Are Humans Becoming Less Violent or Just Better at Hiding It?

Violence is often measured by what can be counted: wars fought, bodies buried, crime rates logged. By those metrics, humanity appears to be improving. Fewer interstate wars, declining homicide rates in many regions, longer stretches of relative peace. On paper, it looks like progress.

But violence has never been limited to what leaves visible wounds.

For most of history, violence was public and unmistakable. It was physical, immediate, and difficult to deny. Today, much of it has changed form. It is dispersed, procedural, and increasingly abstract. Harm is delivered through systems rather than fists, through policies rather than weapons, through neglect rather than force. When suffering is indirect, it is easier to classify it as unfortunate rather than violent.

Modern societies are especially skilled at this reframing. Economic precarity, forced displacement, environmental damage, and mass surveillance rarely register as violence, even when their consequences are long-term injury, shortened lives, or psychological harm. These outcomes are often described as side effects, trade-offs, or structural failures, language that distances responsibility and dulls moral response.

Technology has further refined this concealment. Violence no longer requires proximity. Decisions made in offices, data centres, or boardrooms can inflict harm without ever encountering those affected. Distance sanitises action. When cause and consequence are separated by layers of bureaucracy and code, violence becomes difficult to locate, and therefore easy to deny.

This does not mean that humanity has made no moral progress. The threshold for acceptable physical violence has clearly narrowed. Acts once tolerated are now condemned. But this narrowing has coincided with an expansion of less visible forms of harm, ones that operate slowly, quietly, and legally. The absence of blood does not imply the absence of violence.

So are humans becoming less violent? Perhaps in how violence is expressed. But it is equally plausible that we have become better at hiding it, embedding it in systems, normalising it through language, and outsourcing it to mechanisms that appear neutral.

The real measure of progress, then, may not be how little violence we see, but how willing we are to recognise the kinds that no longer announce themselves.