ABSTRACT
The concept of violence bears some kind of deep and intimate relationship to the notions of harm, destruction and human suffering. And this truism goes a long way towards explaining why violence is generally regarded as an extremely serious social problem, and something about which any sane society must be gravely concerned. Violence hurts. And so, if our lives are to go reasonably well, collectively we must find some way of at least limiting the harm that we are likely to suffer at the hands of our fellow human beings. But we can't effectively control violence, in this fashion, if we can't discuss violence, with one another, in some reasonably coherent fashion. In order to tackle the problem of violence, we need to know what the problem is. We need to know what we're talking about.
