Structural Violence Must Fall

Many have condemned the burning of "art" at UCT. Students have been roundly condemned, defended or some have even been equivocal on the matter in an attempt to sound reasonable and rational. Yet in the midst of the elitist concern for art we often forget that in the midst of our daily existence there exists, even thrives, a form of violence that is often unseen, unheard and often ignored. It is the violence visited on oppressed and marginalised people everyday, often by the very same elitist intellectuals who abrogate to themselves the right to decide what and who is worthy of support and understanding.

Recently in a report on the systemic oppression of mining affected communities Dr. Sarah Malotane outlined this phenomenon for us.

The structural and symbolic violence visited on rural and marginalised communities should not be thought of only as a phenomenon that exists in hidden spaces but must be called out as the spaces that exist in the very foundations of our educational institutions as well, and as such the violence of these symbolic and structural forms of oppression must be acknowledged, called out and eradicated wherever they are found.

To suggest that they should be respected is surely to say that we should bow before our torturers and oppressors and to hold them up to the status of heroes even though they are the vilest expression of our oppression.

She sets out the case thus.

"What is symbolic violence?
According to Johan Galtung, veteran peace researcher, symbolic violence is an aspect of cultural violence. According to him, cultural violence legitimises or delegitimizes and justifies structural and direct violence (Galtung 1996:2) . Bourdieu focuses on the gender aspect of symbolic violence which, he argues, results in unequal power relations that are ‘naturalised’. Meaning, that the ‘powerless’ are not always aware that this need not be the ‘order of things’, but are ‘trapped’ in a one way relationship that renders them as ‘inferior’ and therefore not worthy of being taken into account.
What is structural violence?
Paul Farmer et al (2006, 449) articulates the notion of structural violence best, from a grounded perspective, based on his work in Haiti. He suggests that:
“Structural violence is one way of describing social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way… The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people … historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces conspire to constrain individual agency. Structural violence is visited upon all those whose social status denies them access to the fruits of scientific and social progress.”

According to Kathleen Ho (2007:1) , structural violence is evidenced by ‘structural inequalities that systematically deny some people their basic human needs’. According to her, this constitutes ‘a structural violation of human rights in that ‘structural violence yields a complex picture of inequality as it considers economic, political, and social factors.

In making this argument, Ho states that:
“Structural violence theorists define violence as the avoidable disparity between the potential ability to fulfil basic needs and their actual fulfilment. The theory further locates the unequal share of power to decide over the distribution of resources as the pivotal causal factor of these avoidable structural inequalities.

Recognizing that structural causes are responsible for constrained agency is pivotal in making the transition from structural violence to structural violations of human rights. It is the effect of structures on individual agency that results in this gap between potential and actual fulfilment of rights”.

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