Alma Bravo-Mehmedbasic: Rehabilitation or Robots without Emotions

Otherwise, they will live like robots without emotions. The treatment that they should complete includes medical, psychological and social support as experts try to bring them closer to the way of life they had prior to their traumatic experience.

“Rehabilitation is a process where individuals on an emotional and cognitive level, and through psychotherapy, elaborate on the trauma they experienced and store it in their memory as one horrible occurrence. After that, the psychic energy that was invested in the trauma is turned and focused to the creative activities of living”, says Bravo-Mehmedbasic.

Bravo-Mehmedbasic, who has been working with victims of rape for a long time, and is also an expert at the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, explains that the encapsulated trauma represents a bomb inside the organism, which can at any moment, unless one completes rehabilitation therapy, explode and leave more profound consequences on the victim who survived the rape.

“We have cases where only after 20 years a woman speaks about what happened to her. For all that time, she kept the trauma to herself, and functioned at the level of a robot without emotions”, neuropsychologist Bravo-Mehmedbasic told BIRN-Justice Report.

According to her, there are Centres for Mental Health in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as a special unit at the Psychiatric Clinic which help individuals who have experienced severe trauma such as rape.

“There, a combined therapy that includes medication and psychotherapy is given to them. I think that with the comprehensive help of doctors, victims can be brought closer to the life they had before the rape”, says Bravo-Mehmedbasic.

She says that a complete rehabilitation of the victims cannot be completed without the punishment of the perpetrators of crime, where the state plays a major role.

“First of all, our state is obliged to provide reparations; it means financial, moral and legal satisfaction. So, the state is obliged to financially secure the victim, then to guarantee that torture will not happen again, to protect the victim as a witness in court and to punish the perpetrator. There is no complete rehabilitation of the victim without punishment of the perpetrators”, says Bravo-Mehmedbasic.

She points out that people who have not gone through proper rehabilitation may experience a so-called explosion of trauma during testimony and be returned home because they are unable to testify.

“I saw so deep a regression that a women-witness spoke in the third person and behaved like a little two- or three-year old girl. And then it just came to amnesia and she could not remember anything. She was not able to testify at the trial,” recalls Bravo-Mehmedbasic.

Bravo-Mehmedbasic explains that quite a number of rape victims say nothing to family members about what happened to them because of the feeling of humiliation, as well as the belief that they will not be understood.

“There, the identity of the victim is destroyed and if they say what happened to them, they are afraid of being rejected by their family, and they see their bodies as dirty and less valuable”, says neuropsychologist Bravo-Mehmedbasic.

Bravo-Mehmedbasic said that through working with rape victims, she had cases where persons idealise those who tortured them because of helplessness and fear for their lives. In practice, this phenomenon is called the “Stockholm Syndrome”.

The name derives from an event that took place in Stockholm, when robbers detained female employees in a bank. When they released them, they defended the robbers and spoke positively about them.

“A person finds justification for those who torture them, saying that they are relatively good, that they did not beat them so much, that they gave them food of that they were less violent”, explains Bravo-Mehmedbasic.

In these moments, she explains, the person loses her self-esteem, confidence, her own identity, as well as the sexual identity, and is ashamed of herself. And then, the person is divided into two parts, explains Bravo-Mehmedbasic, the one who observes and the one who suffers, while the cognitive part is completely divided from the emotional one.

“In practice, we meet individuals who tell us terrible things, but as if it happened to someone else, and as if they were the reporters from the event. We could not see the emotions, whatsoever”, says Bravo-Mehmedbasic.

Rape and sexual abuse significantly affects the psyche of the victim, and deep in them, the fight against what has happened to them is going on.

”However, we are working with these persons and we want them to understand that they should not be ashamed just because their psyche reacted to abnormal phenomenon’s such as torture and rape”, says Bravo-Mehmedbasic.

In the work with persons who have survived rape, the neuropsychologist explains that she was touched the most by victims who, along with torture and rape, have also experienced the loss of their husbands and children, and with those who are raped several times in front of their family members.

Mirna Buljugic is BIRN – Justice Report journalist. mirna.buljugic @ birn.eu.com. Justice Report is BIRN online weekly publication.