Vol. 11, No. 2, 2005 Page 6
Our violent behavior bewilders us because we lack crucial information. Countless newspaper articles, books, and television programs chart the social dimensions of violence: poverty, racism, the breakdown of the family, the pervasive influence of television, the ready availability of guns. But the outer world is meaningless until it enters the inner world, the dimension governed by brain and perception, thought and emotion, nerve and tissue. Until we know as much about this inner dimension as we do about the outer one—what goes on inside the heads of aggressors and their victims—we are not prepared to analyze the problem of violence effectively.
Debra Niehoff in
The Biology of Violence
(Free Press, 1999)