7 Common Types of Violence That We Face

Violence is one of those epidemics that doesn’t respect limits or borders. Unfortunately, there are many types of violence, and you can find it everywhere in the world. From the way that someone asks you for or demands something, to the most bloody wars that take hundreds of lives. Even if you don’t directly participate in the latter, you are a witness, which affects you on many levels.Sometimes it seems like we are genetically designed to be aggressive. However, violence (a form of aggressiveness) is cultural. We learn and reproduce it and, in turn, teach and validate it. But just as you can learn it, you can unlearn it and stop the cycle.

To stop the cycle, one of the most important steps is to identify the different ways that violence manifests itself. Next, we will talk about the most common types of violence.

1. Economic Violence

This type of violence is two-faced. One of them is direct and the other indirect. Direct economic violence openly affects your goods or assets. This includes theft, scams, fraud, and anything that illegally or unjustly affects your finances.

Indirect economic violence relates to the internal mechanisms of the economic system that affects your interest. It happens when, for example, wages drop in the labor market. That means you have to face unfair competition because other people might charge less and find work more easily. Another example of indirect economic violence is when authorities enact supposedly equal measures, but they actually only benefit certain parties.

2. Political and institutional violence

Political violence includes whatever a political party might do that goes against your interests. When a political party uses you as a tool that is also a case of political violence. For example, when you are a contributor and victim of a corrupt political class.

Institutional violence has to do with mistreatment or abuse on the part of an institution. For example, if you receive bad service that causes you harm in some way. Another example of this type of violence is when medical institutions ignore or minimize your pain.

3. Sexual or gender violence

Even though we are in the 21st century, violence against women is still a problem. Not only that but in some cases, it has increased. This type of aggression is gender-motivated. That means that men or other women inflict violence on a woman because she doesn’t do what they want or demand of her.

Men are also victims of sexual and emotional violence. Women or other men can perpetuate this violence. Sometimes men experience rejection or prejudice just because they are men. Unfortunately, the reports of sexual abuse of children by women have risen.

4. Cultural Violence

Most marketing promotes a way of life that many people end up copying. Experts consider that instituting this sort of hegemony is a type of violence. That’s because it feeds intolerance and contempt for lifestyles or worldviews that don’t conform to the dominating stereotype.

Likewise, there are many societies in the world that approve of and legitimize violence against certain segments of the population. Those segments might be groups or minorities. Persecution of LGBTQIA communities or ethnic groups fits into this category.

5. Religious violence

There are many religious groups and sects today in the world fighting for power and followers. Some of these, surely, are genuine expressions of faith. However, it’s also true that the true interest of the leaders of many of these groups is financial. They are the ones who dictate and manage the commandments of the faith, and they don’t hesitate to manipulate the hopes of their followers.

This type of sect uses their follower’s fear and confusion to get money. They might do it in a direct or indirect way (through work or willingness to recruit more followers.) They tend to carry dark messages about the end of the world and the destruction of the human race. With these messages and the fear they cause, they break the will of the believers in order to obtain what they desire.

6. Cyber-bullying

With the advent of social media, we added another kind of harassment to our list of types of violence. In one way or another, our new technology makes harassment easy because it provides anonymity to cowards. Likewise, the laws in different countries about cyber-bullying aren’t particularly clear yet, so lots of this violent behavior goes unpunished.

Also, everyone has the ability to save and share images. And many people take advantage of this possibility. That leads to new forms of violence. One of them is that anyone can record a video of you and upload it to social media. They can use your image as a joke or give the impression that some isolated incident defines you as a person. By the time you figure it out, it’s possible that thousands of people have already seen the images and come to their own, biased conclusions.

7. Information violence

The programming of so many media outlets includes a large amount of violent news. It would seem that the more grisly the information, the greater the impact it has and the more viewers it attracts. Sometimes when you open a newspaper or watch the daily news on TV, you get a whole slew of information that skews your idea of reality.

The worst thing is that the media offer this type of news because there is a demand. In a way, the media is used to the impact that this type of news causes. Because of that, the media is always on the hunt for news stories that have a bigger impact than the last story. Pain, death, torture, and all sorts of horrible things have turned into a spectacle.

These types of violence are only some of the ways that we experience violence. The complete list is much longer. However, we’ve touched on the main types of violence that impact all of us because of their scale and significance.