Valeria, do you talk about violence in the plural?
Yes. Karl Marx said that “Violence is the midwife of every old society that carries a new one in its womb” (p.788). We then ask ourselves if the human experience takes place as a transition through violence. Both good and evil constitute us. The voracity of an unstoppable capitalism, the established forms of power from the macro to the intersubjective are accompanied by the growth of violence in each social stratum with its collective and particular consequences. From war conflicts to gender-based violence, abuse and mistreatment of children and adolescents, against older people, indigenous peoples, to those that are invisible, such as economic or symbolic violence (discrimination and oppression), among others, all of them imply consequences that They destroy social frameworks and subjectivities.
Can we think of any way to prevent them?
They involve processes of dehumanization and the risk is their naturalization. An in-depth analysis from a rights-based approach is pertinent. Intersectionality is an analytical tool developed by American lawyer Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, in the late 1980s, to study forms of exclusion and mistreatment based on race and gender. The observation and study of each sector involved in all forms of violence, and the consideration of each case and its particularities, is essential.
At the same time, the ethics of care, derived from feminist bioethics, proposes an ecologized, interrelated subject that transcends gender roles and inequalities towards women and generic gender dissidence. Care is collective, beyond the private there is citizen co-responsibility, it is a public issue. We can be active agents of care.
Promotion and prevention requires an urgent personal and collective commitment, taking into account that the consequences of each violent act, whatever it may be and towards whoever it is, will have a multidimensional and parasitic impact on each social sector and each subject. As mental health professionals we are listening to the voices and bodies that are violated.
How are victims cared for?
Narrative, which is inherent to our existence, organizes the fragments of our memory, historicizes us, gives an account of our identity. Listening is a right and the professional is waiting, harboring the voice and body of those who have been violated.
Violence is exerted on voices and bodies. The voice is inaugural of our species. The first exchanges with a primordial other, which sustains them, are intersonic. Voice and body in corporal sound intersubjectivity will be the subsequent support of the word.
When violence is exercised “that voice that was inaugural, founding of the human does not silence, but is drowned and the one that humanized, on the occasion of the drowning of its expression, results in the subject being dehumanized” (Casal Passion, 2022, p.71).
The victims of such a disruptive act cannot always access words or find some meaning. Then we provide space and time for the sound display, to accommodate the wound, to listen to the narrative, also written. We are there waiting for the unveiling of what shocks existence as a whole.
Hosting the voices and bodies of victims of the disruption of violence is granting the possibility of their power, the inauguration of another reparative brand, advocating for subjective rights in co-responsibility and providing narrative deployment in all its expressive forms: a timely humanizing intervention. (Casal Passion, 2023).
Valeria, how can readers, potential patients and their families find you?
At www.valeriacasal.com or on IG: @casalpassion
Thank you so much.
References
Casal Passion, V. (2022). The muffled voice. From the unprecedented to the power. In: Echoes of horror. Sequelae in adults of subjective destruction due to sexual violence during childhood. Roots Editions.
Casal Passion, V. (2023). Host the voice. The sound and written narrative as a timely approach in the clinic of violence. Disclosures of mistreatment/abuse. Human rights approach and feminist bioethical perspective. In: Subjectivation and its frameworks. Clinic, politics and rights. Ed. AASM. Connections Series.
Marx, K. Capital. Volume II https://www.marxists.org/espanol/me/1860s/eccx86s.htm
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