SUMMARY. Highlighted in this article is a call for feminists to expand their level of intervention to include global awareness. Several projects are described as examples of feminists working as positive facilitators of change for victims and survivors of war. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: getinfo@haworthpre5sinc.com]
KEYWORDS. Peace psychology, feminist psychology, global awareness, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR)
Feminists have long been active in the peace movement. Early Western feminists often made a connection between militarism and sexism and were active opponents of war (Brock-Utne, 1985). Today many feminist peace psychologists and other mental health professionals (Van Soest, 1997) are working on global issues to respond to violence and to build peaceful communities. Traditional peace psychology, informed by feminist perspectives (Murphy, 1995), addresses not only issues of war, international and inter-ethnic conflict, but also has expanded to include "the elimination of coercive systems of interaction as a basis of interaction between individuals and groups" (McKay, 1996, p. 94). The multiplicity of manifestations of structural violence, violent conflict and oppression that at11ict our world calis for multi-level, multifaceted interventions.
Feminist psychotherapists, by definition, are familiar with this type of analysis and are working with their clients "towards strategies and solutions advancing feminist resistance, transformation and social change in daily personallives and relationships with the social, emotional and political environment" (Brown, 1994, p. 22). But the press of individual situations and cases can often cause us to lose sight of the larger picture. We overlook our capacities to participate at several levels of intervention well beyond the confines of our office walls. With this report I hope to stimulate the creativity, passion and hope of feminist therapists to expand our horizons and find ways to support, extend and multiply the work of our colleagues around the world.
We find feminist psychologists in a variety of settings-from working with individuals in the treatment room, to performing community-based interventions, teaching psychology, pursuing action research, providing policy analysis, and initiating political action. This article discusses several projects as concrete examples of the multi-leveled interventions being undertaken to support women and foster peaceful, sustainable societies around the world. These projects were chosen because they adhere to the following feminist principles:
Many of the programs described in this article were developed by members of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) or have been supported by PsySR members. PsySR is a United States-based international network of psychologists and other mental health professionals who draw upon the research, knowledge, and practice of psychology to promote durable peace at the community, national, and international levels. Members work to: (a) apply the growing body of knowledge about conflict resolution and violence prevention, (b) facilitate positive change for victims and survivors of personal, community and civil violence, (c) advocate for basic human needs-including actions which decrease poverty, ensure ethnic and gender equity, increase work opportunity, promote healthy and sustainable environments, and achieve wiser balance between human needs and military budgets, (d) ensure that relevant information from psychology is used in local, national and international public policy. The first project we look at facilitates positive change for victims and survivors of war.
WAR TRAUMA AND RECOVERY BROCHURE
In 1992, when the stories of mass sexual assault and rape began to break from the territories of the former Yugoslavia, PsySR realized that women would be needing psychological services but that many would not have access to them. Few services were available and there was little social support for seeking mental health therapeutic help. With Irena Sarovic, M.A., originally from Croatia, as our principal author and translator, we consulted with a number of mental health professionals with particular expertise in dealing with the aftermath of sexual violence and trauma and developed a self-help psychoeducational brochure for use throughout the region. Several principles guided our process: the information was to be drawn from the best that feminist psychology had to offer at the time; the product needed to be short and inexpensive-easy to reproduce, transport and distribute in a war zone; the brochure needed to be "user-friendly," offering its help in a culturally acceptable way. For instance, since rape carried such social stigma, the subject needed to be approached in the larger context of the trauma of war. The resulting brochure recognizes the social context of trauma experienced by individuals and their communities. It gives information on normal human reactions to experiencing trauma, includes paragraphs on rape and torture, and provides some concrete suggestions for self-care and support. Recognizing that many people would be experiencing chronic stress because of the continuation of the war, self-care suggestions focused on maintaining as much control over one's life as possible, deciding carefully, for instance, about who to talk to about what and when to do it. There are versions printed in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, so that all sides of the conflict are able to use it.
Well over 15,000 have already been directly distributed by grassroots women's groups working in all parts of the former Yugoslavia, by U.S. mental health professionals providing workshops and other support there, and in asylum countries for use with refugees. Since people are encouraged to copy the brochure, and the brochure has been reprinted in some handbooks, it is impossible to say how widely this resource has been distributed.
Anecdotal information as to its usefulness has been forthcoming from a number of sources. For instance, mental health professionals have found it most useful as a conversation starter for groups of refugees and some have used it as training materials for paraprofessional volunteers. Women's knitting circles, developed by displaced women as a way of making warm clothes and providing a support system for themselves, have used the brochures as a way of helping members of the circle to deal with their experiences. Women for Women, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that hand delivers funds and sponsors microenterprises for women in Bosnia, distributed the brochure and reported that children as young as ten were able to read it out loud without difficulty. The brochure is now also available in a more generic form in English and continues to be distributed more widely.
TRAUMA, TESTIMONY AND SOCIAL MEMORY
Inger Agger, a psychologist from Denmark, has been instrumental in creatively addressing issues of appropriate treatment for women and girls who have experienced gender-specific human rights violations. She was responsible for the Psycho-Social Projects of the European Community Task Force during the war inthe Former Yugoslavia and subsequently was Psycho-Social Advisor at the OSCE Democratization Branch in Sarajevo. She has been a strong advocate for taking "an ethical non-neutral stand" (1995, p. 35) when working in therapy with women who have survived sexual assault, torture and other human rights abuses. " 'Mixing therapy with politics' is in fact unavoidable in psycho-social assistance to victims of political conflicts. If aid workers do not take an ethical stand against injustice they are still acting politically, because they are joining the conspiracy of secrecy and silence which maintains the traumatizing and oppressive power of shame" (1997, p. 123).
In her research project interviewing women from 10 different countries in the Middle East and Latin America (Agger, 1994), Agger used her office as what she calls "a ritual space" in which women could tell their stories "so that people in asylum countries would know more about the human rights violations which take place against women" (1995, p. 37), to contribute to social memory. She used a tape recorder to record their testimony so that the woman knew "that her voice and her name could be heard" (p. 37).
Agger describes this extension of the traditional therapeutic hour this way:
... I attempted to unite my experience from the use of testimony in the consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement with experiences from my therapeutic training and my work with testimony as a trans-cultural therapeutic method. This method implies that the research process and therapeutic process are not separable. For victims of human rights violations, testimony has a special significance, because it becomes a documented accusation and a piece of evidence against the perpetrators. 'Testimony' as a concept has a special, double connotation: it contains objective, judicial, public and political aspects, and subjective, spiritual, cathartic and private aspects. (1995, p. 37)
Agger is very concerned about "the major contradiction between the psychological processes involved in reconciliation and those involved in social memory. Reconciliation involved recreating trust between people who arc divided by hatred and fear of each other; social remembrance and testimony require keeping all that happened-both the good and the evil-in the collective memory of these same people" (p. 38). The term reconciliation has many meanings. At one end of the spectrum we see that when a con±lict has terminated there is social pressure on people to come to some accommodation with the former foe, to "live and let live," or "forgive and forget," so that some order and stability may return to the community. Galtung probably expresses the most ambitious end of the spectrum best when he describes reconciliation as using "creative, positive conflict transformation ... not only to avoid violence ... but to increase the entropy [of peace] by emerging from that phase of conflict with more mature selves and more mature social formations ... " (1996, p. 272).
At the same time there is a need for recognition of and restitution for the suffering experienced by both sides, and for social memory to act as a preventive to "never again" let such atrocities happen. Of particular concern for feminist therapists is the fact that women's experiences are often lost in the social memory, that the underlying structural issues which fostered the conflict are not addressed in the aftermath, and traumatized individuals are caught in the middle. If they go along with the reconciliation then they contribute to the sense of community, feeling connected again, but are in danger of denying their own reality. On the other hand, if they maintain their insistence on publicly remembering their experiences they are in danger of remaining outside the community and stigmatized when their society wants to forgive and forget. Issues involved in both effective reconciliation leading to durable peace (Lund, 1996) and accurate and inclusive social memory need to be addressed in the "search for new methods and aims in trauma therapy" (Agger, 1995, p. 39). This is an area that requires much attention and creative innovation, with feminist therapists uniquely positioned to bring their considerable insights and experience to bear on this problem.
CONSULTATION WITH THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNALS
In 1994, in my role as PsySR Coordinator, I was contacted by an international women's rights Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), The Coordination of Women's Advocacy (CWA), for help with their process of consultation with the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ICTY/R), which is based in The Netherlands, at The Hague. CWA began its work as a group of women from 10 asylum countries in 1993 and has since organized a number of consultations with institutions of the United Nations system. These have focused primarily on the question of gender-specific war crimes against women during the war in the former Yugoslavia, and more recently, also in Rwanda. CWA has consistently called for prosecution of rape as a war crime, has advised the Tribunal on ways to reduce retraumatization of women survivors who agree to provide evidence, how to best support witnesses in the process of testifying, and has called attention to the problems of witness protection.
For instance, when the Tribunal was deciding on whether or not to require public disclosure of witnesses' identity in open court, the prosecution staff asked for expert opinion on the issue. The Tribunal needed to balance the defendant's right to know the identity of his accuser against the right of the witness to protection from physical and psychological harm and intimidation. The PsySR network was able to provide the Tribunal prosecution staff with background psychological information on the probable chilling effect of allowing public identification of witnesses testifying in cases of sexual assault, especially given the very serious stigma attached to rape in their society. This contributed to the Court's decision to allow anonymity of witnesses.
My fellow CWA consultants have been working with refugees, potential witnesses, and survivors of war crimes, both in therapeutic situations and in other advocacy and service roles. Their dedication and concern for maintaining the dignity of their clients, empowering their recovery and providing the best they can offer to the ICTY/R in its quest for some measure of justice is palpable whenever they gather in consultation. They maintain a clear-eyed view of both the limitations of international institutions to make real differences in individuals' lives, and also the power of reaching international consensus on such issues as declaring and prosecuting rape as a war crime.
Former Chief Prosecutor Justice Richard Goldstone, said,
The role of gender-based war crimes in the former Yugoslavia ... is of much greater importance than we originally expected.... The question of rape in Rwanda and the frequency of crimes of sexual assault point to the need for more focus there.... You may not realize how important your inputs have been all these years. The Tribunal has carefully listened to your recommendations and it has responded to the quest for solutions in many of the areas which you brought up with us. (CWA, 1996, p. 12)
The consultations have also contributed to successful political action. We developed a draft resolution which was adopted by the European Parliament, which increased the budget for the protection and support of people testifying before the Tribunal. CWA provided a whole list of suggested psychosocially informed support systems and improvements in the treatment of female witnesses interviewed by Tribunal personnel (CWA, 1996). For instance, we have recommended that all witnesses be allowed to bring a support person with them, with their travel also funded by the Tribunal, that interviews be held in the mother tongue of the witness, that translators, when used, be trained to handle testimony about traumatic events sensitively, and that asylum countries (where many potential witnesses currently reside) be called upon to offer increased witness protection. With the increased funding, the Tribunal should be able to implement at least some of the improvements in their support of witnesses. The most recent Consultation considered how witnesses are faring back in their communities. A questionnaire is being developed for use with the now hundreds of people who have been interviewed by the ICTY/R, to give them a voice and an opportunity to affect the future workings of international tribunals through the telling of their experiences as people who testified for the ICTY/R. These practices, established at the international level, can also be used, eventually, as models for women activists striving to improve treatment of women in their own countries.
WOMEN AS PEACE BUILDERS
Women in roles as peace builders are often invisible. "Women have a long history of negotiating conflicts and creating compromises in the private sphere and at the community level. Yet rarely is this ever called upon in situations of armed conilict and war" (Bunch, 1997, p. 7). To shed some light on this critical aspect of women's lives, a multicultural research project has been developed by another PsySR member, Susan McKay of the University of Wyoming, and Cheryl de la Rey of the University of Cape Town, South Africa. McKay notes:
...we think that women work in ways that are distinct from men's but these have not been documented. It is interesting that several peace building projects are presently occurring ... and I am not free to give any details because of concerns for women's safety. [Women] tend to work quietly and at communitylevels, building coalitions and networking for proactivity.... We think we can start to learn more by asking women themselves, women who do this work. (McKay, personal communication, 3/12/98)
The project, based in South Africa, consists of two parts:
One of the problems we think occurs, and I have discussed this with very experienced people, is that there seems to be a trendiness in doing peace building training and it is a quick affair without extensive and ongoing capacity building (capacity building is key in peace building work) which we see as critical. So a central question is how to develop woman-centered programs to build women's capacities in peace building. (McKay, personal communication, 3/12/98)
In another example of ways in which small projects relate to wider levels of intervention, McKay also notes the direct connections between this project and one of the goals specified in the United Nations Beijing Women's Conference Platform for Action (United Nations, 1996), that of increasing women's capacities for peace building. Included as part of this goal is the development of policy recommendations for governmental and nongovernmental organizations about best practices and training models which can help facilitate sociopolitical and psychosocial reconstruction processes (McKay, personal communication, 2/6/98).
Community-Based Intervention-Angola
Psychologists and other mental health professionals are increasingly called upon to treat the survivors of the chaos that is unattended to in our cities, our rural communities, and in war-torn countries. And yet, often those programs are designed and implemented without tapping the local knowledge and resources, often held by women for their communities. The project described below is an attempt to correct those problems.
Carlinda Monteiro, an Angolan psychologist in Luanda, has been leading an all-Angolan team of mostly women, under the auspices of Christian Children's Fund, on a seven-province project to assist war-affected children. Since over half the population of Angola is under 15, and includes many child soldiers, the problem is immense and cannot be addressed through traditional Western-based individualized treatment for PTSD and other related diagnoses. For one thing, there are very few trained psychologists available and Western interventions must receive appropriate cultural tailoring in order to be effective. But more critical to the situation is the fact that "the psychological wounds are communal and cannot be addressed effectively at the individual and family levels" (Wessells, in press).
One of PsySR's past presidents, Michael Wessells, has been working with Monteiro and her team in an effort to bring an effective blend of Western psychological expertise and traditional methods to bear on the problem. Using a "train the trainers" approach, the team has been conducting seminars with groups of people from around the country who have been nominated by their communities as trustworthy and effective in caring for children. The team's process has been effective in eliciting traditional views of what children need to grow up healthy, as well as community assessments of the problems children are facing today. For instance, in 1995 the team
conducted a study of a nonrandom sample of 200 unaccompanied children who had come to the capital city, Luanda. . . . Although it was a worst case analysis, the results were shocking: 27% had lost their parents, 94% had been exposed to attacks, 66% had witnessed mine explosions and 55 had been victims thereof, 36% had lived with troops, 33% had suffered injuries by shooting or shelling, 65% had escaped death, and 7% had fired guns. These experiences had a powerful psychological impact on the children who exhibited trauma symptoms such as fright and insecurity (67%), disturbed sleep (61%), intrusive images (59%), frequent thoughts about war (89%), and sensory-motor disturbance (24%). Moreover, 91% of children in the sample exhibited three or more symptoms of trauma. (Wessells and Monteiro, in press)
The team has also been able to teach basic Western-based psychological perspectives on child development, and has developed culturally appropriate techniques for helping children work through the trauma they have experienced and for helping restore spiritual harmony. For instance, in Angola,
... traditional Bantu societies place a strong emphasis on extended family and community, which includes both the living and the spirits of the ancestors.... The spirits of the ancestors protect the living community, which is an extension of the ancestral community. If the ancestors are not honored through the teaching of traditions and the practice of appropriate rituals, their spirits cause problems manifested in poor health, misfortune, social disruption, and even war. (Wessells and Monteiro, in press)
Given that the children experiencing the trauma described above are also part of the Bantu culture, these spiritual, communal issues must be part of the process of healing.
Participants in the project have been using art, dance and music as vehicles for the children to address their distress. They have also worked with traditional healers to handle the difficult problems of people not having been able to bury their dead properly, and in arranging for the proper cultural rituals that will allow child soldiers who have killed to reenter the community and be reunited with their families wherever possible. These last two factors could not have been addressed without a willingness to listen respectfully to all the voices with an openness to understanding the meaning and significance of the issues being brought forth. Italso required respect for local cosmologies. While there are many traditional cultural practices that are harmful, especially to women, the team is committed to gender equity and believes that the process of listening with an eye for healing and prevention of future problems can only help with the change process in the long run.
This particular project, while still in progress and therefore not fully assessed, has had good interim results in reducing problems of children's flashbacks, sleep disturbances, aggression and social isolation, while improving child-child and adult-child interaction and helping to mobilize communities around children's needs. Working with local helpers, the team is documenting ethnographically traditional healing ceremonies and their impact. The project activities have also been helpful for primary caregivers, most of whom are women, who themselves have been strongly affected by 35 years of war (Wessells, personal communication, 2/2/1998).
UNITED NATIONS FOURTH WORLD CONFERENCE ON WOMEN-BEUING, 1995
PsySR and the APA Division of Peace Psychology, under the auspices of Women for Meaningful Summits NGO statu.<;, sent a delegation of psychologists to the NGO Forum that accompanied the official UN Women's Conference in Beijing. A major concern for the delegation was to strengthen the focus of the Conference on peace issues and how they affe<.,'l women's lives. The delegation led open dialogues on conflict resolution processes in different cultures, women's experiences of human rights violations and the role of forgiveness in con±lict resolution. Upon their return, psychologists gave over 100 presentations to community and student groups who were interested in the Conference. They reported on the forum and educated people on the significance of the world-wide consensus reached on a number of issues critical to women which appeared as the Platform for Action (United Nations, 1996).
The President's Interagency Council for Women was charged with the official U.S. follow-up of the Platform for Action and invited continuing consultation with NGOs. PsySR participated in the nationwide conference televised through satellite down-links and provided analysis and suggestions both at the roundtables and through written responses. As peace psychologists, PsySR especially emphasized the lack of attention to issues of peace and war in the follow-up agenda. Recently, the Council published its report, "America's Commitment: Federal Programs Benefiting Women and New Initiatives as Follow-up to the UN Fourth World Conference on Women" (1997). A second report, "Building on Beijing: United States NGOs Shape a Women's National Action Agenda" (Stanley Foundation, 1997), is a compilation of the suggestions from many NGOs, including PsySR, who contributed to the dialogue.
Even a cursory look at the sections of the Platform highlights how far the United States has to go in meeting these international goals within our borders. Feminist mental health professionals understand that public policy decisions affect the health, mental health and well-being of the people with whom we work. For instance, social policy in the United States is inextricably tied to the policy priorities that place continued high military spending as a given and also require a balanced budget. Those same policies support continued sales of conventional arms to almost any country who pays for them, exacerbating the tensions in that area and turning simmering conflict into lethal violence. That lethal violence is then used as a rationale for continued high military budgets. Then, to complete the vicious circle, high military budgets mean decreased resources available for health care, job training, child care, environmental clean-up, etc.
It is in our best interests, as feminist psychotherapists, to use our expertise to advocate for governmental policies that will alleviate and prevent the devastation we see every day in our offices-to help meet the real human needs of the women, men and children of our world. And, we need to advocate not only for the physical human needs of people, but also for those psychological needs with which we are most directly familiar-"the equitable satisfaction of human needs for security, identity, well-being and self-determination" (Christie, 1997, p. 329). The implementation of the Platform for Action is a unique opportunity to focus attention on the full range of human needs with a feminist lens.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
The projects reviewed in no way encompass the breadth and depth of the work being pursued by feminist psychologists around the world. Although this article cannot even attempt to be fully inclusive, there are several good resources that can add significant analysis and suggestions for action.
The United Nations Report on "The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children" (1996), led by Graca Machel, former Minister of Education and First Lady of Mozambique, must be mentioned here. It highlights the need for psychosocial interventions at the community level which include supporting and caring for the women who often end up being the sole caretakers of our world's future generations. Machel brings the point home that prevention of violent conflict must become a priority for the international community and provides a number of specific suggestions for changes in policy. Feminist mental health professionals will find much in this report to support arguments for reductions in conventional arms sales, support for psychosocial services, and shifting resources to meet human needs.
A recent book, Myths About the Powerless: Contesting Social Inequalities(Lykes, Banuazizi, Liem, & Morris, 1996), provides a powerful analysis of ways that Western psychology has been misused in the assessment and treatment of "other" populations. As feminist psychotherapists participate in the facilitation and development of more cross-cultural connections, cross-fertilization, partnerships, support systems, research projects, and practice alternatives that match the cultural milieu in which they are to be carried out, we need to tread with care. Banuazizi points out that,
... the potential role of a culturally sensitive psychology within an interdisciplinary approach to problems of development in the Third World can be quite significant ... collaborative efforts between Westem psychologists and their Third World counterparts in recent years cannot help but broaden the horizons of both groups. (1996, p. 192)
AN ACTION AGENDA
The global feminist coalition for women's rights as human rights has proven extremely effective in advancing our cause on a global level. Those activists have chosen an issue and pursued it from the grassroots level up to the largest global arena they could find. We, as feminist mental health professionals, need to do the same thing. I'd like to propose a framework within which we can work together, bringing our many strengths, talents and interests together to focus on a specific vision-building sustainable, peaceful communities. This vision encompasses a vast array of issues from the most local and individual to the global and international. For instance, the projects mentioned above all contribute