A Multi-Dimensional Model of Violent Behavior (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION During the past two decades, social scientists have become increasingly concerned with the issue of violence. While an EBSCO computer literature survey covering the five-year period of 1981-1985 revealed 4,476 works dealing in some way with the topic, one covering the five-year period of 2005-2009 revealed 212,532 works-a 1,242% increase in scholarly activity in this area. This heightened concern may be partly due to a growing awareness of violence's influence on mental as well as on physical well-being (Anderson et al., 2003; Kirkpatrick and Acierno, 2003; Lecrubier, 2004). Aside from its potential for physical harm (Sharpe and Taylor, 1999; Straight et al., 2003), the problem in young children has been recently linked to such forms of psychological dysfunction as suppressed IQ (Koenen et al., 2003), general psychopathology (Malkovich et al., 2008) and post-traumatic stress (Ruchkin et al., 2007). In the population at large, violence has been linked to general psychological morbidity (O'Reilly and Stevenson, 2003); depression, anxiety and phobias (Heise and Garcia-Moreno, 2002); substance abuse and self-destructive ideation, conditions underlying more than 90% of suicides in the U.S. (Dube et al., 2003); and mental health issues associated with post-traumatic stress (Kaysen et al., 2003). The dramatic rise in the study of violence has been accompanied by an equally striking lack of consistency of research findings in this area (Wolfe et al., 2003). As a case in point, while Grandin, Lupri and Brinkerhoff (Grandin et al., 1998) reported finding no difference between physical and psychological violence in their effects on mental health, Baldry (2003) reported finding psychological abuse to be a stronger predictor of anxiety, depression and low self-esteem than physical abuse. One reason for the inconsistency may involve the way in which the phenomenon of violence has been conceptualized-at times in terms both too narrow and too broad to yield consistent research outcomes. For example, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (Meirriam-Webster, 2003) defines violence as "exertion of physical force so as to injure or abuse"; and, of more immediate interest to workers in the social sciences, the World Health Organization similarly defines it as: