ABSTRACT
Both glamorizing and demonizing violence help avoid having to understand the violent mind. Violence is a universal phenomenon, an integral part of any social system. In most societies rigorous attempts are made to control levels of violence, and legal distinctions are made between sanctioned and unsanctioned violence. Learning theories evolved from studies of conditioning processes in animals. The cognitive behavioural literature takes violence as a conscious behavioural choice based on problematic ideas and erroneous belief systems rather than attempting to understand the problem as a clinical disorder. The idea that violence is unlearned rather than learned has been proposed by Fonagy who cites the first ‘peak’ of physically aggressive behaviour at 2 years of age. The feminist perspective on domestic violence raised the profile of the issue and probably contributed to the fact that domestic violence went from being studied very little, to being studied a great deal from the 1970s onwards.
