The Costs of a Violent Society: If someone punched you in the nose and took your money, we could all agree that you'd been the victim of violence.
But what if someone polluted the air you breathe, or denied you health insurance? Would that constitute violence? What if the schools near your home offered a lower-quality education than those just a few miles away in a wealthier neighborhood — would that hurt as much as that punch? Would it cost your family as much as a robbery?...While we are worried about individual violence, many more people are being hurt by institutional and structural harm.
"We are a society that talks about equality and the value of equality," Neil Wollman of Manchester College says, but our institutions and social structures don't always serve that ideal. Sometimes they do the opposite.” A few years ago he and some other professors and students started combing through census data and other studies to get a sense of how much harm is done by the way our society is organized.
"We were trying to look at violence in a more comprehensive way. Hunger, homelessness. It's a little different way of looking at harm."
All of the data they collected are reported elsewhere, but they wanted to draw the statistics together and see whether it told them something about the nature of our society.
They looked at data for the United States beginning in 1995 and found that rates of most kinds of face-to-face, interpersonal violence have declined. Rates for murders, sexual offenses and robbery were down.
But many structural problems, what Wollman calls "social negligence," worsened.
Emergency food requests rose 20-fold from 1984 to 2002, including a 17 percent rise from 2002 to 2003.
In 2003, a record 84 percent of cities turned people away from overflowing homeless shelters.
In 2002, 43.6 million Americans lacked health insurance, a 5.7 percent increase from 2001.
The school dropout rate has gone down a bit but is still troubling...
Even as some gaps are closing, one troubling gap widened. The income gap between the top 5 percent of the population and the bottom 10 percent grew, and is the widest it has been since the government started tracking it in 1967.
"These income gaps are not good for a society (that) holds equality as a primary value," Wollman said. Other studies have shown a significant correlation between economic gaps and health. The United States may be ahead of most nations in wealth and achievement, but we are also ahead in stress. People measure themselves not against other societies, but against their fellow citizens. U.S. Americans struggle to rise up the ladder or to stay at the top. People up and down the food chain are stressed.
The Population Health Forum lists the United States in 26th place for life expectancy among developed nations and says life expectancy rates match economic inequality. The higher the inequality in a society, the worse everyone's health is.
A burglar may hurt one family at a time, but a system that supports inequality damages millions of lives at once and ultimately harms everyone.
From Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living (Session 1: The First Step, page 22-23) Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.
