A number of surveys have by now provided information about the relative risk of persons from various backgrounds to experience sexual abuse during childhood. Interestingly, they are fairly uniform in failing to find differences in rates according to social class or race. However, several other factors have emerged from community studies as being consistently associated with higher risk for abuse: (a) when a child lives without one of the biological parents; (b) when the mother is unavailable to the child either as a result of employment outside the home or disability and illness; (c) when the child reports that the parents' marriage is unhappy or conflictual; (d) when the child reports having a poor relationship with the parents or being subject to extremely punitive discipline or child abuse; (e) when the child reports having a stepfather. The article draws some implications from these findings and makes recommendations for ways to improve subsequent studies of risk factors.
Are high rates of homicide better explained by cultural or economic factors? Some research suggests that a regional culture of violence underlies high rates of homicide, whereas other research suggests that poverty or economic inequality increases the likelihood of homicide. A major limitation of this body of research has been the failure of researchers to include an indicator of cultural support for violence that is analytically separate from measures of southern region. In this article, a 12-item Legitimate Violence Index (LVX) is introduced that measures cultural support for violence. Using the 50 states as the units of analysis, hypotheses derived from cultural and economic theories of homicide are investigated using multiple regression. Several additional variables are included in the analysis to control for spurious relationships. The results show that legitimate violence, poverty, and economic inequality are significantly associated with state-to-state differences in the incidence of homicide.Southern states have a higher average homicide rate than states in other regions of the country. Although a substantial amount of research has been devoted to explaining the predominance of lethal violence in the South, there appears to be little consensus. The major point of contention concerns whether southern homicide is best explained by cultural or economic factors. Some research seems to suggest that the high rate of southern homicide is due to a regional culture of violence (Gastil 1971;Hackney 1969;Messner 1983; Reed 1971;Simpson 1985), whereas other research suggests that it reflects conditions of poverty (Baily
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