Violence: Phenomenology

Phenomenological studies of violence, like psychological, criminological, or sociological studies, can focus on the violator as well as the violated. The focus of phenomenology applied to studies of violence is understanding the meaning of the lived experiences, or the “lifeworlds,” of the individuals.

Phenomenological studies are not concerned with determining cause-effect relations, testing hypotheses, measuring experience, or developing theoretical explanations of behavior. Rather, they rigorously follow a methodology aimed at exploring in minute detail how violators experience being violent or how victims experience being violated. Phenomenological concepts are used to interpret narratives provided by violators or victims. The purpose of this approach is to gain rich insight into a level of experience that is assumed, but not explored, in traditional human science inquiries. Although we might scientifically determine what causes a person to act, we cannot necessarily assume that we understand the meanings of those acts for the person who experienced them. Phenomenological studies are thus important for understanding criminals and deviants, but they are also important for understanding violence in a variety of everyday contexts, such as employment, families, gender, race, aging, disability, and the like. Violence is possible in any social interaction.

Because violence is possible in any social relationship, phenomenological studies begin with an understanding of how consciousness “intends,” or puts together, the meanings of its lived experience. Phenomenological studies provide an understanding of consciousness, which includes felt, bodily experience (embodied experience) that is typically taken for granted by the human sciences. Without a rigorous and rich understanding of experience as it is constituted by the actions of embodied consciousness in moment-tomoment, everyday life situations, it is difficult to understand the origin of concepts like “motives” or “causes.” If criminological analyses of victimizers or victims are considered the structure of a building, then phenomenological studies provide the solid foundations that that structure relies on.

Phenomenological studies do not necessarily focus on unconscious factors, but rather on factors that are simply assumed but not investigated. Without understanding how experience is lived; how it unfolds in the space and time of successive moments of “here and now”; what the features of embodied consciousness are; and how embodied consciousness uniquely perceives and interprets a particular situated event, it is difficult to claim that one understands or can explain someone's experience.

Phenomenology was originally developed in philosophy, primarily by Edmund Husserl, in the early 1900s. Whereas Husserl was a pure philosopher, his students (including Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz) and other notable figures (such as Sartre and de Beauvior) applied phenomenology to everyday life experiences. Analyses of everyday existence focus on both subjective and intersubjective aspects of experience. Subjective experiences typically refer to the individual's perception of his or her lived experience (or lifeworld) and include that individual's lived experience of another's subjective reality as part [Page 497]of his or her own. Intersubjective experiences refer to the reciprocal understandings individuals have of each other (which occur in the subjective experience of each individual). It is crucial to note that subjective experiences are permeated by intersubjective relations and intersubjective realities are interpreted within the unique perspective of each individual's consciousness. Phenomenological studies of violence thus could focus on the violator's or the victim's experience of himself or herself alone or on himself or herself as a subject inextricably involved with another. Because the lived experience of violence itself includes both subjective and intersubjective experiences, ideally both would be analyzed together, but that is not necessary or even always possible.

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