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A few common observations emerge. The first, and most disturbing, is that human beings, like few other species, are pervasively aggressive, violent and murderous to each other. The major predators of humans are other humans. The second important point is that all violence is not the same. Some violence is due to impulsive behavior, some due to the disinhibition by drugs or alcohol, some due to serious mental illness, some to hate, revenge, or retribution.

How any individual comes to kill is a complex combination of circumstances, and it is almost impossible to know exactly "why" for any given act of violence. We will never really know the full answer to "why" for the murders at Columbine. Yet this should not stop us from trying to understand and prevent violence.

We know that not all humans kill. And some societies are more violent than others. So what do we know about the conditions that increase violence? What observations are common across cultures and through history when violence emerges? When we become desensitized to death or killing, violence increases. When death and violence surrounds someone, the value of human life can diminish and the horror of violent death can decrease.

In Europe during the Black Plague, up to half the people in a village could die in a few months. The survivors often migrated to medieval cities and, soon afterwards, the rates of violence and murder skyrocketed, exceeding the rates of killing in modern New York.

Pervasive death desensitizes. Pervasive violence desensitizes. In the United States, while we have been spared the horrors of war in our land and plague, we will self-expose ourselves to remarkable violence. We will watch , graphic violent acts on TV by age Too many of us have become desensitized to violent acts, not realizing the true effects of a bullet passing through a human body.

Look at his head explode. His aggressive behaviors in school were so disruptive that he was placed in a special classroom. Being part of the solution : Don't watch so much violence. It is everywhere, but try to watch less. Certainly if you are watching and someone younger is in the room, turn the channel, get them out and help younger children see less violence.

You may be able to understand something is "just television," but a young child cannot. Try to learn something about the real impact of violence. Listen to the mother of a murdered child. Your community may have a Survivor of Violence group; see what they can tell you. Try to see what a bullet really does. A little research can teach you more about violence than a lifetime of TV or movies. For one thing, they affect how much and in what direction the world around them will influence how they think and feel about things.

What one child can tolerate, another will experience as highly destructive. What will be overwhelming to one child will be a minor inconvenience to another. Knowing a child's temperament goes a long way towards knowing how vulnerable that child will be in the world, particularly in extreme situations. Most children can live with one major risk factor; few can handle an accumulation of them. Getting from a generalized "it depends" to a more specific assessment of the likely fate of any child lies in accounting for all the elements of accumulated risk factors, developmental assets, and temperament to determine the odds of success or failure.

Although it is defined in numerous ways, resilience generally refers to an individual's ability to stand up to adverse experiences, to avoid long term negative effects, or otherwise to overcome developmental threats.

Many of us know a child whose life is a testament to resilience. All children have some capacity to deal with adversity, but some have more than others and are thus more "resilient", while others are more "vulnerable" in difficult times. But some children face relatively easy lives while others face mountains of difficulty with few allies and resources.

Resilience is not absolute. Virtually every child has a "breaking point" or an upper limit on "stress absorption capacity". What is more, in some environments virtually all children demonstrate negative effects of highly stressful and threatening environments.

What is more, resilience in gross terms may obscure real costs to the individual. Some children manage to avoid succumbing to the risk of social failure as defined by poverty and criminality but nonetheless experiences real harm in the form of diminished capacity for successful intimate relationships.

Even apparent social success - performing well in the job market, avoiding criminal activity, and creating a family- may obscure some of the costs of being resilient in a socially toxic environment such as if faced by millions of children.

The inner lives of these children may be fraught with emotional damage - to self-esteem and intimacy, for example. Though resilient in social terms, these kids may be severely wounded souls. Why are adolescents violent? The simplest answer is this: they are violent because children they did not learn to succeed in non-violent strategies for meeting their needs and responding to emotions like anger, frustration and fear. The success of military training in producing soldiers who are capable of lethal violence "on command" is evidence of that.

But the main story when it comes to adolescent violence starts in childhood. Virtually all children express aggressive behavior in infancy and early childhood, so the real issue is not "how do children become aggressive? Some children receive consistent messages about that reduce the legitimacy of aggression "don't hit" , while others receive messages that legitimatize aggression "fight back when attacked" and "aggression is successful". Similarly, some children observe parents, siblings and peers resolving conflict non-aggressively while others observe abuse and fighting.

Just mapping patterns of cognitive structuring and behavioral rehearsal goes a long way towards understanding why some kids arrive at adolescence with a high level of aggressive behavior while others don't. All this helps explain why boys have traditionally engaged in more physical aggression than girls. And these same processes help explain why the gap between boys and girls in the matter of physical aggression is narrowing as girls are told and shown that "girls do hit" and have a chance to participate in settings where they can practice being physically aggressive.

The ratio of girls' to boys' participation in high school sports changed in the past 30 years changed from 1: 32 to 1: 1. All this may help explain findings like these: The ratio of male to female arrests for assaults changed in the last 20 years from to , and research on the effects of televised violence on aggressive behavior in children shows that in the s girls were immune to the effect and now show the same effects as boys 2.

The kids most at risk from bringing a pattern of serious childhood aggression into adolescence are those who have developed a chronic pattern of bad behavior and violating the rights of others, kids who might be described as meeting the criteria for what mental health professionals call "conduct disorder". Research on the links between "risky thinking" reveals that the odds that a child will develop conduct disorder reflect the intersection of being abused and having lower levels of social information processing being hypersensitive to negative social information and oblivious to positive social information as well as having very limited ideas of alternatives to physical aggression as a social tactic and also carrying around the belief that aggression is a successful social tactic.

These youth can make the transition to murder readily if weapons are available and they reach a crisis state. Knowing how these kids reach this point and what we can do reclaim them empowers us to reduce the odds that they will commit acts of lethal violence. My second conclusion is that the problem of lethal youth violence usually starts from a combination of early difficulties in relationships that are linked to a combination of difficult "temperament" and negative experience.

Every parent who knows children knows that children come equipped with different temperaments. Some are sunny and easy; others are stormy and difficult.

Therefore, it is often understood differently by different people in different contexts - such as those from different countries, cultures, or belief systems. While no standard definition of violence has been established, it is important, when developing effective prevention strategies, to have a clear understanding of violence and the context in which it occurs.

In its World Report on Violence and Health, the World Health Organisation WHO proposes a definition of violence that has since become a working term for many international and South African organisations working in the field:.

It divides violence into three broad categories according to who the perpetrators and victims are of violent acts:. Self-directed violence refers to violent acts a person inflicts upon him- or herself, and includes self-abuse such as self-mutilation and suicidal behaviour including suicidal thoughts, as well as attempted and completed suicide. Interpersonal violence refers to violence inflicted by another individual or by a small group of individuals.

It can be further divided into two subcategories:. Collective violence can be defined as the instrumental use of violence by people who identify themselves as members of a group — whether this group is transitory or has a more permanent identity — against another group or set of individuals, in order to achieve political, economic or social objectives.

This can manifest in a number of forms, such as genocide, repression, terrorism and organised violent crime. By looking more closely at the nature of acts of violence, these three categories can be further divided into four, more specific, types of violence:.

Physical violence is the intentional use of physical force, used with the potential for causing harm, injury, disability or death. This type of violence does not only lead to physical harm, but can also have severe negative psychological effects — for example, if a child is frequently a victim of physical violence at home, he or she can suffer from mental health problems and be traumatised as a consequence of this victimisation.

Sexual violence involves a sexual act being committed or attempted against a victim who has not freely given consent, or who is unable to consent or refuse. A perpetrator forcing or coercing a victim to engage in sexual acts with a third party also qualifies as sexual violence. This type of violence can also lead to physical harm, and in most cases has severe negative psychological effects too. Psychological violence also referred to as emotional or mental abuse includes verbal and non-verbal communication used with the intent to harm another person mentally or emotionally, or to exert control over another person.

The impact of psychological violence can be just as significant as that of other, more physical forms of violence, as the perpetrator subjects the victim to behaviour which may result in some form of psychological trauma, such as anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

This includes, but is not limited to:. This not only leads to mental health problems, but also to severe physical problems, such as psychosomatic disorders. Neglect, or deprivation, is a type of abuse which occurs when someone has the responsibility to provide care for an individual who is unable to care for him- or herself, but fails to do so, therefore depriving them of adequate care. The late Justice Antonio Scalia, writing for the majority in the Supreme Court decision, scoffed at the notion that violent video games cause real-world violence.

Most of the research studies suffer from admitted flaws in methodology, he wrote. Professional societies have struggled with the issue and waged battles within their ranks without reaching a clear conclusion. The council urged the AMA to contact the American Psychiatric Association APA about including internet and video game addiction in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , a text used by psychiatrists around the world. The APA was also split internally.

There was insufficient research on whether violent video games cause lethal violence. Studies have also shown that video game use is associated with a decrease in empathy and other socially desirable behavior. The warring positions on the issue were judged closer to agreement than most think in a recent analysis.

One respected organization, the National Center for Health Research, a non-profit non-partisan organization that critiques medical research, leans in the direction of worrying about triggering lethal assaults. Such studies are difficult to conduct and require very large numbers of children. It makes sense that since playing violent video games tends to increase the level of aggressive behavior it would also result in more lethal violence or other criminal behaviors, but there is no clear evidence to support that assumption.

That paper and many others stress that video game exposure is only one of many risk factors for aggressive behavior and violence. Various scholars point to such factors as racism and ethnic hatred, certain psychiatric disorders, adverse social environments, and easy access to guns and other lethal weapons, which may be the most critical factor of all. Focusing on violent video games as the cause of mass shootings almost certainly distracts legislators and government officials from the pressing need to deal with more fundamental causes.

It is a moral imperative for federal and state legislators, government officials, and all others concerned with lethal violence to confront the underlying problems and not take symbolic refuge in blaming violent video games.