#DontLookAway: How trauma affects the brain

File image: Pexels

File image: Pexels

Published Dec 6, 2017

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Dealing with trauma is complex. Understanding how it affects a person, even before we are born, can help us find a solution.

Independent Media's #DontLookAway campaign is not just about raising awareness around violence against women and children. 

It is also about helping us understand how abuse and trauma can have a lifelong impact on victims. 

In this video Claudia Burger, director of Activists Networking Against Exploitation of Children (Anex), herself a survivor of domestic violence, explains how the brain works and how this makes recovery from trauma both complicated and lengthy. 

The video is more than 10 minutes long, but is well worth watching, especially for victims of abuse and people who want to help change the cycle of abuse in our society.

#DontLookAway

Read more:

#DontLookAway: Why I stayed with my abusive spouse for nearly three decades

#DontLookAway: Abuse rife on Cape Flats

Show your support for the #DontLookAway campaign by:

* Raising awareness by supporting the many initiatives that are being hosted in your communities during the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children.

* Painting your fingernail orange, wear orange, join the marches, take to social media. Just Don’t Look Away.

* Calling it out when you encounter behaviour that seeks to debase and dehumanise women.

* Getting involved in a local organisation that supports women and children victims. 

* Use these 16 days to reflect on what we are doing wrong and how we may be, with our own silence or behaviour, empowering, protecting or enabling those who abuse our children and women.

* Examine new or alternative ways to raise our children, free of violence. Whatever you do ... Don’t Look Away.

IOL

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