Blaming the Victim: The "Catch-22" of Trauma

The U.S. military surrendered today, accepting for the first time the claims of thousands of combat veterans that they are finally, if you will, "crazy enough" for the army to care about. This seems like the right time to dust off an old, overused metaphor, if only out of solidarity for our young, overworked troops. 


Joseph Heller's eponymous "Catch-22" is an exasperating legal clause that keeps his protagonist, Yossarian, stuck in a war zone in which the ever-increasing mission requirements keep any soldier from being sent home. To escape the risk of being killed on the battlefield, after watching a friend die in his arms, Yossarian tries to get discharged by convincing the army that he is insane. The "Catch" is that it's the army that gets to decide if he is sane or not—the same army that is trapping him indefinitely to fight its gruesome war—and to them, if he is sane enough to claim insanity to avoid the line of fire, then he is too sane for discharge. 


For the last six years, our own, "real life," military has been pushing traumatized soldiers into an illogical double-bind of its own in which traumatized soldiers were considered too disabled to be useful to the army but not disabled enough to deserve being helped with benefits pay after their discharge. A  "Catch-22" for the 2010's: soldiers terrorized by the war on terror are left to suffer on their own homeland by a cynical military that cuts them and runs.
   
Until now. Over the next few days, under pressure from a court order in a class action law suit, the army will be notifying 4,300 veterans that they might be able to adjust their benefits, in some cases by hundreds of dollars each month. 


This reversal of policy is worth cheering on its own, but it's also important to us because of the way it so vividly brings into focus the illogical cruelty of an organization or community that turns its back on its trauma victims. When we withhold our assistance from victims—whether because of some policy or some fear—and place the burden of healing squarely on the victims, we tell them not only that we don't care, but also that if they don't magically "make it through" then they have only themselves to blame. 


This is a cruel way for anyone to treat a person in distress. The more so when those pointing the finger have a share in the responsibility for that person's pain. Like the army—on whose missions the soldiers became traumatized to begin with—our communities themselves have helped to develop some of the traumas our members face. The single component of a trauma experience that has the greatest impact on the victim's ultimate level of traumatic stress and prognosis for emotional recovery is that person's experience NOT with the event itself, but with the first reporting of it. A child who reports an abuse event to a teacher only to be rebuffed and isolated will likely become traumatized far more profoundly than would the same child under the same circumstances who is taken seriously and supported when he or she reports.


That makes communities that are unsupportive of trauma victims no better than the army that sends its troops out into the line of trauma and dumps them when they get hit. In fact, it makes us worse. For, unlike the military, when we share in the traumatization of our children it's not because there is a war being waged that someone needs to fight. No, when community leaders turn their backs on our children it is simply because they choose not to deal with them. 


Until our community gets truly serious about developing policies for handling abuse claims in a responsible and humane manner, we will be perpetuating our own "Catch-22," waiting to ensnare anyone with the courage to come forward with a claim. The choice that we offer: either stay quiet and continue to be traumatized as you have until now, or come forward and become traumatized by a whole new set of perpetrators that you thought were on your side.


Now that's crazy.