Suchergebnisse

In this short essay, the focus is on social and political aspects of forced migration. It is argued that policies designed to restrict access to developed countries have, rather like the American "prohibition", produced a thriving criminal market for smugglers, in this case of people. Making travel more difficult increases both their profits and the sophistication of their methods. Provision of targeted, properly controlled, support for refugees in countriesneighbouring conflict zones might help to reduce the pressure on travel to Europe and could be both more successful and more humanitarian. For those who do reach developed countries, there is scope to improve the legal decision-making process. Psychologicalinput should include scientific investigation of legal assumptions, and the provision of relevant expert literature reviews, for exampleconcerning modern knowledge of memory. Trust is the first casualty of repressive violence, and mistrust among opposition groups is probably one of the key mechanisms of its success. We need to make sure that we do not provide further grounds for this sort of reaction. Although there is no brave or new world ahead, we must continue to confront ignorance and prejudice, as we seek to avoid more humanitarian disasters. It is now just over thirty years since we published a potential framework for understanding how survivors of organised state violence react to complex and severe trauma (Turner & Gorst-Unsworth, 1990). We argued that no single psychological process underpins the reactions to this experience, and therefore, there can be no unitary torture syndrome, but rather a series of understandable psychological pathways activated to varying degrees by different experiences, leading to diversity of emotional response, with implications for recovery and treatment. We also asked family doctors about health needs of refugees (Ramsay & Turner, 1993), and it is wonderful to see how the evidence on treatment options has developed since then, especially in recent years. In ...

In this short essay, the focus is on social and political aspects of forced migration. It is argued that policies designed to restrict access to developed countries have, rather like the American "prohibition", produced a thriving criminal market for smugglers, in this case of people. Making travel more difficult increases both their profits and the sophistication of their methods. Provision of targeted, properly controlled, support for refugees in countriesneighbouring conflict zones might help to reduce the pressure on travel to Europe and could be both more successful and more humanitarian. For those who do reach developed countries, there is scope to improve the legal decision-making process. Psychologicalinput should include scientific investigation of legal assumptions, and the provision of relevant expert literature reviews, for exampleconcerning modern knowledge of memory. Trust is the first casualty of repressive violence, and mistrust among opposition groups is probably one of the key mechanisms of its success. We need to make sure that we do not provide further grounds for this sort of reaction. Although there is no brave or new world ahead, we must continue to confront ignorance and prejudice, as we seek to avoid more humanitarian disasters. It is now just over thirty years since we published a potential framework for understanding how survivors of organised state violence react to complex and severe trauma (Turner & Gorst-Unsworth, 1990). We argued that no single psychological process underpins the reactions to this experience, and therefore, there can be no unitary torture syndrome, but rather a series of understandable psychological pathways activated to varying degrees by different experiences, leading to diversity of emotional response, with implications for recovery and treatment. We also asked family doctors about health needs of refugees (Ramsay & Turner, 1993), and it is wonderful to see how the evidence on treatment options has developed since then, especially in recent years. In ...

In this paper, the numbers of refugees travelling to the European Union are set in a global context. It is argued that the increasing restrictions placed on asylum seekers from the 1980s onwards in the UK and the associated culture of deterrence and prohibition have had the perverse effect of supporting the economic market for people smuggling. It appears that these restrictions were initially designed to deter people, most of whom would have been granted humanitarian assistance had they managed to arrive in the UK, so as to prevent them from accessing the decision-making process on asylum. Policy changes concerning travel, benefits, and other pressures on asylum seekers are also considered in the context of deterrence. The problems facing asylum seekers do not end with their arrival in a safe country. The current methods of determining refugee status are alarmingly weak. Indeed there is evidence suggesting that those who are most traumatised before arrival face systematic disadvantage. The focus of this paper is on the United Kingdom but its conclusions apply to most Western European countries. The paper concludes with some tentative suggestions for change.

Abstract
This paper presents evidence that refugee status decision makers make assumptions about how humans think and act that are contrary to decades of scientific evidence about human behaviour and cognition (e.g. memory, risk assessment) – including studies and reviews of studies specifically focused on the RSD context. This evidence is not made available to decision makers. In contrast, decision makers regularly benefit from systems and procedures providing relevant, up to date, methodologically sound, impartial, independent, balanced expert evidence pertaining to country of origin information (COI). This paper proposes similar processes for the collation, assessment, and presentation of psychological evidence in order to ensure fairer, more sustainable refugee status decisions.