Taking stock - taking suggestions!

We’re just starting our third year of the Dissemination Project for Refugee Women, and as I’m finishing our annual report to Comic Relief, it’s a great time to look back on what we’ve achieved, and what we still plan to do...

I’ve just got back from training refugee support workers , counsellors and volunteers in Wales, and I’m about to go back to Manchester to run a training afternoon with more people there. So far the project has trained more than 120 community-based workers and volunteers supporting refugees to understand CSEL’s psychological research.

We’ve presented at conferences in the UK and in Brussels; given talks about our own work and sat on panels. In September in Brussels at the Meeting of Ministers of Immigration CSEL’s trustee David Rhys- Jones and Executive Director Jane Herlihy met partner organisations and made contact with UKBA officials.

We’re exploring ways to bring our training to busy legal professionals working within the time-pressured fast-track process.

We’ve produced readable summaries of our research to go along with our training, and we’re thinking about other ways to make our resources available to people who aren’t psychology or legal professionals.

Now we’re planning the last part of the Dissemination Project – and we’d love to hear from you, if you think there’s something we could be doing that we aren’t, or you’d like us to come to your region and run training.

Get in touch with me: c.cochrane@csel.org.uk

CSEL in Warsaw

We have been taking our research findings to lawyers in Poland.  Jane Herlihy and Raggi Kotak, of 1, Pump Court Chambers, delivered a two day training to the Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), which is based in Warsaw.  Present were members of ODIHR and lawyers from Halina Niec (http://www.pomocprawna.org/en/about-us) - an NGO in Krakow who are funded by ODIHR to provide legal representation to people detained in Poland - many of whom are victims of trafficking.

latest e-newsletter now available

Thanks very much for this newsletter. It's fantastic to read about the work going on nationally. This kind of progressive work supports us all to have hope in amongst some of the challenges we face in the field of asylum.

 - said Kate Smith, Women's Asylum and Refugee Service Manager at the WomenCentre in Calderdale & Kirklees (http://www.womencentre.org.uk/) and Phd researcher at Huddersfield University.

Read the quarterly CSEL e-newsletter here : http://www.csel.org.uk/resource/Jan%202011.pdf and email c.cochrane@csel.org.uk to be added to the distribution list.

Chair of Trustees receives award and speaks of work with UN

Also in Montreal....

Chair of Trustees, Stuart Turner was awarded the Sarah Haley Memorial Award for Clinical Excellence.  This is an award given annually by the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS; see http://www.istss.org/) to a clinician or group of clinicians in direct service to traumatized individuals.  Previous winners include Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Stuart also spoke at the conference about his work this year with the United Nations.  ISTSS has Special Consultative Status with the United Nations and Stuart is one of the three ISTSS representatives who are taking this work forward.

CSEL in Canada & the US

Last week Jane presented data from our study of decision-making assumptions (Herlihy, Gleeson & Turner, 2010) at the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies annual meeting in Montreal, in a session with Derrick Silove of UNSW, Sydney, Australia.  A summary of CSEL's work was also published in Traumatic Stress Points, the society newsletter, just before the conference.  Download the newsletter here - the article is on pages 5&6.

New data

Our latest paper is a qualitative analysis of the assumptions about human behaviour made by asylum decision makers & is now published in the International Journal of Refugee Law.   Some assumptions are in line with robust empirical research, others less so...  For a link to the paper, go to http://www.csel.org.uk/csel_publications.html

Discrepancies project-the protocol

The discrepancies project is well under way.  We are still actively recruiting people with a history of at least one traumatic experience to be interviewed.  As more people are hearing about the project we are getting enquiries - what are the aims of the project? what does the study consist of? why is it needed?  The Protocol (a brief version of a fuller document, available on request) answers these questions.