Apologies to our regular readers (I know that there are at least a few.) I haven’t been able to post as regularly as usual for the past couple of months, but mostly for a good reason: As many readers know, this blog is an offshoot of The Refuge Media Project, whose primary purpose is the creation of a video documentary on immigrant survivors of torture living in the United States, and on the terrific programs around the country that are helping them to recover and create productive new lives here. It’s been the most challenging – but also most rewarding – project I’ve been involved in for a long time.
            In the middle of working on the film, I decided to retire from Fanlight Productions, the educational film distribution company I owned and operated for more than 30 years – a process that took over a year, but ultimately freed me to work more intensively on Refuge: Caring for Surivors of Torture. (Note: Fanlight Productions is now a part of Icarus Films, which will continue to distribute the almost 500 docs in the Fanlight collection.)
            Refuge was filmed in collaboration with torture treatment and rehabilitation programs in the Boston area, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Washington, DC. After at least a year and a half of editing, the shape of the film is finally coming into focus, and I’ve been putting intensive effort into getting it ready to be shown to the Project’s advisors and consultants, friends, colleagues, and test audiences including survivors and folks who work with them. With their guidance and support – and a bit of luck – it will be ready for distribution this coming fall. Watch for more details here and on the project website, and please contact me for information about screenings and/or about obtaining copies of the film when it’s completed.

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April 2-4:  Boston University Law School Conference will
Explore the Law and Politics of Unresolved Refugee Crises

For folks in the Boston area, B.U. School of Law is presenting a three-day symposium on the above topic next week, co-sponsored by the American Society of International Law and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The conference will address the scope and ramifications of protracted refugee situations, as well as attempting to identify state responses and policies addressing potential solutions to refugee crises.
            On the second day, Tuesday, April 4, at 10:30, I’ll be showing excerpts of our forthcoming documentary, Refuge: Caring for Survivors of Torture, and facilitating a discussion with representatives of Physicians for Human Rights and the Boston Center for Refugee Health & Human Rights. 
            Registration information for the conference is on the Boston University website and links to the schedules for each day are below:

• Monday – April 2nd
• Tuesday – April 3rd
• Wednesday – April 4th

Apologies for the late notice on this…

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The Bad News First: Drastic Cuts
in Funding from the United Nations

I just received an “emergency bulletin” from the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, one of the groups profiled in our forthcoming film, Refuge: Caring for Survivors of Torture. Like many torture rehabilitation programs around the country – and around the world – TASSC receives a significant part of its support from the UN’s Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture which, in turn, is supported by contributions from member states. The U.S. is its largest donor.
            Although contributions, and therefore the Fund’s grants, have been declining for the past couple of years, this year’s cuts, according to the letter TASSC received, will amount to 43% or more! TASSC itself receive the “unexpected and devastating,” news that it will receive only half the amount it had expected.
            TASSC performs its invaluable work on a very thin, and fraying, shoestring: its total annual budget is only $240,000 of which the UN funding has represented one third. With the loss of half the UN’s expected contribution, the group will inevitably have to cut programs unless individual donors make up the difference.
            Note: I have been looking online for more information about the support of the fund by the United States. I’ve determined that the U.S. contribution during 2011 – which I assume is the period relating to this year’s grant cycle – was 5.7 million U.S. dollars out of a not-quite 8 million dollar total (source). I have not found information for prior years, and would appreciate any help from readers. Please email me if you have this information or know how to find it, and I will add it to an upcoming post.

A Change of Leadership at
The Center for Victims of Torture

As many of you know, Douglas A. Johnson, the highly-respected long-time Executive Director of Minnesota’s Center for Victim of Torture, resigned earlier this year. His plans were announced early in 2011. During Johnson’s 23-year administration of CVT, it has become an international leader in providing compassionate care for survivors of torture both in the United States and throughout the world. In addition to treatment and rehabilitation centers in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, CVT has a legislative and advocacy office in Washington, DC, and ongoing programs in Africa and the Middle East. Johnson himself will continue to be an active advocate for social justice – beginning with a guest teaching position on human rights in Uruguay.
            I owe a great personal debt to CVT, whose work and publications first made me aware of the situation and needs of immigrant survivors of torture living in our communities. Doug and his Minnesota staff, as well as several CVT clients, welcomed me during an initial research trip, and later during a week-long shoot for the our film Refuge: Caring for Survivors of Torture (estimated completion, mid-year, 2012.) On the Refuge Media Project website, you can see a brief interview with Doug about the National Campaign to Ban Torture, which called upon then newly-elected President Barack Obama to issue an executive order banning U.S. use of torture and cruel treatment. There’s also a nice profile of Doug Johnson by Gail Rosenblum in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
            CVT’s new Director, Curt Goering, will be coming onboard in May. Goering has been the Chief Operating Officer of Amnesty for 30 years. In its press release announcing Goering’s selection, CVT Board chair Patti Andreini Arno comments that Goering “impressed us as an accomplished and effective senior executive in a large international organization,” suggesting that the organization expects to continue and perhaps expand its international programs.

New Website for the
Office of Refugee Resettlement

The United States Office of Refugee Resettlement has introduced a newly-designed website “designed to share the stories of the people affected by our programs, while also providing stronger tools for our grantees and clear, easy-to-understand information for the public.” The Agency invites comments and suggestions from users of the site. Take a look, and let me know what you think
            One feature of the new site will be links to worthwhile new resources – featured at the moment is a guide from the The Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc., on Asylee Eligibility for Resettlement Assistance. The guide is available for pdf download.

Catholic Legal Immigration Network

The Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc., mentioned above, says that its purpose is “to enhance and expand delivery of legal services to indigent and low-income immigrants principally through diocesan immigration programs and to meet the immigration needs identified by the Catholic Church in the United States.” CLINIC supports “a rapidly growing network of community-based immigration programs,” serving 600,000 low-income immigrants a year, “without reference to their race, religion, gender, ethnic group, or other distinguishing characteristics.”

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A survivor of repeated torture and abuse, Doña
Domitila changed the course of Bolivia’s history

A heroine of Latin America’s struggles for social justice died two days ago. If you live here in the global north, I’m pretty sure you didn’t see her obituary in your local paper, but her passing was mourned in her native Bolivia, and throughout the “southern cone.” As noted in my wife, Emily Achtenberg’s Rebel Currents blog post, Domitila Barrios de Chungara was “best known as the miner’s wife who led a hunger strike in 1978 that brought down the dictatorship of General Hugo Banzer, paving the way for the return of Bolivian democracy.”  Domitila died in relative poverty and without medical insurance, but had remained a rebel and an important social activist throughout her life.

“In the 1960’s, Domitila became an outspoken leader of the Union of Miners Wives, organizing miner’s families for improved conditions and services, and struggling against the repressive CIA-backed Barrientos regime. She survived the brutal 1967 San Juan Massacre, where soldiers opened fire on striking miners and their wives and children, in part to head off a rumored alliance with Che Guevara’s guerillas fighting in the Santa Cruz mountains.”

In the aftermath of that massacre, Domatila – then pregnant – was imprisoned and severely tortured, including being beaten in the abdomen. One officer made a show of sharpening his knife in front of her, threatening to kill her baby as soon as it was born. She miscarried and the child was stillborn. Domitila’s torture, and other incidents of official abuse, contributed to the chronic health problems that plagued her throughout the rest of her life.
            We had the privilege of meeting “Doña Domi” as part of a delegation to Bolivia in 2006 (and again in 2008.) During that first visit, we accompanied her to the Legislative Palace in La Paz, to hold a press conference (pictured at right) demanding an end to Bolivia’s participation in the U.S. School of the Americas. As we were entering, the building’s guards blocked her way, clearly thinking that this stocky, plainly-dressed peasant woman had no business among the suit-coated lawyers and legislators pushing their way inside. Once the meeting started, though, it was clear that the newspaper and TV reporters knew whose testimony mattered.

I think my life is related to my people. What happened to me could have happened to hundreds of people in my country. I want to make this clear, because I recognize that there have been people who have done much more than I for the people, but who have died or who haven’t had the opportunity to be known.
            I want to clarify that this account of my personal experience of my people, who are fighting for their liberation – and to whom I owe my existence – well, I want it to reach the poorest people, the people who don’t have any money, but who need some orientation, some example which can serve them in their future life…It doesn’t matter what kind of paper it’s put down on, but it does matter that it be useful for the working class and not only for intellectual people or for people who only make a business of this kind of thing.  
                           – from “Testimony,” the introduction to Let Me Speak

For more about Domitila Barrios de Chungara, see Emily’s Rebel Currents post, the reminiscences by Victor Montoya or on the website of “1000 Peace Women,” or the many other sources available online. Domitila’s 1978 autobiography, Let Me Speak (with Moema Viezzer) is also still available.

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A Slogan for the Ninety-Nine Percent?

More than a century has passed, and not much has changed except for the placement of the decimal point. In 1899, thousands of New York children, who survived on the streets by hawking newspapers for millionaires Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, went on strike over a penny. Though the papers could likely not have survived without the informal workforce these children provided, they required them to pay for their papers up-front, and refused to buy back those that went unsold. The going rate was ten papers for a nickel, but that year the publishers raised it to six cents – a 20% jump – and the kids went on strike.
            Read Dan Barry’s “Arts & Leisure” cover article in last Sunday’s New York Times for more details. It’s stimulated, of course, by Disney’s “Newsies the Musical,” soon to open on Broadway (at prices only the one-percent will be able to afford.) The musical is based, in turn, on the company’s not-very-successful movie. Try to read past the piece’s jokey tone and lapses into “period” language, to the stark, life and death, realities that really faced these young piece-workers.
            As the article does point out, the potential threat to the papers’ bottom lines was real. The strike spread to other cities and Pulitzer aide Don Seitz wrote his boss – then on his estate in Bar Harbor, Maine – referring to it as a “menacing affair.” It produced, during a Bowery rally that saw more than 2,000 newsboys jamming Irving Hall and an additional 3,000 in the streets outside, a statement from newsboy leader “Kid Blink” that could go on any Occupy poster today: 

            “I’m tryin’ to figure out how 10 cents on a hundred papers can mean
             more to a millionaire than it does to a newsboy. And I can’t see it.”  

In the end, the publishers held the line on six cents for ten papers, but agreed to buy back those that remained unsold (though after the strikers disbanded it turned out the papers would only give credit, not actual cash back.)

           
Check out muck-raking photographer Lewis Hine’s photos accompanying the article for a better sense of the newsboy’s real lives. There are more in the Times’ print edition, and many available online. Hines’ documentation of labor and social conditions throughout the United States at the beginning of the 20^th century remains unsurpassed.

American President Demands
Humane Treatment of Prisoners

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”
       …..— George Washington, September 14, 1775:
……….     Charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force

[NOTE: If this post looks familiar, thanks — you're obviously a regular reader of the Refuge Media Project blog. I'll be on the road today, so thought I would honor the day by repeating what turned out to be one of our all-time most popular posts, first published last year.]

No mail today. I forgot – it’s Washington’s Birthday. When you work at home, you can lose track of what’s going on in the real world. Still, focused as I am on the issue of torture and its impact both on its victims and its perpetrators, this is a national hero I try not to forget about. In a speech published by the Los Angeles Time toward the end of 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., noted that “Revolutionary War leaders, including Washington and the Continental Congress, considered the decent treatment of enemy combatants to be one of the principal strategic preoccupations of the American Revolution.”

“While Americans extended quarter to combatants as a matter of right and treated their prisoners with humanity,” Kennedy said, “British regulars and German mercenaries were threatened by their own officers with severe punishment if they showed mercy to a surrendering American soldier. Captured Americans were tortured, starved and cruelly maltreated aboard prison ships.” Washington’s stance, he noted, “puts to shame the conduct of America’s present leadership,” and he concluded that “America’s treatment of its prisoners is a test of our faith in our country and the character of our leaders.”

Kennedy was, of course, talking about the administration of then-President George W. Bush. I remain wistfully hopeful that the Obama administration – eventually – will reverse its predecessor’s policies, but the changes so far seem mostly cosmetic.
.       ….In his Huffington Post blog for February 19, 2007, Scott Horton wrote “Against a loud public outcry of ‘an eye for an eye,’ George Washington stood fast. He made it a point of fundamental honor (and that was his word) that the Americans would not only hold dearly to the laws of war, they would define a new law of war that reflected the humanitarian principles for which the new Republic had risen.” After crossing the Delaware River to defeat the British and Hessian armies at Trenton, our first Commander-in-Chief’ gave the order,  to “Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren.”
….       .As David Hackett Fischer wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Washington’s Crossing: “In a desperate struggle [he] found a way to defeat a formidable enemy… [He] reversed the momentum of the war. [He] improvised a new way of war that grew into an American tradition. And [he] chose a policy of humanity that aligned the conduct of the war with the values of the Revolution.”
..       …You can hear or read the transcript of Robert Krulwich’s interview with Professor Fischer on NPR’s website.  On the antiwar.com blog, Scott Horton (same name, different person) notes that, following the battle at Trenton, Washington intervened when he came across some of the Continental troops preparing to force Hessian prisoners to run the “gauntlet.” And it worked, he says: “Many of the German Hessians in fact joined the revolutionaries in their fight against the English and stayed here in America to be free when the war was won. Must we abandon this legacy? Is it already too late to reclaim it?” Good question…

(If ordering books or DVDs discussed in this blog from Amazon, please consider doing so through our website, which will help to support the work of The Refuge Media Project. Click on the book title above to be redirected to our site.)

Thursday-Friday, March 8-9, 2012

Fostering the Resilient Spirit: Holistic
Responses in the Torture Treatment Field
Sponsored by the National Partnership for
Community Training & Tulane University

Location: Tulane University, New Orleans, LA

Speakers Include:
Richard Mollica and James Lavelle, Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma;
Allen Keller and Hawthorne E. Smith, Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture;
Leslie Velez, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service;
Abbey Weiss, Center for Victims of Torture;
And others…

Registration and Additional Information here, or call (305) 805-5060

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Saturday & Sunday, March 24-25 

Physicians for Human Rights National Conference:
Sustainable Connections & Collaborations
for Health & Human Rights 

Location: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

This year’s PHR National Conference is being held in conjunction with the Sujal Parikh Memorial Symposium for Health & Social Justice, in memory of a University of Michigan medical student active in PHR’s Student Program.

Click for Additional Information

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Saturday & Sunday, March 31-April 1, 2012

The Asylum Program of Physicians for Human Rights is offering two training programs for health professionals seeking to aid asylum seekers and other immigrant survivors of torture and human rights abuses:

Saturday, 3/31

Introduction to Physical and Psychological Documentation of Trauma
For those with no formal training and moderate to no experience conducting forensic medical examinations. Location: Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA

Sunday, 4/1

Advanced Forensic Training for Experienced Volunteers:
Techniques for Increased Effectiveness of Evaluations and Testimony
For evaluators who have attended past trainings or are experienced in providing forensic medical examination.
Location: Physicians for Human Rights, Cambridge, MA

For details contact PHR

(NOTE: PHR also offers self-guided online training on forensic investigation.)

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Friday, Saturday & Sunday, March 30-April 1, 2012

Amnesty International’s Annual Human Rights Conference, on the theme of “Rise Up for Rights.” The Annual General Meeting includes events for youth participants as well as all human rights activists.

Location: Denver, CO

For details contact Amnesty International

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A study co-sponsored by the Research Institute Without Walls, Physicians for Human Rights, and Psychologists for Social Responsibility is exploring the impact of immigration detention on LGBT persons. According to the researchers, the results of the study, LGBT Persons in Immigration Detention: Mental Health Needs and Challenges, “will be helpful to all of us who provide mental health and legal services to LGBT immigrants and refugees.” The study leaders are:

• Ariel Shidlo, PhD, psychologist and Co-Director, Research Institute Without Walls (RIWW)
• Mike Corradini, JD, Asylum Advocacy Associate, Physicians for Human Rights
• Joan Ahola, MD, LGBT Asylum Research Coordinator for RIWW; Medical Director, Weill Cornell Medic al Center

Interviews will be confidential:
The researchers are looking for people who have been in immigration detention and may be willing to be interviewed in person or via phone or Skype. Interviewees need only give their first names, and the study leaders promise that their participation will be confidential. To volunteer or for more information, email Ariel Shidlo at Research Institute Without Walls.
For a quick look at what LGBT detainees are up against, check out this article from Chicago Now, or this report from the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, source of the photo above. A quick web search on “immigration detention — LGBT” will yield many more.

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Nothing Has Changed

Nobel prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska died yesterday at the age of 88. NPR’s David Orr describes her as a “poet of gentle irony,” but her irony could be visceral and corrosive as well. I was introduced to Szymborska’s poetry when a reader sent us a copy of her poem, “Tortures,” from a 1986 collection, The People on the Bridge.

Tortures

Nothing has changed.
The body is a reservoir of pain;
it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep;
it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it;
it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails;
its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched.
In tortures, all of this is considered.

Nothing has changed.
The body still trembles as it trembled
before Rome was founded and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk
and whatever goes on sounds as if it’s just a room away.

Nothing has changed.
Except there are more people,
and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones–
real, make-believe, short-lived, and nonexistent.
But the cry with which the body answers for them
was, is, and will be a cry of innocence
in keeping with the age-old scale and pitch.

Nothing has changed.
Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances.
The gesture of the hands shielding the head
has nonetheless remained the same.
The body writhes, jerks, and tugs,
falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees,
bruises, swells, drools, and bleeds.

Nothing has changed.
Except the run of rivers,
the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers.
The little soul roams among these landscapes,
disappears, returns, draws near, moves away,
evasive and a stranger to itself,
now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,
whereas the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.

Translation: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
© Wislawa Szymborska, Stanislaw Baranczak, Clare Cavanagh

Wislawa Szymborska’s Tortures is included in an excellent collection, Poems New and Collected, translated by Baranczak and Cavanagh.

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­­­­­­­­­­­­­­In his January 25th op-ed piece for the New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof tells the depressingly familiar story of a desperate 13-year-old girl trying to escape from the vicious pimp who has been marketing her “services” through online ads on Backpage.com. Almost equally depressing, it turns out that Backpage is owned by Village Voice media, owner of the Village Voice newspaper. The site, says Kristof, “is a godsend to pimps, allowing customers to order a girl online as if she were a pizza.”
…………Despite a national campaign of several years standing — as well as demands from the attorneys general of 48 states to eliminate the ads, Village Voice Media has refused to back down. (The photo at the beginning of this paragraph is from an ad campaign launched by The Rebecca Project and other groups more than a year ago, calling on Village Voice to do the right thing — so far without effect.)
…………Psychologist Melissa Farley is the founder of Prostitution Research & Education, a 15-year-old San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to the abolition of trafficking and prostitution.  She is the lead author of the two studies mentioned in my recent post on Sexual Abuse & Trafficking. Melissa wrote in response to that post, suggesting several points that she thinks are of particular importance in discussing Garden of Truth, the group’s report on the prostitution and trafficking of Native American women in Minnesota. I agree, and wanted to pass her suggestions along:

The women’s poverty, their 98% rate of current or previous homelessness, the post-colonial theft of land and cultural identity,  and the racism which results in a lack of educational and employment opportunities – all of these, to me and to them also, I think – are coercive. When you live in a place where the temperature falls below freezing and you are homeless, and someone offers to exchange sexual assault for a place to spend the night – to me that is trafficking, even though the Trafficking Victims Protection Act wouldn’t define it as such. Poverty, homelessness and racist lack of opportunities can coerce people into prostitution, but it’s not called “trafficking.” That’s a shortcoming of our law. We define trafficking as third party exploitation or control.  And the control can be and often is psychological in nature.
…………— Melissa Farley, Prostitution Research & Education

Like many others, Farley notes that the definition of trafficking used by the United States – which necessitates that the victim herself prove “force, fraud, or coercion” – is excessively conservative. By contrast, she points out, the law in most Scandinavian countries focuses on perpetrators rather than victims. Sweden’s legislation, for example, de-criminalizes prostitution, and offers federally-funded supports for those seeking to escape it. At the same time, it enforces criminal sanctions against traffickers and purchasers of sex.
…………It’s reported that street prostitution in Sweden has been cut in half by this approach, without leading to an increase in other areas (e.g., via internet sites like Backpage.) Janice Raymond, of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women writes that “the success of the Nordic model is not so much in penalizing the men (the penalties are modest) as in removing the invisibility of men who are outed when they get caught. This, in turn, makes it less appealing for pimps and traffickers to set up shop in countries where the customer base fears the loss of its anonymity, and is declining.”

(For more information on this approach, see Trafficking, Prostitution and the Sex Industry: The Nordic Legal Model, by Raymond, or The Swedish Law That Prohibits the Purchase of Sexual Services by Gunilla Ekberg in the journal Violence Against Women.)

NOTE: The image to the right, above, is by New York artist Mona Mark, and was created for the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women’s Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing (1995). Courtesy: Prostitution Research & Education

Some Resources:

Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
Promotes women’s human rights by working internationally to combat sexual exploitation in all its forms. The first international NGO to focus on human trafficking, especially sex trafficking of women and girls.

Human Trafficking & Sexual Exploitation
A blog by Heidi Hermann on groups fighting human trafficking in southern California, as well as nationally and internationally. (See Heidi’s right-column blogroll for other related organizations.)

National Human Trafficking Resource Center
The Polaris Project: For a World Without Slavery offers a toll-free, confidential hotline for issues related to trafficking.

Prostitution Research & Education
PRE’s goal is to abolish the institution of prostitution while advocating for alternatives to trafficking and prostitution, including emotional and physical healthcare for women in prostitution.

The Rebecca Project for Human Rights
Advocates for justice, dignity and policy reform for vulnerable women and girls in the United States and in Africa.

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