Direct, Structural and Cultural Violence
Chapter Ten
Syllabus topic 1.1, "Notions of "force", "coercion", "violence""
Pages 38 to 41 of 663
In one line
Violence comes in three forms: the blow, the arrangement that makes the blow unnecessary, and the belief that makes both look right.
In the wording a student can write in an exam: direct violence is harm done by an identifiable actor to an identifiable victim by an identifiable act; structural violence is harm built into the ordinary working of a social arrangement, with no actor who intends it; and cultural violence is the body of belief, custom, language and sacred authority that makes the first two appear legitimate. The three together are usually drawn as a triangle, because each supports the other two.
Why the analytic exists
A student asked to explain caste violence and given only the word "violence" will describe incidents. Incidents are the visible part, they are the part the newspapers report, and they are a small fraction of the harm.
The three-part analytic exists because it lets you say the rest. It came out of peace research, where the question was why ending a war often changes so little, and the answer was that the war was the visible layer of an arrangement that survived it. Indian writers on caste and on agrarian relations adopted the frame for the same reason: the massacres end and the arrangement does not.
MU's syllabus depends on this analytic even though it never names it. Three of the four modules are about categories of person rather than categories of act, which only makes sense if violence is understood structurally.
Direct violence
An actor, a victim, an act, a time and a place. The lynching, the arson, the firing, the rape, the killing.
Its features. It is visible. It is reported. It is countable. It produces an offence known to the criminal law. And it is episodic, which is why it is easy to treat as an aberration.
Its limits as a category. It answers the question "what happened on Tuesday" and cannot answer "why does this happen here every few years". A person who studies only direct violence will conclude that collective violence is caused by the people who do it, which explains nothing.
Structural violence
Harm produced by the ordinary operation of an arrangement. Nobody has to do anything for it to happen. Nobody intends it. It happens every year.
Its features. It is invisible, because nothing occurs. It is slow. It is enormously larger in its effects than direct violence. It generates no offence, because criminal law needs an actor and there is none. And it is stable, because nothing has to be organised for it to continue.
How to recognise it. Ask what would have to change for the harm to stop. If the answer is "somebody would have to stop doing something", it is direct. If the answer is "the arrangement would have to be different", it is structural.
Direct, Structural and Cultural Violence
Indian examples, all of which recur later in this book. A wage below subsistence. A tenancy terminable at will. A debt that outlives the debtor. A residential pattern that puts one settlement downstream of another's waste. A school whose midday meal is cooked by a person the children's families will not accept food from. None of these requires an offender.
Cultural violence
The part students find hardest, because it does not look like violence at all.
Cultural violence is the stock of beliefs, stories, symbols, customs, sacred texts and everyday language that makes direct and structural violence look acceptable, natural, deserved, or simply not worth noticing.
Its work is legitimation. It does not itself hurt anybody. It makes hurting somebody feel right to the person doing it, and it makes being hurt feel deserved to the person it is done to, which is the more damaging half.
Its features. It changes very slowly. It is carried in ordinary things rather than in institutions: a proverb, a term of address, a story told to children, a rule about who may enter a kitchen. And it is what makes structural violence survive a change of government, because governments do not control it.
How the three hold each other up
Take the triangle in both directions.
Downwards. Cultural violence licenses the structure. The structure produces routine deprivation. When someone challenges the structure, direct violence is used to restore it, and the culture supplies the justification for the direct violence too.
Upwards. Every episode of direct violence that goes unpunished confirms the structure. Every year the structure operates without challenge, the culture is confirmed.
This is why the paper's last chapters keep asking what the criminal law can do. Criminal law can reach the corner of the triangle labelled direct. It has no instrument for the other two, and the other two are what produce the first.
Worked example
A village has two settlements. The following are true at the same time.
- The families in the smaller settlement are landless and work for the larger. The wage is fixed by custom at less than the statutory minimum, and everyone knows it. Structural.
- Their houses are downstream of the village drain. Waterborne illness is normal there and rare in the other settlement. Structural.
- The children sit at the back of the classroom. No teacher instructed this. Structural and cultural at once.
- It is said in the village that this is the work that community has always done, and the older men in that community say it too. Cultural.
- A young man from the smaller settlement rides a horse to his own wedding. That night his house is burnt. Direct.
Direct, Structural and Cultural Violence
Now ask what the criminal justice system will do. It will, if everything goes well, prosecute the arson. It will not touch the wage, the drain, the classroom or the belief. And the arson happened because of the four things it will not touch.
Distinctions
| Direct | Structural | Cultural | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Actor | Identifiable | None | None |
| Intention | Present | Not required | Not required |
| Visibility | High | Low | Very low, appears as normality |
| Speed | An event | Continuous | Generational |
| Scale of harm | Small by comparison | Large | Enables both |
| Reached by criminal law? | Yes | No | No |
| What would stop it | Somebody stopping | The arrangement changing | Belief changing |
What it does NOT mean
It does not mean direct violence is unimportant. It is the part that kills people on a given night, and the part this paper's statutes are about. The analytic ranks nothing; it distinguishes.
It does not mean structural violence has no perpetrator in a moral sense. It means it has no perpetrator in the sense criminal law requires. Those two are different claims, and conflating them is how the analytic gets misused.
And cultural violence is not the same as culture. It is the part of a culture that legitimates harm. Saying that a proverb does cultural violence is not saying that the tradition it belongs to is worthless, and an answer that slides into that will read as polemic rather than analysis.
Quick revision
- Direct: actor, victim, act. Visible, episodic, reached by criminal law.
- Structural: harm from the ordinary working of an arrangement. No actor, no intention, invisible, continuous, much larger, and outside criminal law.
- Cultural: belief, custom, story and sacred authority that legitimate the other two.
- Drawn as a triangle, each corner supporting the others.
- Test for structural: ask what would have to change for the harm to stop.
- Criminal law reaches one corner of three, and that corner is produced by the other two.
Test yourself
1. Define the three forms in one sentence each. Direct violence is harm done by an identifiable actor by an identifiable act. Structural violence is harm produced by the ordinary working of a social arrangement, with nobody intending it. Cultural violence is the body of belief and custom that makes the other two appear legitimate.
2. Give the test that distinguishes direct from structural violence. Ask what would have to change for the harm to stop. If a person would have to stop doing something, it is direct. If the arrangement itself would have to be different, it is structural.
3. Why can the criminal law not reach structural violence? Because criminal law requires an actor, an act and a mental state, and structural violence has none of the three. The harm is produced by an arrangement operating normally.
Direct, Structural and Cultural Violence
4. What work does cultural violence do that the other two cannot do for themselves? Legitimation. It makes the structure look natural and the direct violence look deserved, including to the people it is done to, and that is what makes the whole configuration stable across generations.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.