preface

This overview of community-based interventions in the wake of terrorism is one of the four products of Impacts EU-project: Citizens and Resilience, the balance between awareness and fear. It offers brief descriptions of best-practice community-based interventions in the context of psychosocial care following a terrorist attack.

Former political prisoners in Chile gave testimony of their traumatic experiences, which resulted in diminishing their posttraumatic symptoms. Based on this experience, testimony therapy has been developed and used in treatment of traumatized victims of war or other organized violence.

The efficacy of a community-based psychosocial program in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war and immediate postwar years (1994-1999) was described in this article. Ten centers provided various kinds of psychological help in the besieged city of Sarajevo and the towns of Zenica, Travnik, and Vitez. Since 1994, an intensive monitoring system has documented data on clients, interventions, and outcomes. This study focused on the systematic evaluation of counseling interventions aimed to alleviate the distress in wartime.

Twelve Kosovo-Albanian interpreters at the Danish Red Cross (DRC) asylum reception centre participated in an interview about their background and work. The majority had fled from the Serbian persecution in Kosovo, which involved living in a permanently hypervigilant stat, with intense fear of rape, ethnic suppression and civil war. All of the interpreters reported a heavy workload and a high level of distress. The most distressing part was interpreting at interviews for psychologists, where stories of torture, annihilation, persecution, and loss were told.