Structural violence and poverty outweigh and are sustained by pathologies of power

Poverty consists of a systematic or structural denial of basic freedoms, as articulated by Sen, resulting in agency constrained to the extent that individuals are unable or lack the ‘capability’ to meet their basic needs. The denial of one freedom amplifies or multiplies the denial of other freedoms, rendering the poor disproportionately vulnerable to a whole array of violations. Poverty not only means lack of money; it means a concomitant impairment of access to adequate healthcare, water, shelter, etc. In terms of de facto and de jure rights, the poor clearly experience a different de facto realization of human rights…those living in poverty, on balance, have less access to the kind of economic resources that are necessary for adequate healthcare, education and welfare services, which may in turn effect the degree to which they enjoy their civil and political rights.34 Poverty, therefore, constitutes a structural violation of human rights. There are systemic reasons that explain why the poor bear a disproportionate burden of rights violations. In this sense, Farmer’s assertion rings eerily true: Human rights violations are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm.35 Furthermore, poverty, although it has an irreducible economic connotation does not necessarily imply the primacy of economic factors in the causation of poverty. For example, when discrimination based on gender, ethnicity or any other ground denies a person access to health-care resources, the resulting ill-health is clearly a case of capability failure that should count as poverty because the lack of access to resources has played a role.36 The social factors, such as sexism and racism, also represent additional instances of structural violence that constrain agency. From a structuralist perspective, with a focus on interdependent relationships, there are clear inequalities between collectivities along social axes. Recalling the example cited earlier in the essay regarding African-American women who are disproportionately at risk of contracting and dying from AIDS and suffering from rape and starvation among numerous other human rights violations in natural catastrophes, race is clearly a social axis along which inequalities have been institutionalized. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois contend that since social structures have institutionalized structural violence, social structures therein render that violence invisible. For them, structural violence is ‘everyday violence [or] part of the normative fabric of social and political life. Structural violence is generally invisible because it is part of the routine grounds of everyday life…’ 37 Most studied in the social axes of structural violence are race, class and gender inequalities. The social location of the individual is crucial to determining how the individual’s agency is constrained, and how that makes an individual vulnerable to human rights violations.