The Silence of Violence
There are forms of violence that do not shout.
They do not always carry weapons.
They do not always leave traces in newspapers or statistics.
Sometimes they first reveal themselves in the silence between people.
In the favelas outside Vitória in Brazil, I gradually learned to understand this. Not only through dramatic events, but through atmospheres. Through the way people moved. Through glances that suddenly disappeared. Through conversations that stopped when certain subjects came too close.
The violence was there.
But often as an undercurrent.
As something everyone knew about, yet few spoke openly of.
I remember one day walking into the favela together with a Brazilian medical student.
The day before, there had been a shooting in the area. A young man had been killed in a conflict between rival gangs. No one seemed truly surprised. Yet there was a tension hanging over the streets that morning. People spoke more quietly than usual. Certain eyes followed us as we walked between the houses.
It was hot.
Dogs lay in the shade along the walls.
Somewhere music played from a radio, as if life was trying to continue as normal.
But something had changed.
We met the brother of the young man who had been killed.
He was young.
Almost just a boy.
Grief was visible in his face. Yet he also carried something else.
A pride.
A demand for revenge.
It became a difficult conversation.
Not because he threatened us.
But because one could sense how the violence was already continuing to live within him.
As grief.
As rage.
As loyalty.
Two weeks later we heard that he too had been killed.
Shot in another violent confrontation.
I still remember the silence that followed when we received the news.
Not only the sorrow.
But the feeling that violence continued to consume the lives of young people in the neighbourhood.
Many in the community were afraid.
Others seemed mostly exhausted with despair.
As if they already knew how the story would end.
Perhaps that was when I began to understand that violence is not only about the moments when shots are fired.
Violence continues to live long afterwards.
In bodies.
In families.
In streets.
In children’s imagination of the future.
When we in Europe think about violence, we often imagine the visible:
assaults,
shootings,
crime,
blood.
But violence rarely begins there.
Perhaps it begins much earlier.
In fear.
In humiliation.
In the loss of hope.
In the experience of living outside the community.
In the area where we worked, violence was part of everyday life. Murders and disappearances were not exceptions, but realities people learned to live with. Yet life continued. Children went to school. Women bought food. Music drifted through the streets in the evenings. People worked whenever work was available.
This made a deep impression on me.
How human beings try to create normality in the midst of the abnormal.
I especially remember the evenings.
The sun slowly disappeared over the densely built neighbourhoods. The sounds gradually changed. Dogs began to bark. Distant music rose between the houses. In some places laughter could still be heard. In other places there was an unease difficult to put into words.
It was as if the neighbourhood itself was holding its breath.
No one needed to explain this.
People knew.
Perhaps this is one of the deepest effects of violence:
that it gradually moves into people’s bodily experience of the world.
One learns where one can walk.
When one should remain silent.
Whom one should not look at for too long.
When one should withdraw.
This is how violence creates its own forms of silence.
I do not believe we fully understand what long-term violence does to a society if we only measure murders or crime statistics. Violence also shapes people’s nervous systems, relationships, and imagination of the future.
Children grow up in landscapes where fear becomes normal.
And when fear becomes normal, human beings themselves begin to change.
Martin Heidegger writes about how human beings always already exist within a mooded world. We do not merely live in physical surroundings, but also in emotional atmospheres. Some environments open human beings. Others close them.
I believe the favelas taught me something about this.
Violence was not only actions.
It was also an atmosphere.
Yet it would be wrong to describe the area only through fear. This is important. For people did not merely live under violence. They also lived beside it, despite it, and sometimes in quiet resistance against it.
I remember women laughing together outside their homes.
Children playing football in narrow streets.
People sharing food with one another.
Music and dancing.
Religion and community.
Life refused to disappear.
Perhaps this is one of the most profoundly human things I have ever witnessed:
how people try to preserve dignity even when their surroundings threaten to destroy it.
But violence leaves traces.
Not always visible traces.
Often silent traces.
Over time I began to notice how little people actually spoke directly about violence. Not because it was unimportant, but perhaps because it was too close. When violence becomes part of everyday life, silence sometimes becomes a way of surviving.
This made me think about how societies are shaped by what they no longer manage to speak about.
In modern societies we like to believe that communication solves everything. Yet some experiences withdraw from language. Not because people lack words, but because words no longer protect them.
Perhaps this is violence’s deepest triumph:
not merely that people are harmed,
but that trust between people slowly breaks down.
When fear becomes strong enough, people begin to withdraw from one another.
And when people withdraw from one another, community itself weakens.
Hannah Arendt wrote that politics and human community require a public space where people may appear and speak freely. Violence does the opposite. It narrows the space people dare to inhabit — physically as well as existentially.
In this way violence becomes more than an individual problem.
It becomes a social climate.
I often thought about this when we visited families through the research project. The medical students walked from house to house speaking with people about health and living conditions. Many welcomed us warmly. Yet sometimes one could sense a certain restraint. As if people were constantly evaluating how much they could safely say.
At first I did not fully understand it.
Later I began to realise that long-term violence teaches people caution.
Not necessarily as a conscious strategy.
But as bodily experience.
Perhaps this is also why violence over time becomes a health issue. Not only because people are physically harmed, but because constant tension slowly wears down the body. Sleep, blood pressure, anxiety, stress, and illness are often connected to the emotional climate of society.
Human beings need safety in order to breathe freely in the world.
This is not only about the favelas of Brazil.
Modern European societies as well now carry signs of new forms of social unease. Many people live with a persistent sense of insecurity:
economic,
social,
existential.
Perhaps this is why violence in our time often spreads as atmospheres before it appears as action.
Aggression.
Suspicion.
Contempt.
Hatred.
Societies can become hard long before they become openly violent.
This is why I believe practical philosophy must concern itself with more than laws and moral theory. It must also ask:
What kinds of emotional landscapes are we creating around us?
Do we nurture trust?
Or fear?
Do we create community?
Or loneliness?
In the favelas I learned that human beings can survive much.
Poverty.
Unrest.
Loss.
But it is difficult to live long without hope.
And hope is not merely individual.
It is also social.
Hope arises when people experience that their lives matter.
That the future is still open.
That they have not been forgotten.
Perhaps this is why small actions matter so much in vulnerable communities:
a person who listens,
a teacher who cares,
a doctor who returns,
a community gathered around a simple meal,
music in the evening,
children still playing football in the streets.
Life continues to send small signs that the world is not yet completely closed.
I still believe in the importance of such small actions.
For perhaps the opposite of violence is not first and foremost control.
Perhaps the true opposite of violence is human presence.
To be met without fear.
To speak without remaining silent.
To walk through a neighbourhood without constant tension in the body.
To trust that one’s life also has value in the eyes of others.
It is easy to analyse violence from a distance.
Far more difficult is it to understand the silence it leaves inside human beings.
I still carry some of this silence from Brazil within me.
Sometimes I think back to the evenings in the favela.
To the sounds slowly fading.
To people withdrawing into their homes.
To the distant music still echoing between the walls.
To children who nevertheless continued to play football in the narrow streets before darkness fully settled.
And I think about the young boy who lost his brother.
The grief in his face.
The silence surrounding him.
How violence was already living inside his body before he himself was killed.
Perhaps this is what violence ultimately does:
it attempts to close the future.
Yet in the midst of this silence, I also encountered people who refused to let violence define their entire lives.
People who still laughed.
Who still shared food.
Who still sang.
Who still hoped.
Perhaps this is precisely where the light of reflection becomes most important.
Not to explain away the darkness.
But to hold on to the human even when the world around us grows hard.
The illustration in this essay was made by OpenAI/ChetGPT.