A Trailblazer of Trauma Studies

A Trailblazer of Trauma Studies Asks What Victims Really Want

Judith Herman’s seminal book “Trauma and Recovery” created a template for her field. Three decades later, she’s published a follow-up to explain how survivors’ needs are still misunderstood.

By Eren Orby The New Yorker

May 2, 2023

When the Harvard psychiatry professor Judith Herman began her medical training, in the nineteen-sixties, sexual and domestic abuse was still considered a private scourge that victims brought on themselves—if, that is, it was considered at all. Prominent journals were publishing studies like “The Wifebeater’s Wife” (Archives of General Psychiatry, 1964), which attributed marital violence to the “masochistic needs” of battered women. A major textbook put the prevalence of incest at one in a million, which was an underestimate by several orders of magnitude. In 1975, when Herman and a colleague submitted the draft of a landmark paper on incest and it circulated within the field, they were surprised to receive numerous letters with messages like “I thought no one would believe me” and “I thought I was the only one.” In a new afterword to her first book, “Father-Daughter Incest,” which was originally published in 1981, Herman recalls, “It was generally held that sexual offenses were rare in reality but rampant in the overactive imaginations of women and children.” She dedicated her career to studying both the psychological impact of such abuse and the public tendency to overlook it. In “Trauma and Recovery,” published in 1992, she famously compared survivors of rape with veterans of combat. Both were subject to “the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society,” she argued, but only those who fought in wars were acknowledged with medals and memorial ceremonies. “There is no public monument for rape survivors,” she wrote.

Herman, who is now eighty-one, came of age during the women’s-liberation movement. She still credits her career to what the author Grace Paley has called “the buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness” of second-wave feminism. In her twenties, she joined the Bread and Roses collective, a socialist consciousness-raising group in Boston. “It was the grassroots activists who knew what was going on,” she told me recently when I visited her at the senior-living facility where she resides, not far from Harvard. “The psychiatry departments had no clue.” “Trauma and Recovery” proposed what was then a novel diagnosis—“complex post-traumatic stress disorder”—for prolonged or repeated abuse, whether it occurred in a war zone or in the supposed sanctum of a family home. Herman outlined a three-stage recovery process, which has since become a therapeutic template in the field of psychiatry. Before anything else, trauma survivors must salvage a basic sense of safety (step one). Only afterward can they mourn what they have lost (step two) and resume some version of ordinary life (step three). Following the publication of “Trauma and Recovery”—which the feminist psychologist Phyllis Chesler, in a New York Times review, called “one of the most important psychiatric works to be published since Freud”—Herman began contemplating a fourth stage of recovery. If trauma was a problem of public recognition as much as of personal suffering, shouldn’t true healing entail more than a private undertaking by the survivor?

In the early two-thousands, during a sabbatical, Herman began interviewing victims of gender-based violence for a new book project. She got as far as publishing a concept paper, “Justice from the Victim’s Perspective,” in a special issue of the journal Violence Against Women, in 2005. But she was sidelined, in the succeeding years, with nerve tumors from an old knee injury, which left her reliant on crutches, a brace, and a fentanyl patch. Herman continued overseeing trainees at Harvard, but her own research stalled. In the meantime, trauma studies developed a new focus on brain science. In 2014, Herman’s old friend and colleague Bessel van der Kolk published “The Body Keeps the Score,” an unexpected best-seller exploring the power of the brain and the body to change consciousness through therapies as plain as yoga and as experimental as psychedelics. (“In the culture right now, if it’s based on the brain, it’s real,” van der Kolk recently told the Times. “Everything else is woozy stuff.”) Herman, by contrast, has largely concentrated on “the power of consciousness”—both social and individual—to change the body and the brain. “Healing from the impact of human cruelty requires a relational context of human devotion and kindness,” she writes in the latest afterword to “Trauma and Recovery.” “No new technique or drug is likely to change these fundamental principles.”

To treat her knee, Herman tried physical therapy, acupuncture, “every weirdo cure you can imagine,” she told me. A few years ago, a doctor suggested an innovative surgery that ended up relieving her pain. During the pandemic, while confined to her one-bedroom suite in the senior-living facility, she returned at last to work on the project that she’d begun two decades before. “Truth and Repair,” which was published in March, is part polemic and part ethnography, assembling testimony from thirty survivors of traumas including child abuse, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and domestic violence. (Twenty-six are women and four are men.) Herman’s central argument is that neither the traditional model of retributive justice, with its emphasis on punishment, nor the burgeoning alternative of restorative justice, with its focus on forgiveness, truly prioritizes survivors.

If her earlier works were like floodlights in the night, baring systemic abuses that had long been blocked from view, “Truth and Repair” is more like a magnifying glass, scrutinizing subtler preconceptions that have persisted through the progress of the #MeToo movement and the mainstream recognition of trauma and its aftermath. Milestones like the criminal conviction of Harvey Weinstein do little to alleviate what Herman sees as the most fundamental breach for victims: the sense that their own communities have failed them. “Truth and Repair” takes aim at the enablers and the apologists, “who profit from the subjection of others,” and also at the onlookers, “who prefer not to know the truth or choose not to help.” Often, Herman argues, “survivors will feel the bitterness of these betrayals more deeply even than the direct harms inflicted by perpetrators.” The new book is slimmer and less overtly revelatory than its predecessor, but Herman’s methodology of assiduous listening serves as its own argument for a new model of justice. In theory, asking survivors of crime what would make things right for them—or “as right as possible,” as she puts it—sounds like a simple thing to do. “In practice,” she writes, “it is hardly ever done.”

Early in her career, Herman attended a lecture at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association about how to testify as an expert witness in court. She’d recently co-founded the Victims of Violence program, at a hospital in Cambridge, to treat survivors of crime and to train trauma clinicians. As Herman recalls, the lecturer, a celebrated forensic psychiatrist named Phillip Resnick, argued that the true function of courts, historically, was to stop disputes from devolving into violence. On a projection screen, he displayed an image of the Hatfields and McCoys, warring factions of Appalachian backwoodsmen infamous for their intergenerational blood feud. The menacing subjects in the photograph, with “their huge mustaches and their rifles across their knees,” lodged in Herman’s memory, she writes, largely as a reminder of the prejudice “that victims will be too angry, too irrational, too fixated on retribution to be trusted.”

Of the victims in “Truth and Repair”—Herman, like an anthropologist, calls them “informants”—very few crave revenge against their abusers. A filmmaker and writer who was sexually abused by her paternal grandfather feels resentment, first off, toward her own mother, who didn’t believe her at first and then urged her never to tell her grandmother, on the ground that the truth “would kill her.” A community organizer who was raped at knifepoint by her ex-boyfriend is appalled when his parents, who once welcomed her into their home, launch a letter-writing campaign on his behalf. A man who was abused as a child by a priest in the Boston archdiocese seems less enraged at the perpetrator than at the religious leaders who moved pedophiles from parish to parish: “I want to go punch them in the face, and I’m not a violent person,” he says. “They should have known better.” Herman suggests that “bystander” is too benign a description for such ancillary figures. Instead, she borrows the term “implicated subjects” from the scholar Michael Rothberg, who has argued that almost all of us contribute to or benefit from structural injustice, and so almost none of us is innocent of implication. “Truth and Repair” invites readers to apply the concept widely. Is a high-school teacher “implicated” for failing to realize that a star student is flunking out because, unbeknownst to him, she was raped? Readers may allocate blame in their own ways, but Herman succeeds in reformulating justice as more than an adversarial contest between victim and abuser. Trauma estranges a victim from “all those who doubt her veracity, who blame her rather than the perpetrator, or who choose to turn a blind eye,” Herman writes. “In standing by the survivor,” she adds, implicated subjects can “reclaim their own moral standing.”

The victims in “Truth and Repair” are perhaps less vengeful than proponents of retributive justice presume. They are also less conciliatory than advocates of restorative justice seem to hope. The #MeToo movement prompted much discussion about the path to absolution for high-profile abusers: What amounts to a satisfactory apology? Can the public tell true penitence from scripted, self-serving expressions of regret? Herman considers real apologies, however healing in theory, to be rare, and she notes that few of her subjects counted on receiving one. “I’ve had enough work to do on my own,” an attorney and rape survivor from Florida tells her. A poet who was molested by her older brother dreads the idea that he’d even discuss the crime: “I suspect he would enjoy talking about what he did.” Herman worries that efforts to reconcile perpetrators and victims, a chief component of certain restorative-justice processes, could be “tailor-made for manipulation” by abusers who re-offend. Even profuse apologies figure in cycles of domestic abuse, by sustaining victims’ hope that violence will end. Although Herman entertains the “creative promise” of restorative justice, she suspects that its “sentimental emphasis” on reconciliation may pressure survivors to forgive crimes that their communities do not take seriously.

In one of Herman’s most complicated interviews, Kyra Jones, a Chicago artist and community activist, recalls that she was assaulted by a fellow-activist who “weaponized the language of the movement to target vulnerable women.” Jones, who is Black, describes herself as a prison abolitionist. She couldn’t stand the idea of reporting her assailant to the police, so she chose to participate in a “peace circle” overseen by the organizer Mariame Kaba. (One general irony of restorative-justice programs, Herman points out, is that they often rely on the threat of criminal punishment to secure an offender’s compliance.) Jones and her assailant—or, in the idiom of the movement, her “harm-doer”—gathered with separate support groups, hers to help “process the trauma,” his to help brainstorm amends. After fifteen months, the assailant’s group deemed him sufficiently committed to “deep reflection and change.” Before long, though, he was accused of assaulting other women. (The man, Malcolm London, has publicly apologized to Jones but denied one of the subsequent allegations.) Like most of Herman’s subjects, Jones ends up pointing her finger at the surrounding community, which “had gone back to its default habits of valuing Black men over Black women.” Jones “agonized” over the outcome, Herman tells us, but she still refrained from reporting the man to the police.

In “Trauma and Recovery,” Herman writes that the therapist’s role is to “affirm a position of solidarity with the victim.” Her commitment to this clinical principle occasionally limits her philosophical inquiries in “Truth and Repair.” Herman doesn’t linger, for instance, on the possibility that Jones had a responsibility to report a repeat offender in order to protect other women. Though “some Black sexual assault survivors were angry with Jones for her choice not to file a criminal complaint,” Herman explains, the community’s “primary obligation” to victims comes down to repairing “the harm that had been done to them.” Some might find this a disquieting insight in a book about collective accountability. Can a survivor’s community members expect from her as much as she expects from them? Jones’s story clarifies, in any case, a cruel predicament of victims who suffer abuses that aren’t reliably redressed by the justice system. Herman cites estimates that less than five per cent of rapes result in a guilty plea or a criminal conviction. If survivors turn to the police, the very process may victimize them again. If they don’t, they risk being seen as implicated subjects themselves.

To her credit, Herman doesn’t profess to have answers to every problem she identifies. “Think of this book,” she writes, “as a beginner’s attempt to reimagine justice, based on the testimony of survivors.” “Truth and Repair” does not recommend abolishing police forces, courts, or prisons. Herman acknowledges that the rights of criminal defendants are protections against the potentially treacherous power of the state, not slights against individual victims. Outside of criminal court, though, she’d like to see survivors given the presumption of credibility. In the first chapter of “Trauma and Recovery,” which was reissued last year, Herman observes that the study of psychological trauma “has a curious history—one of episodic amnesia.” Repression functions in any society just as it does in the traumatized mind, with periods of “active investigation” yielding to “periods of oblivion”: “Repeatedly in the past century,” Herman writes, “similar lines of inquiry have been taken up and abruptly abandoned, only to be rediscovered much later.”

It can be difficult to square the progress of the #MeToo movement with, for instance, the public vilification of the actress Amber Heard during the defamation trial between her and her ex-husband Johnny Depp last year. For presenting herself, in a ghostwritten Washington Post op-ed, as “a public figure representing domestic abuse”—and for trying to prove it after Depp sued her—Heard became the target of a misogynistic pile-on, an object of mockery by men’s-rights activists, right-wing politicians, washed-up celebrities, and even a cosmetics brand. (They settled the case and Heard agreed to pay Depp one million dollars.) “Truth and Repair” often reminded me of a line by the late Lucy Grealy, who wrote that “most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.” Herman’s work revolutionized trauma studies, but she has never taken for granted how much the fate of the field depends on communities strong enough to sustain it. ♦

Pathogenesis

Pathogenesis by Jonathan Kennedy review – in sickness and in health

A fascinating account of how diseases have shaped humanity, from the neolithic to Covid-19

Steven Poole London Guardian

The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked extraordinary destruction and misery, killing nearly 7 million people worldwide thus far and devastating the lives of many more. And yet, viewed through the long lens of human history, writes the public health sociologist Jonathan Kennedy, “there is little about it that is new or remarkable”. Previous pandemics have killed many more, both in absolute numbers and as proportions of populations, and so may future ones. Covid should be a wakeup call that helps us manage deadlier plagues in the future. But will we heed it?

Our very existence and success as a species, Kennedy argues in this fascinating book, has been shaped by bacteria and viruses. Where, for example, did all the other species of humans go? At one time, early Homo sapiens shared the Earth (and interbred with) the stronger, larger-brained and equally artistic Neanderthals, as well as the hobbit-like Denisovans. What happened to them? It could be, as some argue, that we simply killed them all, or that they were somehow less well able to adapt to climate change. But Kennedy explores the possibility that roving Homo sapiens from Africa, who had acquired strong immune systems on their travels, might have simply infected the already settled Neanderthals of Europe with a novel pathogen that they couldn’t fight off – just as the colonising Spanish, tens of thousands of years later, decimated the Aztec population with smallpox as much as with weapons.

A similar dynamic repeats itself over and over in human history, in Kennedy’s telling, even if some of the details remain speculative. Why, for example, were dark-skinned Neolithic hunter-gatherers such as the celebrated “Cheddar Man”, who first settled the British Isles after the last ice age, replaced throughout Europe by light-skinned farmers of Mediterranean origin? “The most likely answer,” the author suggests, is that the farmers carried infectious diseases to which they had, over time, become immune, but which devastated the indigenous populations. Those farmers were in turn almost completely replaced by another wave of migrants, shepherds from the Eurasian steppe – thanks, perhaps, to a Neolithic wave of bubonic plague in Europe. Kennedy does not shy away from emphasising the point most relevant to modern politics: “Contemporary Europeans are neither genetically ‘pure’ nor are they the region’s indigenous people.” Modern genetic analysis shows that even the people who built Stonehenge were completely wiped out and replaced by a new wave of migration. As Spinal Tap so clairvoyantly put it: “The druids. No one knows who they were, or what they were doing.”

We can be more confident, at least, about the geopolitical effects of disease once we enter the era of written history. An epidemic of either typhus or smallpox devastated Athens from BC430, which “undermined Athens’s capacity to fight against the Spartans and had a profound impact on the course and outcome of the Peloponnesian War”. A series of plagues beginning in 65AD, meanwhile, might have weakened the Roman empire to an extent that contributed to its eventual fall. Medieval waves of the Black Death, it is salutary to be reminded, killed astonishing numbers of people – as much as 60% of the entire population of Europe succumbed in a single decade of the 14th century.

The subsequent introduction of rules of quarantine and cordons sanitaires, Kennedy argues, can be seen as marking the beginnings of the modern state, extending as they did its power into ordinary human life in unprecedented ways. Meanwhile, the shortage of agricultural labour caused by devastating recurrences of the plague was perhaps instrumental in the collapse of feudalism in favour of a capitalist system of flexible employment. Later on, the susceptibility to malaria of northern soldiers in the American civil war “probably delayed victory by months or even years”, possibly giving Lincoln time to come round to the idea of abolishing slavery.

The book thus performs that satisfying trick of encouraging the reader to think differently about familiar topics, though its ideas are inevitably variable in their persuasiveness. Among the most conjectural, for example, is the suggestion that the rise of Christianity in the imperial Roman era might itself have depended on the prevalence of disease, because of its consoling message. “The Christian faith skyrocketed because it provided a more appealing and assuring guide to life and death than paganism during the devastating pandemics that struck the Roman empire in the second and third centuries CE,” Kennedy suggests. Well, maybe. But the conversion of Constantine, briefly mentioned on the same page, was surely the nearer and sufficient cause.

There is, too, occasionally a slightly po-faced attitude to Kennedy’s discussions, as when he cites the “What have the Romans ever done for us riff” from Life of Brian. (There is “something unsettling about a group of white, Oxford- and Cambridge-educated men extolling the virtues of colonialism, albeit for comedic effect,” he complains piously.) And the depredations of “capitalism” come to figure, in this story, as a villain as evil as any virus. The economic growth driven by the Industrial Revolution, Kennedy claims, did not, as is usually thought, increase welfare through improved living standards, though here his disagreement seems to be merely about timescales. (It didn’t overall at first because many of the new cities and working environments were filthy and unsanitary, but it sure did in the long run.)

The author seems to approve considerably more of capitalism with Chinese characteristics, celebrating the undoubted improvement in living standards of many millions of people in China over the last few decades. He is also curiously happy to accept the official Chinese figures on Covid death rates in order to argue that the US and “liberal democracy” in general are not obviously superior systems.

Kennedy is convincing, though, in his emphasis on the way that disease can intersect and interact with social inequality, both globally – most sub-Saharan Africans remain unvaccinated for Sars-Cov-2, the rich countries having kept multiple doses for their own citizens – and within countries, where health outcomes are shockingly dependent on socioeconomic status. What is sometimes called “shit life syndrome” will harm you as surely as many infectious diseases, and “pathogens thrive on inequality and injustice”.

The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to So what will we do now? Perhaps, as Kennedy suggests, the recent, comparatively mild pandemic will cause us to rethink “how humans see their place in the world”, to stop creating super-pathogens with our incontinent use of antibiotics, and to realise that “if we Homo sapiens don’t strive to live in balance with the other living things on our planet, we face a very bleak future”. That, however, is a tall order, and not just politically. Bacteria alone make up an estimated 13% of the biomass of Earth, while humans represent a mere 0.01%. In the war against disease, we are massively outnumbered.

Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History is published by Torva. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Lunar New Year mass shooting

Driver found dead after authorities' breach van linked to Lunar New Year mass shooting

(Horrific Asian on Asian crime)

Police say this white van is connected to Saturday night’s mass shooting in Monterey Park. During a standoff Sunday in Torrance, the driver appears slumped over the wheel.

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

BY SUMMER LIN,

JEONG PARK, REBECCA ELLIS, RICHARD WINTON, LIBOR JANY , RONG-GONG LIN II, JULIA WICK, HAYLEY SMITH, DEBBIE TRUONG, GRACE TOOHEY 

L.A. Times

Authorities have breached a white van in Torrance that they believe is connected to the gunman who opened fire at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park on Saturday night, killing 10 people and injuring 10 others.

Just before 1 p.m. Sunday, a SWAT team swarmed the vehicle and smashed its windows in the parking lot of Tokyo Central, a Japanese grocery store near the southwest corner of Hawthorne and Sepulveda boulevards.

At least two bullet holes had been visible in the driver’s-side window in the moments prior to their approach, and the driver appeared to be slumped over the steering wheel. Multiple law enforcement sources told The Times that the driver had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna did not immediately confirm whether the individual in the van was the suspected shooter.

“Could it be our suspect? Possibly,” Luna said. “But at this point, if we’re doing our jobs correctly, we’re not only looking at that situation or scenario, but we’re making sure that we’re looking at any and every possibility.”

The Monterey Park shooting, about seven miles east of downtown Los Angeles, occurred on Lunar New Year’s Eve. Luna said it was too early to tell whether the festival was connected to the shooting.

Some witnesses described a white cargo van, which Luna said should be considered “a van of interest.”

An advisory from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department identified the suspect as an adult Asian man, about 5 foot, 10 inches and weighing 150 pounds. An image showed the man in a black leather jacket, beanie and glasses.

The mass shooting, one of California’s worst in recent memory, happened around 10:22 p.m. in the 100 block of West Garvey Avenue at Star Dance Studio.

“When officers arrived on scene, they observed numerous individuals, patrons ... pouring out of the location, screaming. The officers made entry to the location and located additional victims,” sheriff’s Capt. Andrew Meyer told reporters Sunday morning.

Firefighters pronounced 10 people dead at the scene, including five men and five women, Luna said. At least 10 others were taken to numerous hospitals, and their conditions range from stable to critical.

About 20 minutes after the shooting, a “male Asian suspect” with a firearm walked into another dance hall in the neighboring suburb of Alhambra, Luna said. “Some individuals wrestled the firearm from him, and that individual took off,” he said.

Law enforcement were on scene Sunday morning in Alhambra at the Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio in the 100 block of South Garfield Avenue, about two miles north of the Monterey Park shooting. It was not clear whether the police activity at that site was the incident referenced by authorities. A handmade sign affixed to the front doors said, “Closed, in observance to Star Dance Tragedy” in red marker.

Officials are still working to determine whether there is a connection between the two incidents.

Wong Wei, who lives near the scene of the shooting, had four friends who were at Star Dance Studio on Saturday night, including his sister. He had been invited to go with them but decided not to. Wei said one of his friends was injured in the shooting and was lying on the ground with blood on her face.

The gunman was holding a “long” gun and appeared to be firing indiscriminately, Wei was told. The “boss” of the studio, referred to as Ma, had also been shot and was on the floor.

“She said, ‘Certainly, he was dead. He wasn’t moving,’ ” Wei said. He wasn’t sure about the condition of his friend Sunday morning or whether she had been hospitalized.

Seung Won Choi, who owns a seafood barbecue restaurant on Garvey Avenue across from where the shooting happened, said three people rushed into his restaurant and told him to lock the door.

They said there was a man with a semiautomatic gun in the area. The shooter, they said, had multiple rounds of ammunition, so that once his ammunition ran out he reloaded, Choi said.

The shooting occurred near the site where tens of thousands had gathered Saturday for the start of a two-day Lunar New Year festival, one of the largest holiday events in the region.

Earlier in the day, crowds were enjoying skewers and shopping for Chinese food and jewelry. Saturday’s New Year festival hours were scheduled from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Monterey Park’s two-day Lunar New Year festival had been scheduled to conclude Sunday. But the day’s events are canceled “out of an abundance of caution and in reverence for the victims,” Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said.

The motive for the shooting remained under investigation, officials said, including as a possible hate crime or domestic violence incident.

“Everything is on the table,” Luna said. “Who walks into a dance hall and guns down 20 people?”

Hate crimes against Asian Americans in California increased 177.5% in 2021, according to the California Department of Justice.

Winn Liaw, 57, said she lives about two blocks from the studio and was in bed shortly before 11 p.m. on Saturday when she heard what sounded like firecrackers. She assumed they were part of a Lunar New Year celebration until she heard helicopters starting to circle over her neighborhood.

She woke up early Sunday to check out the set up for the Lunar New Year celebration that had been planned for later in the day when she learned about the shooting. Liaw said she is worried the shooting could have been motivated by anti-Chinese hate — a fear she said has been heightened by anti-Chinese rhetoric during the pandemic.

“This kind of thing doesn’t happen in my neighborhood,” she said, adding that she thought living in a mostly Asian community would insulate her from violence. “It’s starting to get worse and worse.”

John, who declined to give his last name, lives near the shooting site. The 27-year-old got home around 10 p.m. and heard four or five gunshots, he said. Then he heard police cruisers and “smashing” down the street. He went downstairs around 11:20 p.m. to see whether the shooting occurred at the festival.

“My first concern was I know they’re having a Lunar New Year celebration,” he said. But he said he saw that the festival had already been cleaned up for the day when he arrived. He went to the scene of the shooting and saw one person being put on a stretcher. Another person had a bandage on their arm.

Video on social media showed police and fire units swarming an area on Garvey Avenue and treating victims.

The violence left many in the area stunned.

Police say this is the shooter

Edwin Chen, a 47-year-old delivery dispatcher, rushed over from Woodland Hills to Monterey Park around 12:30 a.m. after hearing the news. Chen said he grew up in the area, and about a dozen of his relatives and friends live there.

He said he was saddened this happened just as the community was celebrating Lunar New Year.

“This is [supposed to be] a happy time,” he said. “I want to find out as much as possible. It’s still shocking.”

“Our hearts go out to those who lost loved ones tonight in our neighboring city, Monterey Park, where a mass shooting just occurred,” Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia, the first Asian American to hold citywide office in L.A., said on Twitter.

Monterey Park, a city of 61,000 in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles, is 65% Asian American, 27% Latino and 6% white, according to census data.

One of the anchor suburbs in the San Gabriel Valley, Monterey Park is a hub of Asian American supermarkets and restaurants.

The Star Ballroom Dance Studio sits behind a Chinese herbal store along West Garvey Avenue. International ballroom competitors teach waltz, tango and Chinese dance classes every day. The dance studio, which opened 30 years ago, offers party room rentals and karaoke happy hour as well.

On Saturday night, the studio listed an event between 8 and 11:30 p.m. as “Star Night, $10.”

Dance instructor David DuVal taught at the studio, most recently samba and tango on Thursday morning.

He said the studio has Saturday night parties and that a lot of people who attend are older. “60s would be young.”

“There’s definitely going to be people in their 70s, 80s, people in their 90s,” he said. “A lot of people I teach are older people. I have a feeling it could be one of them or people I know.”

DuVal said he learned what happened Saturday night over WeChat. He reached out to one of his students, who was there and hid under a table. His student said she saw a man with a “long firearm.” She doesn’t know what he looked like.

DuVal said there are couples who have been going there for a decade or more, many who are retired; some are in their 90s “and still dancing.”

“It’s old people dancing to music for fun. It’s their exercise,” he said.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted that President Biden had been briefed on the shooting. The tweet said Biden directed his Homeland Security advisor, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “to make sure that the FBI is providing full support to local authorities, and to update him regularly today as more details are known.”

The shooting is one of the worst in modern Los Angeles County history. One of the last mass shootings of this scale happened Christmas Eve in 2008, when a man dressed as Santa Claus entered a home in Covina, armed with five handguns. Nine people were killed in that rampage, including the gunman’s former wife and her parents. The gunman took his life hours later.

Other recent mass shootings in California include the massacre at a San Ysidro McDonald’s in 1984, where a gunman killed 21 people; and the terrorist attack that resulted in 14 deaths in San Bernardino in 2015.

In 2018, 12 people were killed during a mass shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks.

Saturday’s shooting comes five days after six people — including a 10-month old baby, his 16-year-old mother and a grandmother — were killed in the Central Valley farming community of Goshen in Tulare County.

“I hope we can make a determination as to whether this was a hate crime,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) said, describing the Lunar New Year as a time to celebrate with family. “This tore a hole through all of our hearts.”

‘You Don’t Negotiate With These Kinds of People’

‘You Don’t Negotiate With These Kinds of People’

Early in the morning on Jan. 7, Speaker Kevin McCarthy receives a congratulatory handshake from Representative George Santos.

Credit...

Mark Peterson for The New York Times

By Thomas B. Edsall NY TIMES

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

Over the past eight years, the Republican Party has been transformed from a generally staid institution representing the allure of low taxes, conservative social cultural policies and laissez-faire capitalism into a party of blatant chaos and disruption.

The shift has been evident in many ways — at the presidential level, as the party nominated Donald Trump not once but twice and has been offered the chance to do so a third time; in Trump’s — and Trump’s allies’ — attempt to overturn the 2020 election results; in his spearheading of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol; and most recently in the brutal series of votes from Jan. 3 to Jan. 7 in the House of Representatives, where 20 hard-right members held Kevin McCarthy hostage until he cried uncle and was finally elected speaker.

What drives the members of the Freedom Caucus, who have wielded the threat of dysfunction to gain a level of control within the House far in excess of their numbers? How has this group moved from the margins to the center of power in less than a decade?

Since its founding in 2015, this cadre has acquired a well-earned reputation for using high-risk tactics to bring down two House speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. During the five-day struggle over McCarthy’s potential speakership, similar pressure tactics wrested crucial agenda-setting authority from the Republican leadership in the House.

“You don’t negotiate with these kinds of people,” Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, declared as the saga unfolded. “These are legislative terrorists.”

“We have grifters in our midst,” Representative Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas, told the Texas Liberty Alliance PAC.

One of the key factors underlying the extremism among Republicans in the House and their election denialism — which has confounded American politics since it erupted in 2020 — is racial tension, not always explicit but nonetheless omnipresent, captured in part by the growing belief that white Americans will soon be in the minority.

As Jack Balkin of Yale Law School noted, “The defenders of the old order have every incentive to resist the emergence of a new regime until the bitter end.”

In his paper “Public Opinion Roots of Election Denialism,” published on Jan. 6, the second anniversary of the storming of the Capitol, Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at M.I.T., argues that “among Republicans, conspiracism has a potent effect on embracing election denialism, followed by racial resentment.”

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According to Stewart’s calculations, “a Republican at the 10th percentile of the conspiracism scale has a 55.7 percent probability of embracing election denialism, compared to a Republican at the 90th percentile, at 86.6 percent, over 30 points higher. A Republican at the 10th percentile on the racial resentment scale has a 59.4 percent probability of embracing denialism, compared to 83.2 percent for a Republican at the 90th percentile on the same scale.”

In other words, the two most powerful factors driving Republicans who continue to believe that Trump actually won the 2020 election are receptivity to conspiracy thinking and racial resentment.

“The most confirmed Republican denialists,” Stewart writes, “believe that large malevolent forces are at work in world events, racial minorities are given too much deference in society and America’s destiny is a Christian one.”

Along parallel lines, Neil Siegel, a law professor at Duke, argues in his 2021 article “The Trump Presidency, Racial Realignment and the Future of Constitutional Norms,” that Donald Trump “is more of an effect than a cause of larger racial and cultural changes in American society that are causing Republican voters and politicians to perceive an existential threat to their continued political and cultural power — and, relatedly, to deny the legitimacy of their political opponents.”

In this climate, Siegel continues, “It is very unlikely that Republican politicians will respect constitutional norms when they deem so much to be at stake in each election and significant governmental decision.”

These developments draw attention to some of the psychological factors driving politics and partisan competition.

In a 2020 paper, “Dark Necessities? Candidates’ Aversive Personality Traits and Negative Campaigning in the 2018 American Midterms,” Alessandro Nai and Jürgen Maier, political scientists at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany, argue that the role of subclinical “psychopathy” is significant in the behavior of a growing number of elected officials:

Psychopaths usually show “a cognitive bias towards perceiving hostile intent from others” and are impulsive, prone to callous social attitudes and show a strong proclivity for interpersonal antagonism. Individuals high in psychopathy do not possess the ability to recognize or accept the existence of antisocial behaviors and thus should be expected to more naturally adopt a more confrontational, antagonistic and aggressive style of political competition. Individuals high in psychopathy have been shown to have more successful trajectories in politics. They are furthermore often portrayed as risk-oriented agents. In this sense, we could expect individuals that score high in psychopathy to make a particularly strong use of attacks, regardless of the risk of backlash effects.

Narcissism, Nai and Maier continue,

has been shown to predict more successful political trajectories, also due to the prevalence of social dominance intrinsic in the trait. Narcissism is, furthermore, linked to overconfidence and deceit and hypercompetitiveness, which could explain why narcissists are more likely to engage in angry/aggressive behaviors and general incivility in their workplace. Narcissism is furthermore linked to reckless behavior and risk-taking and thus individuals high in this trait are expected to disregard the risk of backlash effects.

Nai and Maier also refer to a character trait they consider politically relevant, Machiavellianism, which they describe as having

an aggressive and malicious side. People high in Machiavellianism are “characterized by cynical and misanthropic beliefs, callousness, a striving for argentic goals (i.e., money, power and status) and the use of calculating and cunning manipulation tactics” and in general tend to display a malevolent behavior intended to “seek control over others.”

In an email, Nai argued that structural and ideological shifts have opened the door to “a greater tolerance and preference for political aggressiveness.” First, there is the rise of populism, which “strongly relies on a very aggressive stance against established elites, with a more aggressive style and rhetoric.”

“Populists,” Nai added, “are very peculiar political animals, happy to engage in more aggressive rhetoric to push the boundaries of normality. This helps them getting under the spotlight and explains why they seem to have a much greater visibility (and perhaps power) than they numerically should.”

Second, Nai contended that

a case can be made that contemporary politics is the realm of politicians with a harsh and uncompromising personality (callousness, narcissism and even Machiavellianism). Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, all share a rather “nasty” character, which seems indicative of a contemporary preference for uncompromising and aggressive leaders. Such political aggressiveness (populism, negativity, incivility, dark personality) is perfectly in character for a political system characterized with high polarization and extreme dislike for political opponents.

Other scholars emphasize the importance of partisan polarization, anti-elitism and the rise of social media in creating a political environment in which extremists can thrive.

“There are likely a few factors at play here,” Jay Van Bavel, a professor of psychology and neural science at N.Y.U., wrote by email. “The first is that ideologically extreme people tend to be more dogmatic — especially people who are on the far right.”

He cited a 2021 national survey that he and Elizabeth Harris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted that “found that conservatism and ideological extremity both contributed to an unwillingness to compromise.”

The members of the Freedom Caucus, Van Bavel noted,

tend to be ideologically extreme conservatives, which makes them very good candidates for this type of rigid and extreme thinking. We also found that politically extreme individuals were more likely to have a sense of belief superiority. These traits help explain why this group is very unwilling to cooperate or strike a political compromise.

Three years ago, I wrote a column for The Times about a segment of the electorate — and a faction of elected officials — driven by “a need for chaos,” based on the work of Michael Bang Petersen and Mathias Osmundsen, political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, and Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Sciences Po in Paris. Since then, the three, joined by Timothy B. Gravelle, Jason Reifler and Thomas J. Scotto, have updated their work in a 2021 paper, “Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn: The Prevalence, Psychology and Politics of the ‘Need for Chaos.’”

In their new paper, they argue:

Some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society, while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos seekers are not a unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents. Multiple pathways can lead individuals to “want to watch the world burn.”

The distinction between those seeking chaos to fulfill destructive impulses and those seeking chaos in order to rebuild the system is crucial, according to the authors:

The finding that thwarted status desires drive a need for chaos, which then activates support for political protest and violence, suggests that a need for chaos may be a key driver of societal change, both currently and historically. While some simply want to “watch the world burn,” others want to see a new world rebuilt from the ashes.

There are, the authors continue,

both nihilists and those who have a purpose. Nonetheless, owing to the destructive force of a high need for chaos, one of the key challenges of contemporary societies is indeed to meet, recognize and, to the extent possible, alleviate the frustrations of these individuals. The alternative is a trail of nihilistic destruction.

In a more recent paper, published last year, “The ‘Need for Chaos’ and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors,” Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux found that the need for chaos “is significantly higher among participants who readily take risks to obtain status and among participants who feel lonely.” At the extreme, the need surpasses partisanship: “For chaos-seekers, political sympathies toward political parties appear to matter little for sharing decisions; instead, what matters is that rumors can be used as an instrument to mobilize against the entire political establishment.”

The authors found that “the need for chaos is most strongly associated with worries about losing one’s own position in the social hierarchy and — to a lesser but still significant extent — the perception that one is personally being kept back from climbing the social status ladder,” noting that “white men react more aggressively than any other group to perceived status challenges.”

Van Bavel wrote by email that instead of focusing on a need for chaos, he believes “it might be simpler to assume that they are simply indifferent to chaos in the service of dogmatism. You see some of this on the far left — but we found that it simply doesn’t reach the same extremes as the far right.”

Van Bavel pointed to the structural aspects of the contemporary political system that reward the adoption of extreme stances:

In the immediate political context, where there is extremely high polarization driven by partisan animosity, there are strong social media incentives to take extreme stances and an unwillingness for moderate Republicans to break ranks and strike a compromise with Democrats. In this context, the Freedom Caucus can get away with dogmatic behavior without many serious consequences. Indeed, it might even benefit their national profile, election prospects and fund-raising success.

Along similar lines, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U., stressed

the rapid change in audience and incentives that social media has engineered for congresspeople. The case of Ted Cruz, caught checking his mentions as he sat down from giving a speech on the Senate floor, is illustrative. Why is he making himself so responsive to strangers on Twitter, rather than to his constituents or to his colleagues in the Senate?

Haidt wrote by email that he agrees with Yuval Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, that:

Social media has contributed to the conversion of our major institutions from formative (they shape character) to performative (they are platforms on which influencers can perform to please and grow their audiences). When we add in the “primary problem” — that few congressional races are competitive, so all that matters is the primary, which gives outsized influence to politically extreme voters — we have both a road into Congress for social media influencers and the ultimate platform for their performances.

Plus, Haidt added:

The influence economy may give them financial and career independence; once they are famous, they don’t need to please their party’s leadership. They’ll have opportunities for money and further influence even if they leave Congress.

Leanne ten Brinke, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, wrote by email:

My research on power and politics focuses on the role of psychopathic personality traits, which is characterized by callousness, manipulation/coercion, impulsivity and a desire for dominance. When people think of psychopathy they often think of criminals or serial killers, but these traits exist on a continuum, so people can be “high” in these traits without meeting any kind of clinical cutoff, and it will impact the way they move through the world. People with high levels of these traits tend to gravitate toward powerful roles in society to fulfill that desire for dominance and to bully others when in these roles.

Brinke noted that she has “no data on the personalities of those in the House Freedom Caucus,” but in “previous research we actually found that U.S. senators who display behaviors consistent with psychopathy were more likely to get elected (they are great competitors!) but are less likely to garner co-sponsors on their bills (they are terrible cooperators!).” In addition, Brinke continued, “they enjoy having power over others but don’t use it to make legislative progress. They tend to be more self-interested than other-interested.”

In a separate 2020 paper, “Light and Dark Trait Subtypes of Human Personality,” by Craig S. Neumann, Scott Barry Kaufman, David Bryce Yaden, Elizabeth Hyde, Eli Tsukayama and Brinke, the authors find:

The light subtype evidenced affiliative interpersonal functioning and greater trust in others, as well as higher life satisfaction and positive self-image. The dark subtype reflected interpersonal dominance, competitiveness and aggression. In both general population samples, the dark trait subtype was the least prevalent. However, in a third sample of U.S. senators (N =143), based on observational data, the dark subtype was most prevalent and associated with longer tenure in political office, though less legislative success.

In a separate 2019 paper, “The Light vs. Dark Triad of Personality: Contrasting Two Very Different Profiles of Human Nature,” Kaufman, Yaden, Hyde and Tsukayama wrote that dark personalities are “not associated with exclusively adverse and transgressive psychosocial outcomes” and may, instead, “be considered adaptive.”

Those with the more forbidding personal characteristics “showed positive correlations with a variety of variables that could facilitate one’s more agentic-related goals” and they “positively correlated with utilitarian moral judgment and creativity, bravery and leadership, as well as assertiveness, in addition to motives for power, achievement and self-enhancement.”

In contrast, more sunny and cooperative dispositions were “correlated with greater ‘reaction formation,’ which consisted of the following items: ‘If someone mugged me and stole my money, I’d rather he be helped than punished’ and ‘I often find myself being very nice to people who by all rights I should be angry at.’ While having such ‘loving kindness’ even for one’s enemies is conducive to one’s own well-being, these attitudes” could potentially make these people “more open to exploitation and emotional manipulation.”

In March 2022, Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U., warned in “Political Fragmentation in Democracies of the West”:

The decline of effective government throughout most Western democracies poses one of the greatest challenges democracy currently confronts. The importance of effective government receives too little attention in democratic and legal theory, yet the inability to deliver effective government can lead citizens to alienation, distrust and withdrawal from participation and, worse, to endorse authoritarian leaders who promise to cut through the dysfunctions of democratic governments.

For the Republican Party, the empowerment of the Freedom Caucus will face its first major test of viability this month. According to Janet Yellen, secretary of the Treasury, the United States will hit the $31.4 trillion statutory debt limit on Jan. 19. The Treasury, she continued, would then be forced to adopt stringent cash-management procedures that could put off default until June.

At the moment, House Republicans, under pressure from the Freedom Caucus, are demanding that legislation raising the debt ceiling be accompanied by sharp spending cuts. That puts them at loggerheads with the Biden administration and many members of the Senate Democratic majority, raising the possibility of a government shutdown.

In other words, the takeover of the Republican Party by politicians either participating in or acceding to tribalism and chaos has the clear potential in coming weeks to put the entire nation at risk.

Looking past the debt ceiling to the 2024 elections, Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at U.C.L.A., writes in the April 2022 Harvard Law Review:

The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules. The potential mechanisms by which election losers may be declared election winners are: (1) usurpation of voter choices for president by state legislatures purporting to exercise constitutional authority, possibly with the blessing of a partisan Supreme Court and the acquiescence of Republicans in Congress; (2) fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by law- or norm-breaking election officials; and (3) violent or disruptive private action that prevents voting, interferes with the counting of votes or interrupts the assumption of power by the actual winning candidate.

What, one has to ask, does this constant brinkmanship and playing to the gallery do to democracy generally?

The Steep Price of Beauty in Mauritania

Force-Feeding and Drug Abuse: The Steep Price of Beauty in Mauritania

Addie Esposito Harvard International Review

It’s for their own good…How will these poor girls find a husband if they’re bony and revolting?”

Elhacen, who force-feeds young girls for a living, takes pride in her work. “I’m very strict…I beat the girls, or torture them by squeezing a stick between their toes. I isolate them and tell them that thin women are inferior,” she says. This child cruelty is the horrific product of Mauritanian beauty standards, which idealize obese bodies. According to Elhacen, a woman’s job is “to make babies and be a soft, fleshy bed for her husband to lie on.” The force feeder even enjoys additional payments for stretch marks, hailed as a crowning achievement for any Mauritanian woman trying to gain weight.

This force-feeding practice is called “leblouh” or “gavage,” a French term that refers to “the process of fattening up geese to produce foie gras.” This dehumanization of girls and women extends far beyond semantics. Historically, Mauritania’s Moor population, which makes up two thirds of the country’s 3.1 million people, has viewed female obesity as a status symbol, with thinness being a sign that a woman’s husband could not afford to feed her. As a result, in order to display wealth, higher-income girls were fattened with milk to make them more desirable to potential suitors. Exemplifying this relationship between obesity and attractiveness, a Moor proverb asserts that “the woman occupies in her man’s heart the space she occupies in his bed.” By creating a direct relationship between weight and desirability, this beauty standard encourages extreme behavior.

Force-Feeding and Early Marriage of Young Girls

This extremity is evident in the abuse of young girls at the hands of force-feeders like Elhacen. Girls as young as five are sent to “fattening farms” to gorge on calorie-dense foods such as millet and camel milk. Force-feeding can also occur at home, often supervised by a girl’s mother. Activist Lemrabott Brahim describes how this mother-daughter dynamic perpetuates leblouh, explaining that the practice is “deeply-rooted in the minds and hearts of Mauritanian mothers, particularly in the remote areas.” Disciplined by their mothers or force-feeders, girls may be force-fed up to 16,000 calories daily, which can include up to five gallons of milk. Older female force-feeders or relatives who conduct the leblouh employ brutal tactics to keep their girls eating. For example, the “zayar” technique involves positioning a girl’s toe between two sticks and pinching it when she resists leblouh. The supervisor may also “pull her ear, pinch her inner thigh, bend her finger backward or force her to drink her own vomit,” and girls are further threatened with beatings if they do not finish their food. A 2013 study using survey data from 2000 found that “over 61% of those who had experienced gavage reported being beaten during the process and almost one-third (29%) reported having their fingers broken to encourage participation." In addition to these excruciating injuries, Mar Jubero Capdeferro of the U.N. Population Fund notes that leblouh is increasingly dangerous because some force-feeders have transitioned from using camel’s milk to force-feeding young girls “with chemicals used to fatten animals.”

In a 2018 Unreported World documentary, reporter Sahar Zand witnessed this cruelty firsthand, interacting with Mauritanian women to learn more about leblouh. She describes how girls are fattened during the rainy season, when food is more plentiful, gaining a targeted seven kilograms. According to Zand, about 25 percent of Mauritanian women endure leblouh, but the percentage could be as high as 75 percent in rural communities where women are especially vulnerable “because there are no distractions and no easy ways to escape.” Zand focuses on one particular group of rural nomads with two young girls undergoing leblouh. It takes them each two hours to finish a 3,000-calorie breakfast, followed by a 4,000-calorie lunch and a 2,000-calorie dinner. By the end of the feeding season, the girls will consume 16,000 calories every day. Zand tried the leblouh diet—after lunch, she could not continue, but the little girls were forced to keep eating. “It’s horrible,” she describes. A force feeder claimed that pushing her daughter through leblouh is an act of love. Trying to explain how mothers could inflict such “pain and torture” on their own daughters, Zand concludes: “This is a society where a woman’s biggest power is to be beautiful, and to be beautiful, you have to be fat.”

Zand could have easily re-phrased this statement as: “This is a society where a woman’s biggest power is to marry, and to marry, you have to be fat.” The 2013 study breaks down the centrality of child marriage to leblouh, for “the large size of these force-fed girls creates an illusion that they are physically mature and ready for marriage.” In creating this illusion, leblouh suppresses the marrying age of girls, perpetuating a child marriage crisis. Legally, Mauritanian women must be 18 years old to marry, but de facto, younger brides are common; a 2015 study concluded that “nearly one out of three girls aged between 15 and 19 gets married.” According to 2019 data, 37 percent of Mauritanian girls marry before age 18. Often, these young girls marry older men. One 29-year-old victim of child marriage began leblouh at age four, married at 12, and got pregnant at 13 “right after [her] first period.” These child marriages and pregnancies severely jeopardize the physical and mental health of the female Mauritanian population.

Long-Term Health Consequences of Leblouh

Even after marriage, women continue to suffer from extreme beauty expectations. Dr. Mohammed Ould Madene recalled a patient: “She was only 14, but so huge that her heart almost collapsed under the strain.” He worries about women’s risk of weight-related health problems such as diabetes and heart disease. Other long-term effects of obesity include hypertension, high cholesterol, stroke, osteoarthritis, poor mental health, decreased mobility, sleep apnea, and cancer. Due to leblouh, these national health concerns disproportionately impact women: as of 2016, 18.5 percent of Mauritanian women were obese, compared to only 6.6 percent of men.

These statistics are particularly alarming in the context of a global pandemic, for which obese individuals have higher “risks of hospitalization, intensive care unit admission admission, invasive mechanical ventilation, and death” from COVID-19. Considering barriers to healthcare access in Mauritania (the country has only 0.18 physicians for every 1000 citizens, compared to 2.59 physicians in the United States), obese Mauritanian adults are especially vulnerable to complications from the coronavirus. This additional risk underscores the fact that exacting beauty standards are severely limiting women’s health and lifestyle opportunities. One 26-year-old woman describes this dilemma: “I’m always tired, and I wheeze when I walk. I want to be slimmer so I can be more dynamic…I’d love to be able to wear jeans and high heels. I want to diet, but I’m scared men won’t like me anymore.” Her words exemplify the extreme pressures on women to sacrifice their mental and physical health to appease the male gaze, a practice especially detrimental during the COVID-19 crisis.

Medication Abuse and Black Market Drugs

However, obesity is not the only threat, for many women abuse medications and take black market drugs to become obese more quickly. These drugs include birth control, cortisone, and even livestock medications, such as “hormones used to fatten camels and chickens.” One 26-year-old woman, whose husband reportedly “didn’t like sleeping with a bag of bones,” has resorted to allergy drugs that peripherally boost weight gain at the risk of other complications. “I bought this one because the pharmacist told me it was the least dangerous,” she explained. These drugs are easy to purchase and not heavily regulated, which can—according to one pharmacist—be partially attributed to the profitability of black market drug sales to an eager female market. When Sahar Zand visited the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, she noted the openness and conspicuousness of these drug sales, remarking, “That was too easy. They weren’t even trying to hide it.” Such markets teem with feeders buying drugs for their girls and older women buying for themselves. Zand even met a family whose daughter died from taking weight-gain steroids, yet another daughter continues to take the same steroid. Dr. Madene’s words effectively summarize the crisis: Mauritania’s beauty standards are “a grave matter of public health.”

Backsliding After the 2008 Military Coup

Recent political events offer some insight into this crisis. By 2007, the obesity obsession appeared to be improving—the Mauritanian government was trying to bolster national public health and raise awareness surrounding the dangers of obesity. The New York Times even joked: “Until lately, a Mauritanian woman in jogging shoes was about as common as a camel in stiletto heels.” Beauty standards were evolving, and increasingly health-conscious. However, the murder of French tourists by al-Qaeda in 2007 resulted in fewer foreign visitors to Mauritania, and after a military coup in 2008 that ousted the democratic regime, the incoming junta began to revive traditional values under the leadership of General Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz. Aminetou Moctar, leader of the activist group Women Heads of Households, bitterly remarked, “The authorities want women to return to their traditional roles—cooking, staying indoors, and staying fat to keep men happy.” Aminetou Mint Ely, a member of the same organization, expressed similar sentiments:

"We have gone backwards. We had a Ministry of Women's Affairs. We had achieved a parliamentary quota of 20 percent of seats. We had female diplomats and governors. The military [has] set us back by decades, sending us back to our traditional roles. We no longer even have a ministry to talk to."

The government’s unraveling of cultural progress helps explain why Mauritanian law still fails to hold the perpetrators of leblouh accountable. Fatimata M’baye, a lawyer for children’s rights, laments: “I have never managed to bring a case in [defense] of a force-fed child. The politicians are scared of questioning their own traditions.” Therefore, the government actively perpetuates the brutal subjection of girls to leblouh, child marriages, and continuous pressures to fatten themselves.

Paths for Progress

However, amidst this regression, there is hope for progress. The success of pre-coup awareness campaigns indicates that Mauritanian women are open to prioritizing health and loosening the hold of beauty standards. After the government began to educate citizens about ethical treatment of children and physical health in 2003, rates of leblouh began to decline. Kajwan Zuhour, who worked in a female-only gym in Nouakchott, noticed more and more customers by 2009: “Women don't want to be fat anymore, they want to be thin,” she said. This changed outlook emerged from the work of women like Yeserha Mint Mohamed Mahmoud, who was involved in government information programs. She described how many women were unaware of leblouh’s extreme health risks: “The diet here is very rich—they eat couscous, pure lard…[and] don't know this food is fattening, so we explain to the women what to eat every day, so they don't put on weight and they can protect themselves from diseases.'' This observation indicates that future information campaigns must be multifaceted to cover various demographics; some women deliberately feed themselves—and force-feed young girls—fattening food to gain weight, while other women unknowingly consume similar foods. Perhaps, this difference can be partially explained by an urban-rural divide, in which rural women are more familiar with leblouh and the foods most conducive to weight gain. Although this variation underscores the need for additional specialized information campaigns, sweeping, nation-wide efforts to boost awareness of leblouh’s adverse health effects are still worthwhile. Aminetou Mint Ely of the Association of Women Heads of Households remarked that “the government even commissioned ballads condemning fattening,” demonstrating the creative extent of its efforts.

Since the new military junta began dismantling and reversing these governmental programs, the role of private sector organizations has become increasingly important. For example, May Mint Haidy founded an NGO to promote healthier habits among Mauritanian women: “We have carried out a campaign to convince these women to give up the habit of forced feeding. The reason we as an NGO are trying to spread the message is because this forced feeding can lead to dangerous diseases like heart attacks, blood diseases.” These messages are important to ensure adult women do not jeopardize their own health or that of their young daughters. With this mission in mind, NGOs can revive and build upon the work of prior governmental campaigns, counteracting traditional rhetoric glorifying obesity. They should also work to “empower women economically and politically, especially in rural areas, and…reduce illiteracy,” which would further promote physical and mental health. The primary motivations for leblouh and the consumption of weight-gain drugs are early marriage and male validation. If women feel secure and capable in their own right, they would be less likely to sacrifice their health for others. Empowerment and improved literacy would also battle child marriage, arm women against misogynistic government rhetoric, enable them to pursue careers, and help them not only avoid self-destructive practices, but actively take charge of their well-being.

In order to ensure that such efforts reach women in rural areas—a problem noted by Aminetou Mint Ely, May Mint Haidy, and Yeserha Mint Mohamed Mahmoud—larger NGOs will likely need to partner with local community groups and “traditional information sources.” Immediately before the coup in 2007, Haidy told the New York Times that only about 25 percent of Mauritanian women watched TV and even fewer tuned into radio programs; since this statistic aggregated all women across the country, it suggests that the rate of media consumption is even lower for women in rural areas. Given these limitations, NGOs should also consider forging connections with religious leaders, expanding the role of mosques to encompass both worship and education.

After all, many imams have already demonstrated their commitment to uplifting women and children through existing media channels. For example, the Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend project (SWEDD)—which spans multiple African nations including Mauritania, Mali, and Niger—combats child marriage and uplifts women through radio. If imams involved in such efforts could spread these positive messages to rural mosques, ideally partnering with local religious leaders, women without access to radio could be empowered as well. Hademine Saleck Ely, an imam in the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott and a member of SWEDD, powerfully articulates Islam’s moral repudiation of practices that harm women: “Islam is a religion that honours human beings. Any action that harms an individual's physical or mental health is therefore forbidden.” Given this support, local community religious leaders may be critical in the fight to ensure messages about the dangers of leblouh reach women across Mauritania.

Mauritania’s beauty standards—manifesting in the force-feeding of young girls, child marriage, and the abuse of weight gain medications—are centuries-old. However, they are not immune to change. Information campaigns about healthy habits, the many dangers of force-feeding, and child advocacy are promising avenues for progress, especially with the assistance of religious leaders to spread positive messages in rural areas. Additional initiatives to empower women and increase literacy would help dismantle patriarchal gender relations and foster female independence. The tenacious advocacy of women such as Aminetou Mint Ely and May Mint Haidy prove that such solutions are entirely possible. With their help, the health and beauty of Mauritanian women can cease to be mutually exclusive.