Hama, the old woman of the fishing village in Avatar: The Last Airbender, hides a biography of pure loss. She was once a proud waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe, in the days when the Fire Nation was systematically hunting down and imprisoning every bender it could find. She watched her people taken, one by one, until she alone remained; then she too was captured and locked away for decades in a prison built specifically to deny a waterbender any water to bend. Everything positive in her life—her home, her tribe, her freedom, the ordinary use of her gift—was stripped from her, and in its place came only confinement and suffering. When she finally escapes, what she brings back into the world is not healing but bloodbending: a technique she invented in her cell to seize control of the water inside living bodies, and which she now uses to dominate, torture and abduct innocent villagers of the Fire Nation. For Robert Agnew's general strain theory, Hama is a stark illustration: overwhelming, unrelieved strain, with no legitimate way out, is one of the strongest known pressures toward violence. And she is also the warning the theory demands: explaining that pressure is not the same as excusing what she did with it.
// The theoryWhen pressure has nowhere to go
General strain theory, formulated by the criminologist Robert Agnew in 1992, revived and broadened an old idea in criminology: that crime can be a response to pressure. Where earlier strain theories focused almost entirely on the frustration of not achieving economic success, Agnew identified three broad families of strain. The first is the failure to achieve positively valued goals—the gap between what one wants and what one can reach. The second is the loss of positively valued stimuli—the removal of something or someone that mattered: a home, a community, a freedom. The third is the presence of noxious stimuli—being subjected to harmful, aversive treatment one cannot escape: abuse, victimization, confinement. These strains do not cause crime directly. They generate negative emotions, and above all anger and resentment, which create pressure for corrective action. Crime becomes likely when a person has no legitimate, effective way to relieve that pressure—no support, no coping resources, no path to redress. In his book Pressured into Crime (2006), Agnew stresses that the strains most likely to lead to crime are those seen as unjust, high in magnitude, and associated with low social control.
The theory's force lies in what it adds to the picture. It does not treat the criminal as simply wicked, nor as a passive product of poverty; it asks what pressure the person is under, how intensely they feel it, and—crucially—what options they have for relieving it. Two people can face the same loss; the one with support, standing and a legitimate path to redress absorbs it, while the one who is isolated, powerless and treated unjustly is pushed toward an illegitimate response. This is why Agnew insists strain raises the probability of crime rather than dictating it: the same pressure meets different people, different resources and different choices. It is a lens that takes suffering seriously without ever collapsing into the claim that suffering makes the sufferer's later acts inevitable—a distinction that will matter enormously when we turn to Hama.
Loss, noxious stimuli and the anger with no outlet
The engine of general strain theory is not the hardship itself but what happens when hardship meets a closed door. Agnew's model runs in stages: a strain arrives (a goal blocked, a positive stimulus lost, a noxious stimulus imposed); it produces negative emotion, most powerfully anger, a feeling that demands response and lowers inhibition; and then everything turns on coping. If the person can grieve, protest, seek help, reframe the loss or repair the harm through legitimate means, the pressure finds a healthy channel. If every legitimate channel is sealed—as in a prison cell, in prolonged victimization, in absolute deprivation—the pressure builds until it seeks an illegitimate one. Hama's life concentrates two of Agnew's three strains at maximum intensity. She suffers the loss of positively valued stimuli in the most total form imaginable: her home destroyed, her people taken, her freedom and the very use of her bending stripped away. And she suffers the presence of noxious stimuli for decades: imprisonment engineered to break her. With no legitimate outlet available and her strain experienced as flagrantly unjust, the theory predicts exactly what happens—the pressure is channeled into a new capacity for violence.
// The subjectThe victim who becomes a victimizer
What makes Hama disturbing is that she is not a villain who arrives fully formed: she is made, and we are shown the making. Before the Fire Nation, she was a defender of her tribe; her strain is real, enormous and unquestionably unjust—she is, in the most literal sense, a victim. But general strain theory is a theory of pressure, not of destiny, and Hama shows what happens when the pressure is answered with cruelty rather than repair. In her cell, denied every drop of free water, she notices that water is present in every living thing—and she teaches herself to bend it. The invention of bloodbending is her coping mechanism turned monstrous: the deprivation that was meant to render her powerless becomes the seed of a power to seize other people's bodies against their will. When she escapes and settles into the quiet Fire Nation village, she does not lay her burden down. She abducts innocent villagers—ordinary people who never imprisoned anyone, who had no part in her captivity—and hides them away, repaying an old, general wound on new, particular, blameless victims. This is the grim logic the theory helps us see and the show dramatizes without mercy: unrepaired harm does not stay where it was inflicted. It seeks new bodies. Hama is the victim turned victimizer, a mirror of how trauma, left to fester without justice or care, is transmitted rather than resolved. Understanding this is not a way of siding with her; it is a way of seeing the machinery of cruelty clearly enough to interrupt it.
Hama
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// The flawThe strain explains a risk, it does not clear the deed
The most dangerous crack with a character like Hama—and with general strain theory misread—is the slide toward the perfect alibi: if her violence grew out of decades of unjust suffering, then perhaps she cannot be blamed at all; perhaps her captors bear the whole of it and she bears none. This is the trap, and it must be named. General strain theory explains why a person under crushing, unrelieved pressure is at higher risk of turning to crime; it does not say that crime was inevitable, and it does not dissolve the choice made at the moment of the act. Agnew himself insists that most people who experience even severe strain do not become violent—they cope in other ways. The theory maps a probability, not an excuse. Avatar itself makes the point through contrast: Zuko, raised inside the very regime that broke Hama and scarred by his own father, still finds his way to a different choice—proof that pressure shapes a path without sealing it. And here the decisive fact is who pays the price. Hama's tormentors were the Fire Nation regime that imprisoned her; her victims are villagers who did none of it—innocent people used as substitutes for a debt they never incurred. Nothing in her history was chosen by them, and nothing in her history was chosen by her when she chose to abduct them. Understanding how victimization can breed violence is essential—it lets us repair harm, offer justice, break the cycle before it claims new victims—but it never hands the person who crossed the line a clean conscience.
Breaking the cycle before it claims new victims
Hama matters because she makes visible something criminology takes seriously and societies prefer to look away from: harm that is never repaired tends to reproduce itself. Victimization, prolonged deprivation and injustice are among the strains most reliably linked to later violence—and prisons and conflicts that break people without healing them are engines that manufacture the next generation of harm. General strain theory is not a machine for excuses; it is a map for prevention. If strain and blocked coping raise the risk of violence, then the levers are clear: reduce the unjust strains where we can, and above all open legitimate channels for those who carry them—justice for the wrong done, support that metabolizes anger, communities that receive the survivor instead of abandoning her. Robert Agnew, and researchers such as Lisa Broidy who extended the theory, studied these pressures precisely so that we could relieve them before they curdle. The lesson of Hama is double. Take her strain seriously, because that is where the violence is bred and where it can be interrupted—and hold her responsible, because her victims were innocent and the harm done to her never licensed the harm she did to them. The two truths hold together.
Three key takeaways
- Hama is a stark case of accumulated strain: the Fire Nation destroyed her home, took her people and imprisoned her for decades. General strain theory (Agnew) explains violence as a response to pressure—failed goals, loss of positive stimuli, presence of noxious stimuli—that generates anger and, with no healthy outlet, pushes toward crime.
- The mechanism is a sequence: strain produces negative emotion, and when every legitimate way to cope is sealed, the pressure seeks an illegitimate one. Hama's deprivation becomes bloodbending and her abduction of innocent villagers—the victim turned victimizer, a mirror of how unrepaired harm is transmitted.
- Strain raises the risk of violence, it does not make it inevitable or dissolve responsibility—most people under severe strain never turn violent. Her victims were innocent and had no part in her captivity, so we repair the harm and still hold the person to account.
Sources · further reading
- Agnew, R. (1992). “Foundation for a General Strain Theory of Crime and Delinquency”. Criminology 30(1).
- Agnew, R. (2006). Pressured into Crime: An Overview of General Strain Theory. Oxford University Press.
- Broidy, L. & Agnew, R. (1997). “Gender and Crime: A General Strain Theory Perspective”. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 34(3).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Hama?
Hama is a villain from Avatar: The Last Airbender, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. They took her home, her people and her freedom, one by one.
Why does Hama become a villain?
Hama and general strain theory: a Southern waterbender, captured and imprisoned for decades by the Fire Nation, turns trauma and absolute deprivation into revenge. She invents bloodbending to dominate the bodies of others and, in old age, abducts innocent villagers. Accumulated strain as the origin of violence—and why that origin does not absolve her.
Which criminological theory explains Hama?
Hama's case is analysed through General strain. Robert Agnew's general strain theory holds that certain pressures—failing to reach valued goals, the loss of positive stimuli, and the presence of noxious stimuli—generate negative emotions, above all anger and resentment, that push toward crime when no healthy way of coping exists. Hama, the Southern waterbender of Avatar: The Last Airbender, is a limit case: the Fire Nation razed her home, cut her off from her people and kept her imprisoned for decades in conditions designed to nullify her waterbending. That accumulated strain—absolute deprivation and continuous suffering, with no legitimate outlet—culminates in bloodbending, a technique with which she dominates and tortures the bodies of others, and in the abduction of innocent Fire Nation villagers. She is the victim who becomes a victimizer, a mirror of how unrepaired harm is passed on. Her case illustrates the mechanism and its ethical flaw: strain explains a risk, it does not excuse it. Her victims are innocent and had no part in her captivity.
