Flickr/michael_swan. Some rights reserved.
Economics is rarely linked to violence in the UK’s mainstream media. Instead it is widely reported in terms of rational processes, statistics or the rising or declining fortunes of the political class. Economics as the means by which wealthy individuals and powerful institutions perpetuate harm on others is rarely perceived. Economic violence involves causing harm by denying those in need, of the economic resources required to live above a minimum threshold. When the media show a systematic indifference to engaging directly with the victims of economic violence, they help ensure that these crimes remain unrecognised in the court of public opinion. And austerity has given economic abusers free reign. Their pin-up boy until recently was Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) Minister Ian Duncan Smith. It is the representational practices of the mainstream media that repeatedly produce negative and derogatory images of the working classes, constructing them as problematic and dangerous in ways that both justify austerity and excuse economic violence.
One area where the dominant media have failed to report on the pain, misery and fatalities associated with economic violence is the ongoing scandal of the Work Capability Assessments regime (WCA). These were until recently undertaken by the French IT firm Atos on behalf of the DWP. From the formation of the coalition government in 2010, the link between a rising number of suicides and other welfare reform related deaths was highlighted by bloggers, charities and disability rights campaigners. On their websites and in their reports we can glimpse the scale of the corporate and state brutality that continues to be meted out to vulnerable and sick (and sometimes terminally ill) people as they are sanctioned and/or pushed off Employment and Support Allowance and onto Job Seekers Allowance.
