How Poverty Constitutes Structural Violence in Global Societies

When we picture violence, we imagine a fist, a weapon, or a war. But some of the deadliest harm in our societies leaves no visible wound. It works silently through laws, markets, and institutions that decide who eats and who starves, who studies and who labours, who survives and who dies young. Poverty is the clearest example of this hidden harm. It is not a natural accident or a personal failing. It is a condition manufactured by the way our economic, social, and political systems are organised. Understanding poverty as a form of violence changes everything about how we judge it and who we hold responsible.

What makes poverty a form of violence?
Direct violence versus structural violence
How exploitative systems produce poverty
Poverty as powerlessness and lost agency
Who pays the heaviest price?
Children and the inheritance of deprivation
The feminisation of poverty
The chain of violations that follows
Can the cycle be broken?
Why the framing changes everything

What makes poverty a form of violence?

The idea that poverty is violence comes from the Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung. In his 1969 paper Violence, Peace, and Peace Research, he argued that violence is not only the direct physical act committed by an identifiable person. There is also structural violence, which is built into the structure of society itself and shows up as unequal power and unequal life chances. No single villain pulls the trigger, yet people are harmed all the same.

Galtung defined this kind of violence as the avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs. His most famous example is direct: if people are starving when this starvation is objectively avoidable, then violence has been committed, even if no one threw a punch. By this logic, Galtung listed poverty, understood as the deprivation of basic human needs, as a primary category of structural violence. The harm is real; it is simply slower, more subtle, and harder to trace back to a culprit.

Direct violence versus structural violence

The difference matters. Direct violence has an actor, a victim, and a clear event. Structural violence has no obvious actor and no single moment. Galtung described it as silent and static, like tranquil waters that hide what lies beneath. A child who dies in a bombing is a victim of direct violence. A child who dies of malnutrition or a preventable infection, in a world that produces more than enough food and medicine, is a victim of structural violence. The death is just as final, but the cause is woven into the system rather than committed by a person.

How exploitative systems produce poverty

Poverty is not the absence of wealth. It is the product of how wealth is created and distributed. Galtung originally framed structural violence to describe any constraint on human potential caused by economic and political structures, where unequal access to resources, political power, education, healthcare, or legal standing all count as violence. When a small group controls land, capital, and decision-making, the rules they create tend to protect their advantage and entrench the disadvantage of everyone else.

This is why poverty and inequality travel together. The gap between rich and poor is not a coincidence of effort or luck. It reflects who owns assets, who sets wages, who writes tax policy, and who can influence the state. The concept of structural violence first developed in the 1960s precisely to explain disparities in health and development between wealthy and impoverished nations, including the suffering imposed by rich countries on poorer ones through trade and colonial legacies. The same logic operates within a single country, where regions, castes, and communities are systematically excluded from opportunity.

Poverty as powerlessness and lost agency

One of the cruelest features of structural poverty is what it does to a person’s ability to act. The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen reframed poverty not as a lack of income but as a deprivation of capabilities, meaning the real freedoms a person has to do and be what they value. In Sen’s framework, functionings are the actual states a person achieves, such as being nourished, healthy, or educated, while capabilities are the genuine freedoms to achieve them.

Seen this way, poverty is the inability to secure a basic level of those capabilities. A person trapped in poverty cannot easily choose a different job, move to a safer place, send their children to school, or recover from illness. Their choices are constrained not because they lack ambition, but because the structure offers them no real options. Income thresholds alone cannot capture this harm, because the damage is the loss of agency itself. Powerlessness becomes self-reinforcing: the poor have little voice in the institutions that shape their lives, and those institutions rarely act in their interest.

Who pays the heaviest price?

Structural violence is never distributed evenly. It concentrates on those who are already least able to resist it, which means children and women bear the worst of it.

Children and the inheritance of deprivation

Poverty harms children before they can make any choices at all. Galtung built his theory on a basic needs framework in which the negation of survival is death, and the negation of well-being is poverty, illness, and misery. For a child, deprivation of nutrition, clean water, and healthcare in the earliest years can cause lifelong damage to the body and the mind. A malnourished child becomes a child who cannot learn well, who becomes an adult with fewer opportunities, who then raises children in the same conditions. This is how structural poverty reproduces itself across generations.

This is also why modern measurement has moved beyond income. The National Multidimensional Poverty Index, developed by NITI Aayog with the UNDP and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, captures overlapping deprivations in health, education, and living standards. Several of its twelve indicators, including nutrition, child mortality, maternal health, and school attendance, point directly at the vulnerability of the young. Recognising poverty as more than a shortage of money is the first step to seeing it as structural harm.

The feminisation of poverty

Women experience poverty differently and often more severely than men. The pattern is so consistent that scholars call it the feminisation of poverty. The link between employment and poverty is especially sharp for women, who in much of South Asia are frequently barred from owning land or other significant assets. Without assets, women lack the security and bargaining power that could lift them out of deprivation, and they remain dependent on others.

This is structural violence in its purest form. Customs, inheritance laws, unpaid care burdens, and unequal labour markets combine to keep women poorer and more powerless, regardless of how hard they work. Because women are also primary caregivers, their deprivation passes directly to their children, deepening the cycle. Any serious effort to reduce poverty therefore has to confront the gendered structures of asset ownership and opportunity, not just raise household income on paper.

The chain of violations that follows

Once we accept that poverty is structural violence, its consequences read like a list of human rights violations. Inadequate nutrition stunts bodies and brains. The absence of safe shelter exposes families to disease and disaster. Lack of clean water and sanitation spreads illness. Poor access to healthcare turns treatable conditions into death sentences. Globally, poverty is correlated with infant mortality, infectious disease, and shortened lifespans, which is exactly why Galtung insisted these outcomes be named as violence rather than misfortune.

Each of these deprivations feeds the others, forming a cycle that is extremely hard to break from within. A family without sanitation faces more illness; illness drains the little money they have; without money they cannot afford schooling; without schooling the next generation cannot escape low-paid work. The structure does not need anyone to actively oppress this family. It simply has to keep functioning as it is.

Can the cycle be broken?

Naming poverty as structural violence is not a counsel of despair. Galtung paired the idea with a vision of positive peace, meaning not just the absence of war but the presence of social justice. If poverty is built into structures, then structures can be rebuilt. This is the reasoning behind large-scale public action, from food security programmes and public healthcare to schooling and asset redistribution.

The measurable gains are real. NITI Aayog has reported that the national multidimensional poverty rate fell sharply over recent years, with improvements recorded across all twelve indicators covering health, education, and living standards. Progress on nutrition, sanitation, schooling, and cooking fuel shows that deliberate intervention can dismantle parts of the structure that produces deprivation. The point of Galtung’s framework is precisely this: because the harm is avoidable, leaving it in place is itself a choice with moral weight.

Why the framing changes everything

To call poverty violence is to refuse the comfortable idea that it is simply the way things are. It places responsibility on the systems we design and the policies we accept or reject. It tells us that allowing avoidable starvation, preventable disease, and denied education is not neutral. It is a form of harm, even when no one intends it and no single hand is to blame.

This is the lasting power of the concept. It connects the quiet suffering of the poor to the language of justice and human rights, and it insists that peace cannot exist while structural deprivation continues. A society that tolerates extreme poverty is not at peace; it is merely quiet, like Galtung’s tranquil waters hiding the harm below.

What do you think? If poverty is a form of violence built into our institutions, who should be held accountable for the harm it causes? And in your own community, which structures would have to change for the cycle of deprivation to finally break?

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Table of Contents

What makes poverty a form of violence? 🔗

Direct violence versus structural violence 🔗

How exploitative systems produce poverty 🔗

Poverty as powerlessness and lost agency 🔗

Who pays the heaviest price? 🔗

Children and the inheritance of deprivation 🔗

The feminisation of poverty 🔗

The chain of violations that follows 🔗

Can the cycle be broken? 🔗

Why the framing changes everything 🔗