{"id":165483,"date":"2020-07-27T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2020-07-27T11:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=165483"},"modified":"2020-07-27T05:27:58","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T04:27:58","slug":"a-typology-of-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/07\/a-typology-of-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"A Typology of Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mapping Direct, Structural and Cultural Violence<\/em><\/p>\n

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Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u201cAn unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.\u201d<\/em> \u2014 Gandhi<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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21 Jul 2020 –<\/em> During college, I hung out a lot with the activist types and other students who were definitely more socially engaged than myself. I read lots of books, though never really in the subject I was meant to be studying. I was more interested in reading about social justice issues, history (that you don\u2019t learn in school), Eastern philosophy, and stuff like that.<\/p>\n

There was often a lot of discussion about structural violence and cultural violence in the circles I frequented, though I never really understood the concepts. And if I\u2019m being real, few of those I hung around with likely had a solid grasp of the concepts.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until some years later, when I pursued a Masters in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies where I learned a bit more about these terms and where they came from. Even then, what I got was a more academic take on the terms, and it took me some years to recognize them readily and everywhere, beyond just the few examples I studied.<\/p>\n

The problem I find is that these concepts are often too academic for most people to grasp. Even those studying them in academic settings may rarely apply them in practical settings. I think that\u2019s why it never really \u2018clicked\u2019 for me when I was in college or even in my post-grad. But for those idealists and dreamers out there like me, the ability to understand and recognize concrete examples of these can profoundly influence your ability to create any form of change in the world around you, whether as an individual or as part of a group.<\/p>\n

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Do a google search on the term \u2018structural violence.\u2019 You\u2019ll find a lot of academic articles, but there\u2019s not much out there that is publicly available. And if you seek to find a decent framework to help you understand the various forms of violence and recognize examples of them, good luck.<\/p>\n

The World Health Organization has a typology of violence<\/a>, but it is limited to interpersonal violence. This is typical. Many others have frameworks similar to this that only cover the scope of what we would classify as \u2018direct violence.\u2019 Even then, they don\u2019t cover things like war or other forms of large-scale violence. The main focus is \u2018interpersonal violence.\u2019<\/p>\n

Now don\u2019t get me wrong. The types of interpersonal violence they include are harmful, and we should be addressing them. But if our understanding of violence is only limited to these types of violence, then we are only scratching the surface. And this neglect in itself is incredibly harmful. As you\u2019ll see, we may even recognize this as a form of violence in itself.<\/p>\n

If I may quote the Dalai Lama,<\/p>\n

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\u201cOf course war and the large military establishments are the greatest source of violence in the world. Whether their purpose is defensive or offensive, these vast, powerful organizations exist solely to kill human beings.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Gandhi saw it too\u2026<\/p>\n

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\u201cPoverty is the worst form of violence.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I figure, no typology of violence is complete if we aren\u2019t considering a broad range of forces that produce systemic violence, war, and things like poverty. Certainly, these do not occur in a vacuum. They are a product of the structures that form our society and the cultural forces that uphold them. If they produce violence, they are a form of violence.<\/p>\n

So since there\u2019s very little out there that properly maps the full scope of violence to my liking, and after years of rolling these concepts over in my head, looking out for examples of them, I figured I\u2019d take a crack at it. After all, it is those types of violence we don\u2019t see which cause the most widespread suffering. Shedding a little light on it I hope will contribute to others finding ways to alleviate some of this suffering, if only a little.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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A Typology of Violence<\/h1>\n

These types of violence were first laid out by peace studies scholar Johan Galtung, back in 1969 when he elaborated on the concept of structural violence (see HERE<\/a>), and followed up in 1990 with an expose on cultural violence (see HERE<\/a>). These were and are to this day discussed predominantly in academic circles. I do think there is a lot of additional academic literature on these too, but most of it I (and most people) don\u2019t have access to anyhow as you need to pay for it or have a membership to specific academic journals\/databases.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019ve gone my own way here and produced more practical explanations that I hope will be more widely understood to anyone outside academia (i.e., most of us normal humans). I\u2019ve compiled these explanations, and a subsequent visual typology by joining what I learned from the old academic stuff with observations from my lived experience.<\/p>\n

Another reason for the typology is that, for nearly every explanation of these terms I see, when they cite examples, it\u2019s always the effects of structural and cultural violence. They\u2019ll talk about poverty, or some groups suffering (and dying) from diseases at disproportionately higher rates than others, or how police violence affects some communities more than others, etc. But in the end, these are effects of cultural and structural violence, not the cultural and structural forces themselves. So with the typology, I hope to help you recognize these.<\/p>\n

So here is the typology below, covering three key terms: direct violence, structural violence, and cultural violence, with introductory explanations for each term.<\/p>\n

Direct violence<\/h2>\n

Direct violence needs little introduction. We get it. It is what comes to mind first when we think of violence. It is easy to identify and, therefore, what we tend to focus on when we talk about addressing violence. Existing frameworks tend to focus on what you see in the \u2018interpersonal\u2019 box, perhaps including the \u2018personal\u2019 box, but seldom cover the scope of what you see in the third box.<\/p>\n

People will mobilize to stop gender-based violence, end a war, or something like that. But the problem is that we\u2019re only scratching the surface here. It\u2019s the tip of an enormous and grotesque iceberg of violence. It is the other forms of violence that produce widespread direct violence.<\/p>\n

Check out my typology of direct violence<\/strong> below. You\u2019ll get the idea. And I hope it is a good frame of reference for when we get to the other types of violence, as they are all connected.<\/p>\n

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Structural violence<\/h2>\n

So here\u2019s where we dig deeper on violence. I\u2019ll start with Galtung because he\u2019s the man on this. He invented it, so let\u2019s see what he\u2019s got to say. Here are a few quotes plucked from his 1969 academic article<\/a> on structural violence:<\/p>\n