According to the report of the United Nations commission on Human Rights, rape is the least condemned war crime (coomaraswamy, Further Promotion 64n263). Although wartime rape was listed as a crime against humanity by the Nuremberg Military Tribunals and by the Geneva Conventions, it was not until 2001 that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia identified rapists as war criminals. In that year the tribunal sentenced three men for violations of the laws or customs of war (torture, rape) and crimes against humanity (torture, rape) committed during the war in Bosnia during the 1993 takeover of Foca, where women were systematically raped and killed, the purpose being “to destroy an ethnic group by killing it, to prevent its reproduction or to disorganize it, removing it from its home soil.”

As i write these lines, back in Argentina a myriad of commemorative events mark the thirtieth anniversary of the genocidal military coup that destroyed our movement for social change in the 1970s. An outpour of testimonial texts is reaching the presses. The words of public intellectuals pepper interviews and newspaper articles dealing with the currency of the testimonial first person. Beatriz Sarlo's new book Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusion contributes to this debate. Sarlo recognizes the value of the testimonial first person for legal purposes, to set records straight while other documentation is not available (24) and to secure justice. She admits that personal narratives can be a source for historians (25). Sarlo argues, however, that excessive trust is placed on victims and survivors as producers of historical truth (62, 63). Her intervention has been called polemical by journalists in the country and abroad. Arturo Jiménez, from the Mexican newspaper La jornada, has seen it as a call to “go beyond the overwhelming predominance of the testimonial account of the repression by the military dictatorship and to engage with more strength in theoretical reflections to be able to understand what has happened” (my trans.). What concerns me about these words and Sarlo's statements is the belief that survivors are unfit for theoretical reflection unless they undergo traditional academic training and do not refer directly to their experience.

I used to worry a lot about what good we do in the humanities. Sometimes I'd get so sore from the everyday ethical barbs that interrupt a literature teacher's chain of thought that my thinking would get derailed from aesthetic questions to questions of their importance. The moments that haunted me most were when graduate students would wonder why—when the world was so urgently in need of practical contributions—they should write a dissertation about this or that literary genre or motif or formal property. They didn't doubt that preparing to teach in the arts is an enormous pleasure and also a privilege. But what redeems the profession from irresponsibility? What direct or indirect outcomes could justify the resources of time and money, the intellectual passions that can replace sleep at night, the dedication to writing books that (by my hardly admirable example) can trump even a mother's attention to her children? Can we, in good faith, counsel students to pursue humanistic careers when the same barbs that bother us may prick their conscience if they manage to land a job?

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Human Rights violations traumatize more than the immediate victims of “barbarous acts.” they wound families, communities, and entire societies sometimes for years, even generations. While the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights locates rights primarily in the individual (“Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”), it is clear that “the human family” invoked in the opening sentence both sustains claims to inalienable rights and suffers from their transgression. Nonetheless, most responses to violations focus on individual victims almost to the exclusion of family and the broader community. Several countries sponsor “torture clinics” to reintegrate victims into society or find them asylum elsewhere. Survivors are diagnosed, and therapists help them work through their trauma in different ways, usually involving individual, group, and family therapy. These important programs medicalize trauma as individual pathology and attempt to reduce symptoms and empower survivors. However, even when particular programs are successful, problems and contradictions abound. Not all communities have access to mental health care. Not all governments are willing to sponsor programs that recognize the traumatic effects of their political actions. The wider impact of criminal politics on society as a whole remains unexplored. The question of whether society is the site of the so-called normal rather than a highly repressive or toxic environment is left unexamined. The individual becomes both the exclusive site of traumatic injury and the subject to be healed.