When violence leaves no bruise, is it even violence?

This week in England and Wales, the Home Office published new statutory guidance for Domestic Abuse Related Death Reviews, the process previously known as Domestic Homicide Reviews. The change sounds bureaucratic, but it reflects something much more significant. A death related to domestic abuse does not necessarily follow a final murderous assault. It may be a suicide after months or years of coercive control, emotional abuse or economic abuse. By the time somebody dies, the violence may have been taking place for a very long time, even where there are few or no visible injuries.

This creates a problem for the way we normally think about violence. If somebody is beaten, stabbed or shot, we know what we are looking at. The difficulty begins when there is no obvious physical attack. Somebody else controls the money, decides who you see, checks your messages, determines where you go, threatens consequences if you disobey and gradually reorganises your decisions around their wishes. From the outside you may still appear to be choosing. In reality, the field in which choice is possible has been steadily reduced. If we refuse to call any of this violence unless somebody is physically attacked, we miss something important. But if every injustice, inequality or restriction becomes violence, the word ends up meaning almost everything and therefore very little.

Johan Galtung confronted this problem when he argued that violence could not be understood only as the deliberate physical action of one person against another. Social structures themselves can produce avoidable suffering and sharply reduced possibilities. His concept of structural violence was hugely influential because it allowed us to recognise forms of violence for which there may be no obvious attacker. Yet it also left an unresolved question: where does violence end and injustice more generally begin? Poverty, discrimination, inequality and exclusion may all be profoundly unjust, but does calling all of them violence actually help us understand what violence is?

The Argentine thinker Silo offers another way into the problem. His starting point is the human being as an intentional being: someone who imagines possibilities, makes projects, transforms the world and constructs a future. My body is not simply an object I carry around. It is the means through which my intentions enter the world. The person in front of me is not simply another body either, but another centre of intention, with projects and a future that do not belong to me. In The Human Landscape, Silo describes what happens when that recognition disappears: “I can annihilate the intention of others, considering them as prostheses (extensions) of my own body.” A prosthesis has no project of its own; it carries out mine. To treat another person in this way is to objectify and dehumanise them.

That image suggests a simple starting point for thinking about physical violence. My intention expressed through my body is an exercise of freedom. Your intention imposed through my body is violence. If somebody hits me, forces me to move, prevents me from leaving or uses my body against my will, the injury is not the whole story. For that moment, somebody else’s intention has taken command of my body. My capacity to act, refuse or escape has been overridden and my body has become the means through which another person’s project is being carried out.

Coercive control is disturbing precisely because the same relation can develop without somebody physically moving my limbs. Instead of taking command of the body for a moment, another person can progressively take command of a life. The victim’s own body still performs the actions, but increasingly those actions are organised around somebody else’s intention. A person can remain apparently free while the practical possibilities through which freedom is exercised are steadily hollowed out.

Nor is this confined to inter-personal relationships. Forced labour puts another person’s body and activity at the service of a project they have not freely chosen. Racial, religious or political domination can do something comparable to whole populations, closing possibilities and subjecting people to decisions about futures they have little part in shaping. Over time, such relations can become embedded in laws, institutions and economic arrangements and continue long after the intentions of their original creators have disappeared. That does not make every unjust structure violent, and an institution does not possess an intention in the way a person does. But human intentions can leave behind structures that continue to organise other people’s lives.

This formula will not solve every case. Human beings constantly affect one another’s choices. A parent pulls a child out of the road. A doctor may act when a patient cannot give consent. An attacker may have to be restrained. Two boxers deliberately strike one another. Consent, reciprocity, necessity and the standing of the other person all matter. Physical violence gives us the clearest example, but not a mechanical definition: the deeper problem begins when another human being ceases to be treated fully as the subject of their own action and becomes instead the means through which somebody else’s intention is imposed.

Nor are violence and injustice the same thing. Something can be unjust without necessarily being violent, while violence can sometimes be justified. If somebody is carrying out a serious attack and the only realistic way to stop them involves injuring them, the defensive act does not suddenly become nonviolent because we approve of its purpose. It may remain violence while also being the least harmful effective response available. Calling every justified use of force “nonviolent” only makes the concept harder to understand.

Silo gives us the other side of the relationship in the Fourth Letter to My Friends: “to humanize is to move beyond objectification to affirm the intentionality of every human being.” That does not mean allowing everyone to do whatever they want. Human life necessarily involves limits, conflict and sometimes restraint. It means that even then, the other person does not cease to be a subject with a body, a voice, intentions and a future of their own.

The new Domestic Abuse Related Death Reviews matter because they require us to look beyond the final injury and sometimes beyond physical injury altogether. A bruise tells us immediately that something has happened to a body. Coercive control makes us look harder. If another person’s intention has come to govern where you go, whom you see, what you spend, what you say and what future you can realistically imagine, the absence of a bruise does not mean violence has not occurred. It may mean we have been looking for it in the wrong place.

Tony Robinson