How are Structural Violence and Direct Violence Related?

Violence is “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, 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 (P-5, S 37).”  In C. Sarah Soh’s book, The Comfort Women, she introduces the reader to the gender based violence against women in Japan during the time of World War II. 

            Soh's main argument is that "the personal tragedies of Korean comfort women arose, in part, from the institutionalized everyday gender violence tolerated in patriarchal homes and enacted in the public sphere (including the battlefront) steeped in what I call 'masculinist sexual culture' in colonial Korea and imperial Japan." Additionally, "the majority of Korean comfort women survivors were not mobilzed as cheongsindae." (Soh, p. 3) In other words, the comfort women system cannot be properly understood outside of the structural gender violence prevalent in both Korea and Japan which allowed it to flourish as a transformation and extension of prewar sexual practices.

Soh reviews the social and cultural structures of oppression that enabled the wide spread of the comfort women system in the Japanese empire before and during the war, noting that "the way in which they [South Korea activists and their supporters] have framed the story of comfort women as exclusively a Japanese war crimes issue has diverted attention from the sociocultural and historical roots of women's victimization in Korea" (Soh, p. 1-2).  Women victimization is an example of structural violence that leads direct violence towards these women.

Direct violence is very simple, and can be defined as physical violence that harms or kills people, producing somatic trauma/total incapacitation (P-5, S 38).  Alternatively, structural violence is not as simple.  Structural violence kills indirectly and slowly, shortening life spans by depriving people of material and non-material resources (P-5, S 39).  Structural violence devalues a segment of a population based on their political, economic, cultural, racial/ethnic, social, gender, religious background

            In the book, the lines between structural violence and direct violence are blurred.  Korean women are forcibly taken from their families, and their homes. They are then forced to be ‘comfort women’ for men of the Japanese Imperial army.  These women lived nearly every day of their lives being forced to have sex men they have no interest in being with.  The comfort woman system is one that is referred to as a “a system of military sex slavery” (Soh, p.49).  That line alone will rub anyone the wrong way. 

Reviewing the different kinds of "comfort stations"(Soh, p.108) involved in the comfort women system and the different kinds of sexual labor that took place there, Soh finds that the comfort women system encompassed both the more familiar "forced military prostitution" (Soh, p.107) and sexual slavery and militarily authorized licensed prostitution in which comfort women were lucratively compensated, for their sexual labor.  These women are victims of direct violence when they physically being raped and assaulted.  However, the social norms that have been set in place by World War II Japanese society are an example of Structural Violence.

The Comfort Women encompasses both structural and direct violence as covers the sex slave industry in Japan during World War II.  This was developed as a result of authority figures doing nothing to prevent it, which I see as structural violence. On the other hand, the kidnapping and rape is clearly a prime example of the direct violence that is found throughout the book.  The Comfort Women  does a wonderful job of discussing both of these topics inter-dependently.