Truth and reconciliation processes — from South Africa after apartheid to Canada's inquiry into residential schools — rest on the bet that a society cannot move forward until it has faced, collectively, what was done in its name. The process is not primarily about punishment but about acknowledgment: the formal, public recognition that specific harms were done to specific people by identifiable systems. The evidence from multiple national experiences suggests that truth-telling, even without prosecution, does something that silence and denial cannot — it allows the wounded to be seen and the society to begin the work of re-knitting.
Juana