Before 11 September 2001 it seemed for many people living in North America and Europe that trauma was something distant in time and place. It was either something they knew about through their parents' or grandparents' war memories, or more distant folk memories of famines, wars or other upheavals, or something they might have come across through friends or relatives who had experienced private trauma of one sort or another – sexual or physical abuse within the family being perhaps the most common. Many people themselves would not have come closer to the sense of vulnerability and the fracturing of self that what we call trauma brings, than a war movie or a road traffic accident. In other parts of the world, of course, this was not the case. Wars, genocides, torture and persecutions formed part of the map of the second half of the twentieth century, as of the first, but they were exported for much of it to what was then called the Third World. And, of course, at the beginning of the twenty-first century not only were there older generations in Europe and North America with memories of when Europe was a far from peaceful continent.