Credibility, science and spreading the word in Manchester

These are challenging times for women seeking asylum in the UK, and for those working to support them. Funding cuts mean that services are being reduced, access to legal support is ever harder to achieve, and public opinion is not softening – in fact it sometimes seems attitudes are hardening. But at the same time, there is increasing concern for the different experiences and particular needs of traumatised women seeking asylum, and I was invited by the Red Cross to give a workshop at their March conference in Manchester on Women and Asylum.

The conference aimed to share knowledge and good practice around understanding the needs and supporting the rights of women who make asylum applications in the UK. About 30% of asylum claims in the UK are made by women. As Nick Scott Flynn, head of refugee services at the Red Cross, pointed out, women often have different experiences of persecution from men – because both the reasons and the form of the persecution they suffer is gender-based, and because women’s social roles may mean that they have non-typical profiles of political activity, for example. These issues have to be taken into account in order to offer women protection appropriately and in appropriate forms.

In the morning, we heard presentations from Tony McNulty MP; Nick Scott Flynn; Ian Macdonald, a team leader for the UK Border Agency; and Debora Singer, head of policy at Asylum Aid. Nick Scott Flynn gave a great overview of why we need to focus on women seeking asylum, and Debora Singer brilliantly and engagingly summarised the key issues that Asylum Aid has been raising for years about the need to respect the rights of women seeking asylum, and the way that a systematic failure to recognise these rights leads to human rights abuses against vulnerable women. The speaker from the UKBA gave a general overview of the role of the UKBA and spoke about anti-trafficking work.

The afternoon saw seminars on surviving destitution (the Refugee Council and Women Asylum Seekers Together); the journey of an asylum claim (Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit); and rehabilitation after surviving torture (Freedom from Torture); and credibility and seeking asylum (CSEL). Sadly for me, the price of giving a workshop was missing out on the others.

However, my seminars were very popular, and so lively that I can’t complain. I used the time to host a discussion about why it’s important to be able to refer to credible, scientific research findings when supporting women seeking asylum, and how you can make use of findings in different support roles, with reference to CSEL’s research where appropriate. I found that 45 minutes isn’t long when you have a room full of lively professionals and volunteers keen to share their experiences and explore ways to use new information to improve the quality of the service they provide for women seeking asylum.

The conference report is now being written, and will include evaluation of the workshops, but if the vitality of group discussions are anything to go by, I can definitely say that CSEL’s research captured the interest of the conference delegates. Many thanks to Rachel Keene, Antonia Dunn and all the Red Cross volunteers for pulling together this exciting regional event.

CSEL in The Times

See the media page for an article about our work with testimony at the Khmer Rouge trials.

Improving psychological understanding in international human rights trials

On New Year’s Eve 2011 I flew to Cambodia to get CSEL’s 2012 work off to an international start, witnessing human rights law in action. We went to run training sessions at the UN / Cambodian hybrid court of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) www.eccc.gov.kh/en, where the second trial of Khmer Rouge leaders has just begun. The current defendants are amongst those being tried for some of the atrocities and ‘killing fields’ of the 1970s.

CSEL’s work at the intersection of psychology and law, and particularly around trauma, memory and the practice of justice, is highly relevant to the ECCC. In December 2011, a publication on the impact of “trauma psychology” by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) www.dccam.org – an international NGO documenting the history of the Khmer Rouge period – had cited our research and emphasised the value of training legal actors in psychological issues at the ECCC, to ensure that the best quality justice can be provided by the court.

With Pennie Blackburn, a Clinical Psychologist experienced in work with torture survivors, and cross-cultural psychology and training, I gave a one day training session to legal monitors from the War Crimes Studies Center of the University of California (Berkeley), who will write weekly reports of the trial proceedings (see www.krtmonitor.org). We also provided two days of training - hosted by the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) - for a number of the ECCC lawyers (including the two lead co-lawyers) and their assistants. The training covered an introduction to how psychology is relevant to legal decision making; psychological responses to trauma; research showing the impact of psychological issues on legal decision making; and how to look after oneself psychologically when working with traumatised people.

It will be interesting to see how psychological issues in the presentation of legal evidence are recognised and responded to in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in 2012.

Jane Herlihy.

Free training in February - book now!

In February we’ll be holding another London training seminar, funded by Comic Relief, in how to understand psychological research and use it to support traumatised women seeking asylum.

Our first training seminar was in London in February 2010, and it seems fitting that what may be our last open access free seminar will also be in London. Since that first one, we’ve held seminars in Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow, Sheffield, Brighton, and Newcastle, as well as an inspiring workshop at the annual conference of the Rape Crisis Federation of England and Wales. Many of these have been oversubscribed, with waiting lists as long as the list of bookings.

The seminars have been well received, too – nearly everyone who has come along has found the discussions and presentations interesting, stimulating and useful. It’s hard to write this, really, because it sounds too good to be true – and not very modest. And to be honest, we’ve been surprised (as well as pleased of course) by such overwhelmingly positive reception – I mean, we think our research is exciting, fascinating and useful, and we hope we’re good at conveying this to others. But we hadn’t really hoped for quite such enthusiasm.

Participants in the training have told us how helpful it was “having a mix of therapists, doctors and lawyers all in the same room”; that it was “important to have new ways of organising the facts I already knew, such as the reasons why women have special difficulty with the asylum system, new ways of classifying ideas about memory and post-traumatic stress, and several useful new references.”

After the training, organisations have successfully used our research to assist in individual cases; cited our research when advocating with the UK Border Agency; incorporated our training and research findings into their own staff and volunteer training; and notably Freedom from Torture has shared our research findings throughout their network of medico-legal report writers.

Of course our training isn’t perfect – we’ve taken a lot of feedback on board and adapted the workshops/seminar as far as we can to try to get a balance between delivering information and vital discussion time. And we’re tweaking the content all the time...

So I’m looking forward to running the seminar one more time on 7 February 2012. This is probably the last training session in this programme – so if you work with traumatised women seeking asylum, don’t miss this chance to sign up for your place.

Contact: c.cochrane@csel.org.uk as soon as possible!

new data on PTSD & credibility assessments presented in US

Preliminary data from Hannah Rogers' exciting new study on credibility assessment were presented this week at the annual meeting of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies, in Baltimore. Some of the world's foremost PTSD researchers and practitioners attend this meeting and there was a great deal of interest in the findings. Briefly, Hannah had noticed that the things that we think people do when they are lying overlap with some of the things that people might do when they have PTSD (e.g. looking ashamed or anxious). She asked a group of Royal Holloway students to assess the credibility of an actor playing an asylum seeker presenting as either lying or with PTSD (or both!). We are currently submitting a paper for publication in a high impact, peer-reviewed psychology journal - to be announced here once we are 'in press'.

Esmee Fairburn Foundation supports CSEL

Excellent funding news - after a careful investigation of our work and our future plans, the Esmee Fairburn Foundation are making us a grant towards our core costs.  Trustees said that they were "very impressed by the work so far and by the links [we] have managed to develop with those in decision making positions",

Onwards and upwards!

crazy triathlon hero raising money for CSEL

GO RIGHT NOW to http://www.justgiving.com/Bryn-Davies to sponsor Bryn (partner of Roxanne Agnew-Davies) in his Ironman Distance Triathlon, raising funds for CSEL!!