Rümeysa Öztürk writes:

It started off as a normal Tuesday. On 25 March 2025 I reviewed applications from university students applying for a summer research position at my lab. I told friends I would bring pastries from Harvard Square for the Friday dinner we were planning. I finalized my schedule for an upcoming child development conference. I worked on my dissertation proposal.

The day was busy but not unusual – until I left home after quickly dressing for an iftar dinner at the interfaith center. What followed was my first personal encounter with human-made trauma through state violence.

After a few minutes of walking, masked individuals suddenly surrounded, handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. I was unlawfully arrested, transported across state lines and detained for six weeks in inhumane conditions in a for-profit ICE prison in Louisiana because I co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts Daily. The piece affirmed the equal dignity of all people and urged the university to uphold the democratic resolutions of the undergraduate student body – including recognition of the Palestinian genocide.

Until then, I had not known that governments read school newspapers. I certainly did not know someone could be baselessly punished for expressing ideas in the US, a country that historically valued freedom of speech, the country where I have spent most of my young adulthood years learning and growing as a scholar and contributing to the child development field.

Trauma, with its unexpected and overwhelming nature, shatters your sense of safety and security. Simple activities become challenging. For me, many mornings now begin in sadness, and intrusive memories occupy my days. I escape some days to sleep, only to wake up with recurring nightmares of violence. Some days, numbness prevails: I spend hours wanting to cry but find myself unable to shed a tear. I often have a profound, unending fatigue.

I had previously encountered human-made trauma more conceptually – as a 21-year-old college student during a course simply called Trauma. At the time, I also volunteered with an art and music project led by an international team that assisted Syrian refugee children. I vividly recall the children’s bodies trembling from anxiety and fear, their rapid startle reflexes, and the trauma evident in their artwork: their use of bold colors and depictions of death, violence and separation. The children’s beautiful eyes would often be fixed on the wall, their expressions distant and numb.

The literature distinguishes between traumas caused by the behavior of other people and those caused by natural disasters. For example, earthquakes – like the one I experienced as a five-year-old during the 7.6-magnitude Marmara earthquake in Türkiye, 1999 – can be experienced as trauma caused by natural disasters. Within seconds, everything around me was reduced to dust and rubble. In the neighboring apartment, just one person survived.

Natural disasters like this generally have a clear beginning and end. The impacts last, but survivors know that the event was beyond human control. In the case of my community, many of us were able to accept what had happened, come together and rebuild our lives.

Human-made traumatic experiences are often more challenging to recover from. The harm comes not just from the event itself, but from the knowledge that another person deliberately chose to inflict pain or deny basic needs. This stark realization undermines your sense of trust and safety – if humans can cause pain without any reason, the world is not safe or predictable any more, and the body constantly feels under threat. [Continue reading…]