Violence is a concern due to the consequences it triggers, its variety of expressions, its habitual nature, and its widespread reach.
Types of Violence
The main types of violence that exist are gender-based, workplace, sexual, and terrorist violence. It is very important to combat aggressive or violent behavior, discover its root causes, and eliminate it.
How to Predict Violent Behaviors?
The prediction of violent behaviors or acts is the first step in violence prevention – preventive programs, violence risk assessment techniques, prediction procedures to reduce the risk and consequences of violence, known as “risk management” – and consists of an assessment where risk and protective factors are identified, which in turn condition the probability of future occurrence of violent acts by an aggressor in specific circumstances.
Violence risk assessment protocols generate valuable information about conditional probability, which goes hand in hand with preparing ways to act to control or reduce this probable risk of violent behaviors.
Problematic Aggressiveness and its Conditioning Factors
Problematic aggressiveness involves the interrelation of the following factors:
- Biological Personality Factors: reactivity or impulsivity.
- Individual Psychological Factors: emotional reaction capacity, alteration in the interpretation of social interaction, inadequate problem-solving strategies.
- Social Factors: deficits linked to early ages, incorrect behavioral models, inadequate reward contingencies, deficit of affective and disciplinary vigilance in educators, exposure to violent behaviors in caregivers, social environment, or media.
It can be considered, apart from the biological factor, that violence is not linked to a gene, but rather to determining psychological and social factors.
Psychological Factors of Violence
Thus, the subject with a psychological profile of a personality with aggressive and violent tendencies shows:
- Conflictive. Does not learn from experience or punishment.
- Breaks usual social norms.
- Aggressive. Desire to harm others. The aggressor knows that their victim does not like what they are doing. Therefore, they do not have to wait for the group to evaluate their behavior as a violation of social norms; instead, the victim, by providing direct information about the negative consequences of their action, reinforces and maintains these behaviors.
- Difficulty experiencing feelings of shame and guilt.
- Low frustration tolerance.
- Tendency towards egocentrism and extrapunition.
- Low or no capacity for empathy and collaboration.
- Limited capacity to establish interpersonal and equitable relationships.
As mentioned, risk assessment is based on identifying the risk and protective factors present in the personal history and also in the current and immediately future reality of a potential aggressor, considering a respective generalization of the scenarios that the aggressor and victims may encounter.
Montserrat Soto