Conclusion
By drawing upon and applying the principles of liberation psychology to the situation of Palestinian children, this chapter does not intend to imply that Latin American theories of trauma are necessarily better suited to Palestine than dominant Western models.
Instead, this chapter has first of all sought to highlight and valorize the counter-geographies of subaltern knowledge production that connect disparate sites - from Algeria, to Brazil, El Salvador, and Palestine - in struggle against the dehumanizing violence of colonial subjugation. Secondly, this chapter has sought to highlight the ways in which Palestinians themselves have already developed and practice their own forms of liberation psychology, as attested to by the longstanding community projects such as the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) as well as recent critical psychology literature emerging from Palestine (Makkawi 2013; Tawil 2013).Principles of liberation psychology have been applied to understand the effects of and responses to political violence and repression in a variety of contexts, including Columbia (Hernandez 2002), Northern Ireland (Moane 2003), Puerto Rico (Varas-Diaz and Serrano-Garcia 2003), and the USA (Duran et al. 2008). However, this literature tends to focus almost exclusively on adults. This chapter has asked what it means to decolonize ideas of trauma and recovery in thinking about how political violence affects children as well. Psychology has long understood that children develop through active engagement with their environments (Brofenbrenner and Evans 2000). It is because of this reliance on their environments for physical and psychological development that, as Martin-Baro (1996) points out, political violence can be so damaging. This is not because of children’s unique innocence or vulnerability, but because children are forced to primarily “construct their identities and develop their lives within the network of these dehumanizing relations,” and often have known no other reality (Martin-Baro 1996, p.
125). In this way, children’s geographers, and other interdisciplinary researchers working with children and youth from an ecological perspective, can offer real insights into how children’s experiences of trauma and violence are shaped through and by their physical, social, and cultural environments, and how children in turn shape these environments.Within a framework of liberation, we must remember that children are not the passive victims of their environments, but rather, they too have political agency and social consciousness. Though the notion that children have agency may be not be revolutionary within children’s geography, recognizing children’s capacity for active recovery and sensemaking poses a real challenge to one of the fundamental precepts of Western Psychology (and still much of the social science literature on children), namely, vulnerability. Although our innate vulnerability to suffering may potentially serve the basis for humanistic solidarities (Butler 2009), the assumption of children’s complete vulnerability in war often comes at the expense of understanding their ability to cope with and actively resist political violence (Veronese et al. 2012). Applying the notions of political consciousness towards working with children within violent contexts is rarely done. While rare, scholarship considering the relationship between political involvement and well-being among youth facing political violence has found that political engagement actually fosters well-being (Barber 2008; Berk 1998; Farwell 2001; Qouta et al. 1995), perhaps due to the ways in which political activism encourages social connection and a sense of purpose, and provides a concrete avenue for action (Berk 1998).
As it moves away from the dehumanization of violence toward communal selfactualization through empathetic political consciousness, liberation psychology also necessarily relies upon aspects of healing that highlight hope and perseverance (Hernandez 2002).
These elements of emotional and tactical survival can be found in communities facing almost unbearable circumstances. This underlies the important idea that hope and adaptation are normal occurrences in the face of the adversity (Barber 2013). However, this is not the blind hope that comes from ignoring the reality of the situation. Nor does adaptation mean leaving unchallenged the systematic violence that perpetuates oppressive conditions.Instead, hope comes from collective political consciousness and struggle motivated by ideals of justice and framed within a historical narrative. What might be the role of the helper in fostering resistant forms of hope and perseverance in the context of political violence? Scholars have proposed that, in a Freirean model, “helping” encounters are shaped by a spirit of solidarity and the notion of “accompaniment,” a particular type of relating understood as “togetherness,” which holds the purpose of working alongside people “to collectively understand and transform those life conditions that they experience as the most important ones” (Hernandez 2002, p. 336; for more on the process of accompaniment within liberation psychology, see Comas-Diaz et al. 1998). Researchers working from a liberation psychology perspective might seek to highlight and engage with the work of these helpers in contexts of violence, whoever they might be, and in doing so can strive to become helpers in solidarity themselves.