in the wild have ritualized combat between males to safely establish dominance without the likelihood of crippling injury or death. Just because it’s not inherently life-threatening does not mean that accidents never occur, but the intent of the altercation is not to kill the opponent. Similarly, humans frequently delineate their social positions through fistfights and other unarmed conflict.
Most people who frequent bars or nightclubs have seen the glaring, staring, sizing-each-other-up type of conflicts, many of which start with the ubiquitous “what are you looking at” game. In many cases, there is an expectation that others will break up the fight or otherwise give a face-saving way out once status has been established.
Monkey dances are almost always initiated with someone whom the aggressor sees as close to his social level. (Although females occasionally exhibit similar behaviors, this is predominantly a male thing.) There is no status to be gained by a grown adult monkey-dancing with a child or elderly person. Similarly, regular people will not attempt to monkey dance with a very high-ranking individual. Mid-level people in everything from biker gangs to corporate management constantly jockey for position, but they do not do it with the folks in charge. It’s too much of a leap. Challenging the group’s senior leaders like that tends to be career limiting, to say the least.
The group monkey dance is about solidarity, aimed at discouraging outsiders from interfering with the group’s business or as a way to establish territory. Sometimes the victim is an insider who betrayed the group or stepped way out of line. In these cases, the fight can become a contest of showing loyalty to the group by determining who can dish out the most damage to the victim, a horrific and dangerous thing that rarely ends well. Unlike an individual monkey dance, the group monkey dance can easily end with a murder, even when killing the victim was not the goal.
In some places or elements of society, if you do something rude and inconsiderate, you could be socially excluded or ostracized. In others, you will have the tar beaten out of you for your indiscretion. It’s sort of a spanking between adults, an extreme show of displeasure designed to enforce the “rules.”
If the recipient did not do something horrific to initiate the attack and properly acknowledges the wrong, an educational beat-down can be over quickly and end without significant or lasting injury. Not understanding or conceding the wrongdoing or repeated behavior that is outside the group’s rules, on the other hand, can lead to a beat-down designed to maim or kill the victim.
In certain segments of society, such as criminal subculture, a reputation for violence can be very valuable. This reputation can lead others to treat you more respectfully for fear of your “going off” on them. The challenge is that for someone to be truly feared and respected, they may feel a need to do something crazy beyond the bounds of “normal” social violence, such as attacking a child, disabled individual, law enforcement officer, or elderly person. It’s still social violence because it is designed to develop status for the aggressor, yet the outcome could easily be fatal for the victim.
Defending one’s territory against “other” members of different social groups is fairly common in certain aspects of society such as gang culture. It’s an “us versus them” worldview with violence aimed at people who look, act, or dress differently than the group. The act may be as benign as driving someone out of the group’s territory or as malevolent as shooting a person for straying onto a gang’s turf. Territorial defense is a bridge between social and asocial violence because while it is a defense of the group’s turf or resources, it is often carried out in a manner that is profoundly asocial. This type of conflict is deliberately developed and maintained by the leaders of the involved group.
Venkata Cattamanchi thought he was about to get lucky. He was dead wrong. He’d met a woman online who agreed to meet him for a tryst at the EZ Rest Motel in Southfield, Michigan (near Detroit). He was surprised to discover not one, but two women in the room upon arrival, yet the romantic encounter abruptly took a sinister turn when two men showed up as well. Things went downhill from there…
Kevin Huffman, 28, and James Randle, 35, were convicted of ambushing, robbing, and killing Cattamanchi, in part due to statements by the two women who pled guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for their testimony. Huffman and Randle face life in prison for premeditated murder.
Predatory violence is a whole different beast from social disputes. Violence is either a means to an end or, in the case of process predators, it is the goal itself. Or it might be somebody who wants to do really bad things to you simply because he can. Predators are usually solitary because it is hard for antisocial people to band together for common purpose for any length of time. There are generally no witnesses to the attack, or the person is playing to someone of a different social class where his actions make no logical sense. For example, an adult playing the “what are you looking at” game with a child or elderly person is not going to gain any status from the outcome, whatever it may be.
There are two basic types of predators: resource and process.
A resource predator wants something badly enough to take it from his victim by force. Examples include muggers, robbers, or carjackers. Such aggressors are often armed. If intimidation alone works, the resource predator may not hurt you, such as in a carjacking scenario where if the vehicle is surrendered quickly, the victim is almost always left behind uninjured. A ten-year Bureau of Justice Statistics study showed that while 74 percent of all carjackings were perpetrated by armed individuals, only 0.004 percent led to murder. Because auto-related abductions were thrown into the mix, the homicide rate from carjackings could potentially be even lower than that.
Process predators, on the other hand, act out in violent ways for the sake of the violent act itself. They are extraordinarily dangerous. Unless the process predator perceives that you are too costly to attack, it’s going to get physical. You do not have to win, but you absolutely cannot afford to lose. The situation needs to end immediately. It may require you take a human life to come out as intact as possible. Rapists and serial killers are examples of process predators. A fight with a process predator frequently ends with someone in the hospital or morgue.
When we came on shift, Day Shift passed on that four of the inmates assigned to the kitchen had refused to go to work. That’s odd by itself. Working can cut serious time off a sentence. Refusing to work is automatic “hole time”—a trip to disciplinary segregation. Kitchen jobs were considered a good deal and were in high
