Psychosocial Responses to Sociopolitical Targeting, Oppression and Violence: Challenges for Helping Professionals

This book will prepare social workers, psychologists, and counselors for psychosocial work with individuals and groups who are experiencing distress and trauma resulting from historical and current sociopolitical oppression and violence. Sociopolitical oppression is a sustained, systematic catastrophe, which results from social targeting and discrimination such as racism, sexism and misogyny, homophobia, and anti-immigrant fervor. The consequences are profound and debilitating. In some ways, they are similar to reactions to a single event disaster (e.g., hurricane, earthquake, terrorist attack) but even more insidious because the social targeting and harassment have been ongoing and will continue. As a guide for direct clinical practice, this book offers new models for understanding the nature and consequences of sociopolitical disasters as well as guiding a range of interventions – clinical, psychoeducational, advocacy, and social justice – for use on a micro, mezzo, and macro level. Drawing on indigenous and BIPOC knowledge and scholarship and using case studies from around the world, it criticizes while also adapting and integrating knowledge and theory from the fields of disaster mental health, psychosocial capacity building, trauma therapy, psychodynamic theory, cognitive behavioral theories, and theories of resilience and positive psychology, linking them to an understanding of historical and social oppression, social justice, and intergroup conflict and reconciliation. The book offers critiques of dominant Western, Eurocentric visions of personhood and models of intervention and questions assumptions about the roles of "client" and "worker," proposing more egalitarian, collaborative relationships and extensive use of training of trainers. It will prepare graduate students and practitioners across the helping professions for work that promotes the collective and individual strength and efficacy of affected people, while also responding directly to vulnerability, stress, and trauma.