Incorporating sociocultural and situational factors into explanations of interpersonal violent crime

Abstract

This review adapts a previously prescribed multifactorial model of multiple perpetrator sexual offending (Harkins, L., & Dixon, L. (2010). Sexual offending in groups: An evaluation. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 15(2), 87–99.) to more fully inform explanations of different types of interpersonal violent crime. First, factors within the sociocultural and situational contexts of the model are reviewed, as well as the interactions between them and the individual context, to examine their role in explaining a broad range of violent crimes. Exemplars of street-gang and intimate partner violence are then examined to assess how the empirical evidence supports the proposed framework. It is concluded that the adapted multifactorial model lays the foundations for fuller causal explanations of violent crime without restricting the focus to a specific crime type, or level of explanation, in addition to bridging interdisciplinary theoretical gaps.