The Plague of Violence: A Preventable Epidemic
 (written and originally published in 2002)
by
Mitch Hall

Shame is the feeling that oneself is fatally flawed, defective, inferior, and unworthy of respect and love.   Shame is a lack of self-respect and self-love, and it is extremely painful.  A shamed person consciously or unconsciously believes himself or herself to be wrong.  This contrasts with a person who feels guilt, which is a sense that one has done something wrong.  If you do wrong, you can regret, repent, and make amends.  If you are wrong, you are hopeless.  Humiliation refers to all abusive and demeaning behaviors that destroy a person’s self-respect and dignity and leave that person feeling shame.  For example, if a mother reprimands her child for running into the street by saying, “Bad boy,” he will feel shame.  On the other hand, if she says, “What you did was wrong,” he will feel guilt. 

The most severely abused and neglected people, who lacked a helping witness, could not learn self-love because they never received love.  As we shall see, abuse and inferior status usually induce shame. Cultural violence, involving myths of superiority, is also fueled by shame.  Only people suffering from wounds of shame need to believe themselves superior to others, whom they hold in contempt, and onto whom they project their own unbearable shame.

Observers have repeatedly been astonished that apprehended murderers, terrorists, and war criminals show no signs of genuine remorse for the harm they have caused.  This is because they are incapable of feelings, including empathy for others.  Their psychological defenses ward off  awareness of their underlying shame, which precludes their experiencing guilt. They cannot dare feel guilty because it would drag them into the abyss of their own hopeless shame.  The American forensic psychiatrist James Gilligan discovered this core of shame in the violent prisoners he met.4 He found that shame leads to paranoia, narcissism, sociopathy, selfishness, sadism, revenge, and a drive to dominate and control others no matter what the cost.  By contrast, guilt leads to depression, penance, self-punishment, self-sacrifice, martyrdom, masochism, and the tendency to subordinate oneself.5

All people feel shame at some moment in their lives.  Most of us have creative ways of coping with it.  For example, we can realize that no one is perfect.  We can talk with others and get help from an empathic friend.  We can also sublimate the energy of shame with achievement, but compulsive achieving is a sign of unrelieved shame.  A seriously shame-ridden person may not have such coping strategies within his or her behavioral repertoire.  


All destructive violence is a delusional, futile attempt of humiliated people to displace their shame onto others and to replace it with the “pride” of being dominators.  People who feel worthless, and who have no rational means of getting help or healing, avenge themselves on victims.  The irrational psychological mechanism that is operative here is the same as in many religions where innocent animals or humans are murdered in sacrifice to deities.  In sacrificial rituals, individuals or groups who feel shamed, polluted, or sinful shed the blood of scapegoat victims to try to rid themselves of their shame.  Murder and warfare are just such sacrificial rituals.  Young soldiers sent to war are  sacrificial victims for their own societies.6

CHILD ABUSE

The primary cause of violence is child abuse.  It is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause, but it is a highly likely one that becomes reinforced by later social and cultural forces.  Children who are physically, sexually, or emotionally terrorized and exploited, and whose real needs are neglected by adults, become damaged.  They suffer from a pervasive sense of shame, lack self-esteem, and believe themselves flawed, defective, and unworthy of getting their needs met, especially the most basic need for love.  This sense of worthlessness is usually unconscious.

While the golden rule of ethics teaches us to do unto others as we would have others do unto us, the leaden rule of the unconscious compels us to do unto others as significant others have done unto us.   The most important lessons that affect our way of relating to the world occur before we are three years of age, when we are so utterly helpless and dependent on the kindness of our care givers.  Child abuse during this period and later is much more pervasive in our society and worldwide than is commonly recognized.7   In fact, there is massive personal and cultural denial about child abuse.  Many children who are violated will take violent revenge upon others later in life, most frequently not on their abusers, without ever knowing the real causes of their own hatred.    

Extreme shame, resulting from child abuse and aggravated by other factors, is the root psychological cause of all violence.8  It is a necessary but not sufficient cause of violence, since, as shown above, shame is universally experienced by all humans at some time or other, but most people have nonviolent means of coping with it.

 Severely abused children are at high risk of becoming either self-destructive, violent toward others, or both, unless they are fortunate in being recognized for who they are and supported by at least one compassionate, empathic witness, who helps them feel their pain, discover and express their true feelings, and learn that the abuse they suffered was not their own fault. The earlier such a witness intervenes in their lives the better, but even later interventions can make a difference for all but the most seriously damaged.

Children are weak and defenseless in relation to adults.  Much corporal punishment in homes and schools is even legal.   Any hitting, beating, or spanking of children is abusive, and it ought to be criminal, as it would be if adults were similarly assaulted.  However, worldwide 90% of adults believe in beating children for their own good.9 In the U.S., only one state, Minnesota, has outlawed parental corporal punishment of children, and only 11 nations worldwide have done so.10  Beating children in schools is still legal in twenty-three states.11  Texas, which had the highest rates of capital punishment under governor George W. Bush, also leads in corporal punishment in the schools with 118,000 beatings administered per year.  Nationwide, children are battered in schools with wooden paddles on their buttocks from 400,000 to 1 or 2 million times annually, according to varying estimates.12  School disciplinarians specialize in punishing children physically, “This punishment is given for minor offenses usually in the form of paddling on the buttocks...  There is a graded scale of different forms of corporal punishment aimed at meting out ‘discipline.’”13 Such legal abuse needs to be outlawed.

Six  U.S. children are reported abused or neglected per minute.14 This amounts to over 3,100,000 cases a year and 63 million over a generation.  We can reasonably assume that much child abuse is never reported, however.  Children are often threatened with even worse abuse, or the murder of their pets, for example, if they dare report how they are being abused.

While virtually all violent people were once abused children, only some abused children become violent.  Therefore, child abuse is a necessary, but not a sufficient cause for violence.  Depending on the degree, extensiveness, and age of onset of child abuse, there are different outcomes.  The earlier the abuse occurs, the more intense it is, and the more sustained and repeated over time, the worse the effects are and the more likelihood there is of resulting violent pathology.  When they grow up and become parents, many who were abused children repeat the abuse on their own innocent offspring.

The most severely abused, who never received help, become the violent psychopaths, also called sociopaths.   They are the sadists, predators, murderers, serial killers, assaulters, batterers, rapists, abusers of power, dictators, terrorists, and necrophiles attracted to death and decay.   They may also become destructive political leaders who send others to their sacrificial deaths in wars.

Other abused children become the dominators in relationships, politics, and business.   Inwardly empty, they are driven to win.  They desperately want to appear successful in others’ eyes.  They seek rewards for themselves no matter what the expense to others.  When narcissistic corporate leaders despoil the environment, use workers instrumentally, and ignore human rights, they are displacing their own shame.  For example, the real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump names most of his towering constructions after himself to prove his own grandeur.  His books are replete with bragging about his triumphs and vindictiveness toward anyone who opposed him: “I’m screwing people aginst the wall, and I’m having so much fun.  People say it’s not nice, but I really believe in getting even. I believe in an eye for an eye.” With regard to an environmentalist who had opposed one of his schemes, Trump wrote, “Often you appreciate a good fight, and you respect your opponent,  But in this case I really liked grinding her into the ground.” 15  Trump’s grandiosity and narcissistic contempt for his “opponent” reveal the shame from which he is trying to defend himself by humiliating her.  His preoccupation with his image is so extreme that it extends beyond his own lifetime:  “One of my biggest fears  concerns how I will be perceived after I am gone.”  Trump is far from unique among successful business leaders in such behavior, which usually derives from having been abused.  Even Bill Gates, the world’s wealthiest individual, is known for temper tantrums against employees and berating them with such humiliating words as, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.” 16  A person with a stable level of self-respect who is capable of empathy for others would never demean them in such ways.  Clearly, no amount of net worth can give a person self-worth.       

Many abused children grow up to manifest their damage through psychosomatic illnesses, depression, self-destructive addictions, and becoming submissive, masochistic victims in relationships with abusive partners.   They also may elect or follow destructive political, religious, or ideological leaders, all of whom are essentially parent figures.  This includes cult leaders such as Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson, Muktananda, and Reverend Moon.  The followers are blind to the character flaws of those to whom they submit because their leaders are similar to their early abusers whom they did not dare to criticize, could not see for who they were, and whom they may even idealize.  Many eventually leave the fold, either because they awaken to the irrationalities, abuses, and contradictions they notice, or because they undergo a shock that leads them to choose an independent life over continued subjugation. However, the followers and victims of some necrophilic, charismatic leaders and dictators are not always so lucky in being able to escape.  For example, Jim Jones commanded the mass suicide of all the members of his intentional community, and few survived. 

Another group of abused children become idealists, altruists, helpers, and activists.  They have become sensitized to injustice and may adopt any number of callings and causes.  They are among the environmentalists, animal rights activists, peace and justice protesters, social workers, and psychotherapists, for example.  Some recognize their own original wounds, usually with the help of an empathic witness.  Others project their hurt onto the causes they choose to champion.  The latter can be recognized by such signs as dogmatism, intolerance of diversity within their movement, extremism, and vehement anger that hurts rather than helps their cause.   

The discussion above provides only a partial indication of how different people adapt to having been abused more or less severely in childhood.  It is not intended to exhaust the possibilities, but only to show that violence is not a universal result of child abuse.     

Psychiatrists working in U.S. prisons with convicted murderers, serial killers, and rapists have been able to document in at least 90% of cases that these destroyers of life were themselves extremely abused children.17  They were, for example, the objects of attempted murder, usually by parents or other close relatives.  They saw other family members murdered.  They had been tortured and maimed, shot, hit with axes, burnt,  prostituted, sexually abused, frozen, starved, locked in confining spaces, shaken violently, beaten into comas, had their bones broken, were smeared with excrement, and were subjected to relentless verbal and emotional abuse.18 

What we know about the serial killers within our society regarding child abuse is relevant to the tyrants.  In every case for which there is data, including Hitler, Mao, and Stalin, we discover that these cruel dictators who condemned millions to violent deaths had themselves once been defenseless children who were beaten mercilessly and repeatedly.19  Tyrants command the slaughter of millions of sacrificial victims while avoiding feeling the terror from their own childhoods that dominates their unconscious minds.  They inflict it all around them without ever recognizing its source in themselves.  Information about their childhoods also shows that America’s war-making presidents, including F.D. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, Bush the first, Clinton, and others were once neglected and abused children.20

We have so far been speaking of physical child abuse.  What about sexual abuse?  Standard statistics from government agencies report that one-third of American girls have been sexually abused before the age of eighteen.  The actual rates are almost double that.  Lloyd deMause calculated, on the basis of in-depth studies, that sixty percent of girls and forty-five percent of boys have been sexually molested, with the average age of abuse being seven.21  As far as technologically advanced democracies go, the U.S. is highly likely to be a leader in child abuse since the murder rate here is from 5 to 10 times higher than in any other industrialized or post-industrial democracy.22

Neurobiological Effects of Child Abuse

Because the human brain and nervous system are incomplete at birth, early abuse and neglect can cause lifelong damage to developing tissues and produce unhealthy hormonal imbalances.  High levels of stress hormones destroy delicate, developing tissues, and abnormal hormone ratios become habitual.

The orbitalfrontal cortex is an area of the brain located behind the eyes and responsible, along with the hippocampus, for monitoring our own emotions and making possible empathy for the feelings of others.  It is still forming connections with the lower lying emotional areas of the limbic system when we are between ten and eighteen months of age and is still developing neurologically up to the age of sixteen or eighteen years.23  Brain scans conducted by Bruce D. Perry and others of severely neglected and abused children show lesions in the orbitalfrontal cortex and reduction in size of from 20% to 30%.24   This means the worst abused children can’t monitor their own emotions or feel empathy.  Literally they cannot know what they or others are feeling.  They lose access to emotional aliveness.  Stress hormones have destroyed vulnerable, developing nerve tissues. Abnormally increased levels of stress hormones, such as corticosterone, become chronically present in their blood streams, making them prone to overreacting to stimuli as if they are constantly being threatened.25

Corresponding to the increased stress hormones is a reduction of normal levels of hormones associated with pleasurable states.  One of these is serotonin which facilitates relaxation, inhibits aggressive impulses, and is normally higher in women than in men.  Another depleted hormone is oxytocin, the love hormone, stimulated after birth when a mother and baby bond through touch and nursing, and found in abundance during love making and orgasm. Surprising to many people is the fact that testosterone levels are also lower in  violent adult males who had been abused children than in nonviolent males.  Although lethal direct violence is disproportionately male (90%), testosterone, which girls and boys have at equal levels up to the age of ten, is not the cause.26

Abused children shut down physically, emotionally, and cognitively.   They have extremely high levels of chronic, involuntary muscular tension, which has been called character armor.27  They lack a whole range of feelings, including love, compassion, fear, empathy, and guilt, all of which would normally preclude violence.28  What they do feel virtually constantly is shame and humiliation, but they cannot recognize their having been abused as the cause of this, so they tend to project it onto others.

Psychological Effects of Child Abuse

Often severely abused children cannot consciously remember how they have been abused.  The knowledge is stored in their tissues,29 but cognitively they suffer from amnesia about their abuse. For their survival, the children grow up in denial about their own suffering and helplessness.  They identify with their abusers, and, in a desperate attempt to rid themselves of shame, they inflict violence on others.

The amnesia and denial of the severely abused lead to an inner void, an emptiness, a hollow self, out-of-touch with spontaneous access to feelings.  Underneath the void, however, is a rage for revenge, a hatred, that may be acted out when the criminal or political occasion arises. 

Because they have been so mistreated, they have learned to expect cruelty. This leads to paranoia, exaggerated perceptions that others are out to harm them, and a misreading of any stimuli that even vaguely hint at this.   They show distorted sensitivity to insult and are prone to misperceive others as threatening.  They project their own rage and violent tendencies onto victims for the unconscious purpose of revenge for the harm done to them earlier in life.

In his interviews of murderers, one researcher found that they go through a stage of thinking that the world is divided into the abusers and the abused, the killers and the killed.  They make a decision to be among the former and get validation for their decision from “phantom communities,” imagined others who approve.30  Of course, violent ideologies, pathological leaders, hate groups, gangs, and warfare situations offer actual communities, not just phantom ones, to legitimize violence. I believe all hate group members were severely abused children. They project their unconscious rage and hatred against their original abusers onto people of color, Jews, gays, etc.            

Many observers have noted that violent offenders, even Nazi war criminals, could appear at times normal and harmless, leading to Hannah Arendt’s observation about the “banality of evil.” 31  One researcher found the explanation for this in the fact that severely traumatized individuals dissociate.  They have alter personalities housed in each of the two hemispheres of the brain.  One personality can be relatively more socialized, while the other is traumatized, anti-social, and violent.32 

Ultimately, violent people have an unbridled hatred of life, because their own lives had been so early violated that they had to shut down their capacity to feel. They are contemptuous of others and envious of those who are more alive.   They suffer from the emotional plague, which is  the impulse of those whose souls have been deadened to attack what is softer and more emotionally alive than themselves.33

Criminally violent people are unable to verbalize their needs, wishes,  and feelings because they have lost touch with a vital, core self.  They compensate with a macho, tough, hard facade, the signs of hypermasculinity. They often show pathological self-importance, grandiosity, and levels of narcissism to the degree that other people are not real to them but are only objects in their fantasy worlds onto whom they project the chaotic emotions generated from their traumatic pasts.  When they were innocent children, they had been crudely treated as objects of adults’ life-threatening aggression or warped sexuality, so they have learned to treat others as objects as well.  Their sociopathy is the unfortunate, tragic outcome of how their souls, meaning their capacity to give and receive love, have been murdered.

       A remarkably consistent observation is that killers always think of themselves as agents of justice.34  In their delusional thinking, their victims deserve to be destroyed.  Killers believe themselves innocent of any wrongdoing.  In this respect, the murderers whom society labels as criminals are no different from terrorists or political leaders who wage war. Likewise, the logic of punishment, including the death penalty, is the same as criminal logic.  Both the enactors of legal and illegal violence believe they are delivering justice.  In fact, they are doing the opposite, compounding injustice.   

Murderers also share with terrorist suicide bombers, such as those who flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a drive to self-destruction.  The suicide rates of recent murderers are several hundred times higher than for a comparable gender and age segment of the general population.35  As has been repeatedly witnessed, murderers experience no guilt or remorse.  They are too hardened against feeling, too out-of-touch with reality, too hateful and disrespectful of life to be capable of feeling the pain they have caused others.  Again, if only somewhere in their lives they had  benefited from an effective intervention by a compassionate witness, perhaps their horrific violence could have been prevented.

Other early shame wounds that compound direct abuse arise from being unwanted while in utero,36 of unwanted gender, not breast fed with love,37 not responded to when crying,38 being treated with disgust for natural body functions, 39 being verbally demeaned, being abandoned or threatened with abandonment,40 or being genitally mutilated (circumcised).41 Because circumcision is such a widespread practice in the U.S and in other cultures, many readers may resist considering this an abusive practice.

Those cultures with the most abusive, unloving childrearing practices produce the most murderers, terrorists, and wars.  Children raised abusively are more easily hypnotizable in adulthood.  This means that in times of crisis, such as war, the formerly abused dissociate and submit to the authority of leaders, just as they had done as children.42  Whereas they were likely alone in their suffering as abused children, they can now be participants in collective trances.  The onset of wars is enormously popular because there will be outlets for violence and also, on a delusional level of thinking, because the sacrificial blood of innocents will be shed to purge the group members of their imagined sins.43  The approval ratings of U.S. presidents reached record levels, for example, when George Bush launched the Gulf War, and when Clinton ordered bombings of Serbia and Sudan. George W. Bush eclipsed their popularity when he announced the long-term war against terrorism and commanded the bombings of Afghanistan.  American flags waved throughout the land where, according to polls, 90% of the people supported war.


GENDER ABUSE

The second most important cause of violence is gender abuse, the unequal and inequitable treatment of the genders.  This occurs in the context of patriarchy, which is a cultural system of male supremacy, that is, the domination and oppression of women by men.  In patriarchal cultures, males inordinately control wealth, political power, and have higher prestige and status, all to the detriment and disempowerment of women. 

Endemic to patriarchy is misogyny, the fear and hatred of women and of character traits culturally identified as feminine, such as nurturance, emotional expressiveness and accessibility, vulnerability, sensitivity, sensuality, and gentleness.  Misogyny afflicts patriarchal males, but many women may suffer from it also through false consciousness, which is the internalization by the oppressed of the negative value judgments of the oppressors.  An example of such false consciousness is seen again and again in cases of battered women who believe their mistreatment is their own fault.  Their low self-esteem derives from and perpetuates the trauma of having been abused, neglected children when the false consciousness of believing themselves unworthy of respect and love was first instilled.  Many women say they have never been treated abusively until they met the male abuser in adulthood, but I believe they are in denial.  A woman with high self-esteem would have left an abusive relationship very early or not gotten into it in the first place. 

In reaction to misogyny, as well as to child abuse, the most insecure males develop traits of hyper-masculinity.  They are the macho, aggressive, violent, sexually predatory, feelingless males who will do anything to prove they are not like women, and that they have no needs for nurturance and dependency.  Their hyper-masculine facades mask their underlying sense of inadequacy.  As children, these males were unloved.   Their parents were cold, rejecting, dominating, and abusive. This gave them abysmally low self-esteem and led them to  doubt their own masculinity.  They compensate through aggressiveness and violence in a culture which identifies maleness with these very rough traits.

In the midst of patriarchy, women are mostly in charge of the activity that has the greatest effect on human character formation, early child rearing.  Those women who have been or are victims of male abuse are the mothers most likely to abuse their children.  Males who have an unhealthy psychological need to dominate women are themselves dominated by the mother figures in their own psyches.  Although they cannot admit it, they live in fear of women’s power.  As we shall see later, parents’ differential treatment of very young boys and girls aggravates the problems of hypermasculinity, misogyny, patriarchy, and social violence. 

In a context of gender inequality and abuse of power, many family scenarios are possible, and it is impossible to depict them all.  Mothers may take revenge on boys for how males in power have mistreated them.  At the same time, these mothers may still suffer from false consciousness and transmit an internalized sense of inferiority to their daughters. Fathers may take revenge on their sons for how their own fathers mistreated them, and they may sexually abuse their daughters as revenge for hidden abuse in their own past.  Some mothers may want to protect their children, but may be too afraid of their violent mates to do so.     

Whereas males are supposed to be dominant in patriarchal cultures, boys usually begin their lives, like girls, under either the nurturing care or the abusive domination of mothers in the nursery.  Whereas girls can grow up to become like their mothers, the culture prescribes that boys can’t.  If boys have been badly abused, they fear and hate female power, and this will become a lifelong phobia.  No matter how much power they accumulate in the outer world, their fear of being overpowered by their mothers will dominate their inner worlds.  Despite warm, fuzzy stereotypes, mothers can be cold, distant, punitive, harsh, domineering, and abusive.  Mothers who have been hurt and oppressed by males in the patriarchal pecking order often avenge themselves on boys for abuse by their own fathers, husbands, brothers, or other males.  “You’re just like your father!” is a reproach many mothers speak to boys in anger, for any number of reasons, ranging from spite to concern for the boys, however misguided its expression and hurtful its impact.  When the boys do not have access to positive fathers with whom to identify, they have little hope of rescuing their very maleness from contemptible status.  At the same time, fathers who are either absent, emotionally inaccessible, or violent are responsible for the damage they cause their sons.   

Although it is contrary to common sense, some researchers claim that mothers commit twice as much physical child abuse in U.S. culture as fathers.44  If this is accurate, it may be because mothers are much more likely to be with children in the first place.   The mothers’ abuse takes place within the surrounding patriarchal context.  Correspondingly, male abuse of women emerges from abusive child raising contexts as well as from violent male socialization in the patriarchy.  It is a vicious circle that every conscious person needs to transcend.

Sexual repression and perversions are results of gender abuse.  Healthy human sexuality requires mutual respect and equality between partners.   Inequality implies gender antagonism and distrust.  In social patriarchies, normal sexual curiosity and play, often beginning in adolescence, are repressed and punished.  Sexuality is distorted and stigmatized in many cultures as base, dirty, and undignified.  Men view women degradingly as sex objects. Many men in these cultures become sexual predators, incapable of love.  Pornography, prostitution, perversions, pedophilia,  rape, and other sexual perversions and crimes proliferate, adding to the sum of human misery.  Sex becomes associated with violence, as it is so often depicted in movies.   Only the more fortunate members of the culture know the blessing of sexual health as the mutual expression of tenderness, passion, playfulness, devotion, and love between compatible partners. 

Genital mutilations of males and females are among the most perverse of abusive practices. The World Health Organization estimates that about 120,000,000  living women have had their genitals mutilated in dangerous, painful rituals from which many die.44  These women are primarily in Islamic cultures and areas of Africa that were former slave catchment areas for the Arab slave trade. 

In the U.S., doctors perform 700,000 hysterectomies annually, 90% of which are medically unnecessary, and also do breast amputions for cancer prevention.45  Misogyny and sadism targeted at the sexual organs are no doubt involved in far too many cases.  Countless males have also suffered medically unnecessary foreskin amputations (circumcisions) that cause physical, emotional, and psychological damage.  Much ignorance and denial surround this widespread practice.  It is to be hoped that more and more parents will choose not to inflict this ancient custom upon future generations. 

The polarization of the genders is most striking when viewed in regard to violence.  Greater than 90% of the murders, assaults, rapes, and acts of war worldwide are committed by males, primarily in the age ranges of 14 to 39.46  Biology and higher testosterone alone do not account for this fact because, as we have already seen, the most violent males have abnormally low levels of testosterone.  Therefore, what explains the much greater male propensity for violence?  In keeping with the thesis that child abuse is the primary cause of violence, we may wonder whether boys are more abused than girls.  The data support this speculation.  Boys are more often the objects of life-threatening abuse, whereas girls are more often the objects of sexual abuse.  Boys are physically punished more often and more severely than girls.  Boys are given less nurturing touch than girls.  Parents of both genders speak to sons less often than to daughters, and they shame, blame, and humiliate boys more than girls.  Because of culturally defined gender roles, boys are denied the right to express needs for comfort or feelings of vulnerability, for which they would be stigmatized as being like girls.  In the home, community, and school, boys are more harshly disciplined than girls for the same offenses.47

Male violence against other males and against females shows different patterns.  75% percent of victims of life-threatening and lethal male violence in the U.S. are other males.49  In this culture, as in many others, masculinity is defined by aggressiveness and readiness to be violent against other males.  Typical males take pride in defeating other males, whether in football, boxing, business, conversations, or war.  Males feel shame in being defeated in any of these realms.  As we have seen, the ultimate source of pervasive shame is child abuse.  In treating other males as violence objects,  abused males attempt to displace onto their victims their own shame and inferiority feelings derived from their own childhood abuse. 

On a few occasions in my own life, total strangers chose me as a violence object.  When I was a freshman in college, some friends invited me to go to a party with them.  Shortly after we arrived, we decided to leave because we felt the bad vibes of this party that was taking place in the basement of a suburban house.  My exit was blocked by a beefy man who claimed he had picked me for a fight so that he could win a bet he made that he would have a fight that evening. Since I was the tallest among my friends, fighting me was the best way for him to prove his “manhood.”  Talking reasonably with this belligerent stranger got me nowhere. My survival instincts took over, and in a moment I threw him aside enough to run past him up the stairs, from where I fought off his brutal assault.  He choked me around my neck and repeatedly hit me with his fist on the side of my head.  Finally, I got out of there and later learned he had a police record and had previously put other victims in the hospital.  On another occasion, at the beginning of graduate studies in Chicago, I was shot at in the streets one day by a gang that tried to kill people during autumn recruiting time to scare other youth into joining their gang.  In these and other instances, nothing personal was directed against me.  I was just a random violence object for violently disturbed males.

Again, hypermasculinity is a futile attempt to cover over feelings of shame, humiliation, inferiority, and doubts of masculinity.  In the punitive, abnormal context of U.S. prisons, the most aggressive males are violent to younger and weaker prisoners by raping them and in effect turning them into “females,” or “galboys,” as they call it.50  Because of the high incarceration rates of perniciously violent individuals, epidemic proportions of rapes occur in prisons.  Many of these inmate victims, usually the younger and less aggressive ones, are subjected to daily humiliations.

Male violence against females begins with treating girls and women as sex objects for conquest rather than as autonomous, equal, respect-worthy subjects of their own lives.  In the U.S., 1.3 adult women are reported raped  per minute.51   This amounts to nearly 700,000 per year.  Many cases are not reported, and this figure does not account for juvenile rape.  Official statistics state that 1 in 3 women in this country will have been raped at some point in their lives.52  For a Western democracy, this is a high rate.  Places like South Africa have double that rate.  One-third of U.S. males regularly fantasize raping women while they are engaging in either masturbation or intercourse with a partner.53  Male partners assault 20% to 30% of pregnant women.54  Their reasons may include fear and hostility toward women’s ability to bear life, anger their partners are pregnant in the first place, and fear of competition for their time and attention with the children. 

Clearly male aggression against women is alarmingly high and often is expressed in sadistic, distorted, sexual ways.  Male violence against women differs in important respects from that enacted against other males.55 In the patriarchy, female honor is based on sexual “purity” according to cultural norms.  Therefore, rape is the ultimate dishonoring.  It robs females of  their autonomy, and also shames and dishonors any males who were supposed to be protecting the females.  In some cultures, the female who is violated may herself be murdered in so-called “honor” killings by her male relatives.56  By contrast, male honor is shamed and disgraced by being violently overpowered by other males.  Soldiers at war, in addition to killing one another, are notorious for raping women from the enemy side.57  Wars are frequently preceded by a buildup of images that may reflect collectively shared fantasies of aggressive, violent, poisoning women, as seen in cartoons, comic books, movies, and popular fiction.58  

STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE
Structural violence refers to inequalities of wealth and power that cause harm to the dispossessed and disempowered.  Structural violence means the chronic gap between rich and poor.  It is both a form of violence and also the third major cause of direct violence.  In direct violence, aggressors use physical force, often amplified by weapons, to overpower, maim, or kill their victims.  In structural violence, people in positions of power dominate others, such as workers, or racial, ethnic, or religious minorities. This leads to increased rates of death and disability for those on the lower socioeconomic levels.59  It also provokes direct violence itself among the poor and powerless, who are shamed and humiliated by their frustratingly inferior status.  Class and caste hierarchies, racism, xenophobia, colonialism, imperialism, and globalized capitalism are all aspects of structural violence, which has both national and global ramifications.  An example of a caste system is the shaming (and shameful) racism in the U.S. This is reflected in the fact that unemployment of blacks has remained twice that of whites since WWII.  Alarmingly, 1 out of 30 black males dies from homicide versus60  versus 1 out of 10,000 for the entire population.61

The gap between rich and poor contributes to the measurable incidence of direct violence.  In the U.S., each 1% increase in unemployment leads within a year to a 2%  increase in the death rate, a 5% increase in infant mortality, and a 6% increase in homicides.62  Because of cultural myths that being poor or unemployed is a person’s own fault, these conditions are shame-inducing.  If an individual already has an overload of shame from having been an abused child, relative poverty could accentuate the shame to a homicidal degree.  Such data on structural violence led Gilligan to see it as a main cause of behavioral violence “on an epidemiologically significant scale.”63

As previously noted,  the U.S. has from  5 to 10 times the murder rate of any other developed nation.  It also has the most extreme levels of structural violence and inequality, and the hugest gap between rich and poor.  CEOs in Japan and Germany earn about 20 times the income of workers in their companies, whereas US CEOs earn over 500 times as much.64  Many poorer countries have even more extreme structural violence and inequality, and their ruling elites are too often supported by the U.S. for the ultimate benefit of multinational corporations.  Under the auspices of the WTO, NAFTA, FTAA, IMF, and World Bank, globalization is a euphemism for increased structural violence.

How does structural violence relate to the main cause of violence, child abuse?  Basically, rich, powerful people who had been abused and emotionally neglected in their childhoods act out their hostility and take revenge for their deprivations by dominating others and accumulating more wealth, prestige, and power.65  They are never satisfied since they are compensating for unconscious needs.  They make others suffer, and they never see these others as fully human, but rather as expendable means to their own grandiose ends.  Therefore, both the dominators and the dominated in systems of inequality suffer from shame and have different outlets available to them for trying to rid themselves of it.  The wealthy use achievement and competition. The poor often have recourse only to direct violence or becoming victims.

The status of American workers in relation to their bosses is a vivid example of structural violence.  Executives garner unprecedented wealth for themselves while workers suffer from layoffs, hazardous working conditions, injuries, deaths, and the need to work longer hours for less reward.  CEOs who laid off 1,000 or more workers in the first half of the year 2000 averaged $23.7 million in compensation each, over $10 million more than CEOs in other big corporations of comparable size.66  There are 273 work-related deaths daily, amounting to 80,000 per year.67  If workers’ health and safety were a priority, this death toll could be greatly reduced.   However, those in power place corporate profits at the top of their agenda, so workers are expendable.  Unprincipled corporate executives also see consumers as expendable as exposés of the drug, tobacco, and automotive industries have repeatedly revealed.

Political violence is an important, reinforcing component of structural violence.  It takes many forms: warfare waged between competing ruling classes, police brutality against minorities and protesters, punitive criminal justice systems that discriminate against the poor, and capital punishment.  Interlocking political, military, economic, and ideological systems are in force.  They maintain wealth for a privileged few and desperate poverty for multitudes.  This social stratification, both nationally and internationally, has been getting more extreme over recent decades.  It is expressed through class and caste systems within societies, and the hegemony of rich nations and corporations over former colonies. 

About 18 million deaths a year worldwide are due to hunger, lack of sanitary water, and other consequences of relative poverty.68 This is more deaths than those due to armed conflict.  Children are the poorest sector of the U.S. and global populations.  250,000,000 children from 5 to 14  are trapped in slavery, hazardous work, and sweatshop serfdom, and a million are prostitutes.69  To counteract the distress of so much of humanity, the U.N. set a goal for  wealthiest nations to spend 0.7% of their  GNP on development aid per year.  None of them has met this goal. Great Britain has given only 0.31%, Japan 0.32%, and the U.S. a measly 0.15%.70  Although we hear political rhetoric about helping the poor, since 1948 U.S. foreign policy has explicitly aimed to maintain global structural violence for the benefit of the ruling elite in this country.  In that year, George F. Kennan, the head of planning for the State Department, wrote his vision for ensuing decades.71  He noted that with only 6% of the world’s population, the U.S. controlled about 50% of the wealth.  The only way to sustain this untenable and enviable lead, according to Kennan, would be through force, and he held that spreading democracy was a dispensable illusion.  Over the past five decades, in order to support  structural violence, the U.S. has armed tyrants in other lands, such as Indonesia’s Suharto, Zaire’s Mobutu, and Chile’s Pinochet, whose militaries and police carried out horrific direct violence against their own populations.  Even the subsequently vilified Sadaam Hussein and Osama bin Laden had received CIA support when their violent actions accorded with U.S. foreign policy goals.

The two-hundred twenty-five wealthiest individuals in the world, most of whom are in the U.S., have $1 trillion in assets, as much as the poorest 47% of the entire world population, or nearly 3 billion people.  According to United Nations Development Program calculations, if those super-wealthy people donated only 4%  of their assets, specifically $40 billion  per year, this could feed, clothe, house, provide hygienic water, free schools, and free health care for every one of the poor of the earth.72

CULTURAL VIOLENCE

Cultures that are rife with child abuse, gender abuse, and social stratification also justify their direct and structural violence through myths, religions, ideologies, histories, vocabulary, symbols, songs, art, and stories.  Together these symbolic justifications constitute cultural violence.  Shamed individuals compensate for their humiliations through group identities which give them the illusion of being superior to others. 

Myths legitimize the domination of one category of people by another, such as the domination of women by men, children by adults, people of color by whites, unbelievers by members of the “true religion,” the poor by the wealthy, one ethnic group or nationality by another, and other animal species and nature by humans.  Survivors of child abuse unconsciously project their own stories onto the myths, which contain references to threats and traumas, real or imagined. 

Fundamentalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims justify male domination of women with literal scriptural interpretations from earlier misogynist cultures.  References to god as male imply men are more godlike.  At weddings, priests quote St. Paul’s statement that just as men must submit to god’s will, wives must submit to their husbands.  The biblical commandment to “honor thy parents”and phrases such as “spare the rod, spoil the child” justify adults’ forceful  subordination of children. Fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, and Snow White depict parental cruelty in the personae of jealous stepmothers or wicked witches.  While these stories give imaginary happy endings, they reflect the cultural reality that children are at the mercy of dangerous adults who abandon them in the woods, abuse them, or even try to cut their hearts out.  In the biblical creation myth,  god gives humans dominion (= domination) over other animals and the earth.  According to the capitalist extension of that myth, animals and the earth are resources and commodities for ownership and exploitation rather than worthy of respect in their own right.  Herbert Spencer misappropriated Darwinian evolutionary thinking to justify imperialism as “survival of the fittest.”  

The Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung identified seven civilizations as promoters of cultural violence in the form of megalo-paranoia complexes.73  These civilizations are the U.S., Europe, Japan, China, Russia, India, and Islam.  Proponents of each pathological world view believe themselves chosen, whether by the higher power of God or history for special, privileged status, superior to that of all other humans and animals.  Each has also suffered traumas that threatened this superior status.  For example, in Islam, Mohammed is viewed as the “seal of the prophets,” the last human to receive and transmit the word of god directly in the Koran.  Islamic countries suffered such traumas as colonial conquests by European powers, and the imposition of the state of Israel in the Palestinian region.  In another example, the white, male founders of the U.S. envisioned the new republic as the culmination of classical Western civilization, Christianity, and democracy.  Ideologists justified the conquest and genocide of the indigenous peoples as “manifest destiny,” meaning they were obviously chosen by god to occupy the entire continent.  Subsequent U.S. planetary hegemony is believed a divinely sanctioned continuation of this destiny.  The military defeat in Vietnam and vulnerability to terrorist attacks, such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon destruction on 9/11/01, are among the traumas that threaten the myth of American chosenness and invincibility.   

Grandiose collective identities ultimately serve the power of ruling elites.  Internally oppressed members of these populations get psychological compensation for their shame and feelings of inferiority by vainly believing they are superior to “others” among the non-chosen nations.   Collective sentiments of grandeur are useful in times of wars directed by and fought in the interests of the rulers.  Masses can be readily mobilized to fight a scapegoat onto whom all evil and abuse are projected.  Crusades, jihads, genocides, and the imperial conquest of “heathens” are examples. 

Rulers consolidate control with wars.  The down-trodden members of one group fight to the death against the down-trodden of other groups rather than against their own rulers and oppressors.  People who had been severely abused are subject to trance-like regressions into their dissociated, traumatized, and potentially violent alter personalities when in groups under stress, and the bigger the group the more regression since each individual becomes relatively more powerless.74  The tendency of leaders’ popularity to soar when they declare war is a measure of how many formerly abused children are among the adult population.  Of course, wars often have instrumental objectives, such as access to oil or land, but these could be pursued nonviolently were it not for the underlying pathologies and irrationalities of the war makers.

According to traditional myths about war, soldiers fight against one another while sparing the civilian population from harm.  This is not the case.  “In the wars fought since WorldWar II, 90% of all victims are found in the civilian population, a large share of them women and children.” 75

Violent ideologies, in the form of racism, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism, give outlets for sadistic impulses found among the abused.  These ideologies preach hate and the diminishment of others.  Violently inclined people band together in lynch mobs, terrorist cells, and hate groups to take revenge on despised outgroups for their own humiliations, projecting their own suppressed rage, lust, greed, and hatred.  The politically manipulated Hutus massacred 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 100 days.  This could not have been successful without both a history of animosity between the two ethnic groups and abusive childrearing practices in the culture.76 The political leaders of the Hutu-dominated government at the time carefully planned and orchestratred this genocide, including use of radio to broadcast their call to all Hutus to enact the genocide.

Schools are among the cultural institutions where increased shaming may occur and hence raise the potential for violence.  Puberty is often a time when the humiliating effects of child abuse become compounded by other negative social forces, including failure in school and hormonal confusion in tense bodies that have not learned to experience healthy pleasure.  1 out of 11 students in 6th to 10th grade reports being  a victim of bullying at least weekly.77  In each of the recent incidences of teenage mass killers in the schools, the murderers, who were all white males, had been the objects of ridicule and humiliation from classmates, which no doubt exacerbated shame they already suffered from earlier child abuse.  Their diaries and internet postings reveal the buildup of intolerable shame and their fantasies of revenge.  As we saw above, in 23 U.S. states, corporal punishment is still legal in school.  365,000  students were paddled in  the 1997 to 1998 school year according to U.S. Dept. of Education statistics,78 and this has risen to 400,000, as seen above in the section on child abuse.

When I was a Peace Corps volunteer high school teacher in Togo in the 1960s, I saw how students were ranked at the end of the year from first to last in their large classes.  The headmaster and other teachers publicly beat the lowest achievers with switches in front of their classmates.  In the U.S., invidious distinctions are perpetrated in schools via grades, ranks, awards, and harsh criticisms by those teachers who lack humaneness.  Only a small minority of students graduate from schools as the academic winners. Some of them have compensated for their abuse-induced shame through their scholastic achievements and by outcompeting their less successful peers.  Rhodes Scholar and President Bill Clinton is an example of an abused child who became a high scholastic achiever.  However, this did not rid him of shame, as revealed by his compulsive, at times brutal, womanizing, his lying to save face, and his waging war.  

Religions are among the most complex, historically enduring, and influential of cultural institutions. In theory, they usually preach unity while in practice they often divide and stimulate violence.  Doctrines such as original sin justify beating, spanking, shaming, incarcerating, punishing, and sacrificing.  Pious ideals are proffered, but menacing, sadistic messages about everlasting punishment in hell strike terror in the hearts and minds of gullible children already beset by abuse in their lives.  Ascetic ideals justify life-negating, self-sacrificial styles of living.  Many religions idealize poverty, sexual abstinence, and obedience to ecclesiastic authorities. While the asceticism is supposed to purge sins, in actuality it adds to violence potentials by increasing shame and frustration.  Furthermore, priests, monks, and nuns in many traditions physically, emotionally, and sexually abuse children.  Trying to live up to religious ideals, believers unconsciously adopt false selves based on appearances.  To escape the wrath of authorities, they repress their core feelings and needs.  As noted above, major religions have preached superiority of males over females, adults over children, and humans over animals.   Religious institutions and beliefs have been vehicles for either social progress or regression depending on the character orientations of the people who used them.          

The most contradictory of cultural institutions with regard to violence is the nation state itself.  Its existence is justified as the supreme protector of the safety and rights of its citizens, and many states do that to greater or lesser degrees.   However, nation states were originally created by conquering military groups, such as feudal kings with their attendant knights, to tax and use the local populace to feed, supply, and  support their armies.79  Many states continue to organize historical  myths and economic structures into a system for the benefit of ruling elites backed by threats of lethal force.  In the U.S., the military accounts for 57% of the federal budget, amounting to $350 billion per year.  Rather than protecting the people from dangerous enemies, such as terrorists, the government invests in useless schemes such as “star wars,” which enrich weapons manufacturers, overburden taxpayers, and threaten the world with human extinction.      

Our favorite myth is that our nation guarantees freedom and justice for all.  In reality, we have over 5 million people on probation, parole, or in prison at any given time, among whom 2 million are incarcerated.  They are disproportionately poor people of color.  Many have been incarcerated for drug-related crimes without victims.   The United Nations Committee Against Torture cited the U.S. criminal justice system for violations of the U.N.’s Minimum Standards for the Treatment of Prisoners.80  Despite constitutional guarantees against “cruel and unusual punishment,” prisoners in this country are subjected to stun guns, prolonged solitary confinement that drives some mad, capital punishment, and rape.  The U.S. imprisonment rate is 6 to 10 times higher than that of any other country except Russia and South Africa.81  Despite the myth that we want to spread democracy around the world, we have repeatedly supported brutal dictatorships, as mentioned above in the section on structural violence.  While the constitution guarantees freedom of expression and assembly, the police meet nonviolent protesters against state and corporate abuses with violence and arrests. 

The state claims a monopoly on “legitimate” violence, including police power, war, capital punishment, and punitive imprisonment.  Some of the state’s institutions — specifically the police, military, and criminal-justice system — do provide protections.  They attract many people who want to serve justice and public safety, but they also give sadistically oriented people outlets for their violent drives.  This accounts for police brutality and war crimes.  Again, I want to stress that not all   people drawn to these professions are sadists.  In the U.S. military, only a small percentage of recruits kill readily.  Others need to be trained (abusively) to kill.

While the world is plagued by excesses of horrific violence, it is important to remember that most people do not commit  violent acts.  Even violent criminals are not violent all of the time.82 Furthermore, not all cultures produce violence or the same levels of violence.  Many people believe destructive, interhuman violence has always been with humanity, but this is not the case.  The geographer James DeMeo has not been able to find any archeological or historical evidence of extensive violence in the form of mass graves, fortifications, ritual widow murder, human sacrifice, or other telltale indicators of violence prior to about 4,000 BCE when desertification occurred in central Asia, the Arabian peninsula, and northern Africa, an area DeMeo dubbed Saharasia.83  He presents massive and compelling evidence that violence spread  around the earth like a plague, carried by nomadic conquerors from Saharasia.  These nomads had been originally brutalized by famine, dehydration, child abuse, and neglect.     

Not all cultures were or are equally violent.  DeMeo analyzed and mapped data tabulated in G.P. Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas (50 variables, 1,170 cultures), and R. Textor’s A Cross-Cultural Summary (63 variables, 400 cultures).  DeMeo’s analyses found 95% correlations among variables that supported the view “...that antisocial violence and destructive aggression were rooted in specific, culturally determined infant and childhood traumas, adolescent sex repressions, and socioeconomic processes and institutions which worked to significantly  subordinate children to adults, females to males, and ordinary people to class- or caste-structured hierarchies.”84 

Similarly, the neuropsychologist James W. Prescott studied 49 cultures with regard to  2 key variables.  He found that those cultures which raised children in nurturing, physically affectionate ways and which were also permissive toward adolescent sexual play had a 98% probability of being nonviolent.  The likelihood of this relationship’s occuring by chance is 1 in 125,000. When anthropologists corrected errors in the coding of data used by Prescott for his cross-cultural analyses, the probabilty rose to 100%. Thus, cultures that truly value age-appropriate physical affection are nonviolent.  Cultures that inflict pain and abuse, especially in early childhood, and that inhibit sexual pleasure in adolescence produce violence.  Prescott concluded that the deprivation of physical sensory pleasure is the principal root cause of violence85.  

CONCLUSION
While I have primarily written about the violence of humans against one another in this booklet, I am equally concerned about the plight of non-human animals and the earth itself.  Researchers have demonstrated conclusively that individuals who are cruel and violent against humans also torture and kill other animals.86  These writers are not even taking into consideration the fact that 98% of people regularly eat meat without any consideration for the suffering of the slaughtered animals or of how meat eating negatively affects the environment.87  Nor are they considering culturally sanctioned hunting, trapping, the fur industry, and scientific experiments on non-human animals. The annual murder rate of animals for meat amounts to 9 billion in the U.S. and 20 billion worldwide.  These animals are most often raised and slaughtered in extremely cruel ways. I believe that the repudiation of violence and the elimination of its causes will lead more and more people to recognize and protect the rights of non-human animals.88  Likewise, people who learn to treat other animals more compassionately will find their hearts more open to members of their own species, as pilot studies have already demonstrated.89

It has taken billions of years for this beautiful planet’s ecosystems and life forms to evolve.  Over millennia, humans have also created much cultural beauty, but our species’ destructiveness threatens to turn the entire earth into a wasteland.  As stated earlier, we are faced with an ecological imperative, as well as a humanitarian one, to arrest violence.    

If humans are to live in peace, which Galtung defined as “the ability to handle conflict with empathy, nonviolence, and creativity,”90 all people of good will and conscience must do everything in their power to end child abuse, gender abuse, structural violence, and cultural violence.

A BRIEF, RANDOM LIST OF VIOLENCE-PREVENTION MEASURES

Each person can contribute in countless ways to creating a culture of peace and reducing violence.  Below is a brief list of  practical actions that individuals and groups can take toward curtailing the plague of violence and making a safer world.  Many books and articles have been or could be written about each of these measures. 

Gentle, natural childbirth.

Ending and outlawing genital mutilations of males and females.

Outlawing corporal punishment and beating of children worldwide.

Intervening with education, help, and, if necessary, restraint wherever children are being abused.

Compassionate, nurturing child raising to help children actualize their own potentials.

Unconditionally supporting parents, especially mothers, for the first three to five years of a child’s life.

Carrying infants in contact with the parent’s body, such as in soft snugli carriers,  rather than distant and alone, such as in hard plastic buckets (removeable car seats).

Parent-child centers everywhere to teach how to raise children nonviolently.

Education based on children’s cognitive and emotional needs and developmental levels.

Encouragement for reading books to children rather than television watching.

Cultural support for heathy sexuality as an expression of love.

Ending media exploitation of pornography and violence.

Equality between males and females.

Involvement of fathers in child raising.

Closing the gap between rich and poor.

Elimination of racism.

Courageous willingness of citizens to confront and oppose the authoritarians in their own cultures.

Worldwide education about how to raise healthy, nonviolent children.

Publishing annual reports on child raising practices in all cultures and countries of the world as part of a global education campaign to end child abuse.

An effective international court of justice to try crimes against humanity.

Use of UN peacekeeping forces if needed to prevent or restrain violence.

Voluntary population limits based on education and contraception.

Demilitarization

Giving the former military budget to biophilic agencies.

Enhancing a culture of altruism and helping.

Treating violence as a public health issue.

Ending capital punishment.

Reforming the criminal justice system so it is based on restraint, education, and therapy rather than punishment.

Vegetarianism and veganism.

More humane treatment of animals.

Abolishing industrial animal husbandry on factory farms.

Ending inhumane practices of vivesection, hunting, and trapping.

Reverence for all life practiced and taught.

Good nutrition: reduced sugar, meat, animal products, and chemicals.

Practicing empathic, nonviolent communication in everyday life and teaching it in all school curricula.

Global justice through development based on democratic self-determination of peoples.

Banning guns.

Ending imperialism.

Stopping corporate globalization.


REFERENCES

1. Alice Miller, The Truth Will Set You Free. New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. x.

2. This term was first  distinguished from direct violence by the Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung in 1969, as noted in Manfred B. Steger and Nancy S. Lind, Violence and its Alternatives: An Interdisciplinary Reader. New York: St. Martin’s Press,1999,  p. xv.

3.    Galtung also conceptualized this concept in his 1990 essay “Cultural Violence,” as republished in Ibid,  pp. 39 - 53.

4.  Gilligan, James, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, New York: Vintage Books, 1997, pp. 103 - 136.

5. Ibid., p.  273-274.

6. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966, 1967, pp. 149-153, 218-227.  Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964, 1970, pp. 260, 298, 326, 331, 332.  René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977,  William Beers, Women and Sacrifice: Male Narcissism and the Psychology of Religion, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. Lloyd deMause, “It’s Time to Sacrifice...Our Children,” The Journal of Psychohistory 18(2), Fall 1990.

7. For evidence in support of this contention see any of the following.  Lloyd deMause,     “The Evolution of Childrearing,“ The Journal of Psychohistory, 28 (4), Spring 2001.  Alice Miller, For Your Own Good : Hidden Cruelty in Childrearing and the Roots of     Violence, New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1983.  James DeMeo, Saharasia: The 4000 BCE  Origins of Sex-Repression, Warfard and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World, Greensprings, OR: Orgone Biophysical Research Lab, 1998.

8. Gilligan,  Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, pp. 110-111.

9.   Olivier Maurel,  La Fessée, Paris: Editions La Plage, 2001, as cited in  Alice Miller, “D’où vient le mal dans le monde et comment se génère-t-il?” <www.Alice-Miller.com>.

10. James Gilligan, Preventing Violence, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001, p. 48. Olivier Maurel, La Fessée, p. 89.

11. < www.nospank.net>  See also “The Chld-Beating Mandate of George W. Bush,”

    <http://irregulartimes.com/cpmap.html>.

12. Jordan Riak, in letter to the editor of the Beaumont Express (11/27/01), < www.nospank.net>. Olivier Maurel, La Fessée, p. 107.

13.  Alice Miller,  The Truth Will Set You Free,  p. 63.

14. National Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse (1998).

15. Donald Trump with Kate Bohner, Art of the Comeback, New York:Times Books, 1998.

16. Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller, Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside, How the World’s Richest Corporation Wields Its Power, New York: H. Holt, 1998.  Sean Connolly, Bill Gates: an Unauthorized Biography, Des Plaines, Ill.: Heinemann Library, 1999.

17. Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley, Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence. New York: Atlantic Monthly Pres, 1998, p. 119, as cited in Lloyd deMause, “War as Righteous Rape and Purification,”  <www.psychohistory.com>.

18. James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, pp. 45-46.

19.  Alice Miller,   For Your Own Good,  pp. 142 - 197.  Alice Miller, “The Political Consequences of Child Abuse,”  The Journal of Psychohistory, 26 (2), Fall 1998.  June Stephenson, Poisonous Power: Childhood Roots of Tyranny, Fullerton, CA: Jeremy Smith Publishing Company, 1998.

20.  Lloyd deMause, “The Gulf War as a Mental Disorder,” “War as Righteous Rape and Purification,”  “The Phallic Presidency: The Clinton Scandals and the Yugoslave War as Purity Crusades,”  <www.psychohistory.com>.

21. Lloyd deMause, “The Evolution of Childrearing,” The Journal of Psychohistory 28 (4), Spring 2001, p. 430, using statistics from Judson T. Landis, “Experiences of 500 Chldren     with Adults’ Sexual Deviance.,” Psychiatric Quarterly Supplement 30 (1956): pp. 91-109.

22. James Gilligan, Preventing Violence, p. 39.

23. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, New York: Bantam Books, 1995, p. 226.

24.Alice Miller, The Truth Will Set You Free, p. 15.

25. Bessel A. van der Kolk and Jose Saporta, “The Biological Response to Psychic Trauma: Mechanisms and Treatment of Intrusion and Numbing,” Anxiety Research, 4 (1991), p.     205, as cited in Lloyd deMause, “War as Righteous Rape and Purification.”

26. For lower serotonin information see: Adrian Raine, The Psychopathology of Crime, pp. 85, 260; David M. Stoff and Robert B. Cairns, Eds., Aggression and Violence: Genetic, Neurobiological and Biosocial Perspectives.  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum     Associates, 1996; for lower testosterone information, see:Stephen S. Hall, “The Bully in the Mirror,” The New York Times Magazine, p. 34,  as cited in Lloyd deMause,“War as Righteous Rape and Purification.”.

27.Wilhelm Reich,  Character Analysis, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux,1971;  The     Mass Psychology of Fascism, NY, Orgone Institute Press, 1946.

28. James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, pp. 35, 36, 47-49, 52.

29.This observation has been made and clinically demonstrated by a wide range of psychotherapists and somatic educators including Wilhelm Reich, Ilse Gindler, Gerda Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais, Arthur Janov, Alice Miller, and many others.

30. Lonnie Athens, The Creation of Violent Criminals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992,  as cited in  lloyd deMause, “War as Righteous Rape and Purification.”

31. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. New York:Viking Press, 1963.

32. Frederic Schiffer, Of Two Minds: The Revolutionary Science of Dual-Brain Psychology. New York: The Free Press, 1998,  as cited in  Lloyd deMause, “War as Righteous Rape and Purification.”

33. Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, p. 248, as cited in James DeMeo, Saharasia, p. 67.

34. James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, p. 9.

35. Ibid,  p. 41.

36. Thomas R. Verny with John Kelly, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, New York : Summit Books, 1981; Thomas R. Verny, “Perspectives on Violence,”

<www.birthpsychology.com/violence/verny.html>;  

37. Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, 1978; Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Magical Child: Rediscovering Nature’s Plan for our Children. New York : Bantam Books, 1980, c1977; James W. Prescott, “Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence,” originally published in The Futurist, April 1975 and in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 1975.

38. This was the standard as taught by the most popular childrearing experts, such as Luther Emmettt Holt in the United States and the earlier writings of Benjamin Spock, as discussed in Ashley Montagu, Touching, pp. 78, 121-122, 123.

39. Margaret Ribble, The Rights of Infants: Early Psychological Needs and their Satisfaction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.

40. Lloyd deMause has documented the high frequency of abandonment in childrearing     modes, as in “The Evolution of Childrearing,”  The Journal of Psychohistory, 28 (4), Spring 2001, pp. 415-422.  See also the work of John Bowlby on attachment, separation, and loss.

41. “Recent Medical Studies on Circumcision,” annotated bibliography from the Circumcision Resource Center, Boston, <www.circumcision.org>.  Jeannine Parvati Baker, “Ending Circumcision: where Sex and Violence First Meet,” <www.birthpsychology.com/violence/baker.html>.  James DeMeo, Saharasia, pp. 117-128.

42. Jerrold Atlas, “Understanding the Correlation Between Childhood Punishment and Adult Hypnotizability as It Impacts on the Command Power of Modern ‘Charismatic’ Political Leaders,” The Journal of Psychohistory 17 (1990), pp. 309-318

43. Lloyd deMause, “It’s Time to Sacrifice ...Our Children,”  The Journal of Psychohistory, 18 (2), Fall 1990, pp. 135-43.

44. James DeMeo, Saharasia, pp. 124-128.

45. Ibid, p. 149.

46. James Gilligan, Preventing Violence, p. 49.

47. Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys.  New York: Ballantine Books, pp. 11, 53,   as cited in  Lloyd deMause, “War as Righteous Rape and Purification.”

48. Judith Sherven and James Sniechowski, “Women Are Responsible Too.”  Survivors of Female Incest Emerge 3(1995), p. 5; Ross d. Parke and Armin A. Brott. Throwaway     Dads: The Myths and Barriers That Keep Men from Being the Fathers They Want to Be.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999, p. 50.  Murray Strauss and Richard Gelles, Physical Violence in American Families, New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1990, p. 4, as cited in Lloyd deMause, “The Evolution of Childrearing,” The Journal of Psychohistory 28(4) Spring 2001, p. 404.

49. James Gilligan,  Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic,  p. 232.

50. Ibid, pp. 165-182, 284n. 10, 285n. 21.

51. http://members.aol.com/tpdrad/rape.htm.

52. Ibid.

53. Robert I. Simon, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior.  Wahington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1996, p. 78, as cited in deMause,  “War as Righteous Rape and Purification.”

54. Amy  L. Gilliland and Thomas R. Verny, “The Effects of Domestic Abuse on the Unborn Child,” Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health, 13 (1999), p. 236, as     cited in Lloyd deMause, “War as Righteous Rape and Purification;”  Lloyd  deMause, “The Evolution of Childrearing,” p. 406

55. James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, pp. 231-232.

56.  James DeMeo, Saharasia, pp. 43, 61, 66, 252-253, 404.

57. Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War, New York: The Free Press, 1991, p. 171, as cited in  Lloyd deMause, “War as Righteous Rape and Purification.”

58. Lloyd deMause, “War as Righteous Rape and Purification.”

59. James Gilligan,  Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, p. 192.

60. Marianne W. Zawitz, ed., Report to the Nation on Crime and Justice, 2nd edition.  Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1988, as cited in James Henslin, Social Problems, 4th ed.  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990, p. 142.

61.  James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, p. 194.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid, p. 196.

64. AFL-CIO Executive Pay Watch, www.aflcio.com. “Executive Pay,” Business Week, April 16, 2001, pp. 76-80.

65. Beverly Red and Mitch Hall, Ignoring Binky, the Life and Times of Victor Evertor, Vergennes, VT: Checkmate Press, 2001.

66.  Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy annual report on executive pay, 8/28/2001, <www.FairEconomy.org>.

67. Rachel’s Environment and Health News, #725, May 24, 2001.

68.  James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, pp. 195-196.

69. Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000, p.23.

70. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, Cambridge, New York : Cambridge University Press,1993. 

71. Richard L. Russell,  George F. Kennan’s Strategic Thought: The Making of an American Political Realist, Westport and London: Praeger, 1999.

72. James Gilligan, Preventing Violence, p. 82.

73. Johan Galtung, “Is There a Therapy for Pathological Cosmologies?” in Jennifer Turpin and Lester R. Kurtz, The Web of  Violence: From Interpersonal to Global, Urbana and     Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997, pp. 187-205.

74. Jerrold Atlas, “Understanding the Correlation Between Childhood Punishment and Adult Hypnotizability as It Impacts on the Command Power of Modern ‘Charismatic’ Political Leaders,” The Journal of Psychohistory 17 (1990), pp. 309-318; Tom Main, “Some Psychhodynamics of Large Groups,” in Lionel Kreeger, ed., The Large Group: Dynamics and Therapy.  London: Karnca Books,1994, p. 64, as cited in Lloyd deMause, “War as Righteous Rape and Purification.” 

75. Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape: A Preliminary Analysis,” in Alexandria Stiglmayer, ed., The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993, p. 63, as cited in  Lloyd deMause, “War as Righteous Rape and Purification.”

76. Alice Miller, The Truth Will Set You Free, pp. 66-67. Olivier Maurel, La Fessée, p. 114.

77. Harpers’ Index, 2001

78.  <www.corpun.com/uss00105.htm>

79. Ekkehart Krippendorf, Staat und Krieg: die historische Logik politischer, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985, as cited in Johan Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” in Violence and Its Alternatives, p. 48.

80. James Gilligan, Preventing Violence, pp. 14, 123.

81. Ibid, 123.

82. James Gilligan made this observation in both his books cited in this work.

83. James DeMeo, Saharasia.

84. Ibid, p. 389.

85. James W. Prescott, “Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence,” originally published in The Futurist, April 1975 and in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 1975.

86. Randall Lockwood and Frank R. Ascione, eds., Cruelty to Animals and Interpersonal Violence, West Lafayette, IN:Purdue University Press, 1998; Frank R. Ascione and Phil Arkow, eds., Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, and Animal Abuse, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999.

87. Jeremy Rifkin.  Beyond Beef: the Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture. New York, N.Y.: Dutton, 1992.  John Robbins.  Diet for a New America.  May All Be Fed.

88. Tom Regan, Defending Animal Rights. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2001.

89. Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: the Search for the True Self , revised edition, New York: Basic Books,  p. 124.

90. Johan Galtung, <www.transcend.org>.