Slow violence shapes bodies and souls of the poor (pt. 1)
Slow violence is insidious in poor nations and poor neighbourhoods in wealthy nations, where delayed destruction is drawn out over time and passed across generations.
This will be the first of three or so posts that deal with the issue of ‘slow violence’ -how it affects those in poverty overwhelmingly, the health effects (with an emphasis on the brain and neurological effects), and how it is passed on to the next generation.
The term ‘slow violence’ as I am using it here comes from a book by Rob Nixon entitled ‘Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor’ (2011) (From Harvard University Press). Before I define slow violence as Nixon does, let me share a quote from the first page of the book, which I think will give you a pretty good idea of what is to come (and hopefully, will make your blood boil like it does mine).
I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that….I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles….Just between me and you, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?
—Lawrence Summers, confidential World Bank memo, December 12, 1991
As Nixon points out, Summers was acting in the best interest of the rich nations he represented and was solving more than one problem. The first would be a financial benefit to the US and Europe and the second benefit would be to appease the rich-nation environmentalists that were making more and more noise about toxins and pollution in their own countries. This serves as a great example of slow violence - as opposed to the violence that we are used to from governments. As Nixon points out, if Summers had proposed invading Africa with guns blazing and bombs dropping, this would have been viewed as a military or imperial invasion.
But, dropping tons of toxic waste is not seen as a military or imperial invasion. Yet it is an insidious invasion that may have few immediate effects but can have immense and very long-lasting consequences for the people and the environment. Thus, Nixon uses the term slow violence to capture ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’. Unpacking this a little makes us realize how vastly different slow violence is - there is not the immediate death of people and destruction of infrastructure that captures the western media’s reporting time and therefore, much of the public’s interest. Nixon puts this perfectly by stating that ‘The insidious workings of slow violence derive largely from the unequal attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time’.
Not only is slow violence slow, which means that it may take years to exert its effects, it is generally out of sight, being most often perpetrated in far-off places and/or places inhabited by the poor. The western media have little interest in portraying the stories of the poor and certainly not the poor from far away places.
The time lag issue of slow violence is a difficult one to address. It’s challenging for scientists doing the research to stay with a topic such as a radiological exposure (which slowly leads to cellular mutations) long enough to measure the health effects years later, much less in the next generation. Likewise, for the reporters informing the public of the research results. But, Nixon’s book and other research is testament to the fact that it can be done. The Bhopal disaster in 1984 in India is a case in point - research was still being published last year (Long-term human and health capital effects....).
As for the second challenge facing the outing of slow violence - the fact that it generally affects the poor from far away - we can only hope that our humanity is enough for us to care. As the genocide in Gaza has shown, it is possible in 2024 (13 years after Nixon wrote his book) to be informed about events occurring in far-off places and to speak up for those that can certainly be characterized as disenfranchised, to say the least.
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See my other posts related to this one - thanks for your interest.