Canada’s (1995) essential thesis on violence causation is that violence is a learned response to the realities of a harsh environment. Canada (1995) utterly rejects any consideration of the possible genetic or biological roots of violence:
There is no way that I can buy the theory that humans
have some genetic predisposition to violence. I know
better. I remember clearly the time in my life that I
knew nothing of violence and how hard I worked later
to learn to become capable of it. My initial belief that
violence is learned has been reinforced by years of
counseling and teaching children and adolescents in
inner-city neighborhoods in Boston and New York
Canada, 1995, p. 23).
Canada (1995) recounts his first encounters with violence as a six year old, remembering distinctly how frightened and intimated he was when another child robbed him of sixty-one cents and how, no matter how much he felt like he should, he just couldn’t bring himself to fight back. He also remembers an earlier time (when he was about four years old) when a bully stole a coat from one of his brothers and he (the author) couldn’t even conceive of the possibility of resisting or fighting back. Canada (1995), noted, however, that he soon learned that violence was the expected and appropriate response to any challenge or threat. Eventually, he also learned to effectively carry out the violent response.
Although Canada was to a certain extent self-taught in the discipline of violence, he also had a number of teachers. The first person to instruct Canada in the rules and norms of violence was his own mother. A single mother raising four sons in incredibly difficult economic and social circumstances, Canada’s mother told him and his brothers that “she would not tolerate our becoming victims” (Canada, 1995, p. 5). She made her sons stand up to bullies, to act unafraid and to defend themselves – violently, if necessary. She told them if they didn’t stand up for themselves, she would beat them. Canada (1995) reported that he was not alone in the experience of having been schooled in violence at his mother’s knee:
I have counseled so many children who’ve said they
acted violently because their parents told them to.
Parents often give instructions similar to those my
mother gave my brother: fight back or I will beat
you when you get home..The parents feeling as if
they had no alternative. Accept it, this is a violent
world, so teach them to cope by acting more violently
than the others (Canada, 1995, p. 6).
Canada (1995) notes regretfully that he had in fact given similar advice to his own daughter (telling her to never again let any boy or girl attack her without fighting back) after she was attacked by another girl on a school bus.
While his mother first set down the mandate to respond to violence with violence, she provided no direct instruction in how he should respond violently. Canada’s (1995) direct tutors were the older boys in his neighborhood, including his own older brothers. These boys taught Canada the “code of conduct” in the ghetto and schooled him in the rules of survival in a violent world. From these mentors, Canada learned when he had to fight and when it was acceptable to back down, he learned how to fight with his fists, and he learned the advantages of carrying a knife. Canada (1995) describes a macho-driven inculcation into the violent ghetto culture:
The first rules I learned on Union Avenue stayed
with me for all my youth. They were simple and
straightforward: Don’t cry. Don’t act afraid. Don’t
tell your mother. Take it like a man. Don’t let no
one take your manhood. My teachers were the typical
instructors on blocks like Union Avenue – the
adolescents we all looked up to... (p. 37).
Adults really didn’t figure into the world inhabited by Canada (1995) and his contemporaries, and Canada (1995) reports that he learned early on that it was a mistake to turn to adults (e.g., school officials) for help since they would inevitably betray confidences and in doing so put him at greater danger.
The first several chapters of Canada’s (1995) book present a case history of violence as a learned response. He recounts his own initiation into violence and reports how he learned the “code of conduct” of the violent streets that were his home. In the final few chapters of his book, Canada (1995) take pains to note the differences between the violent streets of the present era and those of his youth. While maintaining that today’s youth also “learn” violence, Canada (1995) argues that they have done so within a far less organized and comprehensive framework of lessons and codes than in his day. Canada (1995) was schooled in violence within the context of “fair” (albeit, mean) fighting which did not often feature guns. In contrast, violence on the contemporary street is dominated by gun violence. The presence of lethal weapons inevitably changed the traditional codes of conduct. Canada (1995) notes that he “knew that the codes of conduct were deteriorating when I heard young teenagers saying they’d ‘rather be judged by twelve than carried by six’. The message on the street is clear: make a preemptive strike, shoot first even if you’re not sure that your life is threatened at the moment. Odds are you’ll live, and if you’re arrested and then convicted at least you’ll still be alive (p. 69). Whereas Canada and his generation learned, through years of experience, how to make effective violent responses, Canada (1995) notes that the current generation is inherently inexperienced: [“For many of today’s child gangsters, how tough you are is measured by how lethal a gun you carry. They may never have won a fight, or even fought one...”] (p. 85).
Canada (1995) argues that the proliferation of handguns (which he attributes both to the natural tendency to escalate the level of violence from fist to knife to gun and to the widespread availability of guns, thanks to a lack of adequate gun control laws, gun ownership among adults, and deliberate efforts by gun manufacturers to market gun to young people) is a significant causal factor in the increase in youth violence, and a primary factor in the increase in lethal violence among young. He argues that not only the mere presence and availability of guns, but also the psychological impact of the availability of guns heightens the risk of lethal violence:
There were always some natural checks on violence
among young people before handguns were so common.
There were many times that I wished I could have fought
back when I was growing up but I didn’t because I knew
I couldn’t beat the other boy...Even when a fight went ahead,
the outcome wasn’t guaranteed...Kids with guns often see no
limits on their power. They have never run up against the
natural checks that we faced growing up...Too often today
kids with guns experience the limits of their power only when
they are dying. Having a gun means that you can adopt a new
set of standards of what you will or will not take from others...
(Canada, 1995, p. 100).
Thus, in looking for the causes behind the current epidemic of youth violence, Canada (1995) hues to the same basic causal framework he cited to explain the violence of his own youth – that is, a learned response to environmental/social influences including poverty, unemployment, disrupted families, and an absence of adequate school/community resources. While these same factors hold true today, Canada (1995) argues that the proliferation of guns has both raised the stakes and accelerated the time frame for learning the lessons of violence. In assessing the current explosion of urban youth violence, Canada (1995) also points to the important causative role of political and social factors, notably the passage of so-called “Rockefeller drug laws” (which imposed heavy penalties on adult repeat offenders) and the emergence of the crack cocaine market. Canada (1995) argues that these two factors combined to encourage the direct involvement of children and adolescents in the urban illegal drug trade. Whitaker (2000) likewise notes the crack epidemic and the new drug laws as combining to create powerful social inducements to lethal violence among gun-toting urban youth. The following section three discusses the causes of violence through the lenses of current research.
The Causes of Violence: Current Research Perspective
Tilly (2000) argues that observers of human violence can be divided into three camps in terms of their assessment of the causes of violence: idea people, behavior people, and relation people. According to Tilly (2000), the idea people “stress consciousness as the basis of human action” and “claim that humans acquire beliefs, concepts, rules, goals, and values from their environments” (p. iii). “Behavior people” on the other hand “stress the autonomy of motives, impulses, and opportunity”, while “relation people make transactions among persons and groups far more central than do idea and behavior people. They argue that humans develop their personalities and practices through interchanges with other humans” (Tilly, 2000, p. iii). Conversely, “from a social constructionist perspective, social reality is a product of social interaction in the form of individual decisions, interpretations, and action” (Brownstein, 2000, p. 4). Within this framework, Canada (1995) would probably fall somewhere between an “idea person” and a “relation person” while clearly rejecting the basic tenets of the behavior view.
A review of the literature on violence causation suggests that most analysts argue against the notion of any one single cause of violence, instead maintaining that there are multiple, overlapping causes of violence. Garbarino (2001) presents one of the more extreme versions of multi-causal theory:
When asked, ‘what causes violence among
children and adolescents?’ I respond, ‘there is
no cause, only the accumulation of risk factors.’
This means that no single factor does much to tell
the story. Rather, each adds to the cumulative risk.
This model is an important derivation of the ‘ecological’
perspective on human development. From such an
ecological perspective, when the question is ‘does X
cause Y?’ the best answer is ‘it depends.’ It depends
on the context in which that X and Y are operating...
(Garbarino, 2001, p. 13).
Borduin and Schaeffer (1998) note that a broad range of factors have been correlated with violence and aggression. These include low IQ scores, early childhood aggression, disturbed family relations, domestic violence, ineffectual parental discipline and poor parental monitoring, lack of parental warmth, involvement with deviant peers, absence of positive role models, and poor school performance. Correlation does not, however, prove causation, and as Borduin and Schaeffer (1998) note, most studies indicate that violent behavior “is contributed to directly or indirectly by variables at the individual, family, peer, school, and community levels” (p. 158). These researchers further caution that:
It is possible that the variables that lead to violent
behavior in adolescents may not be the same as the
variables that maintain such behavior. For example,
individual (e.g., hostile attributional biases) and
family (e.g., parental rejection, low family warm)
variables may represent key determinants of the
onset of violent criminal activity among younger
adolescents, whereas peer (e.g., association with
deviant peers) and school (e.g., low achievement,
dropping out) variables may be linked more strongly
with continued participation and even escalation in
violent criminal activity in middle and later
adolescence (Borduin & Schaeffer, 1998, p. 158).
Current research points to a broad range of social, political, psychological, and biological causes of violence. Focusing on the social/environmental inducements to violence, Whitaker (2000) cites many of the same causal contributors as Canada (1995). In particular, Whitaker (2000) cites the proliferation of guns and the promotion of guns by gun manufacturers and anti-gun control organizations, the promotion of violence by the entertainment media and by the news media, media promotion of a macho culture, fatherlessness, poverty, police attitudes and law enforcement policies, economic inequality, and racial discrimination. In looking at the social causes of violence, Gilligan (2001) focuses on a similar range of factors, including poverty and unemployment; income inequity; and race and age discrimination.
Canada (1995) is also not alone in pointing a finger at the media. While analysts have long accused the entertainment media of promoting violence and contributing to young people’s acculturation of violence, other analysts have looked at the role played by the news media. In separate studies, Kirkhorn (1996) and McManus & Dorfman (2002) found that the news media coverage of violence in general, and youth violence in particular, tended to focus on the more sensational aspects of the violence. McManus & Dorfman’s (2002) content analysis of three major California newspapers found that routine coverage of youth crime “fails to provide context to help readers make sense of such events” (p. 6). Six years earlier, Kirkhorn (1996) had argued that “the media need to focus less on sensational and violent crime and more on the social and cultural roots of violence” (p. 4).
A number of researchers have pointed to alcohol and drug use as increasing risk for violent behavior. Noting that alcohol and drug use are two of the most widely cited correlates of violent behavior, Markowitz (2001) examined the causal role of alcohol and drugs in teenage violence. Statistical analysis demonstrated that “drinking, marijuana use, and cocaine use are all positively related to the probability of physical fighting and carrying a gun” (Markowitz, 2001, p. 422). At the same time, Markowitz (2001) cautioned that “these simple results do not provide evidence of causality from drugs and alcohol to violence” (p. 422). Contrastingly, Brownstein (2000), quoting Jeffrey Fagan contents that “drugs, alcohol, and aggression does not consistently lead to aggressive behavior” (p. 31). Meaning that “althought intoxication is widely found to be associated with aggressive conduct, the association is far from consistent and the reasons are diverse and poorly understood” (Ibid, p. 32). Furthermore, quoting Jan and Marcia Chaiken’s studies relating to drugs and violence, Brownstein (2000), also contends that “”the use of illicit drugs does not apper to be strontly relted to onset and participation in predatory crime” (Ibid, p. 32)
Yet, other researchers have conceptualized violence causation as a developmental process, mediated by the family, social environment, and individual characteristics including genetics. Connor (2002) argues that parenting practices, including coercive parent-child interaction patterns, harsh and inconsistent parental discipline practices, and parent’s failure to monitor and supervise children after school are correlated with increased violence in young people. Gilligan (1996) likewise cites life and employment experience supporting the contention that aversive and punitive environments (both at home, church, and in school settings) effectively “breed” violent youth (p. 247 to 249).
While Canada (1995) unilaterally rejected the notion that there might be a biological/genetic basis for violence, current research supports the notion of biological contributors to violent behavior. However, it is important to note that these studies do not suggest that “genes cause violence”; rather, they argue that a genetic predisposition may interact with environmental forces to increase the likelihood of violent responses. Raine (2002) conducted an extensive review of recent biosocial studies of antisocial and violent behavior in children and adults and summarized the major findings from these studies. The existence of certain “biological markers” for violent and antisocial behavior is incontrovertible. For example, low resting heart rate and other indicators of low autonomic activity are consistently associated with antisocial behavior. On the other hand, heightened levels of autonomic arousal seems to serve as a “protective factor” against violent behavior. Overall, however, Raine’s (2001) analysis reinforced the finding that there are always interactions between psychophysiological and social risk factors, with social factors predominating in some cases, and psychophysiological factors in other cases. The biosocial studies indicate that psychophysiological risk factors are more important in youth from benign home backgrounds and middle to upper-middle class families, whereas social risk factors predominate among persons from lower class backgrounds (Raine, 2002, p. 315).
In his personal case history of violence, Canada (1995) stressed learning to behave violently within the context of complex social rules that required certain responses to violent or potentially violent challenges. This is consistent with Gilligan’s (2001) model of violence causation which stresses the role of shame and respect. Gilligan (2001) hypothesizes that “the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation...and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride” (p. 29). Gilligan (2001) goes on to argue that “the purpose of violence is to force respect from other people” (p. 35). Thus, from this perspective, young people “get respect” with a gun. Gilligan’s (2001) theory does not discount the role of various additional biological, psychological and social causes of violence, but rather maintains that while these factors contribute to violence causation,
feelings of shame and the desire for respect remain the root cause.
