Dear WJC Readers:
In the past year or so, a considerable number of manuscripts have been submitted to the Western Journal of Communication about the nature and perhaps unanticipated consequences of communicating aggression. Scholarly attention to VA, bullying, and violence, of course, should not be surprising because it simply reflects the regrettable pervasiveness of the “darker side” of our culture's interpersonal and social communication patterns, particularly within conflicts. Yet, communication research also routinely extends theory into the applied arena by providing communication-based remedies to harmful communication-induced problems. Such is the case with the six essays appearing in this themed issue.
Fully peer-reviewed, these articles span our discipline's methodologies, multiple contexts in which verbal aggressiveness, bullying, and violence all too frequently and alarmingly rear their ugly heads, and fluctuating consequences of communicating aggressively. For instance, in interpersonal relationships, although aggressors choose whether to express or suppress verbal impulses, VA can generate positive outcomes for the perpetrator under certain conditions. In the classroom, verbally aggressive teachers might be forgiven by students if the teacher's immediacy can offset the loss of credibility prompted by VA use. In collegiate debate, however, when judges assess debaters’ comments after a round, women tend to be perceived as more verbally aggressive than men, and punished as a result. This is ironic given that verbal aggressiveness is anathema to the integrity of prized argumentativeness skills taught in university forensics programs. The essay on bullying clearly demonstrates that students bullied in high school carry its negative effects into college life, threatening their abilities to succeed academically and personally. The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre precipitated heartrending eulogies by parents of the slain children; but in a nasty turn of events, those eulogies prompted ideologically intractable pro-gun advocates to condemn the parents to hell for daring to honor their dead through expressions of support for gun law reforms. To help serve physically and emotionally abused women and their children, domestic abuse shelter personnel must walk a tightrope of dialectical tensions to communicate with disempowered, dependent women and foster in them some sense of empowerment and autonomy. In their diversity, these essays remind us of the power of communication to hurt, but also to heal.
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Notes on contributors
Sharon Downey
Sharon Downey is the Editor-in-Chief of Western Journal of Communication.