Today, we hosted Dr. Jeffrey Sonis from UNC-Chapel Hill. He’s been studying the international human rights trials in Cambodia, to see if trials produce measurable effects on the mental health of victims who suffer from trauma (or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, according to the lingo). This was an event cosponsored with the Duke Global Health Institute.
The question is provocative. Usually, trials are seen in the context of justice, not mental health. Trials evaluate accused law-breakers and mete out punishment to the guilty. In purely legal terms, they are not meant to improve the mental health of victims.
Yet often, trials are said to be “healing” or provide “closure.” There is a common perception that by telling their stories, victims who have suffered horrible treatment can get better. The victims’ rights movement in the United States would argue that trials — and especially guilty verdicts or even the death penalty — help them recover from the loss of a loved one.
Is this really true? In the context of international tribunals or truth commissions, can you measure therapeutic outcomes? Can genocide be somatically “healed” with justice? Most tribunals have no mental health services that accompany proceedings or serve witnesses who testify.
The questions don’t stop there. If the effects are negative — if trials retraumatize — then should they be stopped in the interests of the victims? Is impunity the price of mental health? Or does impunity (and forgetting) take its own, harder-to-measure toll?
But trials really aren’t about satisfying victims, but upholding the rule of law. In murder trials, the prosecutor doesn’t represent the victims; the prosecutor represents the government, acting to uphold its laws. So even if victims suffer again, isn’t it defensible for the world to insist on justice for the greater good?
Of course, individuals would react differently — some more and some less traumatized. And trauma in the context of justice, the emergence of a fuller story, the contact victims might have with each other — might end with some healing.
This leaves aside entirely the subject of reconciliation — when individual healing leads to the ability of larger numbers of people, victims and perpetrators, to establish a new and positive relationship.
One thing is clear, though. It’ not possible to assume that justice automatically produces healing. Justice can take its own, separate toll. And unfortunately, victims continue to pay the price for us all.