's stated goal in Violence, Aggression, and Coercive Actions is the exposition of a social interactionist theory of aggression. In developing and expounding their theory, the authors incorporate past research and attempt to bridge an assortment of previous theoretical perspectives. After exploring past research findings and critically examining biological, psychological, and criminological theories, Tedeschi and Felson devote the greater part of the book to their own theory.Within the social interactionist perspective, they suggest replacing the concept of aggression with "coercive actions," treating all harm-doing as coercive. The theory does not distinguish hostile aggression from instrumental aggression, because the authors assert that even angry aggression is instrumental to achieving valued terminal outcomes such as tangible goods, personal safety, retributive justice, and the restoration of social identities. In the framework of their perspective, all harm-doing behavior is viewed as cognitively mediated, goal-oriented behavior that results from decision-making processes. The authors contend that biological factors play at most a remote causal role, often moderating rather than causing aggressive behavior in human beings.The authors illustrate at some length two applications of the theory, first examining harm-doing in the relationship between parents and children. Focusing on punishment and child abuse, the authors assert that other theories of aggressive behavior largely neglect the topic of punishment. They compare the effectiveness of coercion or power assertion vs. other methods of social control such as reasoning or persuasion, discussing why and how parents will use coercion to control their children's behavior. The authors borrow heavily from previous researchers who apply a social interactionist model to child abuse, suggesting that child abuse develops out of attempts by parents to discipline their children. They fail to address the possibility that much child abuse occurs regardless of the children's own actions and without any intention to discipline them. Displaced aggression, for example, receives little attention.The second major application of the theory looks at sexual coercion, the use of contingent threats or bodily force to compel a person to engage in sexual activity, including rape, attempted rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. Much of the discussion concentrates on rape simply because much of the past research on sexual coercion has focused on rape. Particular attention is devoted to the matter of what motivates a person to commit sexual coercion, suggesting that sexual motivation plays a larger role than many other researchers acknowledge. The authors express skepticism toward explanations of any type of interpersonal violence, including rape, that emphasize hatred for groups. They argue, for example, that interracial crime rates would be higher if motivated primarily by between-group animosity; they point out that the rate of white men raping blacks is relatively rare.Also ...

The National Crime Victimization Survey is used to examine factors that encourage and inhibit victims of domestic violence from calling the police. Victims of domestic violence are less likely than victims of other types of violence to call the police because of their privacy concerns, their fear of reprisal, and their desire to protect offenders, but they are more likely to call for self‐protection and because they perceive domestic assaults as more serious. As a result of these and other offsetting factors, victims of domestic violence are just as likely as other victims of assault to call the police.

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This article examines the interactive process leading to criminal violence. Official data from 159 incidents of homicide and assault that were not committed in conjunction with other crimes and that resulted in incarceration were examined with respect to the actions of offenders, victims, and third parties. These incidents tended to follow systematic patterns. They began with identity attacks, followed by attempts and failures to influence the antagonist. Threats were made and finally the verbal conflict ended in physical attack. It appears that retaliation is a key principle in the escalation of these incidents in that aggressive actions by the victim were associated with aggressive actions by the offender and the likelihood that the victim would be killed. The importance of situational identities for retaliating was suggested bg the moderately strong relationship observed between identity attack and counterattack. Retaliation also occurred for strategic reasons, in that offenders were more likely to kill aggressive victims when those victims used weapons. (Ball-Rokeach, 1973;Athens, 1977;Hepburn, 1973;Stark et al., 1974; Luckenbill, 1977). Such suggestions are based on the assumption that the outcomes of an aggressive interaction are not predetermined by either the characteristics or the initial goals of participants; rather, they AUTHORS' NOTE: We wish to thank Ronald Farrell, Marcus Felson, and Victoria Swigert for their comments on an earlier draft. The contributions of Stephen R i h r to this research, especially in developing the coding categories, is gratefully acknowleged. A number of scholars have suggested the need for research on the processual development and interactional dynamics of violent situations