William Thomas sat at a wood table across from Detective Michael Moctezuma, his cuffed hands shackled to a chain belted around his waist.
It was June 2018 when the detective finally interviewed Thomas in prison — nearly 13 months after Sandi had given Cleveland police her rapist’s full name.
Moctezuma told Thomas how he “inherited” the nearly three-year-old rape case. Thomas agreed to talk to him, waiving his right to a lawyer.
“What I’d like to do is show you a photo of someone and you can tell me if you recognize them or not,” Moctezuma said.
William Thomas agreed to talk to a Cleveland detective in 2018.
The detective slid a color print of Sandi’s driver’s license photo in front of Thomas.
Thomas leaned in, looked down through his wire-rimmed glasses and didn’t hesitate: “Yes,” he said.
“Do you know this person’s name?” Moctezuma asked.
“I don’t remember,” Thomas replied.
Thomas’ version of the story started the same way Sandi’s did. They met through a mutual friend, Terrance.
But Thomas told the detective the purpose for the meeting was a “date.” An exchange of drugs for sex. Not an unusual transaction in the neighborhoods where he hung out.
“It’s really something unspoken but known,” Thomas explained.
Thomas said he and Sandi drove around drinking and smoking pot before returning to his mother’s house.
His mother wasn’t home, he said. Thomas said he gave Sandi some heroin to inject.
“You guys had sex?” Moctezuma asked.
“Yes,” Thomas answered.
Thomas said they fell asleep and Sandi woke up early in the morning, hysterical. “She ran out the side door, undressed.”
“And why do you think that happened?” Moctezuma asked.
Thomas said he figured that she was married and was probably supposed to be home at a certain time.
“I guess she was in trouble,” Thomas said.
He tried to stop her, tried to talk to her, he told Moctezuma.
“At any time did you strike her?” Moctezuma asked.
“No.”
During the interview, Moctezuma shared a simple sketch of Sandi’s account. The detective didn’t dive into the inconsistencies between Thomas’ story and what Sandi told police - or what the evidence showed.
And there were many.
Thomas mostly listened, blinking. He didn’t react.
At one point, during one long pause as Moctezuma took notes, Thomas spoke up.
“I got a question, though,” Thomas said. “It took you all this long to find me?”
Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams shares the department's staffing plans with Cleveland City Council members in 2018.
'This is not like TV'
Sandi once described the feeling of trying to get police to respond to her as “pushing against doors that wouldn’t open, over and over again.”
It’s hard to imagine a better way to put it.
Cleveland police won’t say why they did so little to find Sandi Fedor’s rapist or why, once they knew who he was, it took them so long to question him.
The department also won’t allow any of the detectives who worked on Sandi’s case to be interviewed, and if they speak without permission, they can be disciplined.
The city insists that its supervisors review cases with detectives, but did not provide specifics on the process.
Mayor Frank Jackson and Chief Calvin Williams wouldn't agree to sit down and discuss chronic, well-documented problems in the sex crimes unit or long-term solutions.
Instead, Chief Williams parroted assertions that sexual assault cases “remain a high priority” for the department. "We hold our investigators to a very high standard," he said, in an email sent by a spokeswoman.
Williams said sexual assault cases are “very personal and emotional” and that investigators “remain committed to providing the highest level of service while remaining compassionate and understanding to victims and their families."
What is clear, whether the city acknowledges it or not, is that when Sandi reported her rape in 2015, the sex crimes unit was as overloaded and ill-equipped as it had been for decades.
The unit had only 13 full-time detectives to investigate 1,163 new reports of sexual assault and child abuse; 753 of those felony sex-assault cases.
Most of the cases reported that year never made it to court.
Detectives in the unit may well be as committed and compassionate as Williams contends. But they are also swamped with tough cases, and when detectives in the unit are underwater, the stress of it can spill over into their work, into interviews with victims and witnesses.
The day Sandi and Gabe visited Detective Evans, almost two years after Sandi first reported her rape, they’d hoped the cop would take the evidence Sandi gathered and collar her rapist right away. Instead they were lectured.
“This is not like TV,” she told them. “I get one case, I get five cases [the] next day. It’s not one case, we have a bunch of cases. And it’s just not me. It’s 13 of us in there and you’re talking about 13 people with over 1,000 cases, OK?”
Evans had a point. Not counting vacation and sick days, routine updates on policing techniques and time in court, that left her with an average of 14 hours to investigate each of the 88 sex crimes and child abuse cases she was assigned that year.
The detective’s burnout was part of the reason Evans told Sandi and Gabe that she was leaving sex crimes. “That's why I'm ready to go,” she confided. “It's very stressful for us, too.”
The third detective on Sandi’s case, Michael Moctezuma, said the same thing to Sandi’s friend Terrance, a potential witness. Moctezuma was the first detective to interview Terrance, more than three years after Sandi first gave police his phone number.
“That’s part my fault,” the detective said during the recorded phone call. “We’re overwhelmed with work. I had always had intentions on calling you, but it just fell through the cracks because of everything that I was involved with, with this investigation and others.”
Those were the people Sandi had to rely on to put her rapist away.
Details she shared with them became distorted, like in a game of Telephone, forcing Sandi to walk through her brutal assault again and again to correct the errors. In one interview, a detective peppers Sandi with questions she’d answered more than two years earlier. As she struggles to respond, she visibly shrinks in her chair, trying to ward off a flashback. The detective plows on.
Sandi was called in for an interview with a new detective more than two years after she first reported her rape.
Even her last name, Fedor, was misspelled five different ways in the detectives’ reports: “Fendor,” “Fender,” “Fefor,” “Fodor,” “Fedora.”
As Sandi left voicemail messages that were never returned in 2016 and 2017, supervisors from the unit were penning memos to police brass for more resources — begging for bodies and cars — so they could do their jobs. Sometimes a detective or two were added, but it was never enough to keep up with ones who left.
Staffing was a “choke point,” Lt. Daniel Ross wrote in a memo to his bosses. “This is not a complaint; it is a fact.”
Police Chief Calvin Williams answers questions at a 2018 press conference where discipline was announced for sex crimes detectives and supervisors.
In 2018, as Sandi waited for her rapist to be charged, Mayor Jackson held a City Hall news conference, calling the unit’s most recent black eye “egregious.”
The city was disciplining another sex crimes detective, this time for failing to investigate 60 cases assigned to him as far back as 2014. The detective’s supervisors were punished, too. What Jackson failed to mention is that one of those suspects raped another woman as the cases sat. Just like in Sandi’s case.
Flanked by Chief Williams and Michael McGrath, the city’s safety director, Jackson blamed the cops for not following protocol and deflected suggestions of a systemic breakdown. The city had given the cops in the sex crimes unit “all of what we needed to give” for them to do their jobs, the mayor said.
But when a reporter questioned that contention, Jackson pushed back.
“It's not that simple," he said, adding that the chief has to balance the needs of all units, from sex crimes to homicide to car theft.
It was the same excuse the cops gave during the Voinovich era 30 years earlier.
Eight months after that 2018 news conference, a different detective was in trouble for stashing nearly 200 rape evidence kits in a storage room instead of sending them for testing. That detective was suspended for 25 days, a punishment his supervisors argued should be tempered by the enormity of his job: For two years he was responsible for submitting, transporting and logging 10,000 or more pieces of evidence from sex crimes, homicides and other crimes.
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” Sondra Miller, president & CEO of the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, said on the heels of those two scandals. “This unit has not been made a priority.” The squad, she added, “has no more resources to do this work than it did 10 years ago. Until that changes, I fear it is going to be ‘Groundhog Day.’”
The breakdowns were almost unfathomable. The department had spent years following the Anthony Sowell murders emptying its evidence storage shelves of thousands of untested rape kits, many of them decades old. Most were collected before DNA testing was routine.
Once tested, the evidence kits helped identify so many suspects that a task force was formed to review nearly 7,000 cases from Cleveland and the surrounding suburbs. The undertaking also offered a look at how cases were handled in the past and a roadmap for how to do better investigations today.
Some of the cases would never have been solved without DNA testing. In others, hindsight helped. Reports that named the same suspect over the years pointed investigators to hundreds of serial rapists.
But, in many cases, it seemed that the police hadn’t really tried. The question was why.
Cleveland police photo of rape kits stacked in an office after a detective fell behind in submitting them for testing.
A team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University’s Begun Center for Violence Prevention, Research and Education took a close look at hundreds of Cleveland’s older, never-prosecuted rape cases.
Half of them were closed after a week or less. A quarter were open for a day or even just hours.
Cleveland detectives had to contend with a “conveyor belt” of new reports, wrote Begun Center researchers in 2017. If there was a “hiccup, difficulty or stall in a case, it would be shunted to the side” to keep the fresh cases rolling down the belt from piling up.
Detectives weren’t told “spend whatever time you need to get the bad guy,” said professor Rachel Lovell, a senior Begun Center researcher. Instead, it was more like, “Get those cases off your plates because here is a new stack for you.”
Cuyahoga County’s Sexual Assault Kit Task Force, the group formed to tackle all those older cases, has been heralded as a national model. The initiative has identified more than 830 serial sex offenders and has resulted in indictments of 754 rape suspects, a jaw-dropping number compared to any other place in the country that has tested older rape kits.
The task force, though, benefited from many things Cleveland’s sex crimes unit — just on the next downtown block — has never had: double the number of investigators and a close partnership with victim advocates who work alongside the detectives and prosecutors as they prepare rape cases for court.
Early on, it created a strict checklist to ensure investigations are thorough. And to keep investigators accountable to their supervisors, who know the public is watching.
Just as crucially, investigators have, on average, almost three times longer to work cases than Detective Evans had to dig into Sandi’s case.
Cleveland detectives still don’t respond to sex crime scenes except in what the department says are “extraordinary” circumstances. That’s in part because the unit has no overnight shift to cover the hours when at least one-third of sexual assaults are reported. That was one of the recommended changes brushed off by the department after a national policing think tank reviewed the sex crimes unit’s operations in 2013, in the aftermath of the Sowell case. Another forgotten post-Sowell promise: bringing in outside experts to regularly review the unit’s case files.
Earlier this year, City Council members pushed Chief Williams about the unit’s anemic staffing during a hearing. At the time, sex crimes had 14 detectives, not the 23 the chief had budgeted and nowhere near the 30 detectives needed to do thorough investigations, at least according to “a workload analysis” shared with council members.
Williams sounded a familiar refrain, saying that he planned to add detectives to the unit just as soon as the next police academy class graduated.
The city said in an August email that the unit has new leadership and the chief will make good on his promise to add new detectives, though it didn’t say how many. As of Sept. 19, no new detectives had been added but a police spokeswoman said interviews were scheduled.
The new detectives will get at least 40 hours of state training in investigations and sexual assault, the city said, instead of only the occasional seminars by rape crisis experts they get now.
Standard training was something suggested six years ago by the policing think tank to replace the department’s informal “on-the-job training” for sex crimes detectives.
Cleveland police plan to add detectives to the Sex Crimes and Child Abuse unit, a spokeswoman said.
Cleveland is hardly the only city failing women like Sandi. Other cities have made public efforts to turn around deeply flawed sex-crimes investigations that result in few prosecutions, though reforms are hard fought and progress comes in fits and starts.
New Orleans and Baltimore, both faced with scathing reports that revealed bias and ineptitude, added new investigators to reduce crushing caseloads. New Orleans detectives were given checklists and told to document each investigative step they took. Baltimore’s department made it policy to respond to the scene of every sexual assault call. Even then, federal officials found that victim-blaming persisted among its detectives.
In Philadelphia, which instituted reforms almost two decades ago, an independent group still reads hundreds of sex-crimes files each year and questions the department about how cases are handled to add a layer of public accountability.
Experiences elsewhere show that while resources and training matter, such oversight is just as pivotal, said Lovell, the Begun Center researcher.
Without sweeping, lasting change, reports like Sandi’s will continue to speed down the rape-case conveyor belt.
Many victims walk away, resigned to numbing their pain, looking over their shoulders and hoping nobody else gets hurt.
Others, like Sandi, risk sanity and safety by taking on the burden of investigating their own rapes. It probably happens more than we think, said Lovell.
In one case Lovell and her colleagues looked at recently, a victim was able to provide police with a first name of her rapist and the location of her attack. But without his full name, first and last, authorities told her the case couldn’t move forward.
So, the woman went back to the house to get her rapist’s last name from the mailbox. He was home. He grabbed her, beat her and held her captive for almost half a day before she escaped.
Rachel Dissell was a reporter for The Plain Dealer from 2002 until 2020. Her investigative pieces have changed laws, policies, hearts and minds.
Reinvestigating Rape, a series with reporter Leila Atassi, led to the testing of nearly 14,000 rape kits and investigations that resulted in indictments in nearly 800 cold cases in Cleveland. Researchers built on the project’s early discoveries to redefine the understanding of serial rape in Ohio and beyond. Toxic Neglect, a series with colleague Brie Zeltner, exposed Cleveland’s poor track record for investigating when children were lead poisoned. The series sparked a communitywide effort to proactively protect children from the toxin, including a grassroots citizen petition drive and the formation of a coalition of more than 300 public, private and philanthropic partners who worked to pass a law that requires all rental homes in the city to be inspected for lead hazards.
In 2019, Case Closed, a series with Andrea Simakis, explored the systemic failures of Cleveland police through the experience of a woman who had to solve her own rape. Dissell was a 2016 Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma Ochberg Fellow and has received training in the neurobiology of trauma and trauma-informed interviewing and storytelling techniques and ethics. Her series, Johanna: Facing Forward, won the 2008 Dart Award, and her story, Case Closed, won the 2020 Dart Award.
Dissell also has trained law enforcement, nurses and advocates and community groups for End Violence Against Women International and the National Center for Victims of Crime. She also has taught emerging journalists at her alma mater, Kent State University.
Andrea Simakis
Reporter
Andrea Simakis spent more than 20 years at The Plain Dealer covering everything from pop culture to wrongful convictions. Her work moved people to write an Ohio governor, earning a man an early release from prison, and prompted a local college to offer a scholarship in honor of forgotten women murdered by a serial killer.
Simakis was a Kiplinger Fellow at The Ohio State University and was chosen as one of 29 journalists worldwide to study at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow. She is a frequent lecturer at Case Western Reserve University where she teaches courses on criticism and narrative non-fiction writing.
Her national awards include the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for her magazine profile of a lawyer who defends abused and neglected children in juvenile court; a National Headliner Award for her profile of Cleveland playwright Eric Coble as he shepherded his first play to Broadway, and the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for her magazine narrative on the plight of a diesel mechanic whose one punch earned him two years in prison.
Lynn Ischay
Photographer
Lynn Ischay has worked at The Plain Dealer for 22 years. Her work there has taken her from Switzerland to South Sudan. She spent four years as Chief Photographer, then decided to return to shooting after an illness.
Prior to The Plain Dealer, Ischay worked at The Columbus Dispatch, and was a finalist in the Robert F. Kennedy Awards for "Fragile Lives," a story about the cost of keeping medical fragile children at home vs institutionalization.
At her first job, The News Herald, she won the Pro Football Hall of Fame award for a photo of a double face mask between two rival players, one a Cleveland Brown, one a Pittsburgh Steeler.
Lynn lives in Euclid, Ohio, as close to Lake Erie as money would allow. Right now, the lake is 60 yards away.
Ellen Stein Burbach
Editor
Ellen Stein Burbach spent her career as a newspaper and magazine editor, alongside thoughtful, gifted, gutsy journalists and storytellers producing stories that impacted lives and influenced policy. She has edited award-winning newspaper stories and series including “Road to Ruin” (Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi Award); “Guardian Angel” (Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism) and “Tales from the Heart” (Reader’s Digest 20 Best Reads of 2011). As a magazine editor, she earned National Magazine Award nominations in General Excellence and Public Service, as well as twice winning Regional Magazine of the Year.
Kelley Benham French
Narrative Editor
Kelley Benham French is a Professor of Practice in journalism in the Media School at Indiana University. She is also Senior Editor for Narrative and Special Projects at USA TODAY. She has edited three series that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her series on the birth of her extremely premature daughter, Juniper, was also a Pulitzer finalist.
Melodie Smith
Copy Editor
Melodie Smith has a bachelor's degree in communications from John Carroll University and studied journalism at Kent State University and at the Maynard Institute's copy-editing program at the University of Arizona. She has had a number of roles in her more than 20 years at The Plain Dealer, including copy editor, business copy desk chief, deputy news copy desk chief, writer of the cleveland.com entertainment blog The Morning After, and curator of the Sunday Business section. She currently is the assistant business/health editor, and she also writes movie reviews.
Wendy Carr McManamon
Copy Editor
Wendy Carr McManamon was an award-winning copy editor at The Plain Dealer for 17 years. Her work includes subjects as diverse as Joanna Connors’ personal story of rape; a fraudulent house flipper who contributed to a neighborhood’s downfall; the effects of lead poisoning on Cleveland’s children; a day in the life of patients and doctors at Cleveland Clinic’s Miller Family Heart & Vascular Institute; the $350 million expansion of the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the hope and heartbreak of patients undergoing experimental cancer treatments at University Hospitals. She now resides in Richmond, Va.
Joel Downey
Copy Editor
Joel Downey has been at The Plain Dealer for over 40 years. For most of his career he was in the Graphics Department and worked as an Artist and then the Graphics Coordinator. He had a short stint, 2 years, filling in as the acting Graphics Editor. The last seven years his focus has been on Design and Layout as an Assistant News Editor.
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Tragedies & Journalists
A 40-page guide to help journalists, photojournalists and editors report on violence while protecting both victims and themselves.
This documentary, available online and on DVD, features a wide range of Australian journalists their recounting experiences covering traumatic stories.
Whether clinicians like it or not, children and families affected by trauma are routinely covered by the media. When that happens, clinicians often face difficult choices.
In conjunction with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Dart Centre Asia Pacific created a teaching video on the treatment of news sources. The project was developed to supplement teaching materials for journalism educators.
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Integrating clinical and social perspective without sacrificing either the complexity of individual experience or the breadth of political context, "Trauma and Recovery" brings a new level of understanding to the psychological consequences of the full range of traumatic life events.
Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character
Jonathan Shay is a Boston based psychiatrist caring for Vietnam combat veterans diagnosed with severe, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. In this unique and revolutionary book, Dr. Shay examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer’s Iliad with many of his patients, Vietnam veterans struggling with PTSD . Although the Iliad was written twenty-seven centuries ago, so much can be learned about combat trauma, especially when it is threaded through the compelling voices and experiences of Vietnam vets.
Journalists under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War
War journalists, like all who have prolonged exposure to violence, come home emotionally maimed and often broken. And yet, a news culture in denial has pretended that war journalists are immune from trauma. This fit into the macho culture of war journalism. It also assuaged the consciences of those running news organizations, who often crumple up and discard, years later, those they send to war. Dr. Feinstein has provided us with research that is a chilling reminder that war journalists are human, as well as a searing indictment of major news conglomerates who have refused to acknowledge or address the suffering of their own.
PTSD and Veterans: A Conversation with Dr. Frank Ochberg
How do we help veterans who are returning from war with PTSD? Dr. Frank Ochberg, a leading authority on PTSD, shares his experiences, seasoned insights and suggestions in this intimate conversation with reporter Mike Walters. He shares his insights regarding common symptoms to look out for and the importance of building trust and other aspects of the patient-therapist relationship. He then explains techniques he has developed that help his clients work through the trauma and adapt to civilian life.
Mapping Trauma and Its Wake: Autobiographic Essays by Pioneer Trauma Scholars
Mapping Trauma and Its Wake is a compilation of autobiographic essays by seventeen of the field's pioneers, each of whom has been recognized for his or her contributions by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. Each author discusses how he or she first got interested in the field, what each feels are his or her greatest achievements, and where the discipline might - and should - go from here. This impressive collection of essays by internationally-renowned specialists is destined to become a classic of traumatology literature. It is a text that will provide future mental health professionals with a window into the early years of this rapidly expanding field.
Post-Traumatic Therapy And Victims Of Violence (Psychosocial Stress Series)
Frank M. Ochberg, MD is adjunct professor of psychiatry, criminal justice and journalism at Michigan State University. He served in the cabinet of Governor William Milliken as Mental Health Director. His book, Post Traumatic Therapy and Victims of Violence, is widely acclaimed as one of the leading resources in the field.
In this long-awaited memoir, Lifton charts the adventurous and surprising course of his fascinating life journey, one that took him from what he refers to as, "a Jewish Huck Finn childhood in Brooklyn, to deep and meaningful friendships with many of the most influential intellectuals, writers, and artists of our time—from Erik Erikson, David Riesman, and Margaret Mead, to Howard Zinn and Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Kunitz, Kenzaburo Oe, and Norman Mailer.
This work is more than a memoir, it is also a remarkable study of Hiroshima survivors. Lifton explored the human consequences of nuclear weapons, and then went on to uncover dangerous forms of attraction to their power in the spiritual disease he calls nuclearism. Lifton writing illuminates the reversal of healing and killing in ordinary physicians who had been socialized to Nazi evil. Written with the warmth of spirit—along with the humor and sense of absurdity—that have made Lifton a beloved friend and teacher to so many, Witness to an Extreme Century is a moving and deeply thought-provoking story of one man’s extraordinary commitment to looking into the abyss of evil in order to help others move past it.
Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming
In this original psychological literary work, Dr. Jonathan Shay continues what he started in his book, Achilles in Vietnam. Uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, Shay sheds light on the pitfalls that trap many veterans on the road to recovery, the return to civilian life. The combination of psychological insight and literary brilliance feels seamless. Shay makes an impassioned plea to renovate American military institutions and in doing so deepens the readers understanding of the veteran's experience.
Trauma Journalism personalizes this movement with in-depth profiles of reporters, researchers and trauma experts engaged in an international effort to transform how the media work under the most difficult of conditions.Through biographical sketches concerning several significant traumatic events (Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine school tragedy, 9/11, Iraq War, the South Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina), students and working reporters will gain insights into the critical components of contemporary journalism practices.
After the War Zone: A Practical Guide for Returning Troops and Their Families
Two experts from the VA National Center for PTSD come together in this work to provide an essential resource for service members, their spouses, families, and communities. They shed light on what troops really experience during deployment and once they return home. Pinpointing the most common after-effects of war and offering strategies for troop reintegration to daily life, Friedman and Slone cover the myths and realities of homecoming; reconnecting with spouse and family; anger and adrenaline; guilt and moral dilemmas; and PTSD and other mental-health concerns. With a wealth of community and government resources, tips, and suggestions, After the War Zone is a practical guide to helping troops and their families prevent war zone stresses from having a lasting negative impact.
Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges
Experiencing trauma at some point in life is almost inevitable, overcoming it is not. This inspiring book identifies ten key ways to weather and bounce back from stress and trauma. Steven M. Southwick incorporates the latest scientific research and interviews with trauma survivors. This book provides a practical guide to building emotional, mental and physical resilience after trauma.
Trauma Therapy in Context: The Science and Craft of Evidence-based Practice
This book examines several current clinical approaches to trauma-focused treatment. Rather than describe theoretical approaches in isolation, the editors have integrated these interventions into a broader clinical context. Chapter authors emphasize basic therapeutic skills such as empathic listening, instilling resilience, and creating meaning, in the service of empirically-supported, highly efficacious trauma interventions. Throughout, they focus on the real-life challenges that arise in typical therapy sessions to deepen our understanding and application of evidence based interventions.
While this book is intended for all clinical mental health professionals who work with trauma survivors it is also a phenomenal resource for those who seek to broaden their understanding of the way various approaches to understanding treatment of trauma.
The award-winning author and noted psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton offers a powerful critique of American militarism during the Vietnam War. Home from the War is recognized as the ultimate text for those working with Vietnam veterans, the book's insights have had enormous influence among psychologists and psychiatrists all over the world.
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
The Boston Globe called this book, "A powerful reminder not only of what happened, but of the monumental evil done by the particular human beings who were trained to heal and cure."
Based on arresting historical scholarship and personal interviews with Nazi and prisoner doctors, the book traces the inexorable logic leading from early Nazi sterilization and euthanasia of its own citizens to mass extermination of "racial undesirables."This extraordinary work combines research and analyzation to describe a seemingly contradictory phenomenon of doctors becoming agents of mass murder. With chilling literary power, Lifton describes the Nazi transmutation of values that allowed medical killing to be seen as a therapeutic healing of the body politic.
When Trauma and Recovery was first published in 1992, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work. In the intervening years, Herman’s volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large.
Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting About Victims & Trauma
More essential now than ever, Covering Violence connects journalistic practices to the rapidly expanding body of literature on trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, and secondary traumatic stress, and pays close attention to current medical and political debates concerning victims' rights.
Sharing the Front Line and the Back Hills is a story that points to a crisis facing international institutions and the media who seek to alleviate and report human suffering throughout the world. The goals of the editor are to tell the story of thousands of individuals dedicated to helping others; and to integrate issues of protection and care into all levels of planning, implementing and evaluating international intervention and action. The book identifies approaches that have proven useful and explores and suggests future directions.
The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence
Ervin Staub explores the psychological, cultural, and societal roots of group aggression. He sketches a conceptual framework for the many influences on one group's desire to harm another: cultural and social patterns predisposing to violence, historical circumstances resulting in persistent life problems, and needs and modes of adaptation arising from the interaction of these influences.
Drawing on more than 30 years of criminal justice experience, author Susan Herman explains why justice for all requires more than holding offenders accountable it means addressing victims three basic needs: to be safe, to recover from the trauma of the crime, and regain control of their lives.
Arnold Isaacs, who spent the final years of the war in Vietnam as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, describes his firsthand observations of the collapse of Cambodia and South Vietnam―from the 1973 Paris peace agreement to the American evacuation of Saigon and its aftermath―with heartbreaking detail, from the devastated battlefields and villages to the boats filled with terrified refugees.
Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles
This is the story of the Northern Ireland troubles told as never before. It is not concerned with the political bickering, but with the lives of those who have suffered and the deaths which have resulted from more than three decades of conflict
A Country Called Amreeka: U.S. History Retold through Arab-American Lives
The history of Arab settlement in the United States stretches back nearly as far as the history of America itself. For the first time, Alia Malek brings this history to life. In each of eleven spellbinding chapters, she inhabits the voice and life of one Arab American, at one time-stopping historical moment.
This book seeks to tell the life stories of the innocent men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the “war on terror.” As we approach the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, this collection of narratives gives voice to the people who have had their human rights violated here in the U.S. by post-9/11 policies and actions.
Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs/Los niños en un mundo de las pandillas
With profound empathy for a reality that is too easily defined and dismissed as repugnant, Unsettled/Desasosiego takes us on a visual journey into the lives of children deeply affected by civil war and gang violence.
Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future
Legal Lynching offers a succinct, accessible introduction to the debate over the death penalty's history and future, exposing a chilling frequency of legal error, systemic racial and economic discrimination, and pervasive government misconduct.
War Photographer is a documentary by Christian Frei about the photographer James Nachtwey. As well as telling the story of an iconic man in the field of war photography, the film addresses the broader scope of ideas common to all those involved in war journalism, as well as the issues that they cover.
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
For the first time in the United States comes the tragic and profoundly important story of the legendary Canadian general who "watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect.
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
In Blood and Soil, Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides.
Ophuls examines attitudes toward war in the Western media, and in the societies they inform. The 243-minute documentary interlaces stark realities of combat with mordantly hilarious references to Hollywood fantasy-versions of war, and includes over 50 interviews with some of the world’s leading journalists, commentators, historians, newscasters and many others.
An enthralling, deeply moving memoir from one of our foremost American war correspondents. Janine Di Giovanni has spent most of her career—more than twenty years—in war zones recording events on behalf of the voiceless. From Sarajevo to East Timor, from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, she has been under siege and under fire.
Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity)
Echoes of Violence is an award-winning collection of personal letters to friends from a foreign correspondent who is trying to understand what she witnessed during the iconic human disasters of our time--in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and New York City on September 11th, among many other places.
It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War
War photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir It’s What I Do is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life.
With inspiring fearlessness, McClelland tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind and repairing her broken psyche. She begins to probe the depths of her illness, exploring our culture's history with PTSD, delving into the latest research by the country's top scientists and therapists, and spending time with veterans and their families.
Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide
This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.
Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values
In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld signed a memo that authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. From a behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates how this memo set the stage for divergence.
Shoah is Claude Lanzmann's landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust. Assembled from footage shot by the filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, it investigates the genocide at the level of experience: the geographical layout of the camps and the ghettos; the daily routines of imprisonment; the inexorable trauma of humiliation, punishment, extermination; and the fascinating insights of those who experienced these events first hand.
Humankind has struggled to make sense of human-upon-human violence. Edited by two of anthropology's most passionate voices on this subject, "Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology" is the only book of its kind available: a single volume exploration of social, literary, and philosophical theories of violence.
A gripping and insightful examination of the relationship between news-makers and news-watchers, looking at how images of war and tragedy are presented to us in the media and how we consume them
Guzmán focuses on the similarities between astronomers researching humanity’s past, in an astronomical sense, and the struggle of many Chilean women who still search, after decades, for the remnants of their relatives executed during the dictatorship. Patricio Guzmán narrates the documentary himself and the documentary includes interviews and commentary from those affected and from astronomers and archeologists.
In his extraordinarily gripping and thought-provoking new book, Jeremy Bowen charts his progress from keen young novice whose first reaction to the sound of gunfire was to run towards it to the more circumspect veteran he is today
The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict
The Observer's chief foreign correspondent Peter Beaumont, takes us into the guts of modern conflict. He visits the bombed and abandoned home of Mullah Omar; discovers a deserted Al Qaeda camp where he finds documents describing a plan to attack London; talks to young bomb-throwers in a Rafah refugee camp. Unflinching and utterly gripping
France's leading sociologist shows how, far from reflecting the tastes of the majority, television, particularly television journalism, imposes ever-lower levels of political and social discourse on us all.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom.
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World
MINDFULNESS reveals a set of simple yet powerful practices that you can incorporate into daily life to help break the cycle of anxiety, stress, unhappiness, and exhaustion. It promotes the kind of happiness and peace that gets into your bones. It seeps into everything you do and helps you meet the worst that life throws at you with new courage.
Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
Full Catastrophe Living is a book for the young and the old, the well, the ill, and anyone trying to live a healthier and saner life in today’s world. By using the practices described within, you can learn to manage chronic pain resulting from illness and/or stress related disorders.
Slee: A Very Short Introduction, addresses the biological and psychological aspects of sleep, providing a basic understanding of what sleep is and how it is measured, a look at sleep through the human lifespan, and the causes and consequences of major sleep disorders.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust.
This is a new edition of the world's leading textbook on journalism. Translated into more than a dozen languages, David Randall's handbook is an invaluable guide to the 'universals' of good journalistic practice for professional and trainee journalists worldwide.
Legends of People Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka
This provocative study of the political culture of nationalism in Sri Lanka and Australia - is one of the few genuinely comparative studies in anthropology and in taking up such an important question as nationalism it reminds us that truly relevant anthropology questions deep-seated cultural beliefs, including our own
Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain
Family Secrets offers a sweeping account of how shame--and the relationship between secrecy and openness--has changed over the last two centuries in Britain. Deborah Cohen uses detailed sketches of individual families as the basis for comparing different sorts of social stigma.
During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died—a figure twice that of all American war casualties. Seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. Given the astonishing scope of the devastation, W. G. Sebald asks: Why?
The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan
Christina Lamb's evocative reporting brings to life the stories that no one else had written about: the abandoned victims of almost a quarter century of war. Her unique perspective on Afghanistan and deep passion for the people she writes about make this the definitive account of the tragic plight of a proud nation.
House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe
Christina Lamb's powerful narrative traces the history of the brutal civil war, independence, and the Mugabe years, all through the lives of two people on opposing sides. Although born within a few miles of each other, their experience growing up could not have been more different.
Butcher & Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Failure in Afghanistan
Butcher & Bolt brilliantly brings to life the personalities involved in Afghanistan’s relationship with the world, chronicling the misunderstandings and missed opportunities that have so often led to war.
Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Jerusalem 1913 shows us a cosmopolitan city whose religious tolerance crumbled before the onset of Z ionism and its corresponding nationalism on both sides-a conflict that could have been resolved were it not for the onset of World War I. With extraordinary skill, Amy Dockser Marcus rewrites the story of one of the world's most indelible divides.
They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq
Based on "Blood Brothers," the award-nominated series that ran in Army Times, this is the remarkable story of a courageous military unit that sacrificed their lives to change Adhamiya, Iraq from a lawless town where insurgents roamed freely, to a safe and secure neighborhood. This is a timeless story of men at war and a heartbreaking account of American sacrifice in Iraq.
The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle against America's Veterans
Aaron Glantz reported extensively from Iraq during the first three years of this war and has been reporting on the plight of veterans ever since. The War Comes Home is the first book to systematically document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Madame Dread: A Tale of Love, Vodou, and Civil Strife in Haiti
Kathie Klarreich's compelling memoir interweaves shattering political events with an intensely personal narrative about the Haitian musician Klarreich, who turns out to be as enthralling and complicated as the political events she covered.
In the tradition of Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood, Columbine is destined to be a classic. A close-up portrait of hatred, a community rendered helpless, and the police blunders and cover-ups, it is a compelling and utterly human portrait of two killers-an unforgettable cautionary tale for our times
Juvenile, photographer Joseph Rodríguez spent several years following several youths, from arrest, counseling, trial adjudication, and incarceration, to release, probation, house arrest, group homes, and the search for employment and meaning in their lives.
By age twelve, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East Los Angeles gang warfare. This story is at times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-earned lesson for the next generation.
Still Here, documents the ongoing expressions of hope, perseverance, and suffering in the still-devastated communities of New Orleans and Texas post hurricane Katrina. Rodríguez spent two years photographing and interviewing families and individuals who shared their daily struggles to rebuild their lives.
Breaking News, Breaking Down, Two journalists' emotional journey after 9/11 & Katrina - This program tells the hidden story of how traumatic news impacts the men and women who cover it. Mike Walter loved chasing the big story, but on one September morning, the biggest story of his career chased him down: a jet rained from the sky, piercing the Pentagon and shattering his emotional well being.
One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers
The debate about women and torture has, until recently, focused on women as victims of violence. The essays in One of the Guys challenge and examine the expectations placed on women while attempting to understand female perpetrators of abuse and torture in a broader context.
Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War
Tara McKelvey — the first U.S.journalist to speak with female prisoners from Abu Ghraib — traveled to the Middle East and across the United States to seek out victims and perpetrators. McKelvey tells how soldiers, acting in an atmosphere that encouraged abuse and sadism, were unleashed on a prison population of which the vast majority, according to army documents, were innocent civilians.
Gogo Mama : A Journey Into the Lives of Twelve African Women
This book is a journey across Africa, in all its complexity; from the townships of Johannesburg, to the back alleys of Zanzibar; from the frontline of the war in the Sudan, to the nightclubs of Cairo. It is a vivid, illuminating and often haunting composite picture of an extraordinary continent, in the words of the women who know it best.
Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America
This is the first anthology of its kind, bringing together outstanding practitioners of the muckraking tradition, from the Revolutionary era to the present day. Ranging from mainstream figures like Woodward and Bernstein to legendary iconoclasts such as I. F. Stone and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the dispatches in this collection combine the thrill of the chase after facts with a burning sense of outrage
Trauma Therapy in Context: The Science and Craft of Evidence-based Practice
This book examines several current clinical approaches to trauma-focused treatment. Rather than describe theoretical approaches in isolation, the editors have integrated these interventions into a broader clinical context. Chapter authors emphasize basic therapeutic skills such as empathic listening, instilling resilience, and creating meaning, in the service of empirically-supported, highly efficacious trauma interventions.
Ari Goldman’s exploration of the emotional and spiritual aspects of spending a year in mourning for his father will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one, as he describes how this year affected him as a son, husband, father, and member of his community.
What began as a project to deepen his knowledge of the world’s sacred beliefs turned out to be an extraordinary journey of spiritual illumination, one in which Goldman reexamined his own faith as an Orthodox Jew and opened his mind to the great religions of the world. Written with warmth, humor, and penetrating clarity, The Search for God at Harvard is a book for anyone who has wrestled with the question of what it means to take religion seriously today.
Being Jewish: The Spiritual and Cultural Practice of Judaism Today
In Being Jewish, Ari L. Goldman offers eloquent thoughts about an absorbing exploration of modern Judaism. A bestselling author and widely respected chronicler of Jewish life, Goldman vividly contrasts the historical meaning of Judaism's heritage with the astonishing and multiform character of the religion today.
This book is a collection of reflective crime pieces, often approaching the events from different angles, yet written by on-the spot observers and reporters. There is an emphasis on the victims, and as a result these stories are written with sensitivity and compassion rather than sensationalism.
Over twenty-five tales of grisly murders and suspicious killings are laid out for inspection, including the story of the Police Killers and tales of the seedy Melbourne underworld.
This fully revised and updated new edition of Smart Health Choices will provide you with the tools for assessing health advice, whether it comes from a specialist, general practitioner, naturopath, the media, the Internet, or a friend. It shows you how to take an active role in your health care, and to make the best decisions for you and your loved ones based on personal preferences and the best available evidence.
The Spanish-language version of the Dart Center's 40-page guide to help journalists, photojournalists and editors report on violence while protecting both victims and themselves.
9/11: Mental Health in the Wake of Terrorist Attacks
This book comprehensively describes the psychological response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and, to a lesser degree, Washington DC. The impact of what happened on the local and US national population is considered through various epidemiological studies, as well as personal accounts from some of those more directly involved.
Filled with astonishing personal stories, conflict, and drama, Feet to the Fire gives readers the rare opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of this nation’s most powerful journalists and news executives and experience their highly stressful environments. With each new and revealing interview, Borjesson gathers devastating details from national security and intelligence reporters, White House journalists, Middle East experts, war correspondents, and others. Like pieces of a terrible puzzle, these conversations combine to provide a hair-raising view of the mechanisms by which the truth has been manufactured post 9/11.
Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss
Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work.
Daring to Feel: Violence, the News Media, and Their Emotions
Daring to Feel is a bold, brave book. Jody Santos challenges the entrenched doctrine that journalists are neutral, dispassionate observers of 'fact.' Santos demonstrates how journalists themselves and society as a whole benefit from emotionally nuanced and emotionally engaged reporting. This is a beautifully written tribute to the passion of journalists and the heart-wrenching stories they cover.
The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War
In The Things They Cannot Say, award-winning journalist and author Kevin Sites asks these difficult questions of eleven soldiers and marines, who—by sharing the truth about their wars—display a rare courage that transcends battlefield heroics. For each of these men, many of whom Sites first met while in Afghanistan and Iraq, the truth means something different. One struggles to recover from a head injury he believes has stolen his ability to love; another attempts to make amends for the killing of an innocent man; yet another finds respect for the enemy fighter who tried to kill him. Sites also shares the unsettling narrative of his own failures during war—including his complicity in a murder—and the redemptive powers of storytelling that saved him from a self-destructive downward spiral.
Kevin Sites, the award-winning journalist, covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels and government troops, child soldiers and child brides, and features the people on every side, including those caught in the cross fire. His honest reporting helps destroy the myths of war by putting a human face on war's inhumanity.
Swimming with Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey Across the Afghan War
Using his trademark immersive style, Kevin Sites uncovered surprising stories with unexpected truths. He swam in the Kunduz River with an infamous warlord named Nabi Gechi, who demonstrated both his fearsome killing skills as well as a genius for peaceful invention. Sites talked with ex-Taliban fighters, politicians, female cops, farmers, drug addicts, and diplomats, and patrolled with American and Afghan soldiers. In Swimming with Warlords he helps us to understand this kingdom of primitive beauty, dark mysteries, and savage violence, as well as the conflict that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives--and what we might expect tomorrow and in the years to come.
The Price They Paid is the stunning and dramatic true story of a legendary helicopter commander in Vietnam and the flight crews that followed him into the most intensive helicopter warfare ever—and how that brutal experience has changed their lives in the forty years since the war ended.
What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars
Most Americans are now familiar with PTSD and its prevalence among troops. In this groundbreaking book, David Wood examines the far more pervasive yet less understood experience of those we send to war: moral injury, the violation of our fundamental values of right and wrong that so often occurs in the impossible moral dilemmas of modern conflict.
Collective Conviction: The Story of Disaster Action
Collective Conviction tells the story of Disaster Action, a small charity founded in 1991 by survivors and bereaved people from the disasters of the late 1980s, including Zeebrugge, King's Cross, Clapham, Lockerbie, Hillsborough and the Marchioness. The aims were to create a health and safety culture in which disasters were less likely to occur and to support others affected by similar events.
When Lynne O’Donnell met Pauline and Margaret in Iraq she could never have guessed the wealth of stories she’d discover. Over tea the two women tell Lynne of their lives in the country: each having married Iraqi men had then relocated from England more than thirty years before.
Trauma Reporting A Journalist's Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories
Trauma Reporting provides vital information on developing a healthy, professional and respectful relationship with those who choose to tell their stories during times of trauma, distress or grief.
