Well said. It’s striking to me how many adults can’t conceive of “violence” as an abstraction that results in certain effects and fall back on “violence is dealing direct physical injury to a person’s body or building.”
Weirdly enough, I find that victims of violence who weren’t engaged in a greater act of violence (i.e., the domestic abuse victim versus a soldier in a conflict) are often the staunchest advocates for unwarranted harm towards others to preserve their personal sense of safety. They will carefully carve out a definition of violence that speaks to the specific harm they suffered and requires explicit physical action, and then use that qualifier to reject any other notions of violence.
A recent example is the domestic abuse victim in my complex who has setup private surveillance cameras in the indoor common areas that are heavily trafficked by other neighbors, none of whom have given their consent. She does not consider warrantless surveillance of others (or calling the police on those of us who do not wish to be surveilled in a secure area of the building by her personal cloud camera) to be a violent act, nor does she consider threats of calling the police on those who shield themselves from her camera’s view to be an act of violence.
Violence is not limited to physical actions that induce physical harm, it is any action intentionally designed to reduce the safety or security of others - physical, mental, fiscal, political, etc.
Not to appeal to authority, but because I think it's useful, here's how the WHO defines it according to Wikipedia:
> the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation
Note words such as "power", "psychological harm" "maldevelopment" "deprivation".
Yes. That also takes resources away from people experiencing actual violence. The qualifier “physical violence” isn’t used by people that deal with violence. They use the term “violence”.
“Intellectual violence” is a term used by cowardly people that desire power and wish not to be challenged by others. Those people must be mocked at every opportunity to ensure they are never taken seriously.
