Violence

• 1. Introduction

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  The economic impact of violence on the world economy in 2024 was estimated at 17.5 trillion dollars. That figure comes from the Institute for Economics and Peace, and it sits beside a quieter number: violence-related injuries kill 1.25 million people every year, as of 2024. Violence is the use of physical force by humans to cause harm to other living beings, including pain, injury, disablement, death, damage and destruction. The World Health Organization stretches that definition further. It calls violence the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community. The phrase or power matters. It means a threat can count, that harm need not leave a visible wound. So how do researchers sort a phenomenon this vast? Why does the public health world argue it should not belong to lawyers and politicians alone? And what does the archaeological record say about whether humans were ever truly peaceful?

• 2. Three Categories

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  The World Health Organization divides violence into three broad categories: self-directed, interpersonal, and collective. Self-directed violence comes in two forms. The first is suicidal behaviour, which includes suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. The second is self-harm, which includes acts such as self-mutilation. Collective violence is defined by the WHO as the instrumental use of violence by people who identify themselves as members of a group, against another group, to achieve political, economic or social objectives. Within that bracket sit several shapes of harm. Political violence covers conflicts led by communities, states, and other groups, and its most extreme form is war. Economic violence covers attacks motivated by economic gain, such as those meant to disrupt economic activity or deny access to essential services. Slow violence is often invisible, gradual, and structural, working through degradation, attrition, and pollution. Structural violence is the kind built into a social institution that harms people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs or rights. Beyond this WHO scheme, violence can also be classified another way entirely: as either instrumental or hostile.

• 3. Behind Closed Doors

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  Interpersonal violence makes up the largest share of non-fatal violence, and much of it happens in private settings the street never sees. Intimate partner violence, also called domestic violence, involves physical, sexual and emotional violence by an intimate partner or ex-partner. Although males can also be victims, it disproportionately affects females, and it commonly occurs against girls within child marriages and early or forced marriages. Among romantically involved but unmarried adolescents, it is sometimes called dating violence. A WHO multi-country study found that between 15 and 71 percent of women reported experiencing physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner at some point in their lives. A recent theory named The Criminal Spin describes a mutual flywheel effect between partners, an escalation in violence whose added value, in this setting, is the mutual spin. Violence against children covers all forms of harm to people under 18, whether from parents, peers, partners, or strangers. Approximately 20 percent of women and 5 to 10 percent of men report being sexually abused as children, while 25 to 50 percent of all children report being physically abused. Elder maltreatment is a single or repeated act, or a lack of appropriate action, within a relationship of expected trust that harms an older person. It is estimated that 4 to 6 percent of elderly people in high-income countries have experienced some form of maltreatment at home. Older people are often afraid to report it, and the problem is predicted to grow as many countries face rapidly ageing populations.

• 4. Counting The Dead

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  In 2013, of the estimated 405,000 deaths due to interpersonal violence globally, assault by firearm caused 180,000, assault by sharp object caused 114,000, and the remaining 110,000 came from other causes. That same year, roughly 842,000 deaths were attributed to suicide and 31,000 to collective violence and legal intervention. The yearly toll of around 1.5 million deaths from violence exceeds deaths from tuberculosis at 1.34 million, road traffic injuries at 1.21 million, and malaria at 830,000, while sitting slightly below the 1.77 million who die from HIV and AIDS. For every death there are many survivors: in 2008, over 16 million cases of non-fatal violence-related injury were severe enough to require medical attention. Suicide rates have risen by 60 percent worldwide over the last 45 years, and suicide attempts run up to 20 times more frequent than completed suicide. Homicide rates have been highest in developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, and lowest in East Asia, the western Pacific, and some countries in northern Africa. Studies show a strong inverse relationship between homicide rates and both economic development and economic equality. War, for all its headlines, carries a lower individual risk than many imagine. The average person in a conflict-affected country had a risk of dying violently of about 2.0 per 100,000 between 2004 and 2007, against an average world homicide rate of 7.6 per 100,000. Yet local figures soar: in Iraq the direct conflict death rate reached 91 per 100,000 in 2006, and in Somalia 74 per 100,000 in 2007.

• 5. Roots And Risks

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  The social ecological model divides the causes of violence into four levels: individual, relational, communal, and social. Individual risk factors include poor behavioral control, high emotional stress, low IQ, and antisocial beliefs, while protective factors include higher IQ and GPA, social skills, and religious beliefs. Relational risk factors include authoritarian childrearing, inconsistent discipline, and low emotional attachment to parents or caregivers. A 2005 analysis of 186 pre-industrial societies found that corporal punishment was more prevalent in societies that also had higher rates of homicide, assault, and war. The American family violence researcher Murray A. Straus believes disciplinary spanking forms the most prevalent and important form of violence in American families. Community risk factors include poverty, low community participation, and diminished economic opportunities. Violence is partly a matter of perception, and psychologists have found people may not call certain acts violent at all. In a state where execution is a legalized punishment, we do not typically perceive the executioner as violent. People may also fail to recognise defensive force as violent, even when it greatly exceeds the original aggression. Social risk factors include social rejection, poor school commitment, and gang involvement. Research into media and violence remains contested: the claim that media violence increases aggression was rejected by the US Supreme Court in the Brown v EMA case, and a 2010 Australian Government review of video game violence concluded the evidence for harmful effects was inconclusive at best.

• 6. A Public Health Problem

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  In 1949, Gordon called for injury prevention to be based on understanding causes, much like prevention efforts for communicable diseases. In 1962, Gomez argued that violence was an issue public health experts needed to address, and that it should not be the primary domain of lawyers, military personnel, or politicians. Public health began addressing violence only 30 years later, and only in the last 15 years at the global level. In 1996, the World Health Assembly adopted Resolution WHA49.25, declaring violence a leading worldwide public health problem and asking the WHO to document its burden and assess prevention programmes. The WHO responded by creating the Department of Violence and Injury Prevention and Disability and publishing the World report on violence and health in 2002. The case for this approach rests partly on reach: the criminal justice system has traditionally focused on violence between male youths in public places, which makes up most homicides, rather than on the private violence that makes up the largest share of non-fatal harm. The WHO has identified seven evidence-supported strategies, among them developing safe, stable and nurturing relationships between children and caregivers, reducing the harmful use of alcohol, reducing access to guns, knives and pesticides, and changing cultural norms that support violence. School-based programmes such as the Safe Dates programme in the United States and the Youth Relationship Project in Canada have been found effective for reducing dating violence. Trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy is among the interventions showing emerging evidence for reducing post-traumatic stress disorder linked to violence.

• 7. Were We Ever Peaceful

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  A comparison across mammal species found that humans have a Paleolithic adult homicide rate of about 2 percent, lower than some animals but still high. That study counted infanticide among animals such as meerkats but not among humans, where estimates of children killed in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras range from 15 to 50 percent. Other evidence suggests organized, large-scale human violence was absent for most of the human timeline, first documented only in the Holocene, an epoch that began about 11,700 years ago. Social anthropologist Douglas P. Fry writes that scholars split into two schools: one holds that warfare reaches back to the first modern humans and their primate ancestors, while the other sees war as a latecomer arising only with agriculture in the past 10,000 years. Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs and Steel and The Third Chimpanzee, argues that large-scale warfare followed advances in technology and the rise of city-states. Lawrence H. Keeley, in War Before Civilization, writes that 87 percent of tribal societies were at war more than once per year and 65 percent fought continuously, with close-quarter clashes producing casualty rates up to 60 percent against the 1 percent typical of modern warfare. Fry counters that such sources lean on present-day ethnography of peoples already impacted by modern colonial states for at least 5000 years, rather than the archaeological record spanning two million years. The relatively peaceful period since World War II is known as the Long Peace.

• 8. What Counts As Violence

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  Max Weber stated that the state claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a specific territory. Civil societies authorize some amount of violence, exercised through the police power, to maintain the status quo and enforce laws. Hannah Arendt drew a sharper line, writing that violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate, and that no one questions the use of violence in self-defence, because the danger is clear and present. Arendt treated violence and power not as a matter of degree but as opposites, where most political theorists had regarded violence as an extreme manifestation of power. Slavoj Zizek, in his book Violence, pushed the question inward, stating that something violent is the very symbolization of a thing. Johanna Oskala cautions against conflating the ontological violence of language with physical violence, even while granting that the first can enable the second. In feminist philosophy, epistemic violence is the act of causing harm through an inability to understand the conversation of others due to ignorance, a harm some philosophers think falls on marginalized groups. Brad Evans calls violence a violation in the very conditions constituting what it means to be human, always an attack upon a person's dignity, their sense of selfhood, and their future. Robert L. Holmes argues that however elusive its definition, violence entails a moral wrong, since it is presumptively wrong to do violence to innocent persons, and he points toward a philosophy of nonviolence that places the well being of individual persons at its moral center.