 to think that this is transitional justice. I'm Jay Fidel on a given Monday and we are joined by Marianna Seussman as she's in Bogota, Colombia and she happens to be the sister of Nicholas Seussman who we know so well here at Think Tech. Welcome to the show, Marianna. Hello, Jay. Thank you so much for having me today. Great. Thank you for coming on. So we're going to talk about testimony and reparation in the context of listening to sexual violence survivors and you are a psychologist and I feel that's very important especially in this context. So let me ask you what do you do in that regard? How do you listen? Who do you talk to? So my work is a consultant for the transitional justice in Colombia and I help with all the topics regarding the victim participation in transitional justice scenarios and also particularly on the evaluation of psychosocial damage within human rights transgressions that's more or less my job. So I usually work with victims but also with other professionals that share with me these transitional justice scenario which is like very, very complex. What is sexual violence in the course of your work? Is it rape? Is it abuse at home or is it both? It is mainly what we understand, let's say rape, but also other violences that transfer the intimacy of the victim through violence and what we have come to understand as the sexuality that is not only like penetration. It's usually associated to abuse but also other violations to the victim's dignity and integrity and its intimacy. Does that include violations and penetration by a woman's husband? Yeah, of course, but let's say that particularly in this scenario where I work that is war and armed conflicts usually outside of the home but what we have seen is that usually there are a very big correlation or there is an unstructural violence that occurs at home and also regarding the context of armed conflict. So they're not really exclusive from each other but they are in some cases like related. Yeah, well, in many ways I guess. We've been hearing about rape in Ukraine. We've been hearing that that seems to be a culture point among the Russian troops, whether it's by instruction or negligence on the part of their senior officers, they are raping Ukrainian women as a regular matter. So rape I suppose comes with war and rape comes with the kind of violence you have in the hinterland of Colombia. How does that work? Is it because the people who are providing the structure of the military force or paramilitary force are saying you are free to do this or is it because in the fog of war, whether they have instructions to do it or not to do it, the violence around them makes them more inclined to do it because of the violence in general. I think that's like a very complex question that has like very different angles from which we could understand what incline is these actions. But what I think is important here is to understand that in these cases in war or in armed conflicts, there is this tendency to assume that sexuality is a form of, it's like an expression of power and particularly in the case of women and these, let's say, patriarchal society we live in, it's usually a way of saying to the enemy I'm owning what is valuable for you. So in this sense, women are dispossessed of their subjectivity under value as human beings and become an instrument for war to tell and to humiliate the enemy, which is usually another man, let's say the expression of masculinity within conflicts. So it's a way an expression of power and to say like I'm owning this in the same sense, I could own a territory or invade or conquer another land. So I think that's like the main motivation. Of course, there are also other elements we would have to evaluate, but I think that's like the most common explanation we have find in this sense. Well, that makes a lot of sense. One thing I wanted to ask you is, are these still talking about rape and war or rape and some kind of political violence? Is it usually accompanied by injury or murder? Or is there ever a situation where it's simply a young man who hasn't had a lot of sexual experience and this has a certain nonviolent aspect to it? Or is it always violent? Well, I think it's always violent in the sense that it's always a transgression that requires violence. If it is not violence, it wouldn't be a transgression, right? So in the sense that the victim subjectivity and will is undermined, I think it is always a violent act. Now, from what I understand of your question is that I don't know and I'm not sure I wouldn't say it has to do with the sexual craving or desire of let's say a man that hasn't had like a lot of sex. In the way you say, I think it's really this need of imposing oneself on top of the other, you know, the deck of submission of having control on top of the other. So it's always violent. It is sometimes accompanied by injury or in others it doesn't. I think it has to do with the concept and the value the perpetrator perceives from the victim. So let's say if the victim is a person that is part of the enemy, let's say of the enemy's forces, its value is always or usually more undermined than the value of, for example, a civil person like a citizen. I mean, that way the transgression tends to be like more hurtful because I want to annihilate him or hurt. Well, in the sense of a civil person or a citizen, there's not such a will to annihilate the other, but I'd just like to use it. So it's different, but I think it has to do with the concept and the value the perpetrator perceives from the victim. What about an audience? In this context, is the rape always by itself in private or does this kind of rape psychologically require the perpetrator to have somebody watching? Well, not always. It has to be somebody watching. But sometimes there is and there is a bigger transpiration because it's like the exposure of the victim and of its submissiveness and the fact that I can use or I just torn this person into an object and is validated by the others, which are commonly part of the same armed organization the perpetrator belongs to. So it's like an exhibition of my power as a perpetrator in front of the other. But it's not always that way. It can happen in private because it's always like a subjective construction of my power, of a reformation of myself. So I have seen both, just that they have different intentions and different motivations. And in one of it, like the public one, you're telling me it's an affirmation of the perpetrator's power in front of the other. So the victim is more objectified not only by the perpetrator, but by the one observing. And that's like very transgressive too. What about age? On a demographic basis, do you find that this kind of violence happens against young women, including really young women, or somebody in their 20s or 30s or 40s, or somebody who is a senior and an elderly person? Or does it not matter? Well, I think it's not set as a particular criteria. But yes, it's also, it's very common to or more use, using more usually these cases in young women, or let's say between their 20s or even teenagers until their 40s or 50s. But I think the explanation of that has to do with the, again, the social value we have attributed to women in society, which is a reproductive value. So it's not about their value as subjects or the social value, but what we have come to understand as their value to reproductive beings. So I think that explains why it's more common to see that the victims are women that are under a reproductive age, because that way the perpetration is like to the society, like to the possibility of this, of the enemy extending its line. Yeah, you're breaking another norm, yet another norm, yeah, still another norm. So that raises a question of how often does this result in pregnancy? And is pregnancy what brings these women to you? Because that's something they may not be able to control very well. How often do they get pregnant? And why do they come to you? What connects them with you so that you can help them? Well, I think that pregnancy is our result sometimes. It's, I cannot say if it is usual or not, because also we have like the limitation that the most of these cases are not really reported. They are lived silently. So unless they have like, and let's say big consequences on health or for example, pregnancy, women tend to remain silent because of the social judgment they are exposing to. So I cannot say if pregnancy is a common result from these, but I wouldn't say that pregnancy only is the thing that brings them to look for help, because the the transpiration itself is it's very destructive for the the mental area. Let's say it's a it's a transpiration and an elimination of yourself. It's like seeing yourself reducted to an object to to see you reduce to let's say nothing to the eyes of the perpetrator. So the the violation itself is just like a reason enough that it brings a victim to look for help. Of course, the pregnancy is more destructive because it's a change on your life project on the way you're conceiving yourself on a lot of things that are of course very disruptive of the way you're pairing on your life. But I would say like just the violation itself, it's reason enough to to bring them to to look for help. Yeah. Now they come to you and they've obviously been through a traumatic experience. Who puts them together with you? Through social agencies, family, friends, government? What brings them to your office? What brings you to their residence? Right. So as I said before, it's not so usual for these victims to look for help on the state's institutions because they have been also very violently treated and judged by the by the state. So they try to remain silent or to look for help within their their most closest circles. But there are a lot of organizations that usually carry on justice processing in their law sense. And then through the process, they see that the victim requires some emotional support. And that's where they call the psychosocial worker. But it's not something that is looked for immediately. It's always like an aid that comes like among other processes, because they have been like very badly treated by institutions. So it's not very common or usual for them to look for help immediately. It's always like by the side of another process that is going on. You may not be able to answer this, but is the experience in this area, the social experience different in Colombia and other countries in Latin America, other countries in general? Does Colombia have a, because of the violence in the countryside, if you will, do you have a special problem in this regard? Or is Colombia's problem the same as other countries? I would say this is a crime that is very linked to a system of beliefs in the sense of what we have talked to about the value of women in society and how we see the transpiration, not to them, but to a social morality or to a man that owns her. And I think that has a lot to do with the culture, of course, of the country. I think in Latin America, we have like a very religious weight on our beliefs, even if we believe or not. And there's also this like a moral frame in which there's a very present misogyny that makes it, I would say, worse than in other countries, because we are not very prepared mentally as a society to assume a women as a subject of rights other than her right place as a good woman in society. So unless she's a mother, she's a wife, we have like a more difficulty understanding the dimension of the transpiration. And I think that's something we share like in Latin America and probably other countries that have this very, very patriarchal structure. I would say, for example, Europe or maybe the United States have made like a better process at being open minded than the individuality of the victim. So I would say that's different, but it's always affected by the system of beliefs that every country and every culture has, because that defines the volume of the victim, usually the woman on the society and the dimension of the transpiration. Is the phenomenon different and is your role different in dealing with the victims of violence in war and in the countryside versus dealing with violent spouses, husbands? Is that a different kind of involvement for you? Yes, of course. So I think that both violences share certain elements in common. For example, as we spoke before, the violation within war has an intention of referring power within the community. So there's an intention of transgressing the social morality, the social values, the social beliefs. So in that sense, the same phenomenon exists with respect to a husband who abuses his wife. Isn't he exercising power? Yes, absolutely. But I would say this scenario is different, because let's say in the private scenario, there's an affirmation of, of course, a patriarchal power over women and her role, that we have a more big, let's say, panorama in which the perpetrator belongs to an armed organization that is trying to affect a whole community. So there's like a vigor, let's say, like the way the perpetrator conceives the violent action is inscribed with a more intention for cruelty, we could say, of annuling the other, pretending that the other doesn't exist. Well, in the private sphere, though they share some elements, as you say, there's not such a conscience of this, though the act itself is very transgressive. And it's a company that a lot of these patriarchal values and the reformation of power, but I would say it's different in certain ways. We've entitled this listening through sexual violence survivors. There's a lot of implication in that title. I get what implication is that everybody survives. But another implication is that listening or a psychologist is very important. I wonder if you could discuss with us professionally how you enter into the listening experience with the women who are survivors. How does that work? What do they talk to you about? And how do you listen? What do you stay in response? I think that's something I'm still learning. It's very complex, but I would say the first thing one has to do when speaking with people who have lived the transgression of their human rights is you have to give up your expertise, because there's no one more expert on the experience they have had than the victim. And sometimes we as professionals have the advice of trying to tell the victim how to feel or how to reframe their experience within certain meanings we have given to a generalized experience we have absolutely no idea of. So I think the first thing one has to do to listen is to give up your own expertise on what you think you know, but you really haven't lived. The second thing, and I think this is a very, very difficult exercise, is to give up judgment. And this means not judging at all because that is impossible. We all have like our pre-meanings from our lived experience, but you have to be conscious of which are your common judgments or your criteria when you listen to someone and bring that like to your consciousness and know that that's the way you're framing the experience of the other. So that when you make certain conclusions or hypotheses about the experience of the other, you know that you yourself are putting yourself there. Yeah, there's not such thing as a neutral, a hearing. There's always something you're putting from yourself in that. So and about what you ask of what do they tell me and what do I say? I think that varies, but there's nothing you can say like to make the damage this hurtful. That's something the big team has to construct for himself or himself. The only thing you can do is try to help him or her restructure the narrative of the trauma. Because trauma, because of that transgression, is always a disorganized narrative. So what we can do, let's say on the psychosocial attention to victims, is helping them to reorganize the trauma in a way that it has some sort of sense, like not that the transpiration has a sense, but to construct the trauma in the meaning of the damage, to make the damage audible so that we know where to do our intervention or what to communicate to the other or that's the job, let's say that's the big picture. How do you deal with, you know, the somebody who is really, I don't know enough psychology to frame the right question, but somebody who's really affected by this, somebody who's in a state of trauma, who is so shaken that they can't function. Somebody who is afraid that this is going to happen again. Somebody who believes that her life is, from a social point of view, really damaged and over, that she bears, you know, the mark of someone who has been violated. How do you, of course, you know, try to rationalize the trauma and make the woman understand what really happened. But how do you deal with the damage that she has suffered and believes that she will suffer later? Right, yeah. I think we have also, we have come to understand that there's not, we cannot solve the damage completely. There's always something that is unsolvable and terrible. And part of recognizing that is also part of recognizing the dimension of the transpiration. However, for being the damage has been, there's always something in the victim that persists the transpiration. And that's where we have to focus our attention and see which parts of life are still remaining and resisting and giving meaning to the existence of that person. And then start from that to reveal all the other meanings that have been fractured by the transpiration. So we have to let the emotion be because there's the damage and the pain. But also we have to recognize, of course, the resistance and where is the life that it still has meaning and start from there. I imagine some of the sessions, some of the discussions you have with these women are very hard on you where you have to invest your own emotional well-being into it. It must take something out of you. You have to be sympathetic. You have to express sympathy. It requires that you do that. But what is it? How does it affect you, Marianne? Well, part of this is recognizing my own vulnerability as a human being and as a woman who lives in this atreia called structure and violent structure. And part of that is understanding that part of my humanity and of my fear and of my vulnerability is something I can put to the service of the other to listening to the other and to come to understand in a way and in the limits I can because not everything is understandable. How this experience has affected the other. So it's not about not feeling anything but knowing what to do with what you feel. Yeah, finding sisterhood, I suppose, connecting. Do you talk to them once or many times? It depends on the scenario. When you work with organizations or GNOs then there is a possibility of seeing the victim again and again. But for example, on the transitional justice scenario, you see the victim only in the when you're preparing them for the event. There's a ceremony or to participate in the scenario. So it depends. Do you ever treat or engage with the people you already know? Are any of your clientele people you know who you have met before? Does this happen on a repeated basis with some people? Are you asking me if like friends or family or like... I'm asking two questions. One is friends or family. Also people that you have that you have seen before in connection with other previous abuses who are abused yet again. Yes, so within the friends and family question, no it's like I don't think it's ethical for me to to support them in my professional way because it's not objective. They could benefit from other help. And within the other transgressions, of course, I think one of the complexities and the complexities of this is that a victim hasn't suffered only one crime or one transgression. So they commonly have other stories of other crimes and other transgressions. And the thing in sexual violence is that this is perceived as a collateral damage to that transgression and not to like a transgression itself. So building that concept of this is also a transgression, not a collateral damage is also part of the process. So this is transitional justice and you are associated as your brother Nicholas is associated with project expedite justice. And part of that, correct me if I'm wrong, but part of that is to seek justice. Part of that is to make sure that if you can identify the people responsible, you can bring it home to them in some way. Is your role in dealing with this problem? Does that include justice, bringing the transgressor to justice? Yes, I think in my case, since I am not a lawyer, I have a different comprehension from what justice is. And it's not always the recognition of the crime. And I think that that's like a very interesting thing about transitional justice that a party is recognizing the crime, but another part is recognizing the damage. And recognizing the damage can happen in a transitional justice scenario or another scenario that can be a community space or a private space. So bringing them to justice, I think it's bringing them to recognize not only the crime, but the damage they have made and also like this part of forgiveness, you know, that we cannot force it, but they are supposed to feel responsible and ask for forgiveness in some way to return to victim what they have made. Do you report cases to prosecutors? Do you seek either prosecution or compensation for the abuses that come to your attention? Well, right now, in the place I work, which is the transitional, I'm sorry, the tribunal for transitional justice, I am already like on dictionary where the cases are reported. So I do not report them. But if you work for organizations, then it's up to the victim to say if she or he wants their case reported or not, because not all victims seek justice in the in the law sense. They seek other kinds of justice or of closure. It depends. Yeah. My last area of inquiry with you, Mariana, is it is how does how does this work in terms of the psychology of it? I guess I'm interested in knowing where where you leave it and how it affects you. How it affects Columbia. This sounds like it's a serious problem. What can we do on a on a social basis, you know, beyond the psychology to deal with this on a national level? And I'm asking, not only in terms of Columbia, I'm asking how Columbia can be a model in some way or other countries, either in Latin America or elsewhere. Because there has to be a larger picture here. It's not just one client, so to speak, at a time. It's the whole, may I say enchilada. Yes. What I have learned from working with these victims is that they are always very generous to present their individual cases and try to understand their cases in a context. And what they usually find, even if they are, for example, if they are women that come from rural areas that don't have like high levels of education, they understand that this isn't a structural problem. Because even if this presents, for example, in a war scenario, but not in a home scenario, after the war scenario and after being conscious of their perpetration, they are able to see other microviolences that have been silenced because of our naturalization or because of our lack of understanding. So I think the first step we can do is as cliche as it sounds, is sexual education. In order to provide people the criteria to decide over their bodies, to narrate their own experience on their own terms, to respect the limits of the other. I think that's like the first answer. And that's the answer I have gotten from the victims. We have to educate people on thinking different, on thinking different about themselves, their bodies, and the bodies of the others. That's like the first step that sounds like very simple, but we have not come to accomplish it in human history, I think. Do you ever find that your clientele and these engagements want to help others? You see that in the US a lot. Somebody who has had a bad experience then goes out and tries to rally the women against further abuse and belongs to organizations, takes steps, and it's beyond just prosecution and compensation. It's a try to affect social change. To the women that you see, do they join in these movements? Do they become public in their views and their efforts to change the society? Yes, it is very common and that is why I say they are very generous on understanding their own experience and trying to help others, because the understanding they have come to is so valuable and they have never seen this before in any other as an area, because it's always lived in private. They want to help other women overcome this. The main evidence of this is that most of the cases that are reported from sexual violence are reported by feminist collectives, not by particular objectives. It's because they need this sorority, let's say, this collectiveness to find support on an experience that is very silent and judged. So yes, that is something I see a lot and I admire a lot. Mariana, how long have you been doing this and why have you been doing it that long? And do you intend to keep on doing it for a career? Yes, I started, I think, almost four years ago. I was seeing a journalism class and a war journalist and we were required to interview a victim of the conflict. I happened to arrive to one of these women collectives that had deconstructed their own, let's say, a system to bring other women to report their cases and how to do this in a very empathetic way without the transformation of the institutions. And I was so impacted and I admired them so much that I wanted to learn from them. And that is why I started to work on these. And of course, I plan to keep on doing these and learning from them. And amplificating what they are doing because all of these have been constructed by the experience of victims, not by our expertise. That is something different. Now, as we admire you for doing it, participating in social healing this way, improving the world around us as well as the individual lives that have been affected. Mariana Sussman, talking to us today about the transitional justice testimony and reparation and listening to sexual violence survivors in Bogota, Colombia. Thank you very much, Mariana. Thank you so much, Jay. Aloha. Thank you so much for joining us today on LinkedIn and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.