27 - Criminal Violence and Culture in Europe

Summary

In 1970, a senior civil servant in the British Home Office published The Conquest of Violence, which chronicled what he considered to be a social triumph within the United Kingdom. The book was an expression of the way that many felt in the European liberal democracies a generation after the Second World War. It built on perceptions apparent during the nineteenth century that violence, especially criminal violence and harsh responses by those in authority were alien to what were essentially progressive and humanitarian developments within European culture and society. The aims of this chapter are to probe such beliefs particularly with reference to criminal violence and responses to it. It assesses the ways in which the media have provided vicarious thrills since the early nineteenth century, the construction of a criminal class as a separate social group, and the ways in which eyes were closed to violence by agents of the state who were perceived as disciplining the uncivilized.