My Comment #63 NYTimes
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/opinion/04kristof.html?sort=oldest&offset=3
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
March 4th, 2010
10:48 am
The world is full of ethical children. They go unnoticed. Unsung, ethical children.
Nujood Ali of Yemen, you and other children like you, are among their diverse courageous voices.
Q. What can adults learn from girls like you, Nujood?
Q. Nujood, Can journalists, especially US journalists (even a humane and competent one like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times) attempt less simplistic explanations about Yemen and the world? At the same time, let it be noted Kristof makes powerful points about investing in children, especially girls and their mothers, rather than in missiles, as the US is prone to do. Kristof makes a powerful argument for going the Bangladesh way, as opposed to the Pakistan way, in terms of investment in women and girls. Of course Muhammad Yunus had a lot to do with influencing Bangladesh's policies of investing in women and girls.
Q. Nujood, Can journalists offer less simplistic explanations of your ethical capacity, when they share the worldview of the US military-corporate complex; operate and are paid for their work, within the broader context of the US military-corporate complex?
Q. Which adults urgently need to learn from you, Nujood, to advance a New Global Ethical order (NGEO)?
Those mainly male pseudo 'traditionalists' who support and even encourage forced marriage of girl children in certain parts of India; subscribe to female-hating patriarchy in the old world order, the Saudi Wahabis who have overrun Pakistan being among the worst contemporary examples; army rapists in the Republic of Congo; plus those cynical politicians and multinationals in the new world order, who control others through the military-corporate complex -- Can these destructive mainly male adults even begin to detect the ethical path you, Nujood and other children have charted?
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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New York Times copyright
Op-Ed Columnist
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 3, 2010
Divorced Before Puberty
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/opinion/04kristof.html
It’s hard to imagine that there have been many younger divorcées — or braver ones — than a pint-size third grader named Nujood Ali.
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Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.
Nujood is a Yemeni girl, and it’s no coincidence that Yemen abounds both in child brides and in terrorists (and now, thanks to Nujood, children who have been divorced). Societies that repress women tend to be prone to violence.
For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”
Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.
Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.
He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son.
Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.
“I want to talk to the judge,” the book quotes Nujood as forlornly telling a woman in the courthouse.
“Which judge are you looking for?”
“I just want to speak to a judge, that’s all.”
“But there are lots of judges in this courthouse.”
“Take me to a judge — it doesn’t matter which one!”
When she finally encountered a judge, Nujood declared firmly: “I want a divorce!”
Yemeni journalists turned Nujood into a cause célèbre, and she eventually won her divorce. The publicity inspired others, including an 8-year-old Saudi girl married to a man in his 50s, to seek annulments and divorces.
As a pioneer, Nujood came to the United States and was honored in 2008 as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Indeed, Nujood is probably the only third grader whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described as “one of the greatest women I have ever seen.”
Nujood’s memoir spent five weeks as the No. 1 best-seller in France. It is being published in 18 other languages, including her own native language of Arabic.
I asked Nujood, now 12, what she thought of her life as a best-selling author. She said the foreign editions didn’t matter much to her, but she was looking forward to seeing it in Arabic. Since her divorce, she has returned to school and to her own family, which she is supporting with her book royalties.
At first, Nujood’s brothers criticized her for shaming the family. But now that Nujood is the main breadwinner, everybody sees things a bit differently. “They’re very nice to her now,” said Khadija al-Salami, a filmmaker who mentors Nujood and who translated for me. “They treat her like a queen.”
Yemen is one of my favorite countries, with glorious architecture and enormously hospitable people. Yet Yemen appears to be a time bomb. It is a hothouse for Al Qaeda and also faces an on-and-off war in the north and a secessionist movement in the south. It’s no coincidence that Yemen is also ranked dead last in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index.
There are a couple of reasons countries that marginalize women often end up unstable.
First, those countries usually have very high birth rates, and that means a youth bulge in the population. One of the factors that most correlates to social conflict is the proportion of young men ages 15 to 24.
Second, those countries also tend to practice polygamy and have higher death rates for girls. That means fewer marriageable women — and more frustrated bachelors to be recruited by extremists.
So educating Nujood and giving her a chance to become a lawyer — her dream — isn’t just a matter of fairness. It’s also a way to help tame the entire country.
Consider Bangladesh. After it split off from Pakistan, Bangladesh began to educate girls in a way that Pakistan has never done. The educated women staffed an emerging garment industry and civil society, and those educated women are one reason Bangladesh is today far more stable than Pakistan.
The United States last month announced $150 million in military assistance for Yemen to fight extremists. In contrast, it costs just $50 to send a girl to public school for a year — and little girls like Nujood may prove more effective than missiles at defeating terrorists.
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Daily Mail copyright
The illegal child brides of India
By SUE LLOYD-ROBERTS, Daily Mail
Last updated at 09:21 07 June 2006
Mass ceremony
Cruel custom: An under-age girl is married off in one of Rajasthan's many hundreds of mass ceremonies
Forced to marry at six, mothers by 12, their bodies destroyed by 20, SUE LLOYD-ROBERTS finds the unspeakable abuse of India's illegal child brides is worse than ever:
When I was getting married, I had no idea what was going on, says Manemma. "I was only six and all I knew was that I had to leave home. I cried and cried and said I didn't want to, but they made me."
Manemma sits forlornly, surrounded by family members, on the floor of their two-room house in a village in the Indian Andhra Pradesh. Dressed in a bright red dress and with her plaits, she looks even younger than her 11 years.
I look accusingly at Manemma's father, Ghandrappa. How could he let such a thing happen to his daughter? Unembarrassed, he returns my stare, shrugs his shoulders and answers in a matter-of-fact tone. "It's the way things happen here," he says. "It's the tradition. Girls are married at a very young age, regardless of the age of their husbands, and they're expected to adjust to the situation."
Thousands of children get married in India every year, and as soon as they reach puberty, they are expected to conceive. According to the census of 2001, 300,000 girls under the age of 15 had given birth, some for the second time. Now, five years later, the number could be as many as half a million. With their bodies underdeveloped and often malnourished, early childbirth can be fatal. Some 100,000 mothers and one million babies die in India every year.
Manemma's marriage ended in disaster, before she could have a baby. After a couple of years, her 20-year-old husband wanted a more sexually mature woman and sent her packing. "How did your husband treat you?" I ask Manemma. I did not want to ask her directly whether he tried to have sex with her. Doctors had told me of the frequent cases of rape of prepubescent girls in her situation, but it is not a question you can ask in India.
Manemma squirms with embarrassment. "I don't want to talk about my husband," she says. She is still traumatised by the experience and shakes her head when I ask her if she will ever get married again. Throughout India, during the May festival of Akshaya Tritiya, the auspicious day in the year for weddings, streets resound to the cacophony of steel bands, firecrackers and women's voices singing as they prepare young brides to meet their grooms.
Behind closed doors in the town of Jaipur, two sisters, aged 11 and 13, Anjali and Vinisha, bow their heads as family members anoint their heads and limbs with a mixture of yoghurt and turmeric. Their hands and feet have already been covered with swirling patterns of henna. "Of course I'm nervous, wouldn't you be?" the older one says, irritated and frightened about what is about to happen to her. "We haven't even seen our husbands, let alone met them."
She explains how she loves her home, her sisters and her school, and now all that is to come to an end. "There's no chance of going to school at my in-laws' place. I'll just cook and do the housework. Nothing else. I shall have to cover my head with a veil and do whatever my mother-in-law says."
Child weddings are illegal in India. The Child Marriage Restraint Act, passed during British rule in 1929, specified that a girl must be 18 and a boy 21 before they can wed. Since independence in 1947, however, Indian governments have done little to implement the rule. During the wedding season, hundreds of mass ceremonies involving children as young as four take place across the country.
Large, garishly coloured wedding marquees litter the desert landscape, in full view and in defiance of the law. The state of Rajasthan has the highest number of child marriages in India. In the government buildings in Jodhpur, I find a handful of staff in the dusty Department for Child Welfare office, waiting for the phone to ring.
They have installed a hotline so that informers can tip them off about illegal ceremonies. It has not rung once during this year's wedding season. The director, Champala Suthar, explains that the wedding organisers are clever. "They are always one jump ahead of us. They announce a wedding and then change the date, or the venue. And Rajasthan is a big place. The police cannot patrol the area. Maybe if they had enough cars, they could stop the weddings, but it will take time."
Until then they must rely on a telephone that never rings. There is another problem, explains the local landowner who accompanies me to a mass wedding close to his estate. He claims that the landowners still rule in Rajasthan and that the area around his land is 'no go' for the police.
When we arrive at the wedding tent, the women are singing as they carry the brides' dowries, wrapped in silk carpets, towards the grooms' enclosure. In the brides' tent, a six-year-old child bride, dressed like a doll in crimson and gold, stares with kohl-encircled eyes, uncomprehending as the events unfold around her.
An older girl scowls at her mother and at me and then pulls her veil down over her face. The older girls in the tent know what is going on but they are helpless. Up to 15 girls, many under-age, will be married here today.
By the end of it, they will leave their homes for ever and move to their husbands' houses to begin a term of slavery to their mother-in-law and then, once they mature, a life of repeated pregnancies and unremitting childcare; if, that is, they survive their first pregnancy.
India has signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, with all the promises of the right to education and freedom from abuse which the Convention entails. Why, therefore, is this child abuse accepted on such a wide scale?
Some states are attempting to confront the problem by insisting that all marriages are registered. To register a marriage, the bride must produce a birth certificate to prove she is over 18.
But nothing is that simple in India, where the gulf between the passing of a law and its implementation can be a wide one. In Andhra Pradesh, four years after the law was passed, registration officers have still not been appointed at village level and, as elsewhere in the country, the police turn a blind eye.
In the Warangal district, three hours' drive from the capital Hyderabad, Meena Akashi, a local mother and activist, decided she had had enough of watching young girls in her area being abused by mothers-in-law and husbands alike. Walking from village to village, she collected the names of 60 girls who were about to be married and took them to the local police station and asked the inspector in charge to stop the weddings.
I asked Inspector Mogili Durgaiah how many weddings he had stopped and how many priests or parents he had arrested? "None," he replied. "You see, these people are illiterate and they do not understand the law." It is an astonishingly softly-softly approach for the police to take.
Michel Saint Lot, head of UNICEF for southern India, explains. "The police themselves are part of the tradition. This is the culture in which they are raised.
"They are not going to turn on their own families and tell them that a centuries-old custom is wrong. They need to be educated and trained in this matter."
But until this education and training can take place, what hope is there for the thousands of young girls who continue to be sacrificed on the altar of child marriages?
At the Mahatma Gandhi Hospital in Hyderabad, a 15-year-old is rushed into casualty. She is having convulsions and is writhing in pain. "She offers a classic example of what can go wrong if you have a baby too young," Dr Shailaja says. "She has high blood pressure and, because her body is not yet fully developed, her pelvic passage is too small and the baby will get stuck. We shall have to carry out a Caesarean."
The girl travelled 200 kilometres to get to the hospital. She is lucky. The majority of mothers give birth at home and, with similar problems, both mother and baby would die.
The doctor passes through the neo-natal ward, pointing to the underweight, sickly babies born of undernourished, undeveloped children. She stops at the bed of a 15-year-old who is cradling a tiny baby.
"Look what happens if you have babies too young," she says and asks the mother to stick out her tongue. "Look, she's anaemic, most of them are. And look at the baby - only four pounds in weight. He'll be lucky to survive." Fortunately, the mother cannot understand the doctor's English.
When we move on to the outpatients' department, I ask the collection of teenagers who have come for check-ups whether they had been told of the dangers of early childbirth. They all shake their heads. And contraception? I get the same response.
We pass on to the gynaecological ward. Here, women as young as 23 have hysterectomies. Their bodies, ravaged by multiple pregnancies, are already worn out.
When they get home, they will be unable to conceive and will be too weak to work in the fields. More often than not, their husbands will discard them.
But, abandoned by their parents, the police and the lawmakers alike, the children of India are beginning to fight back. I met 14-year-old Jengri as she was addressing a group of younger school children. They listened with rapt concentration as the tiny, four-foot-something girl told them her life story.
She was married at the age of 11 to an alcoholic truck driver more than 20 years her senior. Three days after the wedding, he was killed in a traffic accident. Because the wedding was never registered, she received no compensation.
As a widow, albeit 11 years old, it appeared her life was effectively over - until she decided to change from victim to activist. She now lectures other children and their parents on the perils of early marriages to older men.
Surely the parents do not want to hear what she has to say, I ask? Her expression is anxious but determined. "Of course, I get scared when I talk to parents but I steel myself, telling myself that I must do it. I tell them my story and I hope that it will change their minds," she says.
Suddenly, she breaks into a huge smile. "You see, I thought my life was over but now I have a cause and I have a new life."
Jengri is one small voice in a vast country. But it is a beginning. Unless more people speak out, thousands more girls will suffer trauma, rape and the possibility of death in childbirth in the name of time-honoured tradition.
Sue Lloyd-Roberts' film on India's Child Brides will be shown tonight on Newsnight on BBC2.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-389469/The-illegal-child-brides-India.html#ixzz0hJIjIM8A
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Thursday, March 4, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
A Post-Plantation Economy?
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
February 21st, 2010
11:22 am
Comment #682.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
February 21st, 2010
7:53 pm
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/business/economy/21unemployed.html?sort=newest&offset=6
A Post-Plantation Economy?
My question is not meant to be facetious but serious. What Peter Goldman vividly describes did not start yesterday but goes right back to the US plantation economy.
Sociologists do not own any special knowledge but their entire discipline rests upon the core empirical premise that social structures don't die -- they morph.
The 19th century US plantation economy has morphed into the 21st century post-plantation economy. Plantation capitalism morphed into the capitalism of the military-corporate-complex (MCC)
Let me draw upon 2 personal examples which represent tens of thousands of workers:
1. Large sections of the US public university economy have been functioning, at least since the early 80's, as a post-plantation economy -- cheap surplus academic labor within the context of a corporatized university structure in which the majority of workers are simply not paid for large portions of their wage-work, but are considered part-time workers with no job security. They are under-employed but overworked!
2. Now in 2010, a 26 year-old University of Michigan graduate I know has worked as contract (read post-plantation) labor for Goldman Sachs for the past couple years, without much hope (ever?) of becoming a full-time worker, frequently working 13-hour days, with absolutely no job security and no health care to boot. He cannot afford (neither time nor money) to get the ACL knee surgery he desperately needs.
So, if the New New Deal is chronic unemployment for the majority of US workers, whether they are in the private or public sector, please do not use the word \"rebound\" for the 2010 US economy. There's no such thing as a rebound in the US post-plantation economy. It's one unending boom-and-bust for the US military-corporate-complex.
A total, creative rethink is needed but highly unlikely to occur, given the irrational reliance on the MCC, whether by Obama or the Bush(es) or Clinton, all the way back to Eisenhower, who rightly warned about the \"military-industrial-complex.\" Now that military-industrial-complex has become thoroughly corporatized -- to morph into the MCC, the source of our decades-long chronic unemployment and underemployment.
Recommended Recommended by 10 Readers
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/business/economy/21unemployed.html?em
NYTimes copyright
The New Poor
Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs
The social safety net was built for short-term gaps between jobs, but work may be scarce for years, even as the American economy shows signs of a rebound.
By PETER S. GOODMAN
Published: February 20, 2010
New York City
February 21st, 2010
11:22 am
Comment #682.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
February 21st, 2010
7:53 pm
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/business/economy/21unemployed.html?sort=newest&offset=6
A Post-Plantation Economy?
My question is not meant to be facetious but serious. What Peter Goldman vividly describes did not start yesterday but goes right back to the US plantation economy.
Sociologists do not own any special knowledge but their entire discipline rests upon the core empirical premise that social structures don't die -- they morph.
The 19th century US plantation economy has morphed into the 21st century post-plantation economy. Plantation capitalism morphed into the capitalism of the military-corporate-complex (MCC)
Let me draw upon 2 personal examples which represent tens of thousands of workers:
1. Large sections of the US public university economy have been functioning, at least since the early 80's, as a post-plantation economy -- cheap surplus academic labor within the context of a corporatized university structure in which the majority of workers are simply not paid for large portions of their wage-work, but are considered part-time workers with no job security. They are under-employed but overworked!
2. Now in 2010, a 26 year-old University of Michigan graduate I know has worked as contract (read post-plantation) labor for Goldman Sachs for the past couple years, without much hope (ever?) of becoming a full-time worker, frequently working 13-hour days, with absolutely no job security and no health care to boot. He cannot afford (neither time nor money) to get the ACL knee surgery he desperately needs.
So, if the New New Deal is chronic unemployment for the majority of US workers, whether they are in the private or public sector, please do not use the word \"rebound\" for the 2010 US economy. There's no such thing as a rebound in the US post-plantation economy. It's one unending boom-and-bust for the US military-corporate-complex.
A total, creative rethink is needed but highly unlikely to occur, given the irrational reliance on the MCC, whether by Obama or the Bush(es) or Clinton, all the way back to Eisenhower, who rightly warned about the \"military-industrial-complex.\" Now that military-industrial-complex has become thoroughly corporatized -- to morph into the MCC, the source of our decades-long chronic unemployment and underemployment.
Recommended Recommended by 10 Readers
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/business/economy/21unemployed.html?em
NYTimes copyright
The New Poor
Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs
The social safety net was built for short-term gaps between jobs, but work may be scarce for years, even as the American economy shows signs of a rebound.
By PETER S. GOODMAN
Published: February 20, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Nuclear Iran Here To Stay, Too Bad USA
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/middleeast/12iran.html
My NYTimes Comment #11.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
February 11th, 2010
9:41 am
A Discriminatory International Nuclear Order
The international nuclear order cannot and must not discriminate against sovereign nation-states.
That order is now discriminatory, largely because that order has been hijacked by the US, via the UN In-Security Council.
Q. Is the US in fact saying that Israel can (it does!) have nuclear weapons, but Iran cannot?
Q. Does the US as bully-in-chief get to make the rules, or must the US comply with rules arrived at through consensus by intergovernmental agencies?
The US is on the wrong side of history on this and many other geopolitical issues.
What is the US global charter? The US charter is dominance and manipulation, instead of cooperation and compliance. (China, on its way to global economic and strategic dominance appears to be determined to make the same disastrous mistakes as the US).
Am I arguing for equal opportunity destruction? Obviously not. But I am arguing that the NATO powers, headed by the sanction-happy US, cannot prevent or impede scientific development of any sovereign nation-state, including Iran.
In Iran's case, it must be remembered that the US and UK (aka British Petroleum, BP) acted in tandem in 1953 to topple the popularly elected Mossadegh government, that was elected by Iranians, primarily because it favored State control of Iran's petroleum resources.
The US-CIA/UK installed the Shah (under whom Iran was coerced into signing the NPT) to do their bidding and the Shah was finally ousted by the Ayatollahs. That is the manipulated trajectory of Iran's recent history, in which the US blatantly intervened in the internal affairs of Iran, with disastrous long-term consequences.
When will the US learn? Not anytime soon.
Iran has every right to acquire nuclear capability.
Iran appears to have already acquired that capability.
Iran is now obligated to comply with international nuclear safety standards.
Unlike the US, Iran can attempt to develop its nuclear capability -- responsibly.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
A truncated version of this comment Recommended by 39 NYT Readers
--------------------------------------------------------------------
NYT copright:
By ALAN COWELL and MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Iran’s Leader Shifts Spotlight From Protests to Nuclear Step
Published: February 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/middleeast/12iran.html
My NYTimes Comment #11.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
February 11th, 2010
9:41 am
A Discriminatory International Nuclear Order
The international nuclear order cannot and must not discriminate against sovereign nation-states.
That order is now discriminatory, largely because that order has been hijacked by the US, via the UN In-Security Council.
Q. Is the US in fact saying that Israel can (it does!) have nuclear weapons, but Iran cannot?
Q. Does the US as bully-in-chief get to make the rules, or must the US comply with rules arrived at through consensus by intergovernmental agencies?
The US is on the wrong side of history on this and many other geopolitical issues.
What is the US global charter? The US charter is dominance and manipulation, instead of cooperation and compliance. (China, on its way to global economic and strategic dominance appears to be determined to make the same disastrous mistakes as the US).
Am I arguing for equal opportunity destruction? Obviously not. But I am arguing that the NATO powers, headed by the sanction-happy US, cannot prevent or impede scientific development of any sovereign nation-state, including Iran.
In Iran's case, it must be remembered that the US and UK (aka British Petroleum, BP) acted in tandem in 1953 to topple the popularly elected Mossadegh government, that was elected by Iranians, primarily because it favored State control of Iran's petroleum resources.
The US-CIA/UK installed the Shah (under whom Iran was coerced into signing the NPT) to do their bidding and the Shah was finally ousted by the Ayatollahs. That is the manipulated trajectory of Iran's recent history, in which the US blatantly intervened in the internal affairs of Iran, with disastrous long-term consequences.
When will the US learn? Not anytime soon.
Iran has every right to acquire nuclear capability.
Iran appears to have already acquired that capability.
Iran is now obligated to comply with international nuclear safety standards.
Unlike the US, Iran can attempt to develop its nuclear capability -- responsibly.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
A truncated version of this comment Recommended by 39 NYT Readers
--------------------------------------------------------------------
NYT copright:
By ALAN COWELL and MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Iran’s Leader Shifts Spotlight From Protests to Nuclear Step
Published: February 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/middleeast/12iran.html
Monday, February 1, 2010
Goats for Social Justice -- Lessons from the The Vale
Goats for Social Justice is a 1-year PILOT project that came out of the inspiring work of three doctors who live and work in the Kashmir Valley. These doctors realized that it is part of their professional obligation, to provide mental health services to the most vulnerable of Kashmiris -- the Female Poor.
Goats for Social Justice (GSJ) places local breeds of goats with women and girls who are suffering from depression, anxiety and other challenges to overall wellness.
Why?
Because poor women have asked for goats! And sheep and buffaloes.
Poor women understand best that subsistence supports and economic opportunity are essential to overcome mental health problems and societal restrictions on their freedom to acquire resources to feed their families and be active in their communities. Mental health problems are disproportionately high among the poor, especially in an area of ongoing armed conflict like the fabled valley.
Because of these repeated requests by poor women facing mental health challenges, our project, Goats for Social Justice has tried to assemble a diverse array of EXISTING RESOURCES -- psychiatric workers, livestock, veterinary students, veterinary faculty, veterinary extension bureaucrats -- in target villages where subsitence dairy producers live and are at risk for psychiatric problems. This is the core mission of Goats for Social Justice.
Think about it -- Goats Help Democracy! Goats Foster Economic Opportunity for the Female Poor.
The Kashmiri doctors' professional service is voluntarily offered in Ganderbal, Budgam and Anantnag district villages, to address this ongoing problem of helping poor women and girls cope with the special mental and physical wellness challenges that are the direct consequence of being poor, female, living and trying to earn a subsistence livelihood in a zone of ongoing armed conflict with its searches, disappearances, street confrontations, shutdowns, curfews, hartals.
The female poor are the most vulnerable under these conditions, because they must continue to attempt to earn a livelihood while living in daily physical danger.
Below, I first list, then elaborate, some lessons I have learned from my very limited field service in the Kashmir Valley during the past two years:
1. Kashmir, like every part of India is OVER-RESOURCED, yet UNDER-UTILIZED and these resources are cynically, deliberately UNDER-UTILIZED, against the poor.
Here's what I mean. National/local politicians/ bureaucrats would prefer to have us common people believe instead their self-serving ideology that Kashmir (and other parts of India) are UNDER-Resourced and OVER-utilized.
For example, officials complain that population increases negate any gains in development. The frequently blame the poor and the illiterate for "having too many children." Our netas and babus fail to learn from significant data gathered over 60 years, that the most effective check on population increase is jobs and social justice.
People limit the size of their families, marry later, have children at later ages, secure economic advantages for themselves their families and communities and become prosperous wherever and whenever the nation-state implements policies that ensure land justice, fair access to literacy and education, healthcare, housing, redress civic grievances.
Development Data analyses show that investing in women and girls' health, education and employment, gives government a bigger payoff and a larger return on investment than investment in any other population group.
Families will NOT need to make additional children to give them a safety net, if government provides that safety net for them.
So, What is the biggest check on population growth? Social Justice for our Female Poor.
What is Social Justice? Fair access to food, shelter, healthcare, education, employment.
I am chillingly reminded of Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's statement in the monsoon session of Parliament last year (2009) "In order to distribute wealth, we must first create it."
That's the completely inaccurate, cynical, heartless mindset of our dominant-caste netas and feudal overlords in government.
2. The female poor contribute substantial resources every day by their unpaid labor, but they are denied their fair share of resources every day throughout Kashmir and elsewhere throughout India. The poor, especially the female poor are not seen as an untapped resource asset, which is in fact what they are -- the female poor are an untapped, rich resource asset.
3. Poverty is NOT a "curse" as mentioned to me in a meeting, by one well-intentioned but mistaken Kashmir official.
So how can poverty be most accurately defined?
Poverty is a CRIME committed by the rulers and bureaucrats of the nation-state, against its most vulnerable and disadvantaged citizens -- especially the female poor.
This is my definition of poverty, coming out of my field experiences in Kashmir, as elsewhere throughout India.
4. The diverse indigenous cultural knowledges, especially of the female poor in Kashmir are deliberately exploited or cynically ignored, by the well-heeled self-serving bureaucrats involved in planning and implementation processes. The politicians and bureaucrats employ a top-down strategy solely to benefit themselves and their patrons, relatives and friends. They have no friends among the poor of Kashmir, the poor are seen by them as invisible, less-than-human persons they can exploit every day. What we need is a bottom-up strategy in which aam aadmi gets to say and demand that their basic needs are met and not stolen from them.
5. Islamic religious culture, with its core emphasis on social equality/justice, is an UNDERUTILIZED asset in the efforts on behalf of the poor.
Allah says YES but netas say NO, to the Poor.
Islamic religious culture, a rich resource for ALL Kashmiris and ALL Indians, is also cynically manipulated by self-styled misogynist and Other-hater Islamists, so-called faux Jihadists and separatists.
In my time working in the Valley, I could see everywhere how ordinary folks turned to their faith for comfort and sustenance. Prayers flowed from homes and mosques. Ordinary people like me ( I draw whatever comfort i need from ALL faith systems, large and small, not just one) grow kinder, more emotionally generous, because of the deep faith that ordinary people carry around with them.
But this faith is not IMPLEMENTED in practical programs for the poor, especially the female poor. This needs to happen urgently.
Q. What is the use of any religion if it is just habit and ritual, if it is used by a cynical few to incite violent discord, and does not accomplish Social Justice?
6.Terror has become a Kashmir INDUSTRY with its own geopolitical economy and the female poor especially, suffer the most from the Terror Industry. The female poor are especially unable to earn a livelihood in the context of constant hartals called by politicians, faux jihadists, separatists, who OPERATE the Terror industry and/or are the BENEFICIARIES of the terror industry. They work against the poor, especially the female poor.
7. The female poor of Kashmir are tremendously resilient and are the most important resource of Kashmir. Babus and netas, faux jihadists/separatists should listen closely to the female poor and implement programs to meet their basic needs.
I'll be adding to these thoughts and welcome yours as we proceed to directly work with the female poor in Kashmir.
===========================================================================
Please note the following pilot project Goats for Social Justice can be implemented entirely through in-kind service and material inputs. That means these resource inputs already exist in every district in Kashmir. They just have not been adequately utilized in creative innovative ways. If GSJ is replicated by the state government after our successful pilot, then GSJ will require fiscal inputs (see budget below) wherever it is replicated.
GOATS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE (GSJ)
Livelihood Security/Social Medicine Dual Initiative for Women & Girl Dairy Producers Working in a Conflict Zone -- Kashmir, INDIA
A 1-year Field Pilot of PACEKashmir
1. Name and contact details: PACE KASHMIR -- Prevention & Care for Everyone
• Full legal name: PACE KASHMIR -- Prevention & Care for Everyone
• Acronym: PACEKashmir
• Legal registration number: DYC/NYK/SGR/YC/387 w/J&K State, India (doctors have been
volunteering in the Kashmir Valley, as trained and credentialed psychiatrists, since 2007)
• Official address: #29 Nursingarh, Srinagar 190011, Kashmir, INDIA
• Contact person: Arshad Arif Maghribi, MD
• Telephone: 91+9419428795;
• Fax
• E-mail:
2. Title of PACE's field project:
Goats for Social Justice: Livelihood Security/Social Medicine Dual Initiative for Women & Girl Dairy Producers Working in a Conflict Zone
3. Main thematic area
• Right to Female Livelihood Security & Public Mental Health Services In A Conflict Zone
4. Location
4.1 Country or countries: India (pilot & replication phases), Afghanistan (suggested replication site), Pakistan (suggested replication site)
4.2 Region or regions
• [ South Asia] X
5. Goats for Social Justice Project Narrative
" Arshad doctor, please can you get me a Goat?"
A middle-aged widow (whose teenage ‘militant’ son was shot in an ‘encounter’ by police) asked suddenly, as the 'barefoot' doctor encouraged her to describe her depressive symptoms – sadness, helplessness, despair, hopelessness, lethargy.
Goats for Social Justice (GSJ) A Livelihood Security/ Social Medicine 1-year Field Pilot Project will target female rural/urban dairy producers working & living in a conflict zone, suffering Depression, PTSD Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, substance-related psychiatric symptoms. One female patient, a dairy producer, said "I have sadness, I have become quiet, but my illness is poverty {Garibon ki bimaari}
The fabled Vale of Kashmir has been ravaged by conflict, in 25 yrs of infiltrations, shootings, killings, abductions, rapes, disappearances, by 'separatists', 'terrorists' 'militants’, state police & Indian Army.
Livelihood Security + Social Medicine – A unique combined strategy to counteract conflict and build prosperity for women subsistence earners, their families and communities.
Goats help Democracy!
• GSJ’s Objectives:
1) Conduct a 1-year field pilot in Srinagar & 3 villages -- Anantnag, Budgam, Ganderbal -- to demonstrate the vital importance of paying attention to subsistence women and girls’ own needs assessment, rather than what bureaucrats, politicians or aid donors prescribe for them
2) Promote Liberty; Safety & Security; Freedom of Movement; Self-Reliant Sustainable Economic Activity; Freedom to gain SCIENTIFIC Knowledge; Freedom to implement Livestock Management Sciences & Science of Mental Health Recovery & Wellness Maintenance for Women & Girl Dairy Producers in a 3-state conflict zone {pilot phase in Kashmir India only}
3) Pre-empt, Intervene, Treat Mental Disorders in women & girl dairy producers, resulting from working and raising families in a conflict zone, so that they can be productive entrepreneurial earners for themselves, their families & their communities
• Relevance
Goats for Social Justice (GSJ) is highly relevant to the lived needs of subsistence women and girl dairy producers because:
1. GSJ’s 1-year field pilot initiative directly addresses subsistence-earning women’s expressed livelihood and mental health needs.
2. Women & Girls working in Kashmir’s conflict zone are suffering from mental health disorders, as a direct consequence of living in a zone of extended armed conflict. Mental illnesses (which are preventable, treatable and curable) cause subjective distress; stigmatization; impair women’s freedom of movement and expression, and significantly impede livelihood economic activity.
3. Economic activity (example goatherding and dairying that are culturally valued by their families and communities) gives Women & Girls a socially acceptable opportunity to leave the confines of their homes, (while receiving livelihood and mental health supports), to work outside the home to engage in productive entrepreneurial economic activities within a developing market economy.
4. Women & Girl entrepreneurial dairy producers, through these economic activities, are empowered to approach municipal and civil authorities, as well as mental health personnel, to address their livelihood and mental health requirements.
Since the women and girls are hoping to become self-employed, self-sustaining family and community based entrepreneurs, they will likely be less dependent upon an employer, who would in most instances be a male with authority and influence.
• Activities - brief outline of activities:
Timeline of Activities
1. Week #1Point-person designation & allocation of daily/weekly/monthly clinical tasks; patient case-loading for 2-person psychiatric (one doctor, one counselor) teams; increase patient case-loads as feasible, increase patient case referrals to existing state & municipal mental health clinics and hospitals
2. Week #1 Point-person designation & allocation of daily/weekly/monthly tasks of livestock personnel teams
3. Week #1 Purchase order of livestock units for staggered delivery to 10 FHoH during 2nd week of first quarter.
4. Week #3 Planning for Bi-monthly psychiatric treatment & wellness camps (6) implemented from first month, monthly interim assessments
5. Week #4 Sustainability Consultant reports monthly on networking outcomes as a result of resource mobilization efforts to reach district and state level hospital/clinic personnel, health administrators, local officials, college faculty, psychology and veterinary students
6. Week #4 Sustainability assessment reports of mental health recovery and wellness maintenance, monthly
7. Week #4 Monthly Sustainability Assessment Report of livestock distribution/maintenance patterns to optimize dairy production by female subsistence earners, with expert guidance from livestock teams
8. Week #12 Case Management Review every quarter -- total 4
9. Week #2 Resource Atlas & Resource Directory database compilation, beginning first month of implementation of pilot, ongoing, point person is Sustainability Consultant
10. Week #4 All monthly and quarterly reports compiled to generate year end executive summary under leadership of Founder-Director, consultant is point person for pilot's monthly, quarterly and year-end reports due Week #52.
• Target group(s): Goats for Social Justice (GSJ) will PILOT a field demonstration project to target subsistence Women & Girl Dairy producers, with mental health problems, as a consequence of working in areas of armed conflict.
Each of 10 (ten) Female Heads of Household (herein under referred to as FHoH) will be supplied 2-sheep/2 goat Livestock units, along with expert in-service technical assistance from Animal Husbandry & Dairy Economists.
A.Targeted FHoH will receive technical assistance in
1. Developing and conserving livestock vegetational spaces
2. Green and dry fodder management techniques in their localities.
B. Targeted FHoH will receive
1. Psychiatric interventions, both preventive and ameliorative
2. Necessary medications in an overall program of
exercise, nutrition, mental health wellness maintenance while working and living in an area of extended armed conflict.
Expected Results:
The expected results are listed below, operationalized as Performance Outcomes showing projected behavioral, economic and social changes in the women and girls subsistence earners for whom the project is intended to benefit (based up their self-assessments as described above)
1. Women & Girls will earn a stable daily cash/barter income that would give them the market option to purchase additional livestock assets as well as access to public mental health services for their household members
2. Women & Girls will make social and economic decisions to access education/ vocational training and access to local retail markets for their produce and products.
3. Women & Girls’ social, economic activities generate a “muliplier effect” for their families and communities, thereby increasing the value of donors’ and public-private patrners’ investments in women and girls’ livelihood and health.
4. Women & Girls will speak up/ speak out /take civic action against armed violence
5. Women & Girls will directly participate in civil society through local municipal bodies and street level awareness work to secure their livelihood rights/mental health rights
• PACE Partners :
1. Retired army officers’ volunteer liaison work to help Army develop street strategies to meet female subsistence earners’ just demand for essential personal safety and protection, to ensure productivity
2.University, government, community-based veterinary/husbandry,/dairy economists/green and dry fodder specialists share best practices in dairy/fodder management/pasturage conservation, with subsistence-earning women and girl dairy producers, who in turn peer-assist women and girls in their localities
3.Hospital-based personnel extend mental health services to women and girl dairy producers
4.Municipal and bureaucratic functionaries at the local, state and centre facilitate women and girl subsistence dairy producers’ access to technical assistance, knowledge sharing.
• BUDGET (I year Field Pilot phase ONLY, no replication activity is covered by this budget)
Personnel costs: USD 19,000
[5 FTE -- 2 psychiatrists, 2 counselors, 1 part-time mobile health unit driver, 1 part-time sustainability evaluation consultant]
Administration USD 4,000
[2 FTE – case-loading, intake, discharge, payroll, awareness camps event coordination, clinical file management, livestock/fodder purchase ordering, distribution, management]
Field Activities USD 23, 386
[6 bi-monthly mobile mental health awareness camps, psychiatric interventions including counseling, therapies & medications]
Evaluation USD 1,000
[Executive Summary, Formative & Summative evaluations, Public Domain dissemination of GSJ pilot project results and recommendations]
Total USD 47, 386
[1 year Field PILOT PHASE Kashmir, India ONLY]
This Project is protected by copyright
COPYRIGHT Creative Commons Copyright Creative Commons License.
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice Blog by Professor Chithra Karunakaran is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
covering all materials at the following URL
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
Thursday, September 24, 2009
GOATS -- for Social Justice
The Goat Narrative seems to be gaining ground, clambering into ethical spaces in some of the most conflicted and battle-weary war zones of South Asia.
Kashmir and Kandahar (and several hundred villages in between), would benefit from a few thousand extra goats.
Homegrown goats from across South Asia and perhaps a nice Goat Exchange set up with our sisters and brothers in sovereign nation-states in the previously colonized and still oppressed Global South. Indonesia, Africa, Ecuador.
We need Goats instead of Drones.
Let those US generals and US-led NATO European occupiers, chew on that.
Let Obama ruminate.
Goats have work to do. Peacework. Pro-Poor development.
This past summer I volunteered in Srinagar with an innovative Social Medicine project called PACE -- Prevention & Care for Everyone. The founder-director a serene,intense,dedicated Kashmiri doctor who had quit his safe government job to directly offer care to persons suffering from symptoms related to depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as drug related problems,
told me a Goat story.
One day, Dr. Arshad Arif was treating an elderly woman patient. She suddenly asked him:
"CAN YOU GET ME A GOAT?"
Is anyone listening to this innocent casualty of terror, violence, hunger and deprivation?
What is she telling us?
That she is fully capable of self-diagnosis. She doesn't really need a doctor to tell her what's wrong with her.
She knows what ails her. What has made her mentally ill is a cruel denial of livelihood opportunity.
If she has a goat, a goat will give her milk that she can sell to her neighbors and the money earned will give her a chance to feed herself and her family.
She will walk around while tending her goat and the very act of walking will take her outdoors with something safe and productive to do.
The very act of walking will kick in her endorphins, lessening her pain and despair, and lifting her depressive symptoms.
She wants to be an entrepreneur. She wants to be self employed and earn a living.
Who's listening?
She wants to be well and knows exactly how to get well.
She's basically saying Don't get my Goat. Just give me one.
Or two.
Or three.
Throw in some sheep to optimize sustainability.
Over in Afghanistan the Goat narrative has been repeated many times over. (see link below)
Who's listening?
Goats for PEACE of MIND.
Goats for a PIECE of the Rock, A Slice of the Pie.
Goats for SOCIAL JUSTICE.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------------
Goats for Social Justice (GSJ) places local breeds of goats with women and girls who are suffering from depression, anxiety and other challenges to overall wellness.
Why?
Because poor women have asked for goats! And sheep and buffaloes.
Poor women understand best that subsistence supports and economic opportunity are essential to overcome mental health problems and societal restrictions on their freedom to acquire resources to feed their families and be active in their communities. Mental health problems are disproportionately high among the poor, especially in an area of ongoing armed conflict like the fabled valley.
Because of these repeated requests by poor women facing mental health challenges, our project, Goats for Social Justice has tried to assemble a diverse array of EXISTING RESOURCES -- psychiatric workers, livestock, veterinary students, veterinary faculty, veterinary extension bureaucrats -- in target villages where subsitence dairy producers live and are at risk for psychiatric problems. This is the core mission of Goats for Social Justice.
Think about it -- Goats Help Democracy! Goats Foster Economic Opportunity for the Female Poor.
The Kashmiri doctors' professional service is voluntarily offered in Ganderbal, Budgam and Anantnag district villages, to address this ongoing problem of helping poor women and girls cope with the special mental and physical wellness challenges that are the direct consequence of being poor, female, living and trying to earn a subsistence livelihood in a zone of ongoing armed conflict with its searches, disappearances, street confrontations, shutdowns, curfews, hartals.
The female poor are the most vulnerable under these conditions, because they must continue to attempt to earn a livelihood while living in daily physical danger.
Below, I first list, then elaborate, some lessons I have learned from my very limited field service in the Kashmir Valley during the past two years:
1. Kashmir, like every part of India is OVER-RESOURCED, yet UNDER-UTILIZED and these resources are cynically, deliberately UNDER-UTILIZED, against the poor.
Here's what I mean. National/local politicians/ bureaucrats would prefer to have us common people believe instead their self-serving ideology that Kashmir (and other parts of India) are UNDER-Resourced and OVER-utilized.
For example, officials complain that population increases negate any gains in development. The frequently blame the poor and the illiterate for "having too many children." Our netas and babus fail to learn from significant data gathered over 60 years, that the most effective check on population increase is jobs and social justice.
People limit the size of their families, marry later, have children at later ages, secure economic advantages for themselves their families and communities and become prosperous wherever and whenever the nation-state implements policies that ensure land justice, fair access to literacy and education, healthcare, housing, redress civic grievances.
Development Data analyses show that investing in women and girls' health, education and employment, gives government a bigger payoff and a larger return on investment than investment in any other population group.
Families will NOT need to make additional children to give them a safety net, if government provides that safety net for them.
So, What is the biggest check on population growth? Social Justice for our Female Poor.
What is Social Justice? Fair access to food, shelter, healthcare, education, employment.
I am chillingly reminded of Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's statement in the monsoon session of Parliament last year (2009) "In order to distribute wealth, we must first create it."
That's the completely inaccurate, cynical, heartless mindset of our dominant-caste netas and feudal overlords in government.
2. The female poor contribute substantial resources every day by their unpaid labor, but they are denied their fair share of resources every day throughout Kashmir and elsewhere throughout India. The poor, especially the female poor are not seen as an untapped resource asset, which is in fact what they are -- the female poor are an untapped, rich resource asset.
3. Poverty is NOT a "curse" as mentioned to me in a meeting, by one well-intentioned but mistaken Kashmir official.
So how can poverty be most accurately defined?
Poverty is a CRIME committed by the rulers and bureaucrats of the nation-state, against its most vulnerable and disadvantaged citizens -- especially the female poor.
This is my definition of poverty, coming out of my field experiences in Kashmir, as elsewhere throughout India.
4. The diverse indigenous cultural knowledges, especially of the female poor in Kashmir are deliberately exploited or cynically ignored, by the well-heeled self-serving bureaucrats involved in planning and implementation processes. The politicians and bureaucrats employ a top-down strategy solely to benefit themselves and their patrons, relatives and friends. They have no friends among the poor of Kashmir, the poor are seen by them as invisible, less-than-human persons they can exploit every day. What we need is a bottom-up strategy in which aam aadmi gets to say and demand that their basic needs are met and not stolen from them.
5. Islamic religious culture, with its core emphasis on social equality/justice, is an UNDERUTILIZED asset in the efforts on behalf of the poor.
Allah says YES but netas say NO, to the Poor.
Islamic religious culture, a rich resource for ALL Kashmiris and ALL Indians, is also cynically manipulated by self-styled misogynist and Other-hater Islamists, so-called faux Jihadists and separatists.
In my time working in the Valley, I could see everywhere how ordinary folks turned to their faith for comfort and sustenance. Prayers flowed from homes and mosques. Ordinary people like me ( I draw whatever comfort i need from ALL faith systems, large and small, not just one) grow kinder, more emotionally generous, because of the deep faith that ordinary people carry around with them.
But this faith is not IMPLEMENTED in practical programs for the poor, especially the female poor. This needs to happen urgently.
Q. What is the use of any religion if it is just habit and ritual, if it is used by a cynical few to incite violent discord, and does not accomplish Social Justice?
6.Terror has become a Kashmir INDUSTRY with its own geopolitical economy and the female poor especially, suffer the most from the Terror Industry. The female poor are especially unable to earn a livelihood in the context of constant hartals called by politicians, faux jihadists, separatists, who OPERATE the Terror industry and/or are the BENEFICIARIES of the terror industry. They work against the poor, especially the female poor.
7. The female poor of Kashmir are tremendously resilient and are the most important resource of Kashmir. Babus and netas, faux jihadists/separatists should listen closely to the female poor and implement programs to meet their basic needs.
I'll be adding to these thoughts and welcome yours as we proceed to directly work with the female poor in Kashmir.
===========================================================================
Please note the following pilot project Goats for Social Justice can be implemented entirely through in-kind service and material inputs. That means these resource inputs already exist in every district in Kashmir. They just have not been adequately utilized in creative innovative ways. If GSJ is replicated by the state government after our successful pilot, then GSJ will require fiscal inputs (see budget below) wherever it is replicated.
GOATS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE (GSJ)
Livelihood Security/Social Medicine Dual Initiative for Women & Girl Dairy Producers Working in a Conflict Zone -- Kashmir, INDIA
A 1-year Field Pilot of PACEKashmir
1. Name and contact details: PACE KASHMIR -- Prevention & Care for Everyone
• Full legal name: PACE KASHMIR -- Prevention & Care for Everyone
• Acronym: PACEKashmir
• Legal registration number: DYC/NYK/SGR/YC/387 w/J&K State, India (doctors have been
volunteering in the Kashmir Valley, as trained and credentialed psychiatrists, since 2007)
• Official address: #29 Nursingarh, Srinagar 190011, Kashmir, INDIA
• Contact person: Arshad Arif Maghribi, MD
• Telephone: 91+9419428795;
• Fax
• E-mail:
2. Title of PACE's field project:
Goats for Social Justice: Livelihood Security/Social Medicine Dual Initiative for Women & Girl Dairy Producers Working in a Conflict Zone
3. Main thematic area
• Right to Female Livelihood Security & Public Mental Health Services In A Conflict Zone
4. Location
4.1 Country or countries: India (pilot & replication phases), Afghanistan (suggested replication site), Pakistan (suggested replication site)
4.2 Region or regions
• [ South Asia] X
5. Goats for Social Justice Project Narrative
" Arshad doctor, please can you get me a Goat?"
A middle-aged widow (whose teenage ‘militant’ son was shot in an ‘encounter’ by police) asked suddenly, as the 'barefoot' doctor encouraged her to describe her depressive symptoms – sadness, helplessness, despair, hopelessness, lethargy.
Goats for Social Justice (GSJ) A Livelihood Security/ Social Medicine 1-year Field Pilot Project will target female rural/urban dairy producers working & living in a conflict zone, suffering Depression, PTSD Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, substance-related psychiatric symptoms. One female patient, a dairy producer, said "I have sadness, I have become quiet, but my illness is poverty {Garibon ki bimaari}
The fabled Vale of Kashmir has been ravaged by conflict, in 25 yrs of infiltrations, shootings, killings, abductions, rapes, disappearances, by 'separatists', 'terrorists' 'militants’, state police & Indian Army.
Livelihood Security + Social Medicine – A unique combined strategy to counteract conflict and build prosperity for women subsistence earners, their families and communities.
Goats help Democracy!
• GSJ’s Objectives:
1) Conduct a 1-year field pilot in Srinagar & 3 villages -- Anantnag, Budgam, Ganderbal -- to demonstrate the vital importance of paying attention to subsistence women and girls’ own needs assessment, rather than what bureaucrats, politicians or aid donors prescribe for them
2) Promote Liberty; Safety & Security; Freedom of Movement; Self-Reliant Sustainable Economic Activity; Freedom to gain SCIENTIFIC Knowledge; Freedom to implement Livestock Management Sciences & Science of Mental Health Recovery & Wellness Maintenance for Women & Girl Dairy Producers in a 3-state conflict zone {pilot phase in Kashmir India only}
3) Pre-empt, Intervene, Treat Mental Disorders in women & girl dairy producers, resulting from working and raising families in a conflict zone, so that they can be productive entrepreneurial earners for themselves, their families & their communities
• Relevance
Goats for Social Justice (GSJ) is highly relevant to the lived needs of subsistence women and girl dairy producers because:
1. GSJ’s 1-year field pilot initiative directly addresses subsistence-earning women’s expressed livelihood and mental health needs.
2. Women & Girls working in Kashmir’s conflict zone are suffering from mental health disorders, as a direct consequence of living in a zone of extended armed conflict. Mental illnesses (which are preventable, treatable and curable) cause subjective distress; stigmatization; impair women’s freedom of movement and expression, and significantly impede livelihood economic activity.
3. Economic activity (example goatherding and dairying that are culturally valued by their families and communities) gives Women & Girls a socially acceptable opportunity to leave the confines of their homes, (while receiving livelihood and mental health supports), to work outside the home to engage in productive entrepreneurial economic activities within a developing market economy.
4. Women & Girl entrepreneurial dairy producers, through these economic activities, are empowered to approach municipal and civil authorities, as well as mental health personnel, to address their livelihood and mental health requirements.
Since the women and girls are hoping to become self-employed, self-sustaining family and community based entrepreneurs, they will likely be less dependent upon an employer, who would in most instances be a male with authority and influence.
• Activities - brief outline of activities:
Timeline of Activities
1. Week #1Point-person designation & allocation of daily/weekly/monthly clinical tasks; patient case-loading for 2-person psychiatric (one doctor, one counselor) teams; increase patient case-loads as feasible, increase patient case referrals to existing state & municipal mental health clinics and hospitals
2. Week #1 Point-person designation & allocation of daily/weekly/monthly tasks of livestock personnel teams
3. Week #1 Purchase order of livestock units for staggered delivery to 10 FHoH during 2nd week of first quarter.
4. Week #3 Planning for Bi-monthly psychiatric treatment & wellness camps (6) implemented from first month, monthly interim assessments
5. Week #4 Sustainability Consultant reports monthly on networking outcomes as a result of resource mobilization efforts to reach district and state level hospital/clinic personnel, health administrators, local officials, college faculty, psychology and veterinary students
6. Week #4 Sustainability assessment reports of mental health recovery and wellness maintenance, monthly
7. Week #4 Monthly Sustainability Assessment Report of livestock distribution/maintenance patterns to optimize dairy production by female subsistence earners, with expert guidance from livestock teams
8. Week #12 Case Management Review every quarter -- total 4
9. Week #2 Resource Atlas & Resource Directory database compilation, beginning first month of implementation of pilot, ongoing, point person is Sustainability Consultant
10. Week #4 All monthly and quarterly reports compiled to generate year end executive summary under leadership of Founder-Director, consultant is point person for pilot's monthly, quarterly and year-end reports due Week #52.
• Target group(s): Goats for Social Justice (GSJ) will PILOT a field demonstration project to target subsistence Women & Girl Dairy producers, with mental health problems, as a consequence of working in areas of armed conflict.
Each of 10 (ten) Female Heads of Household (herein under referred to as FHoH) will be supplied 2-sheep/2 goat Livestock units, along with expert in-service technical assistance from Animal Husbandry & Dairy Economists.
A.Targeted FHoH will receive technical assistance in
1. Developing and conserving livestock vegetational spaces
2. Green and dry fodder management techniques in their localities.
B. Targeted FHoH will receive
1. Psychiatric interventions, both preventive and ameliorative
2. Necessary medications in an overall program of
exercise, nutrition, mental health wellness maintenance while working and living in an area of extended armed conflict.
Expected Results:
The expected results are listed below, operationalized as Performance Outcomes showing projected behavioral, economic and social changes in the women and girls subsistence earners for whom the project is intended to benefit (based up their self-assessments as described above)
1. Women & Girls will earn a stable daily cash/barter income that would give them the market option to purchase additional livestock assets as well as access to public mental health services for their household members
2. Women & Girls will make social and economic decisions to access education/ vocational training and access to local retail markets for their produce and products.
3. Women & Girls’ social, economic activities generate a “muliplier effect” for their families and communities, thereby increasing the value of donors’ and public-private patrners’ investments in women and girls’ livelihood and health.
4. Women & Girls will speak up/ speak out /take civic action against armed violence
5. Women & Girls will directly participate in civil society through local municipal bodies and street level awareness work to secure their livelihood rights/mental health rights
• PACE Partners :
1. Retired army officers’ volunteer liaison work to help Army develop street strategies to meet female subsistence earners’ just demand for essential personal safety and protection, to ensure productivity
2.University, government, community-based veterinary/husbandry,/dairy economists/green and dry fodder specialists share best practices in dairy/fodder management/pasturage conservation, with subsistence-earning women and girl dairy producers, who in turn peer-assist women and girls in their localities
3.Hospital-based personnel extend mental health services to women and girl dairy producers
4.Municipal and bureaucratic functionaries at the local, state and centre facilitate women and girl subsistence dairy producers’ access to technical assistance, knowledge sharing.
• BUDGET (I year Field Pilot phase ONLY, no replication activity is covered by this budget)
Personnel costs: USD 19,000
[5 FTE -- 2 psychiatrists, 2 counselors, 1 part-time mobile health unit driver, 1 part-time sustainability evaluation consultant]
Administration USD 4,000
[2 FTE – case-loading, intake, discharge, payroll, awareness camps event coordination, clinical file management, livestock/fodder purchase ordering, distribution, management]
Field Activities USD 23, 386
[6 bi-monthly mobile mental health awareness camps, psychiatric interventions including counseling, therapies & medications]
Evaluation USD 1,000
[Executive Summary, Formative & Summative evaluations, Public Domain dissemination of GSJ pilot project results and recommendations]
Total USD 47, 386
[1 year Field PILOT PHASE Kashmir, India ONLY]
This Project is protected by copyright
COPYRIGHT Creative Commons Copyright Creative Commons License.
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice Blog by Professor Chithra Karunakaran is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
covering all materials at the following URL
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
Thursday, September 24, 2009
GOATS -- for Social Justice
The Goat Narrative seems to be gaining ground, clambering into ethical spaces in some of the most conflicted and battle-weary war zones of South Asia.
Kashmir and Kandahar (and several hundred villages in between), would benefit from a few thousand extra goats.
Homegrown goats from across South Asia and perhaps a nice Goat Exchange set up with our sisters and brothers in sovereign nation-states in the previously colonized and still oppressed Global South. Indonesia, Africa, Ecuador.
We need Goats instead of Drones.
Let those US generals and US-led NATO European occupiers, chew on that.
Let Obama ruminate.
Goats have work to do. Peacework. Pro-Poor development.
This past summer I volunteered in Srinagar with an innovative Social Medicine project called PACE -- Prevention & Care for Everyone. The founder-director a serene,intense,dedicated Kashmiri doctor who had quit his safe government job to directly offer care to persons suffering from symptoms related to depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as drug related problems,
told me a Goat story.
One day, Dr. Arshad Arif was treating an elderly woman patient. She suddenly asked him:
"CAN YOU GET ME A GOAT?"
Is anyone listening to this innocent casualty of terror, violence, hunger and deprivation?
What is she telling us?
That she is fully capable of self-diagnosis. She doesn't really need a doctor to tell her what's wrong with her.
She knows what ails her. What has made her mentally ill is a cruel denial of livelihood opportunity.
If she has a goat, a goat will give her milk that she can sell to her neighbors and the money earned will give her a chance to feed herself and her family.
She will walk around while tending her goat and the very act of walking will take her outdoors with something safe and productive to do.
The very act of walking will kick in her endorphins, lessening her pain and despair, and lifting her depressive symptoms.
She wants to be an entrepreneur. She wants to be self employed and earn a living.
Who's listening?
She wants to be well and knows exactly how to get well.
She's basically saying Don't get my Goat. Just give me one.
Or two.
Or three.
Throw in some sheep to optimize sustainability.
Over in Afghanistan the Goat narrative has been repeated many times over. (see link below)
Who's listening?
Goats for PEACE of MIND.
Goats for a PIECE of the Rock, A Slice of the Pie.
Goats for SOCIAL JUSTICE.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------------
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Who Co-wrote "the Narrative"? The US Govt. & the Jihadists Proudly Present
Creative Commons License
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice Blog by Professor Chithra Karunakaran is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Who Co-Wrote "the Narrative"? The US govt. & the Jihadists Proudly Present their Joint Venture!
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opinion/29friedman.html?sort=oldest&offset=10
My NYT comment #226.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
November 29th, 2009
1:03 pm
--
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
November 29th, 2009
4:28 am
Friedman said: \"What is scary is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.\"
Where to begin with unpacking this assertion? I'll try.
Q. Didn't the US govt. partly write what you call \"the Narrative?
For half a century the US has been a state sponsor of terror. The US has invaded, occupied, tortured, deposed, droned, displaced,nuked, bombed, napalmed, maimed, and in the process killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in sovereign nation-states across the globe.
In the name of freedom, liberty, democracy?
On the other hand Does this necessarily mean the rest of us support that part of \"the narrative\" that has been written by the Jihadists? Not at all. The J's have imagined and then orchestrated a living disaster for us all.
If we don't acknowledge the US govt.'s continuing role in choreographing this madness,right along with the Jihadists, then we have missed the point.
You can obfuscate Friedman but you can't hide.
Satyameva Jayate -- to Truth goes the Victory. Not to you or me, but Truth itself.
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
--------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opinion/29friedman.html
America vs. The Narrative
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Why a cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11.
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice Blog by Professor Chithra Karunakaran is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Who Co-Wrote "the Narrative"? The US govt. & the Jihadists Proudly Present their Joint Venture!
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opinion/29friedman.html?sort=oldest&offset=10
My NYT comment #226.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
November 29th, 2009
1:03 pm
--
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
November 29th, 2009
4:28 am
Friedman said: \"What is scary is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.\"
Where to begin with unpacking this assertion? I'll try.
Q. Didn't the US govt. partly write what you call \"the Narrative?
For half a century the US has been a state sponsor of terror. The US has invaded, occupied, tortured, deposed, droned, displaced,nuked, bombed, napalmed, maimed, and in the process killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in sovereign nation-states across the globe.
In the name of freedom, liberty, democracy?
On the other hand Does this necessarily mean the rest of us support that part of \"the narrative\" that has been written by the Jihadists? Not at all. The J's have imagined and then orchestrated a living disaster for us all.
If we don't acknowledge the US govt.'s continuing role in choreographing this madness,right along with the Jihadists, then we have missed the point.
You can obfuscate Friedman but you can't hide.
Satyameva Jayate -- to Truth goes the Victory. Not to you or me, but Truth itself.
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
--------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opinion/29friedman.html
America vs. The Narrative
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Why a cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
The Psychological Cost of War -- Iraq & Af-Pak
my NYT Comment #25.
http://ethicaldemocracy.blogspot.com/2009/11/psychological-cost-of-iraq-and-af-pak.html
additional resource link
http://www.ptsd.va.gov/
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
November 1st, 2009
8:31 am
A Psychological War
"Shock and awe" by Bush in Iraq was psychological warfare. So were Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. All the soldiers returning from "tours" in Iraq and Afghanistan are victims as well as perpetrators of psychological warfare and they will likely develop the full range of psychopathologies to show for it.
And the US taxpayer (me) will bear the medical and social cost.
Let us NEVER forget the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians who have suffered deep psychological scars in the US war against terror.
The real problem is that the US Govt. is a state sponsor of terror.
The US military-corporate complex has commoditized Terror,turned Terror into a branded product that can feed the already skyrocketing profits of the pharmaceutical industry, the media industry, the armaments industry
The psychological scars (in innocent civilian populations under US invasion, occupation and bombardment in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan) are the direct consequence of such terror. Does any govt care about these hapless long-suffering victims?
U.S. Soldiers, why are you whining? If you chose to go to war for the US and you now suffer PTSD, major depression, suicidal and homicidal tendencies, delusions and hallucinations, etc. what did you expect? Speak up against your own govt, your military, your politicians, your homegrown warmongers against innocents elsewhere.
Didn't you know what would happen before you went?
Of course, I feel sympathy for you, I hope you will get better and I most fervently hope that you will WAGE PEACE, instead of war.
However your diagnosis for a combination of psychopathologies, and most commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) comes as no surprise.
Surprise = Profit for the drug industry.
And the 'legal' drug industry is part of that other 'legal' industry, the US Military-Corporate Complex (MCC).
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01trauma.html
A Combat Role, and Anguish, Too
By DAMIEN CAVE
As women who suffer from post- traumatic stress disorder return to a society unfamiliar with their wartime roles, they often choose isolation over embarrassment.
Women at Arms
A Combat Role, and Anguish, Too
Chip Litherland for The New York Times
Vivienne Pacquette, who served in Iraq, is one of thousands of women who returned from war with a stress disorder. More Photos >
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01trauma.html
By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: October 31, 2009
For Vivienne Pacquette, being a combat veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder means avoiding phone calls to her sons, dinner out with her husband and therapy sessions that make her talk about seeing the reds and whites of her friends’ insides after a mortar attack in 2004.
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Women at Arms
The Psychological Scars
Articles in this series explore how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have profoundly redefined the role of women in the military.
Previous Articles in the Series »
At War
Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era.
As with other women in her position, hiding seems to make sense. Post-traumatic stress disorder distorts personalities: some veterans who have it fight in their sleep; others feel paranoid around children. And as women return to a society unfamiliar with their wartime roles, they often choose isolation over embarrassment.
Many spend months or years as virtual shut-ins, missing the camaraderie of Iraq or Afghanistan, while racked with guilt over who they have become.
“After all, I’m a soldier, I’m an NCO, I’m a problem solver,” said Mrs. Pacquette, 52, a retired noncommissioned officer who served two tours in Iraq and more than 20 years in the Army. “What’s it going to look like if I can’t get things straight in my head?”
Never before has this country seen so many women paralyzed by the psychological scars of combat. As of June 2008, 19,084 female veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan had received diagnoses of mental disorders from the Department of Veterans Affairs, including 8,454 women with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress — and this number does not include troops still enlisted, or those who have never used the V.A. system.
Their mental anguish, from mortar attacks, the deaths of friends, or traumas that are harder to categorize, is a result of a historic shift. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has quietly sidestepped regulations that bar women from jobs in ground combat. With commanders needing resources in wars without front lines, women have found themselves fighting on dusty roads and darkened outposts in ways that were never imagined by their parents or publicly authorized by Congress. And they have distinguished themselves in the field.
Psychologically, it seems, they are emerging as equals. Officials with the Department of Defense said that initial studies of male and female veterans with similar time outside the relative security of bases in Iraq showed that mental health issues arose in roughly the same proportion for members of each sex, though research continues.
“Female soldiers are actually handling and dealing with the stress of combat as well as male soldiers are,” said Col. Carl Castro, director of the Military Operational Research Program at the Department of Defense. “When I look at the data, I see nothing to counter that point.”
And yet, experts and veterans say, the circumstances of military life and the way women are received when they return home have created differences in how they cope. A man, for instance, may come home and drink to oblivion with his war buddies while a woman — often after having been the only woman in her unit — is more likely to suffer alone.
Some psychiatrists say that women do better in therapy because they are more comfortable talking through their emotions, but it typically takes years for them to seek help. In interviews, female veterans with post-traumatic stress said they did not always feel their problems were justified, or would be treated as valid by a military system that defines combat as an all-male activity.
“Some of the issues come up because they’re not given the combat title even though they may be out on patrol standing next to the men,” said Patricia Resick, director of the Women’s Health Sciences Division at the National Center for P.T.S.D., a wing of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
While more men over all suffer from the disorder because they are a majority of those deployed, Dr. Resick added, “people underestimate what these women have been through.”
Indeed, at home, after completing important jobs in war, women with the disorder often smack up against old-fashioned ignorance: male veterans and friends who do not recognize them as “real soldiers”; husbands who have little patience with their avoidance of intimacy; and a society that expects them to be feminine nurturers, not the nurtured.
War as Equalizer
When Mrs. Pacquette joined the army in the ’80s — inspired by her father, who served in World War II — men often told her she did not belong. “Women were seen as weak and whiny,” she said. “Men had to go on sick call all the time but when a woman went on sick call, it was a big deal.”
Even before she was deployed to Iraq in 2004, however, she sensed what thousands of women have since discovered: that war would be an equalizer. And it was.
In early October 2004, her convoy of about 30 vehicles set out from Kuwait for Mosul, one of Iraq’s most violent cities. On the way, she said, they were hit three times with roadside bombs. One exploded 200 feet from the unarmored Humvee in which Mrs. Pacquette spent day and night pointing her rifle out an open window.
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A Combat Role, and Anguish, Too
Published: October 31, 2009
(Page 2 of 4)
Gunshots arrived, too, on a bridge in Baghdad. Soldiers took up positions outside their vehicles, and an Iraqi was killed. “It was my birthday,” Mrs. Pacquette said. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’ ”
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Enlarge This Image
Ed Zurga for The New York Times
“Just admit that it happened. Then it's over,” said Heather Paxton, Iraq veteran who received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress, and whose disability claims were rejected three times. More Photos >
Women at Arms
The Psychological Scars
Articles in this series explore how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have profoundly redefined the role of women in the military.
Previous Articles in the Series »
At War
Instead, she surprised even herself by remaining calm.
“There were guys on the ground that I was responsible for as an NCO,” she said, adding, “As a leader, I had to keep my fear inside.”
But later on, the war’s consequences began to weigh more heavily. On Dec. 21, an Iraqi suicide bomber walked into a mess tent at a base across the street from her own and blew himself up amid the plastic lunch trays, killing more than 25 people.
Then a mortar attack hit the motor pool where her unit worked. At the scene, she saw three of her friends torn up beyond recognition.
Recalling the scene nearly five years later, Mrs. Pacquette’s dark brown eyes began darting back and forth, as if looking for another rocket. She was in St. Croix, the island where she grew up, but her body stiffened like a wound coil — releasing only after her twin sister brought their faces together, in a silent hug that lasted several minutes.
Her mind had returned to the moment. And this emotional flashback is just one in a long list of post-traumatic stress symptoms that female veterans now know intimately. Fits of rage, insomnia, nightmares, depression, survivor’s guilt, fear of crowds — women with the disorder, like men, can and do get it all.
Mrs. Pacquette’s twin, Jamilah Moorehead, said she noticed it soon after her sister’s first tour. “In the middle of the night, I heard this loud noise and there was Viv,” Mrs. Moorehead said. “She was crouching as if holding a weapon and she was not even awake.”
A military doctor gave Mrs. Pacquette a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress in March 2005, but she refused treatment. “I didn’t want anyone to know,” she said.
That November, she returned to Iraq, where she said she managed to keep the disorder hidden because she often worked alone. She retired from the military in 2006, but is still struggling with how to face the diagnosis.
The worst part, she said, was seeing her personality harden. First, she lost the ability to trust the Iraqi soldiers she served with. Then at home, she said, she fell out of touch with loved ones, though her husband has stood by her side. Now simply standing in line with other people is enough to turn her into what she calls “a witch, but with B.”
Dr. Carri-Ann Gibson, Mrs. Pacquette’s therapist, who runs the Trauma Recovery Program at the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, Fla., said the hardest part for women is that they often feel ashamed and guilty because “they’re not supposed to punch a wall, they’re not supposed to get aggressive with their spouse.”
Dr. Gibson said that for men, rage, paranoia and aggression are more accepted, while women are typically expected to snap back into domestic routines without any trouble.
“Women apply that pressure to themselves as well,” she said. “They live with that inner feeling of anger, and that’s why we see more events happening at home than actually out in public.”
Dr. Resick of the National Center for P.T.S.D. said much was still unknown about how the minds of men and women handle war. But at this point, she said, men and women differ mainly in how they manage similar symptoms.
“You put a man and a woman in a truck and they get blasted by an I.E.D., we’re not seeing big differences there,” Dr. Resick said, referring to improvised explosive devices. “That said, there are different context factors that affect how people cope.”
“The women — because they are not surrounded by other women, they may be surrounded by men — may withdraw more,” she continued. “The question is, Who are they with when they come home?”
Homefront Isolation
Many women traumatized by combat stress described lives of quiet desperation, alone, in just a few rooms with drawn shades.
Nancy Schiliro, 29, who lost her right eye as a result of a mortar attack in 2005, said that for more than two years after returning home, she rarely left a darkened garage in Hartsdale, N.Y., that her grandmother called “the bat cave.”
Shalimar Bien, 30, described her life, four years after Iraq, as a nonstop effort to avoid confrontation.
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(Page 3 of 4)
And for those with husbands or young children, finding a social equilibrium is especially difficult. Veterans like Aimee Sherrod, 29, a mother of two, say they constantly struggle to balance their own urge to hide with demands from loved ones to interact.
Women at Arms
The Psychological Scars
Articles in this series explore how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have profoundly redefined the role of women in the military.
Previous Articles in the Series »
At War
Ms. Sherrod said that five years after her last deployment to Iraq, she still makes only a few trips a week outside her home in Jackson, Tenn., usually to drop off or pick up her 4-year-old son at school.
She often feels like a failure because her son pushes for what she cannot handle. “I don’t take him to Chuck E. Cheese because I’ll get angry,” she said, noting that the arcade’s bells and bangs make her jumpy. “Take him to a park? It’s a lose-lose. I don’t like open spaces.”
She can identify a handful of causes for what her mind has become. In Baghdad with an Air Force rescue squadron from the fall of 2003 to the spring of 2004, she worked on helicopters, sometimes cleaning off the blood from casualties, and regularly receiving indirect fire. “I was getting mortared all the time,” Mrs. Sherrod said. “So someone was watching me.”
She also feels damaged from her time in Jordan, at the start of the Iraq war. One of only two women in her unit, she said, she was ostracized after asking to be shifted to nights because some of the men would not stop harassing her. Her superiors, she said, broke a promise to keep her complaint quiet and after that, the men in her unit lashed out. “This one guy said if I was on fire he wouldn’t even piss on me to put me out,” Mrs. Sherrod said.
Many female veterans report being treated with respect by male colleagues, more so as they proved themselves. But several women said in interviews that some men made their wartime experiences even harder.
Mrs. Pacquette said that on her second tour, in Baghdad, she took showers with an open knife on the soap dish after seeing a man flee the bathroom trailer, having just attacked a woman inside.
In Mrs. Sherrod’s case, the harm came more from being shunned by her unit. For months in Jordan, she said, she had no e-mail access. No phone. No friends. She was isolated.
So at home, she got used to pushing people away. On her first date with the man who became her husband, she told him she had post-traumatic stress, figuring he would not stick around. He did, but they have struggled to stay together.
She always wanted to be a mother, and described her first child as a product of a whirlwind return from war. She became pregnant with her son within a month of reaching home, she said, after a night of drinking. When she later got pregnant with her daughter, who is 9 months old, she said she still thought the doctors were wrong about her stress disorder.
Now, having finally accepted the diagnosis after connecting with other veterans online, she fears her own temper more than anything else.
The other day, in the car, she lost control when both of her children demanded attention. “I can handle one or the other,” she said, “but she was crying and he kept saying, ‘Mommy, mommy,’ so in the middle of the road, I stopped the car and yelled: ‘If you do not be quiet I’m going to turn around and hit you.’
“The look on his face broke my heart,” Mrs. Sherrod said. “He just wanted to talk to me. He wasn’t doing anything bad.”
She paused, then said: “I’m like that all the time.”
Homefront Ignorance
When Heather Paxton started working at the V.A. hospital in Columbia, Mo., two years ago, she discovered something she did not expect: no one saw her as a veteran.
Despite her service in Iraq, patients assumed she knew nothing of war. A male colleague who chattered about weapons dismissed her like a silly little sister when she chimed in.
“He’d give me the stink eye,” Ms. Paxton said. “He’d just walk away.”
For many female veterans today, war and their roles in it must be constantly explained. For those with post-traumatic stress, the constant demand for proof can be particularly maddening — confirming their belief that only the people who were “over there” can understand them here.
Men express similar sentiments; combat veterans of both sexes often complain about insensitive questions like, “Did you kill anyone?”
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(Page 4 of 4)
But women say they are also treated to another line of inquiry. Would male veterans, they ask, hear friends or relatives say, “How was the shopping?” Or “In that heat, how did you wear makeup?” Or “How could you have P.T.S.D. when you sat at a desk with a typewriter?”
Female veterans say they have heard them all.
They have also seen their sacrifice overlooked, in bars, where strangers slide past them to buy drinks for men who were never deployed; and at “welcome home” events where organizers asked for their husbands.
Tammy Duckworth, a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot who lost her legs to a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq, said such experiences show that “we’re going through a change — just like in World War II with African-Americans, the military is ahead of the American public.”
What many do not realize, said Ms. Duckworth, who ran for Congress and is now the assistant secretary of public and intergovernmental affairs for the V.A., is that in war today, “it’s not a question, Can women can do a combat job. They just are.”
Some women have found ways to at least minimize the slight.
Ms. Paxton now has a picture above her desk, showing her, her mother and her brother, all in uniform.
Mrs. Pacquette has placed a decal on her cane (like many veterans, she has damaged knees and a bad back from lugging gear) that identifies her as an Iraq war veteran.
Sometimes, though, simple messages are not enough. Renee Peloquin, 25, a member of the Idaho National Guard, had to design a bumper sticker that says “Female Iraqi War Veteran” because the basic “Iraq War Veteran” message on her car led strangers to thank her long-haired boyfriend for serving, even though he has never spent a day in uniform.
“I’m so sick of being stereotyped,” Ms. Peloquin said. “Or being ignored, that’s a better word.”
The military and the Department of Veterans Affairs have worked hard to make the public more aware of women’s roles. There are now Army recruiting advertisements featuring women in war zones. The V.A. has bought hundreds of copies of the documentary “Lioness,” which profiles female veterans in Ramadi, while producing a video of its own with Jane Pauley that shows the history of military women.
Last year, the veterans’ agency also began a systemwide effort to make primary care for female veterans available at every V.A. medical facility nationwide. At Ms. Paxton’s V.A. in Columbia, and Dr. Gibson’s in Tampa, women’s centers take up separate wings of the hospitals, as the V.A. prepares for its population of patients who are women to double over the next few years.
For some women with post-traumatic stress, like Angela Peacock in St. Louis, the V.A. has been a godsend. She said that the doctors who helped her detoxify from drug and alcohol addiction saved her from suicide.
Many others, however, insist that the military, the V.A. and other established veterans organizations have not fully adapted to women’s new roles. The military, they say, still treats them like wives, not warriors.
Some therapists, case workers and female patients also say that because military regulations governing women’s roles have not caught up with reality, women must work harder to prove they saw combat and get the benefits they deserve.
V.A. officials, including Ms. Duckworth, say there is no systemic bias. V.A. statistics show that as of July 2009, 5,103 female Iraq or Afghanistan veterans had received disability benefits for the stress disorder, compared with 57,732 males.
But the V.A. did not provide the number of men and women who had applied, making a comparison of rejection rates impossible.
At best, women are caught in the same bureaucratic morass as men; the backlog for disability claims from all veterans climbed to 400,000 in July, up from 253,000 six years ago. At worst, women are sometimes held to a tougher standard.
Ms. Paxton is one of at least 3,000 female Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with stress disorder diagnoses and no disability benefit, as shown by the V.A. statistics.
Serving in Tikrit, Iraq, five years ago with a civil affairs unit, she took part in missions several times a week on roads regularly rigged with bombs. She worked closely with two Iraqi translators who were killed — she saw one in his bullet-ridden car just after he had been assassinated — and she came home with nightmares, depression and anger.
Though she received a diagnosis of stress disorder by a V.A. doctor, she had her first disability claim rejected in 2006. A second refusal came a year later, and the third arrived in 2008, despite a letter verifying what happened from a captain with her unit.
Her V.A. case worker, Julie Heese, said the rejections highlighted what made the benefits system so challenging. “The claims process is a tough one because you have to have really clear evidence,” Ms. Heese said. She added that it works best “with a well documented battle or attack,” not with experiences that may go unrecorded, like the death of a translator.
Newly proposed V.A. rules easing requirements for documenting traumatic events could help Ms. Paxton’s case. But she said she feared a fourth disappointment.
She said she no longer cared about getting money. After experiencing the grave shock of war and its never-ending aftermath, she would like a little more recognition.
“Just admit that it happened,” she said, her voice rising, over a meal her husband cooked at their home in Columbia. “Then it’s over.”
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APA monitor copyright
PTSD
PTSD treatments grow in evidence, effectiveness
Several psychological interventions help to significantly reduce post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, say new guidelines.
By Tori DeAngelis
Print version: page 40
It's a bittersweet fact: Traumatic events such as the Sept. 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have enabled researchers to learn a lot more about how best to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
"The advances made have been nothing short of outstanding," says Boston University psychologist Terence M. Keane, PhD, director of the behavioral science division of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and a contributor to the original PTSD diagnosis. "These are very important times in the treatment of PTSD."
In perhaps the most important news, in November, the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), a professional society that promotes knowledge on severe stress and trauma, issued new PTSD practice guidelines. Using a grading system from "A" to "E," the guidelines label several PTSD treatments as "A" treatments based on their high degree of empirical support, says Keane, one of the volume's editors. The guidelines—the first since 2000—update and generally confirm recommendations of other major practice-related bodies, including the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Department of Defense, the American Psychiatric Association, and Great Britain's and Australia's national health-care guidelines, he says.
In other PTSD-treatment advances, researchers are adding medications and virtual-reality simulations to proven treatments to beef up their effectiveness. Clinical investigators are also exploring ways to treat PTSD when other psychological and medical conditions are present, and they are studying specific populations such as those affected by the Sept. 11 attacks.
Though exciting, these breakthroughs are somewhat colored by an October Institute of Medicine (IoM) report that concludes there is still not enough evidence to say which PTSD treatments are effective, except for exposure therapies. Many experts, however, disagree with that conclusion, noting that a number of factors specific to the condition, such as high dropout rates, can lead to what may seem like imperfect study designs (see Sidebar).
Treatments that make a difference
The fact that several treatments made the "A" list is great news for psychologists, says Keane. "Having this many evidence-based treatments allows therapists to use what they're comfortable with from their own background and training, and at the same time to select treatments for use with patients with different characteristics," he says.
Moreover, many of these treatments were developed by psychologists, he notes.
They include:
• Prolonged-exposure therapy, developed for use in PTSD by Keane, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Edna Foa, PhD, and Emory University psychologist Barbara O. Rothbaum, PhD. In this type of treatment, a therapist guides the client to recall traumatic memories in a controlled fashion so that clients eventually regain mastery of their thoughts and feelings around the incident. While exposing people to the very events that caused their trauma may seem counterintuitive, Rothbaum emphasizes that it's done in a gradual, controlled and repeated manner, until the person can evaluate their circumstances realistically and understand they can safely return to the activities in their current lives that they had been avoiding. Drawing from PTSD best practices, the APA-initiated Center for Deployment Psychology includes exposure therapy in the training of psychologists and other health professionals who are or will be treating returning Iraq and Afghanistan service personnel (see "A unique training program").
• Cognitive-processing therapy, a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, developed by Boston University psychologist Patricia A. Resick, PhD, director of the women's health sciences division of the National Center for PTSD, to treat rape victims and later applied to PTSD. This treatment includes an exposure component but places greater emphasis on cognitive strategies to help people alter erroneous thinking that has emerged because of the event. Practitioners may work with clients on false beliefs that the world is no longer safe, for example, or that they are incompetent because they have "let" a terrible event happen to them.
• Stress-inoculation training, another form of CBT, where practitioners teach clients techniques to manage and reduce anxiety, such as breathing, muscle relaxation and positive self-talk.
• Other forms of cognitive therapy, including cognitive restructuring and cognitive therapy.
• Eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, where the therapist guides clients to make eye movements or follow hand taps, for instance, at the same time they are recounting traumatic events. It's not clear how EMDR works, and, for that reason, it's somewhat controversial, though the therapy is supported by research, notes Dartmouth University psychologist Paula P. Schnurr, PhD, deputy executive director of the National Center for PTSD.
• Medications, specifically selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Two in particular—paroxetine (Paxil) and sertaline (Zoloft)—have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in PTSD. Other medications may be useful in treating PTSD as well, particularly when the person has additional disorders such as depression, anxiety or psychosis, the guidelines note.
Spreading the word
So promising does the VA consider two of the "A" treatments—prolonged exposure therapy and cognitive-processing therapy—that it is doing national rollouts of them within the VA, notes psychologist Antonette Zeiss, PhD, deputy chief consultant for mental health at the agency.
"Enhancing our ability to provide veterans with the psychotherapies for PTSD that have the strongest evidence base is one of our highest priorities," Zeiss says. In fact, the VA began training psychologists to provide the two approaches more than a year before the Institute of Medicine released its report of successful treatments, she says. "We're pleased that the report confirms our emphasis on this training."
The VA system's structure and philosophy make it possible to test the results of treatments in large, realistic samples—a clinical researcher's dream, notes Schnurr, who has conducted a number of such studies, most recently in a study of female veterans that led to the rollout out of prolonged exposure therapy. That study was reported in the Feb. 28, 2007, issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (Vol. 297, No. 8, pages 820–830).
"The VA was able to support the science, so the research didn't just sit around in a journal and get discussed," Zeiss says. "They put money toward it, and they asked us to help them do a major rollout of the treatment."
Boosting effectiveness
Meanwhile, other researchers are experimenting with add-ons to these proven treatments to increase their effectiveness. Some are looking at how virtual reality might enhance the effects of prolonged-exposure therapy. By adding virtual reality, whereby clients experience 3-D imagery, sounds and sometimes smells that correspond with a traumatic event, "we think it might be a good alternative for people who are too avoidant to do standard exposure therapy, because it puts them right there," says Emory University's Rothbaum.
Other researchers are adding a small dose of an old tuberculosis drug, D-cycloserine, or DCS, to treatment to see if it can mitigate people's fear reactions. Rothbaum's team, which includes psychologist Mike Davis, PhD, and psychiatrist Kerry Ressler, MD, PhD, have recently shown that the drug helps to extinguish fear in animals, so they're hoping for a similar effect in people.
In one study with veterans of the current Iraq war, Rothbaum's team is giving all participants a type of virtual reality that simulates combat conditions in Iraq, then randomizing them into a drug condition where they get DCS, a placebo, or the anti-anxiety drug alprazolam (Xanax).
In a similar vein, researchers at the Program for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Studies at Weill Cornell Medical College are using virtual reality and DCS to treat those directly affected by the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, including civilians who were in the towers or nearby buildings, witnesses, and firefighters and police officers who were first responders.
Participants receive standard cognitive behavioral treatment enhanced with virtual reality, where they see graded versions of a Twin Towers scenario, starting with simple images of the buildings on a sunny day, and progressing gradually to include the horrific sights and sounds of that day. They also randomly receive either a small dose of DCS or a placebo pill before each session.
While neither study is complete, the researchers say the treatments appear to significantly reduce participants' PTSD symptoms. Rothbaum has recently submitted a grant proposal for a study where she plans to compare traditional and virtual-reality exposure therapies—which hasn't yet been done—in combination with DCS or a placebo.
Addressing comorbidity
Other psychologists are starting to think about ways to treat PTSD when it is accompanied by other psychiatric and health conditions. Psychologist John Otis, PhD, of Boston University and VA Boston, for instance, is testing an integrated treatment that aims to alleviate symptoms of both PTSD and chronic pain in Vietnam veterans and veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. The treatment combines aspects of cognitive processing therapy for trauma and cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic pain.
"We think these two conditions may interact in some [psychological] way that makes them more severe and challenging to treat," Otis says. In particular, he and others posit that "anxiety sensitivity"—fear of experiencing one's anxiety-related symptoms—may increase the odds that certain PTSD sufferers have more problems than others.
Again, while the study is not yet finished, results are encouraging, reports Otis. "Many of the veterans who are getting the integrated treatment are experiencing partial or complete remission of both kinds of symptoms," he says.
On a broader scale, the National Center for PTSD's Keane believes that much more research is needed on treating PTSD and psychiatric co-morbidities such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse, personality disorders and psychosis—a common situation that escalates the more severe a person's PTSD symptoms are, he says.
He, for one, would like to examine possible applications to PTSD of the concept of a "unified protocol," a theory and methodology being developed by Boston University psychotherapy researcher David Barlow, PhD, to treat concurrent problems such as panic attacks, anxiety and phobias.
That said, the recent advances promise to help many more people suffering from a condition they did not bring on themselves, says Zeiss.
"While there is still more to learn, we have taken significant steps in developing treatments that have been shown to be effective and that will be increasingly provided both in VA and other mental health care settings," says Zeiss. "Those affected by combat stress and other traumas will be able to reach out for care without feeling ashamed or hopeless."
Tori DeAngelis is a writer in Syracuse, N.Y.
Post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma in children and adolescents is one of the priorities of APA's 2008 President Alan E. Kazdin, PhD. He is forming a task force on the topic, which will be chaired by Annette LaGreca, PhD. The scope of the committee's work will be covered in an upcoming issue of the Monitor.
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http://ethicaldemocracy.blogspot.com/2009/11/psychological-cost-of-iraq-and-af-pak.html
additional resource link
http://www.ptsd.va.gov/
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
November 1st, 2009
8:31 am
A Psychological War
"Shock and awe" by Bush in Iraq was psychological warfare. So were Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. All the soldiers returning from "tours" in Iraq and Afghanistan are victims as well as perpetrators of psychological warfare and they will likely develop the full range of psychopathologies to show for it.
And the US taxpayer (me) will bear the medical and social cost.
Let us NEVER forget the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians who have suffered deep psychological scars in the US war against terror.
The real problem is that the US Govt. is a state sponsor of terror.
The US military-corporate complex has commoditized Terror,turned Terror into a branded product that can feed the already skyrocketing profits of the pharmaceutical industry, the media industry, the armaments industry
The psychological scars (in innocent civilian populations under US invasion, occupation and bombardment in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan) are the direct consequence of such terror. Does any govt care about these hapless long-suffering victims?
U.S. Soldiers, why are you whining? If you chose to go to war for the US and you now suffer PTSD, major depression, suicidal and homicidal tendencies, delusions and hallucinations, etc. what did you expect? Speak up against your own govt, your military, your politicians, your homegrown warmongers against innocents elsewhere.
Didn't you know what would happen before you went?
Of course, I feel sympathy for you, I hope you will get better and I most fervently hope that you will WAGE PEACE, instead of war.
However your diagnosis for a combination of psychopathologies, and most commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) comes as no surprise.
Surprise = Profit for the drug industry.
And the 'legal' drug industry is part of that other 'legal' industry, the US Military-Corporate Complex (MCC).
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01trauma.html
A Combat Role, and Anguish, Too
By DAMIEN CAVE
As women who suffer from post- traumatic stress disorder return to a society unfamiliar with their wartime roles, they often choose isolation over embarrassment.
Women at Arms
A Combat Role, and Anguish, Too
Chip Litherland for The New York Times
Vivienne Pacquette, who served in Iraq, is one of thousands of women who returned from war with a stress disorder. More Photos >
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01trauma.html
By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: October 31, 2009
For Vivienne Pacquette, being a combat veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder means avoiding phone calls to her sons, dinner out with her husband and therapy sessions that make her talk about seeing the reds and whites of her friends’ insides after a mortar attack in 2004.
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Women at Arms
The Psychological Scars
Articles in this series explore how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have profoundly redefined the role of women in the military.
Previous Articles in the Series »
At War
Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era.
As with other women in her position, hiding seems to make sense. Post-traumatic stress disorder distorts personalities: some veterans who have it fight in their sleep; others feel paranoid around children. And as women return to a society unfamiliar with their wartime roles, they often choose isolation over embarrassment.
Many spend months or years as virtual shut-ins, missing the camaraderie of Iraq or Afghanistan, while racked with guilt over who they have become.
“After all, I’m a soldier, I’m an NCO, I’m a problem solver,” said Mrs. Pacquette, 52, a retired noncommissioned officer who served two tours in Iraq and more than 20 years in the Army. “What’s it going to look like if I can’t get things straight in my head?”
Never before has this country seen so many women paralyzed by the psychological scars of combat. As of June 2008, 19,084 female veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan had received diagnoses of mental disorders from the Department of Veterans Affairs, including 8,454 women with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress — and this number does not include troops still enlisted, or those who have never used the V.A. system.
Their mental anguish, from mortar attacks, the deaths of friends, or traumas that are harder to categorize, is a result of a historic shift. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has quietly sidestepped regulations that bar women from jobs in ground combat. With commanders needing resources in wars without front lines, women have found themselves fighting on dusty roads and darkened outposts in ways that were never imagined by their parents or publicly authorized by Congress. And they have distinguished themselves in the field.
Psychologically, it seems, they are emerging as equals. Officials with the Department of Defense said that initial studies of male and female veterans with similar time outside the relative security of bases in Iraq showed that mental health issues arose in roughly the same proportion for members of each sex, though research continues.
“Female soldiers are actually handling and dealing with the stress of combat as well as male soldiers are,” said Col. Carl Castro, director of the Military Operational Research Program at the Department of Defense. “When I look at the data, I see nothing to counter that point.”
And yet, experts and veterans say, the circumstances of military life and the way women are received when they return home have created differences in how they cope. A man, for instance, may come home and drink to oblivion with his war buddies while a woman — often after having been the only woman in her unit — is more likely to suffer alone.
Some psychiatrists say that women do better in therapy because they are more comfortable talking through their emotions, but it typically takes years for them to seek help. In interviews, female veterans with post-traumatic stress said they did not always feel their problems were justified, or would be treated as valid by a military system that defines combat as an all-male activity.
“Some of the issues come up because they’re not given the combat title even though they may be out on patrol standing next to the men,” said Patricia Resick, director of the Women’s Health Sciences Division at the National Center for P.T.S.D., a wing of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
While more men over all suffer from the disorder because they are a majority of those deployed, Dr. Resick added, “people underestimate what these women have been through.”
Indeed, at home, after completing important jobs in war, women with the disorder often smack up against old-fashioned ignorance: male veterans and friends who do not recognize them as “real soldiers”; husbands who have little patience with their avoidance of intimacy; and a society that expects them to be feminine nurturers, not the nurtured.
War as Equalizer
When Mrs. Pacquette joined the army in the ’80s — inspired by her father, who served in World War II — men often told her she did not belong. “Women were seen as weak and whiny,” she said. “Men had to go on sick call all the time but when a woman went on sick call, it was a big deal.”
Even before she was deployed to Iraq in 2004, however, she sensed what thousands of women have since discovered: that war would be an equalizer. And it was.
In early October 2004, her convoy of about 30 vehicles set out from Kuwait for Mosul, one of Iraq’s most violent cities. On the way, she said, they were hit three times with roadside bombs. One exploded 200 feet from the unarmored Humvee in which Mrs. Pacquette spent day and night pointing her rifle out an open window.
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A Combat Role, and Anguish, Too
Published: October 31, 2009
(Page 2 of 4)
Gunshots arrived, too, on a bridge in Baghdad. Soldiers took up positions outside their vehicles, and an Iraqi was killed. “It was my birthday,” Mrs. Pacquette said. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’ ”
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Enlarge This Image
Ed Zurga for The New York Times
“Just admit that it happened. Then it's over,” said Heather Paxton, Iraq veteran who received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress, and whose disability claims were rejected three times. More Photos >
Women at Arms
The Psychological Scars
Articles in this series explore how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have profoundly redefined the role of women in the military.
Previous Articles in the Series »
At War
Instead, she surprised even herself by remaining calm.
“There were guys on the ground that I was responsible for as an NCO,” she said, adding, “As a leader, I had to keep my fear inside.”
But later on, the war’s consequences began to weigh more heavily. On Dec. 21, an Iraqi suicide bomber walked into a mess tent at a base across the street from her own and blew himself up amid the plastic lunch trays, killing more than 25 people.
Then a mortar attack hit the motor pool where her unit worked. At the scene, she saw three of her friends torn up beyond recognition.
Recalling the scene nearly five years later, Mrs. Pacquette’s dark brown eyes began darting back and forth, as if looking for another rocket. She was in St. Croix, the island where she grew up, but her body stiffened like a wound coil — releasing only after her twin sister brought their faces together, in a silent hug that lasted several minutes.
Her mind had returned to the moment. And this emotional flashback is just one in a long list of post-traumatic stress symptoms that female veterans now know intimately. Fits of rage, insomnia, nightmares, depression, survivor’s guilt, fear of crowds — women with the disorder, like men, can and do get it all.
Mrs. Pacquette’s twin, Jamilah Moorehead, said she noticed it soon after her sister’s first tour. “In the middle of the night, I heard this loud noise and there was Viv,” Mrs. Moorehead said. “She was crouching as if holding a weapon and she was not even awake.”
A military doctor gave Mrs. Pacquette a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress in March 2005, but she refused treatment. “I didn’t want anyone to know,” she said.
That November, she returned to Iraq, where she said she managed to keep the disorder hidden because she often worked alone. She retired from the military in 2006, but is still struggling with how to face the diagnosis.
The worst part, she said, was seeing her personality harden. First, she lost the ability to trust the Iraqi soldiers she served with. Then at home, she said, she fell out of touch with loved ones, though her husband has stood by her side. Now simply standing in line with other people is enough to turn her into what she calls “a witch, but with B.”
Dr. Carri-Ann Gibson, Mrs. Pacquette’s therapist, who runs the Trauma Recovery Program at the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, Fla., said the hardest part for women is that they often feel ashamed and guilty because “they’re not supposed to punch a wall, they’re not supposed to get aggressive with their spouse.”
Dr. Gibson said that for men, rage, paranoia and aggression are more accepted, while women are typically expected to snap back into domestic routines without any trouble.
“Women apply that pressure to themselves as well,” she said. “They live with that inner feeling of anger, and that’s why we see more events happening at home than actually out in public.”
Dr. Resick of the National Center for P.T.S.D. said much was still unknown about how the minds of men and women handle war. But at this point, she said, men and women differ mainly in how they manage similar symptoms.
“You put a man and a woman in a truck and they get blasted by an I.E.D., we’re not seeing big differences there,” Dr. Resick said, referring to improvised explosive devices. “That said, there are different context factors that affect how people cope.”
“The women — because they are not surrounded by other women, they may be surrounded by men — may withdraw more,” she continued. “The question is, Who are they with when they come home?”
Homefront Isolation
Many women traumatized by combat stress described lives of quiet desperation, alone, in just a few rooms with drawn shades.
Nancy Schiliro, 29, who lost her right eye as a result of a mortar attack in 2005, said that for more than two years after returning home, she rarely left a darkened garage in Hartsdale, N.Y., that her grandmother called “the bat cave.”
Shalimar Bien, 30, described her life, four years after Iraq, as a nonstop effort to avoid confrontation.
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(Page 3 of 4)
And for those with husbands or young children, finding a social equilibrium is especially difficult. Veterans like Aimee Sherrod, 29, a mother of two, say they constantly struggle to balance their own urge to hide with demands from loved ones to interact.
Women at Arms
The Psychological Scars
Articles in this series explore how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have profoundly redefined the role of women in the military.
Previous Articles in the Series »
At War
Ms. Sherrod said that five years after her last deployment to Iraq, she still makes only a few trips a week outside her home in Jackson, Tenn., usually to drop off or pick up her 4-year-old son at school.
She often feels like a failure because her son pushes for what she cannot handle. “I don’t take him to Chuck E. Cheese because I’ll get angry,” she said, noting that the arcade’s bells and bangs make her jumpy. “Take him to a park? It’s a lose-lose. I don’t like open spaces.”
She can identify a handful of causes for what her mind has become. In Baghdad with an Air Force rescue squadron from the fall of 2003 to the spring of 2004, she worked on helicopters, sometimes cleaning off the blood from casualties, and regularly receiving indirect fire. “I was getting mortared all the time,” Mrs. Sherrod said. “So someone was watching me.”
She also feels damaged from her time in Jordan, at the start of the Iraq war. One of only two women in her unit, she said, she was ostracized after asking to be shifted to nights because some of the men would not stop harassing her. Her superiors, she said, broke a promise to keep her complaint quiet and after that, the men in her unit lashed out. “This one guy said if I was on fire he wouldn’t even piss on me to put me out,” Mrs. Sherrod said.
Many female veterans report being treated with respect by male colleagues, more so as they proved themselves. But several women said in interviews that some men made their wartime experiences even harder.
Mrs. Pacquette said that on her second tour, in Baghdad, she took showers with an open knife on the soap dish after seeing a man flee the bathroom trailer, having just attacked a woman inside.
In Mrs. Sherrod’s case, the harm came more from being shunned by her unit. For months in Jordan, she said, she had no e-mail access. No phone. No friends. She was isolated.
So at home, she got used to pushing people away. On her first date with the man who became her husband, she told him she had post-traumatic stress, figuring he would not stick around. He did, but they have struggled to stay together.
She always wanted to be a mother, and described her first child as a product of a whirlwind return from war. She became pregnant with her son within a month of reaching home, she said, after a night of drinking. When she later got pregnant with her daughter, who is 9 months old, she said she still thought the doctors were wrong about her stress disorder.
Now, having finally accepted the diagnosis after connecting with other veterans online, she fears her own temper more than anything else.
The other day, in the car, she lost control when both of her children demanded attention. “I can handle one or the other,” she said, “but she was crying and he kept saying, ‘Mommy, mommy,’ so in the middle of the road, I stopped the car and yelled: ‘If you do not be quiet I’m going to turn around and hit you.’
“The look on his face broke my heart,” Mrs. Sherrod said. “He just wanted to talk to me. He wasn’t doing anything bad.”
She paused, then said: “I’m like that all the time.”
Homefront Ignorance
When Heather Paxton started working at the V.A. hospital in Columbia, Mo., two years ago, she discovered something she did not expect: no one saw her as a veteran.
Despite her service in Iraq, patients assumed she knew nothing of war. A male colleague who chattered about weapons dismissed her like a silly little sister when she chimed in.
“He’d give me the stink eye,” Ms. Paxton said. “He’d just walk away.”
For many female veterans today, war and their roles in it must be constantly explained. For those with post-traumatic stress, the constant demand for proof can be particularly maddening — confirming their belief that only the people who were “over there” can understand them here.
Men express similar sentiments; combat veterans of both sexes often complain about insensitive questions like, “Did you kill anyone?”
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(Page 4 of 4)
But women say they are also treated to another line of inquiry. Would male veterans, they ask, hear friends or relatives say, “How was the shopping?” Or “In that heat, how did you wear makeup?” Or “How could you have P.T.S.D. when you sat at a desk with a typewriter?”
Female veterans say they have heard them all.
They have also seen their sacrifice overlooked, in bars, where strangers slide past them to buy drinks for men who were never deployed; and at “welcome home” events where organizers asked for their husbands.
Tammy Duckworth, a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot who lost her legs to a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq, said such experiences show that “we’re going through a change — just like in World War II with African-Americans, the military is ahead of the American public.”
What many do not realize, said Ms. Duckworth, who ran for Congress and is now the assistant secretary of public and intergovernmental affairs for the V.A., is that in war today, “it’s not a question, Can women can do a combat job. They just are.”
Some women have found ways to at least minimize the slight.
Ms. Paxton now has a picture above her desk, showing her, her mother and her brother, all in uniform.
Mrs. Pacquette has placed a decal on her cane (like many veterans, she has damaged knees and a bad back from lugging gear) that identifies her as an Iraq war veteran.
Sometimes, though, simple messages are not enough. Renee Peloquin, 25, a member of the Idaho National Guard, had to design a bumper sticker that says “Female Iraqi War Veteran” because the basic “Iraq War Veteran” message on her car led strangers to thank her long-haired boyfriend for serving, even though he has never spent a day in uniform.
“I’m so sick of being stereotyped,” Ms. Peloquin said. “Or being ignored, that’s a better word.”
The military and the Department of Veterans Affairs have worked hard to make the public more aware of women’s roles. There are now Army recruiting advertisements featuring women in war zones. The V.A. has bought hundreds of copies of the documentary “Lioness,” which profiles female veterans in Ramadi, while producing a video of its own with Jane Pauley that shows the history of military women.
Last year, the veterans’ agency also began a systemwide effort to make primary care for female veterans available at every V.A. medical facility nationwide. At Ms. Paxton’s V.A. in Columbia, and Dr. Gibson’s in Tampa, women’s centers take up separate wings of the hospitals, as the V.A. prepares for its population of patients who are women to double over the next few years.
For some women with post-traumatic stress, like Angela Peacock in St. Louis, the V.A. has been a godsend. She said that the doctors who helped her detoxify from drug and alcohol addiction saved her from suicide.
Many others, however, insist that the military, the V.A. and other established veterans organizations have not fully adapted to women’s new roles. The military, they say, still treats them like wives, not warriors.
Some therapists, case workers and female patients also say that because military regulations governing women’s roles have not caught up with reality, women must work harder to prove they saw combat and get the benefits they deserve.
V.A. officials, including Ms. Duckworth, say there is no systemic bias. V.A. statistics show that as of July 2009, 5,103 female Iraq or Afghanistan veterans had received disability benefits for the stress disorder, compared with 57,732 males.
But the V.A. did not provide the number of men and women who had applied, making a comparison of rejection rates impossible.
At best, women are caught in the same bureaucratic morass as men; the backlog for disability claims from all veterans climbed to 400,000 in July, up from 253,000 six years ago. At worst, women are sometimes held to a tougher standard.
Ms. Paxton is one of at least 3,000 female Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with stress disorder diagnoses and no disability benefit, as shown by the V.A. statistics.
Serving in Tikrit, Iraq, five years ago with a civil affairs unit, she took part in missions several times a week on roads regularly rigged with bombs. She worked closely with two Iraqi translators who were killed — she saw one in his bullet-ridden car just after he had been assassinated — and she came home with nightmares, depression and anger.
Though she received a diagnosis of stress disorder by a V.A. doctor, she had her first disability claim rejected in 2006. A second refusal came a year later, and the third arrived in 2008, despite a letter verifying what happened from a captain with her unit.
Her V.A. case worker, Julie Heese, said the rejections highlighted what made the benefits system so challenging. “The claims process is a tough one because you have to have really clear evidence,” Ms. Heese said. She added that it works best “with a well documented battle or attack,” not with experiences that may go unrecorded, like the death of a translator.
Newly proposed V.A. rules easing requirements for documenting traumatic events could help Ms. Paxton’s case. But she said she feared a fourth disappointment.
She said she no longer cared about getting money. After experiencing the grave shock of war and its never-ending aftermath, she would like a little more recognition.
“Just admit that it happened,” she said, her voice rising, over a meal her husband cooked at their home in Columbia. “Then it’s over.”
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APA monitor copyright
PTSD
PTSD treatments grow in evidence, effectiveness
Several psychological interventions help to significantly reduce post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, say new guidelines.
By Tori DeAngelis
Print version: page 40
It's a bittersweet fact: Traumatic events such as the Sept. 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have enabled researchers to learn a lot more about how best to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
"The advances made have been nothing short of outstanding," says Boston University psychologist Terence M. Keane, PhD, director of the behavioral science division of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and a contributor to the original PTSD diagnosis. "These are very important times in the treatment of PTSD."
In perhaps the most important news, in November, the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), a professional society that promotes knowledge on severe stress and trauma, issued new PTSD practice guidelines. Using a grading system from "A" to "E," the guidelines label several PTSD treatments as "A" treatments based on their high degree of empirical support, says Keane, one of the volume's editors. The guidelines—the first since 2000—update and generally confirm recommendations of other major practice-related bodies, including the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Department of Defense, the American Psychiatric Association, and Great Britain's and Australia's national health-care guidelines, he says.
In other PTSD-treatment advances, researchers are adding medications and virtual-reality simulations to proven treatments to beef up their effectiveness. Clinical investigators are also exploring ways to treat PTSD when other psychological and medical conditions are present, and they are studying specific populations such as those affected by the Sept. 11 attacks.
Though exciting, these breakthroughs are somewhat colored by an October Institute of Medicine (IoM) report that concludes there is still not enough evidence to say which PTSD treatments are effective, except for exposure therapies. Many experts, however, disagree with that conclusion, noting that a number of factors specific to the condition, such as high dropout rates, can lead to what may seem like imperfect study designs (see Sidebar).
Treatments that make a difference
The fact that several treatments made the "A" list is great news for psychologists, says Keane. "Having this many evidence-based treatments allows therapists to use what they're comfortable with from their own background and training, and at the same time to select treatments for use with patients with different characteristics," he says.
Moreover, many of these treatments were developed by psychologists, he notes.
They include:
• Prolonged-exposure therapy, developed for use in PTSD by Keane, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Edna Foa, PhD, and Emory University psychologist Barbara O. Rothbaum, PhD. In this type of treatment, a therapist guides the client to recall traumatic memories in a controlled fashion so that clients eventually regain mastery of their thoughts and feelings around the incident. While exposing people to the very events that caused their trauma may seem counterintuitive, Rothbaum emphasizes that it's done in a gradual, controlled and repeated manner, until the person can evaluate their circumstances realistically and understand they can safely return to the activities in their current lives that they had been avoiding. Drawing from PTSD best practices, the APA-initiated Center for Deployment Psychology includes exposure therapy in the training of psychologists and other health professionals who are or will be treating returning Iraq and Afghanistan service personnel (see "A unique training program").
• Cognitive-processing therapy, a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, developed by Boston University psychologist Patricia A. Resick, PhD, director of the women's health sciences division of the National Center for PTSD, to treat rape victims and later applied to PTSD. This treatment includes an exposure component but places greater emphasis on cognitive strategies to help people alter erroneous thinking that has emerged because of the event. Practitioners may work with clients on false beliefs that the world is no longer safe, for example, or that they are incompetent because they have "let" a terrible event happen to them.
• Stress-inoculation training, another form of CBT, where practitioners teach clients techniques to manage and reduce anxiety, such as breathing, muscle relaxation and positive self-talk.
• Other forms of cognitive therapy, including cognitive restructuring and cognitive therapy.
• Eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, where the therapist guides clients to make eye movements or follow hand taps, for instance, at the same time they are recounting traumatic events. It's not clear how EMDR works, and, for that reason, it's somewhat controversial, though the therapy is supported by research, notes Dartmouth University psychologist Paula P. Schnurr, PhD, deputy executive director of the National Center for PTSD.
• Medications, specifically selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Two in particular—paroxetine (Paxil) and sertaline (Zoloft)—have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in PTSD. Other medications may be useful in treating PTSD as well, particularly when the person has additional disorders such as depression, anxiety or psychosis, the guidelines note.
Spreading the word
So promising does the VA consider two of the "A" treatments—prolonged exposure therapy and cognitive-processing therapy—that it is doing national rollouts of them within the VA, notes psychologist Antonette Zeiss, PhD, deputy chief consultant for mental health at the agency.
"Enhancing our ability to provide veterans with the psychotherapies for PTSD that have the strongest evidence base is one of our highest priorities," Zeiss says. In fact, the VA began training psychologists to provide the two approaches more than a year before the Institute of Medicine released its report of successful treatments, she says. "We're pleased that the report confirms our emphasis on this training."
The VA system's structure and philosophy make it possible to test the results of treatments in large, realistic samples—a clinical researcher's dream, notes Schnurr, who has conducted a number of such studies, most recently in a study of female veterans that led to the rollout out of prolonged exposure therapy. That study was reported in the Feb. 28, 2007, issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (Vol. 297, No. 8, pages 820–830).
"The VA was able to support the science, so the research didn't just sit around in a journal and get discussed," Zeiss says. "They put money toward it, and they asked us to help them do a major rollout of the treatment."
Boosting effectiveness
Meanwhile, other researchers are experimenting with add-ons to these proven treatments to increase their effectiveness. Some are looking at how virtual reality might enhance the effects of prolonged-exposure therapy. By adding virtual reality, whereby clients experience 3-D imagery, sounds and sometimes smells that correspond with a traumatic event, "we think it might be a good alternative for people who are too avoidant to do standard exposure therapy, because it puts them right there," says Emory University's Rothbaum.
Other researchers are adding a small dose of an old tuberculosis drug, D-cycloserine, or DCS, to treatment to see if it can mitigate people's fear reactions. Rothbaum's team, which includes psychologist Mike Davis, PhD, and psychiatrist Kerry Ressler, MD, PhD, have recently shown that the drug helps to extinguish fear in animals, so they're hoping for a similar effect in people.
In one study with veterans of the current Iraq war, Rothbaum's team is giving all participants a type of virtual reality that simulates combat conditions in Iraq, then randomizing them into a drug condition where they get DCS, a placebo, or the anti-anxiety drug alprazolam (Xanax).
In a similar vein, researchers at the Program for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Studies at Weill Cornell Medical College are using virtual reality and DCS to treat those directly affected by the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, including civilians who were in the towers or nearby buildings, witnesses, and firefighters and police officers who were first responders.
Participants receive standard cognitive behavioral treatment enhanced with virtual reality, where they see graded versions of a Twin Towers scenario, starting with simple images of the buildings on a sunny day, and progressing gradually to include the horrific sights and sounds of that day. They also randomly receive either a small dose of DCS or a placebo pill before each session.
While neither study is complete, the researchers say the treatments appear to significantly reduce participants' PTSD symptoms. Rothbaum has recently submitted a grant proposal for a study where she plans to compare traditional and virtual-reality exposure therapies—which hasn't yet been done—in combination with DCS or a placebo.
Addressing comorbidity
Other psychologists are starting to think about ways to treat PTSD when it is accompanied by other psychiatric and health conditions. Psychologist John Otis, PhD, of Boston University and VA Boston, for instance, is testing an integrated treatment that aims to alleviate symptoms of both PTSD and chronic pain in Vietnam veterans and veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. The treatment combines aspects of cognitive processing therapy for trauma and cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic pain.
"We think these two conditions may interact in some [psychological] way that makes them more severe and challenging to treat," Otis says. In particular, he and others posit that "anxiety sensitivity"—fear of experiencing one's anxiety-related symptoms—may increase the odds that certain PTSD sufferers have more problems than others.
Again, while the study is not yet finished, results are encouraging, reports Otis. "Many of the veterans who are getting the integrated treatment are experiencing partial or complete remission of both kinds of symptoms," he says.
On a broader scale, the National Center for PTSD's Keane believes that much more research is needed on treating PTSD and psychiatric co-morbidities such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse, personality disorders and psychosis—a common situation that escalates the more severe a person's PTSD symptoms are, he says.
He, for one, would like to examine possible applications to PTSD of the concept of a "unified protocol," a theory and methodology being developed by Boston University psychotherapy researcher David Barlow, PhD, to treat concurrent problems such as panic attacks, anxiety and phobias.
That said, the recent advances promise to help many more people suffering from a condition they did not bring on themselves, says Zeiss.
"While there is still more to learn, we have taken significant steps in developing treatments that have been shown to be effective and that will be increasingly provided both in VA and other mental health care settings," says Zeiss. "Those affected by combat stress and other traumas will be able to reach out for care without feeling ashamed or hopeless."
Tori DeAngelis is a writer in Syracuse, N.Y.
Post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma in children and adolescents is one of the priorities of APA's 2008 President Alan E. Kazdin, PhD. He is forming a task force on the topic, which will be chaired by Annette LaGreca, PhD. The scope of the committee's work will be covered in an upcoming issue of the Monitor.
=================================================================================
=====================================================================================
Friday, October 30, 2009
TENACITY vs. PERSEVERANCE
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
October 30th, 2009
6:47 am
Tenacity vs. Perseverance
Brooks shows, not for the first time, that he is part of the U.S. war machine propaganda.
Though Brooks claims that he has called around to a few of his pro-Zionist (as distinct from pro- Israel) 'experts' in the military establishment, this opinion piece is a call to war, in his own voice, from his own mouth.
Is this responsible journalism?
Tenacity is an attribute that can make one bull-headed and possessing tunnel vision, but in contrast the attribute of perseverance, validated in research, makes it possible to pursue goals that are far-reaching and enduring.
The Rotweiler approach is not working, but Brooks advocates it.
Peace endures. Nonviolence endures. Truth endures.
All wholly attainable, wholly pragmatic ideals, if the US can stay out of other sovereign states and instead, protect itself at home -- against the hatred of those it has blatantly exploited for over 50 years.
The majority of West Asians and South Asians know what I am talking about. The hawks? no. Brooks? no.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/opinion/30brooks.html
The Tenacity Question
By DAVID BROOKS
Military experts say that President Obama is intellectually sophisticated, but they do not know if he has the determination needed from a war president.
====================================================================================
New York City
October 30th, 2009
6:47 am
Tenacity vs. Perseverance
Brooks shows, not for the first time, that he is part of the U.S. war machine propaganda.
Though Brooks claims that he has called around to a few of his pro-Zionist (as distinct from pro- Israel) 'experts' in the military establishment, this opinion piece is a call to war, in his own voice, from his own mouth.
Is this responsible journalism?
Tenacity is an attribute that can make one bull-headed and possessing tunnel vision, but in contrast the attribute of perseverance, validated in research, makes it possible to pursue goals that are far-reaching and enduring.
The Rotweiler approach is not working, but Brooks advocates it.
Peace endures. Nonviolence endures. Truth endures.
All wholly attainable, wholly pragmatic ideals, if the US can stay out of other sovereign states and instead, protect itself at home -- against the hatred of those it has blatantly exploited for over 50 years.
The majority of West Asians and South Asians know what I am talking about. The hawks? no. Brooks? no.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/opinion/30brooks.html
The Tenacity Question
By DAVID BROOKS
Military experts say that President Obama is intellectually sophisticated, but they do not know if he has the determination needed from a war president.
====================================================================================
Thursday, October 29, 2009
RESPECTS -- OR HYPE?
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
October 29th, 2009
9:57 am
RESPECTS -- or HYPE?
Our current President whom I voted for, is a skillful user of the media.
I hope that standing there, watching the war dead come home in boxes, is not just hype.
If he continues to feed the US war machine in West Asia and South Asia, then that would be just hype.
Will Obama stand and pay his respects to the hundreds of thousands CIVILIAN DEAD, KILLED BY U.S. FORCES in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan?
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
New York City
October 29th, 2009
9:57 am
RESPECTS -- or HYPE?
Our current President whom I voted for, is a skillful user of the media.
I hope that standing there, watching the war dead come home in boxes, is not just hype.
If he continues to feed the US war machine in West Asia and South Asia, then that would be just hype.
Will Obama stand and pay his respects to the hundreds of thousands CIVILIAN DEAD, KILLED BY U.S. FORCES in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan?
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
We the Women
My NYT comment #11.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
October 27th, 2009
8:30 am
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/27germany.html
--
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
October 27th, 2009
5:16 am
We need a new Pacifist Women's Movement, real men welcome.
\"Forced to confront?\" etc. etc.? Really, are the Germans \"forced\" to?
The US, through its geopolitical invention of the NATO construct (and other strategic constructs including CENTO and SEATO, even the UN In-Security Council), has successfully managed to entangle various sovereign nation-states and their respective peoples in war arrangements.
Germany should have learned from its own bloody, unenviable history of ethnic cleansing and empire building. But Germany is entangled in the US-led NATO construct which has continued to destabilize Europe by driving a wedge between Russia and her neighbors.
The US has emphatically proven to be NOT a neighbor to anyone, except Canada. Canadians have remained rightfully wary and strenuously non-subservient though also enmeshed in NATO.
We the People are completely failing to give credence to the psychological underpinnings of war -- MALE aggression and counter aggression; thrill-seeking; hunger for power and dominance; maiming, death and destruction; desensitization to violence, wide-ranging mental disorders, ALL of which are negative human attributes and outcomes that impede civilization and civil society progress in the area of universal human rights.
The Cheneyites are still in triumphal mode, through the failed Iraq and Afpak strategies and continuing to gain ground, even in this self-proclaimed \"change\" administration.
We the Women can and must lead Change in this continuing horror equation.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/27germany.html?ref=global-home
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/10/26/world/20091026GERMAN_3.html
German Limits on War Are Facing Reality in Afghanistan
By NICHOLAS KULISH
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Forced to confront the rising insurgency in once peaceful northern Afghanistan, the German Army is engaged in sustained and bloody ground combat for the first time since World War II.....(more at link)
Published: October 26, 2009
==============================================================================
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
October 27th, 2009
8:30 am
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/27germany.html
--
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
October 27th, 2009
5:16 am
We need a new Pacifist Women's Movement, real men welcome.
\"Forced to confront?\" etc. etc.? Really, are the Germans \"forced\" to?
The US, through its geopolitical invention of the NATO construct (and other strategic constructs including CENTO and SEATO, even the UN In-Security Council), has successfully managed to entangle various sovereign nation-states and their respective peoples in war arrangements.
Germany should have learned from its own bloody, unenviable history of ethnic cleansing and empire building. But Germany is entangled in the US-led NATO construct which has continued to destabilize Europe by driving a wedge between Russia and her neighbors.
The US has emphatically proven to be NOT a neighbor to anyone, except Canada. Canadians have remained rightfully wary and strenuously non-subservient though also enmeshed in NATO.
We the People are completely failing to give credence to the psychological underpinnings of war -- MALE aggression and counter aggression; thrill-seeking; hunger for power and dominance; maiming, death and destruction; desensitization to violence, wide-ranging mental disorders, ALL of which are negative human attributes and outcomes that impede civilization and civil society progress in the area of universal human rights.
The Cheneyites are still in triumphal mode, through the failed Iraq and Afpak strategies and continuing to gain ground, even in this self-proclaimed \"change\" administration.
We the Women can and must lead Change in this continuing horror equation.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/27germany.html?ref=global-home
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/10/26/world/20091026GERMAN_3.html
German Limits on War Are Facing Reality in Afghanistan
By NICHOLAS KULISH
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Forced to confront the rising insurgency in once peaceful northern Afghanistan, the German Army is engaged in sustained and bloody ground combat for the first time since World War II.....(more at link)
Published: October 26, 2009
==============================================================================
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Ethical Reassurances vs. Obama's "Strategic Reassurances"
My NYT Comment #531.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
October 18th, 2009
2:52 pm
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opinion/18dowd.html?sort=newest&offset=2
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
October 18th, 2009
10:43 am
Ethical Reassurance vs. "Strategic Reassurance"
I am going to posit my term "Ethical Reassurances" against Obama's "Strategic Reassurances."
Obama has declined to meet the Dalai Lama duirng his recent visit to Washington, because Obama has an upcoming visit to China -- and you know, Obama wouldn't want to offend the freedom loving Chinese authorities by playing host to the Dalai Lama, an authentic winner of a Nobel Peace Prize.
In stark contrast, India's strategy of "Ethical Reassurance" is the exact opposite of Obama's "strategic reassurance."
India's safe haven policy towards Tibetans is an example of Gandhian ethics in practice, in politics. How shrewdly ethical, reminiscent of Gandhi's game-changing nonviolent dismantling of the mighty Brit Empire.
Recently, the Indian Government allowed the Dalai Lama
to visit Arunachal Pradesh, a border state within the Republic of India,
now increasingly stridently disputed by China.
The Indian Govt did not hold the Dalai Lama back,
even at the risk of further sabre-rattling
by the expansionist Chinese.
Tibetans live in Arunachal Pradesh, as they do in every part of India.
The Dalai Lama has every ethical justification,
indeed an ethical obligation to visit with Tibetan communities
in Arunachal Pradesh.
The Chinese government finds intolerable, India's policy of offering Safe Haven to the Dalai Lama and hundreds of thousands of his fellow Tibetans, a policy that India has steadfastly followed since the late '50s, when the Dalai Lama and his followers fled Chinese oppression in their ancestral homeland.
India's Safe Haven policy towards the Dalai Lama incurred Chinese aggression on Indian territory in the Northeast in 1962, in which tens of thousands of ill-prepared Indian soldiers lost their lives.
Of course there are many un-noted geopolitical complexities in my narrative but India's strategy of "Ethical Reassurances" is the exact opposite of Obama's "strategic reassurances."
India's safe haven policy towards Tibetans is an example of Gandhian ethics in practice, in politics. How shrewdly ethical, reminiscent of Gandhi's game-changing nonviolent dismantling of the mighty Brit Empire.
Of course no one seriously expects a policy of "Ethical Reassurance" from the Chinese -- or from the US for that matter.
Obama is no different in substance (only in style and hype) from his other white male forbears in the Whites' House, with the exception of Lincoln.
Obama performs Whiteness which is a US dominance ideology, racialized of course,
in which ETHICS is consistently trumped by PROFIT -- slavery, genocide, nuclear annihilation of civilians, invasion, occupation -- you get my drift.
I guess a major difference between the Dalai Lama and Obama is that Tibet's leader earned his Nobel. So did Vaclav even though he didn't get one. Hey, neither did Gandhi.
Satyameva Jayate -- to Truth goes the Victory.
Not to you or to me, but to Truth itself.
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opinion/18dowd.html
Fie, Fatal Flaw!
By MAUREEN DOWD
President Obama’s legislative career offers cautionary tales about the toll of constant consensus building.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opinion/18dowd.html#bozoanchor
----------------------
Prague Post Copyright
http://praguepost.com/news/comments/2-dignitary-details-tibetan-objectives.html#com4304
-----------------
Reuters Copyright
http://in.reuters.com/article/topNews/idINIndia-42388820090911?pageNumber=3&virtualBrandChannel=0
By Krittivas Mukherjee
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The Dalai Lama plans to visit soon Arunachal Pradesh, part of which China claims as its territory, an aide said on Friday in a trip that could again rile Beijing after it denounced his visit to Taiwan this month.
Chhime Chhoekyapa, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader's aide, told Reuters the Dalai Lama would be in Arunachal Pradesh in the second week of November.
"He is going there for teaching. This has nothing to do with politics, there is nothing political about it," Chhoekyapa said.
The intended visit has already sparked consternation in China, which claims about 90,000 sq km of Arunachal Pradesh along their border as part of its territory, and could become another irritant in ties already dogged by a border dispute.
"China expresses strong concern about this information. The visit further reveals the Dalai clique's anti-China and separatist essence," Jiang Yu, the spokeswoman for China's foreign ministry, said in a statement faxed to Reuters.
"China's stance on the so-called 'Arunachal Pradesh' is consistent. We firmly oppose Dalai visiting the so-called 'Arunachal Pradesh'," Jiang said.
The Dalai Lama's travel plan was announced a week after the completion of his visit to Taiwan, a self-ruled island claimed by Beijing. China denounced the trip.
A visit to Arunachal Pradesh could now draw further attention to China's treatment of Tibetan activists and the Dalai Lama's calls for cultural and religious freedoms and autonomy.
China considers the Dalai Lama a "splittist" who seeks to separate nearly a quarter of the land mass of the People's Republic of China.
"TIMING SIGNIFICANT"
The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, denies the charge and says he seeks greater rights for Tibetans.
"The timing of his trip (to Arunachal Pradesh) is significant. It comes while the debate over his visit to Taiwan is still hot," said Bhaskar Roy, a New Delhi-based China expert.
"Tibetans are as good at playing these games as the Chinese. They know such a visit will keep up the pressure on China."
The trip has ramifications for India-China relations as well.
India and China fought a short war in 1962 and, despite burgeoning trade in recent years, mistrust remains. Both sides jostle for resources and influence as they seek a global role.
This year, the two countries have faced off at multi-lateral forums, including Chinese objections to a $60 million Asian Development Bank loan for a project in Arunachal Pradesh.
Indian media have repeatedly reported "incursions" by Chinese soldiers patrolling the 3,500-km (2,200-mile) border, disputed at various stretches.
In response, India has begun modernising its border roads and moved a squadron of strike aircraft close to the China border. Arunachal Governor J.J. Singh said in June up to 30,000 new troops would be deployed in the area.
"From India's point of view the Dala Lama's visit will restate Arunachal Pradesh as Indian territory," said Roy.
The Dalai Lama fled Tibet through Arunachal Pradesh, which has a substantial Buddhist population.
(Additional reporting by Yu Le in BEIJING)
==================================================================================
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
October 18th, 2009
2:52 pm
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opinion/18dowd.html?sort=newest&offset=2
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
October 18th, 2009
10:43 am
Ethical Reassurance vs. "Strategic Reassurance"
I am going to posit my term "Ethical Reassurances" against Obama's "Strategic Reassurances."
Obama has declined to meet the Dalai Lama duirng his recent visit to Washington, because Obama has an upcoming visit to China -- and you know, Obama wouldn't want to offend the freedom loving Chinese authorities by playing host to the Dalai Lama, an authentic winner of a Nobel Peace Prize.
In stark contrast, India's strategy of "Ethical Reassurance" is the exact opposite of Obama's "strategic reassurance."
India's safe haven policy towards Tibetans is an example of Gandhian ethics in practice, in politics. How shrewdly ethical, reminiscent of Gandhi's game-changing nonviolent dismantling of the mighty Brit Empire.
Recently, the Indian Government allowed the Dalai Lama
to visit Arunachal Pradesh, a border state within the Republic of India,
now increasingly stridently disputed by China.
The Indian Govt did not hold the Dalai Lama back,
even at the risk of further sabre-rattling
by the expansionist Chinese.
Tibetans live in Arunachal Pradesh, as they do in every part of India.
The Dalai Lama has every ethical justification,
indeed an ethical obligation to visit with Tibetan communities
in Arunachal Pradesh.
The Chinese government finds intolerable, India's policy of offering Safe Haven to the Dalai Lama and hundreds of thousands of his fellow Tibetans, a policy that India has steadfastly followed since the late '50s, when the Dalai Lama and his followers fled Chinese oppression in their ancestral homeland.
India's Safe Haven policy towards the Dalai Lama incurred Chinese aggression on Indian territory in the Northeast in 1962, in which tens of thousands of ill-prepared Indian soldiers lost their lives.
Of course there are many un-noted geopolitical complexities in my narrative but India's strategy of "Ethical Reassurances" is the exact opposite of Obama's "strategic reassurances."
India's safe haven policy towards Tibetans is an example of Gandhian ethics in practice, in politics. How shrewdly ethical, reminiscent of Gandhi's game-changing nonviolent dismantling of the mighty Brit Empire.
Of course no one seriously expects a policy of "Ethical Reassurance" from the Chinese -- or from the US for that matter.
Obama is no different in substance (only in style and hype) from his other white male forbears in the Whites' House, with the exception of Lincoln.
Obama performs Whiteness which is a US dominance ideology, racialized of course,
in which ETHICS is consistently trumped by PROFIT -- slavery, genocide, nuclear annihilation of civilians, invasion, occupation -- you get my drift.
I guess a major difference between the Dalai Lama and Obama is that Tibet's leader earned his Nobel. So did Vaclav even though he didn't get one. Hey, neither did Gandhi.
Satyameva Jayate -- to Truth goes the Victory.
Not to you or to me, but to Truth itself.
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opinion/18dowd.html
Fie, Fatal Flaw!
By MAUREEN DOWD
President Obama’s legislative career offers cautionary tales about the toll of constant consensus building.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opinion/18dowd.html#bozoanchor
----------------------
Prague Post Copyright
http://praguepost.com/news/comments/2-dignitary-details-tibetan-objectives.html#com4304
-----------------
Reuters Copyright
http://in.reuters.com/article/topNews/idINIndia-42388820090911?pageNumber=3&virtualBrandChannel=0
By Krittivas Mukherjee
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The Dalai Lama plans to visit soon Arunachal Pradesh, part of which China claims as its territory, an aide said on Friday in a trip that could again rile Beijing after it denounced his visit to Taiwan this month.
Chhime Chhoekyapa, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader's aide, told Reuters the Dalai Lama would be in Arunachal Pradesh in the second week of November.
"He is going there for teaching. This has nothing to do with politics, there is nothing political about it," Chhoekyapa said.
The intended visit has already sparked consternation in China, which claims about 90,000 sq km of Arunachal Pradesh along their border as part of its territory, and could become another irritant in ties already dogged by a border dispute.
"China expresses strong concern about this information. The visit further reveals the Dalai clique's anti-China and separatist essence," Jiang Yu, the spokeswoman for China's foreign ministry, said in a statement faxed to Reuters.
"China's stance on the so-called 'Arunachal Pradesh' is consistent. We firmly oppose Dalai visiting the so-called 'Arunachal Pradesh'," Jiang said.
The Dalai Lama's travel plan was announced a week after the completion of his visit to Taiwan, a self-ruled island claimed by Beijing. China denounced the trip.
A visit to Arunachal Pradesh could now draw further attention to China's treatment of Tibetan activists and the Dalai Lama's calls for cultural and religious freedoms and autonomy.
China considers the Dalai Lama a "splittist" who seeks to separate nearly a quarter of the land mass of the People's Republic of China.
"TIMING SIGNIFICANT"
The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, denies the charge and says he seeks greater rights for Tibetans.
"The timing of his trip (to Arunachal Pradesh) is significant. It comes while the debate over his visit to Taiwan is still hot," said Bhaskar Roy, a New Delhi-based China expert.
"Tibetans are as good at playing these games as the Chinese. They know such a visit will keep up the pressure on China."
The trip has ramifications for India-China relations as well.
India and China fought a short war in 1962 and, despite burgeoning trade in recent years, mistrust remains. Both sides jostle for resources and influence as they seek a global role.
This year, the two countries have faced off at multi-lateral forums, including Chinese objections to a $60 million Asian Development Bank loan for a project in Arunachal Pradesh.
Indian media have repeatedly reported "incursions" by Chinese soldiers patrolling the 3,500-km (2,200-mile) border, disputed at various stretches.
In response, India has begun modernising its border roads and moved a squadron of strike aircraft close to the China border. Arunachal Governor J.J. Singh said in June up to 30,000 new troops would be deployed in the area.
"From India's point of view the Dala Lama's visit will restate Arunachal Pradesh as Indian territory," said Roy.
The Dalai Lama fled Tibet through Arunachal Pradesh, which has a substantial Buddhist population.
(Additional reporting by Yu Le in BEIJING)
==================================================================================
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