Remembering, Healing, and Telling: Community-Initiated Approaches to Trauma Care in South Africa

Abstract

Many migrants live with ongoing experiences of violence and social exclusion. The small numbers of migrants using psychosocial services relative to the very large numbers of people exposed to violence informed the questions behind the documenting of the three case studies described here. The key question for us was: what were people doing to alleviate their distress? Where did they find support and what kinds of support were on offer? A secondary area of investigation for us was related to understandings of trauma or conceptualisations of the term. The existing literature documenting alternatives to trauma, while very useful as ways of connecting to people's systems of cultural meaning, still often takes the underlying principles of psychological counselling as its point of departure. This is appropriate and, as will be discussed in this chapter, is also the approach taken in some of the case studies we reviewed. But we also wanted to go further and ask whether people identified with the notion of trauma at all. For example we wanted to understand, without imposing the frame of psychology, what migrants' responses to their experiences were, even if psychological trauma approaches did not figure at all in this response. Finally, in line with the wider project outlined in this book, we also reflect in this chapter on the relationship between the case studies and their approaches, and we might connect individual healing with broader processes of peacebuilding, social change, and development. Each of the case studies used a different methodology depending on the most pertinent questions for that activity. As such each is described separately. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)