When Suicide Is Unjust Violence: Power, Structural Harms, and Moral Culpability

This article shows how patterns of suicide and self-harm can manifest a form of structural injustice and violence inflicted on the vulnerable. It introduces the original concept of induced self-violence (ISV) to identify the corresponding moral culpability of the state, employers, and other agents. ISV occurs when an institution inflicts a degrading psychosocial environment on a group when it is foreseeable this will result in heightened rates of suicide or self-harm—whether from mental illness or as a means of escape or protest. A degrading psychosocial environment generates extreme distress and is associated with dependence, objectification, and voicelessness. ISV is explained with reference to immigration detention, drawing on interviews with detainees from Australia's offshore system. In its lethal form, ISV can be seen as wrongful killing. The analysis identifies a distinctive wrong, contributing to debates on the politics of suicide and self-harm and normative debates on structural injustice and violence.