Silent violence: a feminist approach to early structural violence against women

Abstract

In this communication we vindicate the centrality of the management of reproduction in Hunter-fisher-gatherer societies and how this crucial management could generate a social organization in which women were subject to a structural violence. Indeed, we contend that there are two types of violence: circumstantial violence, that is, acts of brutality committed by specific individuals resulting in physical injury, and structural violence, the less obtrusive form exercised socially by the “group”. In fact, it is this concept of structural violence that has characterised social systems based on dissymmetrical relations between the sexes, which, in every single case, have favoured men.