HEARTS AND MINDS

WOUNDED BY VIOLENCE:
PSYCHOSOCIAL HEALING
IN SRI LANKA

By Gethsie Shanmugam
2017 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee

Presented at the 59th Ramon Magsaysay Awards Lecture Series

4 September 2015, Manila, Philippines

In 1987, armed with a permit from the Governments Ministry of

Defence, I went into the war zone to work. Since the escalation of
hostilities between the Sri Lanka government and separatist militants
groups in the early 1980s, both conventional and guerrilla warfare
claimed thousands of lives. The separatists were fighting for an
independent Tamil homeland in the north and east of Sri Lanka, and for
most of the war held large portions of this territory.
Having joined Save the Children Norway (also known as Redd Barna) to
work with children and women affected by the war, I had the rare
opportunity to travel back and forth across the frontline that divided the
warring parties.
The war was taking a terrible toll on the population. Death and
destruction, injury and disability, were all too common as a direct result
of attacks, shelling, landmines and bombing. People in the conflict-

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affected areas endured shortages in basic facilities, disruption of services
like education or health, destruction of livelihoods, and also faced the
fragmentation and erosion of community ties as conflict dispersed
families and introduced fear and mistrust between neighbours. Women,
children and men all bore the psychological and social consequences of
these experiences in the short medium and long term, although in
different ways.
From the time I started working in this field until now, I have been
continuously searching for ways to better support the healing of the
hearts and minds that are hurt so deeply by violence. Given the sad
reality of wars and conflicts around the globe today, this is a search that
many of us across our different nations are engaged in. We need to work
together to exchange knowledge and learn from one another, if we are to
keep moving forward.
Throughout my career, I learned so much from friends and colleagues
who had worked in other contexts in Asia and Africa. My talk today is to
share some of my experiences of work in Sri Lanka with you all, in case
that this might help you and others in responding to the conflicts in other
settings. I will focus on a specific area of work: supporting women who
had been widowed by the conflict, and their children.
In the late 1980s there were a number of reports that came to us of how
many men from the villages in the north and east of the country been
killed in massacres or were missing after abduction. In one night, 101
men had been killed in two villages in the district of Vavuniya. In
Mullaitivu district, a young field worker reported that 21 men from her
village had been killed overnight. In the East of Sri Lanka, we learned
of over 1700 killings of men and hundreds more who were disappeared.
When we looked into these deaths, we found that the consequences for
the families left behind were enormous. For women who lost their
spouses, in addition to the grief and other powerful emotions associated

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with these brutal killings, they also experienced challenge of having
support their children emotionally and take on the full burden of
maintaining the family in a social environment that stigmatised them
and where they were also vulnerable to direct violence and exploitation.
In the communities of the North and East Sri Lanka, widows were seen
as inauspicious, so were not welcome at events such as weddings and
other celebrations, and were also subject to other social restrictions that
were very oppressive and marginalising of these women, especially
those who were still young.
Trying to respond to the situation of these women, we quickly realised
that we had to be very careful to develop an approach that did not be
counter-productive. Even though these women were very vulnerable and
struggling with life, we did not want our actions to reinforce an
experience of being passive recipients of assistance. We had to be there
for them, but we did not want to ignore for underestimate the windows
dormant potential.
We did not want to create dependency on either side: the widows should
not grow dependent on the support they would receive this, nor should
our support system become too attached to the widows crisis situation.
The success and sustainability of the program depends on striking a
balance between extending support and guiding them to be self-reliant.
We realise that our program had to build people, rather than only
livelihoods and houses. Our approach was to integrate psychosocial
support, what my colleague Elizabeth Jareg called Basic Therapeutic
Actions, into practical activities that were a priority for the women.
After an initial assessment, the windows were encouraged and invited to
drop in at our office to register with the program. It soon became very
clear that they were more interested in having someone listen to them
then collecting the rations that were being distributed as relief.
Simultaneously our staff collected independent information about the

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widows and their families from the local government officials.
We needed to train our staff to be able to support the windows using our
new and evolving approach. Although we started with an intensive
training, we continue to provide on the job guidance and capacity
building, in response to the needs of the program. We selected young
women from the very villages in which we worked to be trained to do
this work.
Once the supporters, as we called them, had completed their initial
training, they began to visit the homes of the widows, on a very regular
basis. This allowed them to build a rapport with the women and also the
rest of the family. After every visit supporters came back to the office
and discussed the widows experience and the situation within each
family with a more experienced colleague. Each widows life and
situation was unique, and the support is required constant guidance from
each other and from their supervisor as they work with the women and
their families. Remember, the supporters were not professionally trained
counsellors. However, they received guidance and input from more
experienced persons and this is where I sometimes had to step in to
provide direct support to women or children, and then followed up in
person or sometimes through the supporters.
Regular meetings of small groups of the widows were held in each
village. During these meetings they started planning income generation
projects. They discussed what each woman could do and the feasibility
of the ideas they had. Even as they worked on the practical and urgent
issue of generating income for their families, we organised a different
kind of gathering for them.
We brought the women together for listening sessions. The group was
divided into 10 pairs of women, and they were encouraged to share
about themselves with their partners. Then they were formed into small
groups of four and the exchanges continued. The supporters and the

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facilitator interacted closely with the women during this process
encouraging them to speak freely and supporting them when they felt
overwhelmed emotionally. The process was very powerful, and a feeling
of camaraderie set in. Many women said that they had never before been
able to confide their problems to anyone else. They also recognise
themselves not only as people with sadness and problems to share, but
also as people with the capacity to listen to others and comfort them.
We recognise that the womens distress sometimes created problems for
their ability to communicate with others. We facilitated half day sessions
for women to share in a supportive environment, and also to offer peer
support to one another solving practical problems, giving each other
emotional support and sharing resources amongst themselves. The
sessions really led to women no longer feeling helpless, as collectively
they were able to make and put into action plans that they could not
envisage as individuals. Of course there were some women who did not
want to work in a group, as they could not trust the others.
As the groups evolved, we provided them with more skills training in
line with their plans. We encourage them to build on existing skills and
interesting opportunities. The supporters help carry out feasibility study
for the business plans that the women want to implement.
The groups became an important source informal emotional support and
friendship for the women. Where women individual problems that could
not be addressed in the group, the supporters would connect them with
more experienced members of the team could come in for special
assistance and would guide the supporters in their day to day assistance.
We also recognise that women often had challenges relating to their
childrens problems. We were working with the children of these women
separately at first, and then facilitating interactions between mothers and
children to share respective problems feelings. The program was able to
ease some of these challenges.

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There was also separate work done with the children of the widows. On
one hand, there were targeted activities to help these children express
and address the emotions, relationship and social issues that they faced.
Equally importantly, they were involved with other children in their
village through child-focused clubs and participatory processes that
supported their socialisation and integration. We also worked with key
adults in the community, like village officials, teachers and principals of
schools to ensure that these children were not discriminated against
because of their status, and that they had continued access to education
and other services.
What worked about the approach that we evolved to work with widows
and their families was that it was developed in response to the needs that
they had. It tried to build on existing capacities of the women, children
and communities, using the external resources as a support to these or
where more specialised skills were required. This kept the costs of the
programme low, ensured sustainability in a very uncertain rural
environment and most importantly ensured the activities were centred
around the local actors not external professionals.
As far as the approach to psychosocial support went, influenced greatly
by Elizabeth Jaregs idea of Basic Therapeutic Actions, the program
recognised that the practical and material problems in peoples lives
were as central to their psychosocial wellbeing as their emotions and
traumatic experiences, and indeed that these were often connected to
each other. By addressing both the external and inner worlds of the
widows, and also integrating therapeutic elements into practical actions
so that they served both purposes.
Elizabeth Jared has described the Basic Therapeutic Actions approach as
involving the use of eclectic activities with therapeutic effects, and says
they should ideally have the following characteristics:
Be rooted in the community; that is, worked out, implemented and

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 evaluated in cooperation with a particular community, involving
resourceful persons from within and outside the community.
Be developed through reliable relationships with groups, families
and sometimes individuals.
Have specific aims. (i.e. to help women to sustain their families
economically)
Promote personal growth through involvement and trusting
relationships, and involve women and children directly wherever
possible.
Be integrated into other relief and rehabilitation activities.
Be low cost and set in motion sustainable processes that involve
people emotionally as well as intellectually.
The key ingredients in our approach with the widows program were as
follows:
Developing listening and supportive skills in community workers
Enabling women to share their grief and problems
Creating supportive networks of Women in a similar situation
Making women aware of their own resources and strengths, and
showing them respect
Guiding the women to recognise their childrens psychosocial
Needs
Giving Children opportunities talk about the situation and worries
Helping children to belong to a supportive peer network and
socialisation process
Removing or easing administrative and bureaucratic barriers to
accessing key services
Providing appropriate and sustainable assistance to improve the
economic security of the family

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The programs based on this approach ended in early 2000s, when it
seemed as though the intensity of the conflict was reducing and there
might be hope for peace. Even then, these services met only a
proportion of the needs. However, sadly, the final years of the war from
2006-2009 were extremely brutal and created many more widows in the
North and East where the war was fought, but also in the rest to the
country from where the government soldiers came from.
Although the war ended some years ago, the struggles of women who
were widowed still continue, as they have not been adequately
supported. Transformations for the better seem to take place at a very
slow pace. People are discouraged, lose patience and one quick fixes,
forgetting that change takes it all time and its own course. I have been
encouraged by small groups of people coming together to work within
and across communities to offer support. In recent years, I have joined a
small group of widows who lost their spouses in the late 1980s in a
separate armed insurrection in central Sri Lanka, connecting across
ethnic lines with more recently widowed women in North West Sri
Lanka, to extend friendship and share experiences. I hope that efforts
like this will continue, but also that we will be able to do more to
mobilise resources and genuine people to build on our past experience
and establish effective programs for the women who are still struggling
as heads of their households in post-war communities.
Thank you for listening. I hope that the approach I have shared will be of
interest to you, as you consider the challenges facing women widowed
by conflict and violence in your own countries and communities. I look
forward to hearing your thoughts and exchanging views with you in the
discussion that will follow.

Copyright 2016 Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation