Structural Violence

On Monday, May 20, a devastating mile-wide tornado hit the town of Moore, Oklahoma. The storm leveled the community, killing 24, causing as much as $2 billion in damage, and leaving many to wonder why this town had almost no means to protect itself. Many in the news media have suggested that this tornado was more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, making it impossible to prepare for. Others have noted that the clay ground of the western plains makes it prohibitively expensive to build underground safety shelters. Some journalists have even suggested that a culture of local temerity is responsible. But clearly, a larger problem exists with our country’s natural disaster preparation system.

In Moore, a number of life-saving measures, including safety rooms which cost around $2,500 per household, were shamefully scarce. It is a fact that those who cannot afford private means of protection are left to deal with the consequences of these events on their own. Rather than a laudable product of American individualism, this is a form of structural violence.

Last week’s tragedy is the latest example of a disturbing trend in which the private sector, and indeed private citizens, are left responsible for shoring up homes, schools, and businesses in the areas of the country hardest hit by natural disasters. When individuals and communities lack the means to do this, they go unprepared. While popular stereotype suggests that this phenomenon is exclusive to the storms of tornado-alley, history indicates that this has been the case for hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires nationwide.

Indeed, a March 2009 report by the Institute for Business and Home Safety indicates that the destruction from U.S. natural disasters is disproportionately borne by lower-income communities. It concludes that vulnerable populations, particularly the poor, elderly, and disabled, are “more likely to die, suffer injuries, and have proportionately higher material losses” in natural disasters. The report cites issues with building readiness as the leading cause of this discrepancy, writing that low-income Americans, “often live in the most vulnerable housing and lack the resources to undertake recommended loss-reduction.” Despite these findings, the federal government has taken little proactive action to bolster storm readiness among lower-income Americans.

This failing demonstrates a pattern of structural violence against those Americans who cannot afford necessary disaster protection, and people are left tragically unassisted by public trustees of their safety. The concept of structural violence, as put forth by University Professor Paul Farmer, is useful here as it applies to a culture of American natural disaster preparation embedded in prevalent “social structures, normalized by stable institutions and regular experience.” Although violence typically evokes immediate physical harm, here it expresses the “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs” that prevents communities from reaching their full potential. The impact of structural violence becomes evident when we recognize that, year after year, certain towns in America are razed to the ground because they lack the means to prepare for natural disasters.

This does not implicate a single villain, but rather indicates that our whole social structure further disadvantages low-income communities through systemic forces when natural disasters strike. We need to be cognizant of this structural violence and take shared responsibility for whatever the next disasters may be. This means making our building codes tougher and retrofitting our older buildings to meet these new codes. It also means public assistance for those communities and individuals who lack the private resources to protect themselves. Compared with the devastation we have seen in disadvantaged communities across America, the cost of public investment in more equitable disaster preparation seems very low.

Nearly eight years ago, Americans watched in horror as one of our largest cities was drowned by Hurricane Katrina, a storm whose path was inevitable but whose destruction was not. Our leaders pledged that we would never again allow ourselves to be so blindsided by Mother Nature, and that our most disadvantaged communities would be protected from the natural disasters to come. The tragedy in Moore last week was hardly the first test of our post-Katrina resolve, nor was it even the first in the last month. But it has demonstrated that preemptive protection from disasters like these, especially for our most vulnerable citizens, must once again become a national priority.

Jason A. Gandelman ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a neurobiology concentrator in Eliot House. Paul A. Leroux ’14 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House.