About this Research Topic

Background

When cases of domestic violence spiked during the COVID-19 lockdowns, terror spread among potential victims, while governments that enforced the isolation seemed helpless to address the damages. Vulnerable partners, children, and parents were hostage to possible perpetrators, given the risks of retaliation at home and the danger of death by contamination in shelters. The alarm raises questions about under-examined triggers for violence against others and oneself. One common trigger is boredom. It is the elephant in the room, a known stressor in institutional settings–schools, prisons, and military installations–and otherwise out of focus despite the ubiquity of gender-based violence. Detecting the ravages of boredom in apparently safe domestic settings hints at a range of meanings for the word and a web of personal and collective dysfunctions, including anxiety, depression, feelings of worthlessness and anomie. Conventional remedies for these challenges do not address the escalating rates of violence to oneself and to others. Their evident ineffectiveness during the crisis laid bare structural flaws in standard human development strategies which span home and school environments, the law, and approaches to mental health. A major flaw has been the narrow perspectives of one or another discipline, when the dangers are interrelated and demand multidisciplinary approaches. Chronic violence and alarming rates of depression, before, during, and after the pandemic, show failures of predictable perspectives and their recommendations even in “normal” conditions.

The question of how authorities should react to harm done begs the question of how to prevent harm from happening. Prevention–rather than punishment for crimes or treatment for pathologies–has become a preferred approach for both legal and clinical interventions. To stop violence before it irrupts requires investigation into its causes, because treating the effects of aggression–evacuating victims, punishing perpetrators, counselling patients–addresses symptoms rather than diseases. Why was the lockdown a time of increased domestic violence? What accounts for recent spikes in teen suicides? What are the existing and possible tools for measuring boredom? Answers from experts stay within foreseeable observations about the loss of jobs, the increase of alcoholism, social media addiction, and psychological stress. These familiar answers do not lead beyond the description of pathological patterns. But different approaches may follow from attending to the under-examined danger of having nothing to do.

This Research Topic, “Boredom: The Elephant in the Room,” considers a paradoxical and widespread trigger for violence and depression: boredom. It is a stressor that became intolerable for many otherwise normal people during lockdown. An exploration of what boredom means, its triggers, and connections with other dysfunctions will consider its volatile condition. Is boredom a result of anxiety that leads to isolation? Or does it ignite anxiety from the psychic energy that finds no outlet? Questions like these confront an interdisciplinary group of researchers who interrogate words and meanings that may be taken for granted in particular fields and go unremarked in others. This collective interrogation should prepare new approaches to primary prevention of violence. Perhaps interventions will include ways to channel potentially explosive or self-damaging energies toward what D.D. Winnicott called the “symbolic violence” of making art. Creative activities are engaging and require time-consuming dedication. They banish boredom.

Contributing authors will consider governments, health insurance companies, schools, and other providers who either experiment or miss cues for using cost-effective participatory programs as preventive measures against violence and depression. These programs resonate with advocacy for the arts by the WHO among other advocates for health and prosperity. Scholars and practitioners who have not yet considered the connection between sociability, creativity, and the public good may begin with some skepticism. Why should potential perpetrators of violence be beneficiaries of pleasurable programs? How can clinically depressed patients engage in creative activity? Is pleasure a remedy for social and personal ills when it carries a stigma of sin? Practical responses to these questions will face stigma among other challenges to overcome on the way toward developing effective interventions. The articles collected here will consider how spirals of boredom, aggression, and depression can deepen unless they are interrupted by non-violent social and creative activities.

Contributions to this Research Topic should:

• bring to the attention of scholars and practitioners boredom as an urgent object of study
• propose definitions of boredom and its web of related dysfunctions
• analyze psychological tools for identifying and measuring boredom—do they target relevant questions?
• consider perspectives of gender in experiences and analyses of boredom
• identify existing interventions in boredom and evaluate their effectiveness
• propose legal, educational, and clinical responses to boredom
• develop leads from the WHO and other international bodies with respect to arts and health.

Among the specific themes:

• effects of conventional interventions in domestic violence
• violence and bullying in schools
• school dropout patterns
• arts-based education
• public arts projects
• festivals, government supported
• festivals, privately supported
• heritage arts and immigration
• any links between boredom and the public good.

Types of manuscripts:

• Cases for Culture, a business school format to document, evaluate, and comment on a practice. See https://renaissancenow-cai.org/wp/guidelines/
• full length essays on particular theme(s) above
• comparative studies of what works
• reviews of studies from the WHO, OECD, USAID, etc. with respect to boredom, arts, etc.

Keywords: boredom, domestic violence, human rights, aggression, arts, pleasure, primary prevention

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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