The Harm With No Attacker

Here is a question that sounds like a riddle.

If a person dies of something curable, in a place where the cure exists and costs very little, and nobody wanted them to die, what killed them?

The disease is one answer. It is not a complete answer.

Galtung gave a name to the incomplete part. He called it structural violence, which means harm produced by the way things are arranged rather than by a person doing the harming.

The name is a little dramatic and the idea is not. Ordinary violence has an actor. Somebody swings, somebody shoots, and you can point at them. Structural violence has no actor. It has an arrangement. People are hurt, sometimes in enormous numbers, and there is nobody to point at.

Four Examples

A school sits on one side of a busy road and half the students live on the other side. There is no crosswalk and no light. Every year a few children get hit. No driver meant to hit a child. No official decided that children should be hit. But the road, the school, and the missing crosswalk together produce injured children as reliably as if someone had planned it.

A rural county loses its hospital. The nearest one is now ninety minutes away. Over the following years, more people in that county die of heart attacks. Nobody killed them. The distance did.

A form required for a benefit runs eleven pages and asks for documents that people in the situation the benefit exists for are the least likely to have. Nobody wrote the form intending to exclude anyone. The exclusion happens anyway, quietly, at a predictable rate, and the people it excludes are exactly the ones the program was built for.

For centuries, people in cities drank water that ran near their own waste, and they died of it in staggering numbers. Nobody was poisoning anybody. The arrangement of the city was doing it. When the arrangement changed, and cities separated drinking water from sewage, the dying mostly stopped. That single boring change in plumbing has saved more lives than almost any peace treaty ever signed.

That last example is worth holding onto. It is going to come back in Module Four.

Why It Is Hard To See

Structural violence hides for reasons that are worth naming, because each one suggests where to look.

It is slow. Direct violence happens in a second and you can watch it. Structural violence happens over years, and nothing about any particular Tuesday looks like violence.

It has no villain, and our minds are built to find the person responsible. When there is no person, the mind tends to conclude that nothing is happening.

It looks like the weather. Arrangements that have been in place long enough stop looking like arrangements. They start looking like the way things simply are. A crosswalk that was never built is invisible in a way that a crosswalk that was removed would not be.

And the harm is spread thin. Nobody experiences the whole of it. Each person affected gets a share small enough to look like private bad luck, and the shape only appears when somebody counts.

Put those together and you get the central problem. The larger share of preventable human suffering has no author, and the human mind is very poor at seeing anything without an author.

The Part That Is Actually Hopeful

There is an implication here that gets missed, and it is the reason this concept is worth your time rather than just being depressing.

Arrangements were made. Which means they can be unmade.

A person who hurts people is a hard problem. You have to catch them, stop them, and change them, and people are notoriously difficult to change. An arrangement that hurts people is often a much easier problem, because arrangements have no opinions. Nobody has to be persuaded for a crosswalk to work. The crosswalk does not care whether anybody had a change of heart.

This is the single most encouraging fact in the whole field, and Module Four is built on it. A great deal of the violence that human beings have escaped, we escaped by rearranging things rather than by improving anybody.

A Necessary Caution

This idea can be stretched until it breaks.

Once you have a term for harm without an attacker, it is tempting to apply it to every situation you dislike. If everything is violence, then the word stops carrying information, and you have traded a useful tool for a way of sounding serious.

So here is a test with three parts. Before calling something structural violence, ask:

Can you name the actual arrangement? Not a feeling or a general injustice, but a specific thing: a policy, a distance, a rule, a price, a missing piece of infrastructure.

Is the harm real and countable? Someone should be able to measure it, at least roughly.

Could the arrangement realistically be different? If the answer is no, you are describing a tragedy, not a structure. Tragedies are real. They are just not the same thing, and pretending otherwise wastes effort on problems nobody can solve.

If all three answers hold, the term is doing work. If they do not, you are using it as a weapon rather than as a description, and this course would rather you did not.