DISSERTATION

Dissertation



CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

Introduction

The literature review contained in this chapter will address sections outlined in chapter 1 such as the statement of the problem; the effects of exposure to violence may have regarding adolescent health, social adjustment, functioning, academic performance, and related research questions. The databases used for locating the current literature stem from resources provided by the online library of Walden University, including databases such as EBSCO, Academic Search Complete, PsycINFO, and Medline. Keys words which generated the sources from the search were aggression, community violence exposure, social information processing, mediators, origins of violence, and violence effects.

Violence Causes and Effects

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines violence as: "act on someone or make him act against his will by force or intimidation", saying it is a "brute force someone to submit. This definition of violence is also accepted by philosophers and social scientists (Wood 2007). We will call this type of interpersonal violence interaction between an aggressor and his victim. Currently, it is usual in the fields of education and social affairs, as in society in general and its means of mass communication, using the term violence to refer to a reality much larger and whose contours are often blurred. A term used as frequently requires some clarification.

The list of causes of violence could be quite long: racism, sexism, poverty, marginalization of deviant, economic exclusion, war, violence on television, etc. These attitudes and these social conditions favor the emergence of violent behavior in contemporary societies. Even if violence is the term used to designate them, they are often causes of violent behavior. In this chapter we restrict ourselves to the usual definition of violence, that is to say, ways of acting, the violent actions of individuals, behaviors that involve an interaction between two or more persons on a background of coercion. Even limited to interpersonal violence, it is a complex reality. From a scientific perspective, violent behavior have the advantage of being easily measurable because specific and a social point of view, they constitute a visible, circumscribed and disturbing and require strong action to protect society and support for victims and perpetrators.

Violence is witnessed and experienced daily in the United States and around the world. Violence has become so rampant it has become a normal occurrence among humans. Some examples of violence throughout society are vandalism of property, acts of bullying, homicide, suicide, aggression, class disruption, burglary, and the use of drugs and alcohol. Not one single reason is sufficient enough to explain the origins of violence and the effects violence exposure has on youth. A complicated relationship combines contributing factors of violence and the interaction of effects with situational settings to aid in decision making and behavioral responses which produce violence acts. A great amount of the efforts used to explain violence focus include socioeconomic demographics (Sakamoto 2009). A study on demographics has attempted to predict or explain the cause of violent behavior (Rosenthal 2007). Researchers assert individual's born and reared in impoverished communities, raised as a member of a ...