ABSTRACT
This chapter explains different perspectives and backgrounds have offered a number of diverse accounts of violent behaviour. Thus the biologists have referred to such things as genetics, hormonal factors and so on to account for aggression. Sociologists and anthropologists have indicated the extent to which human beings vary in aggressiveness according to social and cultural factors. Similarly psychologists have pointed to such things as situational determinants, personality factors and the like in explaining violence. Aggressive behaviour is clearly a function of several types of variable; psychological, social, biological and so on. Moreover it must be remembered that just as each type of variable can affect aggression, it is also possible for each to affect the other; drunkenness, for example, may reduce the effect of cultural constraints on violence. For most of these variables the details of their interrelationships remain to be discovered.
