This session focuses on institutional violence as it is experienced by and affects what we have referred to as offending bodies, those that are devalued and non-standard within a social context. Dissimilar to typical conceptualizations which characterize violence as interpersonal harm, institutional violence occurs in a more insidious and indirect manner and thus is not well recognized or addressed. Institutional or structural violence refers to the productions of social structures that perpetrate damage through mechanisms such as elitism, classism, racism, sexism and exclusion. We begin with a brief review of the literature on institutional violence, analyze and illustrate its presence in familiar social structures and then propose scholarly and action responses. In