Chapter 5 Questions

• What is the difference between individual violence and group violence and what are the three kinds of group violence?









• What makes violence a social problem? Who is most likely to be concerned?







• Objectively speaking, and in comparison with other countries, how violent is the United States and how has the rate of violence changed since the late 1960's?









• Subcultural theory argues that violence is learned (and defined positively) in interaction with others within violent subcultures which are those that value violence as an appropriate response to problematic situations. Which groups are most likely to have a violent subculture?





• What is Merton's strain theory of crime?











• According to conflict theorists, which groups in society are likely to be violent? How does violence vary by social class?









• What did the feminists of the 1960's and 1970's add to the analysis of rape that led it to be viewed more as a social concern than it had been before?







• What is the likelihood that a woman will be raped sometime during her lifetime?

• What are some of the patterns associated with rape?









• Who is more likely to rape? What happens when women resist their attacker?









• At what point in a relationship is date rape most likely to occur?





• In a study of undergraduates, what percentage believed that forced sexual intercourse can sometimes be permissible?



• What percentage of rapes are reported to the police? Who is least likely to report a rape?









• Why is it so traumatic to report a rape to the police (leading some to refer to this process as the "legal rape")?









• What accounts for above described "legal rape" and what are some of the specific attitudes that comprise that mind-set?









• What recent changes mark an improvement in the treatment of rape victims?













• What percentage of murders are committed by strangers? Who is most likely to commit a murder? Is murder most likely to happen between races or within a race?

• Why are we more likely to kill someone we know?

• What are some explanations of why poor people have such a high murder rate?



















• What's the difference between mass murder and serial killing? What's the probable difference in motivation between the two kinds of murder? Are these kind of murders becoming more common?











• What's the difference in policies advocated by the retributionist and the reformist?













• What are the author's recommendations for dealing with offenders?

















• What are some steps for preventing violence?

• Why, according to your author, is violence likely to continue at relatively high levels in our society?

Questions on the Video, When Women Kill

• What was the pattern of behavior leading up to the three killings that are the focus of this video?







• Why, historically, have the courts tended to define women who kill their men as psychologically abnormal?

What kinds of abnormalities?

• What are battered women's thoughts and feelings about their situation?







• Historically, what has been society's attitude toward men's violence against their wives?







• In the past, what has been the police response to spousal battering? How, then, were men charged with a crime? How has this changed?









• What are some typical penalties haded out by the courts to men charged with spousal assault?







• In what sense, are women who kill their partners using killing as a last resort? What, typically, did women do prior to their final, lethal response?

• In what sense do men who kill their women after a history of abuse represent a form of terrorism for other battered women and for all women?











• In what sense do men who batter gain a sense of identity form their assault?

In their own words, how do men in the real-life group (seen in the video) phrase this?

• Why aren't battered women who kill usually included in the legal model for permissible killing in self defense?











• What is the problem in using the battered women's syndrome as a defense for killing?







• Again, what is the major, long-standing societal problem that underlies the phenomenon of men beating women and women sometimes killing these men?