Rowling depicts the effect that killing has on the perpetrators. In books six and seven, she suggests that killing another person is no less than splitting your soul in pieces.

The fields of restorative justice and trauma healing also help us see this. The line between “offender” and “victim” is often indecipherable in perpetrators of violent crime, who so often have had violence perpetrated on them, sometimes for a lifetime. That “he who shall not be named” was destroyed by his own evil is quite a sobering image, just as Harry’s refusal of offensive violence is a powerful example.

It kind of reminds me of the more pacifistic impulses in the Star Wars universe, where the Force is not to be used as an expression of aggression. But there it seems much more ambivalent than HP, since heads often roll (or arms fall off) when even a Jedi walks into the room…