Why Are People Violent?

It feels like every week there’s a big news story about violence and sex. Often people say ‘we need to teach people boys about consent’. Of course, I’ve written a lot about consent and so maybe some people think about the work I do here at BISH. However, I don’t think that it’s as simple as this. People don’t do violence because they haven’t learnt about consent: I see consent and violence as different things. Here I’m going to explain, as best I can, why I think people do violent things. Why violence is more than a lack of consent. Then I’m going to explain exactly why consent is the answer and what I think we need to do better.

What is violence

The way I have explained violence here at BISH is to say that it is when we are deliberately restricting someone else’s ability to act. Through controlling, dominating, taking their power away from them, making them do what we want and not what they want. This means that it often causes harm and that this was the intention.

Now before I decided to work in sex education back in 1999, I did a law degree (I know, weird). Anyway, in that I learnt a lot about the law and violence and I still remember it so I’m going to use it here. To be found guilty of criminal offences¹ against a person, there has to be an ‘actus reus’ (the thing they did) and there has to be a ‘mens rea’ (the intention to do the thing they did).

If someone did a thing by accident, or just fucking up a little bit, then it’s not as bad as doing it on purpose, but there’s a scale. This scale of ‘mens rea’ from low to high is ‘accident – negligence – reckless – intention’. Violence here is not so much a lack of consent (which might be negligence or reckless and still potentially harmful), but a violent act is more intentional. When someone intends to do something, it’s violence. They wanted to do it. But why do people do violent things?

Sidenote: where violence is necessary

There’s a defence to doing violence if it’s to prevent someone else doing a bigger violence: so things like self-defence. The history of protest and human rights also, sometimes, shows that violence has been necessary in order to achieve a a better society. Of course there is also the violence involved in wars. Some of these wars (eg fighting fascism) have been more just than others.

The thrill of violence

We often get a thrill out of violence, doing it, thinking it, feeling it, imagining it: I know I do. Think about the tiny thrill we get from little violent things as we go about our day. For example, I live in London and there are lots of people on Lime bikes who are always jumping red lights, doing dangerous shit, and being a nuisance. People like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjvvGdIt–Q

Sometimes, for a brief brief second, I imagine them having a little accident. There’s a very brief moment when I get a pleasurable feeling in my body, my face, the back of my neck, my fists, a rush of blood…. Then after a second of this, I realise that this isn’t cool. It would be bad for them and bad for me, because I would feel ashamed. I feel the thrill but it goes away.

I might also do the same for people in the world who I think are really bad and imagine bad things happening to them. Like when _________ got _________. Or if ________ happens to ________ soon. It’s maybe a thrill to imagine but it also kind of eats away at us too, particularly if we do it a lot².

Do you have little violent thrills? Privately laughing at someone else’s misfortune? Maybe a little bit of online bullying? Silently judging someone without knowing the first thing about them? Gossiping about people? Perhaps even bonding with other people who also have this thrill? Of course, this is all on a scale. Everything I’ve mentioned here is low level, but they are still in some ways thrilling, or fun, or exciting even if we don’t actually do anything. The sad truth is, when people are doing violent things they may well be, in some ways, getting a thrill out of it.

Violence is encouraged

Violence, taking someone else’s power away from them, domination, control, making people do things they don’t want to, is very much encouraged in our societies. It’s the major story of our time and it can lead to violent states. Sometimes also the organised thrill of violence leads to fascist movements. Violence is thought to have started to increase when we went from being nomadic hunter-gatherers, to becoming farmers³. After this, the story of capitalism (off the back of enclosures and colonisation) is the violence involved in taking land, extracting labour, and forcing people to create value for them. So violence is encouraged and also it’s in people’s immediate interests to do it, because they can profit from it.

Thus, it’s no surprise that characteristics of humans which are given the most status are being powerful, dominant, strong, hard, competitive, and individually ‘successful’. Things like being easy going, gentle, soft, co-operative, kind, and curious are seen as ‘nice to have’ but not given nearly as much status. Look at how much people who (for example) write books about consent, and compare that to people who profit from violence.

Violence is gendered

These ‘violent characteristics’ that are given status in society are also gender coded. Men are supposed to be powerful, dominant, tough and strong and women are not supposed to. This means that men are (to some extent) expected to be violent and women are not. So men are more more likely to be violent (90% of homicide suspects in contact with the Police are men⁴). This is bad for men because they are more likely to be killed (by a man) than women, but where women are killed it is much more likely to be killed by a man they know⁵. Although intimate partner violence has decreased a lot over the last few years and is also less gender divided than you might think⁶.

Feminism (which is great: big fan) has got us to the point of allowing / expecting women to be tough, powerful, dominant etc – for example to be able to do well in the workplace. However, it hasn’t (yet) got to the point of allowing / expecting men to be easy going, gentle, soft, kind etc. Violence is deeply baked into our systems but also in the ways in which we have (so far) done gender and raised kids.

Violence and consent

So when people are doing violent things, they are maybe doing it because they want to. Whether they get a thrill from it, or it’s in their immediate interests, they receive status for doing so, or because it’s expected of them. In many cases they probably know all about consent, they know what they ‘should’ do, but they choose not to.

I have taught about consent for many many years, both on here, in my consent book, and in person. In that time I’ve learned that it’s not enough to teach people ‘this is what consent is and you should do it because it’s the right thing to do’. Sometimes this might be helpful because it might help to minimise harm by helping people to understand when they aren’t being treated consensually enough. However, we need to go further.

I think we need to give people the chance to learn that it’s in their interests to do consent more because it’s much much more fun for everyone when you do. When we are doing consent we are ‘feeling with’ and producing new connections, wonderful feelings, sensations, and memories with people⁷. We might be slowing down, meeting the needs of each other, creating spaces and vibes, paying attention to how things unfold, being curious and patient, allowing pleasure to emerge between us, communicating with our bodies and words throughout⁸. Active on-going consent, increasing our freedom to choose to agree, is better for everyone than violence. It increases our capacity to act. It’s all about looking for win wins.

Consent for the win / win

So this is why I create so many resources that are all about consent. When we maximise our freedoms to choose to agree we are increasing our capacities to act, to ‘be’. The world is better for us, and we are better for the world, when we do consent and not violence. Any immediate pleasure we get from the thrill of violence is just rubbish when you compare it to a pleasure that you build and build and build with other people.

The ways in which we have been led to value violent characteristics is bad for all of us and especially bad for men. So even at an emotional level can we feel anger without feeling aggression, and also learn to experience the value of all the other emotions too. If we do this then perhaps in our every day lives we might build the kind of relationships that bring us more joy and capacity.

Any individual success that we get from fucking someone else over, actually hurts us in the long run. Either because someone will do it to us, or we fear they will, or we will do it to ourselves, and our assemblage gets smaller and smaller. Instead, co-operating and building things with other people is better for us and everyone else because everyone else is us and we are everyone else.

Of course, we must fight to create the world which gets less and less violent and more and more equal. At the level of politics, this active consent I’ve been talking about is about radical and liberatory democracies which are build on co-operation, kindness and build productive relationships with greater capacity for joy.

References

1. https://www.lawcases.net/guides/mens-rea-a-guide/ ↩︎
2. Here I’m gently and vaguely suggesting that violence and micro-fascism have something in common. This is interesting on this topic The (Un-)Making of Microfascism in Schools and Classrooms. In: Affect and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism: Pedagogies for the Renewal of Democratic Education. Cambridge University Press. ↩︎
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence ↩︎
4. Global Study on Homicide UNDOC https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/gsh/2023/Global_study_on_homicide_2023_web.pdf ↩︎
5. The global prevalence of intimate partner homicide: a systematic review
   https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)61030-2/fulltex ↩︎
6. Rates of Male and Female Physical Victimization and Perpetration in Intimate Relationships: A Comprehensive Review https://connect.springerpub.com/content/sgrpa/16/1/5 ↩︎
7. Rethinking and Redefining Consent. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95352-2_134-1 ↩︎
8. This interesting academic article is good on this and features BISH. Dilemmas of school-based relationships and sexuality education for and about consent. Sex Education, 21(3), 269–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2020.1788528 ↩︎

© Justin Hancock, 2026 Find out more about me and BISH here. If you’re an educator, head to my website BISH training, to find out about my resources for SRE and training for practitioners. This website is funded by me (and I am not rich) and my supporters, please see how you can Support BISH here. Please leave me your feedback here.

BISH is run by me, Justin Hancock. I’ve been a trained sex and relationships educator since 1999. I am proud to be a partner of the Sex Education Forum and I am proud to be a member of the World Association for Sexual Health. As well as BISH I also have resources, a podcast, and a coaching service for over 18s, as well as some of the best RSE / CSE teaching resources around. Find out out about my other work at justinhancock.co.uk. My work has featured (positively) in the media, like the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Sky One, and Novara Media.

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