nations, 529 Ecologically unequal exchange theory, 531–532 Ecological-symbolic approach to disasters, 81 Ecstasy (MDMA), 46 Education on computer hacking, 136–137, 138 Egley, Arlen, Jr., 369 Egypt, 505 Ehrlich, Howard J., 404 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 144–145, 166, 168 Elder abuse, 329–330, 334–336, 339 Elder Justice Act, 330 Elder Mistreatment Research Program, 330 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 102, 103 El Salvador, 390–391 Emergent norm theory and disasters, 81 Enforcement pyramid paradigm, 229 England, wrongful convictions reform in, 456–458, 463. See also United Kingdom English Psychiatric Morbidity survey, 32 Environmental problems, 519–534. See also Climate change; Environmental sociology; Population and social problems; Technology activism and, 526–527 from corporations, 219, 525–526 as depletion of source, sink, habitat, 521–523 in developing vs. developed nations, 493–494, 529–530, 531–532 of disadvantaged populations, 523, 526–527 ecological debt as mitigation against, 532 of ecologically unequal exchanges, 531–532 global context for, 493–494, 528–532 historical awareness of, 519–520 knowledge shaping processes with, 526 migration in response to, 522–523

545

public opinion manipulation on, 525–526 racial issues in, 523–524, 527 thermodynamics laws and, 521 UNFCCC and G-77 treaties for, 530 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 526 Environmental sociology beginnings of, 520 as challenge to Human Exemptionalist Paradigm (HEP), 520 constructivist approach to, 524–527, 533 integrated approaches to, 527–528, 533 with New Environmental Paradigm (NEP), 520 place-based direction for future research, 533–534 realist approach to, 521–524 Epidemics. See Diseases Epidemiological Catchment Area study (ECA), 29–30 Epigenesis, 31 Epistemology through technology, 498 Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus), 511 Ethical hacking, 129, 136 Ethnoburbs, 478 Ethnocide, 178 Eurogang Network, 365 European interconnectedness and terrorism, 158–159 European military organization, 148 European Union, 51, 515 Europe (Western) population cluster, 504 E-waste dumping, 531–532 Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America (Cheney and Cheney), 163 Executions, 439–440, 441, 443 Exonerations from wrongful convictions, 443, 452–453, 454, 455, 462–463 Fagan, J., 441 Fair Sentencing Act (2010), 52 Family violence, 327–339. See also Child abuse; Intimate partner violence elder abuse, 329–330, 334–336, 339 future research on, 337–338 history of private to public approach to, 328–330 intersection of victimization and perpetration in, 337 overview of, 330–336 responses to and prevention of, 336–339 social class as major risk factor for, 336–337 as social problem, 327–328 Faris, Robert, 243 Farmer, Paul, 71 Fear, politics of, 162–163 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). See also Intelligence, domestic; Surveillance and challenges with other agencies, 121–122 and drug abuse confusion, 44 on gangs, 365 on hate crime, 399–400 history of, 111, 112–113, 114–115 InfraGard initiative by, 101–102 investigation of, 113 and juvenile arrests, 347 police brutality at, 420

546

index

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (cont.) and rape, Uniform Crime Reporting definition of, 295, 296 surveillance by, 101, 103 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 476–477 Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), 119 Feenberg, Andrew, 499 Feierstein, Daniel, 184 Fein, Helen, 183 Feldman, Allen, 387 Felmlee, Diane, 243 Female feticide, 512–513 Femicide, 207 Feminist activism second wave of, 288, 290, 291, 329 against sexual violence, 288, 290, 291, 329 third wave of, 290 Feminist approach to child abuse, 315 Fertility rates in global population, 506 Finnström, Svend, 392–393 Food access and residential segregation, 8, 481–482 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 10 Food deserts, 481–482 Food supply sustainability question, 515–516 and carrying capacity of Earth, 516 and Green Revolution, 516 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 103 Foucault, Michel as basis for actor-network theory (ANT), 65–66, 73, 74 as basis for governmentality concept, 65, 74 Discipline and Punish, 68, 104 and internalized social control, 492 on madness, 25 on panopticism, 68, 104 and social problems theory, 63, 64–65 Fourth Amendment and surveillance, 102–103, 116 Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4). See NIS-4 Framing of environmental issues for public opinion, 525, 526 France, 118–119, 147, 148, 156–157 Francis (pope), 442 Free (Libre) and open source software production (FOSS or FLOSS), 131 Freud, Sigmund, xi, 34 Freudenburg, William F., 86 Friedrichs, D. O., 206, 209, 217 Fritz, Charles, 81 Fukushima Daiichi disaster (2011), 86, 88 Functional Family Therapy, 373 Functionalist sociological theory, 144, 175, 177 Furman v. Georgia, 439 G-77 and global environmental problems, 530 Gang, The (Thrasher), 367 Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.), 373 Gangs and gang violence, 363–376. See also Juvenile violence

affiliations and rituals in, 364, 368, 370, 371, 374 causes of, 364, 366–367, 368–370, 372, 375 criminal behavior in, 365–366, 370, 373, 390–391 cultural code of, 367, 369, 370, 372 definitions of, 364–366 drugs and guns in, 367, 370, 371 females in, 368, 371 history of, 366–368 identity and solidarity in, 365, 371–372 interventions for, 366, 367, 372, 374–376 law enforcement approaches to, 366, 367, 372, 374, 375 member characteristics, 368 militarism of, 149, 151 organizational structures of, 370–371 prevention of, 372–375, 376 in prisons, 372 racism and, 366, 367, 390–391 as social problem, 363–364, 375–376 streetworker prevention programs for, 374 structural (social) inequalities and, 364, 366–367, 368, 372, 375 theories of, 368–370 treatment challenges for, 373–374, 375–376 Garbarino, James, 358 Gardner, Erle Stanley, 454 Garrison states, 144–145 Gatekeepers, 225–226 Gayborhoods, 483–484 Gelles, Richard J., 310, 311 Gendercide, 178, 207 Gender factors. See also LGBTQ community; Sexual abuse; Sexual assault, campus; Sexual violence; Women in child abuse perpetrators, 332 in China, 512–513 in gang membership, 368 and gendercide, 178, 185 in genocide, 185 in intimate partner violence, 333, 334 in juvenile violence, 352–355, 356, 357, 358–359 in school bullying, 242, 246, 247, 249 Gender symmetry debate, 333 General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), 118 Genetic factors, 31, 33–34, 49 Genetic theories of substance use and abuse, 49 Genocide, 173–188. See also State violence causes of, 183–186 child abuse during, 319–320 class struggles in, 184–185 and colonialism, 177, 179–180, 182–183 as criminal under international law, 173–174, 175–176 cultural factors in, 185–186 defining, 174–178, 183–184 gender relations in, 185 history of, 178–183 and justice for victims, 186–188 and Lemkin, Raphael, 174–176 as political concept, 173–176 as power relationship, 184 psychological factors in, 185

index as social problem, 174, 186–188 as state violence, 387–388, 389–390 US involvement in, 183 Genocide, cases of of African populations, 180, 182–183 in Bosnia, 319–320 under British rule, 180 in Cambodia, 177, 181 by Columbus, 177 in Guatemala, 388, 389–390 of Indigenous populations, 177, 179–180, 182, 184, 185–186, 187–188 by Nazis (Holocaust), 176, 181–182, 184, 185, 186–187 by Ottomans, 180–181 in Rwanda and Burundi, 182–183, 184, 185, 186, 319 under Stalin, 181 throughout history of, 178–183 in Tibet, 181 Gentrification, 482–483 Germany, 119, 186–187, 515 Ghana, 523 Gibbs, Lois, 527 Gibson, William, 128 Gill, Aisha K., 406 Gillis, J. Roy, 404–405 Glebeek, Mary-Louise, 393 Global Burden of Disease, 23, 31 Global Health Security Agenda, 68 Globalization. See also Population and social problems and computer hacking, 137, 138 and environmental problems, 493–494, 528–532 and offshoring, 493 urbanization of, 484 Global warming, 526. See also Climate change Goldman v. US, 103 Gonzalez, A., 320 Gould, Kenneth, 521 Governmentality, concept of, 65–66, 74 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Green Revolution, 516 Group-conflict theory of police brutality, 419 Guardian, The, 116 Guatemala counterinsurgency in, 384–386, 389–390 genocide in, 388, 389–390 Indigenous peoples as threat in, 386 modernization drive of “antipolitics” in, 385 National Police Archives in, 391–392 political violence in, 385–387 postwar rule of law in, 389–390 US involvement in, 385 Gunningham, Neil A., 222, 226, 229 Guns and gun control, 254, 255, 261–262, 367, 370 Guo Zhiyuan, 463 Gurr, Ted R., 177 H1N1 influenza pandemic, 72 Habeas Corpus Act of 1863, 111 Hacking, 127–139. See also Privacy rights introduction to, 127–128 Anonymous, example of, 136

547

clandestine, 131–136 computer security industry for, 130, 137 constructionism on, 129–130 as cracking, 127, 133 as cybercrime, 132–133, 136 as cyberterrorism, 134–135 darknet and, 133 democratic debate about, 137, 138 as deviant behavior, 130–131 education about, 136–137, 138 and “hactivism,” 128, 135–136 historical overview of, 130 humanitarian and ethical, 129, 136 intellectual property rights vs. digital sharing economy in, 131, 134, 135, 137 knowledge economy and, 138 modding (with computer games) and, 133–134 open source, 131, 135 open vs. clandestine, 128–129, 131–136, 138–139 policy responses to, 136–137, 138, 139 public image of, 128, 138 technoanarchists vs. cyberutopians and, 137 as threat, 130 Hafemeister, Thomas L., 330 Haiti, 86, 391 Hall, Nathan, 401 Hallucinogenic drugs, 47–48 Hamm, Mark, 159–160 Han, Clara, 384, 391 Hanlin, John, 258 Harff, Barbara, 177 Harris, Tirril, 33 Harvest of Violence (Carmack), 385–386 Hassan, Hassan, 164, 165, 168–169 Hate crime, 399–407. See also LGBTQ community; Race and racism; School bullying; Violence and violent crime under criminal law, 399–401, 403–404, 405 cultural values behind, 406–407 as “ethnoviolence,” 404 in Europe, 400 hate vs. anger in, 400–401 meaning and use of term, 399–401, 403 prevention of, 405 research on, 404–405, 406 as social problem, 401–404 in United Kingdom, 400, 402–403, 404, 405, 406 in United States, 399–400, 401–402, 404–405 victimization, research on, 404–405 violence against women and, 405–406 Hate Crime (Hall), 401 Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men (Herek and Berrill), 404 Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics (Jacobs and Potter), 401 Health care industry, 3–16 access to, 7, 8, 11–12, 15 affect on mental health treatment, 27 costs of, 10–11, 15 as market-based, 9 problems of, 4, 9–10, 15

548

index

Health disparities, 3–16 of African Americans, 5, 6–7 behaviors of individuals and, 6–7 in health care, 6, 7, 8 in physical and social environments, 6, 7–8, 9, 481–482 predictors of, 3–4, 6–9, 15 racial factors in, 5–6, 7, 9, 15, 523–524 socioeconomic status (SES) affect on, 4–5, 6, 9, 15 of White Americans, 6–7 Health insurance. See also ACA (Affordable Care Act) and mental health treatment, 27 problems with, 7, 9–10, 11–12 State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), 11 Henry, Jessica S., 402 Hepting v. AT&T Corporation, 103 Herek, Gregory M., 404–405 Heterogeneity and urbanization, 476, 484 Heteromasculinity, 246, 249 Heteronormative view of sexuality, 289, 298, 301 Higher Education Act (1998), 52 Hilgartner, Stephen, 82 Hispanic Americans. See also Gangs and gang violence; Race and racism health issues of, 7, 14 police brutality and, 420, 421, 422 residential segregation of, 8, 478 History of Militarism, A (Vagts), 147 HIV/AIDS, 66–67, 70 Hoffman, Bruce, 162 Holmes, Malcolm D., 421 Holocaust, Jewish, 176, 181–182, 184, 185, 186–187 Homans, George C., 151 Homeland Security Act (2002), 100 Homicidal vs. nonhomicidal sexual offenders, 270–271 Hookup culture for sex, 295 Hoover, J. Edgar, 101, 112 Housing. See Residential segregation and integration Howell, James C., 365, 369 Huggins, Martha Knisely, 393 Human Exemptionalist Paradigm (HEP), 520 Humanitarian hacking, 129, 136 Huntington, Samuel P., 147 Hurricane, The (film), 455 Hurricane Katrina and social constructs, 85–86, 88, 89 Identity-difference and genocide, 183–184 Identity theft, 98, 130 Illness. See Diseases; Health disparities; Mental illness; Substance use and abuse Immigrants. See also Population and social problems; Refugees border fencing projects against, 514–515 criminalization of, 203, 390–391 education in United States of, 514 highly skilled, 509–510, 513–514 labor, 508–510, 513–514 from Mexico to United States, 514 paths to citizenship in United States for, 515 Immigration. See Population and social problems

Incarceration, 159–160, 372. See also Criminal justice system; Death penalty India, 180, 504, 513 Indigenous populations. See also Guatemala children of, 179–180 genocide of, 177, 179–180, 182, 184, 185–186, 187–188 and United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 187 Individual-level theories for corporate crime, 219–221 Industrial Revolution and population changes, 507 I Never Called It Rape (Warshaw), 293 Information security vs. privacy rights, 137 InfraGard (FBI), 101–102 In loco parentis, 292 Innocence movement, 450, 451–452. See also Wrongful convictions in China, 458–463 in England, 456–458, 463 innocence consciousness, 450, 454, 463–465 innocence paradigm, 453 in United States, 454–456, 463 Innocence Network, 455–456, 458, 464–465 Innocence Network UK (INUK), 457–458 Innocence Project, 454 Institute of Medicine (IOM), 7, 9 Integrated theories for corporate crime, 223–224 Integration, residential, 477–479 Intellectual property rights vs. digital sharing and economy, 131, 134, 135 Intelligence, domestic, 109–123. See also Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); Privacy rights; Surveillance in Canada, 116–117 COINTELPRO, 101, 113 country comparisons of, 116–121 as cultural construct, 110 debate about, 110–111, 121–123 definition of, 110 and foreign intelligence, 110, 117, 119, 120 in France, 118–119 in Germany, 119 information sharing in, 121–122 by law enforcement, 96, 98–99, 102, 114–115, 121 legality and ethics of, 122–123 NSA secret program as, 115–116 PATRIOT Act as, 100–101, 105, 114, 115 post-9/11 components of, 114–116 pre-9/11 US history of, 111–114 targets of, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115 Terrorist Surveillance Program as, 110, 116, 122 in United Kingdom, 117–118, 120, 121 US multiple agencies for, 109, 115, 119–122, 123 Intergenerational transmission theory, 316 International Criminal Court, 186 International law League of Nations International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law (1933), 174, 175, 186 United Nations Genocide Convention (1948), 173–174, 175–176, 177, 186 Intersectionality, 168, 290 In the Name of the Father (Conlon), 457 Intimate femicide, 207

index Intimate partner violence, 332–334. See also Family violence; Rape; Sexual assault, campus; Sexual violence challenges with measurement of, 333 consequences for victims of, 334 definitions of, 269–270, 332–333 effects of race, ethnicity, and social class on, 334, 336 feminist activism in fight against, 288, 290, 291, 329 gender factors in, 333, 334 historical background to problem of, 288–289, 298, 329 prevalence of, 333–334 responses to, 277, 338–339 services for victims of, 334 as social problem, 293, 329 Iraq, 164–165, 166, 168–169 Islamaphobia, 135 Islamic State (ISIS), 164–165, 169, 515 Israel and terrorism, 163–164 Jackson, Shelly L., 330 Jacobs, James B., 401, 402 Jalata, Asafa, 166–167 James, Erica, 391 Jamrozik, Adam, 61–62 Janko, Susan, 322 Jeanne Clery College Crime and Statistics Disclosure Act (Clery Act), 293–294, 301 Jelin, Elizabeth, 391 Jewish fundamentalists and terrorism, 163–164 Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, 514 Joint Committee Against Racialism (JCAR), 403 Juvenile violence, 345–359. See also Gangs and gang violence; School shootings during adolescence, 347, 350 age, arrests by, 351, 353, 355, 356, 357 aggravated assault, 355–356 concerns for future, 357–359 developmental stages of, 347–350 gender, arrests by, 352–355, 356, 357, 358–359 murder, 351–354 by preteens, 349 prosecution in adult court for, 346–347, 350 race, arrests by, 351–353, 354, 355–356, 357, 358 rape, 351, 353–355 robbery, 355 by teenagers, 349–350 trends for, 345–347, 351, 352, 353, 355, 356–357 by young children, 348–349 Kagan, Robert A., 222 Katz v. US, 103 Kearns, Thomas R., 389 Kelly, Ann H., 71 Kerner Commission, 413, 427 Khmer Rouge, 177 Kingdon, John, 82 Klayman v. Obama, 103–104 Klein, Malcolm W., 364–365, 370 Kleinman, Arthur, 393

549

Klevens, Joanne, 320 Klinenberg, Eric, 84–85 Knight, Simon, 247 Knowledge shaping process in environmental decisions, 526 Krebs, Gary A., 82 Krogman, Naomi, 525 Ku Klux Klan, 290 Kuper, Leo, 184 Labeling approaches to crime, 61. See also Societal reaction approaches to crime Labor by migrants, 508–510, 513–514 in modding with computer games, 134 in urban America, 481 Lanza, Adam, 256, 262 Lasswell, Harold, 145 Latinos. See Hispanic Americans Latour, Bruno, 65–66 Law, Randal, 158 Law enforcement. See also Police brutality; Substance use and abuse; Wrongful convictions and body-worn cameras, 426 and cold-case units, 440 of corporate crime, 221, 222, 223, 226, 228 and domestic intelligence, 96, 98–99, 102, 114–115, 121 of gang violence, 366, 367, 372, 374, 375 and intimate partner violence arrests, 338 at local and state levels, 115 of marijuana, 51, 52 Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, 413 Lawrence, Frederick M., 401 League of Nations International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law (1933), 174, 175, 186 Leaks of government documents, 136. See also Snowden, Edward Legalistic approaches to crime, 200–202 advantages of, 200 with consensus (mala in se), 200, 201 criminals vs. noncriminals in, 203 vs. critical approach, 205 disadvantages of, 200–202 vs. societal reaction or labeling approach, 204 Leicester Hate Crime Project (U.K.), 405 Leighton, P., 203 Lemert, E. M., 204 Lemkin, Raphael, 174–176, 186 Levenson, R., 256 Levin, Jack, 255–256 LGBTQ community. See also Gender factors; Hate crime; School bullying and “gayborhoods,” 483–484 need for more research about violence against, 337 school bullying of sexual minority youth, 242, 246, 247, 249 as victims of rape and rape culture, 289–290, 297, 298, 299, 300 Liazos, Alex, 205 Liberal-democratic government actions and genocide, 176–177

550

index

License to operate model, 222, 226 Lichtenstein, Brownen, 66–67 Liebman, J. S., 441 Life course theory, 50, 369 Life in Debt (Han), 391 Lifestyle choices and health disparities, 6–7 Life without parole, 435, 436, 439, 440–441 Limbic system of brain, 350 Lloyd, J., 441 Looking-glass neighborhoods, 479 Love Canal, 526–527 Lupária, Luca, 463–464 Lynch, Michael J., 219 Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), 47–48 M15 (United Kingdom Security Service), 118 MacMillan, H. L., 320 Macrolevel theories for corporate crime, 222–223 Madfis, Eric, 255–256, 259 Majority-minority urban populations, 477, 478 Mala in se (consensus) basis for crimes, 200, 201 Male prohibita basis for crime, 201 Malthus, Thomas, 511, 515–516 Mandatory minimum sentences, 51–52 Mandela, Nelson, 156 Mann, Michael, 184 Marchak, Patricia, 184 Marginalization and spread of disease, 70 Marijuana (cannabis), 43, 48, 51, 52 Market-based health care system, 9 Maroney, Terry A., 405 Marshall, W. L., 274 Marx, Karl, 184, 222, 492 Mason, Gail, 403–404, 405 Mason-Bish, Hannah, 403, 406 Massachusetts health reform model (2006), 14–15 Mass shootings. See School shootings Mate, Gabor, 50 Materiality and epidemics as social problems, 62–63, 66, 67, 71, 74 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, 400 Matza, David, 220, 315–316 McCartney, Carole, 458 McCloskey, Jim, 454 McCright, Aaron M., 526 McDermott, D., 437–438 McDevitt, Jack, 405 McNulty, Thomas L., 317 Median ages in global population, 506 Media portrayal of climate change, 525 of crime, 199–200, 206–207, 216 of environmental problems, 525–526 of exonerations from wrongful convictions, 455 of school bullying, 238–241, 242–243, 244–249 of school shootings, 257–258, 262 and terrorism, 164, 165, 167 Medicaid expansion of, 11, 13, 14, 16 lack of providers for, 13

Medicalization definition and history of, 63–64 of deviant behaviors, 63 implications of, 66 of mental illness, 27, 38 of perpetrators of child abuse, 321 as social control, 63–64, 66 Medical surveillance, 64 Menchú, Rigoberta, 388 Mental disorders. See Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) Mental health and alcoholism, 26, 64 depression, 23, 26, 31, 33, 34–35, 49 and disasters, 87 and treatment with pharmaceuticals, 27, 36–37, 49 Mental illness, 23–38. See also Diseases from adult stressors, 33–34, 38 boundaries of, 26–27, 36, 38 from childhood stressors, 34–35, 37–38 definitions of, 23–24 vs. deviant behaviors, 24, 26, 27 genetic factors and, 31, 33–34 history of treatment of, 36, 37 at individual level, 35–37, 38 measurement of, 28–31, 33 medicalization of, 27, 38 vs. normal mental states, 25, 26, 28–29 as patterns of symptoms, 29, 30 prevalence of, 27–31 psychiatric classifications of disorders for, 24–26 psychiatric diagnostic criteria for, 26–27 psychoactive medications for, 27, 36–37, 46, 47, 49 social class and, 31–33 social problems and, 31–36, 37–38 Merton, Robert K., 220, 221 Methamphetamines, 202 Methylphenidate (Ritalin), 46 Mexican immigration to United States, 514 Mexico City, air pollution in, 522 Middle East, US role in, 163–165, 168–169 Midtown Manhattan Survey (1954), 28–29, 31–32 Migrants. See Immigrants Militarism, 143–152. See also War in American culture, 148–149 definition of, 143, 146–147 history of, 147–148 military training and, 150, 151 minorities or “others” and, 150 in negative mainstream, 149, 151–152 in negative subcultures, 149, 150–151 officer culture and, 147–148 opinions about, 151–152 in positive mainstream, 149, 151 in positive subcultures, 149–150 vs. social benefits, 150, 151 of terrorist organizations, 150–151 Military-industrial complex, 144–145, 166 Military metaphysic, 145 Miller, Gale, 65–66 Mills, C. Wright, 145

index Minnesota, 438–439 Minority-threat hypothesis of police brutality, 418, 420, 421, 423 Modding (with computer games), 133–134 Montreal Preventive Treatment Program for boys, 373 Morgan, Robert, 508 Mozambique, 523 Multiculturalism and abolishment of genocide, 188 Multiple marginality theory of gangs, 369–370 Multisystemic Therapy, 373 Murder by juveniles, 351–354. See also Juvenile violence Nansel, Tonja, 238 National Academy of Sciences, 435 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 413 National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect, 330–331. See also NIS-4 National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), 312, 331 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, 413 National Comorbidity Survey (NCS), 30 National Council of Juvenile Court Judges, 332 National Elder Mistreatment Study, 335 National Family Violence Surveys, 311 National Housing Act, racist policies of, 476–477 National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS), 310, 311–312, 331–332. See also NIS-4 National Institute of Justice (NIJ), 297, 330 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), 333 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, 317 National Registry of Exonerations, 452 National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences, 435 National Security Agency (NSA). See also Hacking; Intelligence, domestic; Surveillance collection of phone records by, 97, 101, 103, 115–116 leaks by Snowden about, 105–106, 110, 116, 137 violations of privacy rights by, 105–106 warrantless wiretapping by, 103, 122 National Survey of Children Exposed to Violence survey, 312, 314, 317–318 Nature of Prejudice, The (Allport), 400–401 Nature theories of substance use and abuse, 49 Naughton, Michael, 457, 458 Neglect of children. See Child abuse Neighborhoods. See also Residential segregation and integration and distress, 317–318 gayborhoods as, 483–484 gentrification of, 482–483 integration of, 478 police brutality in, 418–420, 421, 425, 427 segregation in disadvantaged, 7–9, 476–479 Nelson, Diane, 384 Neocolonization, 183 Neoliberalism, 88–89, 390–391 Nepal, 523 Net-widening in drug courts, 55 Neufeld, Peter, 454

551

Neuromancer (Gibson), 128 New Environmental Paradigm (NEP), 520 Newman, Katherine S., 254 New York Times, 115, 480 9/11 terrorist attacks (2001) aftereffects of, 160–161, 167 and public opinion, 105, 122–123 response to, 100, 110, 114–116, 122 1984 (Orwell), 97, 104 NIS-4, 310, 311–312, 331–332 Nocella, Luisa, 61–62 Nonhomicidal vs. homicidal sexual offenders, 270–271 Nonprosecution Agreements, 228 Nonroutine social problems, disasters as, 81–83 Normlessness and crime, 221–222, 223 NSA. See National Security Agency (NSA) Obama, Barack, 110, 241, 515 Obamacare. See ACA (Affordable Care Act) Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), 400 Office of National Drug Control Policy, 53 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 112. See also Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Office of Violence Against Women, 298 Officer and a Gentleman, An (film), 149 Offshoring (Urry), 493 Offshoring, inequities of, 493 Oliverio, Annamarie, 156 Olmstead v. US, 103, 104 Olweus, Dan, 238, 241 O’Neill, Saffron, 525 Open source software production (FOSS or FLOSS), 131 “Operation of a Death Squad in San Pedro La Laguna, The” (Paul and Demarest), 385–386 Opiates, 43, 47 O’Reilly Factor, 238–239 Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 400 Organizational-level theories for corporate crime, 221–222 Orwell, George, 97, 104 Ottoman Empire, 174 Outbreaks, diseases. See Diseases Outsiders (Becker), 61 Overcriminalization, 201, 390–391 Palmer Raids, 112 Pandemics, disease. See Diseases Panopticism, theory of, 68, 104–105 Panopticon, 104–105 Pape, Robert A., 159 Paper Cadavers (Weld), 391–392 Parenting on school bullying, 244–245 and sexual violence, 272, 277 Park, Robert E., 144 Partnership for a Drug Free America, 53 Pascoe, C. J., 249

552

index

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, The. See ACA (Affordable Care Act) Patriarchal gender relations and genocide, 185 Paul, B., 385–386 Payne, Brian K., 218–219 Payne v. Tennessee, 438 Pearce, F., 201 Pecora, J., 320 Perry Preschool Program for youth, 373 Peru, 523 Peterson, Cynthia, 405 Pfohl, Stephen J., 328 Pharmaceuticals and conflict of interests, 321 costs of, 10 and export ban on drugs for lethal injections, 435 in mental health treatment, 27, 36–37, 49 and prescription opiates, 47 and prescription pain relievers, 43 in social control, 64 Physical/social environment and health disparities, 6, 7–8, 9, 481–482 Place-based approach for environmental problems, 533–534 Place hypothesis of police brutality, 416, 418, 421, 423 Plea bargains, expense of, 441 Police brutality, 411–427. See also Crimes and criminal behavior; Law enforcement; State violence on African Americans, 412, 413–414, 415, 416, 417, 420–422 community accountability hypothesis on, 420–422, 423 community policing and, 414, 425 complaints of, 420, 422, 423 definition of, 412 in disadvantaged neighborhoods, 418–420, 421, 425, 427 group-conflict theory of, 419 in high-profile cases, 412 on Hispanic Americans, 420, 421, 422 historical context of, 412–414 individual variations among officers and, 414, 416, 422 minority officers and, 421, 422–423 minority-threat hypothesis on, 418, 420, 421, 423 officer accountability for, 414, 418–420 organization of police departments and, 415, 416, 420–421, 423, 424 place hypothesis on, 416, 418, 421, 423 police culture and subculture and, 414, 415, 424 power-threat hypothesis on, 417–418 reform efforts, 413, 414, 425–427 research, future priorities for, 423–425 research on, 412, 415–417, 420–423 in segregated neighborhoods, 421, 423 situational dynamics and, 414–415, 416, 422–423 social class divisions and, 412–413, 417 social psychological perspectives of, 418–420, 425–426 stereotypes and, 419–420, 426 threat hypothesis on, 417 traditional perspectives on, 414–417 Police Services Study (PSS), 416, 423

Political activism through computer hacking, 128, 135–136 Political Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, 187–188 Political economy theory, 222–223 Political violence and repression by state, 383–384 Politicide, 177 Politics of Rape, The (Russell), 293 Pollution. See Environmental problems Polyculturism and abolishment of genocide, 188 Population and social problems, 503–517. See also Environmental problems birth and death rates in, 505–506, 507–508 clusters of, 504 current estimates of, 503–504 demographic transitions in, 506–511 density of, 504–505 discrimination against females in, 512–513 Earth’s carrying capacity and, 516 fertility rates and, 506 food supply sustainability and, 515–516 government policies and growth of, 511–513 historical statistics and stages in, 506–507, 508 illegal immigration and, 514–515 immigration policies and, 513–514 Malthusian view of, 511, 515–516 median ages in, 506 migration and labor issues in, 508–510, 513–514 rates of natural increase in, 505–506 refugees in, 510–511, 514, 515, 522–523 resources-creation view of, 511 Pornography cathartic effect of, 274 and children, 314–315 detrimental effects of, 273–274 vs. erotica, 273 as risk factor for sexual offenses, 273–274, 276–277 in rural areas, 207 Posocco, Silvia, 384 Postconflict narratives of state violence, 391–392 Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) child abuse connection to, 318 diagnosis of, 26, 27 as result of disasters, 87 sexual abuse connection to, 300 Potter, Kimberly, 401 Poverty. See also Socioeconomic status (SES) and food insecurity, 8, 481–482 and structural violence, 71, 177, 183 in suburban America, 477 in urban America, 479–483 Powell, Christopher, 184 “Power elite” as cause of war, 145 Power-threat hypothesis of police brutality, 417–418 Prefrontal cortex of brain, 350 Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Misuse) Act of 1994, 513 Present State Examination (PSE), 28, 33 President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 427 Preteens and juvenile violence, 349. See also Juvenile violence

index Primary deviance, 204 Primoratz, Igor, 160 Prince, Phoebe, 240, 247, 248 Prisons, 159–160, 372. See also Criminal justice system; Death penalty Privacy rights. See also Intelligence, domestic; Surveillance fear of terrorism and, 163 vs. information security, 137 phone surveillance and, 103–104, 105–106 surveillance as threat to, 98, 99, 100, 101–102, 122–123 WikiLeaks, “hactivism,” and, 136 “Problem framing” for public opinion, 525, 526 Problem policy process, 129–130 Profiling of terrorists, 161 Profit motive, effects of. See Capitalism Prostitution, 201 Psychedelic drugs, 47–48 Psychiatry, 24–26, 28. See also Mental health; Mental illness Psychoactive drugs. See also Substance use and abuse antidepressants, 48–49 depressants, 46–47 hallucinogens or psychedelics, 47–48 health benefits of, 45, 47, 48 marijuana, 48 in mental health treatment, 27, 36–37, 46, 47, 49 prevalence of use of, 43 stimulants, 45–46 Psychological theories of substance use and abuse, 50 PTSD. See Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Public health researchers, 71–73, 74 Public policies in reaction to disasters, 82–83 Pulling Levers approach to gang violence, 375 Punishing Hate (Lawrence), 401 Quarantelli, Enrico L., 87 Questionnaires as psychiatric diagnostic tool, 28 Race and racism. See also African Americans; Police brutality; Residential segregation and integration in ACA coverage, 14 in criminal and drug arrest disparities, 51, 52, 203 in death penalty application, 437, 442 in environmental-related problems, 523–524, 527 in Federal Housing Administration (FHA) policies, 476–477 in gangs, 366, 367, 390–391 in gentrification of neighborhoods, 483 in health disparities, 5–6, 7, 9, 15, 523–524 in juvenile violence, 351–353, 354, 355–356, 357, 358 in prevalence of intimate partner violence, 334 in racial profiling, 203 in sexual violence, 289, 290, 291, 299, 300 in stereotypes about sexual violence, 290–293, 299 in use of technology, 491–492, 493 Radelet, Michael L., 435 Rampage school shootings. See School shootings Rape. See also Intimate partner violence; Sexual assault, campus; Sexual violence by acquaintance or date, 293, 294

553

consent and, 296, 351 FBI definition of, 295, 296, 351 historical definition of, 289 incapacitated victims of, 296, 300, 351 by juveniles, 351, 353–355, 357–358 of LGBTQ victims, 289–290, 297, 298, 299, 300 “motivated definitions” for, 295–297, 300 rape culture and perpetrators of, 296, 298 rape myths and victims of, 293, 296, 298, 301 in slavery and marriage, 288–289, 290, 293 by stranger or “others,” 291, 292–293, 294 and “violence against women” catchphrase, 288–289, 294 Rates of natural increase in global population, 505–506 Rational choice theory, 221, 436 Ray, Deepak K., 516 Realist conceptualizations of environmental problems, 521–524 Recidivism and substance abuse, 276 Reckoning (Nelson), 384 Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane), 149 Red Brigades (Italy), 159 Redclift, Michael, 528 Redlining neighborhoods for loan exclusion, 476–477 Refugees. See also Immigrants environmental, 522–523 political and economic, 510–511, 514, 515 Regulatory agencies, 225, 226–227, 229 Reiman, J., 203 Reintegrative shaming theory, 223–224 Relational perspective of terrorism, 161–162 Remittances (from migrants), 509 Reno, Janet, 345, 452, 454, 455 Replacement-level fertility rates, 506 Reprieve (British NGO), 435 Residential segregation and integration. See also Neighborhoods of African Americans, 7–9, 421, 423, 476–479 of Asian Americans, 478 of disadvantaged neighborhoods, 7–9, 476–479 and food access, 8, 481–482 of Hispanic Americans, 8, 478 and police brutality, 421, 423 and socioeconomic status (SES), 7–9, 476–477, 479–483 of suburbs, 478 and White Americans, 476–479 Resilience in disaster reparations, 88–89 “Responsive Regulation,” 227, 229 Restorative justice programs, 260–261, 338–339 Richardson, James, 452, 454 Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, The (Reiman and Leighton), 203 Ritalin (methylphenidate), 46 Robbery by juveniles, 355 Roberts, Stephanie, 458 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 88, 112, 476–477 Rose, Nikolas, 65–66 Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology, The (Donnermeyer), 207 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and, 117

554

index

Rule of law and state violence, 388–390 Rural America, crime in, 206–208, 209 Russell, Diana E. H., 293 Russia, 512 Rutter, Michael, 34 Sampson, Robert J., 317 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre (2012), 256, 260, 262 Sarat, Austin, 389 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 225–226 Sarewitz, Daniel, 494 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 184–185 Saul, Ben, 167 Scarry, Elaine, 387 Scheck, Barry, 454 Schedules for Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (SCAN), 28 Scheme of interpretation for environmental issues, 525 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 390 Schirmer, Jennifer, 389 Schnaiberg, Allan, 521 School bullying, 237–250. See also Hate crime; School shootings antibullying efforts against, 248–249, 250, 259 bullycides, 238, 239–240 cyberbullying, 242, 245–246 elements of, 241, 242 as epidemic, 238–239 expansion to other behaviors, 241–243 explanations for, 243–247 and gender-related issues, 242, 246, 247, 249 at individual level, 244, 246–247 long-term effects of, 240 mass shootings and, 238, 239, 240 media coverage of, 238–241, 242–243, 244–249 moral shocks and, 237, 238, 239 overresponse to, 247 oversimplification with, 247 as parental and institutional failures, 244–246 prevention of, 249–250 secondary victims of, 240 social control in response to, 239, 248 as social problem, 237–238 teachers as bullies in, 245 School shootings, 253–262. See also Juvenile violence; School bullying antibullying programs and, 259 aversion of, 258–259, 260–261 and bullying, 238, 239, 240 bystander behavior and, 259, 260, 261 causes of, 255–256 Columbine High School massacre (1999), 238, 257, 259, 260 copycat phenomenon in, 257–258 cumulative strain theory and, 255–256 definition of, 254 gun culture and, 254, 255, 261–262 in international settings, 256 media coverage of, 257–258, 262 perpetrators of, 254–255

prevalence of, 254 prevention of, 259–262 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre (2012), 256, 260, 262 security measures against, 260 Schur, Edwin, 201 Scouting (Boy Scouts), 150 Scouting vs. domestic surveillance, 96 Search engines as tool for surveillance, 98 Secondary deviance, 204 Secure Fence Act (2006), 514 Sedwick, Rebecca, 245, 248 Segregation. See Residential segregation and integration Self-reporting as psychiatric diagnostic tool, 28 September 11, 2001 attacks. See 9/11 terrorist attacks (2001) SES. See Socioeconomic status (SES) Seto, M. C., 275 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), 69–70 Sexting, 314–315 Sexual abuse and bullying, 246, 249 of children, 271–272, 276, 310, 312, 313, 314–315 consequences of, 34 prevalence of, 34, 37–38 Sexual assault, campus. See also Intimate partner violence; Rape; Sexual violence Clery Act and, 293–294, 301 consequences of, 300, 301 measurement challenges with, 287–297, 302 motivated definitions in, 295–297, 300 peer group dynamics and, 296–298 perpetrator as “other” in, 291–293 prevalence of, 297 prevention attempts, 293–294, 301–302 rape culture and, 296, 298 rape myths and, 293, 296, 298, 301 social media and, 300 underreporting of, 298–299, 301–302 Sexual violence, 269–277. See also Intimate partner violence; Rape; Sexual assault, campus alcohol and drug consumption and, 274–276, 277 childhood maltreatment and, 271–272, 276 definitions of, 269–270, 332–333 deviant sexual fantasies and, 272–273, 276 feminist activism on, 288, 290, 291, 329 homicidal vs. nonhomicidal offenders of, 270–271 and male entitlement, 288–289, 291, 298, 329 and men of color, 290, 299 with perpetrator as “stranger,” 291, 292–293, 294 pornography consumption and, 273–274, 276–277 prevention of, 277, 338–339 and racial stereotypes, 290–293, 299 risk factors for perpetrators of, 271–276 as social problem, 288–293, 329 victim demographics for, 299 and “violence against women” catchphrase, 288–289, 294 and “white womanhood,” 289, 290–291 and women of color, 289, 290, 291, 299, 300 Shia Muslims, 164

index Shoah (Holocaust), 176, 181–182, 184, 185, 186–187 Short, James F., 370 Sieder, Rachel, 389 Signal detection model, 102 Singapore, 69–70, 509–510 Slavery and rape, 289 Slut shaming, 246 Smith, Brad W., 421 Smith, Carol A., 386 Smith, Neil, 482 Smith v. Maryland, 103–104 Snowden, Edward effects of NSA leak by, 105–106, 110, 116, 137 leaks of NSA documents by, 105, 116, 137 Social causation, hypotheses of, 32 Social constructionism challenges to, 62–63 of disasters, 80, 81, 83–89 of environmental problems, 524–527, 533 of hacking, 129–130 overview of, 61–62 of state violence, 393 Social control by fear of terrorism, 162–163 vs. governmentality, 65–66, 74 individualization of, 64 medicalization as, 63–64, 66 through technologies, 492 by torture, 166 Social control (bonding) theory of substance use and abuse, 50 Social disorganization theory, 61, 317–318, 368–369, 479 Social effects of war, 146–147 Social environment and health disparities, 6, 9 Social isolation theory, 479 Social learning theory, 50, 315–316 Social media, 164, 165, 300 Social Origins of Depression (Brown and Harris), 33 Social pathology perspective, 61 Social problems, introduction to, xi Social problems theory overview, 60–66. See also Foucault, Michel of challenges to constructionists, 62–63 of constructionist perspective, 61–62 of critical theory, 61 of deviant behavior perspective, 61 of labeling perspective, 61 of materiality, importance of, 62–63 of social disorganization, 61 of social pathology perspective, 61 of value conflict perspective, 61 Social process framework as theory of gangs, 370 Social psychological perspectives of police brutality, 419, 425–426 Social selection, hypotheses of, 32 Social services, absence of, as state violence, 390–391 Social status and school bullying, 243 Societal reaction approaches to crime, 202–205 vs. conservative approach, 204 criminals vs. noncriminals in, 203–204 vs. critical criminology approaches, 204–205

555

and deviance, 202 immigration basis for, 203 and secondary deviance, 204 socioeconomic and racial basis for, 202–203 Sociocide, 178 Socioecological perspective for gangs, 368 Socioeconomic status (SES). See also Structural inequalities and criminal arrest disparities, 202–203 as factor in child abuse, 313, 331, 332, 336 as factor in intimate partner violence, 334, 336 as factor in mental illness, 31–33 and health care access, 7 and health disparities, 4–5, 6, 9, 15 as indicator of environmental threats, 523, 526–527 measurement of, 5, 6 and residential segregation, 7–9, 476–477, 479–483 and risky health behaviors, 5, 6 and strain theory of crime, 220 Sociotechnical infrastructure, 498 Space of Detention (Zilberg), 390–391 Spice (synthetic marijuana), 48 Spitzer, Robert, 25 Spying, domestic, 109–123. See also Intelligence, domestic; Surveillance Stafford Act (for disasters), 87, 88 Stallings, Robert A., 83 Stannard, David, 179 State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), 11 State violence, 382–390. See also Genocide; Structural violence; Terrorism absence of social services as, 390–391 boundaries, expansion of, 390, 393 consumerism as, 391 controlling postconflict narratives as, 391–392 counterinsurgency as, 384–386, 389–390 criminalization of immigrants as, 390–391 definitions of, 382 genocide as, 387–388, 389–390 political violence and repression as, 383–384 research and debate about, 383, 393–394 rule of law as, 388–389 as social problem and construction, 393, 394 structural inequalities in, 382 and subjectivities, 393 terror and torture as, 386–387 use of new technologies in, 392–393 Steinbeck, John, 98 Steinhäuser, Robert, 256, 257 Stereotypes of minority citizens in police brutality, 419–420, 426 in sexual violence, 290–293, 299 Stern, Jessica, 164–165, 168–169 Stigmatization and corporate crime, 221, 223, 224, 228 and spread of disease, 69, 70 Stimulants, 45–46. See also Cocaine amphetamines, 43, 46 bath salts, 46 caffeine, 45 coca, 45

556

index

Stimulants (cont.) ecstasy (MDMA), 46 methylphenidate (Ritalin), 46 tobacco, 45 Strain theory vs. anomie theory, 221–222 for child abuse, 317 for corporate crime, 220–222 cumulative, for rampage shootings, 255–256 and socioeconomic status (SES), 220 for substance use, 50 “Stranger rapist,” 291, 292–293, 294 Straus, Murray A., 311, 316–317 Street crimes. See also Crimes and criminal behavior capitalism as cause of, 220–221, 222–223 as consensus crimes, 200, 201 vs. corporate crime, 200–201, 205–206, 209, 215–216, 218, 219 explanations for, 208 by gangs, 365–366, 370 Stressors and mental illness, 33–35, 37–38. See also Mental illness Strodtbeck, Fred L., 370 Structural inequalities. See also Socioeconomic status (SES) epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks and, 71 gangs as response to, 364, 366–367, 368, 372, 375 in state violence, 382 structural vs. cultural theories on urban poverty, 480–481 Structural violence. See also State violence capitalism and, 177 epidemics, pandemics, and outbreaks and, 71 genocide and, 177–178, 183 poverty and, 71, 177, 183 Structured diagnostic instruments, 28 Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act of 1990, 293 Subcultural theory of gangs, 369 Substance use and abuse, 43–56. See also Psychoactive drugs addiction in, 44–45 Alcoholics Anonymous for, 50, 54 arrests and imprisonment for, 51–52 Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and, 44, 48, 56–57 Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program for, 52–53 drug courts for, 54–55 drug schedules (CSA) for, 56–57 by gangs, 370, 371 law enforcement response to, 51–52 mandatory minimum sentences for, 51–52 minority arrests for, 51, 52 prevention programs for, 52–53, 55–56 as risk factor for sexual violence, 274–276, 277 theories of, 49–51 and tolerance to drugs, 44 treatment for, 53–56 use vs. abuse in, 44, 45 and withdrawal from drugs, 44

Suburbs, 367, 477, 478. See also Neighborhoods; Residential segregation and integration Suicide, 34–35. See also “Bullycides” Suicide bombings, 159 Sunni Muslims, 164 Sun Tzu, 96 Supreme Court of Canada, 450 Surveillance, 95–106. See also Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); Intelligence, domestic; Privacy rights COINTELPRO, 101, 113 concerns about, 100, 104–106, 492 corporate, 95, 98, 102 as counterterrorism tool, 99, 100–102, 105 definitions of, 95–98 by government and law enforcement, 96, 98–99, 102, 114–115, 121 history of, 96, 101, 102–104 judicial challenges to, 102–103, 104, 116 mass vs. targeted, 97–98, 99–100, 102 medical, 64 power hierarchies of, 97 signal detection model for, 102 as social problem, 96, 98 technological tools for, 98, 104, 123, 133 Sutherland, Edwin H., 216, 220 Swartz, Aaron, 133 Sykes, Gresham M., 220, 315–316 Symbolic interactionist theory, 80–81, 202, 318 Syrian refugee crisis, 515 Tappan, Paul, 200, 205 Techniques of neutralization, 220 Techno-anarchists vs. cyberutopians, 137 Technological determinism, 497 Technological instrumentalism, 495, 497 Technology, 489–500. See also Environmental problems; Hacking; Surveillance for alleviation of suffering, 494, 496 for amplification and delegation, 496 and co-construction with social, 497–499, 500 constraints and affordances from, 498 and coproduction, 498 critical theory of, 499 design of, 494–495, 500 epistemology and, 498 future research and visions for, 494–496, 500 morality and, 499 for novelty, 496–497 offshoring through, 493 overconsumption of natural resources with, 493–494 as political, 491–492 social control with, 489–490, 492 social exclusion with, 489–490, 491–493 and social life, 489–491, 499 as social problem, 491–494, 499 as social promise, 494–497, 499–500 sociotechnical infrastructure for, 498 state violence with, 392–393 for surveillance, 98, 104, 123, 133 technological determinism and, 497

index technological instrumentalism and, 495, 497 unintended consequences of, 490, 492, 493 Teenagers and juvenile violence, 350. See also Juvenile violence Television, 199–200 Terrorism, 155–169. See also Genocide; State violence; Torture antiterrorism laws, 167 counterterrorism and growth of, 157–158 and crime theory, 204 and cyberterrorism, 134–135 definitions of, 155–156, 157, 160–162 dispositional approach to, 161, 162, 168 future research on, 164–165, 168–169 historical context for, 156–157, 159, 160, 168 interpretation (framing) of, 162, 163 key players in, 156 media use in, 164, 165, 167 in Middle East, 163–165, 168–169 and political structures, 156–158 vs. political violence, 158–160 radicalization leading to, 159–160 relational perspective of, 161–162 social control through, 162–163, 166 as social problem, 155–156, 169 state-sponsored, 166–167 as strategy, 160–162 by subnational groups, 167 suicide bombings as, 159 through colonial power structures, 166–167 transnational connections for, 158–159 Terrorism and the Politics of Fear (Altheide), 162–163 Terrorist Surveillance Program, 110, 116, 122 Texas, 438–439 Theocratic Democracy (Ben-Yehuda), 163–164 Thermodynamics laws and environmental problems, 521 Think tanks as forum for false “experts,” 526 Thornton, Dorothy, 222 Thrasher, Frederic M., 367 Threat hypothesis of police brutality, 417 Tilly, Charles, 161–162 Time bombs (with bullying), 238, 239, 240 Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, 288, 301 Tobacco, 45 Torture in China, 461–462 in Guatemala, 386–387 privatization of, 166 for social control, 166 by state, 386–387 Total fertility rates in global population, 506 Total Information Awareness (TIA) Office, 100–101 Toxic contamination, reactions to, 85 Treviño, Javier A., 168 Trumbo, Craig, 525 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, 186 Turner, Heather A., 317–318 Typification, 208 Typology of Corporate Crime, 217

557

UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), 530 Uniform Crime Reports (UCRs), 350–351 United Kingdom approaches to hate crime in, 400, 402–403, 404, 405, 406 and colonial history of Britain, 180 domestic intelligence in, 117–118, 120, 121 psychiatric approaches in, 28, 30, 32, 37 wrongful convictions reform in, 456–458, 463 United Nations (UN), 347, 508 United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, 73 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, 532 United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 187 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 530 United Nations Genocide Convention (1948), 173–174, 175–176, 177, 186 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 510 United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), 88 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 43 United States, wrongful convictions reform in, 454–456, 463 United States v. Garcia, 103, 104 University of Bristol, 458 Urbanism, definition of, 475 Urbanization, 475–484. See also Residential segregation and integration definition of, 475 ethnoburbs in, 478 globalization of, 484 growth of, 475–476, 484 heterogeneity and inequalities of, 476, 484 and poverty, 479–483 and race, 476–479 and sexuality, 483–484 Urry, John, 493 US Agency for International Development, 86 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 47, 68, 70, 239, 312–313, 330–331, 333 US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, 301 US Department of Justice, 111, 112, 297, 298, 420 US Freedom Act (2015), 100 US Government Accountability Office (GAO), 53 US Secret Service, 111, 112 US State Department, 136. See also National Security Agency (NSA) US Supreme Court rulings, 103, 438, 439, 514 USA PATRIOT Act, 100–101, 105, 114, 115 Vagts, Alfred, 147 Value conflict perspective, 61 Van den Haag, E., 437–438 Vertigans, Stephen, 168 Victim Impact Statements, 438 Victimless crimes, 201–202, 217–218. See also Crimes and criminal behavior

558 Vigil, James D., 369–370 Vigilantism and school bullying, 248. See also School bullying Violence Against Women Act (1994), 288, 294, 329 Violence and Subjectivity (Das and Kleinman), 393 Violence and violent crimes. See also Crimes and criminal behavior; Gangs and gang violence; Genocide; Intimate partner violence; State violence; Structural violence; Terrorism by juveniles, 356 against women, 185, 206, 207, 208, 405–406 (See also Sexual violence) Violence in War and Peace (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois), 390 Violentization theory, 318–319 Virtual War and Magical Death (Whitehead and Finnström), 392–393 Vulnerability factors, 33 Wacquant, Loïc, 390 War, 143–152. See also Militarism causes of, 144–146 conflict theory of, 144–145 definition of, 143–144 functionalist theory of, 144 garrison states for, 144–145 military-industrial complex for, 144–145, 166 military metaphysic for, 145 power elite for, 145 social effects of, 146–147 and United States as warfare state, 145–146 in US economy, 144–146, 166 Warden, Rob, 439–440 Warshaw, Robin, 293 Washington Post, 105, 116 Watts, Stephen J., 317 Weil, Andrew, 49 Weiss, Michael, 164, 165, 168–169 Weld, Kristen, 391–392 Welfare Reform Act (1996), 52 Wesley, William A., 415 West, V., 441 West Africa, 67–68 White Americans. See also Race and racism on college campuses, 291–292 and health disparities, 6–7 and Hispanics in Southwest, 420 in history of sexual violence, 288–289, 290–291 juvenile violence by, 351–353, 354, 355–356, 357, 358 and residential segregation, 476–479 and use of death penalty, 437 in use of technology, 491–492, 493 Whitehall study (1984), 5. See also Socioeconomic status (SES) Whitehead, Neil L., 392–393 Wickersham Commission, 413 Widom, Cathy Spatz, 316

index WikiLeaks, 136 Williams, Linda M., 321–322 Wilner v. National Security Agency, 103 Wilson, William J., 480 Winner, Langdon, 491–492 Wirth, Louise, 475 Women. See also Feminist activism; Gender factors female feticide, 512–513 intimate femicide, 207 “slut shaming,” 246 violence against, 185, 206, 207, 208, 406 Woodgate, Graham, 528 Worden, Robert E., 423 World Bank, 88, 509 World Health Organization (WHO), 10, 30, 67, 69, 72, 269, 339 World systems theory, 531 Worrell, Mark, 145–146 Wrongful convictions, 449–465. See also Death penalty; Innocence movement DNA profiling for, 454 due process lapses as, 451 exonerations from, 443, 452–453, 454, 455, 462–463 factual (actual) innocence as, 450, 452 false convictions as, 451, 462 future research on, 465 measurement challenges with, 452 miscarriages of justice as, 449–451 from misconduct by police and others, 451, 453, 462 mistaken eyewitness identification in, 455 prevalence of, 453 from procedural errors, 451, 453, 457–458 public pressure and, 455, 457, 458–459, 461 reform in China, 458–463 reform in England, 456–458, 463 reform in United States, 454–456, 463 torture in, 461–462 York, Richard, 528 Youth. See also Child abuse; Juvenile violence; School bullying; School shootings female feticide, 512–513 health insurance for, 11 indigenous, 179–180 rape of, 351 sexual minority youth and school bullying, 242, 246, 247, 249 young children and juvenile violence, 348–349 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (YRBSS), 239 Zero tolerance school policies, 53, 204, 248, 259–260, 366, 367 Zhao Zuohai, 459, 461, 462 Zika virus as social problem, 73 Zilberg, Elana, 390–391 Zola, Irving Kenneth, 63–64 Zulaika, Joseba, 157–158