A violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.
Rob Nixon, 2011
Slow violence is the violence of the "ordinary" and everyday things that wear us down. The concept is well-known from Rob Nixon’s 2011 book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. An important, and difficult, part of slow violence has to do with time.
With slow violence, time and sometimes space separate the harms that are felt from what caused harm. Harmful things in the present can seem ordinary, because their harm will come in the future. And similarly, the reasons that people suffer in the present can’t be clearly linked to one specific harmful thing they experienced in the past.
Why slow violence matters
Victims of slow violence are often seen as casualties of time. Slow violence can, for example, create high rates of cancer, which is passed off as just a part of ageing and life. It can gradually degrade the environment in ways that are overlooked, seen as an inescapable necessity for development. With slow violence, destructive things happen so slowly that, to the human mind, they appear mundane and natural.
“Slow violence” gives us a way to think about long-term problems that we don’t have enough vocabulary or attention span for.
We need to think bigger about what non-violence truly is. Should gradual poisoning of a community, or destruction or habitats be considered non-violent, simply because they are gradual? It’s important for to know about slow violence so that there is visibility and voice for untraceable harms in the future, and remediation in the present.