Violence converges from the bottom-up, top-down, and side-ways. Individuals most apt to find themselves in this convergence will do so at home and/or as children.

After children, women run a close second in victimhood. But this is not to say that either children or women are either passive or chained by convention, or that men have a corner on perpetrat­ing these never-faceless crimes.

It is important to view violence as an attribute, first of culture, acculturation, and so­cialization, rather than of individuals or from a deterministic biology. Women and children share all those systems with men. Quite aside from any social actor asserting agency in the prevention of, commission of, and resistance to violence, traditions continually change, from within and without. These chapters inspect some of the manifestations of and antidotes for violence close to home.