Examining the Meaning of “Violence” Through Machine Learning Techniques

This paper examines the meaning of violence in contemporary Western societies. Scholars have argued that in contemporary Western societies, the concept is expanding toward a broader understanding of violence, beyond its "traditional" usage in the context of crime and war. The current paper aims to generate empirical evidence that speaks to this question. We take the Netherlands as a case study and apply machine learning techniques to discourse on violence in 80,000 articles published in national newspapers between 2012 and 2021. Results show that the public discourse on violence in the Netherlands has a component that can be described as the familiar or "traditional" usage of the term violence-referring to violent political conflicts, or interpersonal violence such as child abuse. Beyond this, the term violence is associated with discourse on societal challenges. It appears in discourse on social media, political polarization, and social injustice faced by ethnic minorities, women, and the LGBT+ community. The later stages of the analysis demonstrated that the terms associated with social injustice in particular (e.g., "racist") become more closely associated with the concept of violence over time. In short, our findings support the notion that the collective understanding of violence in the Netherlands is developing toward a broader understanding of violence, beyond the context of crime and war. Specifically, in recent years the term violence is increasingly used in association with issues of social injustice.