Violence is most broadly defined as the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against another person, against oneself, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation. That definition, established by the World Health Organization in its landmark 2002 World Report on Violence and Health, remains the most widely cited in public health and policy circles. But it is also just one starting point in a much larger conversation. The word “violence” now spans everything from a punch to systemic racism to cyberstalking, and the boundaries of the concept keep shifting in ways that carry real consequences for law, medicine, and everyday life.
The Public Health Framework
The WHO definition was deliberately crafted to be broader than what most people picture when they hear the word “violence.” Two features stand out. First, it includes the phrase “use of power,” not just “use of physical force.” This was intentional: it pulls in threats, intimidation, neglect, and other acts that do not involve direct physical contact but still cause measurable harm. Second, it lists outcomes beyond injury and death, including psychological harm and deprivation. A glossary developed to support public health work in this area notes that the goal is to clarify concepts so that researchers and practitioners can identify specific points for intervention and prevention.1Europe PMC. Violence: a glossary
Under this framework, violence is sorted into three broad categories based on who commits it. Self-directed violence covers suicidal behavior and self-harm. Interpersonal violence covers acts between individuals, whether they are family members, intimate partners, or strangers. Collective violence covers violence committed by larger groups, including armed conflict, state repression, and organized crime. Each category breaks down further by the nature of the act: physical, sexual, psychological, or involving deprivation and neglect. This taxonomy is useful because it forces you to think beyond street fights and homicides. A government that deliberately withholds food aid from a population, for instance, falls under collective violence involving deprivation. A partner who never throws a punch but systematically isolates someone from friends and family falls under interpersonal psychological violence.
Self-Directed Violence and Why It Counts
Including self-harm within a violence framework surprises some people. The intuition is that violence requires a perpetrator and a victim, and when the same person fills both roles, the word feels stretched. But public health researchers argue that the mechanisms overlap significantly: the same risk factors (childhood adversity, substance use, exposure to community violence) predict both violence against others and violence against oneself. In the United States, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control adopted the term “self-directed violence” specifically to improve consistency in surveillance and research on suicidal behavior.2PLoS ONE. Descriptive Epidemiology and Underlying Psychiatric Disorders among Hospitalizations with Self-Directed Violence The practical effect is that suicide prevention is now institutionally housed alongside homicide prevention, domestic violence response, and child abuse programs, rather than being treated as an entirely separate domain.
Structural Violence
The concept that arguably stretched the definition of violence furthest was introduced by peace researcher Johan Galtung in the late 1960s. Structural violence refers to harm caused not by any individual act but by the way social, political, and economic systems are organized. When institutions and policies systematically disadvantage certain groups based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or class, the resulting suffering, shorter life expectancies, poorer health, and restricted opportunities can be understood as a form of violence even though no single person pulled a trigger. The concept has been described as “indirect violence,” where inequitable structures create conditions that directly oppress members of certain groups.3PubMed. Structural violence: A concept analysis to inform nursing science and practice
The strength of this framing is that it makes visible the harms that traditional definitions miss entirely. If a society’s healthcare system produces dramatically different outcomes for different racial groups, structural violence gives you language to call that a problem of violence rather than just inequality. The criticism, of course, is that this dilutes the term. If poverty is violence, and discrimination is violence, and unequal school funding is violence, then what isn’t? Critics argue that lumping structural harms together with physical assault makes it harder to prioritize responses and muddies moral responsibility. Supporters counter that restricting “violence” to physical acts lets powerful institutions off the hook for preventable suffering.
Symbolic Violence and Everyday Harm
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pushed the concept in yet another direction with symbolic violence. This is not about bruises or even about systems; it is about how people come to accept their own domination as natural and legitimate. The key feature is misrecognition. Symbolic violence works precisely because the people experiencing it do not see it as violence. As Bourdieu himself put it, symbolic violence “can only be exercised by the person who exercises it, and endured by the person who endures it, in a form which results in its misrecognition as such.”4Women’s Studies International Forum. ‘I’d rather you’d lay me on the floor and start kicking me’: Understanding symbolic violence in everyday life
Think of a working-class student who drops out of university not because anyone physically blocked the door, but because everything about the institution’s culture, language, and expectations made them feel they did not belong. Bourdieu would call the processes that produced that outcome a form of symbolic violence. The student is not beaten; the student is made to feel, at a deep and largely unconscious level, that their exclusion is their own fault. This concept is polarizing. Some scholars find it indispensable for explaining how inequalities reproduce themselves generation after generation without obvious coercion. Others argue it stretches the word “violence” so far that it loses explanatory power.
Intimate Partner Violence and Coercive Control
Within the interpersonal category, intimate partner violence has undergone its own definitional evolution. For decades, the focus was on discrete physical assaults: hitting, kicking, choking. Research over the past two decades has shifted the lens toward coercive control, a pattern of behavior that includes surveillance, isolation, financial control, threats, and degradation. The physical assault may be one tool among many, or it may be absent entirely while the control is pervasive. This reframing has changed laws in several countries; England and Wales, for instance, criminalized coercive and controlling behavior in 2015, even in the absence of physical violence.
Some researchers argue that even the coercive control framework does not go far enough. A 2023 analysis published in Violence Against Women suggested that coercive control must be understood within a broader picture of “social and systemic entrapment,” recognizing that an abusive partner’s control tactics operate within, and are amplified by, broader systems like immigration law, welfare policy, child custody norms, and housing markets.5Europe PMC. Understanding Intimate Partner Violence: Why Coercive Control Requires a Social and Systemic Entrapment Framework Under this view, the definition of intimate partner violence keeps expanding to account for the full architecture of harm, not just what happens between two people behind closed doors.
Technology-Facilitated Violence
Digital technology has created entirely new forms of violence that barely existed twenty years ago. Technology-facilitated sexual violence covers a range of behaviors where digital tools are used to enable both virtual and face-to-face sexually based harms, including online sexual harassment, cyberstalking, image-based sexual exploitation (sometimes called “revenge porn”), and using communication platforms to coerce someone into unwanted sexual acts.6PubMed. Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence: A Literature Review of Empirical Research In the context of intimate relationships, digital dating abuse, intimate partner cyberstalking, and image-based sexual abuse have all become areas of growing research and policy concern.7PubMed. Technology-Facilitated Domestic and Sexual Violence: A Review
Defining these acts as “violence” rather than mere “harassment” or “misuse of technology” matters for legal and policy purposes. When non-consensual sharing of intimate images is classified as a form of sexual violence, it can be prosecuted under more serious statutes, and victims gain access to support services designed for violence survivors. When GPS tracking of a partner’s phone is classified as a feature of coercive control rather than a privacy nuisance, it changes how courts evaluate restraining orders. The definitional choice shapes the institutional response.
Workplace Violence
The International Labour Organization’s Convention No. 190, adopted in 2019, tackled the definition of violence in the workplace. Its approach is notably broad and inclusive, covering physical violence, psychological pressure, sexual harassment, and economic coercion under a single umbrella. The convention defines “violence and harassment in the world of work” as a range of unacceptable behaviors and practices that aim at, result in, or are likely to result in physical, psychological, sexual, or economic harm.8Ukrainian society. ILO Convention no. 190 on the elimination of violence and harassment in the world of work and approaches to its implementation in the legislation of Ukraine By bundling harassment and violence together, the ILO was acknowledging what research consistently shows: the line between “mere” harassment and violence is blurry in practice, and victims often experience them as a continuum rather than as distinct categories.
This matters for your workplace rights. In countries that have ratified or are moving to ratify Convention 190, the legal protections extend beyond physical assault to cover bullying, sexual harassment, and even economic forms of coercion such as wage theft or using employment status as leverage for sexual favors. The definition also extends beyond the physical workplace to commuting, work-related social events, and digital communications tied to work.
Political Violence and Terrorism
At the collective level, defining violence becomes entangled with questions of legitimacy, sovereignty, and power. States claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, a formulation traced to Max Weber. Political violence, then, encompasses everything from war and revolution to terrorism and state repression. What distinguishes terrorism from other forms of political violence, according to one analysis, is the relationship between the perpetrator and the target: terrorists are “as indifferent to the various targets as they are to the various political consequences of their attack,” meaning the specific victims are often incidental and the goal is to create fear in a broader audience.9International Relations. Modelling Terrorism and Political Violence
Hannah Arendt made an influential distinction between power and violence that complicates the picture further. In her framework, power emerges when people act collectively as a political community; it is relational and derives legitimacy from consent. Violence, by contrast, is instrumental and ruled by means-end reasoning. The two often appear together in practice, but Arendt insisted they are conceptually opposite: the more a government relies on violence, the less genuine power it holds.10Studia z Teorii Wychowania. Hannah Arendt’s reflections on power, violence and terror This framing is worth knowing because it surfaces regularly in debates about protest, policing, and state use of force. When people argue about whether a riot is “violent” or a police crackdown is “legitimate,” they are often unknowingly arguing about what Arendt laid out decades ago.
The Brain’s Role in Aggression
While most definitional work on violence comes from social science, philosophy, and law, neuroscience has its own angle. Research on the neurobiology of aggression suggests that in some people, repetitive aggressive behavior is grounded in a neurobiological susceptibility. The pattern involves a failure of “top-down” control systems in the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for impulse regulation and decision-making, to rein in aggressive responses triggered by anger-provoking stimuli. There appears to be an imbalance between prefrontal regulatory influence and hyper-responsivity in the amygdala and other limbic regions involved in processing emotion.11PubMed Central. Neurobiology of aggression and violence
This does not mean violence is “biological” in a deterministic sense. Most people with reduced prefrontal function do not commit violent acts. And many acts of violence, particularly collective and structural forms, have nothing to do with individual brain circuitry. But the neuroscience is relevant for understanding a subset of violence, particularly impulsive aggression, and for developing targeted interventions such as medication or cognitive-behavioral approaches for people with specific neurobiological profiles.
Evolutionary research adds another layer. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences distinguished between proactive aggression, which is planned and instrumental, and reactive aggression, which is impulsive and emotional. Humans show a relatively high propensity for proactive aggression compared with many primates, similar to chimpanzees but unlike bonobos. In contrast, humans show comparatively low reactive aggression, more in line with bonobos than with chimpanzees.12Europe PMC / PNAS. Two types of aggression in human evolution In plain terms, our species is relatively good at planning violence and relatively restrained in the heat of the moment. That combination has obvious implications for how violence manifests across settings: from calculated warfare and premeditated crime on the proactive side, to bar fights and road rage on the reactive side.
Concept Creep and the Debate Over Expanding Definitions
All of the expansions described above, from physical harm to structural violence to symbolic violence to technology-facilitated abuse, are examples of what psychologist Nick Haslam has called “concept creep.” This is the progressive expansion of concepts related to harm, where terms that once had narrow, clearly bounded meanings gradually extend to cover an ever-wider range of phenomena. The same trend has been documented across concepts like trauma, abuse, bullying, and mental disorder.13PubMed Central. Concept Creep and Psychiatrization
Whether concept creep is a problem or a sign of progress depends on who you ask. Proponents argue that expanding definitions is how societies become more sensitive to harm they previously ignored. When “violence” meant only physical assault, the law had no tools for addressing psychological abuse, systemic discrimination, or digital exploitation. Broader definitions create broader protections. Critics counter that when a word means everything, it means nothing. If structural inequality, unkind words, and a gunshot all count as “violence,” the term loses its ability to signal severity and urgency. There is also a practical concern: research on the “rising prevalence” of various forms of harm can be confounded by the fact that what counts as harm keeps changing, making it difficult to tell whether harmful behavior is actually increasing or whether the measuring stick has simply gotten longer.14Social Issues and Policy Review. Concept Creep and the Mental Health Crisis
This tension plays out constantly in policy. When a university expands its definition of violence to include certain forms of speech, it may be protecting vulnerable students or it may be chilling legitimate debate, depending on your perspective. When a public health agency classifies racism as a form of violence, it gains access to violence-prevention funding and frameworks, but it also risks pushback from those who see the label as imprecise. There is no neutral ground here. Every definition of violence is a decision about what society takes seriously enough to name, study, and try to prevent.
Why the Definition You Use Matters in Practice
If you work in healthcare, social services, law enforcement, or policy, the definition of violence you operate under shapes what data you collect, which behaviors you respond to, and who gets access to resources. A hospital emergency department that tracks only physical assault injuries will miss the person admitted for a suicide attempt who was also a victim of coercive control. A domestic violence shelter that screens only for physical abuse will turn away someone whose partner has destroyed them financially and psychologically without ever raising a hand.
For individuals, definitional awareness helps in more personal ways. Recognizing that coercive control is a form of violence can help someone name what is happening to them in a relationship and seek appropriate help. Understanding that cyberstalking falls under violence rather than nuisance behavior changes how you think about reporting it to the police. And recognizing the distinction between reactive and proactive aggression might change how you think about anger management: impulse-driven aggression may respond to strategies that target emotional regulation, while planned intimidation and control require entirely different interventions.
The definition also matters for how entire communities understand their own safety. Crime statistics that count only homicides and assaults present one picture of community violence. Surveys that also capture psychological abuse, threats, stalking, and coercive control present a very different one. Neither is wrong, but they tell different stories about the same neighborhood, and they lead to different policy responses. A community that looks safe by assault statistics may not feel safe to the people navigating chronic harassment, intimidation, or structural exclusion within it.
When “Violence” Becomes Metaphor
In everyday speech, people now use the word “violence” in ways that extend well beyond any formal definition. “Violent” weather, “doing violence” to a piece of music, or calling a policy decision “an act of violence against common sense” are all metaphorical uses. These are not typically what researchers or policymakers mean, but the metaphorical uses feed back into popular understanding. When every sharp disagreement is described as “violent,” the word’s emotional register shifts, and that shift matters when it comes time to discuss literal, physical violence with appropriate gravity.
Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence sits uncomfortably in between the literal and the metaphorical. It describes real harm with measurable effects on life outcomes, but the mechanism involves perception, culture, and internalized belief rather than force. Whether you file that under “violence proper” or “useful metaphor” depends on your intellectual commitments. What is hard to deny is that the concept identifies something real: people do internalize the logic of their own subordination, and this does produce concrete suffering. Whether calling it “violence” helps or hinders understanding is a question that scholars have been arguing about for half a century with no resolution in sight.