Week 2 Journal: Seeing Structural Violence

Farmer describes structural violence as the political and economic decisions imposed by one group upon another which construct and exacerbate systemic suffering, and drive the processes and forces which conspire to constrain individual agency (Farmer, 1996). It is a historical process which is based on not just decisions framed by a hierarchy of suffering, but also motivates to determine value judgments as to who lives or dies. We see this in the film Bending The Arc (Davidson & Kos, 2017) where congressional hearings and academic conferences which seek to make decisions about economic support for those in need, often resort to the egregious dismissive, assumptive, and racist blame of patients. Those in developing countries are seen as less worthy of receiving economic aid, because they won’t be able to implement it effectively.

My personal view of structural violence is that those with means have the moral obligation to try to help those less fortunate, especially when we are nearer to the decision-making than the suffering. But it is also our responsibility to understand that however quantitative we might understand the scale of health problems to be, they are inherently reflective of qualitative suffering. And that it is human decisions which show up downstream as human agony (Farmer, 1996). These decisions put millions at risk even prior to falling ill, because they build the structures inside of which the suffering is able to germinate. But the acknowledgement that we are nearer the source of the problem than the locus of the suffering provides us with a spark of moral optimism by which we can begin to affect change.

References:
Davidson & Kos. (2017). Bending The Arc. [Video File]. Retrieved from: https://video-alexanderstreet-com.proxy.library.upenn.edu/watch/bending-the-arc.
Farmer, P. (1996). On Suffering and Structural Violence. Daedalus , Winter, 1996, Vol. 125, No. 1. [Digital File]. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20027362.pdf.

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