Mary King writes: > I've been inspired by an article by Donohue & Levitt (in the most recent AER conference proceedings issue) saying that violence is used when property rights are not legally enforceable. < I would say that it's decentralized, non-state, violence that's used when property rights are not legally enforceable, since the state uses violence to enforce property rights. I guess that's implied in the below. > Maybe this is it: violence is and has been used to enforce property rights in male, white and class privilege. Now admittedly many of these privileges were also legally enforced, sanctioned with state violence, but there is a whole vast arena of action that laws have not prohibited that violence by individuals and groups has policed. < I don't know much at all about this subject, but here are my two Kopeks: over the long haul, it sure seems as if women have lost their "status" as being property of men and have moved in the general direction of being men's equals, though not as completely as they should. This would suggest that man-against-woman violence, both by the state and by individuals, would diminish. I don't know about state or collective male violence against women, but my impression (unbacked, I am afraid, by serious empirical study) is that individual male-against-female violence is unabated. I would guess that individual male violence against women (and children, too) would be encouraged by two factors: (1) low cost: the fact that they can get away with it, because of state acquiescence, weak counter-pressure from women, and the general superiority of men in terms of upper-body strength. Being able to get away with it, and in some sense profit from it, simply encourages this violence to persist. (2) high benefit: the fact that men are trained, and rewarded for being violent in the societal realms outside of male/female relations. One important reason here is that men are responding to the violence (or at least the ego-destruction) by other men, by taking it out on others, including women and children. Those who are beat-up upon are likely to find others, more vulnerable than they, to take it out on. It's the law of the playground, which seems to work in other aspects of life. You might say that alienation on the job encourages male workers to try to compensate by punishing themselves (with alcohol abuse, etc.) and others, including the women in their lives. I'd like to hear what you and others have to say about this. But it tells me that in order to get rid of this kind of violence, we should increase women's resistance (collective action in many cases) and reduce the general level of violence, hierarchy, and alienation in society. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
