Institutional Violence

Front Cover
Deane W. Curtin, Robert Litke
Rodopi, 1999 - Philosophy - 413 pages
Violence can be physical and psychological. It can characterize personal actions, forms of group activity, and abiding social and political policy. This book includes all of these aspects within its focus on institutional forms of violence. Institution is also a broad category, ranging from formal arrangements such as the military, the criminal code, the death penalty and prison system, to more amorphous but systemic situations indicated by parenting, poverty, sexism, work, and racism. Violence is as complex as the human beings who resort to it; its institutional forms pervade our relational lives. We are all participants in it as victims and perpetrators. The chapters in this book were written in the hope that violence can be explicated, even if not fully understood, and that such clarification can help us in devising less violent forms of living, even if it does not lead to its total abolition. The studies bring new aspects of violence to light and offer a number of suggestions for its remedy.

From inside the book

Contents

ONE Is Poverty Violence?
5
THREE Compromised Childhoods
35
FOUR The Death Penalty as a Peace Issue
53
TWELVE
71
SIX Work and Peacemaking
87
Introduction
103
NINE Genocide and Moral Philosophy
129
Shell in Nigeria
149
SIXTEEN
215
SEVENTEEN
225
EIGHTEEN
233
Introduction
251
Introduction
281
TWENTYFOUR Power Public Authority and Nonviolence
331
TWENTYSIX Epistemological Violence
353
Reference Bibliography
381

Introduction
195
FIFTEEN
205
About the Authors
401
Copyright

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Page 25 - Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machinegunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber...
Page 46 - It still remains unrecognized, that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society...
Page 305 - In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.
Page 25 - In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but...
Page 179 - ... submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's employment, (2) submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment decisions affecting such individual, or (3) such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment.
Page 260 - Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), p.
Page 46 - That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection ; that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others.
Page 376 - I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species and thus been...
Page 181 - hostile environment" (ie, non quid pro quo) harassment violates Title VII, the EEOC drew upon a substantial body of judicial decisions and EEOC precedent holding that Title VII affords employees the right to work in an environment free from discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult.