Forgiveness, Women, and Responsibility to the Group

Abstract

The forgiveness advocacy movement in the field of psychology focuses on relief from one kind of trauma: an individual’s psychological wounds that can arise after a victimization. But there is another kind of injury that victims suffer, wounds not merely based on personal harm but based on an injustice done to them as representatives of a group. In the first kind of trauma, when a person is a victim of interpersonal violence, the wounding is often private and can change a person’s psychological well-being for life. Such harm is described in the literature through lists of symptoms representing continued suffering: depression, anxiety, reliving of the experience, vigilance, the inability to connect to other human beings one once felt warmly toward, and other psychological or emotional sequelae. Wounds that stem from injustice to groups can be experienced in this personal psychological way too, through intrapsychic and private reactions to trauma such as nightmares, obsessive thoughts, and depression. But these injuries also have a more public dimension. When a victim is a victim of an attack based on membership to some group and not just a random personal attack, a victim can feel his or her right to live in this world has been challenged and his or her very identity is unacceptable. The wounded can and perhaps should respond not just personally but on behalf of one’s group, especially given that group members who were not themselves harmed can feel the pain and experience the trauma in solidarity with the wounded. In wars, for example, thinking of Jews in Nazi Germany, the Tutsis in Rwanda, and Muslims in Bosnia, the harm done to a person and his or her family often represents another group’s hatred aimed at them as representatives of their ethnic group. In the United States, African Americans, gay Americans, and women in America have been subjected to harms that felt personal in the moment but were perhaps not so personal and instead based on prejudice against them because of group membership. Although it may be, as John Donne said, “forgiveness to the injured doth belong,” forgiveness advocates take this notion too far, describing a hyperindividualized notion of personal harm that does not address harms that befall a person because they are a member of a stigmatized group or that befall the group to which the harmed person belongs. This article explores the idea of forgiveness as it pertains