Module Name: Refugee Placement Essay

Module Code: TV 901

Student Number:

This is a reflective essay on my placement in one of the Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs) in London. It is important that for the purposes of subjectiveness, the name of the organisation and the client(s) would be withheld for reasons of confidentiality and in accordance with the data protection laws in place in the United Kingdom.  My day to day activities involved seeing clients as assigned by the manager on duty on any one day. I worked as a Refugee Caseworker and I must emphasize that rather than being a diversified one, my role was more of a routine kind which I am summarizing as follow:  filling out Asylum Support Application Form (ASP1); participating in refugee Psycho-educational workshop/therapy( this was usually an open session where refugees and asylum seekers( hereinafter collectively referred to as ‘Refugees’ for the remaining part of the essay) come together to be educated and enlightened on the impact of the psychological effect of refugee experience, how to tackle their individual situations and in turn get empowered by listening to their testimonies and success stories from other participants. This workshop was usually conducted by the experts or experienced refugee therapists or therapeutic caseworkers); and administrating financial help (Hardship fund and transport money to clients) where necessary. These clients were mostly those whose asylum claims have been rejected and have also exhausted their appeal rights and not those who are still in the asylum process. They were clients of various forms and of ages----families, young people, men and women.

Throughout my placement, what had frequently repeated itself had been the issues of accommodation, inadequate legal representation, access to medical care, financial support, access to education and lack of employment. With these, the clients have always sought to seek help from me or my colleagues in the organisation. I in turn had often found myself in difficult position as I was not in position to provide everything they asked for owing to organisational policy issues and restrictions in accordance with laws governing refugee community organisations.

The issue of refugeedom generally evokes feelings of empathy for the clients and in my own case especially when I am reminded by my experience in the asylum process by the same or similar present experiences of the clients who also often recount it during the filling of the ASP1 form. Many of them had passed through danger, rape, human rights abuses, hunger and starvation on their way to freedom.

SNIPPET 1

A woman (A) from Sudan came in to ask for legal representation and was looking up to me to provide such. Meanwhile she had exhausted her appeal rights through the appellate court system and was required to leave the United Kingdom. She was sleeping rough and depended on hand-out from friends. From records, that was not her first time coming in for help. Although I empathise with her, I quickly realised that I could not help but to signpost her to a legal firm to seek legal advice. I had to involve my supervisor who advised that she took advantage of the referral to seek legal advice on her situation. She also wanted food, shelter and access to GP and school her and her children.

With reference to the above, I felt a deep sense of responsibility to help but again, I was not in position to do as I was reminded that in accordance with the law, there are remits for each refugee community organisation. Each one is guided and restricted to some extent by an internal policy and general law which regulates such organisations. I felt like advising her but I was not an expert in legal matters and indeed not permitted under the law to give legal advice. I felt like advising on accommodation but I realised I did not have the resources to do so. We could only offer hardship money, travel expenses and some food items donated voluntarily from the public.

My supervisor was also in difficulty as to what to do; the empathy was there but at the same time restricted from going beyond the remit of the organisation owing to policy in place. This reminds me of the systemic approach to the refugee phenomenon[1], which engages the systems or environments where the both the refugee clients and their helpers or practitioners belong or come from. The client was not fully satisfied and kept reminding us that: ”you told us you are here to help refugees but here I am, you cannot do anything….I was a teacher in my own country and living well but because of war, where weapons from the west were used to kill innocent people, displace people from their homes, I have to come here, all I need is money, shelter, access to medical care , right to work and school and I will take care of myself’’

SNIPPET 2

This is a psycho-educational therapy workshop which I occasionally attended and which was being organised by another Refugee Community Organisation (RCO) for refugees and asylum seekers who have in various forms been or in one way or the other affected psychologically by their experiences in pre-flight, during flight and post-flight stages. This would form the nucleus of my overall reflection in this essay because there were opportunities for refugees and asylum seekers from different places in the United Kingdom to come together and tell their stories. Some accounts were distressing and traumatising, yet, in all these, people still found in them sources of encouragement and resilience in their determination to integrate within the UK communities. The supervisor was overwhelmed but in a professional manner advised each and every one to continue encourage one another and make use of the psycho-educational workshop/therapy which will in turn give them information about where to go to access help in accordance with their many and varied individual needs. Like I had mentioned earlier, what kept coming up were stories and accounts of refugee experiences in pre-flight stage (experience of violence, wars, rape, displacement/homelessness, and so on); during flight ( financial difficulties, dangers from armed attacks, hunger, trafficking, malnutrition, separation, loss of family homes and relatives, loss of jobs and so on); post-flight( which included: no right to work, difficulty in accessing medical care, restricted access to education, inadequate accommodation, living below poverty level and far below the UK standards, problem of integration, media misrepresentations of refugee identities and experiences, oversimplification and polarisation and so on).

APPLYING THE THEORIES THAT UNDERPIN THE DISCIPLINE OF REFUGEE CARE

Throughout my placement, I have constantly continued to reflect on a number of themes as they manifest from my personal experience of the refugee phenomenon (having been in the asylum process and experienced what it meant to go through the whole processes from documentation to appeals system, rejected, required to leave the UK but was able to get back into the system through the fresh claim procedure); and indeed lessons from the experiences of others who at the time still in the system during my placement.

One thing is clear---asylum seekers and refugees are not all that vulnerable as the media and the society portray them. Despite their losses and adversities, most of them are still imbued with incredible inner strength and courage. A number of them were professionals and were skilled in their different areas of endeavour before they were uprooted from their home countries by the danger they faced which violate their human rights and posed serious life-threating difficulties to existence. Generally, the society---the media, the politicians, government and so on often ignore the fact that though these group of people are in particular difficult circumstances, they nevertheless have the ‘resilience’, if given the right assistance to carry on with their lives. According to Papadopoulos (2001)[2], the needs of refugees and their families are “multi-faceted and multi-dimensional”. That is why intervention for them should be from a multidisciplinary perspective. The plight of refugees should not be presented in such a way as to depict or portray them as “traumatised people who need sympathy”[3]. Oversimplication of refugee phenomenon and polarisation of refugee people and their experiences should be avoided. In his recent guidance on the way forward, he argued that asylum is a human rights---a basic right[4] to which everybody is entitled to especially when the provisions of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocols are engaged. These rights or entitlements should therefore not “depend on our compassionate generosity”.

In my dealing with refugee clients, I had always believed that refugee issue is viewed exclusively from human rights perspective but my experience with refugees during the placement reminded me of the theoretical assumptions and concepts that underpin the discipline of Refugee Care as both academic and practical field of study---that refugees are not a homogenous group and as such their needs are many and varied having passed through different physical and psychological experiences on their way to their country of refuge in their pre-flight, flight and post-flight stages^[5]. In practice, it is not possible for refugee helpers to be professionals in all the fields of refugee needs like housing, medical care, legal assistance, education, financial and so. This is why there are other refugee organisations specialising in different areas of refugee programmes. I witnessed it first-hand that my misconception had to change from one-directional to multidimensional---I was able to signpost under supervision some of our clients to other specialist organisations when we had cases that fell outside the remit of our work like legal issues, housing and education. With reference to the Trauma Discourse, and although the refugee community organisation was not a mental health institution, there was often this natural tendency to overlook the fact that refugees or adversity survivors (have incredible level of resilience and strength), and though they have passed through traumatic experiences, most of them are not traumatised by those events that brought about those experiences after all (Hutchinson& Dorsett 2012)^[6]. According to Papadopoulos (2001)^[7] this incredible resilient aspect of refugees or adversity survivors is often dominated by the trauma narrative in the analysis of refugee experience with reference to traumatic events. For him, practitioners should pathologise or medicalise refugee experience as this would be make the administration of authentic and empathetic unsuccessful. I was in this regard also reminded of the trauma grid. Here, Papadopoulos (2010)^[8] made it clear in his findings that that ‘refugeedom or the state of being one is not a psychological phenomenon but a combination of both political and legal with some psychological undertone’. From psychological perspective, each individual is unique and therefore traumatic experiences are responded to by refugees or adversity survivors in highly personalized way according to model of Adversity Activated Development (ADD) put forward by him (Papadopoulos 2007)^[9]. As mentioned earlier, he warned practitioner against polarizing, medicalizing or pathologizing refugee’s experiences---they should avoid generalization, oversimplication and compartmentalisation.

 Application of a ‘therapeutic dimension’ to my field placement

One of the principal concepts in the field of Refugee Care is the introduction of ‘therapeutic dimension’ to the work. But what did mean for me? It does mean ‘offering therapy’ because I was not a therapist in a literal sense. The message being conveyed here instead is that in working with refugees or adversity survivors, I should be aware of the psychological complexities involved in:

1. The phenomenon of refugee experience or refugeedom itself and the therapeutic encounter which is taking place at the same time being mindful of the location, the organizational context, limitations and so on. In my ow

2. The Refugees or Adversity Survivors who incidentally are the service users themselves. Being aware of who they are, their background including their culture, their sensibilities, their needs, and their expectations would be helpful in formulating therapeutic alliance and which in turn ensures the creation of a conducive therapeutic environment where there is mutual trust and confidence in both the refugees and the professionals or helpers

3. Service Providers: being aware of who the service providers are including the staff, how they react, where they come from, their background including their culture, gender, ethnicity and also being aware of oneself are very essential in delivering care to refugees.

4. The interaction (between users and providers): This involves the transference of cultural awareness and mutual knowledge of the inner worlds of the refugees on the one hand and the inner worlds of the practitioners on the other. This is because the service users themselves have history and the service providers also have history and both need to permeate each other’s space in order to achieve maximum and desired result.

5. The wider socio-political context: This includes the many and varied societal discourses on refugees, the politics of asylum seeking, the perception of refugees in the country of asylum, the media perception as well, the public opinion on refugees which inevitably impacts on the work with refugees.

6. The methodology / epistemology: Here this is how (we the helpers) perceive the refugees, the conceptualisation of who we think we are and who the refugee people are; whether or not we see ourselves as helpers or rescuers or healers and whether we see the refugees as victims, vulnerable people or whether we see them as people who have resilience in them and who if offered assistance can find their potentials and activate their creative qualities and so on. In fact, the question is: are we there to help or change or heal them? Here, it is very important to remind ourselves and recognise as mentioned earlier the role of the ‘trauma grid’ developed by Papadopoulos (2004)^[10].

It is also very important that practitioners should be aware of the overlapping dimensions of refugee experience or refugeedom. These are Socio-political milieu or realm of which an example is the Societal Discourse on Refugees; others are the intrapsychic dimensions which have to do with the feelings and emotional reactions refugees and workers have; and finally the interpersonal dimensions which essentially have to do with the totality of the many and varied encounters with refugees.

REFERENCE

Kunz, E.F. (1973). The Refugee in Flight: Kinetic Models and Forms of Displacement. International Migration Review, 7.   See also: Kunz, E.F. (1981). Exile and Resettlement: Refugee Theory. International Migration Review.XV.

Hutchinson, M., & Dorsett, P. (2012). What does the literature say about resilience in refugee people? Implications for practice. Journal of Social Inclusion, 3(2), 55-78.

Papadopoulos, R. K. (2001). Refugee families: Issues of systemic supervision. Journal of family Therapy, 23(4), 405-422.

Papadopoulos, R. K. (2007). Refugees, trauma and adversity-activated development. European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling, 9(3), 301-312.

 Papadopoulos, R.K. (2015). Forget the sympathy – asylum is a refugee’s right [Online], available at: https://theconversation.com/forget-the-sympathy-asylum-is-a-refugees-right-43370 (accessed 20 July 2015).