A culture of violence

Web posted September 22, 1997

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By Alisa DeMao
Staff Writer

When a South Carolina man opened fire in an Aiken manufacturing plant last week, gunning down seven people and killing three of them, his actions were in keeping with a long, bloody Southern tradition.

Killing is more common in the South than in almost any other region of the country. And those deaths spill over into the workplace, experts said.

While workplace slayings have declined across Georgia and the United States during the past two years, on-the-job homicides are on the rise across South Carolina and in Richmond County. At least a dozen people have been killed on the job in Aiken County since 1991. Eighteen have been killed in Richmond County in the past five years, five in 1996.

In a 12-year study of U.S. workplace slayings, the South accounted for almost half the killings, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Other statistics show that the South and West consistently have more workplace killings.

The same regions have the highest incidence of homicides, according to statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1995, the last year numbers are available, the South had a homicide rate of 738 killings for every 100,000 people, and the West had a rate of 771 slayings. The national rate was 685 slayings.

Usually, the number of on-the-job homicides is connected to the number of total killings in an area, experts said.

``For the years I've looked at the numbers, workplace homicide reflects the larger picture in a region,'' said Lynn Jenkins of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. ``There's a pattern. The incidence is consistent with what we see in all homicides.''

Modern contributors to the epidemic of violence are poverty and poor education, said Doug Bachtel, a sociologist at the University of Georgia in Athens. The historic prevalence of guns also means weapons are ready to hand, he said.

``You just tend to live for today,'' Dr. Bachtel said. ``You react more to things, and you tend not to have the verbal skills you need to resolve conflicts. You also enter into more risky behavior, such as substance abuse, so little things get out of hand.''

Low education and poor verbal skills leave many people unable to communicate effectively, and that builds frustration, others said.

``Violence in the workplace, many times, is an outgrowth of poor verbal and negotiating skills,'' said Bruce Blythe, president of Crisis Management International in Atlanta. ``Because people can't communicate, they resort to physical violence ... Poor education ties into (lack of) conflict resolution skills.''

Sociologists and historians also speculate that a history of violence, passed down from the frontier skirmishes of the first settlers, left an impression on the Southern psyche.

``In the South, people have a tradition of settling things with violence,'' said Thorne Compton, associate director of the Institute of Southern Studies in Columbia. ``A lot of it has to do with the rural culture - there were not a lot of systems in place, so people had to solve their problems on their own. When the rest of the world began to change, that worked less well.''

A university study released last year showed the Southerners were more likely to react negatively to insults than Northerners. The experiment, in which students were bumped and insulted in a hallway, showed that Southerners became more stressed and challenging.

``It's probably some kind of cultural phenomenon,'' said Fox Butterfield, a Southern native who writes for the New York Times and authored a 1995 book that traced a history of white and black violence from the first settlers in ``bloody Edgefield'' County to the streets of New York.

Mr. Butterfield theorizes that white Scotch-Irish settlers brought a code of honor to the area that demanded retribution for insults and was passed along to black sharecroppers after slavery. The modern remnants are seen in black urban demands that a person not be ``dissed,'' or disrespected, he said.

The book traces a bloody history of the Edgefield district, which also encompassed Aiken and Saluda counties and had the highest murder rate in the country during the late 1800s, despite its rural, agrarian population.

``This has been going on for as long as anyone can remember,'' Mr. Butterfield said in a telephone interview. ``This is not new, it's not recent. Early European visitors often remarked on the high incidence of killing in the area ... If someone offended you, you felt impelled to defend yourself. And you settled it yourself, not in court. There's still a strong element of that in parts of the traditional South.''