Cultural and Economic Sources of Homicide in the United States

Abstract

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

School Violence and the Culture of Honor

“…However, the state-level demographic variables that we examined-which included temperature, rurality, social composition, and indices of economic and social insecurity-were unable to account for the association between culture of honor and our school-violence indicators, and also were inconsistent predictors of the school-violence variables across the two studies. This marks an important difference between these indicators of school violence and more general indicators of violent crime among adults, which typically show stronger and more consistent associations with temperature, rurality, and environmental-insecurity measures similar to the ones we used (Anderson, 1989;Baron & Straus, 1988;Cohen, 1996;Lee, Bankston, Hayes, & Thomas, 2007). This difference suggests that school violence is a somewhat distinct form of aggression that should not be viewed through standard lenses.…”

Measuring Structural Gender Equality in Mexico: A State Level Analysis

“…The macrosystem sources of gender inequality directly affect both aggregate rates of violence and an individual woman's risk of becoming the victim of partner violence (Dobash and Dobash 1979;Smith 1990;Straus 1994;Yllo and Straus 1990). It also influences her risk of suffering health problems, especially those related to sexual health including AIDS (Lawson 1999), of experiencing poverty, unemployment and unhealthy employment conditions (Rice 2001), homicides (Baron and Straus 1988;DeWees and Parker 2003;Titterington 2006;Vieraitis and Williams 2002), rape and sexual violence (Austin and Kim 2000;Yodanis 2004), and more.…”

Behavioral sciences concepts in research on the prevention of violence

“…When transposed into modern settings, the cowboy/gunfighter script or code can even transmit its values to urban minorities (33,34). In the United States, differences between states in consumption of certain gun and crime magazines were found to be partly related to homicide rates and to an overall index of legitimate violence, which included such factors as capital punishment rates, corporal punishment laws, and expenditures by the states on their National Guard military units (35).…”

“…The unemployable, abandoned, urban youth are the most obvious manifestation of this problem (38). In their study of the United States, Baron and Straus (35) showed that poverty and economic inequality are directly related to both homicide rates and an index of legitimate violence. Another major factor may be the presence of covert economies ("black markets") for such widely demanded products as alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and cocaine.…”