close
Thursday March 28, 2024

Call to check cause of violence

LAHORETHE social scientists and researchers, highlighting various factors behind violence, have called for eliminating reasons to reduce violent activities in the society. They were speaking on the first day of a two-day international conference “Encountering Violence-Recent Research on Pakistan in Comparative Perspective” organised by Punjab University’s Institute of Social and

By our correspondents
March 27, 2015
LAHORE
THE social scientists and researchers, highlighting various factors behind violence, have called for eliminating reasons to reduce violent activities in the society.
They were speaking on the first day of a two-day international conference “Encountering Violence-Recent Research on Pakistan in Comparative Perspective” organised by Punjab University’s Institute of Social and Cultural Studies (ISCS) on Thursday.
Punjab Higher Education Commission (PHEC) Chairman Prof Dr Nizamuddin was the chief guest while PU Dean Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences Prof Dr Zakria Zakir, foreign researchers including Prof Dr Wilhem Hietmeyer, Dr Boris Wilike and Ms Rosario Layus from Bielefeld University Germany and presenters including Dr Raghib Hussain Naeemi, Ms Maliha Shah, Muhammad Salman, Dr Amanullah, and Prof Dr Farah Malik, faculty members and a large number of students were also present. Dr Zakria Zakir, highlighting the impact of violence on the quality of life of an individual and tranquility of social system, said reasons creating and prompting violence were affecting our social and domestic lives.
He said our society must eliminate space for violent behaviour and institutionalise the process of reconciliation and dialogue. Maliha Shah, narrating her study conducted on the women of Swat, said family values, gendered roles and expectations within the marriage as well as the perception of lack of other options made Swat’s women more tolerant to violence. She said although women accepted their conventional household roles, they also considered the possibility of becoming more empowered to reduce their vulnerability to domestic violence.
Nauman Aqil said he set out to study one more violent and one less violent neighborhood in Lahore to try to understand how community organisations, physical characteristics and residents’ strategies for crime prevention and control were related to different levels of criminal violence.
He said it was noted that patterns of social interaction among neighbours had undergone a significant change over the past few decades. In addition, he said local strategies of informal social control were limited to random vigilance, settlement of sporadic disputes within the community settings, and surveillance of children’s activities. Presenting his research titled “Justifications and Legitimacy of Police violence: How is Police Violence Legitimised in Pakistan?”, Kamran Adil said people came into contact with criminal justice system in Pakistan largely through police therefore much of the outcome of the system was dependent on the interaction among different components of the system. He said police functions that were assigned by the law could broadly be divided into riot control and investigation of criminal cases categories.