Browsing by Subject "Torture"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Effective Assessment of Torture Survivors for Optimal Care in the Primary Care Setting
    (2020) Newcome, Elle Maureen
    Given the prevalence of individuals who have survived torture living in the United States of America, it is important to screen for torture in the primary care setting to optimize patient health. This presentation introduces torture as a preventable public health epidemic, highlights the effects of torture on human pathophysiology, and outlines a validated question to screen for torture in the primary care setting.
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    It was difficult in Zimbabwe: a history of imprisonment, detention and confinement during Zimbabwe’s Liberation struggle, 1960-1980
    (2008-10) Munochiveyi, Munyaradzi Bryn
    Between 1961 and 1979, African nationalists engaged in a protracted guerrilla war which ultimately ended white colonial rule in Rhodesia (Rhodesia was Zimbabwe's colonial name). The settler regime responded by imprisoning a large number of activists and those whom it suspected of being aligned with the guerrillas. In this thesis, I am particularly interested in the histories and lived experiences of African political detainees and prisoners whose experiences and contributions towards the liberation struggle have been rendered invisible by dominant historical and state narratives. Broadly, this dissertation argues that although political imprisonment in this period was an extreme version of the colonial experience that combined spatial confinement with curtailed freedoms, racialized abuse, racial segregation, and heightened repression, the prison was also a terrain of struggle. By describing the Rhodesian prison as a terrain of struggle, I mean that the prison was doubly a space of repression and subversion, and that political prisoners were capable of challenging and negotiating their incarceration. I therefore seek to establish that although the Rhodesian prisons were centers of brutality, political detainees were not passive recipients of state penal terror as they actively negotiated, challenged, and subverted oppressive penal regulations. The thesis also argues that, as political hostages of the Rhodesian regime, detainees played a crucial role towards dislodging colonial rule both as producers of powerful critiques of the colonial regime from inside the prison confines and as symbols of African resistance. Methodologically, this project relies primarily upon the oral testimonies of ex-political prisoners, and the prison letters that most of them wrote whilst they were in detention. I also make use of little used documentary evidence such as court records and local African and state-controlled newspaper accounts.
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    Love, War, and Healing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: An Ethnographic Study of Torture-surviving Couples' Experiences in Multi-couple Group Therapy
    (2015-05) Morgan, Erin
    Citizens of the DRC experienced widespread and devastating torture at the hands of both government and rebel soldiers during the wars between 1998 and 2004. Among couples in which both partners survived, many separated or divorced after the war; intact couples suffered tremendous relationship stress; and parents and children struggled with relational and behavioral problems. In this dissertation I explored the experiences of torture-surviving couples who participated in a 10-session multi-couple group therapy (MCGT) intervention in 2008 designed to address the effects of torture and war trauma in Pweto, Katanga, DRC, as well as the feasibility of the intervention. Feasibility components included: acceptability, demand, implementation, practicality, and limited efficacy. Feasibility was found to be good for most components, with challenges mostly related to resources and training. Using critical ethnography as a guideline, I conducted individual or dyadic qualitative interviews with the wife, husband, or both partners of all 13 MCGT couples regarding their pre-war, wartime, and post-war group-related experiences as individuals and in their relationships with each other and with their children. Participants reported wide-ranging and profound negative effects of the war on their individual and relational health; mostly positive experiences, including marital and peer connection and relationship growth during the MCGT; and a number of improvements in mental health at the individual, couple, and family levels post-intervention. Clinical implications include that using relational interventions to promote trauma healing can be beneficial when the approaches are based on principles that inform effective therapies from both trauma treatment and couple treatment fields. Research and capacity-building implications include the need for increased action, rather than continued calls for action, to prioritize funding, research, training, and clinical priorities that match the increasingly clear utility of relational approaches to treating the effects of traumatic stress, including experiences of war and torture.
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    The mental health sequelae and treatment of massive community violence in West Africa
    (2008-12) Hess, Daniel Burton
    Sierra Leone is one of several countries in sub-Saharan Africa in which great deposits of diamonds have been exploited to fund regional wars. These wars have resulted in 3.7 million deaths (Amnesty International, 2007a), and massive and systematic human rights atrocities in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Although many international agencies overcame innumerable challenges during this period to provide in-camp relief services for refugees, conventional wisdom in this field suggested that ongoing data collection could not be done in the politically unstable, critically underfunded, and frequently unsafe conditions of a refugee camp. This paper explores the mental health sequelae of the massive violence perpetrated against the people of Sierra Leone and Liberia, and the relations between post-trauma symptomology, daily functioning, social support, and counseling while following survivors living in United Nations' refugee camps, internally-displaced-persons camps, and back to their home communities in West Africa. A secondary, cross-sectional analysis of data initially collected from 2001 to 2006 for program evaluation and the clinical assessment of 4010 adult clients attending a counseling program showed that reported exposure to violence was related to psychosocial symptomology and problematic functioning; worse symptoms were related to worse functioning; refugees who reported exposure to torture had worse symptoms, but no difference in functioning than refugees who reported no torture; females had worse symptoms and worse functioning than males; younger age was related to greater exposure to violence and worse symptoms; greater substance use was related to greater exposure to violence, worse symptoms, and male sex; and access to informal social support was related to better symptoms and better functioning. From the original dataset of 4010 completed intake assessments, a subset of data from 1186 clients who had been successfully tracked for two subsequent assessments was examined. Substantial improvement in symptoms, functioning, and social connectedness was found one month into an 8-to-10-week counseling program and at three-months. Also of significance, this study demonstrates that data can be effectively collected over an extended period under difficult and dangerous conditions, and that ongoing program evaluation and clinical assessment can be reasonably included as a regular component of refugee relief field-programs.