The purpose of the study was to examine whether a set of theoretically and empirically established risk factors could contribute to the classification of violent versus non-violent offending in an ethnically diverse sample of male and female adolescent juvenile delinquents. Variables examined included economic disadvantage, grade point average (GPA), sex, dependency involvement, special education diagnosis, specific learning disability diagnosis, emotional disability diagnosis, history of illegal substance violation, and recidivism. Observed versus expected frequencies of violent versus non-violent offending across different ethnicity categories were also examined. It was hypothesized that economic disadvantage and grade point average would not significantly contribute to the classification of violent versus non-violent offense group membership in juvenile delinquents. It was hypothesized that sex, dependency involvement, special education diagnosis, specific learning disability diagnosis, emotional disability diagnosis, history of illegal substance violation, and recidivism would significantly contribute to the classification of violent versus non-violent offense group membership in juvenile delinquents. It was also hypothesized that there would be no significant differences between observed versus expected frequency of violent versus non-violent offending across ethnicity categories.A discriminant analysis retained five of nine variables in the final stepwise model, including recidivism, illegal substance violation history, special education diagnosis, emotional disability diagnosis, and specific learning disability diagnosis. While variables in the analysis significantly contributed to the classification of non-violent group membership, the model yielded low hit ratio for classification of cases into the violent group. A chi-square analysis was also conducted to examine whether there were significant differences between observed and expected frequencies across different ethnicity categories with regard to violent versus non-violent offense group membership. No significant association existed between ethnicity and the juvenile delinquents' expected versus observed frequency of violent versus non-violent offender group membership. Implications of these findings, limitations of the study, and areas for future research are discussed.

Violence against children and among children in the schools is a very actual problem of nowadays. Not only physical but also psychological violence exists in the schools. Most probably it might be difficult to find a pupil who not have sufferend from violence at least once in the school. Violence damages the quality of life of both people’s who suffer from the violence and people’s who use the violence. The aim of the work was to find out how the violence is being spread in the schools of Utena district. The problems of violence concept are being analysed and the results of different types of violence characteristics are explained in the firs part of the work. The possible influence of the family, class and teachers on the violence is being discussed in the second part of the work. The usage of preventive measures used by social pedagog for pupil who suffers from violence is being explained in the second part of the work as well. The analysis of the research results is shown in the third part of the work. The pupilsdo not classify emotional violence to the types of violence. It is supposed that they take it as a natural thing. The guideline to the social pedagogs is given in the end of the work.

Male partner violence involves repeated abuse, committed by an intimate partner, someone you know and care about, over a period of time. A woman who has experienced this unimaginable betrayal by her intimate partner, the man she believed would protect and cherish her, struggles with the many complexities involved in male partner violence. I use autoethnography as methodology to share my own personal story of male partner violence and I explore, examine, and challenge the socio-cultural and socio-political norms that influenced me to stay in an abusive relationship and also leave the relationship. I include the knottiness of my healing journey after moving out and moving on. I use a silkscreen portrayal of male partner violence, a pen and ink self-portrait, photographs, poetry, court documents and journal entries to explore different perspectives of my experience and to examine the relationship between seeing, thinking, and knowing, and the complex nature of my experience of male partner violence. I struggle and untangle what kept me in the marriage for so long and share the stimulus for why I eventually left and I examine the very troubling effects of male partner violence on myself and my children. I share my guilt, shame, grief and loss but I also recognize my resourcefulness, strength, and determination to survive and move beyond male partner violence. I made many decisions along the way and I always felt caught in a losing dichotomy every time. Through a feminist way of viewing male partner violence and autoethnographic writing, I also examine social perceptions of male partner violence, domination, the loss of voice and power that occurs and the lack of support from traditional social institutions. While I understand that women experience male partner violence in different ways, this is my personal experience of living with and leaving male partner violence.

There is ample evidence to suggest that, in the context of dating relationships, female-perpetrated intimate abuse is as common as male-perpetrated intimate abuse (e.g., Archer, 2000). Despite awareness of this fact, female-perpetrated intimate abuse remains an understudied area. The current study adds to the available literature on female-perpetrated intimate abuse by examining Dutton’s (2007) theory of the Abusive Personality in a sample of 914 women who had been involved in dating relationships. This is the first study to examine all elements of the Abusive Personality in women simultaneously. Consistent with the Abusive Personality, recalled parental rejection, borderline personality organization (BPO), anger, and trauma symptoms all demonstrated moderate to strong relationships with women’s self-reported intimate psychological abuse perpetration. Fearful attachment style demonstrated a weak to moderate relationship with psychological abuse perpetration. With the exception of fearful attachment, all elements of the Abusive Personality demonstrated a relationship with women’s self-reported intimate violence perpetration. However, these relationships were comparatively weak. A potential model for explaining the interrelationships between the elements of the Abusive Personality was tested using structural equation modeling. This is the first study with either sex to examine all elements of the Abusive Personality simultaneously using structural equation modeling. Consistent with the proposed model, recalled parental rejection demonstrated a relationship with BPO, trauma symptoms, and fearful attachment. Also consistent with the model, trauma symptoms demonstrated a relationship with anger, and BPO demonstrated strong relationships with trauma symptoms, fearful attachment, and anger. Additionally, anger itself had a strong relationship with women’s self-reported perpetration of intimate psychological and physical abuse. Contrary to the proposed model, fearful attachment had a non-significant relationship with anger – when this relationship was examined using structural equation modeling. Based on findings from the current study, fearful attachment has a weaker relationship with college women’s perpetration of intimate abuse than it does with clinical samples’ perpetration of intimate abuse. Following a discussion of the results, limitations of the study are discussed in conjunction with possible future directions for this line of research.

Health personnel, especially nurses, are often victims of workplace violence. Unfortunately, little is known about the nurses' experience of violence. A research study was initiated to further explore the nurses' accounts of workplace violence so as to make dimensions of the nurses' experience visible and more fully understood. Interpretive description was the research methodology adopted for this study. Using theoretical sampling, ten Registered Nurses from the lower mainland and Vancouver Island, British Columbia participated in semi structured, audiotaped interviews. In this research, the nurses' experience of workplace violence emerged as a highly complex entity, deeply embedded in relationships and context. How nurses perceive the contextual factors of the organization, their immediate work environment and their individual attributes were found to play a significant role in how they respond to the phenomenon. The findings of this study suggest that organizational culture is an important determinant in managing workplace violence and that policy and administrative personnel play a pivotal role in influencing the problem. Nursing culture also influences the nurses' expectations, assumptions and actions towards violence. Participants voiced that role conflict often challenged their ability to enact acquired professional ideals and that that they routinely undertake roles in dealing with violence that are not appropriate to their level of knowledge or skill. Within the nurses' immediate work environment, bullying as well as physical and verbal abuse was commonplace. Overcrowding, long waits for service, poor environmental design and inadequate staff to patient ratios were seen as factors that increased nurses' risk. Individual factors were associated with emotional and psychological harms that nurses endured. Workplace violence affected self-concept, self-esteem, self-efficacy and the nurses' sense of control. Moral distress, self-blame, feelings of failure, loss of motivation and leaving the nursing profession were significant findings. The results of this study demonstrate a need to re-think how we can address workplace violence in nursing. Research and intervention is needed to further explore organizational policy and governing structures, the culture and climate of practice environments, and the fundamental role nursing education programs have in preparing nurses to manage workplace violence.

This study examines the figure of the violent woman in Atwood’s fiction as a productive starting point for the re-evaluation of various socio-cultural debates. Emerging from Atwood’s conviction that art, in its various forms, is often involved in the re-writing of convention, I begin by re-defining traditional constructions of womanhood and violence in order to evince the reformative work and often unconventional forms of brutality employed by women in Atwood’s novels, including Surfacing, The Blind Assassin, Lady Oracle, and Cat’s Eye, and in her collections of short fiction, such as Dancing Girls, Bluebeard’s Egg, The Penelopiad, and The Tent. Throughout, I demonstrate the ambivalence of violence as both destructive and generative, Canadian and un-Canadian, and Atwood’s drawing on this destabilizing ambivalence in order to propose change within her broader social milieu. More precisely, the introductory chapter offers an overview of representations of female violence in Canadian fiction, and of the various responses to this figure as she appears in Atwood’s fiction, that point to the need for a critical vocabulary that addresses women’s capacity to enact harm. The second chapter examines the various mythologies that define Canada and its people, and how the violent woman troubles these mythologies by inciting recognition of national identity as a narrative process open to re-evaluation. The third chapter moves away from this focus on national narratives to highlight the discourses that similarly shape our understanding of art, and those who participate in it. Here, the violent woman can be seen to engage in revisionary work by exposing the limits of the Red Shoes Syndrome that has in many ways come to define the fraught relationship between the female artist and her art. The final chapter examines Atwood’s on-going fascination with various kinds of mythologies and her revisions of Classical and Biblical myths in order to highlight the veritable range of female violence and the possibility, and at times necessity, of responding to these behaviors in ways that circumnavigate traditionally masculine forms of justice ethics. In focusing on how Atwood’s violent women engage these various socio-cultural discourses, this study concludes that traditionally marginal and nonliterary figures can perform central and necessary roles and that Atwood’s fiction responds to, and in turn (re)creates, the social environment from which it emerges. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-07-31 16:21:26.474

The construction of domestic violence shifted and changed as this issue was forced from the private shadows to the public stage. This dissertation explores how government policy initiatives - Bill 117: An Act to Better Protect Victims of Domestic Violence and the Domestic Violence Action Plan (DVAP) - shaped our understanding of domestic violence as a social problem in the first decade of the twenty-first century in Ontario. Specifically, it asks whose voices were heard, whose were silenced, how domestic violence was conceptualized by various stakeholders. In order to do this I analyzed the texts of Bill 117, its debates, the DVAP, as well as fourteen in-depth interviews with anti-violence advocates in Ontario to shed light on their construction of the domestic violence problem. Then I examined who (both state and non-state actors) regarded the work as ‘successful’, flawed or wholly ineffective. In particular, I focused on the claims and counter-claims advanced by MPPs, other government officials, feminist or other women’s group advocates and men’s or fathers’ rights group supporters and organizations. The key themes derived from the textual analysis of documents and the interviews encapsulate the key issues which formed the dominant construction of domestic violence in Ontario between 2000 and 2009: the never-ending struggles over funding, debates surrounding issues of rights and responsibilities, solutions proposed to address domestic violence, and finally the continued appearance of deserving and undeserving victims in public policy. This exploration is important because it speaks to issues of power, given that within and between these advocacy groups certain voices are privileged and silenced to varying degrees, and the outcomes of these complex processes contribute to the shaping of public policy and perceptions outside the state apparatus. / Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2012-01-09 22:24:41.971

In 2004 the Ontario Ministry of Education created the Safe Schools Action Team (SSAT) to advise on the development of a comprehensive approach to bullying prevention. When four years later in 2008 the SSAT re-engaged in order to review the issues of gender-based violence, homophobia, sexual harassment, and inappropriate sexual behaviour, recommendations were made for addressing these issues (Ministry of Education, 2008). One of the most significant dimensions of the SSAT report was their statement that the most effective method to learn about healthy relationships is through school curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2008). Taking the SSAT recommendation that the most effective method for educating adolescents on healthy relationships is through curriculum, the current study seeks to describe, from the teacher’s perspective, experiences with and motivations for using curriculum advocating healthy relationships, specifically dating violence prevention programming. The purpose of this thesis is to examine four female Ontario Physical and Health Education teachers’ personal and professional experience with teen dating violence and their knowledge about and use of dating violence prevention curriculum that has been approved by the Ontario Ministry of Education. The participants related their experiences with dating violence within their school communities and discussed how they approached these issues within their own classroom. The results of this study indicate that dating violence continues to be a prevalent issue for Ontario secondary schools, and there is a need for continued research into how to teach dating violence prevention in meaningful ways. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2012-04-25 10:00:15.681

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My dissertation presents a survey of theories of violence in contemporary theological discourse. I consider four positions that represent a range of current trends within theology: Girardian anthropology, the radical orthodoxy movement, liberation theology, and feminist theology. / Rene Girard creates a scientific model of violence as a universal scapegoating mechanism at the origin of all human culture, which he posits as knowledge gained through the revelation of Jesus Christ. A key figure in the radical orthodoxy school, John Milbank, recovers Augustine's theology of history as a narrative of the ontological priority of peace in an attempt to discipline human desire away from its fascination with violence. Latin American theologians argue a similar priority of the peace and justice of the kingdom of God in their rhetoric of revolutionary violence as a defense of a poor majority oppressed by the structural violence of the state. Three feminist theologians, Carter Heyward, Rita Nakashima Brock, and Susan Thistlethwaite, construct an essentialist eros untroubled by violence in order to denounce the abuses of patriarchal sexual violence. / These contemporary theologians structure their discussions of violence as a speculative problem within categorical distinctions of good and evil. Their ordered theological systems exclude real negativity, not only from God as a totality of good, but also from humans. Within these theodicies, violence becomes unrepresentable in terms of damage to bodies. / I analyze the work of Georges Bataille, a philosopher of religion, as a critical counterpoint to these theories of violence. Bataille's practice of a mysticism of violence disturbs theological assumptions of humanness as intrinsically good and extends the notion of the sacred to include abject flesh and its violence. / Bataille's work provides resources for a "poetics of reality," a way for Christian theologians to express negativity---undecidability, ambiguity, disorder, pain, violence, bodily disintegration, death---as part of their religious imagination rather than perceiving it as an external threat to ordered theological systems. A poetics of reality is a practice of attention that lives deeply in human instability and human yearning for God.