From Trauma to Transformation: How Communities Affected By Violence Can Use Participatory Wellbeing Studies to Create the Future They Envision

Background and Purpose: Burundaise women have historically played a positive role in peacebuilding during colonialism and afterwards. However, brutal colonial rule and its aftermath left many too affected by resulting extremes of violence and poverty to take up that role. Therefore, women’s empowerment organizations thought that community based psychosocial support might be helpful. In order to create effective programs, social work science was engaged, with the hypothesis that if conflict affected women could envision, define, and operationalize wellbeing they could use this knowledge to create programs to heal themselves and support their communities.

Methods: This study was completed in four regions of Burundi, three rural and one peri-urban. The purposive sample comprised women living in poverty from all three national groups (Bahutu, Batutsi, and Batwa), and included ex-combatants, widows, returned displaced persons, among them. The study engaged 209 unique participants in 18 focus groups and 14 key informant interviews and was conducted in two rounds. The first elicited free listing of ideas, words, phrases, and examples that defined emic conceptions of psychosocial wellbeing. These were transcribed verbatim and then coded thematically in an iterative process, with like operational definitions forming domains. The results were presented to a second round of focus groups in which participants were shown the domains and their operational definitions in graphic form and asked to validate the findings by participatory ranking, eliminate irrelevant ones and alter any that were incorrectly captured.

Results: The study produced 8 domains of well-being that were operationalized by specific measurable indicators: education; access to healthcare, peace, safety and security; access to resources; independent voice; love and support in the family; respect and support outside of the family. The participants described the domains as interlinked and indivisible.

In addition, while the literature on Burundi indicates a patriarchal society with few opportnities for women, the process led the participants to unearth pre-colonial traditions that they considered essential to their well-being including an essential role in “kuganira” or dialogue, as a preferred means of conflict resolution; women’s traditional leading role as educators; and a tradition of formalized solidarity through singing and dancing together.

Conclusions and Implications: The study results were used by the participants as a catalyst to develop social work programs that promoted integrated opportunities for social, economic and psychological recovery from the wounds of war and genocide, which community members could monitor and evaluate for effectiveness based on the operational definitions established in the study. An outgrowth of these women’s groups was the development of a corresponding men’s movement known as the “abatangamuco” or bringers of light where there was darkness. The men did an analysis of the colonial roots of family violence and patriarchy and worked to decolonize their own thinking.

This use of participatory social work science to decolonize knowledge and promote positive social change has much to teach regarding the envisioning of wellbeing and the transformation of suffering.