Social Trauma: A Bridging Concept

Social trauma is a clinical as well as a sociopsychological category: (1) as a clinical category it defines a group of posttraumatic disorders caused by organized societal violence or genocide where a social group is the target of planned persecution and therefore not only the individual but also its social environment is afflicted. Therefore, the concept of social trauma also describes (2) the shadowing of the original trauma on long-term social processes, be it on the family, group, or inter-group level.