Community development with refugees: towards a framework for action

Abstract

It is now well recognized that refugee numbers (and also internally displaced persons) have been climbing in recent years, and there is some recognition of the problems that ensue. However the policy response to those problems varies greatly depending on whether suffering labelled as war trauma is seen as 'individual mental illness needing individual treatment', or whether it is seen as a problem of 'fractured societies needing culturally appropriate social development ' (cf. Summerfield, 1997; Bracken and Petty, 1998). Further, the policy response is frequently dominated by a political response which, supported by a hostile media, labels refugees and asylum seekers as economic migrants without any sense of the trauma and difficulties that they have faced as displaced people. The impacts of international migration are considerable (Craig et al., 2004a), but sensitive and careful consideration of how to respond to these impacts and to the needs of different categories of migrant has been drowned out both by a sense of panic amongst 'receiving' governments, and by a growing tendency towards hostility to refugees, fed by Islamophobia in the wake of the events of September 11.