Beyond Legal Minds Sex, Social Violence, Systems, Methods, Possibilities

Some human beings commit violent acts against others. Some of them are also not penalized for their wrongdoings. Some human groups also act violently, whether it is against a government, a business, a gender, racial or religious group etc. We might say that there is nothing more important than reducing violence for humans during the 21st century, and reducing violence also involves increasing fairness.

Violence seemingly ruins peoples’ lives across the planet every moment and shatters others’ expectations for future endeavors. For these reasons, I wrote Beyond Legal Minds to offer a better understanding of the societal causes of violence and the methods that enable us to study the systems most directly concerned with violence. I wrote this book as a set of innovative proposals, new scientifically testable hypotheses and new expansions of theories, especially social dominance theory. Understanding violence within any society requires an understanding of the systems that both reduce and increase violence, dominance, and subordination. One such system is a legal system and its subsystem called the “penal system” or “criminal justice system.” There are efforts to stop violence and to prevent and deter violence, which are efforts made by the law. However, the law also uses violence and threatens violence against others. Presumably, the law is sometimes terribly unfair and ruins peoples’ lives every moment somewhere across the planet, and the law sometimes shatters others’ expectations for completing their goals and even unfairly prevents groups from reaching their objectives. So, how can we best begin to study violence? How can we find ways to reduce violence and increase fairness? In what ways can we improve human cultures via increasing the proportions of peaceful activities? Can we attain these goals by focusing on the law and its many relations within society? Beyond Legal Minds provides an interdisciplinary set of answers to the latter questions and argues for approaches and solutions, concerning the rise in violence as a type of social phenomenon. It aims to transcend the bureaucratic divisions of any single field of study.