Before we can design strategies to reduce or prevent concert violence, we need a definition. This will allow us to discuss concert violence with a common vocabulary, and ensure that appropriate events are reported. We begin with the WHO definition of violence:
The intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.
Concert violence shares many attributes with mob violence, making it appropriate to also consider the legal definition of mob violence:
A disturbance of the peace by several persons, assembled and acting with a common intent in executing a lawful or unlawful enterprise in a violent and turbulent manner.
This definition is useful; however, to adequately address the multiple facets of concert violence, we must ground it in the context of the live music event. In addition, we are forced to deal with the fact that it is not uniform, and subject to variables such as venue size, indoor/outdoor, day/night, duration, weather (if outdoors), alcohol and drug use, and of course, music type. Finally, concert violence takes on many forms, each which may have a unique spectrum of severity. These include, but are not limited to Audience-on-Audience, Audience-on-Artist, Artist-on-Audience, Artist-on-Artist, Employee-on-Audience, Audience-on-Employee and even Artist-on-Employee. For this project, I will focus on Audience-on-Audience violence, ostensibly the most common variety.
