Chapter 6 The Public Dimension of Privatized Trauma: Impact and Response
In: Where To From Here? Examining Conflict-Related and Relational Interaction TraumaSearch for other papers by Joan Simalchik in
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Abstract
In its 1984 report, Torture in the Eighties, Amnesty International called torture ‘the twentieth century epidemic.’ Widely practiced and institutionally sanctioned, torture and state repression created circles of silence enshrouding individuals, families and communities. Officially denied, torture became an open secret creating conditions of cognitive dissonance for both victimized individuals and the wider society. Many refugees fleeing these regimes found asylum in countries of the Global North where trauma treatment centres were developed. Later, emerging from state dictatorships, new governments in periods of democratic reclamation negotiated the memory of past atrocities according to their own particular political exigencies. Incorporating Ignacio Martin Baro’s theory of psychosocial destruction and Paulo Freire’s notion of critical consciousness, this chapter will discuss the relationship between legacies of trauma and how individual and collective traumatic memory has been managed in countries after dictatorship, i.e. Chile and Brazil and in countries of exile, i.e. Canada.