Bauschard Debate 9/25/15 5: 06 pm refugees Pre-Release


Morality – Responsibility (US) – A2: Nothing US Could Have Done



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Morality – Responsibility (US) – A2: Nothing US Could Have Done




A No-Fly-Zone would substantially reduce violence in Syria

Nicholas Kristof, September 10, 2015, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/opinion/nicholas-kristof-compassion-for-refugees-isnt-enough.html?_r=0 9-22-15



The least bad option today is to create a no-fly zone in the south of Syria. This could be done on a shoestring, enforced by U.S. Navy ships in the Mediterranean firing missiles, without ground troops. If we can simply declare a "no-fly zone," then why can't we just as easily declare that the war is over? Doesn't a no-fly zone have to be... That would end barrel bombings. Just as important, the no-fly zone would create leverage to pressure the Syrian regime — and its Russian and Iranian backers — to negotiate. “If they can’t use their aircraft, the day after they will know they can’t survive, and that will bring them to the table,” said Reza Afshar, a former British diplomat who now advises the Syrian opposition through his group, Independent Diplomat.


Morality – General




We have an ethical obligation to be hospitable – to open our borders to those in need



Zylinska 04 (Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, “The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,” Cultural Studies Vol.18 No.4, July 2004, pg. 526)

The problem of openness which is to be extended to our current and prospective guests - even, or perhaps especially , unwanted ones - is, according to Derrida, coextensive with the ethical problem. ‘It is always about answering for a dwelling place, for one’s identity, one’s space, one’s limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home’ (Derrida 2000, pp. 149/151, emphasis added). Of course, this absolute and unlimited hospitality can be seen as crazy, self-harming or even impossible. But ethics in fact spans two different realms: it is always suspended between this unconditional hyperbolic order of the demand to answer for my place under the sun and open to the alterity of the other that precedes me, and the conditional order of ethnos, of singular customs, norms, rules, places and political acts. If we see ethics as situated between these two different poles, it becomes clearer why we always remain in a relationship to ethics, why we must respond to it, or, in fact, why we will be responding to it no matter what. Even if we respond ‘nonethically’ to our guest by imposing on him a norm or political legislation as if it came from us ; even if we decide to close the door in the face of the other, make him wait outside for an extended period of time, send him back, cut off his benefits or place him in a detention centre, we must already respond to an ethical call. In this sense, our politics is preceded by an ethical injunction, which does not of course mean that we will ‘respond ethically’ to it (by offering him unlimited hospitality or welcome). However, and here lies the paradox, we will respond ethically to it (in the sense that the injunction coming from the other will make us take a stand, even if we choose to do nothing whatsoever and pretend that we may carry on as if nothing has happened). The ethics of bodies that matter also entails the possibility of changing the laws and acts of the polis and delineating some new forms of political identification and belonging. Indeed, in their respective readings of Antigone, Butler and Derrida show us not only that the paternal law towards the foreigner that regulates the idea of kinship in Western democracies can be altered but also that we can think community and kinship otherwise. If traditional hospitality is based on what Derrida calls ‘a conjugal model, paternal and phallocentric’, in which ‘[i]t’s the familial despot, the father, the spouse, and the boss, the master of the house who lays down the laws of hospitality’ (2000, p. 149), openness towards the alien and the foreign changes the very nature of the polis , with its Oedipal kinship structures and gender laws. Since, as Butler shows us, due to new family affiliations developed by queer communities but also as a result of developments in genomics it is no longer clear who my brother is, the logic of national identity and kinship that protects state boundaries against the ‘influx’ of asylum seekers is to be left wanting. This is not necessarily to advise a carnivalesque political strategy of abandoning all laws, burning all passports and opening all borders (although such actions should at least be considered ), but to point to the possibility of resignifying these laws through their (improper) reiteration. Enacted by political subjects whose own embodiment remains in the state of tension with the normative assumptions regarding propriety, gender and kinship that underlie these laws, the laws of hospitality are never carried out according to the idea/l they are supposed to entail (cf. Butler 1993, p. 231).It is precisely Butler’s account of corporeality and matter, of political subjectivity and kinship, which makes Levinas’ ethics (and Derrida’s reworking of it) particularly relevant to this project. Although the concepts of the body and materiality are not absent from Levinas’ writings - indeed, he was one of the first thinkers to identify embodiment as a philosophical blindspot - Butler allows us to redraw the boundaries of the bodies that matter and question the mechanisms of their constitution. Her ‘others’ are not limited to ‘the stranger’, ‘the orphan’ and the ‘widow’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the more acceptable others who evoke sympathy and generate pity.10 It is also the AIDS sufferer, the transsexual and the drag queen / people whose bodies and relationships violate traditional gender and kinship structures - that matter to her. By investigating the contingent limits of universalization, Butler mobilizes us against naturalizing exclusion from the democratic polis and thus creates an opportunity for its radicalization (1997, p. 90). The ethics of bodies that matter does not thus amount to waiting at the door for a needy and humble asylum seeker to knock, and extending a helping hand to him or her. It also involves realizing that the s/he may intrude, invade and change my life to the extent that it will never be the same again, and that I may even become a stranger in the skin of my own home.

We have an obligation to act on behalf of the rights of refugees—without a commitment to preserve dignity we risk totalitarianism.

Jeffrey ISAAC Poli Sci @ Indiana ’96 “A New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human Rights” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 70-72


Such examples of political praxis illustrate two of the most important features of Arendt's vision of the politics of human dignity. The first is that the most important locus of such a politics is neither the nation-state nor the international covenant or tribunal. These are, of course, crucial loci of power. The nation-state is still the preeminent political actor on the world scene. Constitutional limitations on the exercise of state power, forms of federated authority, and international legal codes--each a way of placing a kind of constraint upon state sovereignty--are all necessary if the rights of minorities, refugees, and dissenters are to be secured. But the primary impetus for such rights will always come from elsewhere, from the praxis of citizens who insist upon these rights and who are prepared to back up this insistence through political means. The words of Albert Camus are apposite: "Little is to be expected from present-day governments, since these live and act according to a murderous code. Hope remains only in the most difficult task of all: to reconsider everything from the ground up, so as to shape a living society inside a dying society. Men must therefore, as individuals, draw up among themselves, within frontiers and across them, a new social contract, which will unite them according to more reasonable principles" (1991, 135-36).Arendt's essays "Civil Disobedience" and On Revolution take up this very theme of a new social contract. Both deal with the subject of resistance to moribund and oppressive power and treat this resistance as a prefiguration of a new politics centered upon voluntary associations and council forms rather than formal or official state institutions. The "lost treasure" of the revolutionary tradition is, for Arendt, the model of an associational politics that exists beneath and across frontiers, shaking up the boundaries of the political and articulating alternative forms of allegiance, accountability, and citizenship (see Isaac 1994). Echoing Camus, Arendt writes that if there exists an alternative to national sovereignty, then it is such an associational politics, which works according to "a completely different principle of organization, which begins from below, continues upward, and finally leads to a parliament." She quickly adds that the details of such a politics are less important than its civic spirit, a spirit that resists the deracinating tendencies of modern political life (1972, 231-33).(29) That such a politics runs against the principle of sovereignty is for Arendt one of its strengths. As many commentators have observed, there is a deep pathos to Arendt's treatment of revolution, which is for her a glorious, empowering, and yet evanescent phenomenon, like a fire that burns brightly for only a moment (see Miller 1979). Arendt recognized the paradox of rebellion in the modern world, namely, that powerful associational impulses would be coopted by more official forms of politics. Yet, this can be viewed as the great virtue of this kind of politics--that it challenges the status quo and calls attention to itself in ways which demand redress and incorporation. In other words, such forms of resistance invigorate formal politics and keep it true to the spirit of human dignity. Their vigilant insistence gives force to the support for human rights that is proclaimed, but often honored in the breach, by more authoritative domestic and international bodies. The second important feature of Arendt's vision of the politics of human dignity is that there is no single community, or single category of citizenship, that can once and for all solve the problem of human rights in the late modern world. One arena of human rights praxis is clearly the state itself, and one kind of citizenship appropriate to it is clearly what we think of as "domestic" citizenship--membership in the nation state as an American, or Italian, or Croatian. But i should be clear that the idea of "domestic" is simply an adjunct of the idea of sovereignty itself; it denotes those matters contained within the boundaries of sovereign power and subject to it. As such it encourages domesticity where vigor is also needed. For there is no reason to imagine that relevant human rights issues, or relevant communities, correspond to the boundaries of nation-states. Local, regional, and global forms of citizenship are equally possible and equally real. One can speak about the rights of aborigines, for example, as a Mohawk, as a Canadian, as a North American, as a human. In each case different forms of organization would be appropriate; in each case one would speak to a different, though not necessarily mutually exclusive, audience. How human rights claims are articulated and mobilized can and will vary from case to case and from time to time, as political identities are transformed and new alliances forged.(30) It would be equally mistaken to conflate ideas of community and citizenship with formal political organizations, be they states, nations, or confederations. In On Revolution Arendt writes about self-chosen "elites," groups of citizens distinguished by nothing but their deep interest and participation in specific public matters. She describes such elites as constituting, through their very own efforts, "elementary republics." In the Arendtian view it is possible to imagine a multiplicity of overlapping "republics," sometimes in tension with one another, sometimes in support of one another. The kinds of international legal institutions and federated state arrangements that she endorses would constitute ineffective security for human rights were they not authorized, empowered, and invigorated by a robust civil society of such "republics."

The Helsinki Citizens' Assembly, formed in 1990 as an outgrowth of links formed between East European dissidents and West European peace activists after the Helsinki Accords in 1975, is an interesting example of what Arendt might have envisioned.(31) As Mary Kaldor, a co-founder, describes the assembly, "it is not addressed to governments except in so far as they are asked to guarantee freedom of travel and freedom of assembly so that citizens' groups can meet and communicate. It is a strategy of dialogue, an attempt to change society through the actions of citizens rather than governments...in short, to create a new political culture. In such a situation, the behavior of governments either changes or becomes less and less relevant" (Kaldor 1989, 15). The assembly has been described as a loose association of citizens acting together in self-organized associations, movements, and initiatives across national boundaries. It is hardly indifferent to the policies of governments; petitioning, demonstrating, and fostering debate about state policies regarding human rights have been central to its activities. But the power that its members have been able to constitute is an important force in its own right; indeed, it is only because of this power, an organizational and an ethical power, that it is capable of supporting more directly "political" efforts, such as legislation, and of influencing the course of state action. According to Kaldor, "we don't represent anyone except the movements and institutions in which we are involved. In many cases, we represent no one but ourselves. And our power rests not on whom we represent but in what we do--in what we say, in our ideas, in our quest for truth, in the



projects we undertake. It rests on our energy and commitment" (Kaldor 1991, 215). Groups such as the Helsinki Citizens' Assembly and Amnesty International embody the kind of associational politics central to Arendt's conception of modern citizenship. They are forms of collective empowerment that might provide a new foundation for human dignity. They play an indispensable role in calling attention to human rights abuses, giving voice to the disenfranchised and persecuted, and empowering citizens to act in concert on behalf of the expansion of rights. They seek not only to alter state policies, for example, on matters such as minority and refugee rights, but also to offer their own, unofficial support for displaced or persecuted people. A group such as Spanish Refugee Aid, with which Arendt was involved, was no substitute for state policies hospitable to the rights of Spanish refugees, nor was it a substitute for diplomatic efforts to change a dictatorial regime; but the voluntary organization of relief efforts and forms of solidarity is itself an indispensable and preeminently political effort, without which more hospitable state policies would not be possible. Not a wholesale alternative to other, more inclusive or official, forms of political community, such endeavors themselves constitute vital forms of civic participation and empowerment. They can be viewed as "elementary republics" of citizens committed to human rights. Our world is in many ways different from the one Arendt described in her Preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Writing in 1951, with the recent experiences of world war and Holocaust seared into her memory, and another world conflict dangerously imminent, she noted that "this moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died" (1973, vii). From her perspective the world, still reeling after the traumatic shocks of totalitarianism and mass destruction, seemed to be hurtling toward other, no less disturbing, forms of violence and human suffering. In contrast, we are witnesses to the end of the Cold War. Our more optimistic contemporaries, invoking Hegel with apparent conviction, only yesterday proclaimed the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy. Yet, few today are sanguine about the state of the world. As I write this essay millions of innocent civilians are starving in Rwanda and Kenya, the victims of brutal civil conflict. Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, and countless other national minorities clamor for human rights. In the heart of Europe, Sarajevo is under Serbian siege, and Bosnian Muslims suffer a brutal, murderous campaign of "ethnic cleansing."(32) German neo-Nazi youth regularly vandalize and burn refugee hostels, to the cheers of large crowds of sympathetic bystanders. Throughout France, Italy, and Germany there are increasingly audible calls to exclude "foreigners" in the name of "real citizens," "true" French, or Italians, or Germans who do not wish to share their country with the others. Across the Atlantic Ocean things are no different, as the Clinton administration recently turned back Haitian refugees fleeing a brutal dictatorship, just as its predecessors had done before with refugees displaced by economic trauma and civil war in El Salvador and Guatemala (see United Nations 1993, Zolberg 1989).

The 1992 Human Rights Watch World Report notes that in the wake of the Cold War "respect for human rights faces a dangerous challenge in the rise of exclusionary ideologies...the quest for ethnic, linguistic or religious purity, pursued by growing numbers, lies behind much of today's bloodshed. By closing the community to diversity and stripping outsiders of essential rights, these dangerous visions of enforced conformity nourish a climate of often brutal intolerance" (1992, 1). Arendt, writing more than forty years ago, observed that "under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena--homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth" (1973, vii). Such a vision sounds grimly familiar.



While Arendt is not a theorist well known for her reflections on human rights, her writing is an indispensable resource for thinking about the threats to human dignity in the late modern world. As she recognized, human rights are not a given of human nature; they are the always tenuous results of a politics that seeks to establish them, a vigorous politics intent on constituting relatively secure spaces of human freedom and dignity. And as she saw, the nation-state, far from being the vehicle of the self-determination of individuals and peoples, is in many ways an obstacle to the dignity that individuals and communities seek. Those interested in human rights, who wish to provide a new guarantee for human dignity, have no alternative but to take responsibility upon themselves, to act politically as members of elementary republics, locally and globally, on behalf of a dignity that is in perpetual jeopardy in the world in which we live. A

As the Human Rights Watch Report makes chillingly clear, such a politics is hardly a matter of mere academic interest.



Jacqueline Bhabha, Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, director of Harvard’s University Committee on Human Rights Studies, 2009, Human Rights Quarterly, “Arendt’s Children: Do Today’s Migrant Children Have a Right to Have Rights?” Project Muse. http://muse.jhu.edu/search/results?action=search&searchtype=author§ion1=author&search1=%22Bhabha%2C%20Jacqueline.%22.
Access to basic shelter, subsistence level welfare payments, and in-kind benefits is as fundamental to modern conceptions of rights in general, and children’s rights in particular, as is protection from physical violence. The same is true for access to such social and economic rights as education and health care, as the Committee on the Rights of the Child has frequently noted in its concluding observations on states parties’ periodic reports. 38 Yet here too, public officials operate under personal codes of conduct that translate into dramatic rights denials. Sylvia da Lomba has remarked, “Curtailments of social rights for irregular migrants in host countries have become essential components of restrictive immigration policies. . . . The threat of destitution as a deterrent against irregular migration generates acute tensions within host states between immigration laws and human rights protections.” 39 Consider this Spanish case: Sixteen-year-old ‘Abd al Samad R. has been in Ceuta [an autonomous Spanish city located on the Moroccan coast] for about five years, including two and a half years living at the San Antonio Center. While at San Antonio he was diagnosed as suffering from renal disease, a potentially life-threatening medical condition, and he received medical treatment. Then, in October 2001 he was told to leave San Antonio, apparently for disciplinary infractions. When we interviewed ‘Abd al Samad on November 8, 2001, he was living with a group of other children and youth in makeshift hovels squeezed between a breakwater and piles of ceramic tiles and other building supplies. He had received no medical treatment since leaving San Antonio, although he was frequently in severe pain. “The pain comes often, when it is cold, or when someone hits me,” he said. “I tried to go to the hospital when I was in pain but they wouldn’t admit me. They won’t accept you at the hospital unless some one from San Antonio comes with you. When the pain comes I can’t move so who will come to take me to the hospital?” 40 Without official confirmation of the child’s social entitlements, he remained outside the categories established by the state—in effect not a person before the law. These exclusionary attitudes were translated directly into rightlessness. The acute risks to which this willful exclusion, combined with the fear of detection as an irregular migrant by state officials, can give rise were noted by the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Siliadin v. France. In this case, an unaccompanied child from Togo, “unlawfully present in [France] and in fear of arrest by the police . . . was . . . subjected to forced labour . . . [and] held in servitude,” compelled to carry out housework and child care for fifteen hours a day without holidays. 41 The Court commented that the applicant “was entirely at [her employers’] mercy, since her papers had been confiscated . . . [S]he had no freedom of movement or free time. As she had not been sent to school . . . the appli- cant could not hope that her situation would improve.” 42 Irregular migration status increases the risk of invisibility and thus gross rights violations. As the Court pointed out, states parties must recognize this serious risk and act “with greater firmness . . . in assessing the infringements of the fundamental values of democratic societies.” 43 In other words, according to the Court, states have an obligation to “see” 44 Arendt’s children—willful and selective blindness is not a legitimate option .

Statelessness is equal to losing the right to have rights- leads to totalitarianism



Seyla Benhabib, professor of political science and philosophy at Yale, June 2004, “The Rights of Others.” http://books.google.com/books?id=3cuUHAJNmuYC&dq=Seyla+Benhabib+“Rights+of+Others”&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=d-pqxd2bJq&sig=Oyb7-wKlE-80M8AlnsdkH3bLD80&hl=en&ei=rqtKSqWVIYqmNurxjIoO&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1
The previous chapter analyzed Kant’s formulation and defense of cosmopolitan right and argued that the text left unclear which of the following premises justified the cosmopolitan right to hospitality: the right to seek human association, which in fact, could be viewed as an extension of the human claim to freedom; or the premise of the sphericality of the earth’s surface and the juridical fiction of the common possession of the earth. Kant’s discussion of cosmopolitan right, whatever its shortcomings, delineates a new terrain in the history of political thought. In formulating a sphere of right - in the juridical and moral senses of the term — between domestic constitutional and customary international law, Kant charted a terrain onto which the nations of this world began to venture only at the end two world wars. Kant was concerned that the granting of the right to permanent residency (Gusrrecht) should remain a privilege of self-governing republican communities. Naturalization is a sovereign privilege. The obverse side of naturalization is "denationalization." or loss of citizenship status.

After Kant, it was Hannah Arendt who turned to the ambiguous legacy of cosmopolitan law, and who dissected the paradoxes at the heart of the terminally based sovereign state system. One of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt argued that the twin phenomena of "political evil" and “statelessness” would remain the most daunting problems into the twenty-first century as well (Arendt 1349.;,134; [1951]1968;seeBenhabib[1996] 21103). Arendt always insisted that among the root causes of totalitarianism was the collapse of the nation—state system in Europe during the two world wars. The totalitarian disregard for human life and the eventual treatment of human beings as "superfluous" entities began, for Hannah Arendt, when millions of human beings were rendered “stateless" and denied the "right to have rights." Statelessness, or the loss of nationality status, she argued, was tantamount to the loss of all rights. The stateless were deprived not only of their citizenship rights; they were deprived of any human rights. The rights of man and the rights of the citizen, which the modem bourgeois revolutions had so clearly delineated were deeply imbricated. The loss of citizenship rights, therefore, contrary to all human rights declarations, was politically tantamount to the loss of human rights altogether.



This chapter begins with an examination of Arendt contribution; thereafter, l develop a series of systematic considerations which are aimed to show why neither the right to naturalization nor the prerogative of denaturalization can be considered sovereign privileges alone; the airs: is a universal human right, while the second - denaturalization · is its abrogation.

Moral obligation –government has responsibility to safeguard vulnerable unaccompanied alien children.


Julianne Duncan, Ph.D. Director, Office of Children's Services Migration and Refugee Services/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Joint Testimony of Migration and Refugee Services/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service before The Senate Subcommittee on Immigration February 28, 2002. http://www.usccb.org/mrs/duncantestimony.shtml
Because of our long experience in caring for and advocating on behalf of unaccompanied minors, Mr. Chairman, our testimony today will point out changes in law we believe are required, as laid out in Senator Feinstein's bill, to reform the current system. In the view of MRS/USCCB and LIRS, our government's treatment of unaccompanied alien children should be governed by the following principles: The Federal government has a special responsibility to ensure that unaccompanied alien children are treated with dignity and care. Children are our most precious gifts. Their youthfulness, lack of maturity, and inexperience make them inherently vulnerable and in the need of the protection of adults. Unaccompanied alien children are among the most vulnerable of this vulnerable population. They are separated from both their families and their communities of origin, they are often escaping persecution and exploitation, they often find themselves in a land in which the language and culture are alien to them, and they are thrust into complex legal proceedings that even adults have great difficulty navigating and understanding. Unaccompanied minors should be held in the least restrictive setting as possible, preferably with family members or with a foster family. Secure facilities should be used on a very limited basis and only when absolutely necessary to protect a child's immediate safety or the safety of the community. 
 Minors should be reunited with parents, guardians, or other family members within the United States as soon as possible. While a family is in temporary detention, they should not be separated unless it is in the best interest of the child. Because of their special vulnerability and inability to represent themselves, unaccompanied children should be provided with legal representation and guardians ad litem to assist them in immigration proceedings and to see that care and placement decisions are made with a child's best interest in mind. Mr. Chairman, these principles are not currently governing U.S. policy toward unaccompanied alien children in the United States. Instead, thousands of children each year are held in detention, some with juvenile criminal offenders, with little or no access to legal assistance and with decreasing ability to reunite with family members. Some children are detained for months awaiting their asylum hearing, while others are deported immediately back to their country-of-origin without substantial attempts to locate their parents or immediate family members. Moreover, as a child welfare expert with knowledge of the foster care and juvenile justice systems, I find it shocking to see how children in INS custody are treated. Equally disturbing is that children in immigration proceedings are not ensured legal representation, a practice which is not accepted in other types of court proceedings.

International consensus – US must fulfill moral responsibility to protect child asylee seekers.


Rachel Bien an associate at Outten & Golden LLP, clerked for Judge Thomas G. Nelson on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, ‘03. “NOTHING TO DECLARE BUT THEIR CHILDHOOD: REFORMING U.S. ASYLUM LAW TO PROTECT THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN” Journal of Law and Policy 12 pg. 840-841

The growing international consensus that child asylum seekers require special protections has important implications for U.S. asylum laws. Although the U.S. asylum system currently does not differentiate between adult and child applicants, the United States should build on recent proposals to afford greater procedural protections to child asylum seekers with substantive provisions that address the forms of persecution unique to children. With millions of children suffering from the consequences of armed conflicts around the world, the international community has a special legal and moral obligation to ensure that child asylum seekers receive adequate care and protection. As this record of violence makes clear, a world unwilling to protect children is one in which “children are slaughtered, raped, and maimed . . . exploited as soldiers . . . starved and exposed to extreme brutality.”202 In short, it is a world devoid of the most basic of human values. The United States has an important role to play in ensuring that children who escape such turmoil are properly protected.

Refugee children suffer trauma and often do not receive the help they need



National Child Traumatic Stress Network and Refugee Trauma Task Force, Established by Congress in 2000 is a collaboration of academic and community-based service centers whose mission is to raise the standard of care and increase access to services for traumatized children and their families across the United States. Combining knowledge of child development, expertise in the full range of child traumatic experiences, and attention to cultural perspectives, the NCTSN serves as a national resource for developing and disseminating evidence-based interventions, trauma-informed services, and public and professional education. 2005
As discussed extensively in the White Paper I, refugee children experience a great number of stressors throughout their pre-migration, flight, and resettlement experiences that impact on their psychological well being. Refugee children experience trauma resulting from war and political violence in their countries of origin prior to migration, as well as during flight or in refugee camps. These multiple stressors include direct exposure to war time violence and combat experience, displacement and loss of home, malnutrition, separation from caregivers, detention and torture and a multitude of other traumatic circumstances affecting the children’s health, mental health and general well being. A large number of studies have documented a wide range of symptoms experienced by refugee children, including anxiety, recurring nightmares, insomnia, secondary enuresis, introversion, anxiety and depressive symptoms, relationship problems, behavioral problems, academic difficulties, anorexia, and somatic problems (Allodi, 1980; Almqvist & Brandell-Forsberg, 1997; Angel, Hjern, & Ingleby, 2001; Arroyo & Eth, 1985; Boothby, 1994; Cohn, Holzer, Koch, & Severin, 1980; Felsman, Leong, Johnson, & Felsman, 1990; Gibson, 1989; Goldstein, Wampler, & Wise, 1997; Hjern, Angel, & Hoejer, 1991; Hodes, 2000; Kinzie, Sack, Angell, Manson, & Roth, 1986; Krener & Sabin, 1985; Macksoud & Aber, 1996; Masser, 1992; McCloskey & Southwick, 1996; McCloskey, Southwick, Fernandez-Esquer, & Locke, 1995; Mollica, Poole, Son, Murray, & Tor, 1997; Muecke & Sassi, 1992; Paaredekooper, de Jong, & Hermanns, 1999; Papageorgiou et al., 2000; Weine, Becker, Levy, & McGlashan, 1997; C. Williams & Westermeyer, 1983), and linked the presence of these symptoms to exposure to trauma prior to migration. With high prevalence of posttraumatic stress symptoms among refugee children reported to be between 50-90% (Lustig et al., 2004), many refugee children are in need of trauma-informed treatment and services. Despite evidence for the need for such treatment, refugee children in resettlement are unlikely to benefit from mental health services because they rarely use them. This problem is not unique to refugee children, as many recent reviews have observed that few U.S. children in need of mental health services receive care (Collins & Collins, 1994; Kataoka, Zhang, & Wells, 2002; Stephenson, 2000; Surgeon General's Report, 1999). Epidemiological studies report that fewer than 20% of children who need mental health care actually receive services (Lahey, Flagg, Bird, & Schwab-Stone, 1996). In addition, of those children who do receive services, fewer than 50% receive the appropriate service relative to their need (Kazdin, 1996). Because refugee children face additional barriers to receiving care, experts suspect that most refugee children in need of mental health services do not find their way into the existing mental health care system (Geltman, Augustyn, Barnett, Klass, & Groves, 2000; Westermeyer & Wahmanholm, 1996). One survey of refugee health programs in nine metropolitan areas in the U.S. found that while 78% of the sites offered mental health care, only 33% of the sites carried out mental health status examinations (Vergara, Miller, Martin, & Cookson, 2003). This suggests that refugees with mental health problems are unlikely to be identified, and thus unlikely to receive treatment. Overall, these findings suggest that interventions that facilitate access and engagement in mental health services for refugee children are needed.



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