Chapter 8: Violent Offending: General Violence and Homicide

Reactive Versus Instrumental Violence:

Reactive violence: Acts of violence and aggression that are impulsive, unpremeditated, and characterized by intense negative emotion (ex. anger)

Vs.

Instrumental Violence: Premeditated violence ultimately aimed at achieving some secondary goal beyond harming the victim (ex. money)

Homicide:

Four types of homicide are identified in the Canadian criminal code

First-degree murder: Murder is first degree when it is planned and deliberate or under any of the following conditions:

The victim is a peace officer (ex. Police officer) or a prison employee (correctional officer)
the victim's death is caused while committing or attempting to commit the hijacking of an aircraft, sexual assault, kidnapping, hostage taking, criminal harassment, terrorist activity, use of explosives and association with a criminal organization, or intimidation.

First degree murder results in a life sentence with no eligibility for parole until a maximum of 25 years served, with the option of consecutive minimum 25-year prison terms for multiple counts.

Second-degree murder: A crime involving the intentional commission of homicide without premeditation, punishable by a life sentence with no parole eligibility for at least 10 years

Infanticide: Maternal cause of death of a young infant by a willful act or omission, if “ at the time of the act of omission she is not fully recovered from the effects of giving birth to the child and by reason thereof or the effect of lactation consequent on the birth of the child her mind is then disturbed”

Maximum sentence length for infanticide is five years

Manslaughter: Homicide that is not deliberate or premeditated

Homicide is also manslaughter if death results from Criminal negligence
manslaughter also results in a life sentence; however, there is no minimum term required to be served for eligibility for parole

Multiple Murder: Definitions and Characteristics:

Multiple murder is usually defined as killing three or more victims. multiple murders can be divided into Mass murder, spree murder, and serial murder

Mass Murder: Killing three or more victims in a single location with no “cooling off period” between murders

Spree murder: Killing three more victims at two or more locations with no cooling off. between murders.

Serial murder: Killing three more people, usually in different locations, with a cooling off. between murders

Assault and Robbery: Assaults involve the unlawful Commission of physical aggression toward another individual and these are graded by their severity.

Most Frequent: Common assault: Unlawful physical contact on a person (ex. pushing, slapping, punching and face-to-face verbal threats)

Level-2 assaults: Assault with a weapon: Actual or threatened use of a weapon against a person

Assault causing bodily harm: Causing physical injury to the victim

Level-3: aggravated assault: Causing severe bodily harm including maiming, disfiguring, or endangering the life of the victim

Robbery: The actual or threatened use of violence when stealing from another person, including the use of physical violence, a weapon (real or imitation, such as an actual or toy gun), or threats in order to overcome resistance during the commission of the offense

Critical Stats and Facts: LO 8.1:

Scope of Violence:

Violet crime accounted for approximately 1 and 5 21% of criminal incidents reported to the police via Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Survey

Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Survey: Measures the incidence of crime reported to police in a given year and some of the characteristics of those crimes; includes offenses against victims of all ages and incorporates the territories and provinces

Offense Characteristics: Men are much more likely to commit violent offenses, but the rates of violence victimization among men and women are quite similar.

However, differences between the victimization of men and women become apparent when the type of violence is taken into consideration.

Impacts of Violent Victimization:

Violence causes physical and emotional harm. approximately one in five violent crimes causes physical injury to victims Gannon & Mihorean 2005)

And recent large-scale literature review of the effects of balance on health broadly defined, Rivera et al 2019: noted consequences to be severe mental health sequel, included elevated anxiety, depression,Post-traumatic stress disorder, and increase suicide. Medically, the authors noted that violence has consequences beyond the physical injuries inflicted by a violent act and extends to increase risk for cardiovascular disease as well as premature death.

LO 8.2 Summarize some of the major theories of violence and aggression:

Social Learning Theory: Social learning theory Bandura 1973 hold, as the name suggests, aggression is learned.

In operant conditioning, behavior is shaped by its consequences; that is, reinforcement or punishment. Reinforcement increases the likelihood that a given Behavior will occur, whereas punishment decreases the likelihood of its occurrence.
Adding The Familiar concept of apparent conditioning Bondurant 1973 argued that people learn not only from direct experience, but also from observing the behavior of others and the outcomes of others behavior.
observing others receiving various rewards for their aggression would increase the likelihood that one would engage in similar forms of aggression
The self is also an important source of reinforcement. self-reinforcement refers to the influence of self- administered Rewards or punishments for aggression. If self-evolution following aggression is positive, aggression will be more likely than itself evolution is negative.

Biosocial Model of Violence: Explanatory model of criminal violence based on interaction of biological and social influences

The model is a product of review of 39 articles examining biological correlates of violence and aggressive behavior, as moderate by Environmental factors, genetic and environmental forces each give rise to biological and social risks which culminates in violence

Two Path Model of Criminal Violence:

Lalumiere, Harris, and Rice’s 2001 Tupac model of criminal violence address two primary Pathways to criminal violence as mediated by antisocial parenting. As with the biosocial model, this model also involves an interaction between biological and social agents; however, it is a bit more specific about the potential casual culprits of violence. both Pathways involve an interaction between biological and social factors
they used a technique called structural equation modeling where they defined each set of pathway markers by a set of individual variables, and then examined their unique associations with criminal violence, which was defined by the presence or absence of violent criminal history and the presence or absence of violent recidivism.

General Personality and Cognitive Social Learning Theory:

General Personality and Cognitive Social Learning Theory (GPCSL) explanation of criminal Behavior is a comprehensive and integrated theory that can also be extended to crimes of violence
In this theory, violent behavior is learned through social learning processes like other behaviors, and specifically through exposure to antisocial role models (ex. parents, friends, siblings, extended family) who display and reinforce antisocial behavior and values conducive to crime and violence; conversely, they may also provide little
supervision or oversight as well as a few or no consequences for antisocial and violent Behavior

LO. 8.3 Factors associated with Violence:

Relevant risk factors have been identified through research efforts by defining the factor and then linking the presence of the factor to important outcomes, such as crime and violence.
When enough individual studies have been conducted, the findings can be aggregated through the process of meta-analysis, which generates more stable and generalizable findings about a given risk factor, since this represents the synthesis of many different studies.
Five meta-analyses are presented in three columns. The results are organized into generally static factors that include some demographic and criminal history variables, as well as what are arguably more dynamic factors, which are psychological and social factors listed

Static Factors:

Key static variables such as young age and single marital status predict violent recidivism
The static variables represent a couple of well-established associations-that the best predictor of future behavior tends to be past behavior and that indicators of young age or interpersonal immaturity predict adverse outcomes, such as criminal violence.