From the Past to the Future of Violence
It is a great honour for me to be the recipient of the 2017 ECS European Criminology Award for Lifetime Contribution to European Criminology. I would like to thank the Award Committee for their work, and Michael Tonry for his Laudatio, in which he highlighted my contributions to various areas of criminological research. This includes work on the long-term history of violence, research on human development and problem behavior from childhood to adulthood, and studies on the prevention of violence in different settings. These research strands are bound together by my goal to make a useful contribution to our understanding of the causes and consequences of human violent behavior. In particular, I am trying to find better answers to: Why do societies differ in levels of violence? What are the evolutionary roots of violence and cooperation? What developmental and situational processes are involved in generating aggressive behavior? And what can we do to reduce violence? To find tenable answers to these questions I believe that we need to think across subdomains of criminology, linking prevention science, neuro-criminology, life-course criminology, sociological criminology and evolutionary thinking — to name just a few.
The Revenge Mechanism
I want to illustrate the benefits of thinking across disciplinary boundaries by highlighting some of my work related to one motivating mechanism for human violence, namely revenge — the desire to pay back for harm inflicted on oneself or a member of one’s family of group. Revenge has been shown to be a powerful motive for wars in pre-modern societies; it is the most frequent motive for murder in non-state societies; and it is an influential driver for the painful public punishment that the Early Modern state inflicted on its subjects. Revenge and retaliation for real or alleged wrongs justifiy gang wars in the South of Chicago as much as murder in the townships of Cape Town, police killings in Rio de Janeiro and genocide in Myanmar (Eisner, 2009).
Using insight from evolutionary psychology, I think of revenge as a set of hard-wired psychological mechanisms that mobilise emotions of anger and moralistic aggression, and that are associated with a sense of satisfaction when retaliation has been delivered and justice has been done (Eisner, 2009; Eisner et al., 2017). Anthropological and historical evidence suggests that revenge is a cross-cultural universal, rooted in human psychology and an important cause of violent death in non-state societies. Humans’ desire to retaliate likely evolved because it solves a series of adaptive problems: the anticipation of revenge deters potential aggressors from considering an attack in the first place; actual revenge increases the costs of aggression and hence prevents attackers from attacking again; and in a group-living species revenge and retaliation prevent self-interested actors from free-riding at the cost of others who contribute to a collective good.
The Decline of Homicide since the Middle Ages
A long-held desire for revenge may have played a role when, on 23 March 1369, Henry of Trastamara stabbed his half-brother and King of Castile, Peter the Cruel, to death in a tent outside the fortress of Montiel. According to the French chronicler Froissart, Henry entered the tent and demanded to know ‘Where is that Jewish son of a whore who calls himself King of Castile?’ to which Peter replied ‘You are the son of a whore. I’m the son of good King Alfonso’. This triggered a fight, during which Henry stabbed Peter with his sword. The murder may have made strategic sense, but Henry also had good reasons to hate his half-brother, who not only had Henry’s mother killed soon after the death of their father Alfonso XI but also had Henry’s twin brother Fadrique slain, reportedly enjoying breakfast next to the cooling body.
The episode belongs to a society in which revenge and feuding among the nobility occurred frequently, occasionally leading to cycles of revenge and counter-revenge that escalated into civil wars (Eisner, 2009). It corresponded to a culture that considered the ability to retaliate against threats to public reputation as a defining element of true masculinity. One area of my research therefore attempts to better understand what happened to this type violence in Europe, starting in the Middle Ages (Eisner, 2001: 2003: 2015). Much of this work is inspired by the sociologist Norbert Elias. In his seminal Theory of the Civilizing Process, he argued that interpersonal violence declined in the history of Europe because of the effects of increasing interdependence in market economies and the growing monopoly over the use of force by the state. In an attempt to test this and other hypotheses, I have developed the history of Violence Database, a collection of quantitative data retrieved from primary historical work on levels and contextual characteristics of homicide in all regions of Europe.
This work, some of which has become widely known through Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, revealed a surprisingly consistent long-term declining trend over several centuries across all of Western Europe. It was not uniform, but interrupted by recurring periods of increase, some of which — such as the increase in interpersonal violence between the 1960s and the 1990s — appear to have been synchronised across the entire continent. Moreover, we can increasingly recognise a large-scale spatial pattern in the decline. It resembles the gradual expansion of low homicide regimes along a centre to periphery axis: The decline of homicide probably started earliest in the North-West of Europe, spread to Scandinavia somewhat later, and expanded to southern Europe even later.
The causes of the decline were complex. But the work by historians and social scientists leaves little doubt that gaining control over feuding, blood-revenge, and tit-for-tat manslaughters that responded to sleighs in taverns or outside university colleges played a major role. The process played out at different levels. It included the gradual introduction of the rule of law as an effective source of protection against the threat by others; it comprised a transition from a man of honour, rooted in a collectivist culture of self-defense, to a man of respect representing a more individualist culture of self-restraint; and it entailed the shift to more spatially mobile societies, where walking away from a conflict became a option that had few costs for public standing (van Gelder et al., 2017).
Links between Victimisation and Perpetration: Ruminating about Murder and Revenge
The claim that the historical decline in violence resulted partly from increasing social control over revenge rests on assumptions about human nature. It entails the idea that humans are highly sensitive to provocations, threats to their reputation, and harm against themselves and their kin — and that such acts activate psychological mechanisms associated with anger, hatred and a thirst for revenge. However, we cannot directly observe psychological mechanisms in historical material. The argument therefore risks remaining mere speculation.
We can overcome this limitation by searching for evidence of the revenge mechanism in modern societies. For example, longitudinal data with information on victimisation, angry ruminations about striking back, and actual violent behavior would allow us to examine whether threats to well-being and reputation activate a desire to take revenge even if ultimately we don’t do it. One data set that fulfills these requirements is the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood, or z-proso (Eisner and Ribeaud, 2007). I initiated this study in 2002. It follows a cohort of 1675 children who entered one of 54 primary schools in the city of Zurich in 2004. Since then we have collected multi-informant data on the study participants at ages 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, and 17, and we are currently preparing the upcoming data collection wave at age 20. The initial participation rate was 83% (N = 1361). At age 17 the participation rate was 81% of the original target sample (N = 1306). The study has a particular focus on aggressive and violent behavior, with extensive data on victimisation and a range of age-adequate measures on related psychological mechanisms. One of the research programmes that my colleagues and I pursue on the basis of this unique data source related to improving our understanding of the mechanisms that link victimisation and perpetration (e.g., Averdijk et al. 2016; van Gelder et al., 2017).
When the study participants were aged 17 we administered a newly developed measure of violent ideations. The instrument consisted of 11 items that ask participants to indicate how often they had thought of killing, assaulting or otherwise attacking others during the past 30 days (Murray, Eisner and Ribeaud, 2016). Three items relate to fantasies of killing a person who is personally known to the respondent.
This information allows us to estimate how frequent ruminations about murder and revenge are in one of the most peaceful societies in the world. Results show that young Swiss produce enough murderous fantasies to eliminate much of Swiss society if they acted on their thoughts (Murray, Eisner and Ribeaud, 2016). More specifically, 18.6% of the study participants had thought at least once about killing a person they know during the past 30 days. Men were about twice as likely as women to have homicidal ideations (24.1% versus 13.0%), and the male respondents who did have homicidal ideations were more likely to experience them repeatedly than female respondents.
Where do these ruminations come from, and why do individuals differ in how much they experience thoughts of killing a person they know? To a large extent the likelihood of homicidal ruminations reflects broader personality characteristics such as impulsivity and aggressiveness (Murray et al., 2017). However, if the revenge mechanism exists, we would expect that victimisation experiences cumulatively lead to more, and more intensive, thoughts of brutal revenge, especially among men.
In ongoing research we have started to explore this hypothesis by examining the prevalence of homicidal thoughts as a function of victimisation experiences over the five preceding years. Using the data collected at ages 13, 15 and 17 we calculated an overall variety index of violent victimisation. The index comprises 36 (12 items in each of three waves) items on victimisation at home by the parents (e.g. slapping), serious violent victimisation (assault, robbery), and bullying victimisation. We first calculated total sum scores and then categorised them into groups (0–2, 3–5, 6–8, etc. victimisations).
Provisional results are shown in Figure 2. They demonstrate a strong bivariate association between the overall load of multiple victimisations on the one hand, and the proportion of young people who experience homicidal ideations on the other. For example, young men who experienced 0–2 victimisations over the past five years were 15 times less likely to think about killing a person they know than young men who had experienced 19 or more victimisations.
More analyses will be needed. But it seems that our findings may shed some new light on one of the best-established empirical regularities in criminology, namely the overlap between victimisation and perpetration of violence.
Future Research — Evidence for Better Lives
In the future, I intend to further expand this research line in a project that I hope to develop in collaboration with an international network of partners over the coming decade. The project is called Evidence for Better Lives. It aims to combine innovative research, policy impact, and capacity building. Its scientific core would be a birth cohort study launched simultaneously in eight medium-sized (pop. 130–700,000) cities in Low and Middle Income Countries, namely Kingston (Jamaica), Koforidua (Ghana), Stellenbosch (South Africa), Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Ragama (Sri Lanka), Tarlai Kalan (Pakistan), Hue (Vietnam), and Valenzuela (Philippines). The main focus of the study will be on the link between violence against children and child psychosocial development in the first years of life. In each site, cohorts of 1500 families with an expectant mother in the third trimester of pregnancy will be recruited (12,000 index children in total) and assessed on an annual basis.
A set of questions to which we aim to contribute with this research relates to the processes through which prenatal exposure to violence affects child psychosocial health in the first years of life, and also possibly well into later childhood and adolescence. In particular, we expect substantial proportions of mothers in the study sites to experience intimate partner violence during their pregnancy. According to the Demographic and Health Survey, for example, an estimated 11% of women in Pakistan experience physical domestic violence during pregnancy, and rates may be even higher in South Africa and Jamaica (e.g. Taillieu and Brownridge, 2010). Existing research shows that exposure to intimate partner violence during pregnancy affects a range of manifestations of child problem behavior, including children’s higher negative emotionality, more internalizing and externalising symptoms, as well as developmental delays. Various causal mechanisms have been suggested. One hypothesis holds that the maternal experience of stress affects the neurodevelopment of the unborn child, especially a range of processes involved in the development of the child’s stress-response system. This, in turn may lead to an increased tendency to angry responding, which may then lay the basis for long-term tendencies towards reactive aggression later in life.
Conclusions
Probably the most intellectually rewarding aspect of being a criminologist for me lies in the endless opportunities to navigate between disciplines. Understanding something like revenge and retaliation requires macro-level comparative thinking across human societies; it necessitates an understanding of the evolutionary forces that have shaped the mechanisms at the basis of human emotions such as empathy, hatred and a desire for justice; and it demands an understanding of how the development of individuals is shaped by the interaction of genetic, neurocognitive, and environmental mechanisms. At the same time, such knowledge can shape the prevention and intervention policies that can help us as criminologists to advance productive co-operation and to reduce violence, neglect and exploitation in all their manifestations.
Manuel Eisner is Wolfson Professor of Criminology, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Manuel Eisner
Manuel Eisner is Wolfson Professor of Criminology, Professor of Comparative and Developmental Criminology, and the Director of the Violence Research Centre at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Professor Eisner studied history and subsequently obtained a PhD in sociology at the University of Zürich. He is a scholar of world renown in three substantially different subjects: the history of violence, comparative studies of violence, and longitudinal studies of early childhood interventions with high-risk children. His work on the history of violence since the fourteenth century is considered groundbreaking. His History of Homicide Database, first developed two decades ago and regularly updated since, is referenced extensively by every major historian of crime and violence. The Violence Research Centre at Cambridge, which he founded and heads, is the driving force — along with the World Health Organisation and the United Nations — in a program to reduce violence globally by 50 percent in 30 years. He also founded and heads the project “z-proso — The life-course development of violence and crime” at the ETH Zürich in his native Switzerland. The project aims to understand how individual, family, school, and situational factors work together in the development of violence and other problem behaviour with a view to developing more effective methods of intervention and prevention.
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Eisner, M. (2003). Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime. Crime and Justice; A Review of Research, 30, 83–142.
Eisner, M. (2009). The uses of violence: An examination of some cross-cutting issues. International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 3(1), 40–59.
Eisner, M. (2014). From swords to words: Does macro-level change in self-control predict long-term variation in levels of homicide? Crime and Justice, 43(1), 65–134.
Eisner, M. & Ribeaud, D. (2005). A Randomized Field Experiment to Prevent Violence. The Zurich Intervention and Prevention Project at Schools, in: European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 13(1), 27–43.
Eisner, M., Murray, A., Ribeaud, D., Averdijk, M., & van Gelder, J.-L. (2017). From the savannah to the magistrate’s court. The roots of criminal justice in evolved human psychology. In B. Jann & W. Przepiorka (Eds.), Social Dilemmas, Institutions, and the Evolution of Cooperation. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Eisner, Manuel and T. Malti (2015). “Aggressive and Violent Behavior”. Lamb, M. E. (ed.) Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, Vol. 3 Socioemotional Processes. New York: Wiley, pp. 794–841.
Murray, A. L., Eisner, M., & Ribeaud, D. (2016). Development and Validation of a Brief Measure of Violent Thoughts The Violent Ideations Scale (VIS). Assessment. doi: 1073191116667213
Murray, A.L., Eisner, M., Obsuth, I., & Ribeaud, D. (2017). Situating violent ideations within the landscape of mental health: Associations between violent ideations and dimensions of mental health. Psychiatry Research, 249, 70–77.
Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of our Nature; Why Violence has Declined. London: Viking.
Taillieu TL, Brownridge DA (2010) Violence against pregnant women: Prevalence, patterns, risk factors, theories, and directions for future research. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 15, 14–35.
van Gelder, J. L., Averdijk, M., Ribeaud, D., & Eisner, M. (2017). Punitive parenting and delinquency: The mediating role of short-term mindsets. The British Journal of Criminology. (online first).