Systemic violence is the erosion of what matters most, carried out not with a weapon but with a smile.
The dominant understanding of violence requires a visible actor and a physical blow. Johan Galtung shattered this in 1969 when he introduced the concept of structural violence: harm embedded in social structures so normalised that no single perpetrator can be identified, no single blow can be recorded on camera, yet the distance between what a person could have been and what they are grows wider every day. Galtung defined violence as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, and structural violence as the case where “there is no such actor” sustaining the gap. A person dying of tuberculosis in the eighteenth century may have been unavoidable. A person dying of it today, despite the existence of medicine, is structural violence. The structure does the killing. No individual pulls the trigger.
But Galtung’s framework, powerful as it is, was built for material conditions: housing inequality, health disparities, educational access. It describes a world where violence is structural but still legible as deprivation. There is a further form of violence that Galtung did not address, one that operates at the level of the soul rather than the body. This is systemic violence in the spiritual sense: the casual, unremarked erosion of a person’s relationship with the divine, repackaged as harmless tradition, innocent fun, or simply “how things are now.”
When a community absorbs practices with no divine sanction, celebrates the self over the Creator, and treats the abandonment of spiritual discipline as freedom rather than loss, it is enacting systemic violence. Not with a weapon. Not with a policy. But by hollowing out the foundation on which everything else was built. The harm is real. The distance between potential and actual grows. But because no one is holding a blade, no one calls it what it is.
This is what makes it dangerous. Physical violence provokes resistance. Systemic violence provokes participation. The eroded do not report the crime because they do not recognise it as one. They call it a birthday party. They call it tradition. They call it harmless.