Chai Brady
People attend an event marking the UN Day in Support of Victims of Torture in 2018. 
Direct provision compounds the suffering of asylum seekers who were torture victims, writes Chai Brady
Torture has always been an horrific reality for humanity and to this day atrocities are being committed against people for nothing other than their faith, political belief, ethnicity and sexuality in many parts of the world. Some of the victims seek protection in Ireland, but the residual trauma follows.
In the late 1990s there was an exponential increase in the number of people seeking asylum in Ireland and the Spiritan congregation decided to help them integrate into society. It quickly became clear that some of those that had fled their home countries were dealing with severe emotional trauma and needed help beyond their capabilities.
Still operating from North Circular Road in Dublin to this day, Spirasi was founded to offer professional support and has helped thousands of asylum seekers in direct provision and refugees.
The Executive Director of Spirasi, Rory Halpin, tells this paper that originally the Spiritans, with education being very much part of their ethos, started offering English language classes to asylum seekers but that it became obvious some were traumatised and had been victims of torture.
Shift
“That provided a shift in what was being offered and people said ‘well we need to respond to this’ so fairly quickly after that – that was in 1999 – I’d say by 2000-2001, the first doctors were brought in to provide initial assessment to torture victims. By signing up to the UN Convention against Torture Ireland had agreed to provide some rehabilitation to victims of torture and that strand of funding was coming through the HSE to Spirasi,” Mr Halpin says.
“Since then, it has developed to provide those initial assessments and then the first therapists came on board. Psychotherapy became very much central to what we provided, psychosocial officers, psychosocial support. That developed in tandem with the English language, that was kept on, we still provide English language classes to asylum seekers and refugees.”
During the course of the last two decades Spirasi has seen more than 5,500 victims of torture, with their multidisciplinary approach aiming to help people along the road towards rehabilitation. The charity sees 10% of all asylum seekers who come to Ireland. Due to the pandemic the number of asylum seekers has dropped sharply compared to 2019. From January to November last year 1,406 people sought asylum in Ireland compared to about 5,000 in 2019.
One of the reasons people can receive refugee status is if they have been a victim of torture in their country of origin. Spirasi conducts legal medical reports for the protection process and victims who are referred to them can use the reports to secure refugee status.
Torture comes in many forms, with Mr Halpin saying, “you name it, people have suffered it”, whether it be psychological or physical.
“You can imagine between beating, electrocution, sexual violence is a big one for both males and females, you know very degrading stuff. Whatever you can imagine it has been done to people and that’s the horrible thing about it. We would see a lot of that,” he explains.
Remit
“Our remit is torture, but it’s not torture in general, it’s very specific. The UN definition states it has to be intentional, it has to inflict severe pain – that can be either psychological or physical – and then the third, and this is the key piece, it has to be sanctioned by the Government. So that the particular Government in the country of origin will carry this out through the soldiers, through police, through secret police whatever.
“For example, you might say people who are in dreadful, dreadful domestic situations, where a husband is beating his wife or being very abusive; horrible, horrible situations, but unfortunately we cannot take people unless there is a Government sanction involved in some shape or form. There are situations where people might go to the police and the police turn a blind eye for whatever reason and we can look at that again but that narrows our remit substantially.”
Despite the narrow remit, Spirasi believe that at least 30% of asylum seekers are probably torture victims but “this could be much higher”, according to Mr Halpin, who says some research points to it being as high as 50%.
However, people who experience the trauma of war – lived through a direct war situation – would also be considered to have been through torture.
“Because the trauma is so severe and so great for those who have experienced the direct effects of war, seeing people die in front of them, family members and so on, that can be very traumatic so we would make that exception as well for people we see,” Mr Halpin says.
Trials
To truly understand the trials of someone who has being tortured and forced to flee their home, Mr Halpin says we must look at what they call the “triple trauma paradigm”.
“So, you’ve got whatever the person has suffered in their country of origin, then you have the journey, so we’re very aware certainly in the last couple of years of people coming across the Mediterranean in boats and so on, the horrible situation they’re being subjected to, then what we as a State were inflicting on people through the direct provision system which often exacerbated the mental health issues that people had,” he says.
“The uncertainty, the lack of power would have all contributed or compounded that original torture experience for many people, that’s what people have to deal with.”
The Government has committed to end the direct provision system which Mr Halpin has very much welcomed. However, a White Paper on bringing the controversial system to an end was due to be completed and submitted to cabinet by late December but this has been delayed until February 2021. An Expert Advisory Group said in October last year that the direct provision system should end by 2023 and be replaced by a three-stage system of State-owned centres – which would end the involvement of private companies.
The effect of the direct provision centres on people, specifically those who have experienced torture, is harrowing. “If you look at what remains after the torture, people do invariably suffer from PTSD which involves things like flashbacks, insomnia, nightmares, depression, anxiety and very often the techniques used by the torturer are to deprive people of liberty, deprive them of choice,” Mr Halpin says.
“Uncertainty is a huge element in it, they don’t know what’s going to happen next, obviously it’s not to the same extent – a kind of milder form – but nonetheless it exacerbates those symptoms within people and makes it very difficult for them to recover, to be rehabilitated – so it’s about finding stability, that’s the key thing, finding safety.
“They are all key elements in allowing a person to begin that process of healing, of rehabilitation, if that’s not there, which it isn’t because they don’t know what’s going to happen next – they could ultimately be deported back to their country of origin and so on – all that adds to that sense of insecurity.”
Asylum
Spirasi would mainly see asylum seekers who are in the direct provision system but about 5-10% are people who have got their refugee status or even Irish citizenship as sometimes “that’s the time the effects of the original torture begin to emerge, they’ve kind of put stuff to the back of their minds and now that they have a sense of stability it emerges for them”, Mr Halpin says.
When viewing data from IPO (International Protection Office) over the past two decades the stand-out countries of origin of asylum seekers are Nigeria, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In total, 24 countries have featured in the top five or six countries of origin in annual reports over 18 years. Many have been obvious conflict areas such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan.
Speaking of the countries of origin the victims of torture come from, Mr Halpin says: “It depends on what’s happening in the particular country people come from, it’s usually because of some kind of outbreak of a war situation or a particular group is being persecuted so it sort of mirrors what’s going on in the world. We probably would see people from Zimbabwe, DRC, Afghanistan, Iraq and South Africa the most – they’re probably the five. A lot of people would have been fleeing from places like Zimbabwe, arriving in South Africa and then experiencing xenophobia there and then come to Ireland.”
Mr Halpin says it is “extraordinary” the number of countries that have signed up to the UN Convention against torture but “significant world players flout it” and that influences smaller countries. Torture is not “a million miles away from us” Mr Halpin continued, “up in the North and relatively recently in our own history there were atrocities carried out by the British government, I’m not trying to politicise this, but it does happen in situations closer to home. If you look at the definition of torture, there are government sanctioned ways of dealing with people which certainly amount to torture”.
Asked why people are tortured, Mr Halpin says: “Where people have a well-founded fear of persecution for reason of their race, their creed, their nationality, their political opinion, their social group, for all those reasons people are persecuted and certainly I spoke about Zimbabwe there, because of Robert Mugabe’s regime and the ZANU-PF [president’s political party] and so on there was some terrible atrocities carried out there by the government on anybody who didn’t vote for ZANU-PF.
“They were hounded and persecuted and tortured, so that’s how it happens and it happens all the time and people are extraordinarily brave in these situations where they stand up for what they believe or have a different opinion or whatever it is in a particular country.”
Spirasi are also seeing a lot of LGBT people particularly from the Middle East and some African countries who have been persecuted because of their sexual orientation.
“There’s lots of reasons why people can be tortured and unfortunately it’s not the last resort in a lot of these countries. Particularly the LGBT communities coming in, either it’s actually against the law to be of a different sexual orientation or at least to practice anyway and then also it’s the way they’re treated by society.
“If they try to go to their local police station and say ‘I was beaten up because I’m gay’, or whatever, obviously they’re not heard at all and they may be taken into prison as a result of that. In some situations, it’s very institutionalised.”
Persecution
Religious persecution is another reason people flee their countries, with some having been victims of torture because of their creed. Spirasi says many of the people they have helped who have experienced religious persecution and torture come from Islamic countries, with certain sects within Islam also being targeted.
Mr Halpin says: “We would see people who are Christians for example in largely Muslim countries that would experience it, we would have seen clients in those situations because of their Christian faith. We would also see Muslims as well not being able to express a particular form of Islam.”
This can occur because of the divide between Sunni and Shia, two branches of Islam. “Certainly, religion does play a big part and people are persecuted because of it,” he says, making specific reference to Pakistan, particularly if the individual is a more moderate Muslim.
“Sharia law is very predominant in that part of the world, if you’re not in that, the more moderate Muslims would perhaps have experienced persecution because they’re not following that very strict, rigid, form of Muslim practice,” Mr Halpin says.
However most torture is due to political and social conflicts and more recently due to sexual orientation he explains.
Challenges
One of the challenges Spirasi is facing is that they’re overwhelmed with the numbers of people seeking to avail of their services and there are long waiting lists which has “a huge effect on clients who are waiting for initial assessments or medical reports or whatever it is”.
Mr Halpin says: “Given that we would be seeing on average just over 300 initial assessments every year, that’s of new people coming into the organisation, and a further 100 looking for medical legal reports, our absolute capacity is about 400 new people coming in, that’s as well as the people we continue to see on an ongoing basis.”
While some people may just need a medical report and Spirasi may not see them again, for other people who are referred in for an initial assessment they are seen by a doctor, a therapist and a psychosocial officer and then there’s a care plan put together for that person. They might then receive further therapy and psychosocial support.
“So that person could be with us for a year, or two years and for some people it’s longer and because of the nature of the trauma and the depth of the trauma, people very often are dealing with the results of that trauma for the rest of their life,” Mr Halpin says.
“I don’t know what the longest anybody has ever been with us but I’d say it could be two or three years and we have that facility which is great because very often the work is long-term, the therapists will say that you can’t just give people 10 sessions and say good luck now, you can’t do that and we’re grateful that we can and we have the funding that allows us to do that.”
Outcomes
The outcomes of Spirasi’s work depend “very much on the person, their own capacities, their own resilience, their own sense of who they are and their own background”, Mr Halpin says.
Direct provision can have a negative effect on person’s ability to cope and “they might have had to stay in direct provision for a long time and that can be very difficult for people”. But overall the charity is “very hopeful as to what is possible”.
“The model of what we try to put in place, providing this first stage of safety, that word safety is so important, and then once people have a sense of safety, which is very difficult when you’re living in direct provision, then they can begin to process the trauma which is the second stage and then thirdly they would move to some sort of integration within themselves, accepting, acknowledging and so on, but also the physical social integration into the new country where they’re trying to set up their new lives. I suppose for us all of that is possible, we’ve seen it and people are extraordinarily resilient,” Mr Halpin adds.
