ABSTRACT
Suffered violence is a kind of experience that can hardly be addressed in terms of a purely objective description. A normative dimension belongs constitutively to its meaning and a phenomenological approach cannot ignore it. This normativity arises at two distinct but correlative levels. The first one is the level of suffered injuries that can be experienced in very different ways, but mostly as something that shouldn’t exist or happen. The second one is a level of a broadly accepted social regulation of the kinds of injuries that are collectively rejected or that find a certain acceptance in the frame of a given social group. The experience of suffered violence presupposes and combines these two levels of normativity: something is experienced as suffered violence when it is suffered as an injury and when this injury is experienced as a violation of a social norm. The thesis of a normative force of suffered violence consists in the assumption that this normative dimension contributes to the constitution and to the evolution both of the social normativity itself and of what is experienced as violence in a given society. To be aware of this normative force should be part of any political debate on the question of violence.
