Healing everyday life?

By Lotte Buch, Anthropologist, PhD

In addition to torture survivors as RCTs target group, another target group includes the so-called secondary traumatised victims of violence. Since torture survivors are often men, the group of secondary traumatised victims is usually mothers, wives and children of torture survivors.

This group can be characterised as a group who has not experienced traumatic events directly but has experienced these events indirectly through their relation to the primary victim - the torture survivor. Crudely stated, the secondary victims lack the experience of a traumatic event that can be healed through therapy.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among wives of Palestinian men who are detained in Israeli prisons, the speaker describes how it is experienced to live as near kin to a detainee who is at once a national hero due to his participation in resistance against the Israeli state and at the same time is categorised as a primary victim by psychosocial organisations. Today's talk inquires what kind of everyday life is made possible for a woman whose husband is detained indefinitely and lays the ground for a discussion of the limits of therapy when the victim has neither experienced trauma nor torture but 'only' lives an everyday life that is emotionally, socially and financially permeated with the absence of a detained spouse.

The seminar is held in RCTs canteen, Borgergade 13, Copenhagen K

Registration for the seminar is not necessary