James Gilligan Preventing Violence Summary

James Gilligan is an American psychiatrist who presents the causation and prevention of violence from his point of view of working in US prisons for decades in his book “Preventing Violence”. Gilligan provides readers with a multitude of data and theories, but his book (or at least the first four chapters) boils down to the fact that violence towards other is caused by shame. He calls upon his many years of interaction with prison inmates and explains how inmates who committed violent crimes often said it was because they were disrespected, and therefore shamed. However, it’s very important to highlight that it takes not only shame but also an inability to “regain respect” after a shameful event, to cause violence as Gilligan proposes. This

doesn’t mean they would somehow go perform actions to garner respect to feel better, this means that the person has no factors that make them feel respected to society such as: being rich, holding power by employment (high ranking jobs), being highly educated, and simply being in the “upper class of society”. However, he proposes that many of these societal factors such as relative income, gender, race, and employment are not correlated with violence, but are instead correlated with shame, (in the case of being on the “low end” of these spectrums) when intense irreparable shame is correlated with violence.
Gilligan eventually ties all the societal factors together in an umbrella of the gender role.

When a man feels shamed from being unemployed, Gilligan states that this is an extension of being “not manly” or not fulfilling his societal expectations. A man who has a good job has money, is white, and is educated tends to be, in general, seen as someone in society deserving of respect, or a useful member of society. This man has “admirable traits” that he can acknowledge to alleviate feelings of shame. These are the ways to “regain respect” that Gilligan talked about, and someone lacking in many, or all such traits may resort to violence when shamed since they have no other mechanism with which to earn

respect.
Of course, not everyone who is impoverished and uneducated resorts to violence, and when they do, it tends to be men. The explanation that Gilligan gives for the first problem is, as stated earlier, these societal factors are not correlated to violence, but to the likelihood that they will experience shame; which, in turn, is correlated to the use of violence. It may sound like a matter of semantics, but it means the majority of people classified as on the lower end of all these factors, aren’t just going to go attack people. The gender issue, Gilligan explains, is more because society has completely different expectations of men and women. When women are, for example, unemployed they aren’t viewed as lazy or incapable as a man would be in the same situation. In short, the problem is how you stack up to society’s view of how you should be.
Gilligan speculates that the reason violence is such an issue in the US is that our society believes that if you are doing everything right, you will have everything you want.

This culture of, if you aren’t succeeding in everything then you didn’t try hard enough, creates intense shame for those who can’t succeed, for outcasts already dealing with shame of differing from the norm. Gilligan calls our culture a culture of shame, as opposed to a culture of guilt. The difference is that guilt is internalized; the feeling that you’ve done wrong can’t be reconciled by forcing others to respect you because guilt comes from oneself. This is why in such guilt cultures like Japan, Gilligan theorizes, that suicide is much more common since the only way to alleviate guilt would be to reconcile the wrongdoing or eliminate the source of guilt, themselves. This culture of shame is precisely what James Gilligan proposes we must fix in order to prevent violence. He believes that in order to stop people from using violence to take back respect, or in some cases, to beget fear in lieu of respect, we must give them ways to be respected

otherwise