Collective Trauma and Its Impacts
By Ezat Mossallanejad
Introduction
In this article, a modest attempt will be made to study the nature of collective trauma by tracing its roots. Special attention will be given to the impact of collective trauma on individuals, communities and the entire society. Finally, suggestions will be made for alleviation of the devastating after-effects of the evil of collective trauma.
What is Collective Trauma?
A horrible, widespread, multifaceted and pervasive event or accident makes the entire community or the whole society traumatized – a peculiar complication that can be called Collective Trauma. War, colonialism, slavery, genocide, crimes against humanity, gross human rights violations, generalized violence, occupations, technological catastrophes and natural disasters (tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, etc.) can lead “to collective trauma. Collective trauma event,
“injures in one sharp stab, penetrating all psychological defense barriers of participants and observers, allowing no space for denial mechanisms and thus leaving those affected with an acute sense of vulnerability and fragility” (Alexander L., Veerman, A.L & Ganzevoort, R.R., 2001).
Collective trauma occurs when the trauma is experienced by the larger population for a lengthy period of time, and as an extreme long-lasting burden.
According to J. C. Alexander (2004), it,
occurs when members of a collective feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks on their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways (p. 1).
A horrifying event with tragic impacts on the lives of a section of the community may act as trigger to develop into a collective trauma with devastative effects on the entire society. On April 19, 1995, for example, a truck-bomb explosion outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City left 168 people dead and hundreds more injured. This horrifying event caused panic across the United States of America. It “reached far beyond the direct victims and their families.” (Neria, Y, Gross, R., Marshall, R. & Susser, E., p. 144). More recently, in September 2010, a poor street vendor in Tunisia, named Mohammad Bouazizi, was harassed and humiliated by a municipal police and his wares were confiscated. His tragic self-immolation on September 17, 2010 and his consequent death on January 4, 2011, acted as a trigger for the uprising of hundreds thousands of people against President Ben Ali’s autocratic rule.
Sudden death, murder, assassination or execution of charismatic, popular personalities could lead to a nationwide or even global collective trauma. The grief is not limited to those who intimately knew the public figure, but extends beyond to the members of the greater society who feel bonded in grief by sharing in a national trauma. Before the first World War in the year 1914, the Austrian Crown Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist.
The trauma that quickly followed from that day in Sarajevo is undeniable. By the first week of August 1914, Europe was at war…. War and revolution, loss of homes and exile, terrified flight from invading armies, and torture at the hands of brutal dictators all became unwanted companions as the twentieth century progressed (King, G. & Woolmans, S., 2013, p. xxxiv).
Following the independence of India, the great leader Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by some extremist elements.
India’s leaders still reverentially place flowers on the hallowed ground where his corpse was cremated…. India’s peasant poor and landless Harijans squat to mourn him every day (Wolpert, S., 2001. p. 262).
It is unfortunate that collective trauma, by its nature is cumulative and is transmittable in space and time. The war in Europe, for example, developed into the World War II with the consequent collective trauma in many countries. This is true about the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 that rapidly traumatized the whole world. In the course of time, the continuation of war and genocide lead to other traumatizing events such as mass exodus of civilians, enforced dislocation, massive imprisonment, abject poverty, sexual violence, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, massive discriminations and other types of horrible crimes against humanity.
Collective trauma is not the sum total of individual traumas. Rather than approaching it at the individual level, it should be studied as a complicated socio-anthropological phenomenon. It, however, leaves a large number of highly traumatized individuals within the affected community. Their tormenting pain, in turn, adds to collective trauma of the community. In late August 1979, following the military occupation of the Iranian Kurdistan by the order of Ayatollah Khomeini, a Kurdish gentlemen told the author, “no one in the world is more miserable than Kurds.”
The group suffers from feelings of terror, anxiety, dissociation, powerlessness, humiliation, or dehumanization, symptoms which can lead to a collective experience of pain, anguish, and hopelessness. Not everyone has to have directly experienced the trauma; however. a sense of that trauma is developed through oral history, education, secondary experience and the media. It is not wholly negative in its manifestation as it may drive attempts at achieving equality or social change to improve future prospects for the affected group of people. This, of course, comes at the tremendous cost of human loss and suffering.
Impacts
Collective trauma might have different impacts on the affected population depending on the nature of the traumatizing events, preparedness, culture, historical precedence, the future prospects of victory or defeat, collective fortitude as well as local, national and international solidarity and relief activities as well as collective memory and consciousness of affected people. Following are some common impacts of the tragic events that lead to collective trauma.
1. Shock, Confusion and Feeling of Helplessness
Events of collective trauma may have shock, confusion and denial as its first outcome: “… in the collective one, they appear as one, with shock, disbelief, grief, and pain being the most dominant during the first week of the acute phase, followed by disorientation and denial” (Zinner E.S. & Williams, M.B., 1999, p. 127). Survivors may not initially understand the extent of loss and damage that have been inflicted upon them. As most of the collective trauma events are sudden and unprecedented, they make affected population initially speechless and thoughtless.
2. Massive Fear
Chronic fear is a byproduct of collective trauma, specifically when the traumatizing events come one after another and the survivors are incapable of responding to ongoing risks and danger and are always in a state of hyperarousal. Under the conditions of war and repeated bombardment of civilian targets, people are afraid of the future. Air raids and terrorist attacks could be followed by more terrorist attack and create ongoing collective fear.
Collective fear may reach a point that makes survivors hypervigilant and extremely sensitive to trivial issues because so many times in their daily experience of war and conflicts, a trivial issue has led to a catastrophe. Consequently, fear becomes part and parcel of their personality. A personal recollection might be useful here; during four years of my imprisonment in Iran I used to jump with every small sound, feeling that they had come to take me to torture.
3. Silence
The ominous outcome of fear and intimidation is silence at a massive level. The celebrated Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire has made frequent remarks about culture of silence in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In Iran the silence that comes out of collective trauma is referred to as ‘graveyard silence’. Tyrannical regimes in countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, North Korea and Iran have imposed mass silence on the entire population by iron fists.
Let me a personal recollection here. News of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 reached the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture a few minutes after the attack. A graveyard silence haunted the whole centre and paralyzed all doctors, counsellors, managers, staff, teachers and clients. Some two hours later, clients came to my office and with low shaking voice asking me about the consequences. As almost all our clients have refugee backgrounds, they asked me whether they would be deported back to torture, detention and execution. Few people had guts to analyze the tragic attack. The same night I was invited to a program by Canada Broadcast Corporation (CBC). I found the speakers divided into two camps: those who called for a war against the so-called axis of evil, and those who begged for restraint. I shared my opinion as follows; violence brings more violence and leads to a vicious circle of perpetual violence. I called upon the US government to go with a tremendous amount of restraint. A deep silence followed when I said that violence should be pacified by non-violent means.
4. Damage to the Community and Values
Under conditions of collective trauma, community links might be disrupted. A kind of struggle for survival may appear with its fatal impacts on resorting to the community for support. People may try to take care their own skins without bothering about others. The American sociologist Kai Theodor Erikson has has gone too far to define collective trauma,
a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality. The collective trauma works its way slowly and even insidiously into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of suddenness normally associated with ‘trauma’. But it is a form of shock all the same, a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared (Erikson, 1995, p. 233).
This is in our opinion the impacts of collective trauma rather than its definition. Under condition of collective trauma, people may distrust one another and find themselves unable to trust the social structure. Collective trauma “ruptures social ties, undermines communality, and destroys previous sources of support” (Veerman, A.L & Ganzevoort, R.R., 2001, p.145). The Jesuit priest and social psychiatrist Ignatius Martin-Baro has depicted destruction of community ties under the condition of war marvelously:
“A critical split is produced in the framework of coexistence, leading to a radical differentiation between ‘them’ and ‘us’…People, actions and things are no longer valued in and of themselves….Thus the basis for daily interaction disappears” (Aron & Caron, 1994, p. 112).
5. Cultural Bereavement
Collective trauma may result in a phenomenon that is referred to as “cultural bereavement” – alienation from one’s values, culture and identity and the tragic loss of community structure. It may impose a destructive impact on the integrity of the cultural system and reduce cultural values to absurd traditions, meaningless ceremonies, empty rituals and fragmented collective memories. Services for dead people for example, loses its meaning and value when hundreds of innocent people die on a daily basis, in a whimsical manner by hostile forces. In the context of daily carnage and devastation, cultural consistency will cease to exist. What is at stake here is the destruction of humanitarian system of values. According to the Irish writer, William Butler Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. (Vendler, 2007)
With the passage of time, it might be possible to reconstruct human and material damages. It is, however, next to impossible to repair the universal values that once united us. The community may lose making differentiation between the things that are acceptable and those that are unacceptable. In conditions of war and genocide, for example, the systemic massacre of vulnerable civilians (women, children and elders alike) and the destruction of houses, crops and livestock are justified by both sides as “collateral damages,” or the inevitable price that must be paid for “freedom.” Humanity loses ground in the process of the dehumanization of human beings. Torture, war crimes, and multiple crimes against humanity are sanctioned and justified as necessary evils with almost no respect for customary international law.
The destruction of culture, according to one author, “inevitably gives rise to fierce nationalism, tribalism, and fundamentalism. All regressive forces act to release individuals behaviorally and ideologically from intolerable complexity that cannot be managed or used in a more productive way. When culture no longer can provide identity and meaning, it is these kinds of regressive forces that rush in to fill the vacuum.” (Alayarian, A., 2008, p. 53) The psychological impact of disintegration of culture is horrible; “paranoia substitutes for trust; aggression replaces nurturance and support; identity confusion or a negative identity substitutes for a positive identity.” (McKenna, B., 2003. p. 19)
We should not, however, make cultural disintegration in the context of the instances of collective trauma an absolute. Collective trauma acts both as centrifugal and centripetal force. While it has a tendency to push traumatized community away from its cultural centre, it can also “bring people together in a kind of social interaction” that will give a capacity to recreating the culture. History has proved that common pain and suffering could lead to people’s cultural cohesiveness. People are capable of collecting pieces of their fragmented culture and reconstruct a new one during and after the termination of trauma. Cultural richness can always facilitate the process of community healing.
6. Identity Crisis
Identity crisis is a peculiar mental and psychological disorder under the condition of collective trauma. The affected population may feel their personality split, but worse than that, they are at risk of losing every shade of their personality. A person who goes through this process, may ask him/herself questions such as who am I? What is the philosophy of my absurd life? Is there any place and position for me in the society and in the world? Is there any use in speaking against injustice? Lewis Carroll illustrates this condition in his satirical masterpiece Alice in Wonderland. Alice is pretty sure that something terrible has happened to her: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” She feels that something terrible has happened to her, “I cannot explain myself, I am afraid sir, because I am not myself.” (Carroll, L., 1869, p. 60)
Collective trauma can be overcome if affected people see the horizon bright. With the consecutive repetition of traumatizing events, the sky may turn dark and people find themselves in a vicious circle of misfortune. Identity crisis may lead affected population to feel humiliated by the atmosphere around them and by themselves. They may reach the point of unconditional denial of the positive aspects of all cultures. Cynicism as such is fatal because it denies the spiritual dignity of humanity and the standards of morality and justice elaborated by human race. Uneasiness, pessimism, lack of patience, ambiguity about everything, hatred, isolation, loneliness and frustration are only some symptoms of this crisis.
7. Feeling of Pessimism, Humiliation and Apathy
In massive traumatizing events, affected community may lose its faith on the meaning attached to human existence and the inherent goodness of human race. People may stop believing on their own competence, dignity and value. Collective trauma may lead to extreme pessimism:
The experience of trauma, at its worst, can mean not only a loss of confidence in the self but a loss of confidence in the scaffolding of family and community, in the structures of human government, in the larger logics by which humankind lives, and in the ways of nature itself (Erickson, K., 1995, p. 242).
Humiliation due to the defeat and helplessness could be another effect of traumatizing events. German unexpected defeat during World War I, for instance, acted as a fatal blow to the national pride. The massive feeling of confusion and humiliation prompted certain groups to justify the defeat by attributing it to conspiracy of external forces: Jewish people, socialists, communist and other “subversive elements”. This, among others, ultimately produced grounds for the rise of Hitler. According to an author:
Many historians view Hitler as a logical consequence of deep-seated flaws in German historical development. Yet Hitler’s rise to power was more a con- sequence of the German defeat in the First World War than anything else. Without the war – and the fact that Germany lost it – it is almost certain Hitler would never have entered politics and the Nazi party would never have needed to exist” (Mc Donough, 2012, p. 33).
Apathy is another by-product of collective trauma. When human life loses its value and people witness hundreds of deaths and the killing of their loved ones, they may focus on their day to day survival and become indifferent to death and human calamites. In Nazi concentration camps, CAPOS were ready to commit all sorts of crimes to survive one more week. This situation has eloquantly been illustrated by Shakespeare in his masterpiece, Julius Czar:
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy, –
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy,
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mother shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds;
Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial (William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, scene 1, lines 255-275).
8. Violence and Revenge
In the atmosphere of man-made collective trauma hate can be developed by both victims and victimizers. One example is demonization of Palestinian and Arabs in general by Israeli fanatics and hate for Jews by average Palestinians. In a situation where violence speaks the last word, even victims of violence resort to violence and revenge to resist or resolve their problems. Terrorism can be explained as a violent reaction to State terror.
Under a shroud of collective trauma, survivors might find revenge as a psychological reaction. Following the September 11 attack, the U.S. government tried to appease public outrage by using war and violence against Afghanistan as the illusory enemy. This aggressive means resulted in more violence and terrorism – the state of war and terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. Media creates a hysteria at the national level reminiscent of what Mark Twain said in his piece entitled: “War Prayers”,
…nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener (Twain, M., 2006, p. 739).
Children under generalized violence, war, or genocide may approach violence as a short cut and enact violence in their adulthood.
Violence brings more violence and entraps the whole community into a vicious circle of perpetual violence. It is the biggest risk to future peace efforts. According to Martin Luther King:
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that (As quoted Chang & Terry, 2007, p. 356).
9. Impacts on Women
Instances of collective trauma like war, genocide and crimes against humanity have heavy tolls on women. They may be the first victims of casualties. In a state of war or ethnic conflict, where certain people are regarded as enemies, all sorts of war crimes, genocide or heinous crimes against humanity are justified and even sanctioned by both the belligerent governments and extremist groups. Women suffer due to the inequality with which gender is treated and as means of retaliation and putting shame to the other party.
During World War II, for example, 200,000 ‘comfort women’ or ‘lanfu’ from Korea, China, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia, and Japan were enslaved. They were forced into sexual servitude to Japanese Imperial Armed forces before and during the war. Girls, as young as 12, were taken from homes through coercion, intimidation and deception. Most came from poor, rural backgrounds. As a result of multiple rapes many of the women were later unable to bear children and were never able to marry (Nobe, 2009, p. 25). Years later, a handful of these women broke silence by organizing the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal that in year 2000 found Emperor Hirohito of Japan guilty of crimes against humanity posthumously (Hawkesworth, 2006, p. 79).
During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), military and paramilitary forces from both sides raped women in their occupied zones, easily finding moral and religious sanctions for their actions. Women were raped or gang-raped during Rwandan genocide of 1994:
In almost every case, these crimes were inflicted upon women after they had witnessed the torture and killings of their relatives, and the destruction and looting of their houses. Some women were forced to kill their own children before or after being raped (Nowrojee, 1996, p. 39).
Rape was also used as a weapon of war during genocide in former Yugoslavia. Serbian forces raped women publicly in the presence of friends, relatives and family members “in a pattern of intimidation and abuse focused on forcing the Croatian or Bosnian population to flee” (Bames, 2005, p. 300).
Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, and many other forms of sexual violence have been widespread in many war-trodden regions of the world including Sierra Leone, Uganda and Sudan. In Sudan, for example, large numbers of militia and government forces killed civilians and abducted and raped dozens of women and girls due to their ethnic origin calling them ‘slaves’ as they “beat them with whips, gun butts or fists” (Human Rights Watch, 2007, p. 38).
In situations of collective trauma, women suffer from all sorts of health hazards. They live in constant fear and harsh conditions with all sorts of diseases untreated. Miscarriage and dying from pregnancy are widespread. Mothers’ hope for the future of their children is shattered by witnessing them play the games of combatants using stick guns. With husbands gone, surviving women have to deal with everything single-handedly: collecting wood, cooking, washing, taking care of children, etc. Millions of women in sites of collective trauma have lost everything: their husbands, children, siblings, relatives, homes and lives. Millions more are forced to live a sub-human life in camps inside and outside their home countries. Among clients at the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture (CCVT), there is a woman form Afghanistan who has lost her husband, six children, siblings and parents. At the age of early 40s, she looks like an octogenarian woman. She is one of our scores of clients coming from war-ravaged regions of the world.
Refugee and displaced women may continue to suffer after the instances of collective trauma are over. Starvation and destitution may force them to exchange sex for their and their children’s sheer survival. This has resulted in their infliction with HIV-AIDS and other contagious diseases.
Despite their tormenting experiences of torture, inhuman atrocities and irreparable bereavements, I have found women survivors, who are my clients at the CCVT, highly resilient. I have seen them demonstrating astonishing power, braveness, courage and life-force in promoting their coping capacities to overcome their traumas. One of our clients, who has lost all her family members in war, attends our English classes enthusiastically and shares her meager resources with other survivors generously.
10. Impacts on children
A great human tragedy is the recruitment of children by armed groups and government forces to fight in wars. They use children because they can easily brainwash them to obey orders and engage in fearless killings. The phenomenon of child soldiers is an ever-increasing problem. There are currently 36 countries where it is reported that children under 18 are participating in armed conflicts. (Barnitz, 1999). The exact number of child soldiers is unknown, but it is likely to run into more than 300,000, despite the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Rome Statute for International Criminal Court that have prohibited the participation of children in armed conflict. Children are conscripted, kidnapped or pressured into joining armed groups. Warlords have converted thousands of innocent children into participants of armed conflicts by providing them with lightweight weapons and turning children, even those under 10 years of age, to effective killers.
Collective trauma events take their toll on children and robbing them of their childhood. In some conflict zones, the fighting is older than the children are. There are children of war who have never experienced any other life. In some areas of heavy bombardment, when the bombs begin to drop, children run to shelters in pairs, one or two with their father and others with their mother. They are never run together: if a bomb hits, the whole family will be wiped out.
Disruption of children’s education and destruction of schools is another sinister by-product of massive traumatizing events. The tragic memory of the massacre of Beslan children in their school is still fresh in minds. In September 2004, the hostage taking tragedy at a school in Beslan (a city in southern Russia) by a Chechen armed group and the counter attack of the Russian security forces resulted in the massacre of more than 350 people, 150 of them small children. This tragic event speaks to the outrageous disdain for the most basic principle of human decency by both the government and rebel forces.
Children are innocent victims of war, genocide and crimes against humanity. Childhood plays a crucial role in building the personality of each and every individual. Horrible traumas leave negative impacts on the social and emotional development of children. Devastating psychological effects may appear later in their adult lives. Younger children suffer more due to their vulnerability. Children’s trauma may later develop into a collective trauma at the social level. Surviving children are at great risk. By being direct witnesses to the massive slaughter of their families and the destruction of their community, they may constantly blame themselves for not doing enough to protect their loved ones. This feeling of absolute helplessness and guilt of conscience may remain with them throughout their lives.
It is a well-known fact that children have a powerful sense of imitation. In conflict zones, they are at risk of imitating violence committed by belligerent forces. They see a gun as a source of power and therefore the solution to all problems. They internalize the indoctrination that killing is a short-cut to overcome all difficulties. This is a great danger to the future peace within communities when children of war grow into a generation of adults. They may approach war or violence as the universal solution to all problems.
Children affected by instances of collective trauma rarely trust others and are not normally capable of establishing close relationships at the social and individual levels. The trauma may remain with them for many years after its initial experience. They may lose the joy of childhood and behave like gloomy old persons with a strong sense of cynicism.
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