Structural Inequalities in Health

• Define social structures.

  The policies, economic systems and other institutions (e.g. schools, work hours, childcare) that have produced & maintain modern social inequities as well as health disparities, often along the lines of social categories (e.g. race, class gender).
• Define structural violence.

  One way of describing social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way … The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organisation of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people.
• Define structural vulnerability.

  The risk that an individual experiences as a result of structural violence - including their location in multiple socioeconomic hierarchies. Structural vulnerability is not caused by, nor can it be repaired solely by, individual agency or behaviours. 
• What is naturalising inequality?

  The process when inequality and structural violence are justified by, or go unacknowledged due to, nonstructural explanations for structurally mediated harms/inequities. These nonstructural explanations - which often emphasise individual behaviours, “cultural” characteristics or biologised racial categories - help preserve social inequities by giving the impression that the status quo is “natural”, in the sense of not being primarily social or structural in origin.