Truth and Repair
by Judith Lewis Herman, MD
Basic Books, 2023

Herman says every survivor she interviewed or worked with wished, above all, for Acknowledgment, vindication, apology, and amends. Those four things are what justice looks like for the people directly affected.

However, justice also depends on the social organization of power. Is the relationship based on dominance and subordination or on mutuality and reciprocity? The hidden violence of patriarchy, she says, is perpetuated not only in culture and custom but also in the structures of law, law enforcement, and justice itself.

Thus, those four things are rarely received by the survivors, seriously hindering recovery. Without the truth, there can be no repair.

In the book, she bears witness to the stories of trauma survivors she has listened to. She unpacks power in chapters on tyranny, equality, and patriarchy, elaborates on details of their perspective of justice in chapters on acknowledgment, apology, and accountability, and then suggests some solutions for healing through chapters on restitution, rehabilitation, and prevention.

While there may already be concepts of the above abroad in our society, through her research, we learn how inadequate, and in fact even damaging, those preconceptions are. We learn of more effective ways, such as justice not being centered on the question of the offender’s fate but the primary obligation and duty being the care and support of the survivors, repairing the harm done. “When the community embraces the survivor, justice is served.”

In her Conclusion, Herman looks at the broader picture, what she calls the longest revolution, which is against the discrimination against women. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, passed by the UN General Assembly in 1979, was ratified by 99 countries, with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia and the United States. In 2017, the leaders of 4 major grassroots organizations of women of colour survivors came together to develop what they called the Survivors’ Agenda. After three days in 2020, it was declared that ‘it was time for survivors to come together to create the vision of a world without violence.’ That would mean “an end to patriarchal and racist systems of dominance and subordination, revealing the violence at their heart and repairing their profound harms.” The 30-page agenda, addressing all domains of women’s oppression and centered on safety and healing for survivors, was published in 2020.

That radical vision of justice also demanded bystanders “forgo easy complicity, to stand up and put an end to it, in order to transform the culture that glorifies white male supremacy, preventing sexual violence by addressing its root causes.”

When the community comes through with enabling and providing the four components survivors want, the damaged relationship between the community and survivor is healed, trust is restored, and a better kind of justice is done, Herman says. Prevention through mutuality forms the basis of trust and justice in a democratic society.

I’ve found it fascinating that many of the books I’ve been reading lately (by black and indigenous authors on religion and psychology) have all seemed interrelated. Both this book and Herman’s first book, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, have applications for the historic violence and trauma associated with black and indigenous lives, which continues even now.

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Beverley Burlock grew up in a small ocean town in Nova Scotia, Canada, born into an award-winning weekly newspaper family. Thus, from the beginning, ink was in her blood, and questions were in her brain. Since the questions extended into theology, she was often ‘in trouble’ from an early age, though that never stopped the questions. She has both journalism and theology degrees and has worked in both professions, calling out injustice in both. Always an avid reader, now in retirement, she can blissfully read to her heart’s delight on an even broader range of topics.