Session 11: Victims of Violence

2nd Global Conference

Friday 13th March – Monday 16th March 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

The Community Response To Violence: Do Rituals Of Healing Support Forgiveness?
Christina Tomacic-Niaros & Barbara Flood
LCSW- Therapist for Cook County, IL. States Attorney’s Office, Victim Witness Unit, USA and Consultant for Domestic Violence Agencies, USA

In previous research, we have discovered that individuals who have lost a loved one in a senseless random act of violence report that forgiveness is most successful when they are assured that the community in which they live supports and acknowledge their pain and loss. But it is clear that it is not just the immediate family that is affected when a crime occurs in a public venue such as the federal building in Oklahoma City, the twin towers in New York City and academic institutions across the United States. These violent events are shared globally through mass media which personalize the impact they have or potentially can have on each of our lives. We are therefore challenged to reconsider our definitions of community to include an extended circle of observers emotionally connected to the tragedy they are witnessing. Research on vicarious trauma indicates that those observing can be as affected as the victims themselves. What kind of rituals impact and support the community in a process of forgiveness? Does the repeated ritualistic act of remembering delay the forgiveness process or encourage it?

Our interest here is to investigate the ways in which communities demonstrate their support immediately after the event and on subsequent anniversaries of the event. Are these rituals memorializing the initial tragedy intended to simply show solidarity for the victim and their families and friends or are they an expression of a greater need for the entire community to restore a sense of balance and safety and unity? Communities are united in tragedy through ritual; they are the voice of the victims. Yet, their solidarity may refuse to acknowledge space for forgiveness. We will investigate the various rituals communities engage in and compare and contrast the impact of these rituals on the communities’ process of forgiveness. Rituals of loss, especially traumatic loss have similar trends and expressions. We are interested in rituals that also encompass strategies for forgiveness.

The question of how one defines community informs the method and context of healing modalities and intervention that will allow for true internal resolution of these unthinkable crimes. Looking at both urban and rural communities, clearly defined and in the global context, we will investigate what supported forgiveness and what may have impeded the process. Finally we will suggest treatment intervention based on the data, both for individuals and for the larger communities

My project will examine the contemporary phenomenon of Islamic suicide bombing in order to understand how the concept of personal immortality can operate as a barrier to reconciliation. Pursuing this thesis, I will juxtapose the bombing to the secular philosophy of Albert Camus. Camus’s ethical precepts offer reasons to reject not only an aggressive form of suicide bombing—a form constituted by its wish to forcibly impose a parochial worldview—but they also provide an argument against suicide bombing aiming to resist extant and cruel forces of oppression. His core ethical intuition is that in rejecting oppression an ethical rebel, in contradistinction to a revolutionary, will reverse the conditions she opposes. The revolutionary, on the other hand, merely reverses her position in relation to these conditions. The rebel inaugurates a reign of justice, whereas the revolutionary becomes the distributor, as opposed to the recipient, of injustices. Camus’s ethical hero must, therefore, act from a position of forgiveness. This is because she aims to overturn those conditions originally requiring forgiveness.

Still, one must wonder, how does Camus’s schema illuminate personal immortality as an obstacle to reconciliation? First, I suggest that suicide bombing is a revolutionary rather than rebellious act. My proposal is to view it as a retributive rather than transformative decision. Applying Camus’s reflections specifically to the bombing’s religious plane, immortality is problematic insofar as it grants utopia to one who responded to her suffering with an act perpetuating the suffering of others. The difficulty is that religion is portrayed as rewarding revolutionary activity as opposed to demanding rebellious behavior.

The difficulty is further enforced when Camus endorses a discriminatory use of violence in his play The Just Assassins. This endorsement is surprising in light of the foregoing, but he believes that pacifism is not always possible in the face unrelenting and unconsciousable abuse. He claims assassination to be tenable so long as the assassin is unable to enjoy the fruit of his act. Justifiable violence is thus founded upon the paradoxical intuition that it is unjustifiable. For Camus, murder is never morally permissible and that is why the assassin must not realize a state blessing her act. Yet, in instances of religiously inspired suicide bombing, an otherworldly realm is invoked wherein Camus’s unforgivable is not only forgiven but blessed. The fundamental shortcoming is that the murderous act, through which the prospect of human reconciliation is absolutely renounced, is transformed into an event worthy of divine approval. Even further, this invocation of personal immortality provides an opportunity for one who does not forgive to eternally stand on the side of righteousness.

In closing, it is useful to highlight the more general horizon in which I make this proposal. In no manner do I wish to deny a debate as to whether religion and immortality offer other avenues promoting peace and reconciliation. Rather, my intent is to articulate how religion can become a barrier to forgiveness. I offer this to religious thinkers with the hope of a rich and alternative response.

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Since the 1970s, the problem of torture has attracted growing attention from international bodies. Data from Amnesty International and the US State Department has shown that torture is a routine aspect of detention worldwide, with incidences reported in 165 countries. In 97% of cases, the torture of  individuals has come about as a consequence of state action, and at the hands of state agents (Rytter, Jefferson & Worm 2005).

At the same time, since the onset of the so-called ‘War on Terror’, there has been in Europe and the USA an insidious softening of attitudes toward torture.  Whereas formerly most liberals and democratic conservatives alike would repudiate the use of torture as inadmissible in a civilised state, the use of extreme political rhetoric, the presentation of ‘What If’ scenarios and the realities of ‘extraordinary rendition’ and Guantanamo Bay have all combined to open up a space in ‘reasonable’ political discourse for discussion of the possibility of necessary torture in the last resort. Such discourse generally operates from a position of intense free-floating anxiety and fear, arguably over-influenced by extremist terrorist strategies such as suicide bombers and the purposeful targeting of civilians, a fear that is so pervasive as to drive out strongly held cultural and personal  values about the integrity of the person, about human rights and about the deep-seated taboo on  deliberate, considered and persistent inflicting of harm by one person on a helpless other.

But it is this interchange between persons that lies at the heart of torture.  What are the consequences of such barbarism, in terns of the belief systems and values of the one who survives torture? Forgiveness is often seen as the touchstone of our humanity. But the act of torture involves a wilful forfeiture of humanity. Is forgiveness therefore possible or, indeed, desirable? Could forgiveness be a triumph of sorts over the corruption of the torturer?  And if forgiveness proves impossible, how does this impact upon a survivor who embraces a religion with forgiveness at its heart?

This paper draws on narratives by those who have survived torture, or who have lost loved ones through torture, in order to discuss the conditions of possibility for forgiveness.  The narratives were gathered using disciplined empathy, a stance that has proved successful in the past (Medlicott 2001, 2004) in helping survivors to speak about the almost unspeakable.

Both the telling of such narratives and the respectful reception of them involve emotional labour. Such labour is a dimension that is lacking in any discourse that allows for the possibility of torture ‘in certain cases’. In asking torture survivors to consider the possibilities and impossibilities of forgiveness, we are asking them to expose their humanity, a humanity that has already been so hideously denied. Such exposure is justified if we hold that finding out about our capacity as a species to inflict suffering on others, and about our capacity to forgive, is a shared journey into ourselves.

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