Abstract

This article proposes a theoretical perspective on violent crime, using qualitative interviews with inmates in Italy and Brazil, who have perpetrated violence against women. In our proposal, “factorsµ such as “maleness/masculinityµ or “patriarchateµ influence violent crimes only if their authors, during their process of socialization, have built what we would describe as a “violent cosmologyµ through the internalization of attitudes, representations, symbols and self-images that sanction the male role with respect to the relationship of domination between males on the one hand, and female on the other. More generally, we suggest that a “radical interactionistµ approach, in dialogue with narrative criminology, might help in recognizing the uniqueness, the integrality and the ambiguity of the lives of males who have attacked female bodies and in creating the preliminary conditions to deconstruct the patriarchal cosmologies that legitimate violence on the individual, social, cultural and institutional level.