Betrayal as Political and Psychological Wound: Integrating Politics into War Rape Survivors Syndrome

Abstract

This article develops a politicized understanding of betrayal trauma through the framework of War Rape Survivors Syndrome (WRSS). Rather than a diagnostic category, WRSS functions as an analytical and clinical lens for understanding wartime sexual violence. Conventional trauma models—especially PTSD and Complex PTSD—frame betrayal as interpersonal rupture, but such definitions fail to capture the structural realities of rape as a political weapon. Drawing on over a decade of clinical and field research with survivors in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Poland, and among Holocaust descendants, this article extends betrayal into the political sphere, where states, institutions, and international actors collude in both the violence and its aftermath. WRSS reframes silence, shame, and rage not as pathology but as logical responses to systemic denial and abandonment, redirecting intervention toward political and historical conditions. Integrating psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and decolonial trauma studies, the article demonstrates how justice processes, survivor-led rituals, and communal witnessing are not adjuncts but essential forms of healing. Recovery emerges as a layered movement—psychic, political, and cultural—where structural justice restores recognition, community practices repair social fabric, and psychotherapy supports survivors’ self-authorship. Healing is therefore not a private endpoint but a collective transformation that confronts and redresses political betrayal.