14 The effects upon the mental health of the victims can be seen below in Table 12. As can be seen, there was no overall change in the mental health of the groups as a whole, although there were differences between the groups. The differences were not as predicted however. It had been assumed that successful testimony – testimony that led to an overturning of the election result – might have produced a greater shift in the SRQ-8 scores14, but this has not been found. This may be due to the fact that all these witnesses have been attacked or threatened subsequent to testifying, and virtually all have had to go into hiding away from their local homes and communities. Table 12. Pre- and post SRQ-8 scores: Means and S.dev. Pre-testimony Post-testimony SRQ-8 SRQ-8 Zvishavane 3.5 [2.1] 3.4 [2.2] Mutoko South 4.3 [0.8] 2.3 [1.3] Hurungwe East 3.2 [1.7] 4.1 [2.4] Chiredzi North 4.3 [1.9] 4.1[2.0] Total 3.7[1.9] 3.7 [2.2] Conclusions Testifying about the human rights violations that one has experienced is clearly a very difficult thing indeed. From Nuremburg onwards, it has been evident that it is painful to have to recount the terrible things that a person has experienced, and it is often so terrible that even experienced psychotherapists would rather not hear the stories that their torture victim patients can tell them 15. However, it can be doubly difficult when the testimony must be given in a situation where the gross human rights violations are continuing to occur and where there still remains significant threat to anyone who makes public statements about the gross human rights violations that they have experienced personally. This is the background against which this small study took place. As indicated in the introduction, a caring process was set up that would hopefully overcome all the many handicaps that these Zimbabwean victim-witnesses could experience. The pilot study reported here has evaluated as far as possible whether the process was successful and which factors contributed to the success or failure in the testimony of the witnesses. Although this is too small a sample to test the hypotheses statistically, the results are nonetheless interesting. 14 The SRQ-8, or the Self-Reporting Questionnaire-8, is an 8-item psychiatric screening instrument that was developed in Zimbabwe, and has been widely used in epidemiological and other psychiatric investigations. It was developed from the SRQ-20, an instrument developed by the World Health Organisation. All scores in excess of 4 on the SRQ-8 are indicative of psychiatric disorder, but do not indicate the type of psychiatric disorder. 15 See DANIELI,Y. Confronting the Unimaginable: Psychotherapists reactions to victims of the Nazi Holocaust, in J.P.WILSON, Z.HAREL, & B.KAHANA (EDS), Human Adaptation to Extreme Stress, NEW YORK: PLENUM, 1988. Heroism in the Dock: Does testifying help victims of organised violence and torture? A pilot study from Zimbabwe.