Gilligan, J. (2001). Preventing violence. London: Thames and Hudson, 29.

Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a national epidemic, 106.

In a landmark study on homicide and suicide, it was observed that the lower social strata - due to chronic feelings of powerlessness - tended to project blame onto others and, therefore, were more prone to acts of homicide than suicide. By contrast, the more affluent classes - given their developed sense of self-efficacy - tended to internalise blame and, accordingly, were more inclined to commit suicide than homicide. Several studies have confirmed the aforementioned finding regarding the inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and homicide-suicide ratios.

One can see the same happening in national politics as quasi-facist movements swim ever closer to the political mainstream. With the degree of cooperation between the two spheres increasing all the time - and with social inequality showing few signs of abating - it is only a matter of time before impotent rage - ressentiment - gets channelled into the creation of anti-democratic political movements.

Middle-class students in South Africa, that is, are becoming increasingly adept at identifying what we now call epistemological - or symbolic - violence, while appearing oblivious to the problem of real, concrete violence. We cannot blame them, of course, because the burden of responsibility rests with us as their bourgeois teacher.

In the aforementioned South African study, for example, it is reported that perceived chronic radical discrimination acts independantly of other demographic variables - including several socioeconomic indicators - to negatively affect mental health. Around the world, young girls and women are particularly vulnerable to acts of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, along with all of the traumatogenic outcomes. Longitudinal studies since the 1930s have documented the impact of unemployment on physical and mental health. But when these forms of social suffering intersect in people’s lives - as in the case of impoverished black women, for instance - the adverse effects are compounded.