THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 9, 1994 TAG: 9406090004
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By LUCIEN X. LOMBARDO
DATELINE: 940609 LENGTH: Medium
For the past 10 years, I have been teaching a course called ``Understanding Violence.'' The course explores forms of violence ranging from suicide to nuclear war in an effort to understand the common processes of violence. We try to understand the processes as they affect perpetrators and survivors of violence.
{REST} I try to help students understand the dynamics of violence with the hope that they can eliminate it from their own lives and understand how surviving violence has an impact on their lives.
After taking this course, I hope that my students will recognize what is happening to them when they or those they are with find themselves wanting to hurt other people or use violence. By understanding the process, they can stop themselves from succumbing to violence and search for alternative non-violent solutions.
As this course has evolved, I have learned a number of lessons which I believe might prove useful as we all attempt to devise strategies to reduce violence:
Lesson 1. Violence is not behavior reserved for criminals. We are all capable of violence. Given the right set of conditions, we all can be turned from our normally non-violent selves into people who use violence. Some of us become members of gangs and drug dealers and our violence is directed at rivals and competitors. Others become parents and as parents direct violence at our children. Some become soldiers and learn the skills and attitudes necessary to kill our enemies.
Lesson 2. Our language and the use of violence are intimately related. When we use violence, we are masters of linguistic self-delusion. Our language lets us pretend that the pain we inflict on others is not violence but something else. Killing rival gang members is simply business. Hitting children is discipline. Killing enemy soldiers produces a body count. Some of this violence is socially approved. Some of it is not. But we should not fool ourselves: It is all violence. Violence by any other name still inflicts pain and suffering on our chosen targets.
Lesson 3: In the mind of the user of violence, violence always finds a justification or excuse. More often than not, these justifications and excuses have wide social support. A woman is raped because the rapist believes sex is an entitlement linked to paying for dinner. A parent hits a child to put her on the right path. One man shoots another because the victim violated the perpetrator's sense of masculinity, which must be defended at all costs. The state executes a criminal in defense of the community. Civilians are killed in wartime to help make the world ready for democracy or to purify the race.
Such explanations and justifications are not unique inventions of deviant individuals; they form part of our everyday discourse, which we are all able to draw on should we find a need and an appropriate victim.
Lesson 4: In choosing and defining appropriate targets for violence, we are really trying to define ourselves. The selves we are trying to define always reflect a need for power, control and dominance. We define our victims as less than human, as evil, as threats not because they are but because we want to define ourselves as truly human, good and defenders.
Elie Weissel has said that hate is the aggrandizement of the self at the expense of others. Whether the targets of violence are children, women, rival gang members, people with an ethnicity different from ours, convicted murderers or enemy soldiers, we need these others to define ourselves, to make ourselves feel better and superior to another.
These lessons imply that we cannot begin to create a world in which the amount of violence is reduced until we recognize the potential for violence which resides in us all.
We cannot reduce violence until we recognize that many of our own solutions to problems of conflict are in reality violence.
We must begin to recognize that conflicts are problems in search of solutions, not contests in search of winners.
We cannot stop using violence to control others unless we can begin to understand the necessity of assisting others in taking control of themselves. We cannot stop the death unless we come to an understanding that we are all - whatever our race, social class or religion - engaged in the common enterprise of living.
by CNB