Socioeconomic inequalities are increasing in many OECD countries, as are punitive welfare reforms that pathologise ‘the poor’. This article draws on the accounts of 100 families in Auckland to consider the impacts of increased social stratification and structural violence on their interactions with a government welfare agency. Each family was recruited through a food bank and was matched with a social worker who used a range of interview, mapping and drawing exercises to document their experiences of adversity over a one-year period. The analysis sheds new light on how institutionalised and abusive relations with these families manifest in spatially located urban interactions. It is argued that poverty is misrecognised at the institutional level and that this nurtures structural violence in service provision interactions.