I don’t know why they call it a “sensitive claim”.
Before you can get counseling covered by ACC you have to tell them, explicitly, what happened. You have to do this in the first three sessions. You need counseling with this ghastly traumatic experience that you have never talked to anyone about, ever, and the first thing you have to do is put it in writing. You have to find words for the horror, clinical words, to describe what he did, where he put his hands, what he did with his penis. Your deepest, most painful secret, burned into the paper. Somehow seeing it in words makes it even more horrific, even more unbearable.
And then you have to wait.
ACC does not pay for any counseling in the interim, while they process your claim, so you have to wait for several weeks, without a counselor, to find out if your experience of abuse is acceptably traumatic.
So what is the sensitive part?
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Tonight the Wellington Palestine Group were leafleting outside the Jerusalem Quartet concert. The fliers equated going to the concert with supporting racism. They also said that the members of the quartet were “trained killers” because they’d all served in the Israeli Military. Given that it’s conscription, ie, compulsory, this statement isn’t particularly meaningful. One could say that a large percentage of the world’s population, are trained killers, from those who choose to join the police or army, to all those who are called up for involuntarily in dozens of countries, everywhere from Taiwan to Sweden.
I am utterly opposed to Israel’s violent military occupation of Palestine, but while I can see the reasoning behind calls for trade sanctions, I cannot bring myself to extend that to chamber music concerts. I think it’s a powerful thing that people with different political viewpoints can come together and be moved by the same music.
The inflammatory language of the flier didn’t endear me to the Wellington Palestine Group at all. But maybe I was just grumpy because my season pass was already paid for, and I didn’t want to be made to feel guilty for something I’d been looking forward to.
It was an amazing concert, Shostakovich’s 8th Quartet was incredibly moving. And they played Barber’s Adagio as an encore. Beautiful.
Posted by Fionnaigh at April 4, 2006 10:44 PM | TrackBack