Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in low-income neighborhoods

WSIF-01711; No of Pages 12 Women's Studies International Forum xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

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Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in low-income neighborhoods Silvia Dominguez a,⁎, Cecilia Menjivar b a b

Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Northeastern University, Holmes 525, Boston, MA 02115, United States School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Sociology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-3701, United States

a r t i c l e

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s y n o p s i s Low-income minority women are among the most disadvantaged in terms of social location, which exposes them to various forms of violence that perpetuate their poverty. Previous research has focused on individual explanations of actions that affect them. We seek to redirect our understandings away from individual explanations to focus on the broader contexts and inequalities that lie at the root of multiple and interconnected forms of violence in the lives of women in vulnerable positions. This approach facilitates recognition of violent structures often unrecognized or misrecognized as such. Our framework includes structural, interpersonal, and symbolic forms of violence, which we apply to examine the lives of a subsample of minoritystatus women gathered ethnographically in low-income neighborhoods in Boston, Los Angeles and New York through the Three City Study of Moving to Opportunity. In this exercise, we highlight the broader contexts that create conditions for individuals to harm one another. © 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Introduction Low-income minority women living in poor neighborhoods experience multiple disadvantages in terms of class, race and gender in ways that perpetuate their poverty and social vulnerability. Most of the literature that documents their lives focuses primarily on individual or other proximate determinants of their situation, such as the violence occurring among males as well as domestic and other gender-based violence (Anderson, 2008; Sampson, 1987). Further, most of the research on sexual and gender-based violence highlights immediate factors, often not neighborhood-specific (Anderson & Umberson, 2001; Lundgren, 1998).1 Thus, this research tends to focus on individual acts of willful intention to cause harm (see Jackman, 2002), focusing on the characteristics of perpetrators and the interactional patterns that lead to violence. Indeed, Randall Collins (2008) notes that the way we have understood and studied violence has largely been guided by how data are collected — by examining individuals and their actions. While a focus on individuals is useful in identifying immediate determinants of acts of violence, it does not help ⁎ Corresponding author.

to detect patterns embedded in structural systems, which Feldman (1991) describes as formations of violence, or to understand how patterns of violence are connected to larger structures. Furthermore, by focusing on individual characteristics, research on violence in poor neighborhoods shifts the focus away from structural factors and inequalities that create the context within which violent acts in various forms take place (Johnson & Ferraro, 2000; Johnson, Palmieri, Jackson, & Hobfoll, 2007). Taking the work on individual factors as a point of departure, we advance a perspective that focuses on the structural roots of violence in the lives of women. We do not locate our work directly within the scholarship on domestic violence or on individual's victimization because the forms of violence we seek to unveil are normally not recognized as such (and not “counted” as violence) and indeed go misrecognized in the “order of things” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2004). We focus on providing another angle, anchored in structures and extrapersonal factors, from which to examine and understand violence in women's lives—both in visible expressions, such as physical violence, as well as in less visible manifestations, such as the injuries that come from profound structural inequalities. More specifically, this article is not

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.01.012 0277-5395/© 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Please cite this article as: Dominguez, S., & Menjivar, C., Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in..., Women's Studies International Forum (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.01.012

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about violence against women or based on this scholarship; rather, we focus on how different forms of violence in the lives of women are tied together. To achieve this, we make use of a framework that includes structural, interpersonal, and symbolic forms of violence initially developed to examine violence in the lives of Guatemalan women (see Menjívar, 2011). This framework in some ways parallels the intersectionality approach (Crenshaw, 1989a,b), a particularly useful tool to examine the lives of women who face multiple layers of discrimination and exclusion in a context of multidimensional power structures. Proponents of intersectionality (see Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1989a,b) argue that different systems of stratification and oppression, such as race, class, and gender shape and are shaped by one another in a “matrix of domination” (Collins, 2000: 42) and their effects cannot be analyzed separately. In a similar vein, Critical Race theorists like Derrick Bell and Patricia Williams point out that race alone cannot account for disempowerment. Instead, factors like race, class, gender, national origin and sexual orientation are all parts of the multidimensionality of oppression. Our approach parallels these conceptualizations in that we also argue that different forms of oppression are intertwined and cannot be analyzed separately, but instead of integrating race, class, gender, and national origin, we locate the sources of suffering in extrapersonal factors and thus bring together structural violence, symbolic, and interpersonal forms of violence. The violent effects of the accumulation of multiple forms of deprivation and devaluation of personhood can be found in poor areas of the global South as well as in innercities of the north. Thus, using a framework developed to unveil multi-sided and interconnected, often hidden, forms of violence in the lives of women who live in a different social and geographic contexts, and who on the surface may seem to have little in common, we highlight the structural roots of vulnerabilities and suffering manifested in context-specific ways in the lives of vulnerable women in the most disadvantaged social locations in their respective societies. We follow feminist legal scholars like Schneider (1992: 568) who call us to hold on to both particularity (the particular experiences of women who have had relationships with battering men) and generality (violence and power and control, reasonableness and the larger struggle of women in the world) simultaneously. In this light, our work is relevant to theorizing the conditions in which vulnerable women live around the world today.2 Thus, we “extend” a framework used in another case and context, following closely Snow, Morrill, and Anderson's (2003: 187) proposals for theorizing based on ethnographic work. Accordingly, our use of this framework involves the “transferability” of theory to a different context (2003: 187), shifting attention from factual novelties and the peculiarity of actual events to trans-situational patterns; from the concrete, to the search for formal patterns across a multiplicity of situations or contexts (Zerubavel, 1980). Therefore, as Snow et al. (2003: 189) note, “although the specific contents of the actions observed are different, their social forms are quite similar,” and it is through extension that we can advance theory based on ethnographic work. Thus, we extend this framework to data obtained ethnographically among low-income minority women participating in the Three City Study of Moving to Opportunity conducted in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. We argue

that analytical attention should begin with the context in which multiple, layered forms of violence coalesce, setting the conditions within which individuals hurt one another and social relations are distorted, an approach that has been used to study violence in other US urban contexts (see Bourgois, 2004a,b). Although this framework gives primacy to broader contextual factors, we recognize the importance of individual and intermediate level factors because the broader context shapes these other proximate determinants and thus they are all intimately related. Shifting attention away from individual acts to the broader context may lead to a reframing of how we understand violence in the lives of women (and men). We briefly consider the literature on violence in low-income neighborhoods pertaining to youth violence and household or home-based violence, the two areas related to violence in poor neighborhoods that have garnered significant scholarly attention. We then present our analytical framework to highlight how our approach differs from work that has been done in this area, and end this section with a discussion on how these types of violence are gendered. We then review the data we use and our methodological approach before we turn to our empirical sections, where we present cases of structural, interpersonal and symbolic violence. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of using this framework to examine violence in the lives of women in US contexts. Violence in high poverty neighborhoods A review of the literature linking neighborhood disadvantage to violence reveals a focus on youth-related violence, but less attention to sexual and gender-based violence even though both are quite common in poor neighborhoods. Miller's (2008) research in a historically African-American high poverty neighborhood in St. Louis demonstrates how sexual and genderbased violence are normalized and become normative. Nevertheless, it is the high rates of violence associated with crime in poor neighborhoods that have attracted more attention and have led to important explanations of violence that go beyond individual acts. For instance, Devine (1996a, 1996b) posits that schools in inner-cities contribute to the development of a “culture of violence” by increasing the militarized and prisonlike security dynamics in inner-cities. In the same vein, youths in deprived 3 neighborhoods who are exposed to high levels of violence tend to develop cognitive frames that normalize violence. And Gilligan (1996) theorizes that experiences of humiliations, particularly for those in disadvantaged social locations, breed violence. Other scholars focus on social networks as possible explanations for violence in deprived communities (Haynie, Silver, & Teasdale, 2006; Kreager, 2007), as negative peer relations can provide harmful social modeling, which reinforces the use of violence to achieve objectives (Collins & Pancoast, 1976a,b). While this scholarship focuses primarily on individuals' immediate social worlds, many of these studies do acknowledge the broader structure in shaping individuals' acts of violence (Anderson, 2008; Gilligan, 1996; Kramer, 2000). As in the case of youth violence, studies on domestic violence generally use individual-level approaches to examine this type of violence; thus, several variables have been examined, such as witnessing violence while growing up (Martin et al., 2002; Osofsky, 1995); difficulties controlling anger (Feldman & Ridley, 1995; Follingstad, Bradley, Laughlin, & Burke,

Please cite this article as: Dominguez, S., & Menjivar, C., Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in..., Women's Studies International Forum (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.01.012

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1999); drug and alcohol problems (Farley, 1996; Klostermann & Fals-Stewart, 2006); poor communication skills and hostile attributional styles (Malik & Lindahl, 1998), that are correlated with the perpetration of domestic violence. Others have posited a “culture of battering”, in which a set of informal rules and statements results in the escalation of violence (Fischer, Vidmar, & Ellis, 1993; Rimelspach, 2001). Still others have looked at power differentials in relationships that result in domestic violence (Johnson & Ferraro, 2000), such as the shift in power dynamics that occurs when women earn more than men, which can result in men's perceived lack of control and ultimately lead to violence (Author, 1999). In a minority of cases, these types of power differential can lead women in homosexual and/or heterosexual relationships to act violently as well. As with youth violence, some scholars of domestic violence have argued that violence can become normative through social modeling (Jewkes, 2002; Dominguez, 2011). The normalization of violence, it is argued, numbs and desensitizes individuals to violence, depleting their emotional resources and increasing vulnerability to further violence (Johnson et al., 2007). Generations of exclusion and discrimination can lead to cultural adaptations that sometimes further reinforce inequality (Menjívar, 2011; Wilson, 2009). Recognized as a public health issue and focusing on individuals as perpetrators, research in this area tends to focus on prevention (Saltzman, Green, Marks, & Thacker, 2000). The scholarship we have summarized has indisputably advanced our understanding of how violent exchanges arise and has shed light on the characteristics that can predispose individuals to engage in violent situations. However, following Jackman's (2002) heed, we seek to focus on forms of violence beyond the interpersonal (and beyond individual characteristics and motivations) which are hidden in structures and institutions and contort human relations among residents in disadvantaged contexts. Thus, we see our contribution as opening up the analytical lens to recognize a multiplicity of extrapersonal forms of violence located in structures which then coalesce in the lives of deprived women and are experienced in the form of everyday suffering. These conditions are often not recognized as violence because they are not experienced in the form of individual acts with the intention to cause harm. These various forms of violence are layered on one another and deeply interconnected, veiled and expressed in normalized fashion in direct and indirect forms, in visible and sometimes invisible ways (Menjívar, 2011). Indeed, the pervasiveness of violence in sites identified as ‘poor neighborhoods with little capital use’ in the neo-liberal economic system, which simultaneously removes large numbers of men through incarceration while rendering women vulnerable to multi-sided violence, takes on the effect of “white noise”. As Feldman (1991) notes, “This is the backgrounding of violence, that is, the emergence of violence as the assumed basis of entire domains of social interaction and of the informal ideologies of everyday life” (110). Theoretical framework of violence: Visible and invisible forms The experiences of minority women in deprived neighborhoods are shaped by a multilayered web that includes structural, interpersonal, symbolic, gendered forms of violence, such that one form acts on the other to exacerbate individual effects. To be sure, we are not the first to argue that various forms

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of disadvantage (and derivative forms of violence) accumulate, “piling up” in the lives of the poor and marginalized (see Farrell et al., 2007); indeed Bourgois (2009) and Scheper-Hughes (1997) have noted important connections between visible and invisible forms of violence in contexts where they are often unrecognized as violence. What we propose here is to use an analytical framework that identifies the violence in unequal structures and practices that are connected through the thread of injury (see Jackman, 2002), and to examine how various forms of violence shape the quotidian lives of women living in deprived neighborhoods with a view to opening a policyrelevant discussion. Complementing and paralleling intersectionality and its concern for the effects of mutually constitutive social positions (Crenshaw, 1989a,b), we shed light on the structures within which social positions emerge. For ease of discussion we lay out each form of violence below, keeping in mind that these occur simultaneously in the lives of women, and it is precisely their intertwined nature that we emphasize here. As several scholars have observed, lack of economic opportunities together with social isolation creates a context in which interpersonal violence thrives (Popkin, Leventhal, & Weismann, 2010; Wilson, 1987). We explore how these observations are lived on the ground. Structural violence As others who have used a similar framework to examine multiple vulnerabilities in various sites around the world (Bourgois, 2004a,b; Farmer, 2004; Scheper-Hughes, 1992), we include in our lens structural violence, which, as TorresRivas (1998, p. 48) observes, “is rooted in the uncertainty of daily life…it is reproduced in the context of the market, in exploitative labor relations, when income is precarious and it is concealed as underemployment, or is the result of educational segmentation and of multiple inequalities that block access to success.” Structural violence has no identifiable “perpetrator”; violence is built into the structure and shows up as deeply unequal life chances (Galtung, 1969). In contrast to physical violence, structural violence harms both directly and indirectly through a slow but steady process. When violence is a byproduct of the social and economic structure and its roots are invisible, it is difficult to be concerned about something that cannot be seen (Gilligan, 1996; Kent, 2006). Thus, malnutrition and a lack of resources do not appear to be a form of violence because immediate death is not the result, but as Galtung (1990) observed, for those in the most disadvantaged social locations, such shortfalls do amount to a slow death. An examination of the ills that afflict the poor from this vantage point highlights how a political economy of inequality promotes social suffering, forcing us to reflect upon structural violence as economic oppression that the poor endure (Bourgois, 2004a,b). We pay attention to feminist scholars' observation that when attention rests on individual actions, “the focus is still on the woman and her individual pathology instead of on the batterer and the social structures that support the oppression of women and glorify violence” (Schneider, 1992: 568), a point that weakens the fight for gender equality (Schechter, 1982). Structural violence is expressed in unemployment, layoffs, unequal access to goods and services, and exploitation (Bourgois, 2004a,b), which impacts a range of social relations,

Please cite this article as: Dominguez, S., & Menjivar, C., Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in..., Women's Studies International Forum (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.01.012

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including those that shape social capital generation. Structural violence therefore makes people vulnerable to numerous forms of harm, including direct physical assaults, robberies, insults, and humiliations (see Menjívar, 2011). The broader political economy creates numerous forms of harm, which people suffer, and in turn causes them to harm one another, distorting social relations and cognitive frames to understand the world. Interpersonal violence Everyday violence includes the daily expressions on a microinteractional level, such as interpersonal, domestic, and delinquent violence. This concept comes from the work of Scheper-Hughes (1992, 1997) and Bourgois (2004a,b) to focus on the routine practices and expressions of interpersonal aggression that serve to normalize violence at the micro-level. This concept of violence focuses on “the individual lived experience that normalizes petty brutalities and terror at the community level and creates a common sense or ethos of violence” (Bourgois, 2004a, 2004b, p. 426). Like our project, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2004) avoid explaining individual-level confrontations and expressions of violence, such as “common” crime and domestic violence, through psychological or individualistic frameworks. Instead, the prism they propose links these acts to broader structures of inequality that promote interpersonal violence. From this angle, one can trace the violence of common crime to structural violence (see also Portes & Roberts, 2005), as well as to the creation of a “culture of terror” that normalizes violence in the private and public spheres. Using this framework, we can understand how those who experience structural violence end up directing their brutality against themselves, rather than against the structures that oppress them (see Bourgois, 2004a,b). Symbolic violence Symbolic violence, according to Bourdieu (2004), refers to internalized humiliations and legitimations of inequality and hierarchy, which range from sexism and racism to intimate expressions of class power. As Bourdieu and Wacquant (2004, p. 273) put it, “it is the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity,” exercised through cognition and misrecognition, with the unwitting consent of the dominated (see also Bourgois, 2004a, 2004b). In this conceptualization, “the dominated apply categories constructed from the point of view of the dominant to relations of domination, thus making it appear as natural. This can lead to systematic selfdepreciation, even self-denigration” (Bourdieu, 2004, p. 339). A key point in Bourdieu's conceptualization that is relevant for our work is the notion that an everyday, normalized familiarity with violence renders it invisible; power structures are misrecognized, and the mechanisms through which violence is exerted do not lie in conscious knowing but rather are entrenched in the “social order of things” (see Kleinman, 2000). Auyero and de Lara (2012) introduce a key distinction here, between habituation (or desensitization) and familiarization (noticing, but being used to); we mean the latter. Symbolic violence in the form of feelings of inadequacy, mutual recrimination, and exploitation of one's closest relations diverts

attention from those responsible for the conditions of violence in the first place (the state and classes in power) (ScheperHughes & Bourgois, 2004). Symbolic violence causes direct harm as well as racial harm. Roberts (2002) demonstrated how the child welfare system uses negative belief systems, which racially harm minority children and their entire communities. Smith (2005) focuses on the lack of judicial response to the heavy toll of sexual violence and its role in the ongoing genocide of Native Americans. Thus, symbolic violence grounded in racism and sexism emerges in social exclusion and oppression in institutions in high-poverty neighborhoods; as such, it is deeply intertwined with structural and with everyday violence. Bourdieu's (1991) concept of symbolic violence allows us to focus on how the dominated naturalize hierarchies and the status quo and blame themselves for their conditions, a key point for our examination. Gendered violence Given the population we examine and the various forms of violence to which they are exposed, we turn to Hammar's (1999) and Bourdieu and Wacquant's (2004) work to highlight how the forms of violence we outline become gendered. According to Hammar's (1999) conceptualization, gender differences that occur in a gender-imbalanced political economy that disadvantages women represent gender violence, whereas acts of violence, including physical, psychological, and linguistic violence, constitute gendered violence (1999, p. 91). And according to Bourdieu and Wacquant (2004, p. 273), “The case of gender domination shows better than any other that symbolic violence accomplishes itself through an act of cognition and of misrecognition that lies beyond—or beneath—the controls of consciousness and will, in the obscurities of the schemata of habitus that are at once gendered and gendering” (original emphasis). Gender and gendered violence work in conjunction with each other, an interlocking that harms women in various ways – some times more visibly and direct than others – particularly as new arenas in which gender becomes a significant axis of stratification multiply. Disadvantaged social locations place women in situations where they are exposed to gender and gendered violence. Structural, symbolic, and everyday violence coalesce in the lives of study participants in Boston, Los Angeles and New York in “normalized” fashion so that non-physical violence is not usually recognized as such because it is not localized in individual, discrete acts that can be counted and tabulated. The women's experiences of suffering the ravages of poverty, humiliations, and assaults to their personhood based on the race or gender, and daily interpersonal violence are often seen as part of the “social order of things”. It is this normalization and “misrecognition,” in Bourdieu's (2004) conceptualization, that perpetuates and exacerbates existing forms, and even creates new forms, of suffering that obstructs people's paths, both women and men. Data and methods This study uses data gathered ethnographically through the Three City Study of Moving to Opportunity (3CMTO) conducted in Boston, Los Angeles, and New York from 2003 to 2006. The family-level data were collected in 2004 and 2005.

Please cite this article as: Dominguez, S., & Menjivar, C., Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in..., Women's Studies International Forum (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.01.012

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The 3CMTO focused on seeking a better understanding of the conditions of life among the mostly African-American and Latin-American4 women who participated in the Moving to Opportunity program. The study used an integrated mixed method approach in the three sites that includes: a) neighborhood scans; b) 276 semi-structured, in-depth qualitative interviews with a stratified random sample of parents, adolescents, and young adults in all three treatment groups; and c) family-focused ethnographic fieldwork (Burton, 1997). The first author was one of a group of ethnographers in the “family-focused” fieldwork (see Burton, 1997), which included repeated two-hour visits with a subset of 39 families that participated in the ethnographic study who were visited monthly over a period of six to eight months. This paper is based on this subset of 39 families and family members interviewed include mothers and children. The ethnographic fieldwork, a blend of naturalistic or unstructured interviewing, semi-structured interviewing, and direct observation of family life inside and outside the home, complemented what participants reported about their views, attitudes, choices, and outcomes (Comey, de Souza Briggs, & Weismann, 2008). The project team, including some of the ethnographers, analyzed and coded the field notes (with reliability checks) using EthnoNotes, an online software program that facilitates multi-site team ethnography (Lieber, Weisner, & Presley, 2003). The analysis included individual, family, and grouplevel analyses in the form of memo-ing (Miles & Huberman, 1994). The first author scoured the data for mental healthrelated information including symptoms related to depression, anxiety and high levels of stress as well as descriptions of stressors related to poverty including various forms of violence. Importantly, we did not ask questions about violence directly, but the various expressions on which we focus, came up inductively regularly in the course of data analysis. As Purvin (2007) discovered, ethnographic research on minoritystatus low-income women yields information from a contextual and relational perspective that is seldom accessible through research focused specifically on violence. Out of the 39 women in the families on whom this paper is based, 18 are African-American; 15 are Latin-American; four are labeled “other” and two are Asians. The average age for the African-American women is 41.7 years and they have an average of 1.7 children. The average age for the Latin-American group is 37.5 years, and the average number of children is two. The average age of the “other” participants is 38.7 years and they have an average of 1.2 children. The two Asian mothers had an average age of 56.5 years and 2 children. Multisided violence as multiple burdens, neighborhood violence, and threats The multiple burdens that low-income women endure, such as financial insecurity, lack of access to good-quality medical care, household management problems, and neighborhood violence, constitute expressions of structural violence. They coalesce with the symbolic violence that comes from overt and subtle acts of discrimination directed at vulnerable women. The majority of the women on whom we base this paper were single mothers, and all came from low-income families making an average of $16,278 per year. The symbolic violence

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in the lives of low-income minority women is often expressed in the denigration that comes from stereotypes (welfare dependent, drug-seeking), which are used to discriminate and negate services and opportunities to them. The symbolic violence embedded in such discriminatory, normalized practices has a number of short and long-term consequences, ranging from high levels of stress, to the internalization of inequality and oppression, to a decrease in life span and the perpetuation of poverty (Jackson, Antonucci, & Gibson, 1995). Thus, one form of violence acts on the other to exacerbate the women's vulnerability obstructing their life chances by creating race-based stress that can lead to unemployment, abuse and dependence of substances which can then lead to criminal involvement (Richie, 1996; Shepard & Pence, 1999).5 To illustrate, we first present cases that exemplify each form of violence separately, and end with cases in which these forms of violence coalesce. Structural violence Structural violence, through the unequal distribution of resources and lack of economic opportunities, conflated with symbolic violence in the form of racism and discrimination, keeps low-income minorities, particularly women, living in poverty and financial insecurity. For instance, in 2008, 24.7% of blacks and 23.2% of Latinos were poor, compared to 8.6% of non-Hispanic whites and 11.8% of Asians (Gabe, 2009). But poverty, like other social ills, is gendered: 28.7% of households headed by single women were poor, while 13.8% of households headed by single men and 5.5% of married-couple households lived in poverty in 2008; poverty rates are highest for families headed by black or single Latinas (Gabe, 2009). A case in point is Tina, a 39-year-old African-American mother of one in New York City who was in an extremely precarious situation, which illustrates how poverty and deeply unequal access to resources are manifested in the health disparities that the poor endure. Tina had recently lost her mother, who had died from medical problems before turning fifty. Now Tina was facing the loss of housing and welfare benefits, and was concerned because she had a blood clot in her leg, causing her pain when she stood for long periods of time, which was a requirement of many of the jobs that were available through welfare to work programs. My leg was hurting me, constantly. We always standing. The doctor said to just keep taking the pills, I had missed taking them because I was stressed but he said just to make sure I take them and I be okay… Sometimes I get a little dizzy, weak…. Tina had to place her own health at risk in order to maintain her meager income and a home in public housing. In fact, welfare-to-work programs are the state-directed institutions that mediate how low-income women are punished by a neo-liberal economic system that has no legitimate use for them (Wacquant, 2008).6 And like others, Laura, a 47-year-old Latin-American mother of six in New York, always calculated her ability to pay her bills by determining how much she would receive from disability, food stamps and welfare payments, and how these payments would fluctuate according to her part time job meager earnings. The constant vigilance

Please cite this article as: Dominguez, S., & Menjivar, C., Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in..., Women's Studies International Forum (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.01.012

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and calculations that the social welfare system requires kept Laura wondering constantly if she had enough to pay her bills and in fear of eviction. This is one example of how structural violence, where the state and its practices figure prominently, manifests itself in the lives of the vulnerable. In the case of Monica, her level of education and skills, expressions of deep inequalities in the educational system, only enable her to obtain low-paying jobs. The 46 year-old, married Latin-American woman with three children in Los Angeles worries about the stability of her job and of life in general. Bernardo, her husband, had lost a job recently, causing added financial stress. The family endured this hardship for some time until Bernardo was able to find another job. During Bernardo's unemployment, Monica worked at a Catholic school and had received two warnings that threatened her position and made her feel vulnerable. She complained about “a lot of stress…Money…what will happen if we lose our job.” Her concerns were valid given that her work hours were reduced, she did not receive a Christmas bonus or paid Christmas vacation, and she knew the school district was laying off teachers. Monica and her husband were hopeful about their children's chances to go to college, but worried that by losing their income, they would jeopardize these chances. The constant threat of lay-offs renders low-resourced people vulnerable to further violence and leads to health disparities and the lowering of their life span (Bourdieu, 1998; Torres-Rivas, 1998), effectively leading to a “slow death” (Galtung, 1969). Structural violence is also manifested in a lack of school funding and failure to sustain an infrastructure conducive to learning, which exacerbate the vulnerability that inner-city schools face in efforts to educate children. Stephanie, a 32 year old African-American mother of two in Los Angeles, explained that she worries about her daughter Shari's middle school and would like to have her bussed out of the neighborhood for high school. Because they don't have enough security, police patrol. Because guys from different neighborhoods be hopping the gate and pulling guns on young kids. So, it's not a good school…the kids are not really safe there. It seemed like it's worse now because all of the gangs are, it's worse. [Shari] don't like it. They be more scared to go to school. Because they think that somebody going come up there and shoot. Such conditions derail inner-city kids' education and their chances for economic mobility, and are a constant source of fear in the lives of the mothers. As Shari explains, “I'm allowed just to walk to, like, Jordan Down, Nickerson, like that, sometimes. I'm not allowed to go everywhere.” In fact, Stephanie, her mother, also limits her own activities. I couldn't go sit outside and get fresh air. None of that… Can't go outside to clean up your yard without looking back on for thinking somebody will come through shooting. It was just very uncomfortable. Devante (her son) started to have nightmares from the shootings in the neighborhood. Shifting the lens to unveil the roots of suffering in the broader context, beyond individual acts, gives us a different image of how life in disadvantaged communities is shaped by multiple inequalities and larger forces. The restructuring of welfare has forced many minority, low-income women off of welfare and into low-wage jobs

with little or no security or benefits which leaves them without the necessary funds to run a household (Belle & Dodson, 2006; Stacey, 2005). In addition, as Tina and Juana (in the next section) show, these jobs at times endanger the health and lives of low-income women, compounding their already vulnerable situation as members of the uninsured or sub-insured poor. This is how structural violence manifests itself in the lives of the socially and economically vulnerable. These conditions intertwine with other forms of violence, such as interpersonal violence, to which we now turn. Interpersonal violence Structural violence limits the opportunity structure of individuals, who purportedly turn to interpersonal violence to gain respect and dominance thus increasing the violence in the lives of low-income women (Stewart & Simons, 2010). The analytical framework we offer builds on Ellison's work (ibid) to include other forms of violence. The women who participated in MTO lived in “severely distressed” neighborhoods characterized by a high poverty rate, high percentages of female-headed households, high percentages of unemployed working-age males, and high levels of school dropouts (O'Hare & Mather, 2003). Using the analytical prism we employ here, we argue that the multi-layered context in which the women lived “piles up”, setting the conditions for interpersonal violence in the lives of women. Several of the women in the three sites had experienced and witnessed gendered interpersonal violence at home and in their low-income neighborhoods. As a result, some of them had limited their physical movement in their neighborhoods, leading them to avoid certain areas or specific locations where they had experienced violence. This is how space and place in high poverty neighborhoods and most public housing developments become synonymous with violence (Feldman, 1991) and are gendered. Stephanie lived with her 13 year-old daughter, Shari, and 4 year-old son, Devante, in public housing in the Watts neighborhood of LA. She avoided a certain street because, she explained, “my daddy got killed on that street. I don't go on that street…the children have seen guns in the neighborhood” and they had relatives who were killed or injured in crossfire. Interpersonal violence and deviance that is considered criminal are prevalent in these neighborhoods, where viable forms to make a living are practically nonexisting and dilapidated housing is abundant; these and other forms of violence become commonplace and familiar and embedded in the “social order of things.” However, residents of low-income neighborhoods experience a lack of confidence in the judicial system's willingness to prosecute as it does in higher income areas. A case in point is Patricia, a 34-year-old African-American mother of three who had experienced a life time of interpersonal violence which was never investigated by police and further reinforced her embodiment of other forms of violence endured (Feldman, 1991). Her partner and the father of her children sexually and physically abused her, but the context in which she lived all her life had shaped in particular ways the cognitive frame with which she interpreted this treatment: … because I have been through an abusive relationship with my kids' dad, but I loved him, but I was 19 years old

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when I got with him, and I didn't know what was right and what was wrong. He hit me. He was hitting me because he loved me…I think that's maybe why he turned to drugs too, because he knew that he did me wrong, and his kids, he never been abusive to his kids, he loved his kids, just me, just fighting me, I've been through a lot of hard stuff. I try to be strong and not think about it because that is the past, but it's hard…. Noteworthy, her partner's life was also shaped by the same context, and by the symbolic violence and internalization of self-blame that Patricia and her partner experienced, which made both of them vulnerable to other forms of violence, including diminished self-esteem, self-recrimination, shame, and guilt (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2004; Bourgois & Schonenberg, 2009). In keeping with our objective, we emphasize that both, those who harm and the harmed, live in the same contexts and thus their cognitive frames are shaped by the same forces where they suffer from the same lack of resources, unavailability of viable economic activities, and daily humiliations and discrimination from the bureaucracy that oversees their lives. In fact, the line between those who inflict harm and those who suffer is blurred under conditions of structural and symbolic violence (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004). Symbolic violence Symbolic violence in the form of racial harassment, humiliations, and the internalization of these injuries was routine in the lives of women in the study. Racial harassment is degrading, frightening and sometimes physically violent, can extend over a considerable period of time, and it can have serious psychological, job-related, and health-related consequences that result from humiliation and the internalization of oppression (Buchanan & Ormerod, 2002; Hensing & Alexanderson, 2000). Symbolic violence stemming from racism and racial discrimination constitutes discriminatory stress; racial harm and race-based stress (Carter 2007; Roberts, 2002). Symbolic violence emerges in negative belief systems perpetuated by power structures, dominant classes, institutional practices, and media outlets. Symbolic violence in the form of racial discrimination comes from individuals in the neighborhood and in employment settings; this is how the vulnerable end up hurting each other. Kim moved to a new neighborhood to escape interpersonal violence, but there she began to experience racial harassment from her new white neighbors and was unable to find a job or access training opportunities. Consequently, she moved to another, higher poverty neighborhood. But there, Kim was under so much stress that she experienced “heart palpitations” and “high blood pressure.” The violence in the contexts in which Kim lived had physical manifestations. And while women like Kim are often seen as failures for their inability to live in better neighborhoods, we would like to point to the social context where discrimination and harassment are routine, injuring the lives of those who are exposed. This is also the case of Anique, who lived in Los Angeles, is 32 years old, African-American, and a single mother to 11 year-old Clara. She had been the target of racist insults and racism at her school; Anique blamed the neighbors. Individuals often blame

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others in similar circumstances (rather than social structures) for their condition.7 This misdirection of blame and internationalization of structures of privilege highlight the symbolic violence in the lives of the lives of the vulnerable. In addition, Anique's status of being on probation, and the perceptions and stereotypes associated with it, compounded her vulnerability. She returned home from work stressed due to what she perceived to be sexual harassment from her supervisor. As she explained angrily, “He knows exactly how far he can go, as far as the guidelines about what constitutes harassment will let him.” As Silber (2004) observes, when women are economically vulnerable, they not only become vulnerable to men's sexual violence and easily exploited, but are also seen as culpable for their own conditions, which in turn limits their ability to seek redress for their predicament. April, a 51 year-old African-American single mother of two in New York, experienced racial harassment routinely. She worked at a retirement home with a largely white resident population that uttered “racial slurs” to her regularly. When asked why she put up with it, she replied, “I have to, honey. I just go for my kids….it's such a nasty job, it makes me mad…but I don't bring that home, otherwise I'll kill somebody.” April's words highlight how violence is carried forward discursively, as it speaks to the frustrations she faces that arise from the structural violence in her life, simultaneously replicating a violent modality. April's words also demonstrate how injurious acts in the form of racism transform and contort social relations. The physical manifestations should also be noted, as racial and sexual harassment have severe consequences for health, such as increased blood pressure (Krieger et al., 2008), and contribute to health disparities (Ilies, Hauserman, Schwochau, & Stibal, 2003). In fact, discriminatory stress results in a reduction in life expectancy (Lauderdale, 2006; Williams, 1998). Multisided cumulative violence In preceding sections, we have presented instances of the different forms of violence separately so as to illustrate how they may manifest in the women's lives. In this section, we highlight how multisided violence coalesces in the women's quotidian lives. The symbolic violence that comes from racism exacerbates the effects of structural violence marked by deeply unequal access to housing, good quality health care, and unemployment, which then create conditions where interpersonal violence can happen; all together, they shape gendered forms of violence for women in vulnerable social positions. For instance, many public housing developments are dilapidated and poorly maintained by public services (Cova, 2005). Yolanda, a 39-year-old Latin-American mother of two in Boston, suffered significantly when her building caught fire but the local fire department was unable to respond in time: “It traumatized me so much…when I saw the two-year-old baby burn in the crib.” In public housing, where residents have little to no control over their environment, failure to adequately implement fire codes and preventive efforts constitute disregard for the lives of the poor. Without an affordable alternative to public housing, Yolanda and others like her are often literally trapped in these unsafe structures. 8 The residents endure the structural violence of deep inequalities in housing, as well as the symbolic violence that comes

Please cite this article as: Dominguez, S., & Menjivar, C., Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in..., Women's Studies International Forum (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.01.012

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from a bureaucracy that places little value on their lives. Yolanda's sickness was intensified by her fear every time her children went back to the site of the fire, where high levels of interpersonal violence put her children, family and friends in danger. And the scarcity of resources available to Yolanda placed her in continued danger of gender and sexual violence. The proliferation of firearms in low-income neighborhoods points to the more visible manifestations of violence, as it results in injuries that increase lethality. A case in point is Patricia, introduced above, who talked extensively about several family members who had died through gun violence, and who, as previously described, had herself been sexually and physically abused. The justice system had not responded to these incidents, which demonstrates the injury of discrimination, racism and neglect that come from institutions, which exacerbates experiences of violence and revictimizes individuals. She burst into tears when talking with the ethnographer, crying in front of her children. The various forms of violence to which she had been exposed all her life had physical manifestations and had led her immobilized and unable to work. It's just like a lot, I got a lot of issues that I need to overcome, in order for me to get out in the work[ing] world. Because, if I get out in the world? I don't think I can handle that. Aware of her challenges, Patricia joined a church and received some support from the congregational community. But, the neighborhood violence, which took the lives of several family members, compounded the violence she faced at home as violence often travels both ways, i.e., between the street and home (Anderson, 2008). When asked about it, Patricia explained, I think I really needed counseling after my brother passed, you know, he got killed then, somebody took his life and my uncle, they took my uncle's life and one of my other uncles. I have, it's been like… my brother, my uncle, my other uncle, and my grandma. It's been like four deaths and that's not including, like, friends who I'd known or you know…yup. Cuz my mother… she's… like, when my brother got killed, my mother wanted to kill herself, and me and my sister we was like, ‘What about us momma?!’ you know. She was like, she didn't want to live no more after my brother got killed. She had lost her brothers and 'em previous, before that, so she was like, ‘What is it to live for?’, and that was so sad…it took a long time…. The combined experiences with multi-sided violence created conditions that made the rest of her family vulnerable to violence (Levendosky & Graham-Bermann, 2001). Patricia worried about her 12-year-old daughter, who gets into fights at school with another girl. Patricia has tried to intervene by talking to the other girl's mother, but she wonders if talking “really makes any difference.” Pointing to the structural violence that comes from a deeply unequal and acutely underfunded educational system, Patricia also worries about her children living amid neighborhood violence. She explained, “I want to see if can I get her bussed away, because I think that will be better for her and Tony… he'll be in 6th grade and I want to get him bussed out too, because the education out here is not good.” Not only is she unable to negotiate the sexual and

gender based violence and the many deaths of loved ones through neighborhood violence, but her sense of loss is compounded by her distrust in a system of justice. The sense of injustice for her family members' deaths has decreased Patricia's trust in legal institutions, cementing the injuries of symbolic violence. It has given her the impression that the lives of certain people, such as low-income minority males, are not worthy of equal treatment. The internalization of inequality resulting from feelings of devaluation by the formal structures that govern their lives, renders individuals unable to seek the few resources available to them. Indeed, legal institutions operate through a legitimizing frame that presents them as upholding equality when in practice they function within a framework of prejudice and thus apply policy inconsistently. This is behind the disproportionate levels of poor and racial minorities filling the nation's prison system. As such, legal institutions and the criminal justice system become vehicles of structural and symbolic violence.9 10 One ubiquitous expression of structural violence that exacerbates other forms of violence in the lives of residents of poor neighborhoods is the lack of jobs that offer living wages and benefits such as health insurance. Thus, they often risk their health and sometimes their lives in dangerous jobs. This is the case of Juana, a 26-year-old Latin-American mother of two in Boston who participated in a workfare program that pushed her off welfare and into a job as a health aid in a psychiatric setting. Without adequate training, she was left in a room with a woman who was psychotic and assaulted Juana, severely injuring her. This job did not offer worker's compensation or access to medical leave. She was fired, and adding insult to injury, which is how multiple forms of violence “pile up” in real life, Juana saw doctors who, Thought I was faking my pain and kept accusing me of lying…they thought I wanted drugs. This went on for a long time and the pain getting worse…until one day when I was hanging clothes and I got stuck in that place and could not move…I was eventually referred to a chiropractor who told me that I had already started to develop arthritis and he started to help me. However, I could not continue treatment because I could not pay for it. Symbolic violence in the form of negative belief systems about minority individuals promulgated by dominant ideologies are expressed as stereotypes, which can shape relations with institutions and limit access to resources like health care for women of color. Such discriminatory practices, which are found in the medical bureaucracy, left Juana with physical (and emotional) pain that only subsided when she was rushed to an emergency room in an immobilized state. Juana's health care was further compromised by the arthritis she developed as a result of the denial of care: Juana would not likely have developed arthritis at such an early age had her doctors believed her when she complained about her pain. However, similar to the case Holmes (2007) describes among farmworkers in California, the health professionals treating Juana rely on their personal conceptions about the illness of the poor and blame their patients for their own suffering. Juana's case shows how symbolic violence seeps through formal institutions to increase health disparities for low-income people.

Please cite this article as: Dominguez, S., & Menjivar, C., Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in..., Women's Studies International Forum (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.01.012

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Furthermore, Juana was no stranger to interpersonal gendered violence arising from the context in which she lived all her life. She met her son's father at the public housing development where he was shot and where she barely escaped three different drive-by shootings. Their courtship was embedded in multiple forms of violence, some of which were direct and visible while others more hidden and indirect. In her words, It was really nice at first and we were getting along really well and I helped him nurse his wounds… I used to hate to go out because of the shootings. I was close to drive-bys three times, and that had me pretty scared. A couple of years later, while living in subsidized housing, Juana was once again exposed to interpersonal violence, which threatened her and her family's safety at home. The man across the street has been threatening me… he has me going crazy… we used to be friends but then he got angry with me after I tried to talk to him about abusing his wife and he has been harassing me since then. I began to have panic attacks… I just knew that I was going to be attacked. The effects of this interpersonal violence were compounded by the housing authority's delay in acting on her complaint. Juana requested relocation, filing several complaints and calling the police several times, but “nobody ever did anything.” The wait resulted in a sustained high level of threat, which magnified her fears. In fact, it took more than two years for the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) to relocate her while she continued to be harassed. The BHA's inaction highlights how the mistreatment of the vulnerable is embedded in formal institutions, which is made possible by their disadvantaged social location, and how it exacerbates other conditions; in Juana's case, to the point where her mental health deteriorated and she felt the need to carry a switchblade “just in case.” After one lengthy period of heightened anxiety, someone called the Department of Social Services because Juana “was running out of money and food because [she] couldn't do anything.” Thus, though the inequality embedded in structures beyond her control contributed to her worsening health, the BHA and the physicians placed blame on Juana for her condition and the DSS worker referred her to a psychiatrist. Like Juana, other women also experienced neighborhood threat, which is shaped by gender constructions and by various forms of gendered and gender violence. Indeed, examined through the lens we employ here, neighborhood threat embodies structural, interpersonal, and symbolic violence; it is pervasive in high poverty neighborhoods and affects everyone routinely, albeit with different expressions according to social position. This is the “backgrounding of violence” that Feldman (1991) shapes in the “informal ideologies of everyday life” (110). Under these conditions, women attempt to avoid violent situations by bussing children away from neighborhood schools, fleeing to other cities, requesting relocation, and limiting personal relationships. Neighborhood threat is also an aspect of life that is normalized, familiar, but it recedes into the background and fades from view when the examination of violence focuses on the individual traits,

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acts, or perpetrators alone. Neighborhood threat forces some women and their families to become isolated and to see others as untrustworthy, thus creating further harm, as social relations are undermined. Danielle is a 32-year-old AfricanAmerican single mother of three girls who lived in a Boston neighborhood that is “not a good place to raise her daughters.” At her home's entrance, she displayed her favorite poster of Al Pacino with the quote, “Who do I trust? Me!” The quote embodies Danielle's approach to people, which her daughters had adopted. When the girls were asked who their role models were, each of them independently answered “me.” Kia explained, “I depend on myself! I take care of myself!” This staunch individualism appeared to curtail the depth of friendships. Danielle rationalized that there was no need to get to know her daughter's friend's parents, even though she spent the night at their home, because “it is only a school thing,” meaning that the friendship was likely to be temporary. As such, the threat of violence, in all its forms, distorts and limits social relations. The cases of Yolanda, Juana, Patricia and Danielle demonstrate the vulnerability to suffering embedded in disadvantaged social locations. Through the stories of their lives, and those of the other women in the study, we get a glimpse of how multi-sided violence intersects in the lives of vulnerable women and how these emerge in everyday life. A context of multi-layered violence, both visible and invisible, direct and indirect, curtails life chances, intensifies health disparities, perpetuates poverty, and ensures its reproduction. Structures that injure the poor are also embedded in bureaucracies that further mistreat low-income minority individuals so that the state is also deeply implicated in the production and reproduction of violent structures. Discussion and conclusion Although our examination is based on a small number of study participants, given their shared disadvantage across locations it is likely to potentially illuminate the experiences of other women of color in low-income neighborhoods. The structural violence that these women endure has deeply injurious ramifications for themselves, their families, and their communities. The omnipresent threat of unemployment, lack of access to education, to well-paying jobs with benefits, and to decent housing disrupts the women's capacity to rear children, as in the cases of Yolanda and Juana, to take advantage of opportunities to get ahead, such as in Kim's case, and obstructs countless others from participating constructively in their communities. And quite often, the women, as well as bureaucrats and institutions, blame themselves for their own shortcomings. In sum, structural violence, combined with symbolic, interpersonal, and gendered violence, shortens the women's lives and perpetuates poverty across generations; indeed, it amounts to a “slow death,” in the words of Galtung (1990). Importantly, whereas these various forms of violence lead to injury and suffering, they often go unrecognized as violent misrecognized because the outcomes (e.g., the social suffering they create) cannot be tabulated or counted in rates or as acts with the intention to cause harm. We focus on a structurally-based framework for examining the different types of violence affecting low-income minority-status women, and note that factors like racial and

Please cite this article as: Dominguez, S., & Menjivar, C., Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in..., Women's Studies International Forum (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.01.012

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gender discrimination and exclusion give rise to practices and cognitive frames that make violence normative and familiar. Symbolic violence also emerges in schemes embedded in discriminatory and racist practices in the bureaucracies and institutions that govern the lives of the poor, which exacerbate and “pile up” on existing economic insecurities. Drawing on Bourdieu's work on symbolic violence allows us to understand how the women internalize power inequalities and blame themselves or those close to them for their conditions. It also allows us to examine how the poor and marginalized end up hurting each other as structural power relations seep through to shape interpersonal and intimate relations. In this way, the framework we adopt allows us to make visible and to recognize violent structures and unveil misrecognized forms of violence. The framework we have used here is a useful tool to unearth the violence that does not come solely from interpersonal relations. Through this lens, we see how women experience deprivation and interpersonal violence not only in direct, physical harm, but also through the injuries that come from the bureaucracies that do not respond to their needs and instead disrespect and mistreat them, which exacerbate the harm because women are treated as if their lives are not valued. These processes lead to misrecognize injurious actions against the poor and permit blame to be misdirected to the individuals who suffer, who in turn internalize their own domination. Indeed, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes noted in her work in Brazil, “the routinization of everyday violence against the poor leads them to accept their own violent deaths and those of their children as predictable, natural, cruel, but all too usual deaths” (1997, p. 483). Similar violence is so commonplace among the poor and socially vulnerable that Martinez (2008) found a priest in a high poverty neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles whose primary concern was to help his parishioners accept their own deaths and the deaths of their children. Thus, while formal institutions provide succor to those who suffer during difficult moments, often they end up sustaining violent structures (Menjívar, 2011). Analytically and theoretically, the suffering that comes from the “piling up” of multiple forms of deprivation and devaluation of personhood can be found in poor areas of the global South as well as in inner-cities of the wealthy countries. Thus, we would like to acknowledge the connections and parallels (not specificities related to material goods) that exist between the experiences of women in Guatemala, on whose lives the framework we use here were developed, and the narratives of minority-status, low-income women living in subsidized housing in low-income neighborhoods in the Three City Study of Moving to Opportunity. As Auyero (2011) observes, there are striking similarities in the lives of the poor throughout the Americas that come from political transformations and neoliberal economic policies, which present fruitful opportunities for theorizing vulnerability across contexts. The specific experiences and concrete expressions of the suffering we have exposed will, of across contexts, as the material conditions in which the women live in Guatemala and in the United States are vastly different. However, we want to highlight opportunities for theorizing across contexts of vulnerability, as we “extend” (see Snow et al., 2003) to this case a theoretical framework developed in a different context.

A central contribution we have sought to make in using this framework is to go beyond a focus on one aspect of violence alone—generally interpersonal and usually attributed to individual actions, behaviors and characteristics, or to the immediate social milieu—to unveil misrecognized forms of violence that are equally injurious as those that are normally examined and counted. Future analyses of the experiences of minority status-low-income women can include the multiplicity and interconnected forms of violence that these women endure, violence that has roots beyond individuals and their actions Thus, we reiterate our call for an opening of the analytical lens to include extra-personal sources of violence, to unearth those that are veiled and unrecognized and found in institutions, bureaucracies, structures, and everyday practices, even when acts appear to be so intimate and individual-centered as to reside entirely in individuals' motivations. Focusing on structures that generate social suffering, rather than on individual characteristics and acts, may yield new conceptualizations of violence more generally and new approaches to examining the lives of socially deprived women. Acknowledgments This research was supported by HUD, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Fannie Mae Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation. We would like to thank Liz Williams and Tammi Arford for their comments and in helping to get the article ready for publication. Endnotes 1 This is not short-sightedness on the part of researchers; it has to do with datasets available for large-scale studies, including the Census, which for confidentiality issues do not collect individual-level data for Census tracks. 2 Auyero and de Lara (2012) remind us of the close similarities between the lives of the marginalized in Latin America and in the United States, pointing to the benefit of examining similar processes north and south of the border, which we miss when we remain encased in separate “area studies.” 3 We thank one of our reviewers for calling our attention to the use of term “disadvantaged,” as it might carry connotations to “deficiencies” in the women themselves. Thus, we have followed the reviewer's suggestion and decided to use the term “deprived” when referring to “disadvantaged” populations to signal that the lack of resources in these women's lives is structured and patterned in society and not the result of individual shortcomings. 4 Throughout this article, the term “Latin-Americans” refers to individuals of Latin American origin and descent, Hispanics, and/or Latinos living in the United States. 5 We are not making a heteronormative assumption or generalizing based on heteronormative experiences, as violence exists in all forms of intimate relations. However, in those cases of interpersonal violence in our dataset, the abused was a woman and therefore our broader examination is on various forms of violence in the lives of women. 6 One must note the role of state policies in producing and reproducing structural violence, compounded with symbolic violence, in the lives of vulnerable women. This is how various forms of violence merge in formal institutions and bureaucracies. 7 The forms of humiliation that the marginalized and poor endure result in divisions among individuals in same circumstances, which lead to violence among themselves (Bourgois 2004a,b; Gilligan, 1996; Uvin & Mironko, 2003). 8 Similarly, Klinenberg (2002) examines how institutions (the “social organs” of the city) exacerbated the fatal effects of severe weather in Chicago for residents in already vulnerable situations. The crisis magnified

Please cite this article as: Dominguez, S., & Menjivar, C., Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in..., Women's Studies International Forum (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.01.012

S. Dominguez, C. Menjivar / Women's Studies International Forum xxx (2014) xxx–xxx the conditions of deprivation for many who perished during the Chicago heat wave. 9 Pettit (2012) shows how the tools used for the collection of government data hide the real injurious effects of African American men's incarceration. This is another example of how government institutions contribute to veil their harmful acts in the lives of the poor and vulnerable; this is how the violence in their lives remains out of sight, hidden and misrecognized. 10 See Wacquant (2008).

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