The concept of dislocation of meaning is not a metaphor; it is a wound. It describes what happens when the original context of violence is stripped from the survivor’s story, and her suffering is reinterpreted through a lens that erases its historical, political, and relational origins. For survivors of war rape, this dislocation is not simply intellectual. It is felt in the body, in the rupture of narrative, in the silence of community, and in the failure of systems that should have protected, believed, and honoured them.
At its core, dislocation of meaning refers to the severing of trauma from its source. It is the process by which a politically inflicted wound becomes privatized, a structural failure is redefined as personal pathology, and the survivor’s testimony is translated into symptoms. In this act of dislocation, the survivor is not only forced to carry the pain of the trauma
but also the burden of interpretation. She must speak in diagnostic codes. She must express her suffering in the language of affect regulation and cognitive restructuring. She must make herself legible to a therapeutic system that was never designed to understand the geopolitical horror written into her skin.
This is especially true when trauma occurs in the context of militarized sexual violence, occupation, or genocide. War rape is not merely an act of interpersonal cruelty; it is a strategy. It is a form of warfare, a mechanism of colonial domination, a tool for erasing identity, kinship, and future generations. When this is later described as “a traumatic event” leading to PTSD, the meaning is violently dislocated. The violence is made private. The community’s betrayal is ignored. The state's complicity is omitted. The world is allowed to move on.
Judith Herman (1992) spoke of trauma as a disruption in narrative coherence. But dislocation of meaning goes further: it is the deliberate replacement of one narrative with another of political violence with medical dysfunction, of collective harm with individual disorder. It is a form of epistemic violence, a term scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Veena Das have used to describe what happens when dominant knowledge systems erase the voices and lived truths of the oppressed. In this sense, PTSD is not only a diagnosis—it is an act of mistranslation. This dislocation becomes institutionalized through trauma therapy that insists on symptoms but not systems, on safety but not truth. The therapist may offer grounding exercises, but not the space to speak of the soldiers who raped the survivor in front of her children. She may be invited to regulate her nervous system, but not to name the betrayal of her community, the silence of her church, the exile from her home. Her trauma becomes something to be treated, not something to be heard, remembered, and witnessed.
This is what WRSS radically restores: the relocation of meaning. War Rape Survivors Syndrome does not pathologize the survivor’s grief, rage, or dissociation—it situates them. It places her responses back in the context from which they were torn: the battlefield, the refugee camp, the ethnic cleansing, the failed asylum system, the inherited silence of generations. It sees the trauma not as a disorder, but as a testimony, not as a deviation from normalcy, but as a coherent response to structural rupture. In WRSS, dislocation of meaning is not just a theoretical concept—it is the foundation of trauma itself. Because when trauma cannot be located—when its causes are denied, its agents unnamed, its aftereffects privatized,it cannot be healed. The survivor becomes trapped not just in memory, but in misinterpretation. And there is no deeper violence than to be wounded by the world and then told that your wound is yours alone. To heal, then, is not only to reduce symptoms. It is to re-anchor the story. It is to return meaning to the body, to the family, to the archive. It is to say: this happened, not just to me, but through a system that must be named. It is to say: I am not broken, I was broken open by history, and I carry the truth of it in me.
In this way, reversing the dislocation of meaning becomes the most urgent and ethical task of trauma work. Not just for the survivor, but for the society that silenced her. Not just for the therapist, but for the field that has, for too long, confused pathology with truth.
Trauma-informed therapy, while often built on compassionate intentions, consistently fails survivors of war-related sexual violence when it individualizes their suffering and strips it of its political, historical, and collective dimensions. Particularly for those violated during war, occupation, ethnic cleansing, or state-sanctioned terror, the act of rape is not simply personal; it is profoundly political. It is an assault not only on the body, but on lineage, community, sovereignty, and memory.
And yet, trauma therapy, especially in its mainstream Western clinical form, continues to frame such experiences as disorders within the individual. Survivors are offered therapeutic models that emphasize emotional regulation, verbal disclosure, and symptom reduction. They are asked to process, to adapt, to "move on." But rarely are they invited to name the betrayal: of the state, of militarized masculinities, of systems that failed to protect and later failed to remember. This exclusion of the political creates not just a clinical shortcoming—it constitutes an ethical rupture. It mirrors what Frantz Fanon (1963) described as the colonial logic of psychiatry: a system that seeks to treat the wounds of the colonized without acknowledging the colonial regimes that inflicted them.
By medicalizing trauma through the lens of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), survivors of war rape are forced to carry their pain alone. The language of PTSD reduces their experiences to a clinical taxonomy: intrusive thoughts, avoidance, and hypervigilance. It pathologizes what are, in fact, morally and politically coherent responses to dehumanization. The diagnosis says nothing of the systemic violence—the ethnic cleansing, the weaponized rape, the betrayal by families or religious institutions, the bureaucratic abandonment. It is not the state or society that is rendered ill, but the woman herself.
This is what War Rape Survivors Syndrome (WRSS) identifies as a dislocation of meaning. The survivor’s agony is severed from its origins, transposed from a world of political betrayal and historical memory into a sterile domain of psychological symptoms. The rape is made invisible, even as the survivor’s body becomes hyper-visible as a patient, a case, a disorder. The therapist may listen, but the world around the survivor remains unchanged. The war ends, peacekeepers withdraw, transitional justice fails, but she remains diagnosed, categorized, and explained.
This dislocation of meaning is not accidental. It is a feature of how dominant psychological discourse preserves the status quo. It allows societies to acknowledge the existence of trauma while disavowing the structures that caused it. It produces what Summerfield (1999) called the humanitarian language of “trauma universalism”—a flattening of suffering that allows institutions to claim benevolence without grappling with their complicity.
Survivors often experience this disconnect somatically. They may enter therapy and feel the weight of being misunderstood—not because they are resistant, but because the clinical space does not accommodate their truth. They may reject the PTSD label not from ignorance, but from clarity: because it implies that their suffering is internal, individual, irrational—when it is in fact communal, political, and entirely sane. They may feel that therapy expects closure when their world is still fractured, that it wants coherence when their trauma is rooted in silence, exile, and a collapse of meaning. This is why individual therapy fails as the sole response to war rape. It isolates what was inflicted communally; it privatizes what was meant to terrorize publicly; it treats the survivor as a site of repair while the system remains untouched. This is not healing; it is containment. And it is precisely this containment that WRSS challenges. War Rape Survivors Syndrome, developed by Dr. Rebecka, is not a psychiatric label; it is a social indictment. It insists that the survivor’s body is not a symptom of pathology but a living archive of state failure, colonial history, and patriarchal dominance. WRSS repositions trauma not as an internal malfunction, but as a witness to the disorder of the world. Dissociation, rage, infertility trauma, broken attachment, narrative silence—these are not merely clinical symptoms. They are embodied testimonies of ancestral grief, interrupted belonging, and systemic abandonment.
WRSS offers an entirely different framework. It does not seek to reduce pain to fit a treatment plan. Instead, it restores meaning. It affirms that what is commonly called “disorder” in the survivor is often an intelligent response to profound betrayal. WRSS honours silence not as avoidance but as an encrypted truth. It does not pathologize fragmentation; it reads it as a relational wound that needs recognition, not regulation.
Where PTSD asks: “What’s wrong with you?” WRSS asks: “What happened to you and what continues to be erased?”
Where therapy seeks closure, WRSS embraces the unfinishedness of trauma.
Where therapy asks for coping, WRSS asks for collective witnessing. To treat war rape with individualized therapy alone is to abandon the survivor once again—this time behind the walls of diagnosis. The ethical task before us is not simply to treat trauma, but to re-situate it. To hold the survivor’s pain not in isolation, but in relation: to history, to community, to justice. Only then can meaning be restored. Only then can therapy become not an act of adaptation, but an act of resistance and repair.