Abstract

Excerpted From: Miyoko T. Pettit-Toledo, Collective Memory & the Temporality of Justice: Healing Trauma Across Generations After Historic Injustices, 35 Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems 106 (Fall 2025) (473 Footnotes) (Full Document).

For Yang Su-ja, a disabled woman survivor of the little-known, startingly horrific, April 3, 1948 (".3") Tragedy on the small island of Jeju, South Korea, the indescribable deep pain--the han--endures nearly eighty years later. Not only did she suffer from physical scars and losing her own family, but "[f]our generations of her aunts family, from her [aunts] grandfather-in-law to her [aunts] children, were massacred [all] at once." Yangs trauma stemming from Jeju 4. is not an isolated experience. Regrettably, similar stories reverberate throughout history and into the present--from South Africas apartheid to the ongoing tragedy in Gaza. Such persisting harms from historic injustices reflect damage to the individual and collective at various levels, including physical and psychosocial scars, familial ruptures, cultural suppression, communal losses, regression in education, economic injustices, and lack of spiritual well-being.

Today, such wounds continue to be inflicted through ongoing military conflicts, violence, atrocities, cultural suppression, political oppression, systemic discrimination, denials of self-determination, and present-day settler colonial states. Observers lament how multi-faceted harms flowing from such ongoing injustices will continue to impact present and future generations. Calls to heal intergenerational trauma from historic injustices and to disrupt its transmission to future generations have thus become even more pressing. In the United States, for instance, the California Reparations Task Force has emphasized intergenerational trauma for Black communities as an important basis for many of its reparations recommendations. This prominent and challenging example of transgenerational trauma, along with other examples of generational impacts stemming from Indian Boarding Schools, Japanese American incarceration, and Asian immigrant trauma, among others, has now started to enter mainstream public consciousness and to shape more robust understandings about reparative justice in the United States and beyond.

Acknowledging injustices has helped long-suffering groups find their voices, tell their stories, and try to move forward with their lives. Yet, despite the laudable efforts of tribunals, truth and justice commissions, human rights bodies, and other domestic, regional, and international reparative justice initiatives, the path to comprehensive and enduring social healing remains elusive. Thus the transmission of trauma across generations continues uninterrupted.

As reflected in the epigraph, social healing, especially for survivors and their descendants, is incomplete. Too often, those survivors include women who suffered from sexual violence injustices during military or political aggression. As I have observed in prior writings, "[r]ace and gender situate women of color at the bottom of the social hierarchy, making them particularly vulnerable to sexual violence as part of mass historic injustices and later often rendering their unique injuries nearly invisible in the redress process." For many women of color who suffered sexual violence (and other forms of gender-based harms), they are often narrowly cast as victims without openings to voice and express their intersectional identities as survivors, political activists, fighters, and so much more. Although a particularized race-gender redress analysis, with a tightened emphasis on sexual violence, has started to "chang[e] societal notions about who is worthy of redress," many of those on the frontlines of justice, especially those harmed and their descendants, still feel silenced, invisible, devalued, and overlooked. Those advocating for more comprehensive justice also continue to question how cascading harms resulting from sexual violence--without acknowledgment or comprehensive redress--might reinforce cycles of vulnerability for women of color and their descendants. These advocates further worry about how unredressed sexual violence harms against these women and the resulting harms to their descendants might perpetuate lasting damage to society as a whole.

Reparative justice gaps thus remain. Those gaps often consist of delays in fully recognizing and redressing broader psychological, economic, and cultural harms. Part of those redress delays stems from pervasive cultures of silencing, or repressive regimes that stifle voices at the margins, thereby obscuring what actually happened and the extent of the damage inflicted, as well as perpetuating exclusion and discrimination inscribed in gender roles. More specifically, one of those present-day redress gaps is the failure to attend fully and comprehensively to healing the intergenerational wounds of survivors, their descendants, and the broader populace. As a result, lasting effects continue to burden large swaths of survivors, their families, and the larger populace, thereby impeding efforts for enduring and comprehensive social healing.

Legal scholarship has largely overlooked the need for reparative justice across generations. Scholars in other disciplines, however, speak to healing and caring for trauma--whether such trauma is individual, collective, historical, intergenerational, transgenerational, or cultural. These other disciplines, including, but not limited to, medicine, social psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, political science, peace and conflict studies, as well as religious and cultural studies, have delved more broadly into studying, identifying, and healing the enduring effects of intergenerational trauma. Still other scholars have doubled-down on calls for "intergenerational justice" in areas as diverse as climate and environmental justice, socio-economic remittances and healthcare, education and employment, migration, land inheritance, as well as in addressing the legacies of colonial and post-colonial violence. These scholars insights from diverse fields serve as a helpful foundation for understanding myriad possibilities for healing intergenerational trauma.

Yet few legal scholars have charted paths to devising or revising legal frameworks--either under traditional legal models in domestic, regional, or international courts, transitional justice initiatives, international human rights norms, or broader multidisciplinary approaches--to redress such persisting historic harms across generations. In some ways, this is unsurprising given the laws limitations to engender the type of comprehensive justice and social healing needed to repair individual harms and the social fabric for victims, survivors, and society itself. Legal frameworks are often not enough to either prevent the repetition of atrocities or to heal festering or new wounds for victims, survivors, or their descendants. Traditional legal remedies are insufficient. Challenges in defining ""intergenerational trauma" dampen novel possibilities for remedies under the law. Conflicting understandings of time in relation to the past further block advocates calls for reparative justice for historical atrocities in the name of a more peaceful future. And even the most perfectly designed, conceptualized, and implemented transitional justice program is unlikely to prevent the initial transmission of intergenerational trauma following horrific violence and atrocities.

Despite the laws limitations, victims, survivors, policymakers, government officials, activists, civil society, and many others must continue to work within existing legal frameworks. This Article therefore suggests that the law serves an important role in providing authoritative frameworks to coalesce various legal and non-legal possibilities to redress intergenerational trauma. When legal frameworks are structured in ways that complement and allow for other disciplinary approaches to healing, innovative multidisciplinary approaches emerge.

This Article begins to explore the intergenerational transmission of trauma across generations (in a temporal sense) following largescale violence. The silencing of survivors stories serves as an entry point for understanding this trauma transmission to descendants and how silencing hinders the formation of collective memories of injustice across generations. This leads to a broader overarching question: how might we create justice openings for these multiple generations today to tell their stories and seek reparative paths forward so that they may live in dignity and peace and even thrive"

This Article seeks to respond in broad strokes to this question and makes two contributions to these burgeoning conversations and the existing legal literature.

First, it builds upon Eric Yamamotos path-breaking social healing through justice framework and the collective memory of injustice. This Article applies these frameworks in a new and emerging context: healing intergenerational trauma. By doing so, it illuminates reparative gaps in recent efforts to address the trauma of successive generations following mass historic injustices. In particular, this Article considers how understandings of the temporality of justice influence the initial formation and later reconstruction of the collective memory of intergenerational injustices.

Second, this Article sets forth a pragmatic proposal of integrating an intergenerational approach to social healing into truth and reconciliation commission ("TRC") programs through the establishment and operation of trauma healing centers. This Article offers this initial practical proposal with the goal of sparking further conversations about ways to heal intergenerational trauma and with the hope that other scholars and advocates will continue to build upon these tentative sketches in the future. The concept of trauma healing centers--authorized through TRC legislative mandates or proposals--would not require the radical revision of existing TRC programs to implement. Indeed, although not a focal point of this Article, this practical proposal draws from the real and grounded potential, albeit limited, model in the Jeju 4. Trauma Healing Center in South Korea. Such trauma healing centers potentially offer significant benefits to victims, survivors, their descendants and communities, as well as governments involved in repairing intergenerational harms stemming from historic injustices.

While neither a cure-all nor even the primary focus of reparative justice efforts, this practical proposal of trauma healing centers is a significant and crucial piece to repairing trauma across generations that has not yet gained much attention in either legal scholarship or on-the-ground advocacy efforts. When complemented with other significant reparative justice efforts like apologies, economic justice, education, memorials, and more, trauma healing centers might lead to social healing that actually repairs the individual and collective damage, redresses festering wounds, and interrupts and limits further transmission of trauma to successive generations.

To be clear, this Article does not suggest that intergenerational trauma will not exist even if legal frameworks are revised or restructured in existing TRCs. Indeed, there are ample examples of legal frameworks that have integrated specific perspectives, such as gender-sensitive or race-focused approaches, but that have still not resulted in genuine and comprehensive social healing. There are a few examples that integrate intergenerational perspectives, too, which likewise have not resulted in stopping the transmission of trauma from one generation to the next. But these approaches, while salutary in many ways, are not enough and fall short of redressing harms across generations.

To lay the foundation, Part II situates the discussion of healing historic harms across generations within the global setting and evolution of transitional justice and reconciliation initiatives, including illustrations of the prevailing template of South Africas TRC and subsequent intergenerational approaches. This Part also addresses skepticism about the role of the law in redressing intergenerational harms, specifically acknowledging the laws limitations and its potential when infused with interdisciplinary insights and approaches.

Part III grounds the discussion of healing historic harms across generations in Yamamotos social healing through justice framework, looking to its working principles distilled from commonalities and shaped into the 4Rs (Recognition, Responsibility, Reparation, and Reconstruction).

Part IV looks to collective memory as a means of recognizing intergenerational harms. This Part examines and modestly expands the theory of collective memory of injustice as a precondition to reparative justice by considering how understandings of the temporality of justice might impact the initial formation and later reconstruction of collective memory of intergenerational injustices for victims, survivors, their descendants, and society itself.

Part V sets forth the practical proposal of devising or amending existing legal frameworks for truth and reconciliation commissions, such as governing mandates or laws, so that they account for intergenerational harms at every stage, including design, investigation, assessment, and implementation. This Part underscores the necessity of integrating a more explicit intergenerational approach to healing harms in TRCs, by first outlining ways in concept to establish legal mechanisms to identify, acknowledge, and redress persisting historic harms across generations, and then describing how such legal mechanisms might operate in practice through the establishment and operation of trauma healing centers. This Part also describes a beneficial, albeit limited, potential model in the Jeju 4. Trauma Healing Center. It concludes with observations of crucial challenges to healing intergenerational harms and potential pitfalls of trauma healing centers.

Part VI calls for further collaboration and research into efforts to redress intergenerational trauma in various contexts. This Part ultimately concludes that, despite potential backlash and roadblocks, efforts aimed at intergenerational social healing should be pursued zealously to disrupt the continuing transmission of harms to current and future generations and to further foster peace and dignity for affected individuals and groups--and for society itself.

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This Article seeks to demonstrate that legal scholarship might offer an important missing piece to ongoing research, dialogue, and proposals relating to healing intergenerational harms following mass historic injustices. With a yawning gap in legal literature, this Article aims to fill that gap with a narrow, yet significant, contribution with both conceptual-theoretical and practical applications. It coalesces multidisciplinary understandings of intergenerational or collective trauma, particularly in the realm of reconciliation and social justice initiatives. And it expands collective memory theory to encompass intergenerational injustices by proposing three distinct categories (short-term, mid-term, and longer-term memories) to illustrate its conceptual and practical utility. All against the backdrop of Eric Yamamotos social healing through justice framework with recognition (the first of the 4Rs) as an important first step to long-term collective social healing. It, then, sketches out possibilities for practical applications of integrating intergenerational approaches through truth and reconciliation commissions and the establishment and operation of trauma healing centers.

Despite the potential for backlash and roadblocks, efforts aimed at intergenerational social healing should be pursued zealously to disrupt the continuing transmission of trauma to current and future generations. With increasing on-the-ground calls for healing across generations (in a temporal sense), and with emerging prominent examples of the phenomenon of intergenerational healing entering public consciousness, such as through the California Reparations Task Force in the United States, the time is now to further collaboration and research--particularly of the role of law and legal processes--to redress trauma across generations. The time is now to disrupt cycles of trauma across generations. The time is now to foster peace and dignity for affected individuals and groups--and for society itself--for current and future generations.

Assistant Professor of Law, William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai'i at M??noa.