Beyond individual and visible acts of violence: A framework to examine the lives of women in low-income neighborhoods

•We examine sources of suffering that are often misrecognized as violence.•Various forms of visible and invisible sources of violence exacerbate suffering.•We use an analytical optic to examine violence not typically defined as such.•We examine violence in the lives of poor women in the United States.•The framework originally developed to examine violence for women in the global South

SynopsisLow-income minority women are among the most disadvantaged in terms of social location, which exposes them to various forms of violence that perpetuate their poverty. Previous research has focused on individual explanations of actions that affect them. We seek to redirect our understandings away from individual explanations to focus on the broader contexts and inequalities that lie at the root of multiple and interconnected forms of violence in the lives of women in vulnerable positions. This approach facilitates recognition of violent structures often unrecognized or misrecognized as such. Our framework includes structural, interpersonal, and symbolic forms of violence, which we apply to examine the lives of a subsample of minority-status women gathered ethnographically in low-income neighborhoods in Boston, Los Angeles and New York through the Three City Study of Moving to Opportunity. In this exercise, we highlight the broader contexts that create conditions for individuals to harm one another.