ABSTRACT
This chapter delineates some of the key components of the mentality that underlay much of working-class violence and examines its interaction with the culture of refinement. The customary mentality of violence had three dominant characteristics: it favored physical retribution, valued community autonomy, and maintained domestic and public norms through disciplinary force. Violence was customarily legitimate in a number of contexts when it was restrained. However, violence that arose from customary motivations could exceed the boundaries that had evolved to constrain it. Domestic violence between spouses or against children, while it can be differentiated from other forms of violence, also fit within a wider set of customary cultural norms. The argument that domestic violence was caused merely by unrestrained impulse becomes more problematic when one considers the cultural legitimacy of violence in the home. Violent acts can be categorized by the type of victim, by the relationship between victim and perpetrator, by severity, by method or by social context.
