Structural violence
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Structural violence, a term which was first used in the 1970s and which has commonly been ascribed to Johan Galtung, denotes a form of violence which corresponds with the systematic ways in which a given social structure or social institution prevents individuals from achieving their full potential. Institutionalized elitism, ethnocentricism, classism, racism, sexism, nationalism, heterosexism and ageism are just some examples of this.
In 1984, Petra Kelly wrote (in her first book, Fighting for Hope):
- A third of the 2,000 million people in the developing countries are starving or suffering from malnutrition. Twenty-five per cent of their children die before their fifth birthday […] Less than 10 per cent of the 15 million children who died this year had been vaccinated against the six most common and dangerous children's diseases. Vaccinating every child costs £3 per child. But not doing so costs us five million lives a year. These are classic examples of structural violence.
The violence in structural violence is attributed to the specific organizations of society that injur or harm individuals or masses of individuals.
In explaining his point of view on how structural violence affects the health of subaltern or marginalized people, a medical anthropologist, Paul Farmer writes, "Their sickness is a result of structural violence: neither culture nor pure individual will is at fault; rather, historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces conspire to constrain individual agency. Structural violence is visited upon all those whose social status denies them access to the fruits of scientific and social progress."[1]
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- Robert Gilman: "Structural violence. Can we find genuine peace in a world with inequitable distribution of wealth among nations?" (1983)
