SUMMARY. This article describes the personal and professional experiences of the author while working as a mental health trainer in Serbia. In addition, various approaches to victims and perpetrators are reconsidered, along with the ethical implications of this work. The relationship between working with violence in a war zone and in a peaceful society is also explored. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: getinfo@haworthpressinc.com]
KEYWORDS. Serbia, trauma, systemic approaches, feminist therapy, oppression, violence
Dusica doesn't want to eat rice anymore, ever again. During the worst year of the war, it was the only food she could get. Rice and flour. A friend from The Netherlands brought her a package of yeast so she could bake bread. A little embarrassed, she accepted it. Now in 1997, we are here and there is enough food again, but not much money with which to buy it. Dusica, who is a psychiatrist, earns about a hundred dollars a month. She does not complain. There has been no fighting in Serbia itself. No houses have been destroyed. There is water and electricity. But among the problems is a seemingly endless stream of ethnic Serbian refugees from Vukovar, Sarajevo, Mostar, and Krajina. They are farmers who have lost everything, old people who have been uprooted once before in the Second World War, "incomplete" families, usually missing a father, and ·some people who have professional training, but who do not get jobs.
Many live in crowded apartments with relatives. Those without relatives live in camps. I have visited a camp, one close to Smederevo, called Male Krsna. It is not the worst. There is simple food for everyone every day. The heaters work. Sometimes they get new shoes or sweaters. They have been living here for five years, five to six people in every room, in bunk beds, their few belongings kept in cartons. They have hung pictures of where they come from on the wall, pictures of the famous bridge of Mostar that doesn't exist anymore. They are ethnic Serbs who are not accepted by the Serbian population because they speak with funny accents and want to share in the scarce food, jobs and housing. But they can't go back. They have no idea what the future will bring or how long they will have to stay in the camp.
At the Institute for Mental Health in Belgrade, many of the patients are heavily traumatized. They are women who still wait for a husband who is probably dead. They are girls who have been raped in the war. They are children who have witnessed their mother being raped or their father being clubbed to death. They are young men, teenagers, who have been soldiers. Many families have been torn apart because the ethnic dividing line ran right through mixed marriages and children with a mixed heritage. There is a story about a Serbian girl who fled and asked for shelter at the house of an uncle. He didn't open the door because he was a Croat. Nobody knows what happened to the girl afterwards.
For us, the trainers from Admira, who are invited to give a course on sexual and domestic violence for the therapists from the Institute of Mental Health, it is not a surprise that violence within the family in any form, including sexual abuse of children and battering and abuse of women, has increased in the aftermath of the war.We have also worked in South Mrica, Albania and Palestine. We know that, in times of political turmoil, and especially after the worst seems to be over, violence in the family and between partners tends to increase.
We don't expect this first training in Belgrade to be an easy job. On the first evening, at an informal gathering, we see all the signs of vicarious traumatization, therapists and psychiatrists who are tired, overworked and burned out, who feel isolated, defeated and even cynical. Itis a universal story that it is difficult to keep faith in humanity after being faced with so much senseless violence, so much cruelty. This first evening we long for South Africa, where life is also hard, but where we felt a sense of solidarity, togetherness that seems to be absent here.
When we start working we meet different layers of resistance. The first is the professional attitude of psychiatrists who are not used to sharing problems openly and showing their vulnerability to colleagues. The second is that we are women, feminists no less, who are not even trained psychiatrists. Who are we to tell them what to do? The third is that this is Serbia, an ex-communist country that has engendered a psychology of mutual distrust and fear of betrayal. We are representatives of the West, who has accused Serbia of being the main aggressor in the war in Yugoslavia and guilty of the worst war crimes, including the systematic rape of Bosnian and Croat women. They are furious about the international sanctions against Serbia which make it seem that they are the only perpetrators in this war. In War and Sanctions, edited by the Institute of Mental Health (Kalicanin, P., Lecic-Tosevski, D., Bukelic, J. and Ispanovic-Radojkovic, V., Eds., 1994), a comparison is made between their camps and Auschwitz. The Serbs were victims in the Second World War. They feel that they are being victimized again by this international condemnation. To me, their attitude bears a great similarity to that of the rapist who is not able to see himself as an offender, but feels that the whole world is one big conspiracy against him.
So we are tested. Do we really want to work with them? Will we listen to them without judgment? Can we be trusted? Itis much the same way that a client tests a therapist. Itlasts for a day before the first real problems are presented. In the first getting acquainted session, even asking someone 's age seems too private, but the urge to talk about the difficulties they face in their work is stronger than their reluctance. "What do you do" asks one psychiatrist who has had classical psychoanalytical training, "when a man comes in who has lost his house, half his family, has no work and no money, who is desperate? Do I treat him for neuroses?" "What do you do" asks another, "when you see a young woman who wants a referral to a plastic surgeon to get rid of the scars on her face? She was mauled by a soldier with a knife, while she was forced to watch her mother being raped. Her father is missing. She wants to go abroad, but wants to get rid of the scars first because every time she looks in the mirror she is reminded of what happened. I asked her, 'Don't you want to talk about the scars that are inside you?' She said 'No', and left. What did I do wrong?"
"My most difficult patient was a woman who traveled many miles to see me once a week. She was mixed Serb and Croat. Her husband was a Serb. She was raped by a group of Muslim soldiers, who forced her to fellate them. The first person she told, a mental health care worker, said she must have done it willingly. She had not told her husband because she feared that he would think the same thing and cast her out. She couldn't go back to her Croatian family because she had been married to a Serb. She came to my office several times, but after the first time she didn't say anything. She just sat there. I waited. After a few times, she didn't come back anymore. I don't know why."
"Maybe because you are a man," someone said. "Maybe because you are a Serb," someone else said. "Maybe because you should have shown more commitment and not waited passively, like we have learned, for her to start talking." Nothing in their training has prepared them for these kinds of problems.
Milan is a man who treats many women who were sexually abused. When we ask about his motives, he says that he thinks about his wife and daughters. It could have happened to them. Then he tells us the story of his most difficult patient-not a woman, but a man. He has sleeping disturbances, t1ashbacks, difficulties in concentrating, the classical symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. What happened? The patient's daughter turned sixteen. At that moment, he realized with shock that the girl he had participated in gangraping as a soldier had also been sixteen. He had kept her passport. "I listened to him," says Milan, "but I was paralyzed. I couldn't say anything. I didn't know what to do. After that first time, he didn't come back. Was there anything I could have done? What do you think I should have done?" he asks us, women, feminists from another country.
Victims and perpetrators. It would be so easy if we could divide the human race neatly into bad guys and good guys, into innocent victims and evil offenders. Black is o.k.; white is wrong. Women are victims; men are oppressors. A man in Soweto is the victim of apartheid, but what do we do when he sexually abuses children? Jews have been an extremely persecuted people, so we support Israel. But what do we do with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land? Do we deny it or do we judge even more severely because they, especially they, should know better than to oppress others? "The Jews have learned nothing from the war," I overhear somebody saying. Were the death camps meant for education? The victim can become an offender; it happens. The mother, who, abused herself, mistreats her children; it can happen. The kid from the ghetto who beats up gay men; the shopkeeper who, while trying to survive in a poor neighborhood, becomes racist; the Palestinian man who has been tortured in an Israeli prison who stabs his pregnant wife with a knife because he has been told she has been unfaithful: true stories. Has the rapist chosen to become a rapist? No. Does that make him less responsible for his acts? No again.
When I return from Serbia, I am faced with two different attitudes. The first is, "All those Yugoslavians are equally bad. That's how people are. It will never change. There will always be war somewhere." The other is even more cynical. "Why do you bother? Let them kill each other." The language of powerlessness and resignation, dissociation and indifference.Why should we care? Nothing we do will change anything anyway. Born of the same sense of powerlessness, the simple accusing of one party, the creation of black and white images of who is the real enemy.
Milan is a man. He is ashamed of his own gender, of what men are capable of doing to women. It is very important to him to show that he is a different sort of man, to dissociate himself from perpetrators. He asks for a lot of our attention. He wants us, foreign women, to acknowledge that he is a good man. Like there were good Germans during the war. It is one of his motivations to work with women, with victims of sexual violence. If he doesn't watch out he will turn into one of those knights in shining armor, a man who needs to rescue poor girls to be able to feel better about himself. A newer and softer sort of abuse of women, although it is well meant. "What would you have done with that man if he hadn't been your patient?" I ask Milan. "I would have hanged him by the balls in the middle of the city so everybody could have seen what he had done," Milan says heatedly. "But he was my patient, so I said nothing." "You don't think that he could see by your face what you were thinking?" "Maybe, I don't know. Well, probably. Yes, but what would you have done if you had been in my place?"
What I would have done? What can I do now? My own reaction to this question surprises me. A few years ago I would not even have been able to think these words. As a survivor of violence myself, as a feminist and as one of the women who was part of the Women's Mental Health Care Movement from the beginning, I saw myself on the side of female victims, and that did not leave me much space or even willingness to think about men, to think about offenders. It was us against them. What I would have done, had that man been my patient, was to praise him for the courage he had to admit that he had committed a serious crime. Is that not the biggest problem in working with offenders, their unwillingness to see themselves as responsible for their deeds? This man, in his despair, had already made that first step. It means that part of him, the part that wants to be a caring father of a sixteen-year-old daughter, has not yet been destroyed. Just praising him for his courage would not have been enough. I would have also let him know that what he did was absolutely unacceptable. Did he have guilt feelings? He had reasons for them that I would not want to take away. Maybe, if I had been able to adopt this dual attitude of acceptance and nonacceptance, and if he had stayed and worked through this painful material, there might have come a time when he could have been able to ask for forgiveness sincerely. Maybe then he could have done something to make amends-not to the girl that he raped; that would have been using her again, but at least to the community that she came from. He might have been an example to other men. Maybe he should have to stand trial. Punishment is not our job as therapists and we should leave it to the judges and the police. Yet we also know that punishment alone seldom changes an offender for the better.
Working with offenders asks something different from us than does working with victims and survivors. I am not saying that working with victims and survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse is easy, but at least we know where we stand: on their side. In working with offenders, there is an inherent complexity. Ifwe offer only understanding and acceptance, they will have no reason to change. Ifwe offer only rejection and judgment, they will have no reason to change. In The Netherlands for a long time, we could afford the "luxury" of working only with victims and survivors. Or so we thought. We were blind to the fact that caring for the victims did not change the offenders, and so, did not change the extent of violence against women. We could only help individual women after the battering or abuse had already occurred. Working in countries where people have not had the opportunity to build a separate women's mental health system or where women, for various reasons (no job, no money, no welfare system, losing their children, being separated from their whole network of kinship), could not leave their violent husbands made me more aware of different therapeutic options than trying to separate victims from ofienders. I became more interested in couples treatment when possible, systemic thinking combined with feminism, and with building a working relationship with men who work with perpetrators. I also became aware of my own fear of working with offenders, a fear that I seemed to share with many women, that trying to understand what makes a man into an offender would mean forgiving, forgetting and acceptance, just as many battered and abused women have tolerated their own abuse because they understood the hurt little boy, the vulnerable man hidden inside their persecutor. It was a fear that too much understanding would take away our strength and weaken our commitment.
Virginia Goldner (1997) gave words to this confusion by stating that violence is never acceptable, but can be understandable, and that forgiving is up to the victim. Rather than an either/or approach, it is an and/and one. Sharon Lamb (1996) cleared up another misunderstanding for me. My feeling once was that understanding offenders would put the blame back on victims. Lamb says that this is not a zero sum game. It should be feasible for us to look at the way a victim has colluded in making her own victimization possible, for instance, by giving priority to keeping a marriage intact to her own safety, without taking any responsibility from the offender. It should also be possible to understand the dynamics in relationships, for instance, that many men resort to violence, not when they feel powerful, but when they feel powerless vis-a-vis their wives, without blaming the woman for his anger and without forgetting that he is still the one who has raised his fist against her.
Once I thought systemic thinking and feminist therapy were mutually exclusive. I saw too many examples of hidden victim blaming in a tooorthodox concept that within relationships or families everyone is equally responsible for whatever problems there may be. Yet I also saw the shortcomings of a too-orthodox feminist viewpoint that could see women only as passive victims, men as offenders without any explanation of how they became that way. It is women like Virginia Goldner, among others, who have inspired me to a synthesis: feminist systemic thinking, including contradictions and creative tensions, a fierce combination of commitment to combat oppression, inside and outside of personal relationships (when we really think systemically the world is bigger than just the family), and a deep compassion not only for victims, but also for victims-turned-oppressor.
Working in Serbia has been a rich and challenging experience. It has made me aware of a complexity around the issue of violence that I had not realized as long as I stayed in a relatively peaceful and prosperous country. It gave me more insight into the mechanisms that combine war and oppression, violence in intimate relationships, trauma and gender. It is no coincidence, I think now, that no matter how big the cultural differences in countries like Gaza, Serbia, Albania and South Africa, there are similarities in the rise of violence just at the moment that people expect life to become less difficult. It has a lot to do with the aftermath of severe traumatization. It always has to do with gender. It is the men who have lost many of their traditional ways of proving themselves to be masculine, when they can no longer be providers, and have not been able to protect their families from poverty and the consequences of war, occupation, racial oppression and decline of state systems, who run the risk of becoming more violent in their relationships, while the women, who have somehow survived extremely difficult times without doubting their worth as mothers and wives, endure.
When dealing with violence within families and relations we are not only talking about methods of treatment and intervention, but also about ethics, about finding a way to stop the cycle of violence, about a balance between help and justice, about seeing an offender who has once been a victim himself, perhaps at the hard hands of his father, of the fear of showing weakness or not wanting to join in games and jokes that were denigrating to women, of the pressure of his internalized myths about masculinity. In the case of the Serbian man who raped a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl, the fear of what his fellow soldiers would do to him if he refused to join them. Something happened to this man that made it possible for him to see the body of a sixteen-year-old girl as enemy territory that needed to be destroyed. We have to be able to see the human part in somebody who behaves in an inhuman way, to fight the illness, not the patient, as a Chinese proverb says. I am sure that years ago, if I were faced with Milan's patient, I could not have kept the contempt and revulsion from showing in my face just as it showed in his. Iprobably would have found it easier to kill than to understand. Iprobably would have chosen to have nothing to do with the case, to avoid my own contradictory feelings.
When we said goodbye, after that first training in Serbia (there were many to follow), we were tired and happy. So were the participants. Dusica had tears in her eyes when she embraced us and so did I. We promised to come back. At that moment, Irealized that our discussion about victims and perpetrators had been a metaphor for the war we had only talked about indirectly. What we said about offenders, we said, between the lines, about Serbia. Working as therapists and trainers in countries with such a complicated political situation does not allow us to divide problems into neat categories of work with battered women, with abused children, with family therapy, but forces us to see the connections between political systems and personal suffering, challenges our way of thinking about women and men, about victims and offenders. It challenges not only our thinking about methods, but also about ethics. That, in itself, is our reward.
REFERENCES
Goldner, V. (1997). De genderdialoog. (The Gender Dialogue) Anja Meulenbelt (Ed.). Uitgeverij Van Gennep.
Kalicanin, P.,Lecic-Tosevski, D., Bukelic, J.and Ispanovic-Radojkovic,V.(Eds) (1994). The stresses of war and sanctions. Belgrade :Institute for Mental Health.
Lamb, S. (1996). The trouble with blame: Victims, perpetrators and responsibility. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Anja Meulenbelt has written many articles and several books on gender, sexuality, and other related subjects, combining psychology and sociology, and is also known for her novels. Her first book, The Shame Is Over, has become a feminist classic in Europe and was translated into 11 languages. Her latest book, Chodorow and Beyond, is about the dynamics in relationships between women and men, and between women. She is also the editor of a series of books called Gender; Psychology and Mental Health Careand is a writer and trainer for the Dutch organization, Admira.
The author is grateful to Sandra Visser for allowing her to use this title. It is from an old Rolling Stones song, but she has used it to refer to working with offenders. The author thanks Admira, the organization in Utrecht, that sent her and Gerda Aarnik to Serbia. She thanks them for their support and for this opportunity. Gerda Aarnik, the other trainer, is a friend and colleague and has been the author's main mentor in this work on violence.
Address correspondence to: Anja Meulenbelt, Tichelstraat 26hs, 1015 KT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: "Sympathy for the Devil: Thinking About Victims and Perpetrators After Working in Serbia." Meulenbelt, Anja. Co-published simultaneously in Women & Therapy (The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 22, No. I, 1999, pp. 153-160; and: Assault on the Soul: Women in the Former Yugoslavia (ed: Sara Sharratt and Ellyn Kaschak) The Haworth Press, Inc., 1999, pp. 153-160. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service (1-800-342-9678, 9:00a.m.- 5:00p.m. (EST). E-mail address: getinfo@haworthpressinc.com].
© 1999 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.