Family Violence

Introduction

In the sociology of crime and criminality, emphasis is placed on cultural and group forces that produce actors who represent forms of deviance from the dominant value, or moral demand, system. The individual offender is not ignored; he is simply clustered with other individuals alike in attributes deemed theoretically or statistically meaningful. His "uniqueness" is retained by the improbability that on several attributes or variables he will appear identical to everyone else. Hence, the researchers resort to means, medians, modes, to probability theory, inferential statistics and mathematical models for analyzing predominant patterns and regularities of behavior. Biological and psychological factors are not ignored, but when a monodisciplinary perspective is used by sociologists, the bio-psychological is suspended, postponed or dismissed after consideration. Biological needs and psychological drives may be declared uniformly distributed and hence of no utility in explaining one form of behavior relative to another. They may be seen as differential endowments of personalities that help to assign, for example, a label of...