Interpersonal Violence

Abstract

Violence takes many forms. It can be the infliction of physical pain and injury by one person towards another, but it also encompasses other harms-the violence of living in poverty or of being subjected to hate speech, for example. This chapter focuses on interpersonal violence between individuals, excluding sexual violence, which is discussed in Chapter 3. Interpersonal violence is not separate from other forms of violence. It is interrelated with state violence, which includes violence associated with law enforcement and immigration restriction, and structural violence, which refers to the harms of social inequality and the maldistribution of resources.Violence is central to securing political domination and to the maintenance of social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, class and nation (Collins, 2017). While acts of violence can be largescale and spectacular, violence is frequently embedded in the routine and everyday. Collins (1998Collins ( , 2017 analyses how different types of violence sustain social hierarchies in ways that are mutually supporting and constitutive. Racial dominance in the United States relies on spectacular, public violent events such as lynching and police brutality. It also relies on the routine violence of racist speech and the structural violence of discrimination