Theories of Violent Offending - Notes

Outline

  • Violent offending:

    • Includes various behaviors.

    • Varies in commonality.

    • Involves specific individuals.

  • Reasons for violent offending:

    • Various proposed theories.

    • Evaluation of these theories.

    • Necessity of theories for violent offending.

The Importance of Theories

  • Effective interventions require a strong theoretical foundation of the phenomena.

Key Reading

  • Polaschek, D. L. L. (2019). The Psychology of Violent Offending. University of Waikato (Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato), New Zealand.

    • Important reading emphasized for 3 lectures.

Theories of Violent Offending

  • Neurobiological theories

  • Single factor theories

    • Psychopathy

    • Patriarchy

  • Typologies of aggression

    • Reactive vs instrumental aggression

  • Theories of aggressive behavior

    • The General Aggression Model

  • Specialization in violent offending

  • Developmental theories of crime

Neurobiological Theories

  • Biological variables associated with violence:

    • Inheritable temperament factors

    • Low constraint

    • High negative emotionality

    • Low resting heart rate

    • Monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) metabolism

    • Less developed pre-frontal cortical structures

    • Serotonin metabolism

  • Planning decision making occurs in the frontal cortex.

  • Lower heart rate is associated with lower fearfulness and anxiety, leading to higher violence.

  • Childhood trauma is strongly associated with future violence.

  • Sensation seeking: higher level of boredom.

Limitations of Neurobiological Theories

  • Limited research linking neurobiology and future violent behavior.

  • Many studies are better characterized as “marker studies”.

  • The extent to which differences in brain structure identified with psychopathy or criminal history may be beneficial in understanding violence is unclear.

  • Need to be cautious because people find these explanations satisfying.

  • Dangerous to assume causality when there is merely correlation.

  • Marker studies suggest life experiences lead to changes in brain functions, not the other way around.

Single Factor Theories: Psychopathy

  • Higher scores on measures of psychopathy are associated with violent offending.

  • However:

    • Generic antisocial behavior and lifestyle features of psychopathy are most strongly associated with violence.

    • Personality trait facets are much less strongly associated with violence (e.g., Yang et al., 2010).

Single Factor Theories: Gendered Theory of IPV

  • Patriarchal views sit behind violence committed in relationships.

  • Pattern of behavior men use against female partners.

Evaluating the Gendered Theory of IPV

  • Attitudes and beliefs about violence towards women remain an important risk factor for violence, particularly within relationships.

  • However, limited treatment effectiveness of programs solely targeting patriarchal attitudes (Gannon et al., 2019).

  • Men’s violence is not solely motivated by patriarchal beliefs; women’s violence is not solely motivated by self-defense (Dixon et al., 2021).

  • Cannot account for:

    • Women’s perpetration/men’s victimization

    • IPV in same sex relationships

    • Reciprocal aggression

    • Other risk factors that are associated with IPV.

Typologies of Aggression

  • Reactive Aggression

  • Instrumental Aggression

Reactive Aggression

  • Driven by anger.

  • Immediate goal is harming the victim.

  • Often a reaction or retaliation.

  • Reinforcement from the reduction in tension.

Instrumental Aggression

  • Premeditated or unprovoked.

  • Victim is harmed to achieve some other goal, e.g.:

    • Gaining material goods

    • Addressing damage to social standing

    • Dispensing justice

Limitations of the Reactive-Instrumental Typology

  • Assumptions are overly simplistic.

  • Both reactive and instrumental aggression can occur rapidly without provocation.

  • Both instrumental and reactive aggression can be premeditated.

  • The same behavior can be reactive or instrumental.

  • Angry aggression is unlikely to be a specific type of aggression.

Social Interactionist Theory

  • Challenged to a fight in a bar.

  • Assault.

  • Inflict harm (proximate outcome).

  • Increase social standing AND deter others from further fights (terminal outcomes).

  • People make rational decisions; aggression is underpinned by more than one goal.

Social Learning Theory

  • Bandura doll experiment: presented children with a doll where an adult was either aggressive or playing nicely to see if children imitated behavior.

Social Learning Theory

  • Attention: Did you notice the behavior?

  • Retention: Can you remember the behavior?

  • Reproduction: Are you physically capable of the behavior?

  • Motivation: Do you want to perform the behavior?

  • What determines whether a behavior is imitated?

Social Learning Theory In The Real World

  • One criticism of the Bandura study is ethics.

  • Study link between seeing and displaying violence – witnessing violence impact on own behavior.

  • Seeing fights, parental familial guns, threats etc.

  • Child maltreatment and extent of interparental violence.

Social Learning Theory

  • Those who experienced or witnessed these things are more likely to engage in them themselves.

  • Even those who experience no maltreatment or parental violence still see 10-15% engage in violence; where was it learned?

  • Majority even those experiences severe over ¾ didn’t engage in violent delinquency in adulthood so not certainty.

Social Learning Theory

  • Consistent with social learning theory

  • Direct and indirect childhood exposure to violence and maltreatment within the family increased the risk of subsequent violent delinquent behavior

  • Strongest effect when children experienced AND witnessed violence

  • Effects were mediated by parental moral authority

  • Limitations of social learning theory

    • 11.4\% of children who did not experience violence reported engaging in violent delinquency

    • 13\% of children who did not witness violence reported engaging in violent delinquency

  • Effects also mediated by parental monitoring and parental knowledge

  • Parental authority + parental monitoring = less violent

Limitations of Social Learning Theory

  • Overvalues role of observational learning

  • Minimizes the role of cognitive factors

  • Neglects biological factors

  • Patterns of reinforcement not included in SLT

  • Cognitive factors

    • abuse led to change in you more likely to do it.

    • Hypervigilance

    • Hostile contribution bias

  • Biological factors

The General Aggression Model (Allen et al., 2018)

  • Models include multiple factors

  • Biology and environment make personality

The General Aggression Model (Allen et al., 2018)

  • ADHD

  • Impaired executive functioning

  • Hormone imbalances

  • Low serotonin

  • Low arousal

  • Cultural norms

  • Maladaptive parenting

  • Difficult life conditions

  • Victimization

  • Violent peers/neighborhood

  • Chronic exposure to violent media

  • Nature + nurture = personality

  • More factors in reading, don’t see exactly how they interact but more factors worse to predispose engage in violence

The General Aggression Model (Allen et al., 2018)

  • Person is predisposed; personality also plays a role to end up in those situations

Violence-Supportive Beliefs (Polaschek et al., 2009)

  • “Beat or be beaten”

  • “I am the law”

  • “Violence is normal”

  • “I get out of control”

  • Common beliefs from transcripts interviews men prison violence

Hostile Attribution Bias

  • Interpret external stimuli out of cues in more hostile way – personal level factor

The General Aggression Model (Allen et al., 2018)

  • Not certain with person + situation

  • Routes – present internal state

    • cognition, arousal, affect each of these 3 can affect other no order.

The Cognitive-Behavioral Model

  • In treatment when working with people, not just violent offending to understand own internal experience.

  • Bidirectional arrows, all can impact the other.

  • Helps to find interventions to break other aspects of experiences.

  • This displays present internal state aspect on general aggression model.

The General Aggression Model (Allen et al., 2018)

  • Outcome – always decision made

  • Most times decision seems automatic – violence aggression but we know its from general aggression model

  • Immediate appraisal situation – bump into party (chapter reading) , then do we have sufficient cognitive resources (intoxication alters resources available, why they bumped into us, if not satisfied with outcome may consider reappraisal. Often even if reappraisal process occurs but that decision will still be to engage in violence

  • Guy bumps into party, accident, no its happened before I have to be violent take social standing – went through appraisal

  • Target intervention – get better appraisal process so nonviolent outcome, they’ve bumped into 4 other ppl to bathroom

  • Don’t run through reappraisal violence

Evaluating the GAM

  • Draws together multiple prior theories at different levels

  • Can be applied to a range of violent offending

  • Includes explanation of why people may NOT be violent in some situations

  • Informs effective methods of rehabilitation

  • Lack of detail about how combinations of risk factors interact

Key Question:

  • Do people specialize in violent offending?

The Case for Treating Violence as Special

  • Looked at frequency of violent offenses compared to frequency of overall offenses

  • No evidence of specialization in conviction records

  • Rates of violence convictions were proportionate to rate of overall offenses

  • Some evidence of specialization in self-report

  • A few individuals had very high likelihoods of committing violent acts

The Case Against Treating Violence as Special

  1. Violent and non-violent elements frequently co-occur with the same criminal event

  2. For chronic offenders, the most common pattern is one of occasional violence and more frequent arrests for diverse other crimes

  3. Risk factors for crime overlap risk factors for violent crime

Wilson (2004)

  • Illustrated study looking at high-risk reoffenders

  • Looked at criminal history total conviction of 149 people

  • 74.13 then 5.66 violent convictions, even those high risk offenders so its not specialist behaviour part of broader picture widespread criminal behavior.

KEY FINDINGS

  • Similar predictive accuracy for general and violent recidivism

  • Lower predictive accuracy for sexual recidivism

  • General recidivism likelihood, not meant solely for violent recidivism however

  • Reflects higher criminal history likely engage in future criminal behavior including violence

KEY FINDINGS

  • Risk measures predicted IPV and other offending

  • Conclusion: “Men arrested for IPV do not specialize in their criminal careers”

  • Some research suggesting some only engage in family violence but doesn’t hold up

  • Risk measure intended to predict IPV, predict IPV and general criminal offending

The case against treating violence as special

  • “these patterns of overlap between violence, other crime, and their correlates suggests that multivariate frameworks and theories developed for those with high levels of antisocial and criminal propensity will also offer at least partial explanations of violent events and why some people commit many more of them than others”

The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory (Farrington, 2003)

  • ICAP – draws on Cambridge longitudinal studies

  • similar idea draw from earlier experiences impact on neuroattachment socialisation not focused on violence just antisocial violence, violence one of many

  • This shows how people end up in situations where violence occurs e.g routing activities theory how activities day to day leads to situations crime or find victims offending

  • Explains more broadly criminal behaviour and antisocial behaviour how reinforced punished what learned from behaviour, various factors play if behaviour continues

  • Limitation of model – doesn’t include why people desist from crime, maybe punishment will take people away from violent or antisocial behaviour

Moffitt’s Typology and Violence

  • LIFE-COURSE PERSISTENT

    • More likely to engage in all offending, including violence

    • “biting and hitting at age 4, shoplifting and truancy at age 10, selling drugs and stealing cars at age 16, robbery and rape at age 22, and fraud and child abuse at age 30” (Moffitt, 1993, p. 679)

  • ADOLESCENT-LIMITED

    • May engage in (serious) violence during adolescence

    • Likely to move away from violence (and other offending) in adulthood

  • LCP – also consistent with idea that violence is non specialized

Summary

  • There has been lots of research into why people commit violent offending

  • This behaviour cannot be explained with a single factor

  • Multifactor theories that incorporate person- and event-related factors currently provide the best explanation of violent offending

  • Social cognitive theories (e.g., GAM) currently used to inform best-practice intervention

  • Role of neurobiological factors receiving a lot of attention, but no causal mechanisms established

  • Theories of general criminal behaviour may also explain violent offending

  • More longitudinal psychological research specifically focused on criminal violence would help to establish the uniqueness of violent offending