Pastoral Care with Children of War: A Community-Based Model of Trauma Healing in the Aftermath of Indonesia’s Religious Conflicts

Abstract

This essay on children and trauma places a community-based, activist model of pastoral care into conversation with contemporary trauma theory to argue for the necessity of contextual strategies of care for traumatized children. Based upon ethnographic research in Ambon City in the southern Moluccas, a group of islands in Indonesia where violent fighting between Christian and Muslim groups dominated the landscape from 1999 to 2002, the study explores the impact of continual trauma on children. Western models of care coming out of a mental health perspective that privilege narrating the trauma experience become problematic in contexts such as this one, where access to mental health is limited and cultural norms work against the disclosure of painful events. Operating from intercultural pastoral care principles of context-based care that relies on local wisdom, the essay offers the example of Pastor Jacky Maniputty’s community-based, activist model of pastoral care with youth as engaging the fundamental tasks of trauma healing in a culturally coherent manner.