Trivializing violence: Marginalized youth narrating everyday violence
| Author | Ann-Karina Henriksen,Tea Torbenfeldt Bengtsson |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480616671995 |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480616671995
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(1) 99 –115
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480616671995
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Trivializing violence:
Marginalized youth narrating
everyday violence
Ann-Karina Henriksen
Aalborg University, Denmark
Tea Torbenfeldt Bengtsson
The National Centre for Social Research, Denmark
Abstract
This article analyzes narratives of violence based on interviews with 43 marginalized
young Danish people. Their narratives reveal that violence is not only experienced
as singular, dramatic encounters; violence is also trivialized in their everyday lives. By
drawing on anthropological perspectives on everyday violence, we propose a sensitizing
framework that enables the exploration of trivialized violence. This framework
integrates three perspectives on the process of trivialization: the accumulation of
violence; the embodiment of violence; and the temporal and spatial entanglement of
violence. This analysis shows how multiple experiences of violence—as victim, witness,
or perpetrator—intersect and mutually inform each other, thereby shaping the everyday
lives and dispositions of the marginalized youth. The concept of trivialized violence is a
theoretical contribution to cultural and narrative criminology research concerned with
the everyday experiences of living with violence.
Keywords
Everyday life, marginalization, narratives, violence, youth
Corresponding author:
Ann-Karina Henriksen, Post Doc at Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University,
Kroghstræde 7, 9220 Aalborg Øst, Denmark.
Email: Ankh@socsci.aau.dk
671995TCR0010.1177/1362480616671995Theoretical CriminologyHenriksen and Bengtsson
research-article2016
Article
100 Theoretical Criminology 22(1)
Introduction
Violence has detrimental effects on young people’s everyday lives and life chances
(Pinheiro, 2006). Current theories about youth and violence are primarily concerned with
the form and meaning of violence as dramatic events that play out among youths and
inform social processes of identity and peer group formation (Anderson, 1999; Bourgois,
1995; Harding, 2010). However, from listening to marginalized young people’s narra-
tives, it appears that violence is not only dramatic in its lived immediacy of pain, fear, or
excitement; it also becomes trivialized as it replays and unfolds over time, turning criti-
cal events into a “critical continuity” (Vigh, 2011: 95). We present the concept of “trivial-
ized violence” as a sensitizing framework for exploring the accumulated violence that
marginalized young people experience.
The existing perspectives within criminology do not fully address how experiences of
violence by witnesses, perpetrators, and victims become trivialized when they are expe-
rienced over time. This concept of “trivialized violence” approximates to what other
scholars have referred to as “routinized” or “normalized” experiences (Hlavka, 2014;
Miller, 2008; Phillips, 2003; Schaffner, 2004; Stanko, 1990) to describe how violence, in
many forms, permeates social spaces and everyday lives. While the empirical evidence
for normalized violence is extensive, the social processes embedded in normalizing the
effects of violence have not been subject to rigorous analysis. Our proposed framework
for analyzing trivialized violence integrates how both the minimization of violence and
the accumulation of violent experiences lead to trivialization. To develop this frame-
work, we integrated three perspectives on the process of trivialization: the accumulation
of violence; embodied experiences; and the spatial and temporal entanglement of vio-
lence. Thus, trivialized violence is conceptualized as the product of social processes
wherein diverse forms of violence inform, transform, and minimize each other across
social spaces.
Our conceptualization of trivialized violence draws on anthropological studies in
which violence and social suffering are explored as lived experiences embedded in eve-
ryday life (Green, 1994; Jackson, 2002; Kleinman et al., 1997; Scheper-Hughes and
Bourgois, 2004; Vigh, 2011). This body of research explores violence as a “continuum of
violence” (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004: 1), not reduced to physical violence or
singular events but viewed, rather, as social processes imbued with meaning and life-
altering potential. This research further demonstrates how repeated abuse or endemic
social suffering can become experiences that people become accustomed to and learn to
live with (see Green, 1994; Scheper-Hughes, 1993; Vigh, 2011). We actively draw on
these perspectives on violence by focusing on continual and everyday experience to open
up new ways of understanding violence in the lives of marginalized young people as
embodied, accumulated events that shape their modes of being in the world.
The article draws on two qualitative studies conducted by each of the two authors on
marginalized young Danish people between the ages of 15 and 21. The term “marginal-
ized” refers to youth who have endured processes of disconnection, devaluation, dis-
crimination, and deprivation in terms of economic and social resources (Charmaz, 2008).
Both studies used an explorative design and included young people receiving support
from welfare institutions for a range of social problems, such as involvement in crime,
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