The Concept of Forgiveness as a Powerful Tool of Feminism Theory  

Consequences of Vietnam War are numerous and negative, including suffering of population and redefining gender roles. Women during Vietnam War constitute a vast group of victims, who experienced ethnic cleansing and had to find refuge in more secure places. Female victims make up only 3% of the overall number of Vietnam War victims and this group is often neglected or inappropriately treated by therapists. Comparing impact of economical or political effect of Vietnam War trauma with psychological one, it should be noted that psychological effect has much more long-lasting and devastating nature than short term economical and political impact. So, thorough investigation of psychological disorders should be conducted to help population, especially female veterans, recover from Vietnam War.

Therapy for women should necessarily include forgiveness, which is defined as an act of accepting injustice from the side of offender and calmly responding to it without negative feelings or reaction. To promote forgiveness a great variety of forgiveness models were implemented and tested on Vietnam War victims.

Two distinctive groups of forgiveness models can be clearly distinguished: decision based models and process based ones. Decision based model lies in the idea that Vietnam War victims should realize the act of forgiveness for their own wellbeing and give up their anger. On the other hand, process based model is based on four stages, subdivided into twenty steps, designed for female victims to forgive their offenders.

One of the tools for evaluating effectiveness of each model is Psychological Profile of Forgiveness Scale. Furthermore, a wise combination of described approaches should be used in order to achieve desired goal- recovering female veterans. However, the question of forgiveness accurate measurement and balanced ratio of models still remain controversial issue.

Gender issues and concept of forgiveness are integral parts of one theory of humanistic feminism. So, it is necessary to combine the concept of forgiveness with Vietnam system of values in order to successfully adopt this concept to the environment of female victims.

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