2 Violence Lab panels at ESC 2019

The Violence Lab is organising 2 panels at the 19th Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology (ESC 2019). Leading up to this event, the ESC 2019 conference team made a word cloud based on the key words from the conference abstract submissions. Amongst the top three conference key words is “violence”. On one hand, this is obviously influenced by the rather impressive number of Violence Lab presentations, counting up to as much as 8 of them. On the other hand, this is a confirmation of the timeliness of violence as a criminological topic and its overall appeal for research.

Violence Lab’s ESC 2019 presentations:

Panel 1:
CRIMINOLOGICAL VIOLENCE RESEARCH – Session 1: Concepts & Normative Aspects (Field of Research: ESC Working Group “European Violence Monitor”)
Violence research may well be characterised as highly fragmentary and (sub)specialised, since it predominantly focuses on specific (sub)types of violence, certain groups of perpetrators, or targeted groups of victims. A significant part of violence research is also devoted to specific violence discourses and justifications as well as partial etiological explanations of violence. With the Violence Research Lab (www.violence-lab.eu) and the ESC Working Group “European Violence Monitor” we take a more holistic approach towards violence, based on the premise that the study of certain (sub)types of violence, offenders, victims, discourses, settings, etc., without an overarching conceptual framework and strategy of dealing with normative figures and constructs leads to fragmentary, and potentially distorted understandings of the (sub)types in question.

Anna-Maria Getoš Kalac (Panel 1 Chair)
Associate Professor
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Law, Head of Central Violence Research Lab in Zagreb
Head of the MPPG for Balkan Criminology
anna.kalac@violence-lab.eu

Criminological Violence Research: Ideas / Challenges / Concepts / Solutions
The presentation provides the most important solutions that are currently being implemented and tested by the Croatian Violence Research Lab as an answer to well-known challenges in violence research. These range from definition and terminology to translating criminological ideas into criminal justice practice all the way to sampling strategies and data collection instruments (quantitative and qualitative). In its second part the presentation discusses first findings on developing a ‘genuine violence classification system’ that would no longer depend on normative constructs of violence, but rather classify violence by looking purely at its very essence: the physical harming and killing of another (human/living) being. Finally, the presentation serves as an introduction into the issues discussed in both CRIMINOLOGICAL VIOLENCE RESEARCH panels and by the ESC Working Group “European Violence Monitor”.

Reana Bezić
Assistant
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Law, Violence Research Lab
Member of the MPPG for Balkan Criminology
reana.bezic@violence-lab.eu

Cruelty Towards Animals as a Study Subject of Violence Research?
The aim of this presentation is to discuss should research on violence include only ‘interpersonal’ violence, therefore focusing only on interspecies violence among human beings or should it be expended on cruelty towards animals. From criminal law perspective, status of animals is still not clear since they are basically still being perceived as ‘things’, but at the same time they are protected from cruelty and violence. Animal cruelty is seen as a moral concern and a crime in itself. There is increasing acceptance of the links between cruelty to animals and human violence. Criminological research showed that crimes against animals can be both indicators of other ongoing crimes against people and predictors of the potential for interpersonal violence. The aetiology of animal abuse is similar to the origins of interpersonal violence, and it is see as one expression of antisocial behaviour.

Petra Šprem & Anna-Maria Getoš Kalac (information aforementioned)
Assistant
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Law, Violence Research Lab
Member of the MPPG for Balkan Criminology
petra.sprem@violence-lab.eu

Criminological Ground Rules for Dealing with Legal Rules, Institutes and Figures
Author will present basic guidelines adopted within Croatian Violence Monitor project for dealing with criminal law rules while conducting criminological violence research. Croatian Violence Monitor project aims to study violence in its essence, as an act that happens in reality, freed from criminal law rules (e.g. attempt, negligence/intent, concurrence etc.), institutes (e.g. self-defence, insanity etc.) and figures (e.g. presumption of innocence, finalisation, statute of limitation etc.). The necessity of discussing general criminal law rules, institutes and figures arises out of the fact that violence research is being conducted in a criminal law environment (using method of court/prosecution case analysis). Author will present how do these abstract criminal law concepts reflect on studying violence. Also, author will present plausible criminological ground rules which will manoeuvre the reality focused research undertaking through the complexity of normative fiction.

Ruža Karlović
Vice Dean of the Croatian Police College for Research, Development and University Study Programme, Violence Research Lab
ruza.karlovic@violence-lab.eu

Violence Awareness – Police Contribution
Violence as a social problem in general and particular areas of violence is distorting social values and norms and disturbing the public. Thus, in the Republic of Croatia in 2019 domestic violence has caused great media attention and public protest. Triger was a case where a father threw his children off the balcony. The police as a formal control strive to cooperate with all relevant actors to raise awareness of the problem of violence in which the victims are mostly the weakest members of society (children, women, elderly people etc.). On the official site of the Ministry of the Interior, information on criminal offences and misdemeanors of domestic violence and the number of victims can be found. The aim is to inform the public with the incidence of the offenses and misdemeanors in the area of domestic violence by which the police and other relevant services handle, away from the public eye. The presentation will present data on this awareness raising model as well as first experiences from the perspective of the police.

Panel 2:
CRIMINOLOGICAL VIOLENCE RESEARCH – Session 2: Methodology & Empirical Aspects (Field of Research: ESC Working Group “European Violence Monitor”)
Violence research may well be characterised as highly fragmentary and (sub)specialised, since it predominantly focuses on specific (sub)types of violence, certain groups of perpetrators, or targeted groups of victims. A significant part of violence research is also devoted to specific violence discourses and justifications as well as partial etiological explanations of violence. With the Violence Research Lab (www.violence-lab.eu) and the ESC Working Group “European Violence Monitor” we take a more holistic approach towards violence, based on the premise that the study of certain (sub)types of violence, offenders, victims, discourses, settings, etc., without empirical data on the overall violent context leads to fragmentary, and potentially distorted understandings of the (sub)types in question. Therefore, this panel will address different methodological and empirical aspects of criminological violence research.

Goran Livazović (Panel 2 Chair)
Associate Professor
University of Osijek, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Head of Regional Violence Research Lab in Osijek
goran.livazovic@violence-lab.eu

The Nature vs. Nurture Dilemma in Aetiology of Violence?
The longstanding debate on the importance of nature or nurture in the aetiology of violence has become even more complex. Recent studies emphasize the role of genes and the biological basis of violent behaviour, as well as the significance of family, parents, school, peers, media or leisure time, indicating a multitude of risk and protective factors in violent behaviour development. Contemporary theories describe violent behaviour through biological and personal factors; the quality of close relationships (family and friends); the community context risk levels or the absence of a social network support; and finally the broad societal factors that help to create a climate in which violence is encouraged or inhibited: the responsiveness of the criminal justice system, social and cultural norms regarding gender roles or parent-child relationships, income inequality, the strength of the social welfare system, the social acceptability of violence, the availability of weapons, the exposure to violence in mass media, and political instability, among others. This paper analyses early life and childhood risk factors in relation to violent behaviour aetiology with special regard to the nurture-nature dilemma.

Gunda Woessner
Senior Researcher
Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg, Germany
gunda.woessner@violence-lab.eu

Measuring Violence: An Empirical Approach to Capture the Phenomenology and Nature of Violence
This paper provides an overview of the empirical challenges and considerations associated with violence research. Moreover, the empirical operationalisation of the subject and scope of the Violence Research Lab will be presented, with a particular focus given to its applied research techniques and underlying considerations. The Violence Research Lab encompasses both a quantitative approach (a case file analysis) and a qualitative approach (to investigate unreported violence). These methods are used to obtain a comprehensive picture of what violence looks like when its normative corset is removed, of how it can be explained and of how different levels of severity impact perpetrators and victims. This necessarily incorporates analyses of contextual, social and psychosocial features. In addition, it is essential to develop parameters that allow for the measuring of the intensity and severity of violence. Results from the pilot phase of the data collection process will be presented.

Hana Gačal & Anna-Maria Getoš Kalac (information aforementioned)
Assistant
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Law, Violence Research Lab
Member of the MPPG for Balkan Criminology
hana.gacal@violence-lab.eu

Violence in Croatia: Crime Statistics and their Implications on Violence Research
The aim of the Violence Research Lab is to gain a comprehensive picture of violence in Croatian society. This means that violence research should not restrain itself by focusing on only some selected phenomena of violence. Rather, violence should be inspected more broadly, ranging from the least severe forms of bodily injury through to homicide. However, if one starts to analyse violence on this basis, the number of cases that need to be investigated is immense. We will therefore introduce the approach the Violence Research Lab used to structure officially reported data on violence into three main categories. In addition, findings on the phenomenology of violence in Croatia for a three-year period (2015-2017) are presented. Implications from these findings for the Violence Research Lab will be discussed.

Marko Mrakovčić
Assistant Professor
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Law, Head of Regional Violence Research Lab in Rijeka
marko.mrakovcic@violence-lab.eu

Challenges in Violence Research: Victimisation Study
Discussion about crime and violence within the framework of sociology of deviance, often imposes question about sources of information that one should use in order to study crime and violence. Many researchers suggest that official statistics data is often incomplete and that it might potentially distort a realistic picture while answering the question to which extent different types of violence occur in social life. Therefore, sociologists generally propose that the scope of different types of crime should be studied with the additional methods such as crime surveys, victimisation studies and self-reported delinquency surveys. Despite of their limitations, these methods can certainly help scholars and practitioners to further illuminate the scope of various types of crime that official statistics did not reveal and to accomplish additional comprehension of main causes of crime and violence in a certain society. Within this presentation, author will present a survey of student self-reports regarding their experiences related to different types of violence. The survey was conducted within the University of Rijeka.