ABSTRACT
Implicit in all the above senses of the term ‘violate’ is the concept of an integral space broken into and, through that breaking, desecrated. Thus, in its passive grammatical sense, ‘violate’ indicates something ‘characterised by impurity or defilement’ as in, to use the Oxford English Dictionary’s own example, ‘Take home the lesson to thee. . . . Who makest of this lovely land, God’s garden, A nation violate, corrupt, accurst’.2 The primary Oxford English Dictionary definition of the noun ‘violence’ – ‘the exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property; action or conduct characterised by this; treatment or usage tending to cause bodily injury or forcibly interfering with personal freedom’ (ibid.) – relays with it this sense of an assault of one entity upon the integrity of another.
