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Contribution type: New Concept
Concept: Harm, Help and Heal
Name of the contributor: Taitu Heron
E-mail of the contributor: taheron@gmail.com
HARM, HELP, HEAL Category: Companion Concept · Origin: Jamaica, 2025 · English
Harm, help and heal are three ethical pillars for evaluating how a state treats the humanity of its citizens, based on the acknowledgement of women as human beings. The triad asks three questions of any law, policy or institution: what harm does it cause or facilitate, what help is it withholding, and what healing does it owe? The pillars are inseparable. Harm alone is diagnosis, help alone is service delivery, healing alone is therapy. Together they form a test. The framework was developed from the experience of Jamaican women navigating pregnancy under a criminal abortion law, and its evidence is their testimony rather than the assessments of those who make policy about them.
Harm is taken to mean someone or something, including state and non-state institutions, that causes or facilitates adverse health effects on the individual and affects their quality of life and how they experience being a citizen of a country. This harm may be physical, psychological, social, economic and/or emotional. Harm in a Jamaican environment (but not exclusively) is centuries old and multi-generational, with colonial patterns of behaviour, laws, institutions and political culture determining how people are treated and how women citizens have to navigate their relations with the state and its actors. Jamaica's abortion statute, enacted in 1864 as a reproductive intervention to secure a labour force after emancipation, remains in force and is shielded from constitutional challenge by a savings clause in the 2011 charter of rights. Naming this as harm rather than misfortune locates responsibility with the institutions that produce it. Help is the act of facilitating a service or providing resources to alleviate someone's personal circumstances. Help is also the exercise of power through a nation's economic, cultural, social and political institutions for the benefit of the citizens. Any failure to exercise such power and resources leads to exclusion, poverty, frustration, violence and economic insecurity. Where a state knows that people will act regardless of prohibition, withholding help is not neutrality. It is a decision to let the harm continue, and its implicit message is that the humanity of those affected is irrelevant and that their suffering is punishment for disobedience. Heal is a prolonged process that allows a woman or adolescent girl equitable and just access to state-supported health services and economic options that guarantee optimal health and longevity. To heal also means that a woman is capable of making decisions and personal changes to her life and behaviour, of seeking access to services that can assist her in restoring her emotional and psychological wellbeing, and of settling grievances or reconciling anger and resentment towards those who may have caused her harm or offered little support. The state has a role in healing by righting wrongs arising from state harm and making efforts at reconciliation with women harmed by law and state actors. Trauma that is not healed is repeated. The third pillar is where the framework departs from conventional rights and public-health language. Harm reduction and service provision are already institutionally legible. An obligation to repair is not. Placing acknowledgement and reconciliation inside the evaluative frame moves the state from administrator to party, answerable for what it has done rather than only for what it now provides.
The triad emerged from reproductive rights but tests any exercise of state power over people's bodies and lives: policing, detention, institutional care, land dispossession, deportation, the treatment of migrants and of the poor. Its underlying claim is old and still contested in practice. People are human beings before they are cases, categories or subjects of law, and a state that cannot say what it has repaired has not finished answering for what it caused.
Source: Heron, Taitu. "Honouring the Humanity of Women: Considerations on Moving from Harm to Help and Healing Reproductive Health and Rights in Jamaica." In Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Women in Africa and the Caribbean, edited by Z. M. Olaitan et al., 325–346. African Histories and Modernities. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-96029-1_17