Up A Notch

[Oxfam] believe[s] that this growing economic divide is leading to death – from starvation, from lack of health care, from climate disasters, from gender-based violence exacerbated by financial pressures.

To describe these consequences, they use the term "economic violence," a term used in academic circles to describe the harm caused by, for example, taking away someone's income or damaging their property.
Oxfam says the rich got richer in the pandemic, and the wealth gap is killing the poor

It would have been nice for National Public Radio to state which "academic circles" they were referring to, but I know better than to expect that by now. In any event, I decided to look up "economic violence," because the term is new to me, and I've learned that when punchy new language comes on the scene, it's not always being used in the spirit in which it was coined. I found a definition in the European Institute for Gender Equality's "Glossary of definitions of rape, femicide and intimate partner violence," and that lends it more context than the NPR mention did.

Proposed definition of economic violence
Any act or behaviour which causes economic harm to the partner. Economic violence can take the form of, among others, property damage, restricting access to financial resources, education or the labour market, or not complying with economic responsibilities, such as alimony.

Personally, it strikes me as an over-broad definition of "violence," but I can understand the viewpoint, as the document seeks to catalog the ways that people do injury to one another in the service of gender-based violence.

I wonder, however, about the escalation in rhetoric. While definitions of violence have expanded to encompass fairly minor acts, such as "a verbal insult," I don't think that the common conceptualization of violence had caught up to it yet. That is, the mental picture that people have of violence is narrower, and more severe, than the conceptual space that many definitions of the term have sought to fill. At least here in the United States, anyway. Perhaps people in Europe have a broader understanding that takes into account that anything from skipping a child support payment to outright warfare all count as violence, and so there's a need for greater nuance than the word alone can provide.

I'm somewhat bummed that I came to a fascination with the way language evolves so recently. I wish that I'd paid more attention to linguistics when I was in high school and college. But, latecomer or not, here I am and one of the nice things about watching the evolution of language is that there isn't a bad seat in the house.

I don't know how long this will be top-of-mind for me, but I think I should keep an eye on terms like "economic violence," and see how they propagate through societies. I suspect that its inclusion in the NPR piece will lead to it popping up in other areas, especially if NPR's audience starts to expect to see it in other outlets they frequent. And given the partisan nature of discourse in the United States, it's likely to be enlisted in the Culture Wars. But only time will tell.