Back to Glossary

Structural Violence

Paul Farmer's term for harm produced not by a direct, identifiable act of individual violence but by social structures and institutional arrangements — poverty, racism, unequal access to healthcare — that systematically increase some populations' exposure to suffering and premature death while sparing others. Farmer's Haiti research on multidrug-resistant tuberculosis showed that removing structural obstacles to treatment, rather than blaming patients for supposed unreliability, produced cure rates comparable to wealthy-country clinical settings.

Learn about this term

Related Terms

Vocabulary from all courses. Terms are cross-referenced to show where each concept appears.