Understanding Violence: From Individual Acts to Social Structures

Violence is one of the most discussed yet least precisely defined concepts in social and political discourse. Most people picture violence as something immediate – a punch, a weapon, a crime. But this instinct only captures a small fraction of what violence actually is and how it operates in the world. When scholars began mapping its full terrain, they found something far more expansive: a spectrum that runs from a single act of physical harm to entire systems built to harm people quietly, over generations. Understanding violence in this broader sense is not just an academic exercise – it is foundational to understanding why gender-based harm persists, who it targets, and why it so often goes unchallenged.

The many faces of violence 🔗

The most widely used starting point in academic and policy circles is the World Health Organization’s definition, which describes violence as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.” Two words in that definition matter enormously: power and threatened. By including “power” and “threatened” violence, the definition significantly expands our understanding – violence doesn’t always leave visible bruises or require physical contact.

This broadened lens opens up a classification of violence that goes well beyond the visible. In the study of gender-based harm, scholars typically distinguish three interconnected forms.

Direct violence 🔗

Direct violence is what most people immediately recognize as violence. It includes any act causing physical harm through unlawful physical force, such as assault or deprivation of liberty, as well as sexual violence – any sexual act performed on an individual without their consent – and psychological violence, such as coercion, verbal insult, or harassment. These are the forms that courts prosecute, hospitals treat, and news reports describe. They are, however, often the end product of deeper forces.

Structural violence 🔗

Structural violence is a concept introduced by Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung in 1969. The term was coined in his article “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” where Galtung described structural violence as an “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs,” embedded in social, political, and economic arrangements rather than in any single individual’s act. His examples include institutionalized racism, sexism, and classism. As Galtung himself put it: “When one husband beats his wife, there is a clear case of personal violence, but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance, there is structural violence.”

Structural violence includes “a host of offences against human dignity: extreme and relative poverty, social inequalities ranging from racism to gender inequality, and the more perverse forms of violence that are uncontestably human rights abuses.” It is marked by unequal access to the determinants of health – such as housing, quality healthcare, employment, and education – which creates conditions of harm for the most vulnerable. Unlike direct violence, no one individual is pulling a trigger. The system itself is the mechanism of harm.

Cultural violence 🔗

Cultural violence, also theorized by Galtung, operates at a different level entirely. It is defined as any aspect of a culture – including religion, ideology, language, art, and science – that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural form. Cultural violence does not kill or maim directly; instead, it is used to make direct and structural violence look or feel “right,” or at least acceptable. Galtung explains that one mechanism of cultural violence is to change the “moral color” of an act from wrong to right, or at least to acceptable. In practice, this is what happens when a community calls an honor killing a matter of family dignity, or when domestic abuse is framed as a private matter between spouses.

How violence is justified 🔗

Understanding that violence exists is one thing. Understanding how societies come to accept it is another – and arguably more important – question. For that, we turn to political and feminist theory.

Hobbes and the state-sanctioned justification of force 🔗

The 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes offered one of the most influential frameworks for understanding why violence is considered necessary. For Hobbes, human existence without government is characterized by the “war of every man against every man” – a constant, violent condition of competition where each individual has a natural right to everything, regardless of the interests of others. Life in this state of nature is, as he famously states, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

To escape this state, Hobbes argued that individuals would choose to form a society – a social contract – surrendering certain freedoms to a sovereign authority in exchange for peace and security. In his work Leviathan, this authority has the power to enforce laws and maintain order, making the state the legitimate wielder of force. This logic is still with us today. Governments invoke it to justify policing, military force, and punitive systems. The Hobbesian argument essentially makes state violence not just acceptable but necessary.

But this framework comes with a serious problem. The social contract is built on assumptions about the nature of humanity – and in particular the nature of men. A social contract that primarily seeks to curtail violence raises important questions about what “natural rights” are, who the state is actually making this implied contract with, and what caveats are placed within it. When the state itself becomes violent toward its citizens – as it has historically done toward women, minorities, and marginalized communities – the Hobbesian logic provides no remedy. It can even provide cover.

Adrienne Rich and the violence of compulsion 🔗

Where Hobbes addressed state-level violence, feminist scholar and poet Adrienne Rich directed our attention inward – to the violence embedded in social norms and expectations. In her landmark 1980 essay, Rich introduced the concept of compulsory heterosexuality to describe how heterosexuality is not simply a natural orientation but an institution enforced through social, cultural, and structural pressures.

Rich argued that violence against women is not random or accidental. It is systematically deployed to maintain male dominance. The enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality – through stigma, exclusion, legal discrimination, and cultural erasure – constitutes a form of violence even when no physical force is involved. Heterosexual culture continuously presents itself as merely natural, the undisputed and unmarked norm. In reality, this normativity is a mechanism of control: women are socialized from birth into particular gender roles in the heterosexual equation, often believing this is the only acceptable way to exist.

Rich’s contribution reframes the conversation significantly. Violence does not only happen when someone is struck. It also happens when entire categories of people are structurally denied recognition, autonomy, and safety. The psychological and social harm of being systematically marginalized meets the threshold of violence under the WHO’s own definition – particularly through the inclusion of “psychological harm” and “deprivation.”

Power structures and the legitimation of harm 🔗

Both Hobbes and Rich point, from different directions, to the same underlying truth: violence is deeply connected to power. Those who hold power in any given society – whether states, institutions, or dominant cultural groups – have historically been the ones to define what counts as violence and what counts as order. Gender-based violence, like any type of violence, is fundamentally an issue involving relations of power. It is based on a feeling of superiority and an intention to assert that superiority in the family, at school, at work, in the community, or in society as a whole.

This is why violence is so frequently rationalized through authority, self-defense claims, or appeals to the “greater good.” When framed as order, discipline, or tradition, harmful acts lose their status as violence in the public eye – even as they continue to cause injury.

Violence in cultural contexts 🔗

Culture is not a neutral backdrop for violence. It actively shapes which acts are recognized as violent, which are normalized, and which are protected from scrutiny. This is what makes cultural violence so consequential: it does the ideological work of making harm invisible.

When harm is called tradition 🔗

Gender-based violence remains shrouded in a culture of silence, supported by cultural beliefs and values that sustain, justify, or dismiss it as an ordinary component of male-female relationships. Several harmful practices illustrate this dynamic clearly.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a practice recognized internationally as a human rights violation. FGM is traditionally believed to preserve virginity until marriage, and nonconformity to the practice may lead to social exclusion, stigma, and the inability to find a husband. Despite its clear physical harm, it persists because the social incentives for conformity remain powerful. At least 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone a form of FGM, and an additional 2 million girls could undergo FGM by 2030 as a result of disruptions caused by COVID-19.

Honor-based violence is another example of how cultural frameworks can transform murder into a matter of community defense. Honor killings involve murders, often committed by close relatives in the name of “family honor,” to sanction perceived transgressions such as refusing an arranged marriage, attempting to marry outside one’s social group, or even having been a victim of rape. As Hannana Siddiqui of Southall Black Sisters has noted, the term “honor” is a profound misnomer – these crimes are dishonourable in every sense; the label of honor is merely the cultural justification their perpetrators invoke.

Domestic violence normalization represents perhaps the most widespread example. In countries such as Guinea, Mali, and Timor-Leste, more than three in four people think that wife-beating is justified for reasons as minor as burning food or going out without telling a husband. Women who agree with such justifications for wife-beating are 45% more likely to experience violence themselves. This data makes a critical point: where cultural norms accept violence, laws struggle to protect people from it. The internalization of norms by potential victims is itself a product of structural and cultural violence.

Child marriage and structural harm 🔗

Child marriage is widely seen as a way to secure care for daughters, who are often viewed as an economic burden. In this way, the practice both arises from and perpetuates gender inequality. Each year, 12 million girls marry before the age of 18 – almost one every two seconds. If the current trajectory continues, more than 150 million girls will become child brides by 2030. Child marriage is not simply a tradition; it is a structural mechanism through which girls are denied education, autonomy, bodily integrity, and economic participation. Under Galtung’s framework, it is structural and cultural violence operating in tandem.

Why cultural context does not justify cultural harm 🔗

Recognizing that violence is culturally embedded does not mean all interpretations of harm are equally valid. An intersectional approach is essential to address the structural discrimination and exclusion that perpetuates violence. Those facing multiple forms of discrimination – based on ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, or gender identity – are more vulnerable to violence and face greater barriers to justice.

The challenge, then, is holding two things at once: understanding that cultural context shapes how violence is perceived and perpetuated, while maintaining that universal human rights standards apply regardless of tradition. A human rights approach to violence that transcends cultural context may provide a way forward, as it highlights patterns of domestic violence across all cultures and gives gendered violence the status of a global risk through creating a collective awareness of the issues. Culture explains violence; it does not excuse it.

Why conceptualizing violence matters 🔗

The way we define violence determines what we choose to address. If we limit the definition to direct physical force, we leave structural inequalities, cultural norms, and psychological harm untouched – and with them, the vast majority of harm that women and marginalized groups actually experience. The use of the term “gender-based violence” shifted the focus from women as victims of isolated incidents to gender and the unequal power relationships between women and men that are created and maintained through gender stereotypes. That conceptual shift was not just semantic – it was the foundation for entirely different kinds of policy, advocacy, and prevention.

Structural violence is a significant public health problem that defies simple analysis. It does not announce itself. It does not leave a visible wound. But it shapes life expectancy, mental health, safety, and opportunity for millions of people around the world. Conceptualizing violence broadly is not about expanding blame – it is about expanding accountability. It forces us to look not just at perpetrators, but at the systems, ideologies, and cultural narratives that make violence possible, repeatable, and defensible.

Violence against women is normalized in its ordinariness, despite the magnitude of the crimes and their effects on the lives of women and girls. That normalization is itself the product of the same structural and cultural violence Galtung described. Breaking that normalization begins with seeing it for what it is.

What do you think? When a society calls a harmful practice a “tradition” or frames it as necessary for “order,” at what point does cultural context stop being an explanation and start being a justification? And if violence can be embedded in structures and norms rather than in individual acts, what does that mean for how we hold institutions – not just individuals – accountable?

References

1. https://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/world_report/en/
2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022343390027003005
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/
4. https://www.womenworldwide.oregonstate.edu