And, Slow violence outweighs - manifests through systemic and invisible attrition causing silent death

[Richard, “The unseen 'slow violence' that affects millions,” BBC Future, January 31, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210127-the-invisible-impact-of-slow-violence, accessed July 1, 2023, GDS-LL]

The idea of slow violence can be traced back to the 1960s, though it wasn't called that back then. In 1969, the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung – known as the "father of peace studies" – argued that violence could be enacted by more than fists or weapons. Violence, he argued, could also be "structural".

For Galtung, this kind of violence happens when a society causes harm to its citizens and their property, often invisibly, through social or health inequalities, racism, sexism or another systemic means. The victims have foreshortened lives, and have suffered both bodily and psychologically. But while the impact is tangible, the blame is harder to pin down.

"Personal violence shows," Galtung wrote. "[It] represents change and dynamism – not only ripples on waves, but waves on otherwise tranquil waters. Structural violence is silent, it does not show – it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters. In a static society, personal violence will be registered, whereas structural violence may be seen as about as natural as the air around us."

How does this violence remain unnoticed? One of the primary reasons is its pace.

This year marks a decade since the environmentalist and literary scholar Rob Nixon of Princeton University coined the term "slow violence". Like Galtung, he described a kind of violence that was structural, but he was the first to point out that it could also be experienced over many years, possibly even generations. It occurs "gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all," he wrote.

According to Nixon, slow violence can be found embedded within the "slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes" of long-term pollution, climate change or nuclear fallout. But it can also describe many kinds of harm that affect individuals and communities at a pace too slow to assign blame.

Like fast violence, people still suffer or even die, but the protagonists of the act are diffuse and often outside the reach of prosecution. Some of the blame might lie with an entire industry subtly polluting an ecosystem legally and collectively, while some blame may lie with a government policy written in a distant capital years before. The point is that slow violence does not always have a clear perpetrator.

"Slow violence provokes us to expand our imaginations of what constitutes harm. It insists we take seriously forms of violence that have, over time, become unmoored from their original causes," says geographer Thom Davies of the University of Nottingham, UK.