Browsing by Subject "Violence"
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Item Open Access Alcohol Use and Violence-Related Injury in Moshi, Tanzania: A Mixed Methods Study(2019) Friedman, KaitlynBackground: Harmful alcohol use and violence are both major contributors to global mortality and morbidity rates, despite being both predictable and preventable. This study seeks to quantitatively determine the scope of violence-related injury and Alcohol Use Disorders in a referral hospital in Moshi, and qualitatively determine 1) how violence-related injury patients perceive alcohol use influences the occurrence of violence and 2) how experiencing a violence-related injury influences patients’ subsequent alcohol use behavior.
Methods: This study was conducted at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (KCMC). Survey data was obtained from a trauma registry including all injury patients ≥ 18 years admitted to the emergency room. Interview participants were included if they reported their injury was due to violence, tested positive for alcohol (by breathalyzer) upon admittance, medically stable, able to communicate and provide informed consent in Swahili or English, and clinically sober at the time of enrollment.
Results: From the 500 injury patients enrolled in the trauma registry from April 17, 2018 to January 12, 2019, 84 (16.8%) reported that their injury was due to violence. Patients with violent injuries were 2.21 times more likely to have a positive alcohol status compared to non-violent injuries (95% CI 1.36, 3.60, p<0.01). Among violent injuries, those with a positive alcohol status were 6.26 times more likely to have an Alcohol Use Disorder compared to those with a negative alcohol status (95% CI 2.13, 18.39, p<0.001). Interview respondents reported a perception that violent injuries were worse from other injuries, that the perpetrator was also under the influence of alcohol, that alcohol contributes to violence, and a desire to change alcohol use behavior following their injury.
Conclusion: Alcohol use and violence-related injury pose a significant threat to health and well-being globally. In Moshi, Tanzania, both issues are prevalent and contribute to a sufficient disease burden. This study has added to the data on alcohol-attributable harm, contributing to expanding information available on this issue from LMICs. To adequately reduce violence-related injuries in this setting, it is necessary to address harmful alcohol use as well.
Item Open Access Association Between Substance Use and Gun-Related Behaviors.(Epidemiologic reviews, 2016-01-13) Chen, Danhong; Wu, Li-TzyGun-related violence is a public health concern. This study synthesizes findings on associations between substance use and gun-related behaviors. Searches through PubMed, Embase, and PsycINFO located 66 studies published in English between 1992 and 2014. Most studies found a significant bivariate association between substance use and increased odds of gun-related behaviors. However, their association after adjustment was mixed, which could be attributed to a number of factors such as variations in definitions of substance use and gun activity, study design, sample demographics, and the specific covariates considered. Fewer studies identified a significant association between substance use and gun access/possession than other gun activities. The significant association between nonsubstance covariates (e.g., demographic covariates and other behavioral risk factors) and gun-related behaviors might have moderated the association between substance use and gun activities. Particularly, the strength of association between substance use and gun activities tended to reduce appreciably or to become nonsignificant after adjustment for mental disorders. Some studies indicated a positive association between the frequency of substance use and the odds of engaging in gun-related behaviors. Overall, the results suggest a need to consider substance use in research and prevention programs for gun-related violence.Item Open Access Broadening the Perspective on Gun Violence: An Examination of the Firearms Industry, 1990-2015.(American journal of preventive medicine, 2017-11) Smith, Victoria M; Siegel, Michael; Xuan, Ziming; Ross, Craig S; Galea, Sandro; Kalesan, Bindu; Fleegler, Eric; Goss, Kristin AIntroduction
Firearm violence injures or kills 100,000 Americans each year. This paper applies the Host-Agent-Vector-Environment model to this issue. Research on firearm violence tends to focus on two elements-the host (i.e., victims of firearm violence) and the environment (i.e., gun policies)-but little attention has been paid to the agent (the gun and ammunition) or the vector (firearm manufacturers, dealers, and the industry lobby).Methods
Using Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives data, trends in firearm manufacturing were investigated from 1990 to 2015. Outcome measures included: (1) trends in domestic gun manufacturing by weapon type; (2) trends in production by firearm caliber; and (3) 2015 market share by type of firearm and company. Data were collected and analyzed in 2016.Results
Overall domestic firearms production decreased slightly from 1996 through 2004, and then steadily increased from 1.7% in 2005 to 13.8% in 2013, when >10 million firearms were produced for the domestic market. The increase in total firearm production was driven by the increased production of pistols and rifles. Within the pistol category, increased production was attributable to an increase in higher caliber weapons. Similar trends were observed in gun purchases and recovered and traced crime guns.Conclusions
Trends in firearm manufacturing reveal a shift toward more-lethal weapons, and this trend is also observed in gun purchases and crime gun traces. This may reflect a societal shift in cultural practices and norms related to guns and could inform strategies to reduce firearm violence.Item Open Access Citizens in Fear: Political Participation and Voting Behavior in the Midst of Violence(2014) Ley Gutierrez, Sandra JessicaHow does violence affect political participation and voting behavior? Why does a violent context push some to be politically active, while others decide to stay at home? Our current understanding of political behavior is mostly derived from analyses conducted in a peaceful and democratic context, or in post-conflict periods. However, citizens in many developing countries make their political decisions in the midst of violence.
The dissertation's central argument is that political participation and voting behavior largely depend on the context surrounding the individual. In particular, the level of criminal violence greatly impacts 1) citizens' decision to participate politically, 2) their forms of participation, and 3) the logic of their vote choice. Faced with violence, voters are generally pushed away from electoral politics. I argue that those that do decide to take part of the electoral process will consider their evaluations of security when deciding to punish or reward the incumbent government. While some may be inclined to take further action and demand peace through non-electoral participation, such a decision carries certain risks that are not easily overcome. I contend that social networks can encourage participation by shaping the understanding of crime, as well as the perception of costs and benefits associated with participation amid violence.
To evaluate this argument, I draw on a rich array of sources. I designed an original post-electoral survey that took place in Mexico a few days after the 2012 presidential election. I also created a novel newspaper databank of protests against crime in Mexico during the 2006-2012 period. In addition, together with Guillermo Trejo, I developed a unique dataset on criminal violence in Mexico. My statistical evidence is complemented with participant observation in marches for peace and qualitative in-depth interviews with victims and non-victims of crime in four Mexican cities.
Statistical evidence shows that violent criminal activity depresses electoral turnout. Voters living in violent contexts are less likely to participate in elections. Victims of crime are significantly less likely to participate in elections. However, faced with rising violence, active voters are able to consider both economic and insecurity evaluations in their assessments of government performance and voting decisions. Overall, as a voter's evaluation of national security worsens, her likelihood of supporting the incumbent national party and government diminishes. At the same time, while institutional channels are not attractive to victims of crime, societal accountability mechanisms are also available to citizens affected by insecurity. Victims of crime and those connected to mobilizing networks are more likely to participate in protests against insecurity than non-victims and "socially disconnected" individuals.
Item Open Access Defying the odds on gun regulation: The passage of bipartisan mental health laws across the states.(The American journal of orthopsychiatry, 2015-05) Goss, Kristin AItem Open Access Experiments in Violence: The Problem of Oppositional Politics in Late Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Fiction(2020) Kellish, JacquelineParadoxically, Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an imagined community occupying a territory at once bounded and sovereign became commonplace around the same time that prominent global novelists were beginning to reject the obligation to reproduce that fantasy. I consider two generations of novelists who do so in the late twentieth century. J.M. Coetzee articulates the failure of sovereign boundaries in the postcolony and the changing nature of the relationship between the citizen-subject and the state, while Sebald considers the possibility that a new form of non-hierarchical community might come into being amid the European ruins of the Second World War. For both authors, such projects rely on an acknowledgment of the limitations, disappearance, or outright absence of the nation-state, despite its purported centrality in modern life. More recent Anglophone novelists, by contrast, feel obliged to think with and within the infrastructure of global capitalism, paying particular attention to individuals who have been either empowered or dispossessed by global flows of resources, people, and information. Teju Cole, Indra Sinha, and Colson Whitehead are among these writers who can indeed sketch and animate the community to come, and they do so in forms predicated on the extinction of anything like the individual citizen-subject in favor of new heterogeneous and often radically antisocial forms of community. These novels offer their variously damaged (former) individuals as protagonists who militantly oppose the partitioning of society into friends and enemies, since such distinctions ultimately encourage the classification of groups according to metaphysical categories of good and evil. The common purpose of these protagonists is instead to negate the negativity of that very opposition in the hope that anything else—some intelligent form of life—might grow.
Item Open Access Factors related to posttraumatic stress disorder in adolescence.(Trauma Violence Abuse, 2012-07) Nooner, Kate B; Linares, L Oriana; Batinjane, Jessica; Kramer, Rachel A; Silva, Raul; Cloitre, MaryleneStudies of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adolescence published from 2000 to 2011 indicate that adolescents are at greater risk of experiencing trauma than either adults or children, and that the prevalence of PTSD among adolescents is 3-57%. Age, gender, type of trauma, and repeated trauma are discussed as factors related to the increased rates of adolescent PTSD. PTSD in adolescence is also associated with suicide, substance abuse, poor social support, academic problems, and poor physical health. PTSD may disrupt biological maturational processes and contribute to the long-term emotion and behavior regulation problems that are often evident in adolescents with the disorder. Recommendations are presented for practice and research regarding the promotion of targeted prevention and intervention services to maximize adolescents' strengths and minimize vulnerabilities. Public policy implications are discussed.Item Open Access Fighting for Life: War Trauma, Healing, and Ritual Communities in the American Pacific Northwest(2022) Webb, ChristopherThis dissertation traces the complex connections between violence, trauma, healing, and medicalization in North America. The project connects to conversations in medical anthropology and American studies, and intersects with science studies, postcolonial studies, the anthropology of militarism, and Native American studies. The central innovation in this dissertation is its focus on veterans who suffer from both the violence of war and the limits of trauma's conventional treatments. I track their experiences through a therapeutic system designed by and for Native people, and argue that questions about suffering and healing from war are inextricable from discourses and practices of gender, race, and territory.Since the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis was codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, the object of combat trauma has grown to occupy significant space in popular culture. In the contemporary world, PTSD serves as the primary lens for translating military experience to both the public and veterans themselves. However, the diagnosis and all of its clinical appurtenances fall short of contextualizing the full range of traumas associated with military service and its treatments often fail to relieve sufferers of their symptoms. An early example of this was observed in American Indian veterans of the Vietnam War, who demonstrated marked “treatment resistance” to novel PTSD therapies that were developed in the 1980s. In response to this, a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital in southern Puget Sound responded to requests by local tribal leaders to make indigenous healing and purification rituals available for American Indian veterans. Noting the efficacy of these rituals, a ritual community of indigenous veterans became established there who continue to practice their ceremonies today on a piece of sacred land adjacent to the VA hospital. The clinical PTSD diagnosis has evolved in accordance with medicalizing trends in the four decades since its recognition in the DSM. However, the social construct of combat trauma that is often known discursively as “PTSD” has grown and become increasingly entangled with various sociopolitical projects associated with war, gender, and racial/ethnic identity. In the 21st century, veterans increasingly prefer the signifier “warrior” over the civil term “veteran.” The warrior signifier conjures a more mythical notion of timeless, transcultural castes located in martial societies. At the same time, this warrior identity is being embraced by many outside of the military, including police and civilian defense contractors. Warriors are seen as a distinct kind of person who experiences war, suffering, and healing differently than civilians. Within this context, the combat trauma construct that is often generalized as “PTSD” becomes the fundamental marker of legitimate warrior experience. When the VA approved of making space for indigenous ceremony in the 1980s, it was because indigenous veterans were seen as denizens of “warrior cultures,” and understood to be ontologically distinct from non-indigenous veterans who were expected to heal best in a clinical environment. Until relatively recently, the ritual healing community was almost exclusive to the indigenous veterans it was created for. However, the ceremonies increasingly appeal to non-indigenous veterans and are now being seen as a therapeutic option for treatment-resistant veterans of all ethnicities. This situation creates the conditions for the complex intersection of several socioepistemological projects, including medicalization, race, indigeneity, militarism, and “warrior” identity among many other things. As a combat veteran with a PTSD diagnosis, my fieldwork centered on extended participation in the ceremonial life of this ritual community. Over a period of 36 months I made several trips to the site, including seven months of continuous fieldwork in 2019. I became close with the Elder Council, the team of experienced Native chaplains who officiate ceremonies in the ritual community. Drawing from several tribal traditions, particularly from Lakota/Plains traditions, these elders conduct sweat lodges, “talking circles,” and other ceremonies. These rituals serve a dedicated cohort of regular attendees, a segment of patients from the hospital’s inpatient PTSD program, and periodic visitors who are seeking healing after the failure of clinical therapy. My findings detail two developments: First, the ritual community exposes the limits of the 20th century process of medicalizing trauma associated with war/military service. For instance, ritual participants draw on the Lakota concept of iwáyazaŋ azúyeya, "the sickness one acquires from fighting others and the self" as the therapeutic object at stake, in contrast to "PTSD". Ceremonies directly address this sickness by highlighting Native experiences of colonization, the unique ways that trauma was experienced by Native veterans (particularly from the Vietnam War era), and the connections between violence and masculinity. Second, the site shifts the ways “warriordom” connects concepts of violence to concepts of culture. The notion that warriors are a unique kind of person who both suffer and heal differently from civilians may account for the increasing appeal of ritual therapy among non-Native veterans. However, the ceremonies compel veterans to confront warrior identity as a feature of white settler violence, and effectively turn healing into a process of social critique.
Item Open Access Forms of Empire: Law, Violence, and the Poetics of Victorian Power(2009) Hensley, Nathan KyranVictorian England was the first empire in history to imagine itself as liberal, believing that its own power could bring law to the darkest and most unruly corners of the world. But despite covering nearly the entire period known as the Pax Britannica, Victoria's long reign did not include a single year without war.
The conceptual knots presented by England's global power forced some of the century's most canonical authors to confront, and attempt to solve, contradictions fundamental to their self-consciously liberal society. Because law was understood by many Victorian theorists as the opposite of violence, it was when metropolitan thinkers came up against the fringes of civilization's ordering power, in the empire, that the violence underwriting peace become most uncomfortably plain. "Out there," said jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, "you see real government." But if what Stephen called the liberal state's quiet but crushing force emerged most explicitly at the peripheries of law's reach, literary forms composed at the center of the imperial network --London-- reveal the problem of liberal violence as absence, as silence: as a problem. These problems became dilemmas of narrative and poetic form that I argue are legible across linked areas of Victorian literary production: from the realist masterpiece (The Mill on the Floss) and the philosophical treatise (A System of Logic) to works of political historicism (On Liberty), sensation fiction (Armadale), and apparently apolitical poetry about flowers (Poems and Ballads). Forms of Empire looks to show how the Victorian state's interrelated forms --literary and political, conceptual and historical-- expose the violence liberal theory could not see.
Forms of Empire builds on and seeks to advance work on the pairing of "liberalism and empire" in the broad area of cultural studies. To do so it works dialectically, placing Victorian liberalism's vision of perpetual peace in the context of the empire's endless war and tracking loose networks of London-based thinkers as they confronted the problem of how violence relates to law. This process exposes live debates, both explicit and implicit, about just what force secured Victorian England's so-called Age of Equipoise. What emerges is a particularly literary analysis of how linked coteries of Victorian writers, through the height and decline of a great world power, attempted to make sense of the uneasy links they saw (and did not see) between liberalism and empire, the forms of law and the disorder of violence --the vexed connection, that is, between peace and war.
The project's focus on literary structure and political theory is also historical, tracing Victorian global rule from its phase of hegemonic globalization at mid-century (the so-called Age of Equipoise) into its more openly war-torn, post-1870 decline, a structure that corresponds to the project's two halves. While reframing existing periodizations of empire in Victorian Studies, this genealogical procedure also particularizes what is often studied as a homogenous "imperial discourse." Forms of Empire is necessarily interdisciplinary, since it charts the conceptual cross-pollination among semi-autonomous fields of Victorian knowledge: political theory, anthropology, economics, philosophy, and literature, among others. But it is also focused on method, showing that theoretical debates among Victorians themselves --about the dilemmas of their hegemony-- can illuminate controversies about liberalism, violence, and method in a newer moment of empire, ours.
Item Open Access Georges Sorel, Autonomy and Violence in the Third Republic(2012) Brandom, Eric WendebornHow did Georges Sorel's philosophy of violence emerge from the moderate, reformist, and liberal philosophy of the French Third Republic? This dissertation answers the question through a contextual intellectual history of Sorel's writings from the 1880s until 1908. Drawing on a variety of archives and printed sources, this dissertation situates Sorel in terms of the intellectual field of the early Third Republic. I locate the roots of Sorel's problematic at once in a broadly European late 19th century philosophy of science and in the liberal values and the political culture of the French 1870s. Sorel's engagement with Karl Marx, but also Émile Durkheim, Giambattista Vico, and other social theorists, is traced in order to explain why, despite his Marxism, Sorel confronted the twin fin-de-siècle crises of the Dreyfus Affair and Revisionism as a political liberal. I show how his syndicalism became radical, scissionistic, and anti-Statist in the post-Dreyfus context of anticlericalism leading up to the separation of Church and State in 1905. Sorel drew on figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Benedetto Croce to elaborate his Reflections on Violence in 1906-1908, finally transforming his political theory of institutions into an ethics of myth and individual engagement.
Sorel has been best known as an icon of radicalism as such--in shorthand, an inspiration for both Lenin and Mussolini. This political polarization has occluded Sorel's profound engagement with the foundational thinkers of the Third Republic. Against the backdrop of a systematic misunderstanding of the philosophical issues at stake, Sorel's political ideas and interventions have also been misunderstood. Not only his insights about the limits and potentials of the intellectual framework of the French Third Republic, but also their most significant contemporary resonances, have been lost. I show how and why this has been so by studying the reception of Sorel's work in the Anglophone world from the immediate postwar years until the early 1970s. Finally, I investigate resonances between Sorel's work as I have reconstructed it, and some currents in contemporary post-Marxist political thought.
Sorel is a revelatory figure in the entangled history of late 19th century liberalism and republicanism. He was profoundly engaged in the intellectual life of the French Third Republic and this, as much as his Marxism although less overtly, has shaped the meaning of his work. To return him to this context gives us a new understanding of the stakes of the philosophy of the period and the limits of its liberalism.
Item Open Access Healthcare Experiences, Needs, and Strategies of Survivors of Violence(2018) Reeves, Elizabeth AnneThe long-term and multi-faceted consequences of trauma are well documented and health conditions associated with traumatic life events are often those that benefit from early and regular attention from a healthcare provider. However, for many trauma-exposed women, seeking out and receiving healthcare is associated with physical and psychological intrusions that are linked to their traumatic experiences. Implementing trauma-informed care, based in knowledge and understanding of trauma that sensitively meets the needs of survivors, is an effective way to improve trauma survivors’ healthcare experiences. However, implementing such changes in practice to improve care for survivors is often made difficult by the current prevailing characteristics of patient-provider relationships and the U.S. healthcare system. Further, relying on providers to change practice is a disempowering position for survivors; supporting survivors to advocate for their needs within healthcare interactions and the healthcare system could be an efficient, effective and empowering solution to attaining widespread trauma-informed care.
This dissertation addresses current knowledge deficits through: 1) description and comparison of lifetime trauma exposure among community-based women from diverse locations and backgrounds; 2) examination of existing trauma-informed care practices for survivors of physical and sexual violence; and 3) descriptions of the healthcare experiences, needs, and strategies of female survivors of physical and sexual violence with regard to navigating healthcare experiences, provider interactions, and the healthcare system. A descriptive, correlational analysis and a synthesis of current literature were used to address the first and second research aims. Original qualitative interview and participatory Photovoice studies were conducted to address the third research aim.
Findings from the statistical analysis of trauma exposure among four community-based samples of women in Colombia, Hong Kong, and the United States indicate that trauma exposure is more similar than different and that trauma and its effects are pervasive in the lives of women across diverse locations. The synthesis of literature elucidates five thematic elements of trauma-informed care including: sensitive and universal screening, provider-patient relationships, minimizing distress, maximizing autonomy, and providing appropriate collaboration and referral. Findings from the qualitative interview and participatory Photovoice studies highlight imbalances in power dynamics and lack of mutual belief and trust as the most significant challenges to positive provider-patient relationships and healthcare experiences. These findings also indicate that survivors of violence use a variety of strategies to navigate healthcare encounters in the face of system-, agency- and provider-level barriers to positive healthcare experiences.
This dissertation adds to existing evidence on trauma exposure and trauma-informed care, and data on the engagement behaviors and healthcare strategies of survivors of violence addresses substantive gaps in the literature. Further, these findings generate useful frameworks and foundations for future research to continue to explore survivors’ healthcare desires, provider-survivor relationships, and provider- and survivor-led interventions to support the implementation of trauma-informed care.
Item Open Access Hostile attributional bias and aggressive behavior in global context.(Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2015-07-28) Dodge, Kenneth A; Malone, Patrick S; Lansford, Jennifer E; Sorbring, Emma; Skinner, Ann T; Tapanya, Sombat; Tirado, Liliana Maria Uribe; Zelli, Arnaldo; Alampay, Liane Peña; Al-Hassan, Suha M; Bacchini, Dario; Bombi, Anna Silvia; Bornstein, Marc H; Chang, Lei; Deater-Deckard, Kirby; Di Giunta, Laura; Oburu, Paul; Pastorelli, ConcettaWe tested a model that children's tendency to attribute hostile intent to others in response to provocation is a key psychological process that statistically accounts for individual differences in reactive aggressive behavior and that this mechanism contributes to global group differences in children's chronic aggressive behavior problems. Participants were 1,299 children (mean age at year 1 = 8.3 y; 51% girls) from 12 diverse ecological-context groups in nine countries worldwide, followed across 4 y. In year 3, each child was presented with each of 10 hypothetical vignettes depicting an ambiguous provocation toward the child and was asked to attribute the likely intent of the provocateur (coded as benign or hostile) and to predict his or her own behavioral response (coded as nonaggression or reactive aggression). Mothers and children independently rated the child's chronic aggressive behavior problems in years 2, 3, and 4. In every ecological group, in those situations in which a child attributed hostile intent to a peer, that child was more likely to report that he or she would respond with reactive aggression than in situations when that same child attributed benign intent. Across children, hostile attributional bias scores predicted higher mother- and child-rated chronic aggressive behavior problems, even controlling for prior aggression. Ecological group differences in the tendency for children to attribute hostile intent statistically accounted for a significant portion of group differences in chronic aggressive behavior problems. The findings suggest a psychological mechanism for group differences in aggressive behavior and point to potential interventions to reduce aggressive behavior.Item Open Access International Crises and Violent Non-State Actors: Ethnic Mobilization and Crisis Management(2011) Walton, EugeneThis dissertation explains the influence of ethnic non-state actors on the management of International Crises. I begin by arguing that when actively engaged in a crisis, ethnic actors contribute to; crisis violence, indecisive outcomes, and the escalation of interstate tensions. They do so because their more robust sponsorship allows them to drive relatively hard bargains with the state they are in conflict with. The analysis contributes to the development of theory by filling a gap in the literature and helping to resolve an important debate. Here I consider the entire population of non-state actors as a topic for analysis. This is in contrast to the general trend, which is to treat non-state actors as part of the landscape in studies that are otherwise concerned with ethnic conflict, terrorism or nation-building. In addition, the analysis here helps resolve a debate between bargaining theorist and ethnic conflict scholars concerning the relevance of ethnicity for our understanding of (both interstate and intrastate) conflict. In particular it identifies mechanisms specifically associated with ethnic rebel groups and demonstrates that ethnicity has an influence on interstate conflict through the actions of violent non-state actors. In the analysis I build on the logic above to develop a series of testable hypotheses. I then collect a new data-set of crisis-dyad-years and identify each crisis with a participating non-state actor (NSA-Crises) as well as those with ethnic non-state actors. Next I conduct a series of quantitative test of the relationship between ethnic actor participation and crisis management. The results demonstrate that ethnically mobilized rebel groups influence crises in unique ways, causing higher levels of violence and a higher incidence of stalemate. These findings are robust to various model specifications and the relationship between ethnic actors and crisis management is not conditioned by state-based sponsorship. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this analysis for both theory and policy-making.
Item Open Access Polyvictimization and Psychosocial Outcomes Among Trauma-Exposed, Clinic-Referred Youth Involved in the Juvenile Justice System.(Child maltreatment, 2022-11) Pane Seifert, Heather T; Tunno, Angela M; Briggs, Ernestine C; Hill, Sherika; Grasso, Damion J; Adams, Zachary W; Ford, Julian DPolyvictimization is a robust predictor of emotional and behavioral problems and is linked to involvement in juvenile justice and other public sector systems. This study extends prior research by employing person-centered methods for identifying polyvictimization patterns among trauma-exposed, clinic-referred, justice-involved youth (n = 689; ages 12-18 years) and how identified classes differ on psychosocial outcomes and demographic characteristics. Most participants had experienced multiple traumatic event (TE) types. Latent class analyses identified three classes: mixed trauma/bereavement exposure group (55.1%; Mean = 3.0 TE types); maltreatment polyvictimized group (29.3%; Mean = 5.7 TE types); and maltreatment plus extreme violence polyvictimized group (15.7%; Mean = 9.3 TE types). Polyvictimized youth were more likely to be female, in out-of-home placements, and experiencing negative psychosocial outcomes (e.g., Posttraumatic Stress Disorder). Hispanic/Latino youth were overrepresented in the extreme polyvictimized subgroup. Results underscore the need for cross-system coordination of trauma-informed, comprehensive services for clinic-referred, justice-involved youth.Item Open Access Secession and Survival: Nations, States and Violent Conflict(2009) Siroky, David S.Secession is a watershed event not only for the new state that is created and the old state that is dissolved, but also for neighboring states, proximate ethno-political groups and major powers. This project examines the problem of violent secessionist conflict and addresses an important debate at the intersection of comparative and international politics about the conditions under which secession is a peaceful solution to ethnic conflict. It demonstrates that secession is rarely a solution to ethnic conflict, does not assure the protection of remaining minorities and produces new forms of violence. To explain why some secessions produce peace, while others generate violence, the project develops a theoretical model of the conditions that produce internally coherent, stable and peaceful post-secessionist states rather than recursive secession (i.e., secession from a new secessionist state) or interstate disputes between the rump and secessionist state. Theoretically, the analysis reveals a curvilinear relationship between ethno-territorial heterogeneity and conflict, explains disparate findings in the literature on ethnic conflict and conclusively links ethnic structure and violence. The project also contributes to the literature on secessionist violence, and civil war more generally, by linking intrastate and interstate causes, showing that what is frequently thought of as a domestic phenomenon is in fact mostly a phenomenon of international politics. Drawing upon original data, methodological advances at the interface of statistics, computer science and probability theory, and qualitative methods such as elite interviews and archival research, the project offers a comprehensive, comparative and contextual treatment of secession and violence.
Item Open Access Shadow Zones: Contraband and Social Contract in the Borderlands of Tunisia(2018) Miller, Alyssa MarieAlthough Tunisia has been celebrated as the unique success story of the Arab Spring, its emergent democracy has failed to resolve the structural inequalities that caused the 2011 revolution, or meaningfully include marginal subjects within its address. This dissertation documents the life-worlds of those left behind in Tunisia’s democratic transition by tracking the precarious labor of smuggling by youth in the Western-Central interior. For unemployed youth living in the shadow of underdevelopment, smuggling offers a rare avenue of insertion into productive life, where the border serves as a natural resource for generating value through arbitrage. Disappointed by the revolution’s implicit promise of structural change, many young Tunisians now use these routes of economic survival to join up with jihadist militias abroad. Through 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kasserine, an impoverished province on Tunisia’s Algerian frontier, I examine how smuggling practice generates a landscape of ambivalent belonging to the nation, a “Shadow Zone” that elicits desire for the state, as well as the material means to evade it. I show how cross-border movement refracts the meaning of social justice for local actors, including petty smugglers and informal laborers who work the border economy, Tunisian families whose sons have been recruited to militias in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, and unemployed youth and civil society groups who militate for equitable development.
Item Open Access The Impact of Violence in Mexico on Education and Labor Outcomes: Do Conditional Cash Transfers Have a Mitigating Effect?(2019-04-12) Barton, HayleyThis research explores the potential mitigating effect of Mexico’s conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, on the education and labor impacts of increased homicide rates. Panel data models are combined with a difference-in-differences approach to compare children and young adults who receive cash transfers with those who do not. Results are very sensitive to specification, but Oportunidades participation is shown to be positively associated with educational attainment regardless of homicide increases. Homicides are associated with decreases in likelihood of school enrollment and compulsory education completion; however, they also correspond with increases in educational attainment, with a larger effect for Oportunidades non-recipients.Item Open Access The Righteous and the Profane: Performing a Punk Solidarity in Mexico City(2013) Tatro, KelleyAbstract
Mexico City's punk scene has a notorious reputation, based on the supposedly angry, rude, and destructive behavior of its integrants. Certainly, participants in the punk scene value intense affects, aesthetics, and interpersonal exchange, but see them as means to amplify their political consciousness, their attempts to create alternative social networks. In this dissertation thesis, based on an extended period of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City's punk scene, I investigate the co-constitution of the aesthetic and political for participants of the punk scene and ask what "the political" might entail for the city's marginalized punk youth. In pursuing a local punk aesthetics that is both righteous and profane, to borrow descriptive terminology from Dick Hebdige, I argue for close formal analysis of musical, artistic, and other social performance. I employ formal analysis to evaluate the flourishing of punk in the context of "el DeFectuoso"--as residents name the hard-scrabble, global South metropolis of Mexico City--decades after punk's initial arrival in Mexico. Deluezian network theory and social movement theory more broadly help me argue for a politically constituted music "scene," created largely through U.S.-Mexico cross-border relations, without fixing its boundaries or stultifying its politics. Additionally, I explore the affective dimensions of punk performance, the role of music in subjectivization, and the importance of the body trained intersubjectively for both listening and performing. It is at the points of convergence of these three approaches that I locate a punk aesthetics as at once a punk ethics, animated by an ideal of "direct action." Within chapters organized through broad themes like networks, violence, labor, and solidarity, I address topics from the harsh, hard-working vocal performances punks employ to the various anarchist currents that shape an always-tenuous, specifically Mexican punk solidarity, constituted through practices like street sing-alongs, the creation of alternative DIY networks of exchange, and fanzine writing and design. Within these routes of investigation, I elucidate the ways in which participants in Mexico City's punk scene use profanity and outrage in the performance of a righteous ethic that informs their struggles to maintain solidarity and make a difference, through an explicitly political social network that is nevertheless grounded in aesthetic experience.
Item Open Access ‘To Restore Peace and Tranquility to the Neighborhood’: Violence, Legal Culture and Community in New York City, 1799-1827(2019) Cashwell, Meggan Farish“‘To Restore Peace and Tranquility to the Neighborhood’: Violence, Legal Culture and Community in New York City, 1799-1827” examines the various ways ordinary people, legal officials, lawmakers, and editors negotiated the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion, or what historians call “belonging.” It uses legal cases and crime publications to analyze contradictory visions of the public good within the context of key political and social changes in the city, state, and nation. The dissertation moves from the operations of violence on the ground to the ideological implications of violence in the era of gradual emancipation. New Yorkers—male and female, free and unfree, native and immigrant—could and did participate in legal proceedings. Complainants and witnesses relied on the processes of law rather than actual verdicts to establish order in their personal lives and in their communities. This dissertation contends that people made and remade community through the adjudication and interpretation of violent conflict.
Violence was indicative of daily exchanges and disagreements, all of which were linked to how people envisioned themselves and the “other,” or what scholars refer to as “reputation.” Gendered and racialized identities developed from negotiations that transpired inside and outside legal forums. White women, free blacks, and enslaved and indentured persons continually redefined notions of femininity and blackness through the violence they employed.
Concepts of reputation and race and gender formation intersected in legal forums and in broader discussions about how men and women should conduct themselves in the nineteenth century. At a moment when lawmakers debated the nature of citizenship, crime publications intentionally highlighted violent offenses to offer a particular vision of who citizens should be and to marginalize the working classes, immigrants, and African Americans. The institution of slavery and the violence inherent to it became a means for editors to portray African Americans as socially inferior and to guard the city’s moral reputation against abolitionists. Ultimately, violence played a role in the efforts of editors and lawmakers to delegitimize free blacks’ social and political belonging in New York and the nation as a whole.
Item Open Access Valuing the benefits of reducing firearm violence in the United States.(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025-01) Cook, Philip J; Jeuland, Marc; Ludwig, JensJustifying a proposed government regulation intended to reduce firearm violence requires a conceptually sound estimate of the monetized value of that impact and how that value is distributed across the population. Some previous estimates do not serve as a valid basis for policy evaluation or are out of date. A nationally representative survey was conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in August 2022 (n = 660). The authors designed and added a series of contingent-valuation items to the questionnaire. Double-bounded estimates of willingness-to-pay (WTP) were derived from a regression analysis of responses regarding voting on a hypothetical referendum on a state-wide package of measures designed to reduce gun violence at specified cost to taxpayers. Average WTP for a reduction of 20% in the state rate of gun violence was $744 per household (IQR:$668-$928), implying a national total of $97.6 billion. Household WTP was positively associated with household income, the respondent's assessment of the seriousness of gun violence in their community and the subjective likelihood that they would become a victim of gun violence. A variety of tests support the claim that this application of the contingent-valuation method provided valid results. WTP is the recognized basis for assessing the value of proposed federal regulations. The estimated WTP for reducing gun violence is about twice as high as a recent cost-of-injury estimate and provides a much different picture of the incidence of costs by income and demographic characteristics.