STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

Structural Violence

Structural Violence

Introdution

In its broadest meaning, the term violence refers to a range of human activities intended to inflict harm or injury (Levine and Rosich 1996). Some acts of violence are spontaneous and informal, occurring without premeditation or structure; others are methodically planned in advance. Some violence is interpersonal, enveloping one or a few individuals; other violent acts are vastly broader and more formal, encompassing numerous victims, entire groups, or even whole societies. Violence can be directed inward as in self-destructive behavior, including suicide; it can also be aimed at other human beings. Finally, violence is frequently aimed at causing physical injury; but it might also be intended to create embarrassment or loss of face.

Based on the informality/formality of its source as well as the amount of destruction it generates, violence can be said to range from the micro level (e.g., “Losing his temper, a man takes a knife from the kitchen drawer and stabs to death his wife”), through the midlevel (“Having planned for 13 months, two students open fire at their high school, shooting to death 12 schoolmates and a teacher”), to the macro level of behavior (“More than 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda are massacred”).

The influence of roles in the construction of violence has been well-represented in the sociological literature. According to Campbell (1993), gender helps to determine whether a particular act of violence will be negatively or positively sanctioned. Traditionally, boys have been rewarded but girls punished for engaging in the same sorts of aggressive behavior.

Just as it is in the wider society, violence is an important area of interest in the field of sociology. In such courses as social problems, deviance, family violence, and criminology, violence is a major topic. Moreover, much sociological research has addressed various aspects and forms of violence, including war/genocide/terrorism, family/gender, and youth/gang violence. Such interest appears to have gained momentum in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

ORIGINS OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE

The sociological approach to violence owes much of its original form and substance to the work of nineteenth-century positivists who employed scientific observation and measurement to explain violent crime. Adolphe Quetelet (1836, 1969), a Belgian mathematician in the early nineteenth century, applied statistical techniques to the investigation of crime as a social rather than an individual phenomenon. In particular, Quetelet studied the impact of poverty, education, sex, age, and season of the year on French crime rates. Many of his findings continue, to this day, to find confirmation in social research. For example, rates of violent crime tend to rise during the summer months and are relatively high among impoverished and uneducated populations. Rates of violence over time and cross-nationally as a result of structural variables—for example, availability of firearms, expanded drug markets, racial discrimination, and exposure to violence—continue, to the present day, to occupy the attention of research sociologists (see, e.g., Beeghley 2003).

Later in the nineteenth century, French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1988, 1996) suggested that crime was both normal and inevitable and ...