Structural violence is the most potent stimulant of behavioral violence – results from overt violence in the form of family violence, gender violence, racial violence, hate crimes, police violence, state violence, massacres, terrorism, and war

The Most Potent Stimulant In addition to being the deadliest form of violence, structural violence is also the most potent stimulant of behavioral violence. American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. (1967) was prescient in calling the “deplorable crimes” of African-Americans to be “derivative crimes”—born of the greater crimes of the white society. Gilligan (1996) has drawn a relation-ship between structural violence—or divisions into superiority and inferiority, by whatever means—and the shame, stress, discrimination, and denigration that result from a lower sta-tus. This underlying psychology in turn stimulates murders, wars, suicides, and deaths from stress‐induced illness. Others have framed it in terms of an erosion of social networks and trust (Elgar & Aitken, 2010). The increase in rates of death and disability that arise from structural violence often results from overt violence in the form of family violence, gender violence, racial violence, hate crimes, police violence, state violence, massacres, terrorism, and war. Indeed, a World Bank‐sponsored study proved that in 39 nations around the world, homicide rates increased with inequality (Fajnzylber, Lederman, & Loayza, 2002). By using rates of employment as a measure of inequality (Galbraith, 1998), we discover that unemployment brings greater mortality (Martikainen & Valkonen, 1996). The figures are valid even among the more developed countries. For 26 European nations, from 1970 to 2007, every 1% increase in unemployment indicated a 0.79% rise in suicides and a 0.79% rise in homicides (Stuckler et al., 2009). Globalized corporate management, with a rising percent-age of layoffs, downsizing, and impersonal management styles has seen rises in workplace vio-lence, usually ending with the perpetrator’s suicide (Noer, 2009).Another cross‐sectional study of 165 countries showed that economic development, inequality, and poverty are significant predictors of homicide, although there are many variations in homicide for lower‐income countries (Ouimet, 2012). Some researchers have taken excess deaths and poor health outcomes to be indicators of unequal development (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2015), while others have approached the question from a feminist perspective (Anglin, 1998; Brock‐Utne, 1989), or in terms of human rights (Eisler, 1997). Economic decline, income inequality, and pervasive rent seeking by ruling elites can generate a reduced surplus in the larger population that can threaten entire nations. Weakening states, alongside competitions for control of goods, eventually give rise to humanitarian emergencies due to war and state violence (Nafziger & Auvinen, 2002). There is also political decay in relation to relative depriva-tion or a perception of injustice arising from a growing discrepancy between expectations and economic and social realities. The structural violence of domination, exploitation, and humili-ation also needs to draw on physical violence in order to coerce its victims to submit to the more powerful party. Some have shown that well‐established democracies do not make war (Rummel, 2003; Weart, 1998), while power and inequality among nations are associated with interstate wars (Hinsley, 1967; van Evera, 2013).Perhaps in need of special emphasis are the effects of economic inequality on suicide. Unemployment (Voss et al., 2004) and frequency of bankruptcy (Weyerer & Wiedenmann, 1995) are highly associated with increased suicide, with a twofold to threefold increase in rela-tive risk (Blakely, Collings, & Atkinson, 2003). However, what is important is not absolute but relative poverty, pointing to factors other than material deprivation. In settings of high economic inequality, suicide among the poor rises drastically, but so does suicide among the rich, to a lesser degree (Daly, Wilson, & Johnson, 2013). With rising inequalities, a concern for human rights becomes more prominent. Human rights are moral principles or norms that outline standards for the treatment of others, in recognition of the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family (United Nations, 1948). The topic has entered into international dialog over the last century in the effort to understand how violence, terrorism, war, poverty, inequality, development, and democracy relate to one another. In the context of rising inequalities (Piketty & Goldhammer, 2014), the drive for a more humane and inclusive kind of globalization and development has led to the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, which animated the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ultimately influenced the drafting of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015).