Sociological Approaches to Individual Violence and Their Empirical Evaluation

Abstract

A description of selected sociological approaches to explaining violent crime must first begin by defining the limits of the project. It should be noted, firstly, that we are dealing with explanations of criminal violence, and thus the many and diverse forms of violence which criminal law does not consider to be crimes are excluded. Since these boundaries are defined by the respective national legal systems and historically have been subject to considerable change, the definition of the topic can never be totally precise. Secondly, the notion of violence reveals a narrow fixation on physical violence, particularly in contexts of criminal law, and given long-term changes in everyday conceptions of violence, the criminal law perspective increasingly loses step with the real “violence problems.” Thirdly, we focus on individual violent crime, which on the one hand makes sense because genocides obviously require a different explanation to purse-snatching, but on the other hand this is questionable because the purely legal classification of a crime as the act of an individual cannot rule out that complex group processes and group relations contributed significantly to the event. Police crime statistics for Germany and many other countries reveal that the vast majority of crimes of violence are committed by one offender acting alone, and this trend has increased over the last 20 years. But this does not at all imply that the explanation of individual violent crime is thus also an explanation of violent crime in its totality.