Legal and Ethical Aspects of Social Trauma

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The salience of understanding the impact of social trauma in public life is ever clearer with increasing protracted conflicts, poverty, inequality, and violence around the world. Accordingly, social trauma is an agenda item and a subject for policy-makers in the last few decades. However, designing, adopting, implementing, and assessing the impact of policies for prevention of social trauma and protection of survivors require concerted action among many public policy actors. In order to facilitate coordination for interventions and preventive strategies, policy-makers initiate the policy cycle by defining a challenge that requires immediate attention. The conceptualization of social trauma as a policy challenge constitutes the first step for involving trauma in the policy process. Social trauma, however, is a complex concept which needs to be broken down to its constituent parts to be part of policy implementation. An accessible definition of social trauma focuses on the issue as a process which “occurs as a result of violence, abuse, neglect, loss, disaster, war and other emotionally harmful experiences” (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA), 2014, p. 2) and is embedded in the consequences of traumatic events in a community or a social group that an individual identifies with. Moreover, trauma constitutes the “experiences that produce intense emotional pain, fear, or distress, often resulting in long-term physiological and psychosocial consequences” (Bowen & Murshid, 2016, p. 223), and needs to be contextualized in social and cross-cultural settings (Good & Hinton, 2016). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) classifies traumatic events (TE) as “exposure to threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence” (Benjet et al., 2016). Individuals and/or groups may be exposed to TE directly or indirectly (APA, 2013). Accordingly, social trauma as a policy challenge involves psychological, emotional, physiological, and sociological dimensions. As the consequences of social trauma transmit across generations of a social group, the transgenerational dimension also becomes an issue requiring healing interventions across time. In the public policy realm, the multifaceted nature of social trauma comes with the challenge of how to begin addressing the diverse consequences of social trauma, for whom, with which policy tools, and by mobilizing which institutional, financial, and human resources. Second, the multitude of policy actors, constituting policy-makers, decision-makers, and implementors, need to cooperate in the design, adoption, and implementation stages across global, national, and local levels. Coordination for any policy including those addressing social trauma-related challenges among different actors and levels is embedded in legal regulations. This chapter presents how and why social trauma becomes part of public policy through legal and ethical aspects of social trauma by examining the case of forced migration.