The Australian government is being examined on Monday evening by the United Nations Committee against Torture. Before the independent committee of experts, an Australian government delegation has to answer…
The recent multiple homicide in a small Victorian township, coming barely a month after a mass shooting in rural New South Wales, may give the impression that firearm-related murders in rural Australia…
The recent killing of 21-year-old Melbourne University student Joshua Hardy is another tragic story of unprovoked, alcohol-fuelled male violence in our community. It is an issue that has animated significant…
Male sports stars perpetrating violence against women is a phenomenon that, sadly, seems to cross both international and sporting borders. In the most recent high-profile case, NFL player Ray Rice was…
Recent coverage of counterterrorism raids in Australia featured hard-core gyms, anabolic steroids, nightclub bouncers, gangs and weapons. Footage from the Middle East regularly depicts truckloads of young…
Islam has a history of violence. Muslims can be violent. Denying this is not at all different to denying that Islam is peaceful and that all Muslims are pacifists. The dichotomy is simply false. The Qur’an…
Ideas about personal honour are a major key to understanding violence. This is so today, when “honour” is often replaced by terms such as respect - with “dissing” as its opposite. It was even more true…
In this age of the rule of brute force, it is almost impossible for anyone to believe that anyone else could possibly reject the law of the final supremacy of brute force. So wrote Mohandas Karamchand…
The petrol bomb – or “Molotov cocktail” – is an iconic symbol of 20th-century political violence. Simple, cheap and effective, it has become a staple feature of protest, riot and rebellion; a weapon of…
When we talk about violence, there is an implicit assumption that we mean human-to-human violence. Yet behind the veneer of our civilised society, economy and culture is a massive edifice of violence of…
Children endure many forms of violence, from slapping and pushing, to fatal assaults; almost one in five of the world’s homicide victims in 2012 were under 20. The recently released UNICEF report on violence…
Over the coming months, we’ll be running pieces looking at the history and nature of violence. Here Philip Dwyer explains why. Violence – to state the obvious – isn’t new. But interest in the history of…
Steroids are easy to scapegoat. Users are viewed as aggressive, violent and mentally unstable, able to snap at any moment and cause great harm to the people around them. Ostensibly, it is this perception…
The Victorian government’s introduction of the Sentencing Amendment (Coward’s Punch Manslaughter and Other Matters) Bill 2014 this week has again sparked debate about the deterrence value and general utility…
Another game, another bite. That’s the allegation against Uruguayan Luis Suárez, anyway, who has been accused of sinking his teeth into an opposition player. For the third time. But a mid-game nibble on…
Services for women fleeing domestic abuse and sexual violence in the UK have developed over the past 40 years, from grassroots services staffed by volunteers to a professionalised (if still small) sector…
A British coroner has sparked anxiety among parents by linking Call of Duty, one of the most popular video games in the world, to teenage suicide. John Pollard says Call of Duty has “figured in recent…
This week saw the convictions of two men at opposite ends of the process of radicalisation – one convicted for radicalising others, the other for being radicalised himself. In the United States, a court…
In November 2013 at Barton Moss on the outskirts of Salford, IGas, a company specialising in onshore extraction of oil and gas, began exploratory drilling to test for coal bed methane and shale gas. The…