IX - Massive Trauma and the Healing Role of Reparative Justice

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Emphasising the need for a multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary, integrative framework for understanding massive trauma and its Aftermath, this chapter examines victims/survivors’ experiences primarily from the psychological perspective. It describes how victims are affected by mass atrocities, their reactions, concerns and needs. Delineating necessary elements in the recovery processes from the victims’ point of view, the chapter will focus in particular on those elements of healing that are related to justice processes and victims’ experiences of such processes. Reparative justice insists that every step throughout the justice experience – from the first moment of encounter of the Court with a potential witness through the follow-up of witnesses After their return home to the Aftermath of the completion of the case – presents an opportunity for redress and healing, a risk of missing or neglecting the opportunity for healing victims and reintegrating them into their communities and societies, or, worse, causing (re)victimization and (re)traumatization. While restitution, rehabilitation or compensation may only come After the process has concluded, there are still opportunities along the way. Although not sufficient in itself, reparative justice is nonetheless an important, if not necessary, dynamic component among the healing processes. Missed opportunities and negative experiences will be examined as a means to better understand the critical junctures of the trial and victims’ role within the process that can, if conducted optimally, lead to opportunities for healing. In what follows I therefore discuss why it is essential to devote resources to all elements of justice. In line with the focus of this volume, the chapter will cite related experiences in Africa.

CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

It was in the context of studying the phenomenology of hope in the late 1960s that I interviewed survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. To my profound anguish and outrage, all of those interviewed asserted that no one, including mental health professionals, listened to them or believed them when they attempted to share their Holocaust experiences and their continuing suffering. They, and later their children, concluded that people who had not gone through the same experiences could not understand and/or did not care. With bitterness, many thus opted for silence about the Holocaust and its Aftermath in their interactions with nonsurvivors.