Revisiting Trauma and Recovery

Abstract

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this discussion of Judith Herman's important book Trauma and Recovery and its relevance today. In this volume, published in 1992, Herman developed many crucial dimensions of battering that continue to be essential to work on violence against women. In these brief comments, I want to highlight two of these dimensions. The first is the link between battering, trauma, and larger political and social violence-what I would call the operation of gender violence on a macro level. I remember reading the book for the first time after I had already been doing work on legal representation of battered women for many years. I was amazed by the very first chapters, in which Herman makes the connection between political violence and battering. I realized that my own understanding of violence against women had been limited by my sense of it as being within the context of a relationship between two people. Yes, I had seen it as political, as a part of a larger context of patriarchy and gender subordination, but I had not consistently made the link between larger political violence and violence against women. Herman saw that battering was terrorism in the home and made those links explicit (see Marcus 1994). Aspects of Herman's analogies have been integrated into sociological and psychological accounts of battering, such as the use of the phrase hostage. But the past fifteen years has seen the development and expansion of these insights, particularly in the context of a global women's international human rights movement (see Schneider 2000). This movement has explicitly linked sexual violence and political violence. We now understand gender violence as a form of torture and recognize that violence against women occurs in wartime and as a weapon of national and international conflict (Copelon 2003). Even the United Nations secretary general's In-Depth Study on All Forms of Violence Against Women, submitted to the General Assembly in fall 2006 (and on which I worked as a consultant), recognized gender violence as a human rights violation and as a vehicle of war (United Nations General Assembly 2006). The law school casebook on battering that I coauthored includes a chapter on international human rights and emphasizes that international human rights frameworks expand our understanding of battering as linked to larger political and social violence (see DaIton, Schneider 2001; Schneider, Hanna, Greenberg, and Dalton 2008). …