Case 5: Superintendent handled perpetrator and victim of a fight
2. The role of family and school in restraining violence
2.1. Control Theory by Travis Hirschi (1969)
Among the theories of deviance, the control theory pays greatest attention to the roles of social institutions such as family and school, especially the family. Different from other theories that strive to explain why individuals violate the laws of their society, control theorists question why not. A basic assumption proposed by control theorists is that human beings have insatiable desires and, as Durkheim argued in Suicide (247), „it is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone.‟
In addition, Hirschi (1969) asserts that individuals are naturally capable of doing bad things as well as doing good things. It is obvious that sometimes breaking the law allows individuals to achieve their goals more quickly and easily than if they conform to restrictions defined by the law. That means breaking the law may bring about profit and even pleasure, and hence deviance is not something problematic
which needs social scientists to explain. What needs to be explained is why individuals do not break the law.
So, what makes individuals refrain from violating the law? According to the social control theory, this is because individuals are internalised with social norms during their daily interactions within the social institutions to which they belong, which restrains their tendency towards deviance. The next question then emerges: How do social institutions impose their effect on the process of norm internalisation, and what institution is most influential? On this point there are some nuances between different branches of the social control theory. Robert Nye (1958), in the same means-end line of explanation as Merton, holds that there are many alternatives to achieve a goal, including both legal and illegal, but indirect control (i.e. attachment to caregiver) and internal control (consciousness), formed under the socialisation process in the family, together with direct control (punishment) help keep individuals from committing deviant actions even though deviance helps them to achieve their goal faster. Hirschi (1969), and then Hirschi and Gottfredson (1993) especially stressed the effects of family during early childhood on forming social bonds which then result in the internalisation of norms. Sampson and Laub (1993), however, highlight that institutions in later adulthood are as influential as family in childhood is.
Given that the research subjects of this study are juveniles, and this study aims at discovering what roles such social institutions as family and school are playing in restraining violent tendencies in juveniles, this study applies mostly Hirschi‟s social bond theory (1969) which provides the most detailed explanation of the role of family and school in creating internal restraints (i.e. social bonds) against violence.
Nye‟s notion of discipline/punishment is also applied to further examine the external control that social institutions impose on an individual‟s choice of action.
Hirschi (1969) argues that the bond to conventional society keeps individuals from violating laws because they do not want to risk their valued bonds. Along the same lines as Sykes and Matza, Hirschi contends that individuals may still believe in the norms they are violating. However, while Sykes and Matza try to explain deviant behaviours and reason that individuals develop techniques of neutralisation to make their violation of laws acceptable, Hirschi holds that deviants do not need to neutralise the meaning of their deviance since their loosened bonds with conventional society free them to violate social laws.
The social bond, according to Hirschi (1969), comprises four components:
attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief.
Attachment refers to the affectional aspect of the bond. Attachment is the core motivation for individuals to learn norms and build up a collective consciousness.
Without attachment, individual will be free from moral restraints and consequently prone to deviance.
Commitment refers to how well individuals invest their time and energy into the conventional institutions to which they belong. If individuals are committed to conventional society, they will be very cautious of the cost of deviant behaviours since they do not want to risk what they have invested.
Involvement refers to how much of their time individuals spend on conventional lines of activities. Involvement can help restrain deviant activities simply because
we are unable to do too many things a day. For instance, once a student is very busy with his studies, he will have little time for peers so that the chance of getting involved in conflicts and violent confrontation will be remarkably reduced.
Belief in legitimate order is the last component of a social bond. However, this component is only significant to an individual when he is attached to, involved in, and committed to conventional society.
The above four components are related to each other, constituting a social bond which holds individuals from delinquency. „Delinquent acts result when an individual‟s bond to society is weak or broken‟ (Hirschi 1999: 312). The social bond is a source of social restraints but how well individuals are controlled depends on how deep social norms, values, and belief in the law are internalised in them and to what extent they are involved in conventional activities and pursuing conventional goals. Agnew and White later provided empirical evidence that having conventional beliefs and attaining good academic results in school are effective inhibitors to becoming deviant (Jones 2002: 112).
Latter, Hirschi (1990), together with Gottfredson, shifted the analytical emphasis from the social bond to the self-control mechanism as a complement to sociological theories of deviance which mainly pay attention to the external restraints that society imposes on individual behaviour. This emphasis is based on their assumption that
„the major benefit of many crimes is not pleasure but relief from momentary irritation‟ (Hirschi and Gottfredson 1990: 334), and self-control is a determinant factor in the way individuals respond their impulse. They also noted that lack of self-control does not always lead to deviance since individual behaviour is also
controlled by situational conditions. However, a high level of self-control is a powerful mechanism that helps reduce the probability of committing deviance. The level of self-control is established through the process of socialisation, especially in childhood. The two authors even came up with the idea that lack of self-control is a consequence of „ineffective child-rearing‟ by the family (Hirschi and Gottfredson 1990).
Inheriting Hirschi‟s early theory of social bond, noting that Hirschi (and later with Gottfredson) highlighted the essential impact of family during childhood, Laub and Sampson (1993) however went on to remark that the social bond established in adulthood is also very powerful. According to them, children who become deviant because of their weak social bond are possibly brought back to conformity when they grow up through the social bond developed in their marriage and career.
One of the important contributions of the control theory is that it highlights the significant role of family which has been belittled in comparison to other social forces adduced in other deviance theories (Empey 1982). Especially, Hirschi‟s theory is highly applicable in policy formulation. Feasible and effective intervention policies aiming at families, schools, and peer attachment can be formulated from this theory. This point is to me one of the most significant contributions of this theory.
Most schools of thought in criminology analyse crime at either the macro-level as social structure and/or culture (such as anomie, culture or subculture) or at the micro-level as the process by which deviancy is originated (such as symbolic interactionism), which helps them explain crime quite well. However, these arguments are too abstract or too descriptive to be operationalized for empirical test and to play a role as a theoretical basis for policy formulation. The strength of the
control theory is that it focuses on testable variables representing social factors that can be intervened upon, so that it is highly applicable to the realm of control and adjustment in real life.
However, the control theory is often criticized for the great emphasis it places on personal attributes and for overlooking the impact of other social forces. As Empey claimed (1982: 346), „when it indicates that delinquents are unsocialised predators, it underestimates the role of peers in generating support for delinquent conduct, overstates the importance of acquired beliefs as barriers to delinquent behaviour, and leaves unaddressed the issues raised by the economic, political, and racial organisation of society.‟
Considering both the strengths and restrictions of social control theories, given that the research subjects are high school students, Hirschi‟s social control theory will hence be applied to this study to discover how the two social institutions most influential to students, namely the family and school, relate to the way students resort to violence to handle their peer conflicts. In addition to Hirschi‟s theory which targets only internal social control (i.e. personal bonds to conventional institutions), external controls imposed by institutions (i.e. parental monitoring and school discipline) will be also examined in this study to see how social institutions (i.e.
family and school) take control over student violence in a more comprehensive view. Therefore, the concept of „social control‟ applied to family and school (namely family control and school control) consists of two components: the student‟s bond to each institution (i.e. family bond and school bond) and the external control each institution imposes on students (i.e. parental monitoring and school discipline). And the social bond (family bond and school bond) is examined by
measuring the four elements of the bond as suggested by Hirschi: attachment, involvement, engagement, and belief.