Private Trauma Gives Jessica Stern Insights on Terrorism
Here are a few paragraphs -- please read the whole thing online, because I've omitted some important material!:
How she came to this realization is the subject of her new book, “Denial: A Memoir of Terror,” which Ecco published last week. The book recounts how, in 1973, when Ms. Stern was 15, she and her younger sister were raped at gunpoint in their home in Concord, Mass. The police disbelieved the girls’ account and bungled the investigation; their father, in Europe at the time, didn’t think it necessary to cut his trip short and return. The whole community, she writes, seemed to be in denial.
The experience created in Ms. Stern a kind of emotional numbness — a calmness, even a fearlessness, that has proved oddly useful in her current work.
“I am fascinated by the secret motivations of violent men,” she writes in “Denial,” “and I’m good at ferreting them out.” She found that terrorists would talk openly to her, she said, because she could “go into a state where I almost tried to become that person, and where I felt that if I allowed myself even the tiniest judgmental thought, they could probably sense it.” ...
“She was asking the right questions of the right people,” he added, “and if some of that comes from her own experience of being terrorized, then the lessons were very fruitful.” ...
She began to come to terms with what was a traumatic family history even before the rape: her mother died when she was 3; her father, a German émigré who had been persecuted by the Nazis, remarried but six years later divorced his second wife, leaving his daughters with her for almost two years while he lived on his own.
And with the help of an investigator, Ms. Stern even tracked down the story of her rapist, who served 18 years in prison and then hanged himself. He turns out to have been responsible for at least 44 rapes or attempted rapes between 1971 and 1973, all with a trademark methodology that the police somehow failed to pick up on. Among other things, he found most of his prey at girls’ boarding schools or at Radcliffe College, and many of his attacks involved two or more young women. ...
Ms. Stern interviewed friends or relatives of the rapist and uncovered a long and depressing history of parental abandonment (he was adopted, though he didn’t know it for years, and a woman he thought was his aunt was really his mother); confused sexual identity; drug use (he even dropped acid once with Timothy Leary); and possible childhood molestation (his parish church harbored a series of predatory priests). He had probably been traumatized himself, and then in the classic fashion went on to traumatize others. ...
Writing the book, she added, taught her a lot about the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome, of which she now considers herself a victim, and also helped refine her thinking about terrorism. Her researches have taught her that there is no common denominator in determining why people become terrorists, but she has identified a checklist of risk factors. These include alienation, coming from a society with a youthful population bulge or a high male-to-female ratio and, for the people who wind up being used as cannon fodder by the terrorists, poverty.
To the list she would now add sexual humiliation, and in January she published an article in Foreign Affairs in which she pointed out that sexual abuse of boys in the Islamic religious schools known as madrasas is not uncommon, and neither is the rape of boys in Afghanistan, especially on Thursday, known as “man-loving day,” because Friday prayers are thought to absolve a sinner of all his guilt.
“I’ve known about this for years,” Ms. Stern said, “but until I wrote this book, I didn’t make the connection. I’m not sure how you study it, but I do think it’s there. Humiliation is definitely a risk factor, and this may be a particular kind of it.”
She paused and added: “But why humiliation in some places and some people but not others? Harvard is a humiliation factory, and yet we don’t produce a lot of terrorists.”
Most of those at Harvard come from a lot of money, and/or can expect to earn a lot of money in this society, which probably cushions them greatly from the effects of any humiliation they might suffer at the hands of their classmates or teachers. Who cushions the poor from what they suffer as ordinary humans in a society which is structured to concentrate income and wealth in relatively narrow slices of the spectrum?Or is this an inconvenient thing we ought to continue to ignore?
Relatedly, one might think about how someone who is in the 20% of America which receives, say, 4% of America's income might feel about those who are in the 1% who receive about 20% of America's household income, and what their opportunities are to move up even a quintile or two.
See also the next post, about a neurologist looking at his own family history, and the difference that a secure and serene childhood can make in one's chances in life. I heard these two stories within a couple days of each other -- what a juxtaposition!
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