Brutality refers to deliberate acts of extreme cruelty, violence, aggression, abuse, or other forms of harsh treatment directed at another person.
Such acts display a conscious disregard for human dignity, natural rights, compassion, and moral limits, and they inflict not only physical harm but also emotional and psychological damage.
Both good and bad human experiences leave imprints in the life, worldview, memory, and feelings of people. The imprints of historical realities may not necessarily be observable and may even be unknown to the person concerned, but this does not make them insignificant, invalid, or less genuine.
To begin, it is important to explain what brutality actually is. 'Brutality' refers to deliberate acts of extreme cruelty, violent behaviour, aggression, abuse, and harsh treatment directed at another person. These acts show a deliberate disregard for human dignity, natural rights, compassion and moral limits, and beyond physical harm, they affect people emotionally and psychologically.
These acts are unacceptable in all societies because of the universal understanding and regard for human dignity and knowledge of the pain of its loss. For the most part, most societies have learnt a lesson from the wounds of history where similar realities were experienced.
Experiences of brutality are, first of all, dangerous to the formation of character and values in young people as they expose them to an entirely new extreme of human acting. Young people’s knowledge of the threshold of human coercive and emotional control is stretched to options that are not acceptable. Brutality corrupts the good sense of being human, which well-raised young people grow up looking up to as an ideal. Psychologists link exposure to brutality to even higher possibilities of perpetrating similar behaviour in the future.
In addition, brutality impacts trauma in those who see it. It is hard to make people forget seeing such experiences, for example, of people in their last moments gasping for breath, of pools of blood from gunshots, etc. Any normal person will be moved to help, and coming to terms with the guilty feeling of being unable to help save a life is also traumatising. Thus, when there is widespread brutality, there are more and more people who are traumatised by those events.
The pain of collective trauma is personal and unpredictable in its impact given the variations in personalities, affective maturity, and temperaments, as well as capacity for externalisation. Externalisation is the ability to separate traumatic experiences from the very essence of the person being affected so as to process them objectively.
Young people are at great risk of developing chronic anxiety, fear, depression, hypervigilance and other psychological conditions following these experiences. In terms of emotions, young people are at risk of developing emotional numbness, where they feel no empathy or sympathy towards anyone anymore.
This is a dangerous extreme, which will result in the formation of a cruel and ruthless generation that will not fear causing harm to others should there be resistance to what they believe, whether on an individual level or, even worse, in organised groups.
Brutality also creates a cloud of vengeance towards those who inflict it, and this has been evident in the world, where people grow impatient of being oppressed and fight back regardless of the consequences. Where proper non-violent means are not employed to address the issues, there are risks of normalising targeted violence as a problem-solving method, which has in many places of the world led to endless conflicts and even wars.
How will we live peacefully if the minds and hearts of our people, especially young people, have so much pain and anger, have no trust, no fear, and no control of their emotions because of the traumatic encounters? Moral injuries of brutality towards persons have effects on the entirety of human life and society, and especially, contextually, in countries where the majority of the population is young.
Moreover, many people lose a sense of value towards their own life after seeing the lives of other people being brutally and mercilessly wasted. This contributes to the rise in risky behaviour, self-harm, suicides, etc. because one feels life is not worth living if it is dishonoured in such a cruel manner. It also affects one’s sense of trust in people and can lead to isolation and difficulty in working with others. Imagine having a whole generation which, because of collective brutality experiences, has developed a collective memory inhabited by a collective trauma; this can easily lead to intergenerational trauma, which implies conflicts and pain being passed to generations to come.
It is time African leaders came to terms with the reality that they are burdening generations of their people with trauma and pain which will not end anytime soon. This is due to the experiences of brutality and cruelty that they make their people exert on each other through orders, as well as the harm suffered by those who are affected either as recipients or witnesses of such acts. History has shown that only true justice is of great help in healing traumas, including those of brutality, as it is a reparative value, which rebuilds the dignity of both the living and the dead.
Shimbo Pastory is an advocate for positive social transformation and a student of the Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines.
