Coping with Survival After Genocide

The damage of genocide is permanent, not just in the lives lost, families decimated, and cultures destroyed, but in the individual lives of survivors. While society rebuilds, the scars of trauma persist, like an unseen undercurrent carried quietly by those who learn how to live in a new "post" reality.

A recent study in Rwanda revealed that over 28 percent of the population suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with over 58 percent of those being women. Similar studies in post-genocide Cambodia found extremely high levels of trauma among the population, but, as one reporter notes, "the issue gets little outside attention, and precious little money." Advocates in Sri Lanka are drawing attention to PTSD in children who lived through the devastating civil war between the government and rebel Tamil militants, which included large-scale displacement and attacks on civilians, or children who were abducted into the fighting forces themselves.

And individual survivors are not alone in their suffering: Studies of the families of Holocaust survivors have shown a "trauma transfer" effect, whereby subsequent generations inherit degrees of the survivor's trauma. Over on Change.org's War and Peace blog, Daniel rails against an assertion that the United States as a nation suffers from PTSD, and argues for the need to distinguish between those who've experience real violence and trauma and (my favorite line from the post) "someone who is sad from watching the nightly news." His post seems all the more valid, and the claims of an American "PTSD Nation" all the more hallow, considering societies that have, indeed, experienced high levels of actual trauma. In post-genocide societies, trauma is a veritable public health problem.

The government of Rwanda is doing the right thing by confronting this issue head on, as challenging a problem as it is to tackle. The memory and scars of genocide can never be taken away, lost loved ones can never be returned, and life will never be the same as before, but providing support and assistance to survivors can provide mechanisms to manage their trauma, and hopefully, in time, to ease it.

Photo credit: Fanny Schertzer