Structural Violence Analysis

Structural violence occurs when social institutions cause harm to people by way of preventing them from meeting their basic human needs through institutionalized inequalities. Farmer outlines that there is a “strong association with poverty and social inequalities to an understanding of how such inequalities are embodied as differential risk for infection and among those already infected, for adverse outcomes including death.” In other words An Anthropology of Structural Violence, sets out to show how structural violence in Haiti, borne out of the racism of the transatlantic slave trade, has been a significant agent in furthering the progression of HIV and tuberculosis in Haiti as well as other postcolonial countries. Farmer uses structural …show more content…
In a comment, Kirmayer expands on this idea and states that “…offered the blandishments of power and privilege, most of us take the low road to maintain our own privilege and comfortable anesthesia. Everyone who participates in an oppressive social order is complicit in it, but the more privileged we are the more we are loath to acknowledge our complicity.” I find great issue in the widespread blame that is put upon society as a large because we cannot be complicit in what we didn’t create. Since we are not the people who committed the historical acts of atrocity against groups which created a system we cannot be held accountable to the continuing existence of the system because it was already put in place and codified by our existence and therefore how are we expected to change the understandings of race which led to the creation of racism without attempting to erase everyone’s minds to re-create understandings of race or remove the existence of race as identification. Even if people attempt to not perpetuate systems of structural violence through social justice actions they still exist and the people who are attacked by this social structure have lived experiences which will continue even if we all blame ourselves and accept complacently. The addition of morality to structural violence seems to create a philosophical argument of whether we are responsible to fix what we did not break despite the long-lasting systemized realities of societies marred by structural violence. This is a vast issue which requires more time and space to be fully understood and argued but to mix morality and structural violence creates issues that can not be simply