Nobody Thinks They're the Villain

Violence rarely has a single cause. But almost everyone who commits it believes they had a reason — and that belief is where prevention has to begin.

Ask a person why they hurt someone, and the answer almost never sounds like a confession. It sounds like a defense. He disrespected me. She wasn’t going to stop. They left me no choice. The words change, but the shape holds: the speaker is not the aggressor in the story they are telling. They are the one who was pushed, cornered, wronged, or forced. That self-portrait is not usually a lie told to dodge consequences. More often it is what the person actually believes — and it is the most important fact about violence that most conversations skip right past.

We tend to talk about violence as though it were weather or a moral defect: something that erupts, or something certain people simply are. Neither framing gets us anywhere useful. Violence is behavior, and behavior has reasons. The honest answer to why do people resort to violence is that there is rarely one reason. There is a tangle. What follows are the threads that researchers, clinicians, and people who have lived close to it tend to pull out of that tangle — not to excuse anything, but because you cannot interrupt what you refuse to understand.

One of the most forceful pulls toward violence I have ever felt was not for a stranger. My son, Aaron, was raped while in foster care — a child in the state’s keeping. The only thing that happened to the person who did it was a transfer to another home. Aaron carried that harm mostly alone. When he later kissed another boy at school, he was met with shame instead of the care he needed. He was troubled in ways no child should ever have to be. Not long after, Aaron took his own life. I would not learn the full truth of what had been done to him for another two years. When I did, all I wanted was to find the person who raped my son and kill him — to make him hurt the way Aaron had hurt.

1. Violence as a Tool

Much violence is simply instrumental. It is a means to an end: to take a resource, hold territory, control another person, silence a witness, remove a threat. Seen from the outside it looks like rage; seen from the inside it is often cold arithmetic. When the legitimate routes to something feel closed — too slow, too rigged, too far out of reach — force becomes the shortcut that is actually available. This is the violence of the stickup and of empire alike, and it is worth naming plainly, because it resists the comforting idea that all violence is a loss of control. Some of it is a decision.

2. Violence as Defense

A great deal of aggression is defensive at the root, even when it wears the face of attack. People who feel cornered, exposed, or in danger will often strike first, and the striking-first is the entire point. What matters here is perception, not fact. The threat does not have to be real to produce a real response; it only has to be believed. This is why fear is such a reliable engine of harm, and why environments saturated with danger — a block, a cell, a household — produce so much of it. People raised to expect an attack learn to get there first.

3. Violence as an Answer to Shame

Across cultures and centuries, violence flares most predictably around disrespect. The criminologist Marvin Wolfgang, studying hundreds of Philadelphia homicides in the 1950s, found that a striking share of them began as trivial altercations — arguments over insults, slights, a look held a beat too long. The stakes that mattered were not material. They were about standing.

The prison psychiatrist James Gilligan spent decades with men who had committed the most extreme violence imaginable and came away with a spare, unsettling conclusion: at the center of it, again and again, was shame. The men he treated described acting to erase a feeling of being disrespected, humiliated, reduced to nothing — trading a sense of worthlessness for one of pride, whatever the cost. Humiliation, on this account, is not a footnote to violence. It is one of its strongest predictors. And it should give us pause, because our systems are very good at manufacturing humiliation and then acting surprised at what grows from it.

4. Violence the Group Makes Possible

Organized violence — the kind done by armies, mobs, crews, and states — usually requires one extra step: the other side has to stop being fully human first. The philosopher David Livingstone Smith has traced how dehumanization works as the enabling condition for atrocity, the mental move that lets people do to a “vermin” or an “enemy” what they could never do to a neighbor. Add the ordinary machinery of groups — loyalty to the in-group, obedience to authority, responsibility diffused until no single person feels they are the one deciding — and you get ordinary people carrying out things none of them would do alone. The social psychologist Roy Baumeister, surveying the research on cruelty, argued that “pure evil” is largely a myth. Most people who do terrible things came to believe, through exactly these pressures, that what they were doing was necessary or deserved.

5. Violence from Blocked Lives

When people are thwarted — especially when they are thwarted over and over — aggression becomes more likely. This is one of the oldest findings in the field, formalized as far back as 1939 by a group of Yale researchers as the frustration-aggression hypothesis. The idea has been refined many times since, but its core has held: blocked goals generate pressure, and pressure seeks release. Now layer that onto a landscape of scarcity, inequality, and a felt sense of injustice — of being locked out of what others move through freely — and the pressure stops being individual. It becomes structural. A society can produce frustration at scale and then treat the resulting violence as though it came out of nowhere.

6. Violence That Was Taught

Violence is learned like anything else — modeled, rehearsed, rewarded. A child who grows up watching force resolve conflicts, or living where force is the currency that actually works, absorbs it as normal long before anyone calls it a choice. Albert Bandura’s work on social learning showed how directly aggression transmits through observation and reinforcement. And the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences study led by Vincent Felitti documented how early exposure to abuse and household violence raises the risk of a long list of harms downstream, in a dose-dependent way — the more adversity, the steeper the odds. None of this is destiny. But it is a heavy thumb on the scale, pressed early.

7. Violence with the Brakes Off

Finally, there is the matter of control. Intoxication, certain mental states, brain injury, sleeplessness, unrelenting stress, or simply the impulsivity of being young can all lower the threshold at which an aggressive urge becomes an aggressive act. This thread rarely acts alone. More often it removes the brakes on one of the others. It is the reason two people can carry nearly identical histories and grievances, and only one of them, on a particular night, crosses the line.

What the Threads Have in Common

Lay the seven threads side by side and a pattern surfaces underneath all of them. In almost every case, the violence felt justified to the person doing it. They were defending something, answering a wrong, restoring a balance, doing what had to be done. Baumeister called the opposite belief — the conviction that harm is only ever done by monsters who know they are monsters — a myth, and it is a comforting one, because it keeps the capacity safely outside ourselves. The harder truth is that violence almost always makes sense from the inside. That is precisely why it is so persistent, and so hard to interrupt.

It also tells us something about what does not work. Punishment that humiliates confirms the very story the person is already telling — that they are wronged, unseen, owed. It feeds the shame Gilligan found at the root and then calls the feeding justice. If violence grows from humiliation, blocked lives, early harm, and a sense of being pushed, then a response built entirely on inflicting more of the same is not a solution. It is the cycle wearing a badge.

An Amparo Peacemaking Perspective

Amparo is a Spanish word for refuge, shelter, protection — the covering you extend over someone who would otherwise be exposed. In the legal traditions that carry the word, an amparo is also a writ of protection, a way of shielding a person from a harm the ordinary machinery of the state would otherwise permit. The Amparo Peacemaking Project takes both meanings seriously. If violence grows in the conditions this essay has described — humiliation, blocked lives, early harm, the settled certainty that no one is coming — then the task is not simply to punish what those conditions produce. It is to change the conditions, and to place something between a person and the next act of harm, whether they are about to suffer it or commit it.

That is what peacemaking means here, and it is older than it sounds. A generation ago the criminologists Harold Pepinsky and Richard Quinney observed that we had built our whole response to crime as a kind of war — the offender as enemy, domination and restraint as the only tools — and that it was a war we kept losing because it was, in the end, a war against ourselves. Peacemaking begins from the opposite premise: that suffering is the soil crime grows in, and that reducing suffering is how you reduce crime. This is not surrender. It is a refusal to answer harm with the very thing that manufactures harm.

The sharpest recent statement of this comes from Danielle Sered, who has spent years building alternatives to incarceration for people who have caused serious violence. Her findings track almost exactly what the research in this essay predicts: violence is driven by shame, isolation, and the absence of any other route to safety or standing — and nearly everyone who commits it has survived it first. Prison, she argues, gives survivors little of what they actually need and gives the person who caused harm neither reason nor room to reckon with it. What works instead is accountability — not the passive experience of being punished, but the active and far harder labor of facing the people you hurt, understanding the harm, and repairing what can be repaired. Punishment asks only that a person endure it. Accountability asks everything of them.

This is the lens Amparo brings to the question of why people turn to violence. The self-justifying story at its center — I had no choice — cannot be beaten out of anyone; the beating only proves the point. It can only be answered, slowly, by a community willing to offer two things at once that the system almost never offers together: protection from the harm still to come, and a way back from the harm already done. Refuge, and a road.

The context shifts the answer, of course. Interpersonal, political, generational, structural — the scale changes which threads matter most, and peacemaking looks different across a kitchen table than it does across a policy. But the question underneath stays the same, and so does the place it points: not toward better cages, but toward the conditions that keep producing people who believe, wrongly and completely, that they had no other choice.

Author’s note: I offer these reasons not as absolutions but as instructions. Prevention that refuses to look at causes is only punishment with better branding. After more than two decades in and around reentry, I have learned that the people we are quickest to write off are usually the ones whose reasons we have worked hardest not to hear. The Amparo Peacemaking Project exists because there is another way to answer harm — one that neither excuses it nor multiplies it. This essay is part of that argument.

References

Bandura, Albert. Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis. Prentice-Hall. 1973.

Baumeister, Roy F. Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. W. H. Freeman. 1997.

Dollard, John, Leonard W. Doob, Neal E. Miller, O. H. Mowrer, and Robert R. Sears. Frustration and Aggression. Yale University Press. 1939.

Felitti, Vincent J., et al. “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 1998.

Gilligan, James. Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. Putnam. 1996.

Pepinsky, Harold E., and Richard Quinney (eds.). Criminology as Peacemaking. Indiana University Press. 1991.

Sered, Danielle. Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair. The New Press. 2019.

Smith, David Livingstone. Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. St. Martin’s Press. 2011.

Wolfgang, Marvin E. Patterns in Criminal Homicide. University of Pennsylvania Press. 1958.