Blog Post- Week 4

How does reframing violence against women and trauma as health issues challenge or reinforce our understandings of health, illness, and medicine?

When we think of the components and factors that influence one’s health, the image may not always include violence and trauma, especially for women. But considering how violence and trauma effects one’s psyche, we must consider it as a health issue. From the news article, “Women, War, and PTSD”, Laura Kasinof writes about the influence war plays on the mental health of women soldiers. Up until 2013, women were not technically allowed to hold combat roles within the army. However, once that changed, people began considering the effects that war would play on the psyche of women. But how is the environment of war any different for women than it is for men? “It is now headline news that female soldiers are routinely harassed, assaulted, and raped by their fellow soldiers or, worse, commanding officers…” (Kasinof, 2013). So not only are women afflicted by the terrors that come with serving in a war, but by unnecessary sexism and rape culture. It’s no doubt that these factors can lead to mental illnesses such as PTSD. PTSD has been regarded as an official mental health disorder since the American Psychological Association listed it as such in 1980.

“War on Women” also describes the consequences of wartime environments for women. Amongst the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, men are not the only victims of trauma and violence. Testimonials from multiple women throughout the video described how men consistently misuse their military power to take advantage of civilian women. Women report feeling hopeless, defiled, depressed, and even suicidal. Sexual violence again these women are wreaking havoc on their mental health. Again, we see how violence plays a role in the overall health and wellbeing of women.

Using Ghana’s issue with unsafe abortions as another example, we can again see the toll that violence takes on women’s health. In my Activity Post this week, I described how even though abortions are legal under certain circumstances, unsafe abortions still cause 11% of maternal deaths, (H.M. Schwandt et al., 2013). The cultural and political climate in Ghana highly contribute to this phenomenon by reinforcing the shame and guilt that women suffer due to sexual violence. When a Ghanaian woman is carrying the child of her rapist, she feels too much shame to terminate the pregnancy at a public hospital, where a safe abortion could be performed. Hence, unsafe abortions with under qualified individuals are conducted, leading to serious complications or death. The World Health Organization reinforced this idea by reporting that intimate partner violence has been linked to substance abuse, poor self-esteem, PTSD, self-harm and unsafe sexual behavior (World Health Organization, 2012).

How does intergenerational trauma challenge or reinforce biochemical, mechanical models of health?

Intergenerational trauma could be described as the consequences of stress and trauma that are passed down from the first generation to proceeding ones. For example, the trauma and stress that is passed down from Aboriginal or First Nations people whom experienced brutal effects of colonialism. But how does something that happened so long ago effect someone of the same population, today? We can use First Nations people as an example, or Native Americans to be more specific. If the first generation of Native Americans experienced traumatic stress throughout the colonialism period, it could have been “accompanied by poverty, poor mental health, substance abuse, poor coping strategies, and physiological susceptibility to stressors, any of which might contribute to the transmission of negative outcomes,” (Bombay, Matheson, Anisman, 2009). So the theory behind intergeneration trauma takes into account the consequences that stem from a traumatic event, and how those consequences effect the next generation. This challenges our standard definition of health, especially within the context of biomedicine. Biomedicine focuses on the present, and the individual. Biomedicine asks questions such as, what are your symptoms? What have you done in your life that could be contributing to the cause of these symptoms? How do we treat this issue? What biomedicine does not ask, is how have generations before you influenced the issue at hand? Intergenerational trauma is a new way of evaluating health, in the sense that it considers historical context as an influencing factor. Maybe it’s time to consider historical factors when evaluating the overall health of an individual.

References

Bombay, A., MSc, Matheson, K., PhD, & Anisman, H., PhD. (2009). Intergenerational Trauma: Convergence of Multiple Processes among First Nations peoples in Canada. Journal of Aboriginal Health.

Kasinof, L. (2013, November/December). Women, War, and PTSD. Retrieved from https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2013/women-war-and-ptsd/

Schwandt, H. M., Creanga, A. A., Adanu, R. M., Danso, K. A., Agbenyega, T., & Hindin, M. J. (2013). Pathways to unsafe abortion in Ghana: The role of male partners, women and health care providers. Contraception, 88(4), 509-517

The New Humanitarian (Director). (2014, March 20). War on Women [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/film/4984/war-women

World Health Organization. (2012). Understanding and addressing violence against women. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/topics/violence/vaw_series/en/

One thought on “Blog Post- Week 4

  1. I really liked that you chose to focus on women in combat roles. We are often made ignorant of military culture due to ideas surrounding patriotism and other such things, but it is something that should be interrogated more.
    I’ve always been personally frustrated by the women in combat debate, because if anything it is the men who are unsuited for the stresses of combat. Women are the ones that carry on after violence and ensure the survival of the next generation even after they are subjected to horrific violence and trauma. Men usually struggle to cope with their experiences and often succumb to drug and alcohol abuse, or become nonfunctioning.

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