Trination Mega Festival : Bangladesh India Pakistan Photographs by Faisal Akram Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
The media shout out their tales and pummel us with their gory photos, of violence, murder, rape, hatred, and we at Engaging Peace try to provide some different perspectives, regarding events…
Engaging Peace has had posts on most of these horrifying stories, but, stubbornly, we have also continued to press the feasibility of nonviolence, most recently with posts from Dr. Ian Hansen and Dr. Majed Ashy as well as reminders from Ross Caputi and Dr. Alice LoCicero of ways in which you can help.
In today’s short post, I invite you to learn more about an important peace initiative aimed at promoting a stable peace between India and Pakistan.
Please be inspired by this model and send your words and images on behalf of peace and social justice—starting perhaps with the work that needs to be done in your own country.
Anyone anywhere can work for peace and nonviolence. The world will be better off if you join the endeavor.
Monument of the refugee children in Skopje, Macedonia This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, Taken by Rašo.
This is the first in a series of two posts by Alice LoCicero.
It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from “Secondly”…..Mourid Barghouti
Since 2006, I have worked with children and adolescents who come to the US out of fears and traumas similar to those faced by the children now at our borders, children seeking a fair hearing and requesting asylum here.
I know what their faces look like, and what their experiences have been. I have talked with children from four continents about experiences of torture, abuse, and trauma. I have helped them cope with their fears. I have been happy to see them gain asylum. I look forward to the citizens they will become. Several are in college or graduate school now. They have become contributing members of our society. We will all benefit.
Most important, the children I met have all depended on the kindness of strangers in many parts of their journey towards asylum. Ordinary Americans have helped them tremendously. I know how Americans can and do help children, once they understand their story. Once they meet them. Once they see their faces. Americans are not, by nature, mean and stingy towards children in need. So what is happening to make ordinary Americans so fearful of the children seeking help at our borders?
The manufactured “crisis” of the Central American youth coming to our border unaccompanied has a long history, and the media coverage of this situation starts with “Secondly.” Briefly, US intervention in the affairs of its neighbors has caused less stable and highly dangerous conditions, including chronic political instability, rebel forces and gangs. Many children, personally in grave danger, traumatized and terrified, have taken the huge risk of fleeing to the US border. Those that arrived alive and intact are now facing hatred, mostly whipped up by media misrepresentations that tell the story of the children starting at “Secondly.”
Dr. Alice LoCicero is a staff member at Boston Medical Center in the Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology, an adjunct professor at Lesley University, and a volunteer psychologist at Community Legal Services and Counseling Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her book, “Why Good Kids Turn into Deadly Terrorists: Deconstructing the Accused Boston Marathon Bombers and Others Like Them” will be released at the end of July.
The accused Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, grew up in my home town of Cambridge and went to the high school my kids attended. They look like kids my children would have gone to school with, and their friends and family describe them in ways that make them seem normal and good.
How could young folks we might easily have known and loved act intentionally to create carnage, terror, and radical disruption of lives and psyches? As President Obama asked: What would lead them “to resort to violence”?
Dr. Samuel (Justin) Sinclair and I set out to answer an eerily similar question when we researched kids at risk of recruitment to the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist organization (now defeated) in Sri Lanka. We wrote about this research in our 2008 book, Creating young martyrs: Conditions that make dying in a terrorist attack seem like a good idea. Our findings help explain this apparent contradiction.
What we learned, both from reviewing others’ research and combing through our own findings, is that many kids who engage in terrorist actions, or who aspire to do so, think that their actions are going to bring attention to the grievances of their people, which they perceive–rightly or wrongly–as legitimate, and to begin to address a highly asymmetrical distribution of power, a distribution that disadvantages the group they identify with. The ultimate goal then, the “end” that for them justifies the means, is to help their peoples’ cause. Aware that they will die in the attack or soon thereafter, they see their actions as dutiful or, in Western terms, altruistic.
I realize that this idea–that young people who do things that result in killing, maiming, and disruption, do so with altruistic intent–is highly counter-intuitive, but it comes to my attention over and over again in our own and others’ data and in the words of family members of kids engaged in terrorism.
In the award-winning documentary film, “My Daughter the Terrorist,” in which filmmaker Morten Daae and director Beate Arnestad follow two Tamil girls, trained to be Black Tigers, who are prepared to blow themselves up in a terrorist action, the mother of one of the girls speaks about her daughter, saying, “She was different. She dreamt of becoming a nun.”
Alice Locicero is Past President and Co-Founder of the Society of Terrorism Research, as well as Chair of Social Sciences at Endicott College. She is a certified Clinical Psychologist, and has been a faculty member at the Center for Multicultural Training and Boston Medical Center, as well as at Suffolk University. In earlier roles, LoCicero served as Senior Psychologist working with families at Children’s Hospital, Boston, and as Clinical Instructor at Harvard Medical School. A member of the Massachusetts Behavioral Health Disaster Responders, she provides mental health services to family members of victims of terrorism and other man-made and natural disasters. She traveled to Sri Lanka in May and June of 2007 to learn about conditions that make terrorism an appealing idea to some youths.
(This post was originally published in the ABC-CLIO blog.)
describe them in ways that make them seem normal and good.