Violence Real and Imagined: Reflections on 25 Years of Research

For more than 25 years, I have done research on perpetrators of violence and on persons who have risks for violence but lived law-abiding, pro-social lives. I talked to them in prisons and treatment centers. In this narrative, I describe my gradual understandings of the meanings of violence to perpetrators and of the violence that resides in my own heart and in my use of violent imagery and thoughts in my daily life. I realize now that listening to these stories of violence helped me to bec...