“I see it running through my family”: the intergenerational and collective trauma of gender-based violence

This article uses two paradigmatic case studies to build on the theories of intergenerational and collective trauma to argue that dissociation should be a key target of prevention strategies for gender-based violence. To illustrate this point, we draw on the life histories of two Australian grandmothers, Kylie and Louise, who described how abuse in early childhood shaped their experiences of violence in adulthood, which in turn impacted their children and, consequently, their grandchildren. We trace the parallels and intersections between individual and collective trauma through their narratives, as well as the silencing of these traumas, with a focus on how children and women are forced to adapt to gender-based violence in the context of collective forgetting and dissociative responses embedded in communities and institutions. We identify a dialectic relationship between individual and collective dissociation, whereby dissociogenic communities and institutions with entrenched defense mechanisms against the recognition of gender-based violence force victims to dissociate at the individual level, thus maintaining collective dissociative structures while increasing the risk of future victimization for women and their children. We argue that the primary prevention of gender-based violence would be enhanced by addressing the prevalence and burden of trauma for affected individuals and families, thereby interrupting intergenerational transmission and addressing the dissociative underpinnings of collective failures to protect women and children from violence.