Healing and Human Rights: A Blog by the Center for Victims of Torture
Showing all blog posts in Syrian refugees
Marie Soueid is CVT policy counsel.
Imagine for a moment that the entire population of Washington, D.C. suddenly takes refuge in Tennessee over the course of 5 short years. The new residents, however, are restricted from working, half of their children remain out of school, and housing prices continue to rise for both Tennesseans and Washingtonians.
Suzanne Jabbour, executive director of PATH partner Restart Center in Tripoli, Lebanon, gave the keynote address at a special event on December 10 in Washington, D.C. We have shared her comments from the event on our blog.
In our international projects, our healing work for torture and war trauma survivors is conducted through group counseling. Groups typically meet for 10 weeks. This is the tenth in a series of posts by Veronica Laveta as she follows the counseling group cycle in Jordan. Veronica Laveta is CVT’s clinical advisor for the Jordan project.
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In this session, as we continue to build safety and stability in the group, we aim to draw out survivors’ internal strengths and external resources to counteract the unhelpful tunnel thinking that keeps traumatized people in a state of despair. After reviewing the grounding exercise that helps survivors feel more stable in their bodies and returns them to the present moment, the facilitators use a table metaphor to demonstrate how the more “table legs” one can develop (internal and external resources), the easier it is to carry the burdens on the table.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) today announced that – for the first time – Syrians are now the largest refugee population under its mandate. This finding is part of UNHCR’s Mid-Year Trends 2014 report.This report shows that 5.5 million people – due to war and conflict – became newly displaced during the first six months of 2014. Taking into account several factors, UNHCR says the number of people it helps stood at 46.3 million as of mid-2014. This number is 3.4 million more than at the end of 2013 and is a record high.
