JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 24, Number 3, 2004 Page: 517
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Mark Bracher
b) recognize the causal role played in all forms of violence by their
perpetrators' prior traumas, a realization that will help people sympathize
with rather than condemn or demonize these perpetrators, which will in
turn help them to eschew their hatred and vengeance and engage in
behaviors toward the perpetrators that will reduce rather than escalate
violence.
3) Literary study, if given a radical reformulation, can make significant
contributions to both of these preventive processes.
Trauma as the Root Cause of Physical Violence
The fact that interpersonal forms of violence such as murder, rape, theft,
bullying, and insult, as well as intergroup forms of violence such as war,
genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism produce trauma is well known.
That the perpetrators of such traumas are usually themselves victims of
prior traumas, and that these prior traumas are a central cause of their
subsequent perpetrations of violence, are facts little acknowledged by
policy makers and the general public, though this knowledge is now
well established among experts who have studied such perpetrators.
What most of these experts, in their turn, fail to recognize is that this
refusal on the part of the public and the policy-makers to acknowledge
trauma as a central cause of violence is itself due to identity-under-
mining traumas that have been suffered by virtually all members of the
general populace. The reason people reject knowledge of the
perpetrator's prior trauma is because of the significant role that hating
the demonized perpetrator and inflicting violence on him plays in
maintaining their own identity or sense of self: if they were to
acknowledge that the violent criminal's prior traumas are the central
cause of his violent behavior, they could no longer hold the criminal,
or terrorist, or genocide perpetratorfully and solely responsible for his
violence and thus could no longer demonize him and justifiably do
violence to him. And the need to demonize criminals and make them
suffer in order to maintain their own identity is itself the result of the
traumas (usually less severe than those of the criminals) that they have
themselves experienced. The core of the problem is thus an unending
chain of trauma, whereby those who are traumatized inflict trauma on
others, who repeat the infliction on victims of their own, ad infini-
tumrn--this much has been generally recognized by psychologists and
sociologists, but not by the general public-and those (the general
public) who could change the circumstances that produce the perpe-
trators' original traumas fail to do so in large measure because517
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 24, Number 3, 2004, periodical, 2004; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28645/m1/9/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .