Distinguishing Direct and Structural Violence in Society

When we hear the word “violence,” we usually picture something dramatic and visible: a riot, a bombing, a brutal assault. But what about a child who dies because the nearest health centre has no doctor? Or a family that stays poor for generations because the system was never built for them? These quieter forms of harm are just as real, yet they rarely get called “violence.” The Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung argued that to understand human security fully, we must look beyond the visible blow and examine the invisible structures that wound people every single day. Distinguishing between these two faces of violence is the first step toward building a more peaceful society.

What we mean by violence 🔗

For a long time, peace studies focused almost entirely on warfare and physical harm. Galtung changed this in his 1969 article “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” where he offered a far broader definition. For him, violence is present whenever human beings are influenced so that their actual physical and mental realisations fall below their potential realisations. In simple terms, if something avoidable stops a person from becoming what they could have become, that gap itself is a form of violence.

This definition is powerful because it shifts our attention. A person who dies of a curable disease in a region with no medicine has suffered violence, even though no one fired a gun. Galtung defined violence as the avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs. With this single idea, he opened the door to studying two very different kinds of harm: direct violence and structural violence.

Direct violence: the violence we recognise 🔗

Direct violence is what most people think of when they use the word. It involves a clear act, a clear victim, and a clear perpetrator. War, torture, assault, murder, and physical and emotional abuse all fall into this category. The harm is intentional, visible, and traceable to an identifiable actor.

Galtung described this as the “classical” form of violence: physical, impermanent, and committed by someone. According to scholars at Harvard’s programme on religion and public life, direct violence represents behaviours that threaten life itself or reduce a person’s capacity to meet basic needs, including killing, maiming, bullying, and sexual assault. The defining feature is the presence of an actor: someone consciously commits the harm.

Because direct violence is so visible, societies build laws, police forces, and courts to respond to it. We have words for it, punishments for it, and headlines about it. This visibility is exactly why direct violence is widely accepted as “real” violence. It is dramatic, it is sudden, and it demands a response.

The link to deeper inequalities 🔗

Direct violence rarely appears out of nowhere. A riot, a lynching, or a caste atrocity is often the eruption of tensions that have been building inside unjust social arrangements for years. Galtung argued that direct violence is frequently the visible expression of deeper, hidden inequalities. The 1996 Bathani Tola massacre in Bihar, where landlords attacked Dalit women and children, was a brutal act of direct violence, but it grew out of a long-standing structure of feudal control and caste hierarchy, as documented in a Human Rights Watch report on caste violence. The visible blow had invisible roots.

Structural violence: the violence built into the system 🔗

Structural violence is harder to see precisely because it has no single actor pulling the trigger. It is woven into the social, political, and economic structures of a society. Instead of a sudden event, it is a permanent condition. People are harmed not by an individual but by the way the system itself is arranged.

Galtung described structural violence as harm that emerges with no identifiable actor committing it. When resources, power, and opportunities are distributed so unequally that some groups cannot meet their basic needs, structural violence is at work. Poverty, hunger, lack of access to healthcare, illiteracy, and systematic exclusion are all examples. No one signs an order to keep these conditions alive, yet they persist and they kill.

Why structural violence feels normal 🔗

The most troubling feature of structural violence is that it becomes accepted as the natural order of things. Because it is constant and slow, people stop noticing it. When poverty, caste discrimination, or gender inequality are seen as “just the way things are,” society treats them as unfortunate but unavoidable rather than as forms of violence. This normalisation is what allows structural violence to continue unchallenged. There are no headlines for a malnourished child who simply never reaches her potential, even though the harm is permanent and the cause is preventable.

How structural violence operates: Galtung’s mechanisms 🔗

Galtung went further than simply naming structural violence. In his later work, particularly Peace by Peaceful Means, he identified the specific mechanisms through which it functions. He saw exploitation as the centre of the structure, with four reinforcing processes that keep the exploited from fighting back. Indian university teaching material on peace and conflict, including resources from IGNOU’s unit on structural violence, builds directly on these ideas.

Exploitation 🔗

Exploitation sits at the heart of structural violence. It describes a vertical arrangement in which those at the top benefit while those at the bottom are deprived. The “topdogs” gain disproportionately, while the “underdogs” may suffer so badly that they become permanently disadvantaged or even die from the deprivation. Bonded labour, exploitative wage systems, and the concentration of land in a few hands are all expressions of this core mechanism.

Penetration 🔗

Penetration means implanting the worldview of those in power inside the minds of those who are oppressed. The underdog begins to see the world through the topdog’s eyes and accepts the existing order as legitimate. When a person from a marginalised group internalises the idea that they deserve their lower position, penetration has done its work. This mechanism prevents the formation of a critical consciousness about injustice.

Segmentation 🔗

Segmentation gives the oppressed only a partial, fragmented view of reality. People are kept from understanding the whole picture of how the system works, so they cannot see the true nature of the relationship between the strong and the weak. A worker who only knows their narrow task, and never sees how the larger economy distributes its gains, is segmented from the full truth. Together with penetration, segmentation blocks the development of awareness.

Marginalisation 🔗

Marginalisation pushes certain groups to the outer edges of society, away from the centre where decisions are made and resources are shared. The marginalised are physically and socially kept on the outside. Migrant workers in Indian cities, for example, are often denied access to welfare and social protection because they cannot prove their identity, a pattern of exclusion linked to caste, gender, and religion that one study of labour migration during the pandemic describes as structural violence against the poorest.

Fragmentation 🔗

Fragmentation keeps the oppressed separated from one another so they cannot unite. If those who suffer the same injustice never come together, they cannot organise to demand change. Galtung paired marginalisation and fragmentation as the processes that “prevent mobilisation,” while penetration and segmentation “prevent consciousness-forming.” Together, these four mechanisms ensure that exploitation continues without serious challenge from below.

The key differences at a glance 🔗

The contrast between the two forms helps clarify why both matter for human security.

Actor: Direct violence has an identifiable perpetrator who commits the act. Structural violence has no single actor; the harm comes from the system itself.

Visibility: Direct violence is visible and dramatic. Structural violence is invisible and embedded in everyday arrangements.

Time: Direct violence is an event, often sudden and short-lived. Structural violence is a permanent, ongoing condition.

Recognition: Direct violence is widely accepted as “real” violence. Structural violence is frequently mistaken for a normal part of life.

Speed of harm: Direct violence kills quickly. Structural violence kills slowly, through preventable disease, malnutrition, and lack of opportunity.

Why this distinction matters for human security 🔗

Human security is about protecting people from threats to their lives, dignity, and wellbeing. If we only count direct violence, we miss the larger, slower killer. Far more people die each year from hunger, preventable illness, and the consequences of poverty than from war and crime combined. In India, the persistence of caste discrimination, deep economic inequality, and gendered practices such as the historical neglect behind sex-selective practices all illustrate how structural arrangements can quietly devastate millions of lives.

Galtung also introduced a third idea, cultural violence, to explain why structural violence is tolerated. Cultural violence refers to those aspects of a society’s culture, such as religion, ideology, and language, that make direct and structural violence look acceptable or even right. As Galtung explained in his work published by the Galtung Institut, cultural violence changes the moral colour of an act so that exploitation appears normal rather than wrong. This is why challenging structural violence requires not only changing systems but also changing the beliefs that justify them.

Recognising structural violence does not diminish the seriousness of direct violence. Instead, it expands our understanding so that peace means more than the absence of war. Galtung called this fuller goal “positive peace”: not just the end of fighting, but the dismantling of the unjust structures that produce suffering. Addressing both forms together is the only way to build genuine and lasting human security.

What do you think? Can a society that ends all war and physical violence still be called peaceful if millions remain trapped in poverty and exclusion? And in your own surroundings, which everyday inequalities have you come to accept as “normal” that might actually be forms of structural violence?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence
2. https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/what-we-do/our-approach/peace-violence
3. https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/India994-04.htm
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/structural-violence
5. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/63422/2/Unit-5.pdf
6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09731741221077496
7. https://journal-iasssf.com/index.php/ICESE/article/view/188
8. https://www.galtung-institut.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Cultural-Violence-Galtung.pdf