Criminal Violentology – a New Trend in Russian Criminal Law

Sharapov Roman D., Doctor of Law, Professor, Institute of State and Law, Tyumen State University, Tyumen, Russia

This paper presents conceptual foundations of the new direction of the Russian criminal law – criminal violentology as a complex legal doctrine of criminal violence, its prevention by measures under the criminal law, methodological foundations of criminal violentology, the notion of criminal violence in the Russian criminal law as proscribed by the criminal violation of safety of the person in the form of wilful infliction of physical or mental harm to the victim against his/ her will by physical or psychological impact on the human body. The article contains a brief description of physical and psychic violence under criminal law, legal terminology and the typology classification of elements of violent crimes in the criminal law, reveals practical significance of the violentology in such areas as developing rules on legislating as to defining elements of violent crime, elaborating theoretical foundations for classifying criminal violence, improving mechanisms of legal prevention of criminal violence. Specific proposals for improving the protection of individuals from criminal violence by means of criminal law are made.

Key words: violence, violentology, violent crime, physical violence, psychological violence, criminal law.

Introduction.

The entire historical path that humanity has followed so far is represented by two forms of existence in society - war and peace. The era of violence comes to replace the era of non-violence, and vice versa. But most often the society finds itself in those two aspects of its life at the same time. Therefore, the problem of violence is one of the perennial problems of humanity. However, another conclusion is even sadder- violence is an incurable social vice.       

Only its symptoms are variable (the volume and qualitative properties of violence), defined by social processes at a concrete historical stage in the development of a society.

Criminal violence as the most malignant form of social violence is a pressing global problem of modern civilisation. The social cost of criminal violence is enormous. It consists not only of the losses of human lives (mortality, physical and mental injuries). The rate of violence includes enormous material losses and costs (e.g., spendings on the law enforcement system and health care, loss of productivity and so forth), as well as spiritual losses (e.g., dehumanisation of interpersonal relationships).

At the turn of the century, at the turn of the millennium, the Russian state once again is experiencing a wave of criminal violence and terror that has swept through the Russian society at all levels. On the crest of this wave are generated by political and ethnic conflicts particularly serious forms of violent crime (armed rebellion, acts of terror,  mass murders and assassinations, mass hostage-taking, kidnapping), and the forecasts as to  their number, large-scale dangerous consequences, the growth in the  number and quality of  weapons involved, extreme cruelty are disappointing. However, at the bottom of this wave, there is a much larger share of household, family, street, service, army, prison and other types of criminal violence deeply imbued in everyday interpersonal relationships of many walks of life.

Occurring at the beginning of the new century, changes in the quantitative and qualitative indicators of more violent crime quite naturally highlight the issue of adequate opposition to criminal violence, including the use of tools of criminal law. The Criminal Code of the Russian Federation carries the whole system of norms providing for responsibility for violent crimes. Practically, almost a third   of the socially dangerous acts stipulated in the criminal law are violent. The foundation of this system is the category of criminal violence, which at the conceptual level was the least developed in the theory of criminal law in comparison with other concepts and categories.

Hence, the combination of norms of criminal law, aimed at combating criminal violence is far from perfect. In the RF Criminal Code, there is no legal definition of violence, no explanation of contents of attributes of violence, whether it is dangerous for life and health or not.  Nor is there clarity in terminological differences in violent behaviour ("violence", "coercion", "assault", "torture", "extreme cruelty", "abuse" and others.). Besides, there is no clarity in criminological justification for rules for legislating on   elements of violent crimes, no differentiated responsibility for physical and psychic violence; at the same time, there are gaps in the criminalisation of violent crime, the role of criminal punishment in the prevention of certain violent crimes has weakened. All these circumstances create considerable difficulties in the interpretation and implementation of the criminal law in practice, generates a contradiction between the investigation stage and the courts in the evaluation of the same cases, cause numerous judicial and investigative errors.

We cannot ignore the fact that "since the second half of the twentieth century, most civilised countries have perceived" the crisis of punishment, "the crisis of criminal policy and criminal justice, the crisis of police control"[1]. As a result, many foreign lawmakers are seriously concerned about searching for alternative measures of state responses to crime (the development of new kinds of punishment and modernisation of those existing not connected with isolation from society, the  increased use of probation and parole forms of punishment, the formation of "restorative" justice beyond the framework of criminal justice, etc.). A reasonable question is raised - to what extent does the tendency to minimise criminal liability and criminal repression measures apply to criminal violence and violent criminals?

To obtain a scientifically based answer to this question and to solve other problems mentioned above, it is important not only to know the parameters of modern violent crime, but also to be aware of the social causation of criminal liability for criminal violence, to have an idea about the concept, types and dangers of the latter. The required amount of reliable knowledge on legal issues in question can be obtained within a holistic doctrine of criminal violence in criminal law, which can be described as criminal violentology[2].

 

1. Methodological basis of the criminal violentology.

The problem of violence in the society, including criminal violence, is so voluminous, complex and multifaceted that its solution, no doubt, may not be a feasible task of any single branch of science. This problem has been extensively researched in legal, criminological, philosophical, political, sociological, psychological, psychiatric and other literature. According to Ya. Gilinsky,

"There appeared a science of violence - violentology (or violensology) (from Latin. violentiae – violence – R.Sh.), designed to explore the phenomenon of violence, its genesis, underlying factors, as well as to develop principles and directions of violence prevention"[3].

Apparently, violentology as a complex science does not have its own research tools. These tools of violentology are provided by other human sciences having a particular aspect of the problem of social violence as their subject-matter. Criminal law plays an important role in the aggregate of sciences studying the problem of criminal violence.

In foreign legal science, the criminal legal aspect of this problem is not based on any significant or well-known  legal research. The problem of criminal violence abroad has mainly a sociological (criminological) vector directed at finding ways and means of general social and specialised criminological prevention of violent crime, especially its segments, such as domestic violence, violence against women and children[4].

Until recently, in the Russian science of criminal law, the  problem of criminal violence  was developed mainly in the form of  analysing   specific offences against the person, property, sexual freedom and sexual integrity, management procedure, and others. Complex investigations of criminal violence as an independent criminal legal category were very few[5]. Meanwhile, the academic and practical significance of such studies is great because they allow us to solve common problems of legislative regulation and classification of violent crimes, to establish uniformity in the interpretation of typical features to streamline the uniform practice of applying criminal law. This issue has been given more and more attention in the new, XXI century, the beginning of which was marked by the emergence of a number of notable works openly claimed to be the comprehensive studies of criminal violence (its separate kinds) in criminal law[6]. However, the content of these works is impossible to assess  unambiguously.

Selected works of recent years are mostly descriptive, abstract, while others are focused mainly on the study of theoretical, historical and conceptual problems of violence in criminal law, which impoverishes their practical value. Some papers on criminal law and criminological study of violence were largely eclectic, which prevented their authors from focusing on a wide range of unresolved criminal matters and issues related to legislative description, classification and punishability of criminal violence. Finally, a number of researchers have devoted their studies to characteristics of only one type of violence (physical or psychic) under criminal law, so there is no reason to talk about their fully comprehensive character.

Objectives of the science of criminal law in solving the problem of criminal violence are seen as the following:

- To determine legal boundaries and attributes of criminal violence,

- To justify the criminalisation of socially dangerous types of violence,

- To ensure the correct application of criminal law providing for criminal responsibility for the violence,

- To develop an effective mechanism to counter violence through the criminal law

- To constantly monitor the level of criminological justification for criminal law norms providing for liability for criminal violence.

The marked areas of studies in the area of criminal law can be described as criminal violentology.

Among the scientific categories of modern criminal law, a special place belongs to criminal violence which generally means a deliberate attempt to violate the safety of the person against his will. In the theory of criminal law, violence is traditionally divided into physical and psychic. However, the characteristics of these types of violence, in our opinion, have not received a satisfactory description in the literature on criminal law. Even more controversial is the issue of the grounds for the classification of criminal violence into physical and psychic, which until recently was generally not an object for self-study in the science of criminal law. That issue is very important for classification and differentiation of liability.

Criminal violence, being a complex category, brings together a large group of intentional crimes that cause physical or mental harm to the person (violent crimes), crimes taking about 30% of the Special Part of the RF Criminal Code. That means that almost one third of all socially dangerous crimes proscribed in the RF Criminal Code are violent. Such acts are either inherently violent initially because of their socio-legal nature or violence appears as a possible method of committing them. Violent crimes are proscribed in most of the chapters of the Special Part of the RF Criminal Code. The exceptions are Chapter 26 "Environmental Crime", Chapter 27 "Crimes Against Traffic Safety and Operation of Transport" and Chapter 28 "Crimes in the Sphere of Computer Information." They do not involve any violent crime, which is obviously due to the fact that violence does not show a steady trend of its use as a means of committing these crimes.

The concept of a violent crime is not the same category as that of criminal violence in criminal law. The category of criminal violence embraces all crimes inherently violent in nature, as well as the violent way of committing certain crimes that can be committed by non-violent means.

Terminological, structural and logical analysis of the norms of criminal law on liability for crimes committed by means of violence reveals a complex system of violent crime in the criminal law. Criminal violence is a global systematising element of this system in its specific forms: physical and psychic violence. Each of these types of violence brings together a large group of violations forming a relatively independent part of the system of violent crimes. Both types of violence have their typical symptoms that are present in every violent crime in conjunction with its individual features.

In this regard, studying  typical attributes of criminal violence and its kinds, creating  (on that basis) general theoretical concepts of criminal violence and securing a legal formula of its kinds in criminal law is , in my opinion, a priority in criminal investigations of violent crime; this direction  does not seem to be  developed well enough. Identification and scientific theoretical consolidation of typical attributes of criminal violence  are ‘the theoretical basis for addressing, in a legitimate and justified way,  the issues of classification of any of the crimes in question, they provide a common understanding of these features in the application of various standards of responsibility for violent criminal acts"[7].

It is important that a tool for establishing common attributes and formulating the concept of violence, its kinds in criminal law is the doctrine of the elements of the crime with the traditional structure of attributes, grouped according to the four elements: object, objective side, subject, subjective side. This kind of research approach to criminal violence seems to be correct. It springs from the progress of science in developing criminal-law concepts of any wrongful act, such as violence, and a set of characteristic features defined by criminal law.

 

2. The concept of criminal violence in criminal law.

Criminal violence - is prohibited by criminal law violation of personal safety rights in the form of wilful infliction of physical or mental harm to the victim against his/her will by physical or psychological impact on the human body.

The object of criminal violence is personal safety (personal inviolability), that is, public relations ensuring the person’s safe physical and mental existence.

Personal safety of a person includes physical safety (relationship providing physical benefits of man - life, health, physical freedom) and psychic safety (relations providing mental benefits of man - mental well-being, sexual freedom and sexual integrity, honour and dignity).

The object of criminal violence is the body of another person, namely, its organs, tissues, their physiological functions and psyche.

On the objective side, a violent act (action or omission) can be expressed in physical or mental violent impact on the body of another person. The physical impact can possibly be exerted on organs, tissues or physiological functions of the victim’s body by the perpetrator using   material factors in the external environment. The psychic impact can possibly influence the victim’s psyche with the help of psychiс factors in the external environment.

A socially dangerous consequence of criminal violence is physical or mental injury, i.e. an adverse change in the physical (biological) and (or) mental nature of man having a negative impact on the person’s body as an integrated bio-system.

Criminal violence involves the infliction of physical or mental harm to another person contrary to his/her will (against or beyond the person’s will). Violence is committed against the victim’s will when the victim is aware of the fact of a criminal assault against him/her. Violence is committed beyond the victim’s will when the victim is not aware of the fact of committing a criminal assault against him/her and  does   not expressed his/her will in this regard.

Criminal violence involves wrongful infliction of physical or mental harm to another person, that is, violence in criminal law is a socially dangerous and unlawful kind of conduct.

On the subjective side, criminal violence involves a deliberate form of guilt.

 

3. Description of physical and psychic violence by criminal law.

I believe the nature of socially dangerous consequences of violence, and not  the object and the way of violent impact,  to be   the basis of ‘criminal-law’ classification of violence into physical and psychic In the Special Part of the existing Criminal Code, offences committed with physical violence  are provided in more than 80 articles (30%). In the most general form, the concept of physical violence  is contained in  penal provisions  on  murder (Art. 105 of the Criminal Code), causing intentional injury , physical pain and physical suffering (Art. 111, 112, 115, 116, 117 of the Criminal Code), illegal deprivation of liberty (Art. 127 of the Criminal Code). In essence, these articles identify varieties of physical violence in regard to consequences.

Physical violence has all the features of the general concept of violence in criminal law. Therefore, the characteristics of physical violence in criminal law should be devoted mainly to the description of its specific features that identify the originality of this type of criminal violence. It seems that these features are inherent in two constituent elements of physical violence - the object and the objective side.

Physical abuse - this is criminal assault on the physical safety of the person in the form of wilful infliction of physical harm to the victim against the victim’s will.

The practice of criminal violence is characterised by a variety of forms (ways) of physical impact on the victim. The most common and typical way to exert physical violence is an assault - the use by the perpetrator of muscular strength or physical force of some other means (machinery, animals, and other people). The vast majority of the killings, intentional infliction of bodily harm, robbery, violent robbery, rape and other violent crimes are committed in this way due to the efficiency of this method of physical violence, the relative ease of its implementation, low intellectual level of violent criminals, most of whom are focused on the use of brutal force to achieve their goals. The assault may be secret or open.

It is not uncommon to encounter a more complex nature of the objective side of physical violence where the perpetrator takes advantage of both physical and mental tools to achieve the result. Among the methods of physical harm, as a result of physical impact but with the use of information tools, are fraud and breach of trust, the use of psychic helplessness of the victim. For example, cases of inflicting physical harm (death, health problems, helpless condition) by   introducing various kinds of poisonous chemicals or sedatives into the victim’s body, using the victim's confidence or through deception, have become common in recent years.

There is a  possibility of inflicting physical harm to a person by exerting the psychic impact on him/her in its pure form, when the offender has a direct impact on the mental sphere of another person by providing  him/her information causing adverse mental processes (stress, anxiety, fear, etc.), accompanied by psychosomatic disorders. Given the fact that, I have taken the nature of the harm caused to the victim as the basis for the classification of violence into the physical and psychic,    physical harm by psychic impact on the victim should be considered as a form of physical violence.

The criminal result of physical violence is the physical consequence (physical injury), which is a harmful change in the biological nature of man depriving the person   of personal physical benefits. On the basis of the rules of criminal law, six types of physical consequences can be distinguished as to the nature and extent of the physical changes: death, injury, physical pain and physical suffering, helpless condition, loss of physical freedom.

In the Special Part of the current RF Criminal Code, offences committed with psychic violence are contained in more than 70 articles (26% of the Code). In the most general form,  the concept of psychic violence is provided in  penal provisions on torture in the part concerning the infliction of mental suffering (Art. 117 of the RF Criminal Code), the threat to kill or cause grievous bodily harm (Art. 119 of the RF Criminal Code), sexual assault (Art. 132 of the RF Criminal Code).

Taking into account the fact that psychological violence has all the features of the general concept of violence in criminal law, the “criminal-law” characteristic of psychic violence focuses on two of its elements - the object and the objective side, which contain individual features of psychic violence.

Psychic violence - this criminal assault on the psychic human safety in the form of wilful infliction of mental harm to the victim against his will.

Traditionally, this type of violence is committed by information impact on the psyche of the victim with the use of mental factors, namely, information of traumatic nature. The most common mental factor is the threat of harm. However, not all information with threatening content presents a threat as a kind of psychological violence. For this purpose, the information must possess certain characteristics.

First of all, the content of the threatening information is the possibility to cause harm, as a rule, to the rights and legitimate interests of the individual, society and the State.  The Criminal Code refers to various types of threats that differ in nature, depending on what kind of a wrongful act the offender threatens to commit, which legally protected interests of the person he is threatening to disrupt: 1) the threat of physical violence ("threat of violence" threat to kill or cause grievous bodily harm”, "threat of harm to health", "the threat of violence, dangerous and not dangerous to life or health "). The  threat of physical violence can be  the threat of kidnapping or threats of rape, which essentially consist in intimidating the victim with inflicting physical harm; 2) the threat of destruction or damage of property (under Art. 133 of the Criminal Code -   the threat of  taking away the  property); 3) blackmail - the threat of spreading  information that defames the victim or the victim’s family, or any other information that may cause significant harm to the rights or legitimate interests of the victim or the victim’s  relatives; 4) the threat to commit a wrongful act is   intimidation of the victim by the threat to commit a crime or other offence (to wrongly fire from their jobs, expel from the university, illegally open a criminal case, withhold pay, not to perform an obligation under the contract, leave without care, etc.) against him or people close to him.

Another feature of the threat punishable under criminal law is that the danger that it enfolds may relate to both the victim and the victim’s family, or even to other people to whom the victim is not indifferent. This point should be kept in mind even when the article contains no direct reference to relatives and other persons (Art. 110, 119, 162 of the Criminal Code, etc.). The threat to inflict of harm to a person to whom the "victim" is indifferent cannot harm the psychic safety of the latter and, consequently, cannot be an effective way of committing the crime.

The manifestations of psychological violence are insults, bullying, harassment, and other similar actions that have a negative impact on the human psyche. The mental factor here is the information degrading the victim’s dignity, capable of causing him a psychic trauma no less serious than the threatening information (e.g., indecent negative evaluation of the victim's identity, giving humiliating orders, false accusations of the person of vicious actions, evil cynical ridicule, mockery , including illegal deprivation of property, housing, etc.).

No less dangerous stressful factor for people is all sorts of "shocking" information (about the death of a loved one, the loss of valuable property, about the "failure" at the entrance exam, demonstration to the victim of scenes of violence towards his relatives, etc.). Giving a person such information may cause a severe trauma, and under certain conditions, even physical harm.

The corresponding actions can be classified as torture (Art. 117 of the RF Criminal Code) with regard to causing mental suffering by other violent acts, and they also form the "extreme cruelty", which is an aggravating circumstance in violent crimes.

Psychic violence is possible by way of physical impact on the human body. We are talking about such assaults in which a physical effect on organs and tissues of the victim, in fact, turns into a knock-on effect on his psyche, is limited to trauma, and does not involve causing  socially dangerous physical consequences. Such acts include, in our opinion, "assault and battery" - a slap in the face, spitting in the face,  cutting off a braid, pulling ears or nose, flicking the forehead, etc. Such actions are regarded as psychological violence not only because of the predominant orientation of the intention of the perpetrator to cause trauma to another person, the humiliation of his honor and dignity (a subjective criterion). Even if these actions have caused the physical consequences in the form of pain, its intensity is so unimportant that the act does not constitute a public danger inherent to physical violence (objective criteria).

The foregoing has been linked to certain sexual offences, the objective side of which is connected with the commission of sexual assault against the will of the victim. Sexual intercourse, sodomy, lesbianism and other sexual acts in violent sexual offences have the status of psychic violence, which manifests itself most clearly in the case of committing these crimes with the use of the helpless condition of the victim when the offender does not resort to additional physical or psychic violence.

Psychic violence is possible not only by actions but also by omission.  Indicative in this regard is such kind of criminal offences as extortion threats that can be veiled, when an official wilfully fails to comply within his/her duties to work for legitimate interests of the citizen, thereby creating a situation for the psychological pressure on the latter, forcing to make material concessions to bribe-takers.

The result of criminal violence is a mental effect (mental injury), which is a harmful change in the emotional sphere of man in the form of negative mental states (emotional stress). The analysis of the norms of the RF Criminal Code makes it possible to distinguish among four types of mental harm (mental effects): the fear of criminal threat, the state of sudden a strong emotion (affect), negative emotional states which do not reach the degree of strong emotion, mental suffering.

 

4. Legal terminology and typology of elements of violent crimes in criminal law.

In criminal law, offences that are committed with violence are described not only by direct usage of the term "violence" in the disposition of the article. In many articles of the criminal code, to the violent nature of a criminal offence stems from other methods of legislative technique and terminology. We can distinguish among three situations in the law when the legislator did not use the term "violence" and resorted to other means of describing elements of violent crimes.

1) Terminology and structure of articles are  the only evidence of the violent nature of the crime - "violence", "violence" (Art. 116, 117, 131, part 2, Art. 139, 334, etc.), The "threat" (Art. 119, 163, part 1, Art. 296, etc.), "extreme cruelty" (part 2, Art. 105 (e), part 2, Art. 111 (b), part 2, Art. 112 (c), etc.), "abuse "(part 2, Art. 302, Art. 335)", abduction"(Art. 126),"deprivation of liberty" (Art. 127) "illegal hospitalization of the person into a mental hospital" (Art.  128), "seizure or retention of the person" (Art. 206), "attempt on life" (Art.  277, 295, 317), "illegal detention, placement into custody" ( Art. 301), etc.

2) The disposition of this article contains ample terms implying violent acts, along with other non-violent methods of  assault - "obstruction" (Art. 144, 148, 315), "interference in any form" (Art. 294), "abuse" (Art. 110, 156, 356), "coercion" (Art. 144, 240, etc.), " embezzlement regardless of the method" (Art. 164), "assault" (Art. 360); or the legislative  design of the article suggests that violence  acts as an alternative method of crime - (part 1, Art. 126, part 1, Art. 127, part 1, Art. 206, part 1, Art. 211).

3) In the disposition of the articles, there is indication of intentional infliction of physical or mental harm - Articles. 105, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 122  (parts 2 and 4), Art. 205, 333(c), (part 2) Art. 334 part 2 (c), Art. 335 (e) part 2, Art. 357.  

The elements of violent crimes in the current RF Criminal Code represent a wide spectrum. However, many of them have typical features, e.g., mechanism of the offence and the role played by violence in its objective side. This role can be ambiguous. There are some crimes in which violence is envisaged as the primary (main) act in the objective side; in other crimes, violence is an additional (secondary) element, that is, the means of the crime in a certain way connected with the principal act, which is generally non-violent.

Based on this classification, we can distinguish between two types of elements of violent crimes: 1) crimes in which violence is the main act in the objective side; 2) crimes in which violence is a means of committing the main act.

In the crimes of the first type, criminal violence as the main act comprises all the   mandatory attributes (act, consequence, causal relationship) of Actus reus. In this role, violence is a major, fundamental sign of a violent crime, directly affecting its social and legal nature (e.g., murder, intentional infliction of grievous bodily harm, use of violence against a representative of authority, etc.).

Among the elements of the crimes in which violence serves as a means of committing the main act, the objective side is very complicated.  Therefore, the crimes are always complicated. Specifically, those are multi-component crimes consisting of two or more acts (accounted for by the law as a real aggregate, for example, robbery, kidnapping with violence, etc.), as well as crimes related to the major components (rape, extortion, etc.). Here, violence is a subordinate act encroaching on the safety of the person as on an additional or optional object. The main element of the objective side on which the socio-legal nature of the offence depends is another action that infringes on the main object. Therefore, all the regular violent crimes and two-action violent are crimes with two objects.

In this group of crimes, there is a certain relationship between violence and the main act determining the socio-legal nature of the crime, Physical or psychic violence, as a means of crime, ensures and facilitates the commission of the primary act by preventing or overcoming the resistance of the victim.

Violence as a means of crime can be a constructive (constitutive) sign of the basic set of elements of a violent crime (e.g, robbery, extortion, coercion to perform a transaction or to refuse to fulfil it).

Much of the violence as a means of crime is provided for as a classifying (aggravating) attribute of a crime, and the major part of infringement in this case often does not provide for violence, so the crime can only be described as violent in relation to its commission with classifying attributes of physical or psychic violence. In all cases where violence is a means of committing a specific crime but is not a constitutive or classifying attribute, it is  recognised as an  aggravating circumstance under  "K" part 1, Art. 63 (k) of the RF Criminal Code.

 

5. The applied value of criminal violentology

Development of theoretical problems of criminal violence in criminal law is undoubtedly important not only from a scientific point of view, in terms of creating a holistic doctrine of criminal law countering criminal violence. Of particular importance is the practical nature of the possible use of the results of the criminal violentological research. The applied value of criminal violentology is seen in at least three directions:

The first direction - development of the rules of legislative design of elements of violent crimes.

The above mentioned typology of elements of violent crime is socially induced because it reflects typical mechanisms of violent behaviour. In view of this, the typology is sustainable in nature, i.e. this typology stands above any trends in legislation and law enforcement in the area of criminal law. This feature allows you to use it as a guide in the processes of criminalisation and penalization of socially dangerous violence as a template for designing structures of violent crimes. From this point of view, all the elements of violent crimes should be subject to the same rules of legislative technique, the core of which is a logical structure of the Actus reus (act or omission, causal relationship, consequences, optional features).

The second direction - development of theoretical fundamentals of classification of criminal violence.

In the process of classifying violent crime, one has to face the question of how many of the harmful physical effects caused as a result of violent acts or omissions are included, without additional classification, in a violent method in a particular set of elements of a complex crime; another question is  when additional classification for causing these effects on the basis of articles on general crimes against life, health and physical freedom. The fact is that the elements of complex crimes committed with the use of physical violence are related to common crimes against life, health and physical freedom as competition of special and general rules. A situation where during the commission of a complex violent crime, physical violence applied by the offender in addition to being classified for the first infringement is additionally classified under another article of the RF Criminal Code, corresponds to the phenomenon of an ideal aggregate  of crimes. In this regard, the development of relevant rules for classifying complex violent crimes  as an aggregate under norms of criminal law and in the situation of their competition.

Important for law enforcement practice is the development of rules for classification of well-known in the criminal law common types of criminal violence:

- classification of violence dangerous and not dangerous to life or health

- classification particularly brutal violence;

- classification of armed violence;

- classification of criminal threats.

The third direction - improving the mechanism of prevention of criminal violence in criminal law.

The most important vector of violentological studies in criminal law is to focus on the prospects of the Russian criminal legislation in the direction of enhancing the protection of personal safety, the development of the latest and most significant problems of improving rules of law, criminalising certain violent crimes. In this direction, one can suggest the following:

- to amend legislation by introducing changes to declare feticide over the age of 22 weeks of fetal development a crime against human life because from a legal point of view, the beginning of human life dates back to the birth of the brain, namely when the fetus reaches full twenty-two weeks of fetal development;

- to provide for introduction in the criminal law of a  penalty of 15- or 25-year imprisonment  or  life imprisonment for the attempt on the life of two or more persons, as well as for the attempt on life committed by a person who has previously committed a similar offence;

- to introduce  in criminal law a separate provision on liability for extremely cruel psychological violence (the infliction of mental suffering);

- to criminalise  the state of sudden strong emotion as an independent socially dangerous consequence  of a number of violent crimes by introducing the relevant aggravating circumstance in the elements of a number of crimes that are typical ’strong emotion’-provoking infringements;

- to exclude from the criminal law  the attribute of  "torture" and replace it, if necessary,  with the attribute of " extreme  cruelty" as the duty of Russia in accordance with the treaties it has ratified to provide for criminal liability for the use of torture has been fulfilled with the introduction of offences in the Criminal Code, such as torture (Article  117 of the RF Criminal Code), coercion to testify (Art. 302 of the RF Criminal Code), the violent abuse of power (part 3 Art. 286 (a) of the RF Criminal Code);

- to classify  the use in offences of uncharged or non-operational weapons, as well as objects that simulate weapons as tools of psychic violence (threats) as an element of a violent crime, which should be formulated as follows: "with the use of weapons, items used as weapons or an object imitating a weapon. ";

- to ban release  on parole of persons sentenced to life imprisonment for committing multiple murders that ended in the victim's death (murder of two or more persons, murder, classified  on aggregate, recurrent murder).

 

Conclusion

Expressed in this article conceptual foundations of criminal violentology as a new branch of science of criminal law in Russia are based on the idea of the necessity of studying criminal violence as an independent inter-normative category of criminal law in terms of developing its general and specific elements and general concepts in relation to the Special Part of the RF Criminal Code in general. This approach to the development issues of criminal violence in criminal law makes a real difference in comparison with theorising on particular problems of legislative regulation and classification of certain violent crimes.     

Criminal violentology is focused on the development of a common conceptual framework, formulation of common rules of legislative design of elements of violent crime and theoretical foundations for classification of criminal violence. Thus, the research involves numerous theoretical, legal and enforcement issues of countering criminal violence by methods and means of criminal law; solutions are  found not only for private matters of legislative regulation and classification of some types of violent crime, but most importantly, the systematic  knowledge is produced about the part the criminal law which is devoted to the fight against criminal violence.

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