Trauma and Human Rights by Unknown

Trauma and Human Rights by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030163952
Publisher: Springer International Publishing


Trauma, Human Rights, and the Gendered Effects of Violence

As the gendered nature of human rights was being understood and codified, there was a parallel advance in the visibility of the gendered dimensions of trauma. Activists, feminists, and mental health advocates brought women-centered discussions of rape , sexual abuse , and domestic violence into the public arena. The feminist slogan “the personal is political” highlighted that women’s experiences of violence were not isolated and individual, but connected to larger social and political structures. Beginning in the mid-1970s, a body of research began to emerge on rape and sexual assault and later domestic violence . Women’s activists established programs such as rape crisis centers and shelters for victims of domestic violence . In the course of these efforts, they generated the direct knowledge of women’s lived experiences that helped to forge broader definitions of what constitutes trauma. This shift was invaluable for those working with women, as most of the early research on trauma and PTSD focused on males, particularly on their combat experience and war-related trauma (Ringel, 2012). Early studies of women’s sexual assault experiences found that rape-exposed women’s responses were similar to those experienced by combat-exposed men; this research resulted in the identification of a new trauma-related condition, Rape Trauma Syndrome (Burgess & Holmstrom, 1974). Feminist therapists also contested the original criteria for trauma in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). They asserted that traumatic experiences in the lives of women were not “outside the range of usual human experience,” as indicated in the DSM–III definition of trauma, but were in fact, so common as to be normative (Brown, 2004).

Judith Herman’s work, Trauma and Recovery (1992), was groundbreaking on several counts. Herman explicitly included interpersonal violence among traumatic stressors, and insisted that the then-current PTSD diagnosis did not fully capture the severe psychological harm that occurs with prolonged, repeated trauma. She posited a spectrum of traumatic disorders ranging from the effects of a single overwhelming event to the more complex effects of prolonged and repeated abuse. Previously, mental health practitioners had often failed to recognize the impact of trauma in the lives of women, especially in women diagnosed with other mental illnesses, including severe personality disorders (Herman, 1992). Herman and other clinicians recommended that a new diagnostic category of Complex PTSD be established (Courtois, 2004; Herman, 1992; van der Kolk, 1996), although it has yet to be included in the DSM. Complex PTSD is caused by long-term trauma or traumas, where victims are brutalized over multiple events, by multiple perpetrators, or are held in a state of captivity, physically or emotionally. It may be the diagnosis of choice for the impact of severe human rights violations, including long-term domestic violence , captivity in a brothel or prison, and other chronic stressors in which a victim is under the control of the perpetrator and unable to get away from the danger (National Center for PTSD, n.d.).

Herman’s (1992) work also and paved the way for research on gender and



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