Community Resilience : Reflections on a Community Response to Tragedy

This chapter explores one community’s response to tragedy from a sociological perspective, in the context of the shootings in a primary school in Dunblane in Scotland in 1996. It draws upon a community member’s observations in addition to written accounts of events. Weigleitner, Heimerl, and Kellehear (2016) have suggested that modern communities have become deskilled in caring for and supporting individuals facing loss, death and grief. This chapter explores a number of questions about the response of communities to sudden tragedy. It considers the influences on individual and community responses. How does a community work through the enormity of the incident? Does their response help to develop community resilience? Challenging the concept of deskilled communities, the chapter explores whether individual and community capacity may emerge through the need to deal with a major disruption to community life. It concludes by proposing that individuals and communities have enormous capacity to respond to traumatic events and that it is important they are encouraged and empowered to do so. Being enabled to respond is a vital step in addressing fear, helplessness and insecurity, which in turn helps the healing process and the emergence of individual and collective resilience.