Picture this:
A young child, dreaming of her future. She screws up her face, clutching her pencil as she writes in her composition book. She isn’t the type to write fairy tales, or futuristic fiction. She’s practical, like her aunts, who scratch the top of her head, pat her back as they walk by. She’s envisioning herself at a lectern, addressing a large crowd. They’re clapping, rising spontaneously to their feet, electrified by what she’s said.
Picture her at school in what is often labeled an “underserved neighborhood.” Notice the way she looks out the window, not really listening to the teacher’s lecture. She’s already understood the assignment, and now the teacher is painstakingly repeating it for the kids who weren’t paying attention. She’s watching the crows peck at the crack in the cement playground. She’s listening to the sound of the van backing up in the street.
See her at dinner that night, with not quite enough food on the table. She bends toward her sister, helping her wrap her fingers around the fork. See the sister thrash and howl and throw the food on the floor. See the sister’s rage, peaking and vibrating, consuming the small room. The sister runs to the corner, curls up, rocking.
When they went to the social services agency to ask for help, the woman behind the desk said fill out these forms, wait for the call and that was months ago. When the young girl wakes in the morning her mother is already gone. She finds the note on the kitchen counter—buy bread and milk with this ten dollars; your sister’s medications need to be refilled, call the number on the bottle and tell the person who answers you need more; there is macaroni and cheese in the box for dinner; your lunch bag is in the fridge love you.
Her mother was up at four, hunched in the cold at the bus stop by 4:30. The bus rocks and sighs every time the front pressure is released and the steps bow down to the next group of riders. She’ll be at her first job by 6:30; her second by 3.
She’s had coffee and a sandwich, and now it’s 6 p.m. and she is trudging down the street to the bus stop and stopping by the bodega to get the sweet treat that signals she’s almost done for the day, almost back to the couch and the not enough dinner but at least this simple five minute ritual of soothing sweetness is coming.
Structural violence does not have an “agent.” There cannot be redress for structural violence under the law, because there is no “actor” and there is no “intention” to harm.
She’s trying not to think of the letter that came in the mail last week: we need to let you know your A1C levels have confirmed your diabetes; please come to this support group next week and schedule a follow-up so we can go over the tests you will need to administer to yourself.
She had stood in the kitchen reading the letter thinking I can’t afford those tests; how am I supposed to come to your support group when I’m working two jobs; how can I get through my days if I can’t have any sugar and as she shifted her weight she tried not to notice the way her feet have been feeling a little numb these last six months, how twice at night she’s fallen on her way to the bathroom but told herself it was just because she’s so tired. Plus, the last time she went to the doctor the staff scolded her for “not complying” with her care and treated her like she was stupid, so why would she want to go back there, just to hear how stupid and wrong and bad she is?
The term “structural violence” was introduced in 1969 by the scholar Johan Galtung, of the Oslo International Peace Research Institute. To better define peace, Galtung wrote, it was necessary to first investigate forms of violence. He began by noticing that it is common to think of violence as either physical or mental/emotional in form, and that violence most often occurs as a result of conflict between people. The cause of violence, then, whether physical or mental, is the action taken by another person.
To witness structural violence, we have to look for a gap—often, we have to see what isn’t happening, when we are accustomed, instead, to look for what is.
But there is another form of violence, he noted, one that is the product of systems. It is harder to apprehend violence when we can’t see a person committing it. To witness structural violence, we have to look for a gap—often, we have to see what isn’t happening, when we are accustomed, instead, to look for what is.
Galtung states that we can teach ourselves to see structural violence by looking for, and then noticing, situations in which the actual potential of people is being limited, or fully taken away from them. He writes:
“Violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations.”
Galtung’s definition allows us to talk about violence not only as something that is present—the person in front of us, robbed, raped, ravaged—but also as something that is not happening, something beautiful that is prevented from being expressed and made real in the world.
If we return to the above scenario, walk it out, imagine what’s going to happen to that mother, and that sister, and that little girl, over the next thirty years—then we can see the extraordinary violence of the gap between the actual life and the potential life of those three people.
And then we can do the math, and start to picture all the other people in similar circumstances. At that point, we have a picture of structural violence. This definition allows us to ask new questions:
Who is harming that little girl, and her sister, and her mother? Could we prove an intent to harm them? Could we stand before a court of law and say: “This is the law that is being broken, here, that is causing this violence? This is the person who we need to lock up, to keep this family safe?”
Structural violence does not have an “agent.” There cannot be redress for structural violence under the law, because there is no “actor” and there is no “intention” to harm. There is no one to exhort, no one to shame, no one to punish, for the series of interlocking oppressions that land, daily, monthly, inexorably, on individuals, families, communities, towns, and regions of the country.
And yet, when we consider the above scenario, and Galtung’s definition of violence as the limiting of human potential, we can see that structural violence is rampant, causes physical and mental distress, and must be addressed, not only in the realm of therapy and public health, but at the level of the political.
It must be addressed not only for moral reasons, but because we cannot suffer the indignity of the loss of human potential, the loss of the creativity and flourishing that is so urgently needed, at this time of human and ecological crisis.
We who work in the field of mental health are often told there is a mental health crisis in this country. We are told there are not enough of us, there are not enough resources, not enough substance use treatment facilities, that we are too expensive, that our treatments take too long, that the country is at once desperate for us and at the same time unwilling to do much to change the circumstances and the approach to “solving” this crisis of mental health.
What remains undefined, taken for granted, is what “mental health” means, in this current moment, and how we know we’re in a crisis..
When my clients come to session, they are ready to talk about themselves, or about their relationships to other people. When they share the traumatic events they have experienced, they tell me stories about other people, doing violent things.
They want to know what the person was thinking, that day when they did that thing. They want to understand why they participated in something, when the voice in their head kept saying no no no no no.
They ask me why a family member could be so heartless and cruel; why the partner left so suddenly, or switched, seemingly overnight, from loving to contemptuous.
It is already so much work to figure out our own motivations, and to try to show up for those we love, that it can seem just too overwhelming to take on systems, too.
Embedded in a devastating definition of violence is a doorway out.
We live in a culture that is relentlessly individualist. A culture that tells us if we just try hard enough, get up after we’re knocked down, we’ll make it. And that if something has gone sideways, it’s because it’s our fault, or another person’s fault. We aren’t encouraged to see systems, or talk about how they create and reinforce barriers to opportunity and growth, or ask how we can come together to use our creativity and collective power to dismantle them.
One thing I love about Galtung’s definition of structural violence is that it gives us an extraordinary way to think about change. Instead of focusing solely on the vast interlocking networks of oppression, we can also focus on that gap between human potential and human suffering. We can ask what it will take to make that human potential actual, concrete energy in the world.
Embedded in a devastating definition of violence is a doorway out.
When I think about oppression, I also picture its elimination—not as some enormous upheaval, uprooting structural violence all at once—but rather as a gradual unwinding. Just as rock cannot withstand water, so our collective mind cannot tolerate for much longer the pain and suffering of others, whether human, animal, or ecological.
One thing that’s fascinating about Galtung’s definition is that it includes a space without words: a gap between human potential and human suffering. He makes us look at that gap.
What he does not do is prescribe: “Do this to stop structural oppression.” For if he said do this, he would be engaging in a kind of dominance, a kind of certainty, a kind of saviorism.
Instead, Galtung invites us to “just look.” Look for the loss of potential, and ask yourself: what will it take for that potential to be unleashed? What has to change, what network of ideas, structures, institutions, inequalities must be transformed, to unleash that human potential, that beauty and creativity and possibility? What will that incredible unleashing of energy produce, and how quickly can we get there?
I want to see that tidal wave of possibility arcing, cresting, thundering down. I suspect that the solutions to structural violence will simultaneously solve many of the other crises we face. I believe that in this unleashing of frozen possibility there is a kind of freedom of Being we have yet to know.
Tell me your ideas about how we get there.
What is structural violence?