Frontline Capacity Building - CSEL Serving the Voluntary Sector

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By Dr. Jane Herlihy

CSEL plays an important ‘back-office’ role to the many professionals who are working directly with people asking for protection in Europe. An example of this is our training sessions for the Freedom from Torture medico-legal report team. When a doctor assesses an individual asylum-seeker they gather important clinical evidence about that person, and psychological research evidence can complement and support this clinical evidence by giving a broader picture of what effects are likely, or possible.  For example, a man might have inconsistent memories of his torture in detention, and research shows reasons for inconsistencies in people’s memory for traumatic experiences.

Earlier this month I was invited to run a workshop on research evidence for doctors and psychologists writing medico-legal reports in The Netherlands.

iMMO is the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights and Medical Assessment (Instituut voor Mensenrechten en Medisch Onderzoek).  iMMO consists of volunteer doctors and psychologists who contribute to the protection of human rights, especially by making medical assessments of suspected victims of torture and inhumane treatment.  The 45 assessors are trained by iMMO and perform assessments working independently within the framework of the Istanbul Protocol.

Dr. Jane Herlihy at iMMO

I was invited to attend iMMO’s regular study day in the beautiful medieval city of Utrecht. I spoke briefly about the notion of using the breadth of psychological evidence to support medico-legal assessments. I then ran quickly through CSEL’s existing research studies, outlined our recent studies (on overgeneral memory, and on credibility judgments about people with PTSD & Depression), and discussed potential new studies. We then spent some time thinking about different types of autobiographical memory in different cultures, working from a paper by Markus & Kitayama (1991), which reviews the robust evidence for differences between individualist, or independent cultures and collectivist, or interdependent cultures in terms of how events are described and recalled.

It was great to work and think together with these dedicated professionals, and to hear about the pressures of policy changes that they have to contend with. We talked about how these pressures interact with their focus on ensuring that individuals seeking protection get the best possible decisions in their cases, taking into account their medical and psychological needs and difficulties. We had a very fruitful exchange – they were very interested in encouraging our research – and I do hope that we will find ways to continue this connection.

Children's Credibility - a Multidisciplinary Approach

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Last week Dr. Zoe Given-Wilson presented her chapter in the second multidisciplinary training manual of the Credo project, at the joint launch at No. 5 Chambers with Asylum Aid and UNHCR London. Thanks to the Credo project Zoe has been able to complete a thorough review of the psychology literature on issues facing young people seeking asylum, including the development of autobiographical memory (some aspects don’t develop until as late as our 20s!), the effects of trauma on children, and how depression and anxiety can affect how they present in the asylum procedure.  This work underpinned her contributions to UNHCR’s final report of the project and her chapter in the training manual.

Pink Sherbert, Creative Commons

CSEL’s research initially focused only on adults seeking asylum, but over the years we often had requests for equally sound research about children. Thanks to the Credo project we were able to engage Zoe, a specialist in children and young people, to allow us to cover this less well understood group.

Zoe’s re-appearance from her maternity leave last week also marked our successful bid for funding for Zoe to write up and submit her work for peer-review and publication in the scientific literature.  Once her two papers have been published in high-impact scientific journals they will be available for citing and using in decision-making, case-work, training, and support work for young people in need of protection from persecution.

As with our adult research, through the Evidence into Practice training workshops and other presentations and ad hoc training, it will be crucial for us to be able to disseminate this work on unaccompanied children seeking asylum as widely as possible - to ensure that decision making for them is also based on the best quality evidence available. We will need to secure support to maintain our capacity to do this. If you can help us undertake and maintain this work, please get in touch.

Providing International HELP (Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals)

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by Jane Herlihy

At CSEL we emphasise the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach to decision making, in order to bring together the best knowledge from the relevant fields. Through our work with authorities internationally, we’ve been glad to see that the value of the interdisciplinary approach is being increasingly widely understood by decision makers, too. Early in June I travelled to Strasbourg to contribute to a Council of Europe (CoE) event bringing legal and non-legal professionals together to extend practical skills for lawyers working on human rights cases.

by zack lee @ flickr.com

HELP, the European Programme for Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) is a project of the CoE that aims to support EU member states’ implementation of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) by ensuring adequate training in Convention standards for legal professionals. HELP also promotes the dissemination across member states of relevant case law from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). HELP aims to ensure that is embedded in the training for all legal professionals, to ensure that national human rights legislation is appropriately implemented, and the programme targets the key legal actors in European asylum processes: judges, prosecutors and lawyers.

I was invited to bring CSEL’s expert knowledge of the psychological issues relevant to credibility assessment into the HELP knowledge exchange process. Working with human rights lawyer Flip Schuller, I gave a presentation on the breadth of scientific psychological evidence available to lawyers and decision makers considering claims for protection from human rights abuses to 200 legal trainers from across the 47 EU member states. The audience included judicial trainers, all attending in order to consider how to incorporate other disciplines in their legal training.

With so many high-level legal trainers in one room, the conference provided an excellent dissemination opportunity - and a chance to address lawyers and decision makers who are considering not just the refugee convention, but the wider world of protecting people from abuses of their human rights. I’m looking forward to further work with the HELP network, and more opportunities to take CSEL’s research findings to human rights defenders across European jurisdictions.

Considering children's credibility at IGC

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In June, Zoe Given-Wilson was invited to speak at a meeting of the IGC, an international, intergovernmental group of immigration policy makers who meet regularly to develop strategic thinking and share knowledge and best practice about migration around the world.

At their latest meeting, the group were particularly concerned to address the increasing numbers of children arriving in North America and Europe, fleeing conflict and other dangers such as gang violence or persecution. Many are trafficked, and some travel ahead of parents. All are vulnerable because of their age. Most protection mechanisms developed by governments to assess asylum applications and provide sanctuary are designed primarily to deal with adults, and have to be adapted to meet the needs of children.

by monique kittan @ flickr.com

Zoe was invited to speak after her review of the literature on child and adolescent psychology and child development was published as a chapter in the CREDO report Heart of the Matter. The report examines the key issues to take into account when assessing the credibility of children and young people making applications for asylum. Zoe’s research is being recognised at high levels as an important reminder of the need to take an interdisciplinary approach to protecting unaccompanied children seeking asylum. In her presentation, Zoe talked about the key factors that need to be taken into consideration when making credibility assessment in children – both those relating to the child, including both normal child development and autobiographical memory; and those relating to decision making, the assumptions that underlie the judgements of decision makers, and the need to ensure that these are in line with scientific evidence for what we know about child development, and memory.

Zoe will be speaking at the London launch of Heart of the Matter on 25 June, with fellow contributors S Chelvan of No 5 Chambers, and Debora Singer of Asylum Aid.

Meaningful and Credible: Researching *With* Refugee Women

At CSEL we're not only interested in conducting and disseminating research, to improve the fairness of decision making, but also in exploring ways to ensure the quality of research findings, and the integrity of research processes. As part of this enquiry, the Evidence into Practice project is exploring the issue of participation of refugee women in research projects.

How can researchers involve refugee women more in the development, design and delivery of research into refugee women’s experience? Why should they? What challenges do participatory approaches pose to the need to balance meaningful involvement by marginalised stakeholders, with the production of reliable, credible research findings? What can be learned from the community sector to help find answers to these questions? These are some of the questions that have emerged through the preparation for our roundtable on Researching With Refugee Women, to be held later this year.

Photo from Participate2015

To explore these questions I’ve been reading some of the literature evaluating the vast experience of participation in the community sector, the user involvement movement, and the international development field. Grassroots community activists have been using participatory methodologies for many decades to support marginalised people to be meaningfully involved in decision making and research that affects their lives. What can more conventional academic researchers learn from this literature?

In May I presented these questions and some of this learning from the community sector at a conference in Paris on Producing Knowledge on Migration. It was an exciting chance to raise these issues with migration researchers, and hear their concerns about ‘participation’ and participatory approaches. These included worries about the integrity of the 'participation'; differences in objectives of researchers and stakeholders; and a loss of objectivity and quality of findings. Many of these concerns have been explored in depth in the community sector - it seems to me there’s a real need to share the knowledge gained outside academia with those working within.

The questions we are exploring in this strand of work raise exciting challenges for conventional researchers. They also open up space to suggest possibilities for new ways of working, and opportunities to support the empowerment of refugee women. This is an important objective for those working on refugee women’s issues, whether as practitioners or researchers, and I’m looking forward to convening the roundtable in October to discuss it further. To find out where we get to, watch this space! c.cochrane@csel.org.uk

The Heart of the Matter: credibility assessment of child asylum seekers in the EU

Today we are pleased to announce a new and exciting multidisciplinary report under the auspices of the CREDO 2 project. The Heart of the Matter: Assessing Credibility when Children Apply for Asylum in the European Union, published by UNHCR, and funded by the European Commission's European Refugee Fund, brings expertise from across a range of disciplines to bear on the complex question of how the credibility of unaccompanied children and adolescents can best be assessed in the context of the EU asylum process.

CSEL's Child Psychology Researcher Zoe Given-Wilson contributed a chapter on 'The Importance of a Multidisciplinary Approach', having spent 2014 working on a rigorous and wide-ranging review of the current literature relating to child credibility assessment, both in the context of asylum proceedings, and also other legal processes such as child protection cases. Zoe looked at a variety of aspects of child psychology, such as memory, fear, trust and shame, alongside studies and papers focusing on the psychology of decision-makers, ranging from the assumptions decision-makers hold about children from other cultures, to how such decision-makers attempt to deal with the emotional impact of hearing distressing or traumatic testimonies from children.

Continuing our work in Europe

We are delighted to have been invited to join the Prague Process Targeted Initiative of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD).  I attended a kick-off meeting in Vienna this week for the “Pilot Project 7: Quality in Decision-making in the Asylum Process” – a training and ‘train the trainer’ project which will continue ICMPD’s work implementing the EU pan-European approach to migration and asylum, particularly in eastern and south-eastern regions of Europe.  We are looking forward to working with decision makers from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Turkey and other Prague Process member states. 

Experienced judges from Austria, Germany and the UK and myself have joined the project as experts, bringing not only training expertise but also deep knowledge of the intricacies of hearing claims for protection and making decisions based often on very little corroborated evidence – or sometimes even none.

It seems to me that this project is well placed to carry forward the work of the Credo project, drawing on and further disseminating the multidisciplinary and evidence-based training manual: Credibility Assessment in Asylum Procedures. I’m looking forward to our first seminar, and another opportunity to take psychological research findings to decision makers.  Watch this space!