1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Structural violence is a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs or rights.
[5] Some examples of structural violence as proposed by Galtung include institutionalized adultism, ageism, classism, elitism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, racism, sexism, and speciesism.
Gilligan largely describes these "excess deaths" as "non-natural" and attributes them to the stress, shame, discrimination, and denigration that results from lower status.
He draws on Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (i.e., The Hidden Injuries of Class, 1973), who examine the "contest for dignity" in a context of dramatic inequality.
Moreover, this does not solely exist for those of lower classes, though the effects are much heavier on them, including higher rates of disease and death, unemployment, homelessness, lack of education, powerlessness, and shared fate of miseries.
Structural violence affects the availability of health care insofar as paying attention to broad social forces (racism, gender inequality, classism, etc.)
Since situations of structural violence are viewed primarily as biological consequences, it neglects problems stimulated by people's environment, such as negative social behaviours or the prominence of inequality, therefore ineffectively addressing the issue.
[5] Findings from another study suggest that the increased rate of workplace injury among undocumented Latino immigrants in the United States can also be understood as an example of structural violence.
[16] If biosocial understandings are forsaken when considering communicable diseases such as HIV, for example, prevention methods and treatment practices become inadequate and unsustainable for populations.
[5] Structural violence also exists in the area of mental health, where systems ignore the lived experiences of patients when making decisions about services and funding without consulting with the ill, including those who are illiterate, cannot access computers, do not speak the dominant language, are homeless, are too unwell to fill out long formal surveys, or are in locked psychiatric and forensic wards.
Structural violence is also apparent when consumers in developed countries die from preventable diseases 15–25 years earlier than those without a lived experience of mental health.
[5] Medical professionals still continue to operate with a focus on individual lifestyle factors rather than general socio-economic, cultural, and environmental conditions.
One response is to incorporate medical professionals and to acknowledge that such active structural interventions are necessary to address real public health issues.
[5] Countries such as Haiti and Rwanda, however, have implemented (with positive outcomes) structural interventions, including prohibiting the commodification of the citizen needs (such as health care); ensuring equitable access to effective therapies; and developing social safety nets.
[5] Petra Kelly wrote in her first book, Fighting for Hope (1984): A third of the 2 Billion people in the developing countries are starving or suffering from malnutrition.
In explaining his point of view on how structural violence affects the health of subaltern or marginalized people, medical anthropologist Paul Farmer writes:[17][5] Their sickness is a result of structural violence: neither culture nor pure individual will is at fault; rather, historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces conspire to constrain individual agency.
He analyzed the naturalization of physical and mental suffering, violence continuum, and structural vulnerability experienced by Mexican migrants in the U.S. in their everyday lives.
[18] Holmes used examples like governmental influences of structural violence—such as how American subsidization of corn industries force Mexican farmers out of business, thereby forcing them to make the very dangerous trip across the border, where the U.S. Border Patrol hinder these migrants' chances of finding work in America, and the impact this all has on the migrants’ bodies.