The Lived Experience of Violation: How Abused Children Unhealthy Adults (Patterns in Applied Phenomenology Book 1) by Kirkengen Anna Luise

Author:Kirkengen, Anna Luise
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zeta Books
Published: 2010-05-09T23:00:00+00:00

Part III

Structural Phenomena

Chapter 5

Destructive Authority

Structural Violence

In this chapter, I shall first explore the impact of structural violence – in other words, of structures that violate human integrity and thereby human thriving and health – by means of examples of violent structures as these are embedded in social settings. Consequently, the interface between structural violation impact and medicine must be discussed. I shall argue that structural violation is embodied as sickness and death. Furthermore, I shall emphasize that when violation is embodied, the human right of undisturbed embodiment is violated. Finally I shall argue that contemporary biomedicine may become instrumental to the maintenance of violent structures due to its theoretical basis. Medical theory of the human body as mindless defines experience as an unreliable source of knowledge production. Since context is avoided, medicine may fail to contribute to a proper and adequate analysis of what appears as a surplus of sickness and premature death in individuals or groups. Analytic omission in medicine may contribute to the maintenance of social asymmetries and to abuse of power by methodically blurring the violent structures that cause suffering and death. This would not only imply a failure to accomplish a societal mandate. It would represent, in itself, an abuse of power.

Definition

I lean to Harvard physician and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer, who, with reference to Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung and Latin American liberation theology during the 1960, defines structural violence as “social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way. 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 to those responsible for perpetuating such inequalities).”[1] Structural violence is often embedded in longstanding social structures that are “normalized” by institutions, and as such become part of what is deemed “regular” and “ordinary.” Consequently, they are almost invisible. According to Farmer (p. 1686), “the idea of structural violence is linked very closely to social injustice and the social machinery of oppression.” How “normalized” social injustice and “invisible” social suppression affect peoples’ health, and how medicine and medical professionals respond to the normalized and invisible, shall be explored in the following.

Racism

Decades of continuous medical research, great progress in neonatal medicine, and high medical intervention to prevent premature termination of pregnancies in the United States and in Canada have so far not shown satisfying results. Preterm birth has been shown to be closely related to social class, and is thus termed a “social disease.” The analysis of risk factors converges to a highly specific, identifiable picture of a woman prone to deliver preterm: she is very young, she is socially deprived because of being unskilled or unemployed, and she is Black. But even if she is older, highly educated, and employed, but still Black, her risk surpasses that of non-colored women of her age and in comparable professional positions.[2] This fact cannot be attributed to a genetically determined proneness to preterm delivery among African-American women, but rather to racism.

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