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Among other writers, Flemmg (1987:186) offered a legal perspective, defiiung
aggression as a group of offences which requues either "intentionally creating m
another person an apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact (assault),
and/or actual physical contact with intent to harm the recipient (battery)".
The definitions elucidated above can be seen as variations on a theme. They
either assume that the meaning of aggression is well understood, or that the problem
of aggression is, to some variable degree, a subset of the legal meaning of aggression,
which includes assault, assault and battery and aggravated assault.
The lack of consistent operational definitions of aggression has been a serious and
continuing limitation in this area of research. It is difficult to know whether
researchers are comparing the same or similar behaviours when they present statistics
on the prevalence of aggression in their research reports. Some studies have employed
differing definitions of physical assault without injuries, for example Hunter and
Carmel (1992), while others have emphasised injuries sustained as a criterion for
definition, (Lanza, 1983, 1984a). Other researchers have defined aggression from
their professional perspective (Hanson & Balk, 1992), whilst some have offered no
rationale for their definition (Whittington, 1997). Others have added sexual assault as
a category to be examined (Carlson, 1988, Kaye, 1996), but no reported study appears
to integrate threatening and actual physical, sexual and verbal experiences of
aggression in a single operational definition. Without a common defiiution of
aggression, research on relevant topics and the collection of meaningful and
comparable statistics is extremely difficult.
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