A new subculture?

Police sergeant stabbed to death. Eight-year prison term demanded for youthful murder suspects. Teacher kills colleague before pupils' eyes in classroom. Youths ransack newspaper office. Police officers beat up motorist. Bus damaged in student brawl.

Those are just a handful of headlines culled from among the innumerable headings that adorned our newspaper pages in the past months. So common do acts of violence seem to have become that many of those newspaper stories about the crime and violence that occurred around us in the past months may not even have been noticed by many of us.

At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, however, we must say that the question of the apparently increasing tendency towards violence among us is one that we believe is worth looking into as we prepare to move into a new year. Who, after all, does not crave a peaceful society in which people can settle their differences through reasoning, rather than through the use of force? So why this tendency?

An oft-quoted but, at least in this country, not actually tested conjecture is that movies and television are among the primary culprits to blame. In part, that may be true. But violence has always been a part of society -- any society, ours not excluded. In highly romanticized form, acts of violence abound even in such elevated forms of our traditional arts as the wayang shadow plays and bedaya and srimpi court dances of Surakarta and Yogyakarta.

Even so, to those of us who have lived long enough to remember, the days seem not to be so far off when just word of a bloody knife fight between men could spread fear and terror throughout entire city neighborhoods. Violence existed, but reason excelled. A food vendor did not get stabbed for asking the patron to pay. What, then, could have gone wrong?

According to some experts, the violence which we see rising around us at present is the product of a society in transition. In the counter-culture that is emerging, in which people have to cope with the pressures of changing societal conditions, while the old societal institutions are losing their authority, the use of violence is increasingly accepted, not only to settle an argument but to establish one's identity.

Urbanization is another ill often blamed for the rise of crime and violence, which indeed appear to occur most often in the big cities. However, in an article published in The Urban Age, a United Nations-related publication, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, a professor of political science at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, says it is not the city which generates violence.

Life in the city, according to Pinheiro, is a constant battle disguised as competition, especially for the poor. Solidarity cannot be constructed in an environment in which human rights are violated and hardships undermine the social systems.

To return to the initial question, it appears that there may be no simple universally valid answer to the problem of the rising tendency towards violence. Social and cultural patterns vary. Nevertheless, the question needs answering, and the sooner the better. What seems to be indicated is that a coordinated effort is needed on the part of the government and the public to try to find a solution. Tough as the task may be, surely crime and violence are not things we can just accept as a matter of course.