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Stories of hurt and healing

August 31, 2009

By pwrdf

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Voices of Hope Pew Bulletin Stories
Peru

The more than twenty years of armed conflicts through the 1980’s and 90’s in Peru, Guatemala and Colombia have killed, displaced and injured thousands of people. During the 2003 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru, PWRDF partner, Project Counselling Service (PCS) provided a program of mental health workshops to the recorders of the National Register of Victims of Huancavelica, as they were in most instances themselves victims of the violence. The workshops helped the recorders to address the emotional and psychological challenges they confronted as they took the testimonies of others.
These workshops have become a model for the rest of the region. This work to ensure that the sexual violence that occurred during the conflict was documented and included in the Truth and Reconciliation Report was a very significant contribution in the country’s post-war recovery. In a country where to be a poor, Indigenous woman is to be three times invisible, and in a language (Quechua) where there is no word for rape, this naming and calling for compensation for rape victims, was a crucially important step in the healing process. More recently PCS has begun to support men to document the abuses that they also experienced. PWRDF is committed to supporting our partner’s groundbreaking work on the long path of healing.
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