Abstract
In the fifth century a.D., a fierce Germanic tribe, the Vandals, plundered Gaul, North Africa, Rome, and other conquered territories. Their heavy destruction of buildings and works of art lent their name in perpetuity to the behaviors of concern herein. Perhaps then, which particular behavior could be called vandalistic was clear. That is certainly not the case now. Like many other behavior-descriptive terms (e. g., stress, anxiety, dependency, aggression), behaviors contemporaneously subsumed under the term vandalism are many and varied. So, too, its very definitions. In the present chapter I will seek to bring a beginning sense of order to what Christensen, Johnson, and Brookes (1992) correctly asserted has become a “hodgepodge concept,” Levy-Leboyer (1984) termed a “ragbag” of meanings, and Rubel (1980) called a “catch-all.”
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Goldstein, A.P. (1996). Definitions and Demographics. In: The Psychology of Vandalism. The Springer Series in Social Clinical Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0176-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0176-7_2
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