ABSTRACT
The news media have been full of shocking accounts of the breakdown of public order and the rise in crime in Russia in the wake of the country's abrupt transition to a "free market." The Guardian describes a country so troubled by escalating crime and so determined to stop the explosion of violence in its tracks that it is resorting to mass public executions. Differences in serious violence among the world's countries are stunningly real. Understanding the unique patterns of criminal violence in any given society requires integrating a range of other factors, of which the historical trajectories of race and gender relations are surely at the head of the list—a list that also includes more subtle cultural and historical differences in childrearing practices. Criminologists can do so best by affirming that violence is one of the clearest costs of our increasingly heedless global assault, in the name of the market, on the preconditions of a sustaining social life.
