ABSTRACT
In this chapter, by violence we mean unacceptable use of physical aggression in response to perceived provocation. To dwell briefly on the qualifying words ‘unacceptable’ and ‘perceived’: ‘unacceptable’ derives from society’s norms and refers to external reality, ‘perceived’ derives from the individual’s experience and refers to internal reality. Often an act of violence, while unacceptable, will strike us as comprehensible, because we can trace a pathway from provocation to execution. That a bullied child one day lashes out at his tormentor does not tax the imagination. By contrast the violence of an adolescent boy who rapes and batters the elderly woman who has befriended him is profoundly disturbing.
