Holistic Approaches to Human Rights Philanthropy
REUTERS/Neil Hall
This is an extended re-post of my article originally published in Philanthropy Impact Magazine.
The human rights space, and the community of philanthropists and institutions that support it, is as complex as the issues it seeks to tackle. The sector is awash with impressive and innovative programmes, tackling multifaceted and grotesque experiences and issues. In the last two decades, investment in the sector has allowed significant progress, despite its frequent contradictions to global governments’ conflicting priorities, and the influence of the incredible wealth of international criminal organisations involved in some types of abuse.
That said, for philanthropists wanting to tackle human rights issues, there is an often-glaring omission in their giving portfolios. People can sometimes forget a vital part of ensuring violence and violations are stopped: caring for people who have already had their rights abused. In working together to achieve the greatest impact in the fight for human rights, it is essential not to ignore people for whom human rights abuses cannot be prevented — because they have already taken place.
Psychological Support for Survivors
Outside of the basic law and morals involved, at the core of most preventative human rights responses is the understanding that people deserve to live without fear, repression, trauma, violence, and neglect. Even within the many complex approaches using the law, diplomacy and justice, the human beings at risk are the main driving factor behind the work. With this in mind, it is vital to treat survivors of human rights violations with the same consideration as those who are at risk of them: to ensure they are protected from further harm. To do this, is it essential to understand the unique kinds of harm these survivors are vulnerable to, and how the philanthropic community can strategically expand its investments to safeguard against them.
From my history with UK human rights charity, Helen Bamber Foundation, and my experiences at I.G. Advisors advising philanthropists on their giving strategies, I would like to introduce several ways shrewd donors can holistically approach funding in the human rights space, with a particular focus on violence, torture, trafficking and conflict. These options are intended as a part of a balanced giving portfolio that continues to address the essential prevention work in the sector, whilst also ensuring survivors do not drop into an abyss of unprepared, non-specialist care facilities and hostile border agencies.
Once someone has their human rights violated, they often become a statistic to justify the need for prevention work; you can see these facts shouting from the homepage of most NGO websites, and they do a great job of demonstrating the scale and focus of the issues. Prevention work also often prioritises those most at risk of harm and intervenes more swiftly for those who will feel trauma more acutely, for example children, or those with mental health issues. By this logic, survivors of human rights abuses should be close to the top of the list of people needing to be protected: if someone survives abuse, even if they escape the danger, their trauma is often continued inside their mind until they receive psychological help. Human rights abuses are one of the strongest indicators of future vulnerability: for example, survivors of trafficking are more likely to be re-trafficked, survivors of physical and emotional trauma often self-harm or attempt suicide, and state or community violence creates displaced, destitute and vulnerable people with no power to shield themselves from exploitation.
There is a strong argument to be made that survivors of human rights violations are still technically experiencing these violations until they are given appropriate care. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and its variant “Complex-PTSD” (C-PTSD: resulting from repetitive, prolonged trauma, rather than just one traumatic event), evokes such a litany of acute psychological symptoms, including flashbacks and hallucinations, that sufferers constantly re-experience their trauma in ways that prevent them from recovering. To meet the philanthropic aim of stopping human rights abuses, one must support interventions before, during and after they occur, and care holistically (that is, physically, socially, psychologically and legally) for the needs of survivors, even if they do not visibly appear endangered. These expert interventions need to be, above all, victim-centred (led by, and prioritising the needs of victims) — and it goes without saying that tokenistic counselling within immigration processing centres do not meet this need.
Stopping the Cycle of Cruelty
Organisations like Helen Bamber Foundation are rare in providing unconditional, holistic support to those who need it most, and connecting vulnerable survivors with expert psychotherapists, psychologists, lawyers, psychiatrists and physiotherapists to help them overcome the physical and psychological scars caused by their experiences. Philanthropists looking to ensure their gifts are thoroughly addressing the complex and changing needs of survivors are advised to support work like this, alongside prevention work to reduce the need for it.
“One of the most common things we need to do for our clients is to help them learn to keep the vivid hallucinations of their trauma from creeping into their daily life in response to noises, smells and other basic experiences. A person who has had their rights repeatedly violated does not escape once they leave that situation or country — even ignoring the distress many must face reaching the UK, they carry their trauma, often experiencing flashbacks, until they are given adequate help, and sadly before they get to us, adequate help is not easily accessed.“ — Prof. Cornelius Katona, Medical Director, Helen Bamber Foundation
Family structures and similar support systems are central to our ability to thrive, from childhood to old age. Through human rights violations, the families of victims are profoundly impacted now, and in the future. At the most basic level, having loved ones disappear or be killed is traumatic enough to require support, but Helen Bamber Foundation and organisations like them see cases with many more complicated barriers to healthy family life — same-sex couples being tortured in front of one another as punishment for their relationship, children being trafficked and returned as adults unable to form familial bonds, survivors of rape needing to raise a baby born out of their suffering, or parents so traumatised they cannot develop the parenting skills to prevent vulnerability in their own children.
These are just a few basic examples where the transgenerational impact of human rights violations can be seen (more famous cases include the grandchildren of concentration camp survivors experiencing PTSD despite never being in a camp themselves), but there are many more insidious effects that require expert interventions to spot and prevent. In every case, the family and children of the survivor are just as at-risk, and just as worthy of protection, as the survivors themselves.
Supporting Traumatised Communities
Philanthropists wishing to protect children from the impacts of human rights abuses are therefore wise to support Systemic Family Therapy interventions — this complex field of practice is still evolving, and often cost-prohibitive for many countries to make available through state infrastructure except in extreme cases. The impact can be surprisingly transformative for families who engage with it, and so philanthropists looking to establish a long-lasting legacy through their giving are well placed to invest in the future mental health of children of survivors.
“Our clinical team is acutely aware of the intergenerational impacts of human rights violations, at their worst creating abuse and violence in the family, and at the very least preventing engagement with wider society that healthy child development requires. Vital things like the transmission of language and culture can also be impacted. Without our work there would be many people in our clients’ families for generations to come whose lives would be severely impacted by this unbroken cycle of human cruelty.” — Dr. Eileen Walsh, Head of Therapies, Helen Bamber Foundation
The array of experiences covered by the term ‘human rights violation’ is huge, and not all are violent in the physical sense, but where wide-spread violence is experienced within a community (be that through state, extremist or civil groups), recovery is not just an individual or family matter — civil unrest can often be reborn from collective trauma. Even when ignoring the complexities of rebuilding trust in the government, or reducing the need to fight for resources, a community with deep psychological wounds is more likely to descend into conflict than rebuild. However, with the right kind of support, the process of recovering from such trauma can lead to empowerment and liberation work that prevent future violations.
The other sections in this article deal with survivors who have managed to escape the locale or power structures in which their abuses took place, but for whom collective trauma is especially challenging to navigate in circumstances where remaining community members have experienced (and have also been forced to participate in) human rights abuses, such as former combatants and child soldiers in D.R. Congo, and refugees trapped between ISIS recruitment and border violence in Syria.
One organisation working closely on this issue is Vivo International: an alliance of professionals experienced in “psychotraumatology,” creating and providing innovative psychological interventions in frontline traumatised communities, whilst training and supporting locals (who may also be traumatised) to provide them. All of this aims to prevent and treat CPSTD. In these often-chaotic environments, it is essential to not just provide support for trauma recovery, but also to collect and share innovative new approaches. To do this, Vivo International publishes academic papers on their interventions, provides training in some of the world’s most volatile environments, and collaborates with communities to create significant impact across vastly differing geographies and contexts.
Making Abuse Abnormal
For human rights philanthropists, investment in organisations like this is a crucial way to ensure the people trapped in seemingly unending conflict are able to maintain their community strength and wellbeing, and resist abuses, whilst being empowered to psychologically support each other through their traumas.
“Together with the complex work of treating people who have been traumatised by conflict and organised violence, one of the most challenging parts of human rights work is helping them to remain psychologically resilient in settings that are still volatile and insecure. Not only is our work effective in doing this, but it has visible knock-on effects in the community. Where people have little ability to influence the things that distress them, empowering them to do this is really impactful.” — Dr. Katy Robjant, Vivo International
The understanding of human rights, the agency to advocate for them, the freedom to communicate about them, and the power to hold abusers to account are crucial components of prevention work in the human rights sector. But in many cultures, specific social groups — typically genders, sexualities, religions or classes — are considered less worthy of rights, or more deserving of abuses, and this is the accepted, perpetuated social norm. This can range from routine lack of access to education and children being expected to work from a young age, through to widespread practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and forced marriage, as well as enforcement of dress codes and prohibition of social mobility (as with caste systems).
What disempowers people experiencing these violations is not just the violence and oppression, but the acceptance by the whole community (and often themselves) that this is the way things are, should be, and will always be. If everyone understands a custom to be normal, and the impacts of it are not visible or challenged, then it is perpetuated: mothers who have experienced FGM subject their daughters to the same trauma, fathers who have been kept from schooling shame their children away into child labour, and religious minorities in sectarian societies face unchallenged hostility and violence with no recourse to justice.
The solutions to these issues are not quick, or simple, and some organisations (like Tostan, Girls Not Brides, and Girl Effect), do great work on tackling social norms by empowering people to advocate against them within their own communities. But with violent traumatic practices (like FGM), there is an important intervention needed alongside the political and social campaigns: again, the survivors need expert care to overcome their trauma. They need this in order to have the understanding, strength and power to challenge their communities and break the cycle.
Navigating the System
Very few organisations bridge this gap between protection work and provision of support for survivors, even though survivors — like Jaha Dukureh and Fatou Baldeh who have both secured legal progress around FGM in Gambia and the UK — are the most impactful advocates for social norm change. Helen Bamber Foundation and Daughters of Eve are two UK based examples on a very short list of organisations giving holistic (physical, social and psychological) support to survivors, and they are an essential part of changing attitudes and customs in communities where such violence occurs. Philanthropists wanting to empower survivors to bring an end to the practices that traumatised them would do well to support organisations like these who are able to combine long-term, victim-centred care with a strong public voice advocating for their rights.
“Experiencing violence or witnessing the abuse of others has a huge impact on a person’s mental health. In some cases (for example, with FGM), it can take a long time for people to understand that what happened to them was abuse. Feelings of guilt, shame and confusion are common responses. It can take a long time for survivors to accept that they are not to blame for what happened. It is not something that can be can overcome without sustained therapy and care. Working alongside survivors to bear witness to their experiences, and speaking out against human rights abuses is an essential part of our work.” — Dr. Franesca Brady, Clinical Psychologist, Helen Bamber Foundation
The refugee crisis is front of mind for everyone lately, but organisations like Helen Bamber Foundation, who provide medico-legal support for their refugee clients, would tell you that the situation has been at crisis level for a long time, and not just from Syria. Legally speaking, the immigration debate narrows the scope of ‘human rights’ discussions to only include human rights violations considered worthy of international protection (refugee status), and depends on the formal recognition by host governments of those violations happening at all.
For example, Sri Lankan Tamils, who reportedly still face massacre and torture by the Sri Lankan authorities, are considered to not automatically have a ‘well founded fear of harm’ by the UK government when it is considering their asylum cases, despite this frequently being challenged in the courts. Additionally, in 2015 Amnesty International found 131 out of 160 of countries it investigated had tortured or otherwise ill-treated people. These facts provide a very different perspective to the popular narrative on the sources of refugees in need of protection, the fairness of the systems assessing the ‘validity’ of their claims, and the pressing need for post-trauma care.
Many articles, papers and studies have been focussed on the legality and morality of immigration policies in the face of such a huge displacement of people, but I would like to highlight an additional area where philanthropic investment in psychological care can feed into work preventing human rights abuses. In many cases, survivors of violations are often only able to accurately recall, and provide an account of their trauma once they have been given holistic, consistent psychological support and care. The process is not linear or supported by typical immigration processes ( which can often retraumatise survivors), as often people will recall their experiences in fragments, out of order, or through distressing images and panic attacks.
Human rights prevention work needs to hear and document the experiences of survivors to build campaigns and plan interventions (remember those statistics that need gathering?). Immigration systems should always (but often do not) account for trauma in the way they detain, process and rule on refugees anyway, but survivors need to be supported to remember, explain, and prove their stories in order to be treated fairly by the system at all. In addition to funding legal, housing and education work with refugee survivors, philanthropists wishing to have the greatest impact in raising the voices and social status of those who have faced violations should not overlook organisations like Helen Bamber Foundation that provide medico-legal (that is medical and psychological expert witness) approaches to protect and prevent further abuses within the immigration system.
“There are so many forces at play in a refugee’s life, legal functions that want to protect and eject them, welfare systems that support yet restrict them, and border forces that seek to extract their story to discredit it. Within this situation, what is essential is a safe place, where their needs are central, their story is listened to when they are able to tell it, and their emotions are cared for when remembering is too painful for them. Aside from the humanity, this has always been the most accurate and efficient way to understand and record what has happened to someone.” — TJ Birdi, Executive Director, Helen Bamber Foundation
In conclusion, when our team at I.G. Advisors are advising philanthropy clients on the most impactful giving strategies in the human rights space, we are always careful to present a portfolio of options that tactically support interventions along the entire journey of a person’s abuse: try to stop it from happening to anyone, try to help people escape or avoid it happening to them, believe and protect people to whom it has already happened, and provide specialist care to help survivors recover from it. Of course, there is scope to tailor your investments to geographies and demographics you are most concerned or passionate about. Above all, philanthropists must scrutinise the expertise and victim-centring of the approaches and organisations they invest in. This is some of the most complex legal, medical, psychological and political work in the world, and all our rights depend on it.
Originally published at http://www.philanthropy-impact.org/article/breaking-cycle on May 15, 2017.
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