by EETTA PRINCE-GIBSON
PHOTO/Department of Defense/Army Staff Sgt. Russell Lee Klika, 133rd MPAD, under Creative Commons
Over the past two years, Dr. Jan Kizilhan has traveled to Iraq 14 times and interviewed close to 1,500 women and girls who were brutalized by the Islamic State.
He hears horrifying stories.
“ISIL has a genocidal ideology,” says Kizilhan, who spoke recently with Women’s eNews by phone. “They do not believe that anyone who is not Muslim is human. Like the Nazis, they are not troubled by anything they do to their victims, because they do not view them as people.”
He says he has talked to 8-year-old girls who were raped hundreds of times. “I have spoken to mothers who watched their children raped and murdered before their own eyes. I heard about the wife of an ISIL fighter who held down a 16-year-old girl so he could rape her.”
Kizilhan, a professor at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Villingen-Schwenningen, is the medical and psychological head of the Special Quota Project.
Baden-Württemberg, a state in Germany’s southwest, began in late 2015 sponsoring the project, which brings vulnerable women and children, almost all of them Yezidis, to the country. Now it shelters some 1,100 women and children who are trying to rebuild their lives.
As part of the program, which has $107 million in funding from the state, participants receive housing, cash assistance, free health and psychosocial care, free education, the opportunity to receive German citizenship and, perhaps, hope that they will be able to lead at least a semblance of a happy life in the future.
The greatest challenge for the professionals providing therapy is to create an effective counseling program for these women. A great deal of psychotherapy is based on Western ideas and values, Kizilhan says. It is also based on an individualistic understanding of the person.
These are not starting points that are necessarily useful for the Yezidi women, who come from a more collectivist society, and their concepts of life and self are different.
“Even their body code is different,” Kizilhan says. “They will speak, for example, of ‘burning liver.’ That is not something familiar to Westerners, but to them, it is an expression of a complex emotion.”
Decades to Heal
For most of the women, Kizilhan expects healing will take decades. “They are experiencing multiple levels of trauma. There is the individual trauma, of course. And the collective trauma, because the genocide was directed at their entire community. And now the scientific community has come to realize that there is trans-generational trauma, too.”
Can they ever truly heal? Can their lives ever be happy or “normal”? What does one tell an 8-year-old child who was raped repeatedly by a man older than her own grandfather?
Women’s E News for more