Kinds of violence

La Gleize, Belgium: Monument to the victims of the Second World War

Many people, including most politicians, are talking about violence only in case of direct physical attacks by individuals, groups or armies on other individuals, groups, cities, regions and countries, etc. We think here of intentionally physically hurting, killing, etc., and many see also directly psychologically hurting others as a kind of violence. We can call such violence direct violence. For the Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung, however, this view on violence was too limited. For people can also be hurt and killed by others without a direct involvement of the latter in the hurting and killing, so that the hurting and killing cannot be ascribed to particular individuals. In this case there is no straightforward physical relationship between perpetrator and victim, but nevertheless the effect is the same as in case of direct violence, so that it is reasonable to call this kind of hurting and killing violence as well. Galtung called this type of violence structural violence. This human-caused violence is a consequence of the social circumstances people live in, because victims of this type of violence have no access to the necessary resources that would improve their miserable circumstances, which can even make them die. The reasons why people cannot use the resources they need for improving their living conditions are not natural, but others prevent them from using them or don’t give them the means they should reasonably give them. Galtung calls structural violence also “social injustice”. To quote Galtung (p. 171):

“Resources are unevenly distributed, as when income distributions are heavily skewed, literacy/education unevenly distributed, medical services existent in some districts and for some groups only, and so on. Above all the power to decide over the distribution of resources is unevenly distributed. The situation is aggravated further if the persons low on income are also low in education, low on health, and low on power - as is frequently the case because these rank dimensions tend to be heavily correlated due to the way they are tied together in the social structure… The important point here is that if people are starving when this is objectively avoidable, then violence is committed, regardless of whether there is a clear subject-action-object relation, as during a siege yesterday or no such clear relation, as in the way world economic relations are organized today.”

Following Galtung (ibid.), we can distinguish direct violence and structural violence this way: In case of direct violence there is a clear subject-object relation between perpetrator and victim, and this is manifest because it is visible as action. In case of structural violence a direct subject-object relation between perpetrator and victim is absent. The violence exerted is not visible on the surface, but it is hidden and latent. It is built in the structure, not in direct purposeful actions. Galtung: “[For example,] in a society where life expectancy is twice as high in the upper as in the lower classes, violence is exercised even if there are no concrete actors one can point to directly attacking others, as when one person kills another.”
If this analysis is right – and I think it is – we can discern also an intermediate kind of violence between direct and structural violence, which I want to call indirect violence. In this type of violence there is a clear relation between perpetrator (or perpetrators) and victim (or victims), although the perpetrator doesn’t directly hurt, beat, or kill the victim. The perpetrator doesn’t stick a knife in the body of the victim or shoot the victim down. Nevertheless, the use of violence is manifest and the hurting and killing of the victim is the clear result of manifest actions. We see this type of violence, for instance, when people are deported without giving them sufficient means to survive during the deportation or at their destination; when food aid is explicitly denied to people who are starving; when international aid is cancelled, while people are dependent on it and no alternatives are provided or developed; when social services are cut so that people fall into poverty. Etc. In such cases, the perpetrators are clear and it is clear who their victims are, though we cannot say that particular perpetrators directly and in direct manifest actions hurt or kill particular victims. We can say that indirect violence is halfway between direct violence and structural violence, but, just like the other types, violence it is.