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The Conversation
The Conversation
Magnus Linden, Associate professor of psychology, Lund University

Can visiting genocide memorials make you more empathic?

National memorial to the victims of the Rwandan genocide in Kigali. Oscar Espinosa/Shutterstock

Each year, people visit museums and memorial sites as part of educational interventions organised around the remembrance of a genocide or an atrocity. Many schools visit a concentration camp as part of Holocaust education, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Others travel to memorial sites associated with other genocides, such as the massacre of Muslim men fleeing Srebrenica in Bosnia or the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Cambodia.

Two important goals for such education are to foster empathy towards the victims and to increase students’ personal identification with them as a group. In this context, empathy is the ability to feel with the victims and to be able to take their perspective .

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