Destruction of property

Property damage (or, in England and Wales, criminal damage) is damage to or the destruction of public or private property, caused either by a person who is not its owner or by natural phenomena. Property damage caused by persons is generally categorized by its cause: neglect (including oversight and human error), and intentional damage. Intentional property damage is often, but not always, malicious. Property damage caused by natural phenomena may be legally attributed to a person if that person's neglect allowed for the damage to occur.

Intentional property damage may be considered a form of violence, albeit one usually (but not always) less reprehensible than violence which does bodily harm to other living beings. For example, allowing a pacemaker to fail or a well to become poisoned may qualify as both property damage and lead to bodily harm. On a similar note, certain forms of property damage may prevent bodily harm, such as breaking a piece of machinery that was about to injure a person. Some argue that property damage signals a willingness to do bodily harm or otherwise intimidates the free flow of communication in political or economic debates. Mohandas Gandhi was of this opinion, but nonetheless differentiated doing bodily harm from property damage, even if he thought both to be violence, which also he thought admissible in certain dire circumstances.

The term vandalism is often used synonymously with intentional property damage, although that term is often associated with superficial or aesthetic damage, such as defacement. When property damage is undertaken for the purpose of intimidating a government or society at large, it may be categorized as terrorism. In certain contexts, the relations between these terms are inextricably politicized. For example, the Earth Liberation Front has claimed responsibility for a number of incidents of property damage, but claims to have never harmed a living being, and in fact has a doctrine forbidding members from doing so. However, the Federal Bureau of Investigation classifies them as a "terrorist" group ostensibly because they send a political and ideological message with this destruction. Meanwhile, the United States Department of Defense restricts the term "terrorist" to groups that do actual bodily harm.

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