Public injecting and symbolic violence

Abstract

The concept of symbolic violence as developed by Pierre Bourdieu concerns the way in which social and cultural control is tacitly maintained by the dominating and the dominated within a given milieu. This article considers Bourdieu's theory of symbolic violence in the context of public injecting environments in an urban location in the South West of England. Specifically, symbolic violence was considered to be present in the policies and practices of the local municipal council in question but also in the attitudes and beliefs of a sample of its employees dealing directly with public injectors. Similar structures and views were also noted within the local private sector (businesses and retail stores). Consequently, symbolic violence was interpreted in the displacement of public injecting sites, dispersal of drug users and within the negative opinions held of public injecting drug users. It is through these practices that symbolic violence precedes ‘micro-spatial structural violence’ involving the exacerbation of drug-related harm within the local setting.