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Writer's pictureKarin Hagemann

Trauma and the SDGs: change on a global scale




Since 2015, we have had the UN’s 17 Social Development Goals (SDGs). They are positively worded, but what they say is that conditions for too many people and for the planet at large are unacceptable and that this has to change:



When you look closely, you notice that all these negative states of affairs are traumatising for people:

 

  • It’s traumatising to live in poverty (1) and to experience hunger (2).

  • It can be traumatising to be sick (3) and not having access to clean water and sanitation (6) is one of the key causes of sickness.

  • As we know, gender inequality is often expressed through gender-based violence (5), which is one of the leading causes of trauma.

  • Other forms of violence are insecurity, conflicts, and wars, which arise inter alia when national institutions and the justice system are weak (16).

  • Education (4) opens the door to achieving one's own potential. Education lacks when the means are lacking. Or it can be refused, often based on gender. This is not only traumatising in its own right, but also feeds back into gender inequality, into the ability to obtain decent work and contribute to economic growth (8), or to play a meaningful role in innovation and industry(9).

  • Inequality (10), of course, has a bidirectional relationship with trauma – being both the cause and the consequence.

  • Cities (11) are now where over half of the world's population lives, over 4 billion people, and unfortunately too many cities are violent places where too many people are exposed to traumatic events.

  • Through destructive production and consumption patterns (12), including lots of dirty energy still (7), we are destroying the climate (13) and the planet (14)(15), which threatens our home and risks being humankind's ultimate trauma.

  • Finally, partnerships (17) and working together - the opposite of abuse of power - are seen as a sine qua non condition to address all these issues.

 

As a senior strategy advisor focussing on international development and the SDGs, I was struck by the extent to which trauma is both the cause and the consequence of so many of the ills which hound humanity in our momentous era – so I wanted to know if there was any correlation between violence and the SDGs. And it seems there is. Not a perfect one, but it's there:

These are almost all the countries in the world. The X axis shows their proximity to having achieved the SDGs. The Y axis shows their level of violence. Countries where SDG achievement remains low are also at the top end of the violence scale, and many OECD countries are on the lower end of the scale.

 

Correlation does not mean causation, however. And we must be careful not to blame countries for their level of violence. For too many, colonialism and oppression have destroyed the social fabric, introduced extreme levels of violence, disrupted the creation of nation states and their economic tissues, and hobbled their growth.

 

Let us also not forget that violence is in our midst, in so-called rich countries. In my picture-perfect home country Switzerland, the government website states that "violence against women and domestic violence are common in Switzerland. [...] 27'000 children are affected by domestic violence every year, and a woman dies from it every 2.5 weeks.” (The Federal Council, 2021)

 

It seems, then, that tackling trauma is key to saving humanity and the planet. We have two battles to fight: One to eliminate the root causes for hunger, poverty, ill health, inequality, wars, and other violence – or, in other words, to address the determinants of trauma. The other, to help people heal and recover from the traumas that these conditions have already caused.

 

The opportunity is global in scale. In coming together to address trauma, we may not only achieve the SDGs but transform the self-perpetuating cycle of violence into a self-perpetuating cycle of healing.


Karin Hagemann



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