Community Violence

Defining the Problem

Although many sources have been written pertaining to violence within communities, there has been much contestation across these studies as to what specifically constitutes “community” and what constitutes “violence.” As a result of these multifaceted conceptualizations, a standardized definition across studies is lacking, and a great variability exists as to what scholars have referred to as “community violence.”

Basically, a community refers to a group of two or more people who share a set of common charac-teristics—often a culture, worldview, social structure, language(s), and in many cases locality, although this is not necessarily the case. A community may consist of members of a family, neighborhood, school, workplace, city, nation, or shared-interest group that can potentially transcend international geopolitical boundaries. Because these varying levels of communities overlap, individuals may belong simultaneously to any number of communities at one time. No matter the context, however, the concept of community is rather subjective in that it relies most importantly upon the perceptions of its members in feeling a shared sense of belonging. Although communities are not necessarily homogenous and thus may be comprised of diverse sets of members, there is a sense of shared presence held by these members, often fortified by a collective history and loyalty, around which they unite and feel themselves connected.

Definitions of violence have been even more diverse. Often described as an act that one uses to inflict physical harm upon a person, violence may also refer to psychological or emotional hurt, sexual abuse, or intended neglect of a person's basic material needs necessary for survival. It may also refer to the witnessing of violence or even feeling threatened. Violence may be perpetrated directly by a person or persons, in which case it is deemed interpersonal violence, or indirectly by a social institution or policy, in which case it is referred to as structural violence. Community violence, specifically, encompasses both these forms of violence—the latter to the extent that communities experience structural impediments and lack resources because of the influence of policies and conditions which adversely affect them, and the former, which is much more widely discussed because of its high visibility, to the extent that direct violence between community members takes place in and often results from these structural inadequacies.

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