Oppression and Violence

Oppression names a social reality that is intertwined with violence to provide the grounding for the threat and use of violence to maintain the victim of violence in a subjugated status without equal access to protection and [Page 492]just compensation for injuries and loss related to the experienced violence. As Marilyn Frye described it in 1983 in a classic essay using the analogy of the birdcage, the concept of oppression points to social forces that tend to press on people to prevent their access to well-being and choices. As Frye describes it, the experience of oppressed people is that of living one's life confined and shaped by barriers that are not accidental and are systematically related to each other in such a way as to restrict motion in any direction.

Oppression is related to the existence of certain groups in any society that are privileged over others. Although reasons for this privileging may vary widely, the oppression that characterizes contemporary societies is most forcefully reproduced when those victimized by violence and subjugated by oppression accept their social status as natural, necessary, or inevitable. Oppression has many faces so that focusing on one strand, such as gender oppression, at the expense of others, such as class or race, disregards the intersec-tionality of oppression that Patricia Hill Collins refers to as the matrix of domination. Each particular form of privilege is part of a much larger system of oppressive strands of domination. Categories that define privilege and its flip side oppression exist all at once and in relation to one another. An individual experiences the totality of the multiple social categories with which he or she is identified.

In addition, social policies are implicated in the reproduction of systems of class, race, and gender oppression. Social policies may open access on the basis of some categories (e.g., race and gender), but at the same time foreclose access to others on the basis of other attributes (e.g., sexual orientation, perceived or actual disability, religion).

The pervasiveness of damage to oppressed individuals appears in people's external and internal lives. Externally, it appears in unequal distributions of income, wealth, and power. It appears in unequal treatment and lack of access to opportunities in education, work, health care, and political representation. It appears in the unequal and disproportionate representation of oppressed people under control by the criminal justice system. Internally, oppression is manifested through a gradual erosion of belief in self and a wearing away of resistance to the dominant discourses that further reinforce the status of individuals of oppressed groups as not measuring up or making the right choices to eliminate their own oppression. It subjects members of these oppressed groups, such as women, gay and lesbian people, and people of color, to the threat and reality of violence at home, at work, and on the street.

Violence refers to acts of aggression and abuse that cause or intend to cause injury or harm to persons. Violence can be used for intentional purposes in criminal behaviors, in retaliatory efforts, and globally in acts of terrorism and war. On some level, violence is always used as a means to gain control to oppress others. In an interpersonal context, violence is used specifically as a strategy to gain or maintain power and control over a relationally known victim. In this respect, modes of abuse tend to be gendered, females using more psychological or emotional forms and males using more physical forms of violence. The consequences of these forms differ markedly as well.

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