The State of Violence, the Violence of the State

Through a detailed ethnographic reconstruction, chapter 7 examines different forms of state violence and their impact on the lives of the urban poor. It also reflects on the limits of understanding the impacts of violence on people’s hearts and minds. Rather than isolating episodes as if they belong to different spheres (public or private), this chapter presents one “story of violence” reconstructed on the basis of multiple accounts so that readers can observe not only the form that violence takes in the home and in the street, but also the effects of early exposure to it and the participation of state agents in its exercise. Vertical violence between state agents and detainees, horizontal violence between inmates and between members of the domestic unit: Both coexist in this story, forming concatenations of physical aggression.