Frontline Capacity Building - CSEL Serving the Voluntary Sector

-->

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.

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