Where Violence Actually Begins

"The officers approached him on the TransMilenio platform with practiced efficiency, their movements rehearsed by repetition rather than urgency. The accusation required no elaboration. A missing phone, a hand where it should not have been, a familiar public crime unfolding in a familiar place. Commuters glanced briefly, then looked away, reassured that the story had revealed itself fully. Theft, after all, offers moral clarity. It draws a clean line and tells society exactly when violence begins."

"The young man stood still as his pockets were searched. Silence surrounded him, dense and unremarkable. Silence had accompanied him long before that platform, long before the uniformed presence and the murmurs of the crowd. No one asked how he arrived there, what had shaped the reflexes now mistaken for intent, or what losses preceded the act that seemed so self-explanatory. The visible crime appeared conclusive, yet it was only the final surface of a process already in motion."

"Scarcity did more than empty shelves and darken streets. It eroded predictability, safety, and the quiet dignity that allows a young person to imagine continuity. Leaving did not extinguish fear. It relocated it. In Colombia, the city absorbed him without hostility and without recognition. Work surfaced briefly, vanished suddenly, and rarely provided enough stability to anchor his days. Hunger returned, accompanied by a deeper sense of deprivation that food alone could not alleviate."

An adolescent migrant from Venezuela arrives in Bogotá pushed by economic collapse and persistent scarcity. The city absorbs him without hostility but also without recognition or stable work. Intermittent employment and recurring hunger produce deeper deprivation beyond food, while emotional needs go unmet and invisibility becomes permanent. Psychological effects of prolonged emotional absence reshape behavior toward survival, reducing reflection and making small crimes the visible outcome of long processes. A public accusation of theft offers moral clarity to bystanders, obscuring histories of displacement, loss, and trauma that preceded the act and that help explain, though do not excuse, the behavior.

Read at Psychology Today