Crimes of gender-based violence, like other crimes against subordinated groups are generally crimes of impunity. Victims are blamed, shamed and isolated, so that the violence becomes hidden and socially invisible. Shame and isolation in turn predict the malignant psychological harms of complex trauma, including the formation of a defiled identity. This talk, based on personal interviews and published accounts, explores survivors’ views of what might be a just resolution of the crimes they had suffered. In general, survivors wished above all for the truth to be known and the perpetrators exposed. Beyond this, their focus was on restoring their relationships, not primarily with the perpetrators, but rather with the “moral community” from which they had been isolated. Finally, rather than punishment of perpetrators, survivors frequently prioritized prevention of future harm.
Speaker
Judith Lewis Herman M.D. is Professor of Psychiatry (part time) at Harvard Medical School. For thirty years, until she retired, she was Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program at The Cambridge Hospital, Cambridge, MA. She is the author of the award-winning books Father-Daughter Incest (Harvard University Press, 1981), and Trauma and Recovery (Basic Books, 1992). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship in 1984 and the 1996 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. In 2007 she was named a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Her new book, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, was published in March, 2023.