Structural violence refers to the social structures that put people in harm's way. Farmer and colleagues describe the impact of social violence upon people living with HIV in the US and Rwanda.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
“Defining Structural Violence
The term “structural violence” is one way of describing social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm's way (see
Box 1) [
16]. 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 (typically, not those responsible for perpetuating such inequalities). With few exceptions, clinicians are not trained to understand such social forces, nor are we trained to alter them. Yet it has long been clear that many medical and public health interventions will fail if we are unable to understand the social determinants of disease [
17,
18].
Box 1. What Is Structural Violence?
Structural violence, a term coined by Johan Galtung and by liberation theologians during the 1960s, describes social structures—economic, political, legal, religious, and cultural—that stop individuals, groups, and societies from reaching their full potential [
57]. In its general usage, the word
violence often conveys a physical image; however, according to Galtung, it is the “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or…the impairment of human life, which lowers the actual degree to which someone is able to meet their needs below that which would otherwise be possible” [
58].
Structural violence is often embedded in longstanding “ubiquitous social structures, normalized by stable institutions and regular experience” [59]. Because they seem so ordinary in our ways of understanding the world, they appear almost invisible. Disparate access to resources, political power, education, health care, and legal standing are just a few examples. The idea of
structural violence is linked very closely to
social injustice and the social machinery of oppression [
16].”
