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< | Violence |
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> | Immigration and Crime in Switzerland |
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< | -- By MarkusVonDerMarwitz - 19 Feb 2016 |
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> | -- By MarkusVonDerMarwitz - 17 April 2016 |
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< | When the term violence is invoked, most of us feel we have a good understanding of what the word means, and what violent acts are. Images of riots, terrorist attacks, and murders normally spring to mind. They are deviations from the status quo, and they are acts that society find morally reprehensible. While these acts are rightly regarded as violent, they are only the tip of a much larger iceberg of systemic violence that goes largely unnoticed. |
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> | My family moved to Switzerland in 1996, and I grew up there during the time when a large number of new immigrants and refugees were arriving as a result of the war in Yugoslavia. Having been born to Swedish parents in the US, I was nervous about moving to a new country. Before attending an international English speaking school, I started in the Swiss public school system and developed strong friendships with a number of the newly arrived immigrants largely a result of finding a shared insecurity about being immersed in a new culture and struggling with the language. Although I definitely felt like a foreigner, and was was classed as “the foreign one” by my Swiss friend, being an expat rather than an immigrant or refugee resulted in a vastly different treatment and upbringing, although I was insufficiently aware of it at the time. |
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< | Subjective vs. Systemic Violence |
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> | Systemic Root Causes of Crime |
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< | Our understanding of violence, and what exactly violent acts represent, has important implications on how we respond to social problems and particularly how we structure our criminal justice system and police force. Slavoj Zizek offers a useful classification of violence and distinguishes between “subjective” violence—those acts that most of us readily perceive as violent acts, such as terrorist attacks or riots—and “systemic” violence, which is violence created by the socio-economic structure of the system. |
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> | Immigrants from the former Yugoslavia are currently listed as the least popular immigrant group in Switzerland, and there has been a political movement to deport individual immigrants, and even their entire families, for committing a crime. Earlier this year, there was a referendum that failed to pass, which would have allowed for the deportation of immigrants after serving sentences for serious crimes, as well as multiple incidents of certain misdemeanors. Although the measure failed, it is an indicator of how politically charged the issue has become. |
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< | When policy makers respond to subjective acts of violence, their focus is largely to quash these specific acts, often by increasing the force of the state, whether its equipping police officers with military style equipment or increasing the harshness of prison sentences. On the other hand, systemic violence goes largely unnoticed, because it persists as our zero state; what is thought of as our peaceful state. This form of violence is difficult to notice, because it requires looking at events one witnesses everyday in a new way. An anecdote in Zizek’s book illustrates this point: |
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> | One statistic often cited by the country’s right wing and largest political party, the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), is the fact that individuals from the Balkans commit crimes at a significantly higher rate than indigenous Swiss citizens, and they further assert that their Islamic culture is incompatible with Swiss values, which culminated into a successful referendum that banned the building of further minarets in the entire country in 2009. They argue that if they are unwilling to assimilate properly to the culture they should be required to leave. But overly focusing on the incidents of crime themselves misses the real underlying reasons behind this increased tendency towards crime. |
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< | “There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards can find nothing. It is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves.” (Violence, Zizek) |
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> | For instance, a large portion of Swiss counties have a tiered school system, as did my county. In mine, the school was divided into 4 tiers and students were placed according to a test administered after lower school, with only the top tier being eligible for a full high-school education that leads to a potential university spot. Students attending any of the lower tiers usually begin an apprenticeship around the ages of 15 or 16, with the lowest tier having the slimmest picks for apprenticeship positions that often translate to the lowest paying jobs. Growing up, I would often hear stories from people I used to go to school with about how most of the students in the lowest tiers were immigrants from the former Yugoslavia. Many believed the poor school performance and ending up in the lower tiers was down to inferior intelligence and academic abilities, as opposed to inadequate grasp of German. And there was a palpable divide between indigenous Swiss students and immigrants. Immigrants from the Balkans now make up a significant part of the Swiss unskilled labor market. Although the standard of living in Switzerland is extremely high, still, unsurprisingly, the lowest income groups continue to be the most prone to crime. |
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< | The wheelbarrows represent the subtle, almost invisible, forms of violence that are present in our moments of supposed peace. In order to think creatively about how to reduce acts of subjective violence, one needs to step back and assess our system in relation to the deeper structural violence present in the system. One needs to be absent when analyzing forms of subjective violence in order to see the underlying systemic violence that fuels these acts. |
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> | My Own Experience |
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< | Responses to Violence |
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> | I left the Swiss school system early and attended an international English speaking school where separate cultures where a part of the experience and individuals struggling with language was common. I was allowed to make mistakes while I was learning English. Moreover, when I went back to visit the Swiss schools I noticed it was acceptable for me to make mistakes when I was speaking German because I guess I was an acceptable foreigner. Now I am confidently fluent in German; yet, this same courtesy was rarely extended to individuals from other immigrant groups. I am unsure whether I would have done well enough on the exam at age 12 to make it to the top tier because I was still learning German, and the road to attending university would have been far more difficult. |
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< | Past policies to combat violence have often been couched in assumptions that prison and punishment deter. This is largely a symptom of merely targeting these overt forms of violence. The irony is that these violent acts are often countered by more “good” violence that have the undesirable effect of perpetuating the system that breeds the very violence it is trying to eradicate. Harsher sentences are aimed at preventing violent actors from committing acts in the sincere belief that individuals are freely weighing the potential gain and costs of their acts, while in reality these policies have added to the injustice in our system. |
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> | There is still a sense that these individuals feel like outsiders in their home country and a number of my friends from Kosovo and Albania no longer have the feeling of gratitude that their parents felt for the opportunity to move to Switzerland. There was always a sense that they were supposed to be Swiss, yet it was acceptable for me to remain foreign, because I was an acceptable kind of foreigner. Other immigrants were meant to assimilate without special courtesy. |
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< | There is a large scale failure to seriously address the deep seeded systemic violence that exists in what we conceive as our peaceful state. The current status quo subjects a large number of people in the United States to poverty, and there is a deep mistrust of the police and justice system for a large number of individuals. When one invokes the word “police” it already strikes up vastly diverging images to different communities in this country. It can invoke both an image of justice, while equally justify images of brutal state force. Recognizing different reactions to a word suggests how deeply divided society is in this supposed state of peace. “Language that we and our neighbors can live in different worlds even when we live on the same street. Verbal violence is not a secondary distortion, but the ultimate resort of every specifically human violence.”(Violence, Zizek p.66.). “The fundamental divide is one between those included in the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it. (Violence, Zizek P.102).” It is vital to recognize this is the status-quo that is perceived as peaceful. |
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> | Conclusion |
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< | When the police responded to the Ferguson riots, the response was no longer one of a police force trying to diffuse the situation; it was a response driven by a feeling that these violent actors need to be defeated with greater force. It is wrong to think of riots such as these as a departure from a peaceful state. And the correct response would undoubtedly be linked to tackling this systemic injustice, not wipe out the actors engaged in these overt “violent” acts. When the rioters engaged in violent responses to excessive police force, it was not the the specific police officers they were attacking, it was the image they represent that was being attacked. “Language creates an image you are attacking…when we are dealing with the scene of a furious crowd, attacking and burning buildings and cars, lynching people etc., we should never forget the placards they are carrying and the words which sustain and justify their acts.” (Violence, Zizek P.67). This exemplifies the narrow focus of how these problems are viewed, and misses entirely the deeper structural forces that are driving this unrest. |
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> | I am in no way suggesting this was the reaction of the entire country, or even the majority, but it was enough for me to recognize that in a way I sympathize with individuals who are more prone to crime and have developed a feeling of dissatisfaction with their situation in the country. It seems wrong to give such emphasis to individual actions. This surface level analysis misses the deeper roots of what causes the crime; the underlying tensions that have been building from a young age. What Zizek classifies as “subjective” violence often disguises underlying systemic forces that have given rise to this phenomenon. |
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Solutions to Violence
Devising effective solutions will require a serious step back and an entirely new perspective. For instance, instituting a guaranteed income for everyone would be far more effective at reducing violence than increased militarization of the police or harsher sentences. “The only true solution is to tear down the true wall…the socio-economic one: to change society so that people will no longer desperately try to escape their own world.” (Violence, Zizek, p.103-104). But solutions such as these only become visible when one analyzes the subjective forms of violence for what they are; a response to systemic injustice.
It's true that there's little of interest in the contemporary
world on which one cannot find a pronouncement by Slavoj Zizek.
A tireless advocate for the freedom of speech, some days he
appears to be determined to exercise the entire collective free
speech rights of all Slovenians. Sometimes he is immensely
insightful, sometimes he's just playing word games.
This is an occasion of the latter class. Force is the common
characteristic of criminality and oppression. Denoting them as
"violence" plus an adjective is not an advance in analysis. Mr
Zizek neither invented the politics we call anarchism, nor the
form of historical sociology we call Marx. Treating these
subjects as though they emerged as epigrams from his elegant form
of highbrow chat does us no service in trying to understand them.
That this is only a word game can be seen from where the idea so
expressed leads us: to the conclusion that all we need to do is
revolutionize society and everything will be fine.
The route to improvement here is to respect Mr Zizek for having
sparked an interest in some pre-existing ideas, and to show him
the door. Now the pre-existing ideas have been identified (if
not exactly directly encountered, because Zizek serves as both
Cliff-notes Kropotkin and Monarch-notes Marx) and the question is
to what new idea of your own they lead you. That idea of yours
the subject of the next draft.
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> | This problem is in no way unique to Switzerland, and it is particularly salient in my country of origin, Sweden, where anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment is challenging the country’s liberal reputation. I am unsure what the exact fix is to this problem, but it seems unjust to deport groups of “criminals” because they have failed to fit into a system that on the one hand says that in order to stay they need to accept certain values, must live a certain way, and behave like model citizens and at the same time never really wanting to accept them and placing multiple barriers to the goal of achieving any real assimilation. This seems to be the conflict between the multiple personalities of the individuals making these claims that makes these incompatible views appear perfectly logical. |