CSEL Current Projects Blog

CSEL in The Times

2012-02-17T13:49:00.009Z

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

2012-01-25T14:06:00.017Z

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!

2011-12-22T15:47:00.005Z

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

2011-11-06T21:36:00.004Z

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

2011-07-08T19:14:00.001+01:00

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

2011-05-31T18:28:00.003+01:00

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!!

latest e-newsletter now available

2011-04-07T18:57:00.004+01:00

Read our quarterly CSEL e-newsletter here.
Please email c.cochrane@csel.org.uk to be added to the distribution list for future CSEL e-news - or with any comments, responses or questions.

Rape Crisis - Hope and Heroines

2011-03-31T15:10:00.003+01:00

Last month I gave a workshop at the annual conference of the Rape Crisis Federation of England and Wales. It was amazing and inspiring to be among these women who dedicate their lives and free time to supporting women surviving experiences of violence – especially as they do it all on a shoestring.

The CSEL workshop aimed to introduce some facts about women seeking asylum in the UK and to get participants talking about how rape crisis centres can support women seeking asylum in the UK.

The Refugee Council has estimated that as many as 80% of women refugees in the UK have experienced sexual violence ; and many women seek asylum in the UK having fled from countries where rape is commonly used as a weapon of war. Yet women find it very difficult to talk about experiences of sexual violence – as our own research has shown – as has research into this phenomenon amongst non-refugee women in the UK, and refugee women in other countries (Marion Tankink has written an excellent and really interesting paper on why women stay silent about these experiences). So you can imagine there’s quite a need amongst refugee women in the UK for the specialist services of organisations like rape crisis centres.

Yet many rape crisis centres and other sexual violence services report that they don’t see a lot of refugee women.

Some rape crisis centres have addressed this problem proactively: Bradford Rape Crisis has set up Project Jyoti, which is run by and for Black and ethnic minority women; Leicester Rape Crisis has changed its name to Jasmin House and recruited Muslim women to do outreach work with Muslim women’s groups in Leicester; and another project is planning to train refugee women as specialist councillors to work particularly with women seeking asylum.

See what I mean about inspiring?

Clare

c.cochrane@csel.org.uk

Taking Care of Ourselves

2011-03-16T09:57:00.002Z

The last module in our training seminar is about self-care – how to look after yourself; prevent burnout and traumatisation in yourself; and spot the signs of it beginning. The module begins with a quick overview of the difference between ‘burnout’ and the kinds of traumatisation effects that you can experience when you work closely with traumatised people, discussed in this text on ‘compassion fatigue’ (if you decide to buy the book, go through the button on the CSEL website!) This is a chance to get a discussion going in the group about how we can spot the signs, or even better, prevent burnout – and what personal and professional solutions there are.

We include the self-care module because we think it’s vital to understand that these things can happen, learn to recognise the symptoms, and share ideas of how we can take care of ourselves and take preventive action.

Usually training groups are quite mixed and include a few therapeutic professionals, who have extensive experience of formalised structures to help, such as regular supervisions. But many smaller, grassroots, or traditional voluntary sector organisations don’t have these structures. Some really creative ideas have come out of these mixed group discussions, for example, the suggestion that organisations in one region get together and hold an away day focused on self-care and peer support.

I know that this part of our training is vital, because however long I schedule for this session, and however careful I am to make sure we have time to discuss it at the end of the afternoon, there is still never enough time. People always want to talk for longer than we can carry on!

Well nearly always... At one session I encountered almost the opposite phenomenon: after talking about the difference between ‘burnout’ and ‘secondary traumatisation’, I opened the topic for general discussion about taking care of oneself. A couple of people spoke, then – silence. And then the group began to discuss something completely different. I wondered if this was a kind of collective avoidance tactic – changing the subject rather than talking about something sensitive and difficult.

What all of this suggests – both talking as though the floodgates have been opened, and avoiding talking about it – is that looking after ourselves is a much bigger topic than we are even able to acknowledge.

For more information about compassion fatigue, see Charles Figley’s website.

Clare Cochrane
c.cochrane @ csel.org.uk

Taking stock - taking suggestions!

2011-03-10T12:42:00.001Z

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

2011-02-23T21:08:00.000Z

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

2011-01-21T18:57:00.004Z

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

2010-12-29T16:31:00.001Z

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

2010-11-08T22:17:00.001Z

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

2010-09-10T18:23:00.001+01:00

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

2010-08-23T18:17:00.000+01:00

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.

CSEL in the House of Lords

2010-07-15T14:54:00.000+01:00

In answer to a question in the House of Lords, Baroness Neville-Jones (Minister of State for Security) said yesterday that the UKBA is aware of CSEL's work, specifically referring to Psychology of Protection - a recent paper in the International Journal of Refugee Law.

See the text of both question and answer in this link to Hansard : http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/100712w0001.htm#10071230000830

Why a women's project?

2010-07-15T14:48:00.002+01:00

CSEL set up the Dissemination Project for Refugee Women in 2009 in order to ensure that our research into the effects of trauma for asylum seekers was more widely understood by those supporting refugee women in frontline and grassroots organisations.

Why women? Well, because we recognise that women seeking asylum who have experienced rape and sexual assault are affected in particular ways, and this can make it harder for them when they are putting in an asylum claim and going through the asylum process. But this is not well understood by many in the asylum system – the UKBA, lawyers and legal representatives, and even refugee support groups.

Our research into the barriers to disclosure in home office interviews showed that those who had experienced sexual violence also experienced high levels of shame, and a greater severity of post-traumatic stress symptoms. They also experienced a greater severity of dissociative experiences – ‘cutting off’ or ‘phasing out’ while telling their story.

What this means is that traumatised women need support to be able to disclose their experiences. They may need more time to tell their stories; assurance that they are being listened to; to choose whether to have a friend in with them, or be alone to ensure confidentiality; to know their children are safely cared for but out of earshot; to choose whether to have a male or female interviewer; to be able to control the environment of the interview; to be able to take breaks.

As our paper ‘The Psychology of Seeking Protection’ points out, many of these issues have begun to be understood for some time by those operating within the criminal justice system; women going through a rape case can access specialist support as they go through the process of making a witness statement and following through with the court proceedings. But as the Every Single Woman campaign run by Asylum Aid shows, it’s very different for women who’ve been raped but are going through the asylum process. The campaign makes the point that, whatever a woman’s background, if she has experienced sexual violence she’s going to need support to go through legal procedures and processes.

Our dissemination project trains refugee support organisations and violence against women organisations who support women seeking asylum to help them understand our research, so that when they are supporting a woman who is traumatised and making an asylum claim, they will better understand what she is going through, and what kind of support she needs – from themselves or from other agencies. And crucially they can help the woman herself to understand what she is going through.

To find out about training seminars and workshops, contact c.cochrane@csel.org.uk

Annual Report now available

2010-07-06T16:38:00.000+01:00

Go to About Us to download a copy of our latest Annual Report. It tells you about our work and achievements in 2009 (our year end is September 2009). Do send any thoughts/feedback/comments to j.herlihy@csel.org.uk.

Discrepancies in asylum seekers' accounts

2010-05-01T09:42:00.001+01:00

We are recruiting now for this project. Anyone who is willing to answer questions about a traumatic experience is very welcome to join in and help us with this important study.

Welcome!

2010-05-01T09:16:00.001+01:00

Welcome to CSEL's blog. This is where we will keep you up to date with the centre's latest work and any training or other events that we are planning.