More fragile and vulnerable than we generally assume

Although it is not always possible to delineate statistical changes in levels of violence, it is, as changing reactions to wife-beating suggest, possible to trace shifting attitudes. Indeed, the development of deeper sensibilities about violence can lead to increases in quantitative evidence of violence – modern statistics on domestic violence, and the long-term rise of prosecutions for sexual assault over the 20th century are probably evidence of this. Nevertheless, many forms of violence that were commonplace in the past are no longer tolerated.

Corporal punishment in state schools in the United Kingdom was abolished in 1986, and in private schools in England and Wales in 1998. Bullying, once regarded as a normal hazard of growing up, or even as a character-forming experience, is now widely condemned, both in school and at the workplace. And although the precise relationship remains elusive, the decline in interpersonal violence between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries coincided with the retreat from inflicting public executions, public whippings and public shaming punishments on convicted criminals. Changes in official attitudes are further demonstrated by how the police and the law courts, albeit imperfectly in some instances, are now much more alert to the reality of domestic violence and to the need for the sympathetic and sensitive treatment of rape victims. The everyday recourse to violence that was apparently so widespread even two centuries ago is now seen, rightly or wrongly, as the prerogative of discrete, and normally lower-class, groups: boys in disadvantaged council estates, teenage gangs, football hooligans, professional criminals, working-class ‘hard men’.

This should not give us cause for complacency: as events in Germany in the 1930s, parts of Africa and the Middle East more recently, and the plots of countless post-apocalypse movies remind us, the essentially secure and violence-free civil society that most of us in the West take for granted is more fragile and vulnerable than we generally assume. And as statistics on domestic violence demonstrate, we still have a way to go. But an awareness of the ‘violence we have lost’ is an important element in that process, central to the general public’s view of history, of ‘understanding ourselves in time’. So many of the issues that we confront when considering violence in modern society – media distortion and amplification, problems of definition, problems of the cultural acceptance of violence, the connection between violence and masculinity – have a historical dimension, and getting to grips with that dimension helps to deepen our understanding of our current situation. Even terrorism, so often identified as a new problem, has been with us in something like its modern form since the Fenian bombings of the early 1880s.

Mais aqui.