Welfare as slow violence
Time is an important weapon in the war on welfare, making it relevant to briefly discuss scholarship on slow violence to analyse how it leads to benefits-related deaths. Cooper and Whyte (2017:24) suggest the normalised mundane ‘slow deteriorative process’ of austerity's violence is usefully understood as ‘slow violence’. Rob Nixon (2011) writes about slow violence in relation to the often-slow unfolding of environmental catastrophes: ‘violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon, 2011:2). Key to slow violence is the temporal scale at which it unfolds – the lag between policy and its violent consequences working to weaponize time and dissociate effects from causes (Tofighian and Boochani, 2021). The ‘delayed effects’ of chemical toxicity (Carson, 2000[1962]:169–170) has been key to understanding slow violence. The ‘slow brutalities of toxicity’ (in relation to petrochemical pollution), where damage is incremental and harm is witnessed slowly (Davies, 2018: 1538), seems especially relevant to understanding the cumulative effects of social security reform – which are described by many as ‘toxic’ (Pring, 2022a). ‘Slow death’ is useful here as an analytical strategy to describe ‘the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people’ (Berlant, 2007: 754) under contemporary global/national regimes of capitalist subordination. Temporality is also at play in the ‘slow burn’ of health inequalities (Marmot et al., 2020).
Slow temporalities are also theorized within de/and postcolonial analysis of colonial violence as constitutive of necropolitics or deathworlds, made up of ‘gradual wounding’ and ‘letting die’ (Mbembé and Meintjes, 2003: 21). Coddington (2019) analyses the weaponization of financial tactics to enact slow violence for refused asylum seekers and Aboriginal people who claim benefits; Mayblin et al. (2020) show the everyday slow violence of asylum seekers’ encounters with the UK (welfare) state; and Povinelli (2011: 145) documents the cumulative and corrosive lethalities and slow deaths endured by Indigenous and First Nations peoples in Australia.
The unfolding of slow violence over time means there is (often, although not always) a lag between the introduction of policies and the harms they inflict (Cooper and Whyte, 2017). We argue that this time lag is significant in understanding how UK benefits reform kills people. Yet focusing on government investigations into benefits related deaths – or what the DWP calls the ‘death of a customer’ – shows that as well as delayed destruction (Nixon, 2011) and delayed effects (Carson, 2000[1962]), time, and specifically delay, is weaponised by the Government to deny accountability. This ‘manipulation of time’ is key to ‘forms of delay, deferral, attrition, and accumulation’ that make up slow violence (Ahmann, 2018: 144).
While grappling with slow violence across the UK social security system, this article more specifically focuses on the ways delay is used as a ‘distancing strategy’ (Nixon, 2011: 60) to avoid accountability and deny justice. The time lag of policies and people's deaths, the build-up of incremental harms, and the weaponization of delay, make slow violence hard to apprehend and represent. Thus, key to our work of tracking the gradual causalities of welfare reform has been the co-production of a timeline that makes slow violence visible. Next, we detail the process of creating the timeline, and how this process made visible specific ‘distancing strategies’ used by DWP, especially in relation to delay tactics.
Creating a timeline of welfare violence: distancing strategies and temporal tactics
Proceeding at ‘a speed that decouples suffering from its original causes’ (Ahmann, 2018:144) slow violence poses a representational challenge with which our research grapples. To do this, we created a timeline – available online at www.deathsbywelfare.org – documenting evidence of the links between welfare reform and people's deaths, and more widely tracking the slow violence of the social security system, as experienced by many disabled people. The timeline is made up of approx. 500 entries dating from the 1970s to 2022. It consists of largely publicly available documents that relate to the deaths of disabled people claiming benefits, including FOI requests and responses, parliamentary debates (in Hansard), safeguarding reports, Prevention of Future Death reports, DWP reports, briefings, and internal guidelines, as well as media coverage of some (though far from all) people's deaths. Piecing together these disparate documents, with a focus for this article on FOI requests and DWP responses, enabled us to identify patterns and strategies used over time by the DWP to deny accountability for people's deaths.
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