OF THE
TIMES
It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain.To understand psychiatric home visits in Palestine necessitates forgoing Western assumptions about patient confidentiality, privacy, and timeliness. Though individual patients often refer themselves to treatment centers after a release from prison, the difficulty of traveling to and from major cities requires therapists to make home visits. Families then participate in the session as a group, thereby coming to better understand their family member's situation and relieving some of their own symptoms as well. Throughout Palestine, families are regularly made to feel that their own house is unsafe and outside of their control. Violence may overtake a peaceful setting without warning, and to resist an arrest would be to invite danger on the rest of the relatives. A study conducted by the Ramallah Treatment and Rehabilitation Center for Victims of Torture (TRC) examining arrests as trauma-inducing events explains that, "92% of arrests [surveyed] happened at home, and most of [them] happened...in the time periods of deep sleep after midnight. This had caused severe emotional and psychological damages to the families, and doubled the impact of emotional suffering and immediate trauma" ("The Impact of Detention on Palestinian Detainees' Families in Israeli Prisons," 2011).
- Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. "Trauma and Recovery"
Comment: There is a distinct difference between cultures and city governments that are truly empathic and thus willing to work toward solving the problems that create homelessness and those who are psychopathic and seek to avoid responsibility by criminalizing homelessness to keep those less fortunate out of sight and mind. People need to understand that these problems can be solved if there is a concerted effort and a willingness to do so. The costs of not doing this are far more than just financial as a society that deliberately ignores its most vulnerable is issuing an invitation to widespread and inevitable social decline and degeneration.