The basis is in that violence's literal definition is physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
I give you a number of definitions that disagree and say that it doesn't have to be physical force, and you completely ignore them.
Firstly I was claiming this seemed a reasonable practise (or rather I was claiming that Dutchling would probably find it a reasonable practise), I was not claiming it was... how shall I say this, semantically accurate practise.
The same way that if someone was stealing money from a cash register and you called it shoplifting, I'd say that's a reasonable thing to call it even though the definition of shoplifting is by most accounts the theft of goods (money not being typically considered goods).
I'd call that a robbery since we have different definitions for different offenses of varying intents, circumstances and scale.
(...)
Threatening as declaring the intent is both harassment and verbal abuse, but it is not violent as any crime where physical force is involved.
If it is semantic, it is because it IS, nor is it my argument, and yes it very damn well is a relevant distinction to make.
And again you're completely missing the point, it's not classified as violent crime because it's semantically fits into that classification neatly, it's called that because it's useful to classify it as a violent crime.
In the case of the shoplifter example, because the person in question was stealing from a shop, so it's useful to call them a shoplifter because that makes the nature of the crime clear. The same applies to the whole idea of assault being a violent crime even if it's purely a verbal assault.
In the US this means robbery, assault, rape, and murder.
We are not talking about the US, this has no relation to what we were talking about at all.
Though since you brought up law in the US, I'd like to point out that in the US they have essentially the exact same practise (though I believe assault laws may vary from state to state), to quote
this random google result.An assault is carried out by a threat of bodily harm coupled with an apparent, present ability to cause the harm. It is both a crime and a tort and, therefore, may result in either criminal or civil liability..
The key difference apparently being the apparent present ability to cause the harm. You yourself classified assault as a violent crime, so the example of threatening someone would be a violent crime, no?
Well, unless you want to get fussy about the semantics for absolutely no reason other than "I think this is the way it should be and damn all definitions, legal precedent, or what everyone else in the world might believe".