Structural Violence – the harm that larger structures and systems in society cause to people by perpetuating social inequalities that lead to suffering, pain, illness, or death
Structural violence is systemic. Aspects of social life, particularly the societal structures we encounter and are bound by everyday, affect the way we think, feel and live.
While we normally think of violence as overt acts that cause physical harm, structural violence can be harder to recognize, however, it can be just as harmful. Political and economic policies can limit access to healthcare, education and other basic needs, creating stress and, ultimately, an erosion of the ability to lead a healthy life.
“Structural violence is one way of describing social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way… The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people … neither culture nor pure individual will is at fault; rather, historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces conspire to constrain individual agency.“ — Paul Farmer
||| Explore the Literature |||
Brady, David, and Linda Burton. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Summary: This handbook is a useful resource for understanding how the social sciences approach poverty, by identifying wide reaching relationships between various measurements, for example such as structural issues, power, gender and race, and the different ways such things can be measured and analyzed through a social lens.
Farmer, Paul. 2004. “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.” Current Anthropology 45, no. 3: 305–25.
Summary: This text outlines Farmer’s primary work on outlining the concept of structural violence, by looking at various issues relating specifically to health, including AIDS, tuberculosis, and the illness attributed to poverty ,and how structures within society create and encourage these illnesses and deaths to continue.
Farmer, Paul. 2006/1993. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. University of California Press.
Summary: The book is an exemplary “ethnography of suffering” and structural violence that combines ethnographic, historic, epidemiologic, and political-economic analyses. Based on fieldwork conducted in Do Kay between 1982 and 1990, the ethnography reveals three areas of accusation regarding the HIV/AIDS pandemic: 1) sorcery accusations Haitians levied against each other; 2) the accusations North Americans (scientists, press, and popular sector) brought against Haitians for the spread of HIV/AIDS in Haiti and the United States; and 3) the counter accusations of Haitian who saw HIV/AIDS as a North American conspiracy to eliminate Haitians (244). Farmer rightly asserts that of the three forms of accusations, only the one that blamed the victim carried real and material consequences (247).
Farmer, Paul E, Bruce Nizeye, Sara Stulac, and Salmaan Keshavjee. 2006. “Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine.” PLoS Medicine 3, no. 10.
Summary: In this article, Farmer explores his concept of structural violence as relating specifically to clinical, allopathic medicine. He lays out how power influences medical systems, and also how medical systems themselves, as structures of power, influence people’s lives in physical ways.
Hirschfeld, K. Rethinking “Structural Violence.” 2017. Society 54, 156–162.
Abstract: The concept of structural violence first developed in the 1960s as a way to explain disparities in health and development between wealthy countries and impoverished postcolonial states. This idea emerged out of Dependency Theory and defined poverty and disease in the developing world as the product of exploitation by colonial or neocolonial powers. Contemporary researchers continue to invoke structural violence to explain international health trends, but a review of recent literature reveals that the concept is increasingly outdated and poorly theorized. It is especially problematic when used to describe contemporary epidemics of infectious disease. In this paper I offer a brief overview of the concept of structural violence and critique the way it has been used to explain the political economy of two recent outbreaks: Ebola in West Africa and cholera in Haiti. Ultimately the paper concludes that these scholars claim to be explaining epidemics but instead use their research as a form of moralistic storytelling that leaves the structural dimensions of health unexplored.
Lane, Sandra D., Robert A. Rubinstein, Robert H. Keefe, Noah Webster, Donald A. Cibula, Alan Rosenthal, and Jesse Dowdell. “Structural Violence and Racial Disparity in HIV Transmission.” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 15, no. 3 (2004): 319–35.
Summary: This article exposes how HIV transmission is affected by structural violence among certain populations, as based on racial disparities and inequalities. It lays out the specifics of vulnerability to infections due to social inequalities and subsequent structural inequalities.
Saleem, R., Pagan-Ortiz, M. E., Morrill, Z., Brodt, M., & Andrade, L. 2020. “I thought it would be different”: Experiences of structural violence in the lives of undocumented Latinas. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 26(2), 171-180.
Abstract: In the United States, a majority of immigrants living with undocumented status hail from Latin America. Their migration is often propelled by adverse conditions and experiences of violence in their countries, which are inextricably linked to historical and ongoing policies of global political powers. However, their suffering does not end in the United States. Whereas many studies focus on the direct/individual violence experienced, few examine the impact of structural violence. Structural violence refers to the injustices embedded in social and institutional structures including laws and policies within societies that result in harm to an individual’s psychological and physical well-being. This qualitative study explored the experiences and consequences of structural violence faced by Latina women with undocumented status living in the United States. Participants (n = 8) were recruited in the community using snowball sampling. We conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews focusing on participants’ immigration process, health, work, education, and support systems. Using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) as a method, multiple themes that highlighted participants’ experiences of structural violence were identified. These included: (a) violence across several contexts, including places of employment, home, community, and while accessing services; (b) psychological and physical consequences of structural violence for participants; and (c) experiences of support and resilience that helped participants survive structural violence. Participants’ intersecting identities (e.g., gender, ethnicity/race, documentation status) increased their vulnerability to violence. We highlight the importance of calling attention to violent structures embedded in sociopolitical histories, the importance of systemic changes, including challenging laws and policies, and building solidarity across struggles
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2004. “Dangerous and endangered youth: social structures and determinants of violence.” Ann N Y Acad Sci, 1036:13-46. doi:10.1196/annals.1330.002
Summary: In this article, Scheper-Hughes theorizes how structural violence “normalizes” issues of poverty, illness, and widespread inequality through an ethnographic account of her work in Northeastern Brazil.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1993. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. The University of California Press.
Abstract: When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside “favela”. Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing – and controversial – is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live.
Schuller, Mark. 2012. Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Summary from publisher: The book analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich ethnographic comparisons of two Haitian women’s NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs’ roles as intermediaries in “gluing” the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain—a process Schuller calls “trickle-down imperialism.”