My research question centers around traumatic childhood experiences of Somali men. There is this concept that, back home, young boys & adolescents were treated harshly as they aged closer to puberty. The reasoning behind this was that Somalia was a harsh place, and that one needed to be hardened by one’s family in order to survive such an environment. This may have worked, to some extent, in helping those boys become men who “survived,” but my question centers around what did we/they lose in the process?
Consider, now, how that mindset becomes detrimental in a new environment, namely, the west. The practices which helped people survive back home now become the cause of their destruction in the new home. Without a Somali cultural & geographical context, that way of raising boys becomes ritual without context – it becomes a sword, not a shield, and there is only so much protection a sword can bring. Swords were designed to harm, not protect.
Now that we see the opioid epidemic sweeping through Somali youth, particularly the boys, we are asking ourselves as a community what the problem could be. As someone who has thought at great length about the nature of trauma & the lifelong impacts it has on its victims, my theory is that the way Somali boys are raised is inherently traumatic, and that at the heart of every addiction or mental health story in Somali boys/men, there is a story of early & persistent traumatization – by the culture, by the community, and by the family.