Good morning everyone. My name is Colette Roush. I'm a senior advisor here at the United States Institute of Peace and welcome to our building and on this beautiful Tuesday morning where the sun has finally appeared after many days of rain and we're in a great room in order to enjoy that great weather. So I know it's tempting to kind of look out there but we have a very interesting group of presenters speakers this morning and I'm going to give just a few introductory remarks and then turn it over to them. And also I'd like to invite all of you who are watching on the webcast to join by Twitter. It's hashtag reintegrating extremists. Also I'd mentioned earlier on each of the seats is a piece of paper. So feel free if you have any questions throughout the the event just jot it down and there'll be people throughout around on the sides and you can pass it to them and for the Q&A afterwards we will be able to take questions. Also if you're watching through the webcast feel free to post your question by Twitter. Again it's hashtag reintegrating extremists and we have folks will be jotting down the questions that are put forward on Twitter. Since 2013 it is estimated that 40,000 people from over 100 countries have traveled to fight with ISIS and many thousands are expected to return home or to a third country. Additionally groups such as Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria have recruited fighters locally as well as regionally and in some cases internationally and a portion of those members will be returning to communities their own or other communities. As a former prosecutor I will say that prosecution and incarceration are often the best options available without question. However what we are talking about today is when it's not available effective in order to prevent violence. What other tools do we have when prosecution is not effective and doesn't get to the goal of preventing violence and building the the social fabric of the communities. Also a criminal justice approach alone in a vacuum can be problematic. Some studies estimate that 25% of people who traveled to live with ISIS are women and children. Countless more children have been born into the conflict. Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab have relied on kidnapping and recruiting children to fill its ranks. Difficulties exist in gathering evidence from foreign battlefields in a way that upholds judicial standards and meets international human rights standards. Nigeria began trying thousands of detained Boko Haram suspects in October 2017 and hundreds have already been acquitted or discharged without trial and returned to communities. And even when convictions are won prisoners are eventually released. In Indonesia, Western Europe and the US hundreds of people convicted of terrorist-related offenses are scheduled for release from prisons over the next several years. There is an emerging imperative for governments and societies to prepare individuals to disengage from extremist violence for reintegrating into society and to prepare local communities to receive and integrate them. Often individuals who are returning into their communities often enter the same ecosystems that facilitated violent radicalization. They will require significant psychosocial and other support. Regardless of whether they were victims or fighters, rehabilitation and reintegration for people who are disengaging from extremist violence present two broad challenges for preventing encountering violent extremism. Specifically addressing trauma and reducing stigma as barriers to pro-social community engagement and our speakers who are experts in these areas and have very concrete recommendations will go into more detail on those facets. They will talk about the role of trauma, personal conflict, and collective that can be profound. They will talk about the role of stigma, self, family, community and structural, and how addressing trauma and reducing stigma are keys to social healing and shifting identities away from those steeped in violence. There is increasing consensus on the urgency of systematic rehabilitation and reintegration programs. Concrete propositions, though, of what those mechanisms might look like and how they might operate has definitely been elusive. And his forthcoming report from the counter-extremism project, when terrorists come home, the need for rehabilitating and reintegrating America's convicted jihadist, Jesse Morton, offers just that. Since 2017, USIP has maintained a focus on reintegration imperative for people exiting violent extremist conflicts. These have included a 2017 special report returning foreign fighters and their reintegration imperative, a 2017 peace brief on de-radicalization, rehabilitating and reintegrating violent extremists, a 2018 global counter-terrorism, good practices on addressing the challenges of returning families of foreign terrorist fighters, because we're not just talking about fighters, we're talking also about the families who are impacted greatly through their experiences in the conflict. We are excited to push this vision forward as we move toward narrowing our focus to addressing trauma and reducing stigma to foster social healing, enable rehabilitation, and ease reintegration for people disengaging from extremist violence. Additionally, this year we started a project that focuses on the nexus of neuroscience and peace building, and will result in a number of practical tools, including a book. Specifically, it seeks to understand not only what drives individuals and societies to use violence to resolve conflict, but also, very importantly, what encourages people to turn from violence to peace and looking at what the field of neuroscience and neuroscientists have to tell us on that topic. It is now my pleasure to turn to our first speaker, Jesse Morton. Jesse is founder and co-director of Parallel Networks, and co-author of the forthcoming report that I just mentioned, When Terrorists Come Home, The Need for Rehabilitating and Reintegrating America's Convicted Jihadists. Jesse. Hello, good morning. I think I'll remain sitting, if you don't mind. I think in order to kick off the conversation today, I would like to share my own personal trajectory, very briefly, my trek into, predominantly, my trek out of violent extremism, what we're doing now, and how I've come to realize the role that trauma plays. I want to start by saying and suggesting I thought I de-radicalized, and it was a cognitive process. I denounced an ideology while I was in prison. I had an opportunity to eradicate the black and white worldview that drives extremism at the back end, and then I had to slip in a fall as I became America's first public former jihadist, because I never addressed the trauma. And the person that has been kind enough to help me address the trauma is sitting on the right, so I'll then pass the conversation over to him so that he can talk about a little bit about how we work together individually, and bring it more to a collective level with regard to talking about the ecosystemic approach that I think needs to be incorporated into a better understanding of how you address trauma at a community level, while at the same time addressing the issues at an individual level that are associated with people that are coming home, predominantly foreign fighters who certainly have seen and been traumatized through what they've experienced with regard to ISIS's situation, but also around the world where extremism is becoming an increasing problem, and even more so increasingly here in North America and Western Europe. So these are issues that we've been dealing with, conflict resolution in the international arena, but I think we've learned a lot, particularly in the peace-building community that needs to be applied to countering violent extremism in general, with regard to how you address the environment in which extremism occurs simultaneously to addressing specific CVE-oriented programs that do things like provide intervention, re-entry, and rehabilitation for individuals coming home from prison with violent extremist defenses, and also foreign fighters that are returning from areas of conflict. So my name is Jesse Morton, but I used to be known as Yunus of Dogh Mohamed. I converted to Islam at about 19, and because before that I was very much revolutionary in my identity, largely as a consequence of abuse and trauma as a child, I found Islam as an outlet to provide me stability where there was none, and that was a healthy component of my adoption of a new faith and identity. But on the other end was the stuff that I never recognized was the fact that I chose an interpretation of Islam that was revolutionary and sympathetic to terrorists, not because I made an objective and a rational decision and processed all of that, but because my traumatized brain was predisposed to accept the black and the white worldview and interpretation, because we were embarking on, in a context of the war on terror, which I think was a very counterproductive paradigm, where we ourselves in general, as a society, adopted the same us versus them worldview of the terrorists, right? So you're either with us or you're with the terrorist, Osama Bin Laden sits on a hill with Taisi Araluni from Al Jazeera and says, Bush is correct, we accept this, let's go to war. So me as an individual who's living in America, who feels like America did not intervene, I was abused as a child rather significantly. We're talking burns, we're talking bites, we're not talking spankings, and I ran away when I was 16 years old and I worked for an identity. I first embarked upon an interest of Islam by reading the autobiography of Malcolm X, and to make a long story short, I adopted an interpretation of Islam that was much more in line with Malcolm X than it was with the Prophet Muhammad. So I went on to become a very prominent recruiter. I was always articulate, I started preaching on 125th Street in Harlem so that I had an ability to convey a message and to get people to convert Islam, but also to get them to adopt an anti-war position. And then I found a community of people that were aligned with the jihadist ideology that took me to the next level because I was then around people where I was socialized. I entered an echo chamber of sorts where my own beliefs were reaffirmed and then all of the social psychological processes that are associated with trying to prove to other people in that network that you were more willing to sacrifice for the cause started to unfold. I went on to start my own website, worked with a prominent preacher that was incarcerated when I first started preaching and came home having radicalized people like Jermaine Lindsay, one of the suicide bombers of the 777 attacks 2005 in Britain. We disseminated an ideology in America where at first they laughed at us because they said that the demographics of the American Muslim community was quite distinct in that they had attained a higher level of education, a higher level of income, and they were better reintegrated. This ideology affects people of all backgrounds. It's not the same way that we think of people being vulnerable and susceptible and being brainwashed by a recruiter. It attracts itself to many people that are frustrated and feel like society whether they're immigrants, refugees or whatnot. It's very attractive to people of all backgrounds. If you really look at the demographics there's no statistical significance and difference between people that join Al Qaeda or ISIS with mental health with other variables, income, education. It's very important that we recognize that. I myself graduated from Columbia University with a degree in international affairs while I was preaching and disseminating a message. My organization was called Revolution Muslim. We set a template upon which ISIS's propaganda stands today and has built. First it was taken to the Middle East by the migration of Sameer Khan who was a prominent radicalizer. He joined Admiral Aldaqi who was involved in almost every case into today because of the legacy of being killed by a drone. But what he did was he took a template that we established in the United States, English language magazines for jihadists. And when we started them we disseminated an ideology because we could only say but so much here wouldn't Sameer moved. He could talk about things like how to build a bomb in mom's kitchen, a recipe that's been utilized in several attacks. My organization was connected to 15 different terror plots. We were the first jihadist organization in the United States and in the West English speaking world to utilize or to tap into social media 2.0. We used clandestine platforms in the same way that ISIS is now using telegram and we really set a template upon which a lot of the propaganda models are set today. I was arrested in 2011 after setting, after threatening the writers of South Park for portraying the Prophet Muhammad in a cartoon and I ran to Morocco. I was ultimately spent about a year in Morocco before I was picked up on a street in Casablanca coming out of a Salafi jihadi mosque. During my time in Morocco I lived there in the context in the environment of the Arab Spring which was a period of I think the whole world was shocked. But as I taught people GRE so that they could travel to the West to get an education that would make them feel as if they were liberated. I had to have conversations about what the millennial youth in Morocco wanted and they were absolutely amazing with regard to wanting just the simple things that I had taken for granted. I was removed from the network to some degree. I had contact with other people in a context that was pro-democracy, pro-human rights and just want an opportunity to speak their mind, to read real press, to make decisions about the people that were going to govern them and plan a seat of doubt with regard to where I was at. I was ultimately arrested regardless because I had committed a crime and I was held in Morocco for five months in prison where I met Mohammed Fizazi who's a very prominent jihadist preacher in Morocco for a long time. We had translated his lectures and he had been incarcerated after some bombings in Casablanca as the ideologue that had incited them and for five months I walked that prison yard on a daily basis with him and he never talked to me about ideology at all. He talked to me about life and as an elder what he had been through. Then the United States government picked me up in a private plane to fly me back to Alexandria Virginia and on that ride what happened was they dressed me as if I was going to go to Guantanamo Bay, the orange jumpsuit we've all seen, the shackles on the legs, the plugs in the ears, the blinders on the eyes. I figured I was going to a clandestine CIA prison to get tortured but when they put me on the plane they put the Quran in front of my table. They took off the blinders, they took off the earpieces and they said do you want to be called Jesse Morton or Eunice Abdullah Mohammed? And I had killed Jesse Morton but in the process of being in Morocco I said I want to be called Jesse Morton and I shocked me.  I thought I was failing the test that they told me we're going to go through when you were on the hook, when you're on the truth. I went back to solitary confinement where they held me because I could have been a threat to radicalize other inmates and I was supposed to spend 23 hours a day in a cell but a kind and empathetic guard took me to the library for her entire 10-hour shift four days a week where I was able to access because Alexandria is a relatively affluent community I had access to good books. I just emphasize this they're important. I read in psychopedia Britannica's great books of the western world and I tapped into Enlightenment philosophers something I had read before but rejected right and I'm reading John Locke, Rousseau, Descartes but I'm going back to the cell and I'm rereading Quran and I'm rereading Hadith because that's all I haven't and I start to find myself for the first time not sitting under the feet of the scholar and memorizing Islam but thinking about Islam for myself and a whole new avenue of spirituality opened up for me. I applied guilty to the crime I was capped at 15 years for sentencing and then I proceeded to interact with the FBI because you have to do a debriefing process and in the process of that there was a kind and empathetic FBI agent who was a female and over time she started to see that I had changed I never told them. Somebody told me about a plot that was still going on on the outside and I betrayed the Muslim Ummah and told as a Jesus as a spy which made me an apostate when I went back to the cell after doing that I felt completely relieved continued to cooperate with the government I was originally sentenced to 11 and a half years and after several of my students ended up joining ISIS and we ended up being able to track them and make sure that Americans did not get hurt. I was released on March 1st 2015 early I only did three and a half years a judge reduced my sentence and so I was released without having been provided any de-radicalization initiative in prison without having any understanding of nuanced understanding of the ideology that exists and is prominent in prison and how those things work to retain a rote memorization and literalist interpretation for individuals that are typically not interested in jihadism but can be radicalized by literalism because they are predominantly people from low income socioeconomically disadvantaged communities that find Islam in prison in order to join a gang for Islam and then go home and completely go back to the same behavior because they have not been exposed to an alternative form and because the Bureau of Prisons does not necessarily identify this as an issue because it is considered a quietist apolitical form of Saudi Arabian Islam that is predominant so I wasn't prepared I had no mental health counseling I wasn't even aware that I needed mental health treatment that was the last thing in my mind it was like yeah I got issues but you got to be strong so I came home and I worked with the FBI and then we worked a case where there was going to be a beheading in Woodbridge, Virginia and I had been able to re-establish myself as I told the FBI when I was released earlier they thought that everybody would know I had spied or whatnot and I told them there's nobody in this community of jihadism that would ever think the units of Duhla Muhammad would de-radicalize and we were able to get me back active in the field when people reached out to me from a local mosque and I worked one case I was working as an analyst at the FBI and then in the courtroom a activist lawyer at a preliminary hearing suggested that the United States is working with a former radical gave my name the judge struck it from the record the US Attorney said you can't tell that from the indictment judge told him that if he continued on about this he was going to put him where his client was put a Washington Post reporter ran with the story and exposed me as an informant and I was quite comfortable I was re-acclimating to some degree I couldn't get a job I couldn't get employment everywhere I went I was a pariah and extremist when people would see my case they would run the other direction I got divorced I got into a relationship with an alcoholic I myself drank for the first time in 14 years and then started a process of first being able to handle it I thought because I had come back to liberalism drinking was fine but I forgot that before I was a radical I was an addict and it was only adoption of a radical ideology that took me out of addiction but it was another form of addiction so after I was outed in the Washington Post I had the desire inside of myself to become America's first former jihadist I had seen many of them particularly in Britain though I didn't agree with some of the things they were saying I saw it as a value to society to be a former I started to navigate and look for connections that would make me America's first former jihadist and I went public in August employed at a think tank here in DC University at one of the most prominent think tanks in extremism field and on the first day I was released to the media I was on the front page of the New York Times I was on PBS news hour and then in the evening I was on CNN I had told reporters the trajectory of my life you know they do like three hours of interviews and then they turned it into an eight-minute piece one of the things I didn't I didn't know was going to come out was the fact that I was abused as a child I had never told anybody in my life what I had gone through and I had felt so comfortable around Rookmini Katamachi she's a reporter for the New York Times it's just you want to tell you know how there's people that you just want to spill your guts to and I told her everything and it was in the piece they even fact checked the abuse with my sister and my mother and she hung the phone up on them but it was enough to put it in the story so I got an email after that first day of media and then I proceeded to do media every day incessantly around the world got an email from my mother fuck you happy interviewing at all caps and it's okay but what I didn't realize was that that physiological reaction that put my story out there and I was alone at that point I left the alcoholic and moved into my own space the day I went public because I saw the rage about her seeing that I was gaining independence so I had to move out low and behold several months later I relapsed on drugs and alcohol when I was about to go home to see my family for Thanksgiving I sat in my car and I tried to go home and I sat there and I couldn't do it and I sent him a piece of shit and I ran to the ghetto what I know and relapsed on cocaine and ultimately lost everything I had built up and thought it was over I was able to recognize when I violated my probation and I was incarcerated that I needed to go deeper that my deradicalization was only cognitive it had absolutely nothing to do with the root causes because every issue that I had that extremist Islam answered for me every grievance that I found was rather a projection of my own pain my own frustration with my society it was internal projection outward of a resentment against people predominantly my mother but then the community that didn't protect me and then the society that didn't see that people that were traumatized and hurt had to have outlets and oftentimes find extremism when there's no compassion and there's occupation as opposed to other alternatives so regardless this is Dr. James Gordon and Dr. Gordon and I met when I was active at George Washington University and I remember telling him my life story around the table with his wonderful colleague Elizabeth and I felt so comfortable around Elizabeth we had interacted at the United Nations event and at the end we talked about the potential of doing things together talked about some of the things I had in mind to do and remember I cried and I said to Dr. Gordon I need to treat my trauma first I never got a chance to do it he was kind enough to keep in contact with me even after I fell apart whereas most people ran the other direction and denounced me as an embarrassment talk about stigmatization Dr. Gordon has been treating me ever since and he has a very different model for treating trauma for decades he's been talking you know about body mind medicine whereas I think we have a knee-jerk reaction to put people on medication particularly in this country and then call it psychotherapy when we let them check in to get their refilled prescription Dr. Gordon's been addressing things for many years from a holistic way in a holistic way and so I will now having shared personal experiences we can come back to some of the things that we're doing in the paper if we want to I think it was most important for me to start with that personal narrative and then be able to pass it over to Dr. Gordon to talk about the unique way he addresses trauma and how it might apply to this phenomenon which I don't think we're looking at one final thing I want to point out because most people are familiar with the peace building space here is that when we talk about countering violent extremism it's a deficit based approach the way that we look at it and what we know from the social sciences is that deficit based approaches can work but typically if they're not coincided to an asset based approach that promotes empowerment at a localized level then we're going to have problems peace building knows that when you have polarization in a community particularly when it leads to war that only dialogue with the other and getting people to sit down on a table and talk so we live in a context even domestically now as we resemble more and more developing country with regard to the variables of inequality and wealth corrupt government etc etc we take for granted the liberal world order I'm not so sure we should at this point right and peace building knows that conflict resolution needs to be addressed in a different holistic way so Dr. Gordon has worked with collectives and he's worked with individuals and I'll pass it on now hoping that that's a good bridge into him sharing what he does thank you thank you very much Jesse for sharing your lived experience and the wisdom from that and your story thank you so much now I will turn to Dr. James Gordon founder and executive director of the Center for Mind and Body Medicine Dr. Gordon thank you very much and thank you Jesse I'm always or once again touched to hear you and feel you and hear your story because what you what you're illustrating by your being is the complexity and ordinary humanity of people who become violent extremists and the possibility for change for transformation that's there in in everyone what I want to do is give you a little perspective on the work that we do at the Center for Mind Body Medicine and then come back toward the end to speak about how it applies to the violent extremism and I have been working with people who are violent extremists of one kind or another for as I thought about coming here today for almost 50 years so from all different parts of the political spectrum different parts of the world we're going to if you want to find out more about what we're doing we have a you can put your name in your email on a sign-up sheet that we have I'll send you these PowerPoints and you can find out more about about the work that we do because a fundamental part of what we do at the Center for Mind Body Medicine is to focus on making self-awareness self-care and group support central to all health care the training of all health professionals and the education of our children it is to use Jesse's phrase it is focusing on assets rather than my abilities giving people an opportunity to talk about their vulnerability and then understanding that all of us have this capacity for self-healing and that we need other people to maximize that capacity so when I started the center I was also interested in creating a healing community and a community of healers so being here is an invitation to all of you if you're interested in being part of that community in sharing what we do and sharing yourselves with us so let me this is the center we have about 160 faculty worldwide and we've trained about 6,000 people in our method we started in 1991 we're non-profit here in DC trauma simply means injury Greek word that means injury to body, mind, and spirit and almost always when there's one the others follow so if there's physical or psychological injury all parts of us we're all we're one that's why we focus on a holistic or an integrative approach seeing human being as a whole person and understanding that everything that goes on in our lives affects us psychologically physiologically socially and spiritually as well trauma has as Jesse is saying the profound effects on the body this is real there's lots of hard science we don't have time to go into it but essentially if you look if you look at what happens to people who've been traumatized the responses that are life-saving that is the fight or flight response which is built into every vertebrate when we're confronted by a predator which makes puts us in a position either to fight or to get away and the freeze response I'm just curious how many of you know have heard of the freeze response some freeze response is a last-ditch effort at survival if you have a any of you have cats kitty cats yep you've ever seen cat catch them mouse gets the mouse in its jaws shakes it back and forth the mouse what happens to the mouse goes limp that is the freeze response it's there in humans as well the guy and the Humvee who whose vehicle hits an improvised explosive device his buddy is killed he can't get out of the vehicle he goes into a freeze response as well it's total shutdown fighter flight a sympathetic nervous system freeze response is the deepest oldest evolutionary part of the parasympathetic nervous system the problem is not with those responses their lifesaving that little mousey who's held in the jaws of a cat cat often gets bored with a limp mouse puts it down then the mouse runs away back to the mouse hole the problem is that when we're traumatized these responses and I'm simplifying for those of you who are have a neuroscience background please excuse me but the basic issue is that fighter flight and freeze get prolonged and they continue and continue and continue if they're not addressed for example we worked in Kosovo during and after the war 1998, 1999 and have continued for 20 years working there five years after the war 44% of the high school seniors in one region of Kosovo had frank post-traumatic stress disorder all the symptoms that you associate with PTSD even though they look like perfectly normal kids joking around with their backpacks etc when you actually ask them questions about what was going on they had it so it continues what happens is there's increased activity in the amygdala which is a center for fear and anger and the emotional part of the brain there's decreased activity in the hippocampus which is responsible for some aspects of memory and which also modulate stress and also in the frontal cortex in areas responsible for judgment self-awareness and compassion and then there are other areas parts of the brain including other cranial nerves besides the vagus nerve that make it easy for us to connect with other people to read their facial expressions to bond with them those are also damaged when we're traumatized so what happens when we're traumatized is we may be angry impulsive have difficulty focusing difficulty sleeping we're preoccupied with what happened in the past and what might happen in the future and we have a hard time connecting with other people or being vulnerable with other people so in a sense we're set up for all kinds of all kinds of influence that may occur to us because if somebody offers us connection that's very very powerful and they keep on coming back and coming back and coming back whether that's a jihadi recruiter or that's a psychotherapist the person is or an FBI agent for that matter that person who has been so deprived because of being shut down responds if there's a situation in which you feel safe because you're accepted you quiet some of the fight or flight activity and so the connections are there but there's still significant impairment in compassion significant impairment in judgment significant impairments in self-awareness and Jesse was alluding to some of those that continue with traumatized people this is the approach that we use everything I started the Center for Mind Body Medicine in 1991 and the focus is on teaching people what they can do to use to help themselves and everything we teach can be taught to anybody in this room and those of you who are interested could learn how to teach it to other people so this is an approach which is very democratic which is relatively easy after an intensive period of training and supervision very easy to scale and we have done that in a number of places so it includes I don't know if you can read this self-expression in words drawings and movement relaxation techniques autogenics which is a way of putting in balance the autonomic nervous system fight or flight and freeze response different kinds of meditation not dogmatic their world has thousands of kinds of meditation we use several different kinds drawn from different traditions using the mind to focus to relax to create guided images to mobilize the imagination one of the things that happens when we're traumatized is the imagination is very limited Jesse was talking a little bit about having been so focused and so kind of shut down in some ways and then things opening up and we use techniques like guided imagery and drawings and written dialogues to help people recover the imagination that may have been stunted by trauma or by membership in a group which has an absolutely dogmatic and inflexible line prayer can be important for some people extraordinarily important nutrition this is not looked at at all I've read over pretty much all the literature on trauma and I've just written a book which will be coming out in the fall on trauma and there's a long chapter in there on nutrition my editor said why is this so long? I said because nobody else paying attention to it that if nutrition is off it can have a detrimental effect and keep people locked into their trauma and I'm happy to answer questions about that later so you need to address that and physical exercise and movement that much of the approach that many of the approaches that work with trauma are basically talking therapies which are fine or cognitive behavioral therapy but we are a body everything that happens to us psychologically and particularly trauma is insisted in our body it becomes a part of us that we shut down we become tense and the most obvious the easiest the most powerful way to work with that trauma is with intense physical activity and that's not done often and needs to be done everywhere with people who have been traumatized I was in working in San Quentin with about 70 guys who were in San Quentin getting them up shaking and dancing and they started first of all they'd never closed their eyes with each other before because they were so afraid of what might happen but they did it they somehow felt comfortable and they began to cry and they said I've never done this since I've been in here I've never done this since I was a kid it was through the body you could have talked to them for weeks and nothing might have happened but simply shaking loose some of that tension was held in the body made them available to talk about their emotions okay we've done a lot of research we did the first randomized controlled trial ever on more traumatized kids this was in Kosovo kids who participated these are high school kids who participated in our groups for 12 weeks had an 80% decrease in post-traumatic stress disorder and those gains held a three months follow-up first randomized controlled trial of any intervention with more traumatized kids so that was important but what's even more important is the people who led these groups were not psychiatrists like me or psychologists these were rural high school teachers with no background in psychology really other than one pedagogy course except what we had taught them so this is an example this is after this is in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina we worked many places this is with the New York Times had to say about our work with psychological trauma nice praise to have that this is work in an area this is coming back to focusing a little bit more on violent extremism the techniques that we use all the self-care techniques that I showed you reverse not only the psychological but as far as we can tell the majority by behavior by cognition by results on tests the majority of the physiological changes that happen when you're traumatized now we have not done specifically MRIs or PET scans on our work but many of the modalities that we include have demonstrated reversal of these kinds of negative changes using those kinds of scans as well as measures of neurotransmitters and other physiological measures so the point is that this approach of self-care and group support and I want to come back to a group support which is likely the single most powerful therapeutic intervention for people who've been traumatized that when you put those together you can for in our experience in Kosovo in Gaza reverse post-traumatic stress disorder and 80 percent of the children and adults we published about I mean six or eight papers on our work with trauma a bunch of other papers on our work with health professionals and medical students this is we use drawings and this is a drawing of a little boy in Gaza and this is the in the first group we use drawings at the beginning and the end of our series of groups and the first was he drew two drawings before this he did well this is really combining the second and third drawings the second drawing first drawing is draw yourself second drawing is draw yourself with your biggest problem and you see his face with a downturned expression and the solution to his problem is here it's around let me see can this I don't think this is can you see it no it's around his waist and it's to his left and it says W and it's a suicide belt the solution to the problem of this boy whose father was killed in the 2014 war by Israelis was to put on a suicide belt and go kill Israelis many of the kids this was a group composed entirely of children his age who'd had fathers killed in that war was in the Shujaya neighborhood which some of you may know and that was his solution now at the end of and unfortunately I don't have that picture at the end of nine one one and a half hour groups when he drew an equivalent picture of what he wanted to be he drew himself in a car I said what's that he said I am the driver for the first president of Palestine now this is utterly without indoctrination this is simply teaching techniques for him to relax to shake loose his tension to mobilize his imagination to share his feelings with the other children and with the group leader who in this instance also happened to be a teacher so this is a powerful change that we see consistently in people who come to our groups and in Gaza as you know I'm sure there's an enormous predisposition to become Shahid to become a martyr to become a suicide bomb and many many of these kids or simply to die this is just one of what we train when we train people we train as many as 200 300 people at a time if we have 300 people we'll have 30 small groups led by our faculty in order to do this work with other people and this is really important as well you need to work on yourself first you need to learn how to do self-care and experience your own challenges your own trauma and work with them openly and honestly and sharing with other people and use these techniques to explore and move through them otherwise it's just it's just wrote it's just by the book and it doesn't it doesn't do the job people don't feel your authenticity you're going to work with people who are former extremists who've been through hell and may have inflicted hell on other people they need to feel that you're for real and they need to understand that you're in it with them so when we lead the groups we are both a leader of the group making sure there's order in the group and at the same time we're participants so I would share my drawings whether it's with kids or adults I would share my guided imagery I would do the shaking and dancing with those kids it's a really important part of the work that needs to be done and one of the reasons that we haven't been terribly successful in working with former violent extremists is because we haven't created a program which they really feel is congenial where they feel they're accepted they're treated with respect that they are given the opportunity to learn what they need to learn and where they're with other people who are also willing to share themselves I think where you have those qualities not just in our program but where you have those qualities those aspects success as possible this is just an example this is a group in Gaza being led by one of our local team we've trained 900 people in Gaza doctors, nurses, teachers leaders of women's groups clergy all kinds of people and this is a little girl if we have time later she was featured on a 60-minute segment that showed our work in Gaza and Israel and the transformation in her was quite remarkable as well one of the things that comes out that comes out that came out with her is that if you can work with people who have been deeply traumatized including people who have either aspirations to be martyrs as she did or people who already have been violent extremists that what comes through after the period of healing is a commitment to helping others you can hear in Jesse's story he started whatever however twisting the path he started out as a radical who wanted to make a better world in a secular way he became an Islamist who wanted to make a better world according to those lights and now he's somebody who's working with others who've been violent extremists to make a better world and it's not just Jesse but this is many of the people this is true of all humans the possibility is there to grow through trauma I'm not saying it's always going to happen but the possibility is there to go through one's trauma and as a natural process of evolution without anybody preaching to you about it to recognize the possibility and embrace the possibility of also helping others serving others using your experience to enrich and help others transform their experience so when Jesse and I work together and we can talk much more about this and Q and A because my time is up we're using these techniques basically we're sitting and talking using techniques of self-awareness self-care and he is deciding he is coming fairly quickly to learn which ones are appropriate no single approach no single technique is good for everyone all the time so you want to give people opportunities to explore what works for them and encourage them to use that it's not about converting people to another ideology it's about giving them the tools and the opportunity and the setting in which they can discover who they're meant to be thank you thank you Dr. Gordon for making very concrete the aspect of trauma the mind body and spirit nature of it and also reminding us as Jesse did just the critical importance of the additive rather than the deficit it reminded me something of what we focus on gross and that that's an important concept so thank you so we're now going to turn to our next speaker and our next speaker is Dr. Susan Abadian she's a Franklin fellow at the office of international religious freedom at the Department of State welcome and thank you for coming hi everyone I'm here on my personal capacity my personal capacity so I'll be speaking not as a State Department official but as a person who both has a background in collective trauma and healing so I'll talk about that of course my office would completely concur with the fact that the upholding of human rights is very important to to you know dealing with violent extremism that you know in a way when we uphold human rights is it's sort of a it's sort of a shorthand for reducing trauma would be one way to look at it so that piece of it is very concurrent you know that when we when there's a lack of due process and clear legislation when there's abusive treatment of people in detention facilities and stigma and censorship of communities religious and ethnic communities that obviously that's that increases trauma but that's a human right those are human rights violations that increase possibilities for violent extremism in the long run but why is this so like what you know I think I think Jim did such a beautiful job of explaining kinds of the physical the physical and psychological roots of what trauma is I want to tell you a little bit about myself I'm not a psychologist by training I'm not a psychiatrist I am I was someone who was in the world of economic development poverty alleviation my father was a World Bank official so when I wanted to help the world I did what my dad did as I started off in looking at how do you alleviate suffering through poverty alleviation and worked with the poorest of poor in villages in Bangladesh and India that's where I started so work with women and and children in in communities in Bangladesh and India and when I had little children I decided I didn't want to be gallivanting around the world and wanted to be doing things closer to home and so in part because I'm also an immigrant and a refugee from Iran I decided to look at communities Native American and Indigenous communities in North America I wanted to give back in some sense as best I could to the people who I thought whose land this was that I had come to and who provided solace for me and my family so I decided to if I could do some work in communities where I saw that in the wealthiest nations among the wealthiest nations in the world we had communities that were you know rivaling Bangladesh in in both poverty and in suffering so I wanted to understand why and when I went into these communities they educated me so my teachers in trauma and trauma healing were amongst were the Indigenous peoples of this land and I learned enormously from them and stand on their shoulders so what I learned when I went into these communities was both of course the amount the enormous suffering of individuals and the traumas that these people had experienced historically and that historical traumas reverberate in the present day and that's one of the big lessons I learned so it's not just that you know trauma is carried over and so how does that happen so that was my big question how does trauma get passed down I mean Jesse described his abuse at the hands of a parent that's a very common experience in many of these communities partly because I don't know how many people here know about the residential boarding school experiences but children were you know from the 1890s on for few generations forcibly removed oftentimes from families and taken into residential boarding schools first generations almost 50% of kids did not return home they died they literally died and over the generations they were abused both spiritually emotionally physically sexually and so there are a number of levels of abuse I don't want to bring this up but I just want to share that this is what these communities many of these people experienced and they came home there's a reason why some of these communities suffer from high rates of alcohol and drug abuse there's a way of wanting to numb those feelings and not being given opportunities healthy opportunities to deal with their emotions so those were the communities I was walking into communities that had experienced long-term historical traumas where not only were individuals traumatized but their communities were affected so their spiritual traditions were banned oftentimes and devalued and demeaned they were shamed for their practices their language so they came to communities that were also destroyed over time so they didn't have it's like an epidemic of trauma in communities where all the doctors had been killed off so the medicine people were deauthorized there was very little capacity for healing so what do you do about that so these were the communities I was walking into so as an economist as a political economist and with my colleagues who are economists the question most people went into these communities well let's just build them schools and let's give them jobs and let's you know this is the solution to the problems and we did some of that we built schools we created job opportunities and sometimes it worked most often it didn't work in the sense of healing the underlying pain and suffering so people were still abusing alcohol they were still beating their wives up but they were still there was a lot of abuse with the children so it didn't we could intervene in those ways but I think what Jesse pointed out is the addictions the problems don't necessarily go away because you're providing material solutions so that's where I got interested in what is what is trauma and what is healing and what indigenous people's taught me was in addition to all the things I mean I've also trained with had the great privilege of training with Jim and knowing intimately the work that he does and I think it's a real seed crystal for what's necessary and possible for the world this is not this is an epidemic at this point and we need to we're at a time in history I mean it's always been an epidemic but we're in a time in history we're finally becoming aware enough to finally deal with this and have the tools to do so in a large scale manner which is what we need to be doing one of the things that the indigenous peoples do besides the group I mean I think it's rebuilding trust is one of the big things that goes when you have trauma when you've been traumatized you lose really fundamental trust in yourself to protect yourself in your parents for example in the authority structure who you know where were they where was God where was everyone when I was going through this this trauma why weren't they there to help me why weren't they there to to support me to save me so trauma is really about a breaking of deep trust so healing trauma in a very fundamental way I think Jesse described both the FBI agent and the prison guard who was you know empathic and caring it's about human relations it's about rebuilding trust again in humanity and hope in possibility and so it's about human relationships I think the group processes that Jim was talking about is is part of that it's also about the indigenous peoples at least believe and I think it's so it's about rebuilding relationship also with the land believe it or not I mean I think that's one of the big things missing and why we're so disconnected from the land and and the natural world and why we have also the environmental collapse that we're seeing we're just disconnected and a lot of healing in indigenous tradition is also about reconnecting and we kind of we knowing ourselves as part of of the the whole system the environmental system I can talk more about various healing modalities but basically my exposure to the modalities I used to go I think the first let's see first foray I did in a community was in Cam Loops British Columbia and I know it's a very unusual name and I loved I felt like I was someone in Raiders of the Lost Ark and I was going into these remote communities and it was really interesting there was a healing gathering there and in this healing gathering it was the little shoe shop band is what it's called and the community was having a healing gathering for the community at large but it wasn't just for people of that band or tribe it was also for what we call the settler population the non-native population and it was a mixing of and they had provided many different healing modalities so I think as Jim said there's many ways and many doorways to healing and they it was a smorgasbord of possibilities and people did their various healing modalities and over the course of four or five days information occurred in people and I was a you know I have a background in anthropology and so I I wanted to experience it all so of course as I enter this world I take part in these healing gatherings and discover lo and behold I have my own traumas to deal with and my own issues and in my own background and my own historical blah blahs and you know it was a really interesting process as I myself went through my own healing process in that so it was a real gift to me and of course I think you know I've puzzled a lot over the years why we know this information on some level what is the resistance in the system to this information about trauma why are we so resistant and I understand it I mean I remember I was writing at my doctorate at the time at at Harvard and my two of my professors who were you know overseeing my my doctorate doctor where it was for economists and political scientists why trauma matters two of them one of them were very resistant to the topic and one of them read some of the stuff and I could see she was triggered and she said wow this reminds me of my own family and the other one said I don't I this is not relevant this we don't want to look at this and you know a year later his his daughter has issues with bulimia I mean there's stuff you know it's very when it's very close to us when we have our own issues it's very hard to look at these these sorts of issues when we haven't dealt with it ourselves so it takes enormous courage to do what Jesse did I mean I think I just want to take my hat off to you because besides everything else that the fact that that you know of just speaking out loud that we we come from backgrounds that have been difficult that have traumatized us that we have you know have had you know have had trauma I've had trauma I had I had I was asked to turn my dissertation eventually into a book for Harvard Press I wrote thousands of pages and I couldn't finish it in part because I realized over time I was dealing with secondary trauma because this is another thing a lot of us deal with those of us who deal with difficult circumstances when we're up close to people who are suffering we you know especially those of us who are empathic we're in this work because we care but we pick up we pick up the traumas of other people nobody teaches us how to how to deal with that how to defend you know how to protect ourselves how to be empathic without absorbing it all I had to that was another whole learning how to deal with all that stuff so we have to train better our people to manage themselves as they walk into these incredibly difficult places dealing with incredibly difficult situations without closing down their hearts because that's what also happens so you know I was and I think part of the the challenge is this issue of stigma I was looking over my dissertation spent a long time and I was remembering that I had worked with this guy named James Gilligan who is I don't know some of you might know his wife Carol Carol Gilligan who wrote on gender issues he was at Harvard amazing woman but James Gilligan was a director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School but it was a former medical director of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane as well as the mental health director for the Massachusetts prison system and he'd written two seminal books on violence and prevention these are now old at the time I was writing they were kind of they were they were very current but he was talking and he was talking about and wrote about that the basic psychological motive or cause of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame at humiliation a feeling that is painful can even be intolerable and overwhelming and replace it with its opposite the feeling of pride so he talks about shame as a pathogen that causes violence just as specifically as the tubercle bachelors causes tuberculosis except that in the case of violence it is an emotion not a microbe the emotion of shame and humiliation so we see that if if you know and there's a lot of evidence for this I have another an FBI profiler you know who talks about the deep-seated feeling of inadequacy of the people and he wrote a book called the anatomy anatomy of motive you know this low self-worths low self-esteem sometimes oftentimes treated by overly authoritarian fathers you know that there's a lot of out you know people who come from those backgrounds I mean not everyone who comes from those backgrounds are obviously violent but you know when you can justify your violence and depart by this feeling of shame that you're projecting out when you make others then less than because you can't hold it in yourself and I think those of us who've been through trauma one of the first things and those of us who have faced it have to face this emotion of shame because some of its is called carried shame it's not our shame it's the shame of the perpetrator because they couldn't hold the shame they gave it to us and we carried it and we carry shame so many of us can't handle that feeling very well and instead we push it on others make them less than so you know the stigmatization of people who have been violent or the shame of trauma itself that is that's so central because that is at some in some sense is the core of some of the violence that we're seeing anyway there's a lot more to cover I could go on but I will stop and look forward to the next commentator and then we'll have questions and answers thank you thank you Dr. Abbottian for telling us your story as well as bringing it from the self to the collective and really the community and historical nature that's a critical component and then also bringing it back around to the driving force that shame can be as an accelerant to trauma so thank you very much we're going to take a very short commercial break here for everybody to pass along your questions so we can get them all sorted and be efficient because we want to be sure that we get through as many as we can so there are folks circling around just so excited to take your questions we have Chris Bosley over here to the left and we're also anyone who needs to run to the restroom this is your time it's right down to the left now that we're talking about mind, body, and spirit let's honor our bodies and realize we have them and to take care of them to the left is there another one too yes oh every floor every there's restrooms on every floor if uh yeah and then by 10 in November it comes it's like it's just all transition kind of you made Joseph the same person yeah and then there are okay so we will pick up where we left off and it is now my pleasure to introduce our next speaker Stacey Shambur she's a senior program officer for ICANN or International Civil Society Action Network thank you so much Chris and Colleen for having me here today I'm delighted to be part of such a distinguished panel and uh Sanam Naragi Andalini the founder and executive director of ICANN I know would have been delighted to have been here today she's worked for over 20 years to promote peace and human rights and pluralism primarily with women's organizations so it's great for us to be part of this conversation and now ICANN supports about 60 women-led civil society organizations globally in 35 countries this network of our partners is called the Women's Alliance for Security Leadership and we exist to support their work to help elevate their voices to policy circles to help them access resources and we provide small grants to them through our innovative peace fund as well as analysis and technical support through the Better Peace Initiative to promote women's inclusion and peace building on the topic of violent extremism ICANN and our partners this year we have been looking a lot at the topic of the rehabilitation and reintegration of women and girls from violent extremist groups and we are delighted that within the next couple of weeks we have a report on this topic coming out co-published with UNDP and we'll be delighted to share that with all of you when it's out this report looks at different thematic aspects like law and justice trauma healing social economic support and ideology as well as it features seven case studies of the work of our partners across different contexts as well as shares policy and programmatic recommendations so I thought I would just share some of what we have learned from the work that they do one that we've already heard today is that trauma can be a driver of radicalization and extremism in some cases our partner RescueMe has interviewed over 70 returnees from ISIS in Rumia prison outside of Beirut and they have found that absent caregivers including absent fathers and the lack of male role models can be one driver of extremism of course when returnees are coming back from an extremist group just the experience of being in detention and in prison can generate a lot of trauma as we heard from Jesse most prisons do not have adequate deradicalization or rehabilitation resources and programming um and then there's the the experience of the families and the communities who may be questioning whether someone has truly disengaged or deradicalized when they re-enter a community and are often reminded of experiences of loss and trauma themselves so our partners take a very holistic approach with their work and their programming they work with returnees as well as their families and communities they provide psychosocial counseling as well as religious counseling livelihood training and social economic programming and work around trying to combat the stigma that exists in communities Dr. Gordon was talking about the use of the arts and our partner in Uganda the Ketgoom Women's Peace Initiative draws a lot upon drawing and music and dance and drama both in working with children who were part of the Lord's Resistance Army as well as with communities to try to sensitize them to the experiences that they've that they've gone through and also the Alamein Foundation in Nigeria they have used a radio program where they will use messages from the Koran and the Hadith as well as discuss the impact that stigma can have on returnees from Boko Haram as a way of reaching out to communities and raising their awareness just I want to say a few words about the gender dimensions of this topic because through our research we found that some people tend to create a very binary category of assuming that all men associated with extremist groups are perpetrated and all women and girls must be victims and our research shows that that is not the case many women and girls voluntarily join extremist groups and are motivated by ideology others follow their husbands or boyfriends into groups some girls like in the cases of Boko Haram are abducted and so they have varied experiences with extremist groups and they can play multiple roles from actually perpetrating violence to providing organizational and logistical support fundraising for extremist groups and being recruiters for other women and girls and so these experiences then also can result in different types of trauma that they're experiencing and different levels of stigma when they return to the communities so for instance women and girls may face stigma for breaking or challenging social gender norms by joining an extremist group if they experienced any sexual or gender-based violence that's another aspect of stigma and then if they are pregnant or they had children while part of an extremist group then that stigma is transferred to the children as if you know concerns about radicalization and violence are some inherited trait so there's a lot of fear and multiple layers of stigma there and finally I just want to say a few words about the kinds of challenges that that exists so we've noticed in a lot of conflict contexts that there is understandably a lack of mental health infrastructure and policy from the national level all the way down to the local level so if a lot of basic services are not in place then it's also very difficult to have specialized programming for returnees and their families one partner organization of our CSAVE the Civil Society Against Violent Extremism in Indonesia really took a leadership role recently in collaborating with the Ministry of Social Welfare the National CT Bureau and local police to develop standard operating procedures for returnees about whom 75% were women and children and that helped to provide clarity of role for different actors they also provided training to social workers and those providing services and established a referral and communication network throughout Indonesia so one question for us is around how do we best support organizations working to establish that policy and that national level infrastructure and at the same time how do we respond in the short term to provide stopgap measures and help ensure that services are available in response to a request from some of our partners from Syria and Iraq ICANN partnered with Venim Foundation in Nigeria which has extensive experience in providing mental health and psychosocial programming to returnees from Boko Haram and we developed a pilot training program for our partners on mental health and psychosocial support this program has been two weeks of in-person face-to-face training that's very interactive with lots of role plays and case examples and covers many topics ranging from basic counseling skills and communication skills to psychological first aid to sexual and gender-based violence to self-care to address some of the secondary trauma that Susan had mentioned and in between these two weeks of training we've provided online coaching and support as well so this is a program that we hope to replicate and the experience has also informed the work that NIEM Foundation does because they have now adapted their curriculum and our training international organizations working in Nigeria as well so promoting this kind of peer-to-peer cross-cultural learning is something that we're really dedicated to and finally I'll just again mention the role of media and opportunity to try to create safe space I think for returnees and communities to have very open and honest conversations about the experiences of trauma that they've endured and and to have very honest and difficult conversations about what it's like to rebuild the trust and the social fabric whether it's through media programming or elsewhere there's an opportunity to support organizations and people wanting to do this work and to try to change some of the larger narrative around this topic thank you Thank you Stacey for sharing with us some of the research surrounding drivers not only a radicalization but as well trauma and then the practical interventions that you described that non-government organizations in the field can do and then bringing to our attention the importance of the gender dynamic in women and children their role in the process so thank you so we're now going to turn to the Q&A and I want to thank Desmond wherever he is he did a beautiful job of organizing all of these by categories and so we have three main categories and what I will do is I will start with I'll mention the three categories and then I will start with a question and whoever feels inspired to respond feel free to speak up there are three major categories at the questions that we receive from you all as well as through Twitter they are the role of the communities the second is women and children and then the third is the holistic and spiritual so I'm going to start with the role of communities the first question is what are the best practices involving communities for reintegration I can start by saying first of all recognizing that it is a community issue this is not an individual issue it of course takes place individuals are traumatized individuals become radicalized and become extremists but we need to work with the whole community and I think that that understanding has to go very deep that this is if you think of it in terms of health this is a public health problem and somebody maybe Jesse used the word somebody used the word epidemic when a community is troubled we've been working in Broward County Florida following the shootings at Parkland High School and everybody not just at Parkland not just at the next door middle school not just the parents and teachers but everybody in this county of two million is on edge little kids 50 miles away or asking their mom and dad am I going to get shot when I go to school so imagine that's just one episode of shooting with 17 people killed imagine societies or you know societies where thousands of people have been killed imagine the level of trauma the level of reaction the level of anger and hurt and pain that goes on the whole community needs to be addressed if you don't address the whole community those people who are unaddressed are going to have many of them and I've seen this in many situations who people who are not regarded as in need of quote help and who are not mobilized to help themselves they become more and more alienated and marginalized and they are obvious people who are vulnerable to joining radical extremist groups that's where they will find their healing I would like to piggyback on that and talk about not just the American context but CVE in general as being a deficit-based approach one of the things that we recommend when we go into analyzing the U.S. prison system and the fact that 90 extremists are coming home over the next three years with very little de-radicalization initiative in-house and no preparation for re-entry and re-integration programming upon their release is that oftentimes we look at this as an intervention-oriented one-on-one sort of perspective without looking at it as a community phenomenon so one of the things that we look at when we talk about our concept and philosophy we call our organization parallel networks which is the idea that you can't just put a piece of counter-messaging or a one-on-one intervention in an extremist network and expect it to have an impact you have to create first a parallel network that rivals in size and scope the extremist networks and that offers a complete cultural and ecosystem alternative and that way when you de-radicalize an individual with a helpline or with an intervention coming home from prison and they actually affirm that they are disengaged from the movement and you have to provide an alternative sense of meaning, significance and importance and I think that's what boils down to but then looking at a community-level approach realizing that the individual in a world of connectivity or inter-connectivity where we're all separated by now on Facebook like 3.5 degrees of separation as opposed to 6 everything that goes on at a local level whether it's a one-on-one intervention is interconnected to an entire holistic universe now we are global we are all global in every little event so conveying in a community level that every person if we recognize polarization hate and extremism has an obligation in this era to do something is one way of creating this ecosystem systemic approach that can be a movement that takes us to the next level of consciousness and I think at this point it is most important to do that and really quickly like one of the most fascinating things is I have driven a lot into network science because it's fascinating with regard to what sort of finds they are making so the other day I'm looking at this study of this phenomenon on network science starts in 1932 with this phenomenon of a 30% increase of girls running away from a reformatory school that was abusive and they didn't understand why it had skyrocketed so they looked at cases they brought in a network scientist it was the first way to use graph theory where they analyzed where the influences were and they found one particular hub in the network so I start tracing the methodology guess who the hub in the network was that nobody really recognizes Ella Fitzgerald who ran away and went to Harlem in the midst of the jazz sort of counterculture consciousness raising environment and became somebody totally different and we only are learning now about the traumatic experiences that she experiences as a child so it's about environment it's about community and I think that's just one representative sample case connected to community connected to the question about community I'm going to ask a few more questions in a group because they relate in some way so one of the questions is are there any mass effects observed in communities affected by violence and a role and perpetuating those cycles of violence and then what to do in communities who reject former extremists and then are there strategies to build community trust and reducing the fear of reintegration and addressing the stigmatization of people working with violent extremists the first question I'm going to any mass effects observed in communities affected by violence and the role in perpetuating cycles of violence and then the other ones relate specifically to communities that reject former extremists strategies to reduce fear and build trust and then those who work with violent extremists how to stigmatization of those people working violent extremists affect the efficacy so it's kind of a holistic piece of trust building those who work with them and then the one mass effects observed in communities affected by violence or role in perpetuating cycles mass effects one of the observations is that after conflict domestic violence increases dramatically so that in itself sets off a whole cycle if you have domestic violence that when I wasn't in the Balkans in the spring and had the fortune to go there as part of my work and looked at and I asked the question what is domestic violence like in Bosnia Herzegovina for example it's a question people didn't ask and it turns out it's 80% so 80% of women 20 years after the conflict are experiencing domestic violence and you can be sure that in those households the kids are also probably either being neglected or abused in some fashion possibly you can imagine that they and neglect also by the way is a form of trauma so trauma isn't just physical violence or abuse it's also neglect of children so in those households of 80% of women are being subjected to domestic violence that I'm just giving you one little example of how then imagine what the children are going up with so imagine a child who's beaten by his dad he's being given two messages at the same time besides all the incredible physiological stuff that goes on and I'm I used to be a pre-med so I'm very into that stuff but I also think it's a distraction on some level because trauma is bigger I mean I think we're enamored by the physical we like things concrete but there's all sorts of things that go on that's more on a spiritual level or emotional level that is not just about the physiological effect so I just want to say that but imagine that a child who's beaten by his dad is being given two messages at the same time he's being given the message you're nothing and I can do this to you but he's also been given the message and when you get to be a man like me you too can do what I do so in my in my lingo what I talk about is the post-traumatic narratives and the toxic post-traumatic narratives that people learn when they're subjected to abuse and part of that is the narrative of being less than and then the grandiose so false empowerment and disempowerment both at the same time and the false empowerment is what often leads people if they are violently inclined to become violent because they feel entitled to hurt it back in some fashion that's sort of the message the father's giving so that's sort of an effect I mean you could just see if 80 percent of households are being subjected to be watching domestic violence take place what is just that one piece of the pie and the effects it has on the society we'll stop there yeah I'll concur that certainly there's a very strong correlation between domestic violence and and war and conflict and violence can take many forms whether it's direct or indirect or structural there are many types of violence that we could discuss in terms of best practices though or response I'll just I'll pick up on that one a lot of our partners are using inter-community dialogue because you have to bring people together and get them to talk to each other to rebuild that trust and talk about what's happened and I think also when we think about programming and addressing some of the root causes of a conflict you have to do the analysis to understand that particular context and situation and then be clear about trying to address those needs and not being exclusive to any particular group so for instance our partner in Indonesia has offered cooking classes both for returnees as well as members of the community and it's a particular skill and and livelihood that's been open to everyone that served a particular need as well as given an opportunity to to bring groups of people together and to rebuild some of those relationships I just want to say come back a little bit to the discussion about shame earlier when people are subject to violence from others they very often I've seen feel tremendous shame I should have stopped it from happening this is true of civilian populations it's also true often of military where they're not able to do anything we've worked in Gaza now since 2002 and what I've seen is tremendous levels of feeling ashamed and impotent and men who feel impotent take it out on their wives and then the wives take it out on the kids and the kids take it out on each other and that was the fact that was the first reason I was called to work but in both Palestine and Israel is by people saying the kids are out of control they're not they weren't killing each other but they were so angry all the time so the whole society is permeated by shame and trauma that then turns into often the temptation or the act of violence physical, psychological, social what we've done is we've as I said we've trained 900 people they've worked with 170,000 people so far in Gaza which is close not about 8% of Gaza's population and the way we have done it is to work with people who are already the helpers and the healers in the society whether it's an imam a shake it's a teacher it's a leader of a women's group a kid who's a leader in his school who can be a peer counselor and it's crucial to integrate this work into people's daily lives and not to have it segregated into mental health clinics nothing wrong with it being done in mental health clinics virtually nobody in Gaza has any interest in going to see a shrink I can assure you but do you want to if you look on our website look at some of the videos that women want to learn skills women who've lost sons and husbands and brothers there's a little video a portion of a video I'm talking to about 100 of them and they're talking about these skills have helped me they've helped me calm down I'm not hitting my kid anymore I'm going out of the house I think I can live again but that was done not in a mental health clinic but it was done reaching out to the community really quickly I'd like to talk a little bit address the piece of stigmatization and reentry and reintegration because I think it's really important to understand because I myself experienced it firsthand and I can only imagine what others I was given an opportunity to cooperate with the other I was given an opportunity to give input while I was in prison on things that interested me so I already had a sense of there can be forgiveness I saw it firsthand before I was released but most of the people that are coming home in the United States and most of the people that are anywhere like in northern Syria we work right now in trying to identify and interview people that are incarcerated with the Peshmerga or with the Kurds that are being held without a country that wants them back right and so that stigmatization is really serious there's a community stigmatization oh my god there's a terrorist we just launched legislation here in the United States that will make any convicted violent extremists have to register where they live just in the same way that we do with sex offenders that's a serious complication with regard to stigmatization but the most important thing is to think about it from an ecosystemic and holistic approach whereas if you have these communities and you're conveying inside of these communities and usually like in any area of conflict they are hotspots it's not like people are dispersed there's hotspots in arenas where people are going to go back to if there's a way to convey a humanist approach to understanding that you might not agree with another individual but at the same time unless you're willing to sit down and talk with them when you sit down and talk with a terrorist things start to get really gray rather than black and white and that's important right nobody's inherently evil right it oversimplifies the world in the same way that extreme is doing we do approach it that way particularly here I mean we're concentrating on the domestic space and it's fascinating and then you have the stigmatization nobody in Gaza wants to go see mental health psychiatrists but they do if framed in a localized way and people are empowered on the ground to have education about the book that you talked about which basically is a fictional work that imparts knowledge of neuroscience while it appears to be fiction at first it teaches you principles that are associated with what goes on in the brain when you return to trauma and so the other part of stigmatization is really the fact that most Muslims in particular I can tell you for sure when you approach them with maybe you have a mental health issue like depression or like bipolar or something like this no this mental health from the west is a joke right but you can frame it they have the same principle and how to address it in the religion and tradition and that's true for Hinduism as Dr. Gordon he studied all of the philosophies and all of this there's so many similarities but you have to put it in a localized context it needs to be localized actors you can't go to a psychiatrist that's not trained locally that doesn't understand the local nuance what you're doing Jesse with setting up a network of people who've been through the experience who've come out the other side that's what a lot of former extremists are going to are going to respond to a support group yes the next question is can we look at trauma induced violence without also looking at the changing geopolitical environment that includes increasing xenophobia retreat of liberal democracy fragmentation of society through urbanization technology etc so it's placing trauma induced violence in the larger geopolitical environment any thoughts on that sure I mean I think if you look at the history of the way my profession psychiatry has recorded trauma you see it so much forgive the word ambivalence there's a focus on it but there's also a lot of avoidance and the avoidance has been systemic because as the question suggests if you look at the extent of trauma you have to start looking at the causes and this is where the resistance comes in if you look at the trauma of all these men and women coming back from wars in the Middle East and you really consider it then you have to think is it worth it should we be doing this and the same the same with any forces that are producing psychological trauma and so the the issue is we need to pay attention to what we have done to ourselves collectively as a species and then we need to address it but I agree completely that's fundamental I'll just add to that as well that a lot of our partners are women peace builders doing this work on the ground and they are now experiencing trauma and direct threats of trauma not just from the work that they do but also because it's politically threatening and so whether it is the closure of their organizations financial restrictions threats to their children to their families the security risks are becoming increasingly threatening and so we're really looking at this issue now of protection of the peacemaker I mean what what do we do when no one is going to be able to stand up for them and protect human rights defenders and peacemakers if I may also add yeah to this wonderful conversation in some of the communities that I worked in in the native communities that I worked in sometimes these communities were let's say 95% suffering from 95% alcoholism for example and then widespread abuse and there'd be maybe one elder who would who all of a sudden decided to become sober oftentimes it was a woman she was threatened her life was threatened oftentimes she was not supported from within her own community she needed support from outside the community just like you guys are thinking of offering and you know people would say what are you doing you know we're being we're being subjected to these structural you know inequalities and it's the government it's the Royal Mounted Police it's the you know it's those people out there who are doing this to us and her response for example that one elder would say well but we have to start from within we have to start from within and I think you know the point I'm trying to make and eventually actually this particular person I'm thinking of her whole community turned around within five to seven years it takes time but she would show up for an AA meeting for example she would show up alone in a community house all by herself she'd have the chairs around and she'd sit there for years by herself and you know we'd ask her what are you doing and she'd say well I'm doing an AA meeting and we'd say but there's nobody here and she'd say well the elders and the spirits are here supporting me and one day the whole community will be here and she held that vision and they did they showed up and they actually inspired other communities around them to shift as well if you know anything about Canada they didn't these people didn't wait for the system to change they healed themselves and then they changed the system they're changing the system Canada is unbelievable what's happening there right now in just a few decades so we can't wait I mean I know I'm part of a bureau that's working on human rights and governance and just governance and all that is important it's you know it's it's just it's important work and yet my work when I worked outside of this bureau was working with communities and people to heal themselves so that they can actually act from a place of sovereignty and impact so that's that's it has to go from both ways I guess I'll just I just would like to say something on the geopolitical context because I think it's very important to recognize how it's changing and what we're going to deal with in the future like 25 percent of youth live in a conflict zone and are growing up in a conflict zone why is that I think we need to take an honest look honest look at how we've addressed the quote unquote war on terror right and we need to really realize that people are using our bombs to drop in Yemen right now we have destroyed whole cities in Iraq and we could continue to go on Afghanistan as a complete failure the Taliban are completely ready to take back over that country we need to recognize that because at the same time we have continuously played since the end of the Cold War a realpolitik approach to foreign policy and at the same time we're telling other people about human rights and governments to improve their human rights we are helping them to elect dictators we are abiding by the overthrow of the first remnants it takes time of democracy in Egypt we need to really not be afraid to say this because right now because of inaction in Syria I remember when I was sitting in a jail son I looked at Syria turned jihadi right and Obama was in this process of contemplating whether he wanted to intervene on humanitarian grounds and Henry Kissinger writes two op-eds in the Washington Post that says you don't base foreign policy on humanitarianism maybe in your age when the world was not interconnected but now people understand everything you do everything you do is recognized and you can't tell Arabs in the Middle East to believe in some form of human rights and democracy that you don't practice rhetoric going up in reading from two teleprompters in Cairo and mispronouncing words is not a very good strategy to try to show that because your middle name is Hussein you understand the Muslim condition and I need to say that because this is the problem the geopolitical situation is changing everybody takes it for granted that it's continuous process in history of progress right we have a serious issue right now with China building railroads all the way into Damascus looking to exploit the fact that we have not intervened in Syria that Bashar al-Assad is in power they're partnering with Russia they're going to rebuild that country they're going to get CC to go with them we have a situation in Saudi Arabia right now what if we do stop because of public pressure utilizing Saudi Arabia as our ally we have serious issues what's creeping problem of people that promote authoritarianism at the same time the X and Y generations right are exposed to more xenophobia more bullying more of this even in the western context and our societies at home are fracturing which is exactly in lines with the plans if you read the doctrine of al-Qaeda and the ISIS they want to split us at home they know they're fighting a war of attrition that democracies are rendered in unable to function efficiently if there's a constant change between left and right that they will malfunction that alongside of continuously spending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas to fight while giving CVE a couple hundred thousand dollars here and there to address the issues to make it look good right to make it look like you're promoting human rights we contradict so much of what we do as the hyperpower in the world right now I don't think we should be afraid to say it because if we don't fix that macro context how can you take the individual interactions and tell a person here's a network you can believe in that promotes human rights and democracy but the people that fund this network they're totally cool with the authoritarian that's in power because it's stability for you I'm sorry but that's the macro context and I know that that's not good for promoting funding and things of this nature but it needs to be said thank you moving from the geopolitical and thank you for all of your comments there there are questions specifically related to women and children and I'm going to read all three of them one is how to consider gender dynamics for rehabilitation programs what is the ongoing trauma processes violence and conflict on the trauma healing specifically for children and then on the gender dimension and the sexually based violence or overall institutional societal discrimination stigma what are some examples that yoga meditation and the other tools that you've all talked about will be successful for transgender women gay men lesbians who have multiple challenges especially if they're economically deprived without education so there's the kind of the package there and then I'm going to close it with what is the current research efficacy on arts music and literature because that's a broad question but then this question relates to a specific population well I can start off with the first question I think related to the gender dimensions in our research with the report that's coming out soon we did review a lot of the DDR programming and literature and found perhaps not surprisingly that a lot of DDR programs were not gender sensitive and because of the stigma and gender dimensions of conflict women's experiences in conflict many of them were even not aware of what programs and options were available to them or they were slipping under the radar and going back into communities because the stigma of being associated with such a program was so great so I think there are lots of lessons learned from that that can inform our rehabilitation and reintegration work for women and girls from violent extremist groups and I think just basic recommendations consult women and girls involve them in the design of programming understand what their needs are a lot of them are economic based as well as the trauma healing work combining those has been very effective I'm trying to think if there's anything else I'll pass it along to my colleagues I'm still working on what Jesse said if you're still I'll begin while you're still working we were in Bosnia within a year after the date and the courts were signed and I was talking to a guy I became friendly with who was the head of psychiatry at the university hospital in Sarajevo he said that in four years of war and in the year since the date and the courts were signed only three women came to the psychiatric clinic talking about rape this is the largest psychiatric clinic in a country where conservatively 50,000 women were put in rape camps the lessons very clear that's not the way to provide trauma healing services when we went to Kosovo we were there during the war after the war we created girls groups and women's groups no criteria no diagnosis necessary just come if you're the proper gender that appropriate age come into the group and share what you have to share without pushing anyone to talk about anything the girls and the women were able to talk about having been raped so it's got to be done through places through organizations in groups that people feel comfortable with in Gaza where it's not so easy to be a woman either we work with all the women's centers we present the work the people who are presenting the work for women who've been abused or the women who are running seven women's centers in Gaza so I think this is a primary way of working it's got to be done in an appropriate context by people who are willing to share their own vulnerability and willing to and have the tools to work with other people and the other thing is that always have to take as far as I'm concerned these are talking about stigma earlier except when we're doing a research study we have no diagnostic criteria for working with people everyone is welcome it's really important that everybody feel comfortable and you don't have to label yourself in any way and just one word about kids kids have their brains their whole being is so vulnerable but also so plastic so flexible so capable of growth so work with kids can move very very rapidly in many societies where we've worked sometimes people in their 30s will say I'm too old don't worry about me my life is over literally but take care of my kids as things change with the kids the kids are happier they function better the women get interested and then perhaps eventually the men get interested as well and this is often the progression that we've seen in terms of recovering from trauma kids I just wanted to say that I don't know people know Jeffrey Sachs who is working on the sustainable development goals in Columbia at Columbia universities and he talked about the importance of community health workers as a new model or as a model for health in I think it's the third sustainable development goal of well-being nowhere is I think mentioned mental health in any of this but I think we need an equivalent kind of community health worker in the mental health world and I think what Jim is talking about is that kind of basically barefoot doctors that barefoot mental health doctors barefoot doctors were doctors from China at one point they were because of lack of resources they were sending people who weren't doctors per se but they had some training into the into the communities and health was improving as a result and we need an equivalent in mental health and we they don't need to be psychiatrists and psychologists they I mean I think that's where we get hung up they need they need to have I think what Jim's model is really effective it's not the only model I think it's a very good model of how to how to make this available to large masses of people and in a way that also where they're they're being I think watched and cared for by maybe a psychiatrist and psychologist the people but they learn and it spreads to the whole community so it's a it's a whole system we need more of that in the world I think where I got stuck with what Jesse was talking about because I completely agree with him on everything I thought about this a lot myself is when I've worked in communities for example in Colombia I worked with father Lionel Narváez Padre Lionel Narváez who created these Espere schools of forgiveness and reconciliation that started in Colombia spread to I think 10 countries and other things and you know let's see I I work with communities where they they have real justifiable reason to be enraged at the at the government at us at you know everybody and yet they choose in these communities to to look at themselves and their own part in it somehow it doesn't mean that the government it doesn't mean the United States doesn't mean the big powers don't have a role a huge role in the violence and the you know and of course we want to stop that but I guess I'm working so we're like a sandwich working from both sides and how the communities can can stop things from within because there's damage going on within their own communities also that they need to look at and so how to become sovereign in some ways which is also free of of trauma and the effects of trauma but also the need to hit back is it is maybe how I want to end it for me we have just a few minutes so what I'd like to do is ask Jesse one question and then do a quick rapid fire parting comments with our presenters so the question for Jesse that came is how do you how do you stay safe your cooperation with law enforcement must place you in danger so I actually welcome the question right because I was sort of micromanaged in media when I was first public before I messed up and I would always give the answer in the preps because they would prep me of course you can say anything controversial and they were worried about the risk of you know the reputation of hiring me as a former and I understood all that but every time I would answer that question honestly I would say if I was willing to take risks to sacrifice and die for a cause that was so heinously evil why should I not be able to take risks that are equal on the other side of things flat out just like that yes I get threatened all the time on social media yes there has been instances where when the lawyer released my name to the public I had to be moved that was quite comfortable where I was at I had to be moved they had to change my car yeah I mean I live under that but it's also part and parcel of taking accountability and looking at things like yeah I have issues with the macro order yes I have issues with the way domestic but at the end of the day like it's really about what you can do what you really as an individual can do and you have to take accountability and look at all of these conspiracy theories all of the stuff that allows this resignation allows Iran and Russia to create this very concrete narrative that the United States is involved in every single thing that goes wrong in the world also applied to me right and that's really what it's all about and in the Muslim community there's this predominant narrative that every single case the FBI intervenes in is a conspiracy and it's an entrapment and I know that most of those cases they don't go to trial so all you have to base that on is a criminal complaint and right so I'm hated in the community that's supposed to provide me the most support because I still identify as a Muslim if I walk into the mosque and somebody identifies me I entrap the Muslim and this gives fodder to the extremists to justify why I'm a spy right and then puts my life in danger so it's really again the point connecting the individual initiatives to the broader paradigm in order to mobilize movements and networks not just individual cases of success like mine because there's potentially hundreds of people like me just in this country and in every country around the world and they are credible voices but they do need protected I have no protection the FBI used to provide it for me but I slipped up so I don't know if they're in the back doors providing protection or not but I doubt it so but I'm okay with it okay thank you any parting comments sports of wisdom before we depart sure just that this is such an interconnected issue the touches on so many things and so we need to treat it and respond to it as such we need to look at our laws and policies both at the international level and nationally on returnees and extremism and we need to look at the work of organizations and people who are who are trying to support them and do this good work on the ground and in local contacts and support what they're doing I wanted to add one last thing which is that we already have a lot of resources by the way for for even I think the work needs to begin in prisons themselves we you know I have a colleague Robin Khasarji and is her name and she has an organization called Lionheart and she's created this program called Houses of Healing where prisons become houses of healing and if they're programs and I've worked in prisons in the past and I'll tell you some of the most enlightened people I've known are people who are in prison for life who've been through these programs they're more enlightened than people I've met in government let me tell you something and it's because they looked at themselves and they had the courage to actually do the healing and forgiveness so this is stuff we have it but there's resistance for some reason in the systems so there's a lot of stuff out there we already have the tools and we have Jim we have lots of tools and we have even an army of native peoples who've been through this trauma and you know if anyone has a grievance it's them they're not blowing themselves up in in Washington you know so we have people and we have communities we have wisdom we have it we have everything we need we have it already so we just have to stop resisting what needs to be done and do it I think yeah good I'm going to give Franz Kafka the first words of my last words I don't have the quote to memory but but basically he said that there's going to be suffering you're going to have suffering in your life but the one form of suffering that you perhaps don't have to experience is holding yourself back from helping others who are suffering so I would say that that that quote is really so inspiring to me and I would say that we all of us have the opportunity responsibilities a bit heavy but certainly the opportunity to look at and heal our own trauma our own misconceptions our own blindness our own tendencies to be extremist or dumb or ignorant and as we do that what will naturally happen is we'll begin to reach out to other people and so the work that we do which I invite all of you to participate in is really the work of healing ourselves and then sharing what we're learning and sharing ourselves with others who are also suffering including very much including those who have been or attempted to be violent extremists okay final words I'll start with the quotes too that I think display so I always quote this because it's like I hold it dear and it's primarily because it comes from a Sufi so it's cool for me to transition from taking quotes from Sufi versus not being allowed to even look at what they say and it's from Rumi and he says that the wound is the place where the light enters you and I think the other quote that we need to look at that I like a lot is Albert Einstein who said that you cannot solve a problem right unless you look at it and adopt a higher level of conscious principle no problem can be resolved by looking at the problem unless you adopt a higher level of conscious principle I think it's safe to say that you know 17 years after the warranty we're all suffering from a bit of PTSD and I think it's safe to say that and I would say that when we look at the direction things are going we should not take for granted that human history is just a continuous progress we have many examples of decadence and decline that have been catastrophic I'm not so sure if we are able to think holistically about the intersection of the economic situation in the world right now the geopolitical situation of the world right now we should take that for granted any longer especially when we look at domestic politics I think that that is a call to action that we all have maybe a responsibility somewhere between a capability and a capacity and a responsibility to do whatever we can in our lives again the individual is interconnected with the global whatever we can in our lives to help to heal or to become part of a network or a movement that is collective so that we can heal ourselves not by healing others but so that we can learn to get off of our iPhones and checking our Twitter account and to actually talk to human beings would be a wonderful first step things along those lines and I think if we can do little things to change that along the way I think that we can start to make the changes that can address a problem which really requires a shift in consciousness to an empathy-based civilization and we can learn a lot from the people that are on this stage that have been dealing with this phenomenon we know so much but so little of it is incorporated and now I'm going to give a quote all good things must come to an end so I wanted to thank our wonderful panelists today for all of the wisdom that they've shared in their stories so please join me in thanking them and I would like to thank everyone in this room for joining us today and taking time out of your schedules and to everyone who joined us by the webcast and have a wonderful rest of a Tuesday