Murderous Socialization: Postwar Gender Socialization and Extreme Violence in the US and Soviet Union

Alina Vetrova, Washburn University
Alexander Myers, Washburn University

Despite decades of criminological inquiry, there remains a deficit in explaining the motives behind extreme violence, or violence that goes beyond what is necessary to subdue a victim or neutralize a threat to the offender. Traditional criminological theories often frame these acts as either instrumental or reactive and emphasize the outcomes of the violence driven in many cases by the pathologies of the individual offender like revenge, emotional release, or sexual gratification, thus assuming that the victim’s death or subjugation is the offender’s primary objective. However, such explanations often fail to explain the unnecessary cruelty and excess that characterize brutal crimes. We argue that it is essential to understand extreme violence as both an affective and experiential process for the offender. Synthesizing insights from criminology, symbolic interactionism and feminist theory through an examination of cases of extreme violence in the postwar US and Soviet Union, we show that many function as socially-conditioned performative acts through which individuals experience transformation, moral justification, and intensified feelings of power connected to gendered behavioral norms. Crucially, the significance of this violence lies in the meaning that the offender attributes to the process of the violence itself. Our research suggests that extreme violence is frequently driven by its socially-conditioned performative elements, rooted in the gendered socialization patterns of postwar societies.

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 Presented in Session 192. Violence, Gender, and Criminalization