Rebuilding Communities

by Binta Barry and Nancy L. Pearson

View full notebook in pdf format. [*note]

In this notebook, we learn about building local and long-term capacity building within communities to address massive human rights atrocities. The Center for Victims of Torture has instituted an intensive training and supervision model for refugees to develop local capacity for providing understanding and skills for mental health support to rebuild communities after massive human rights atrocities. CVT has instituted the training model in refugee camps in Guinea and Sierra Leone for refugees from Sierra Leone and Liberia. The model combines intensive, hands-on training of refugees with ongoing supervision. These refugee "mental health specialists" build their capabilities, provide individual and group therapy for traumatized individuals and use their skills toward rebuilding their own communities and support systems.

There are currently 122 "mental health specialists" involved in this ongoing training and supervision model with thousands of refugees of all ages having received a wide variety of services. Devastating wars in every region of world have created massive number of refugees and internally displaced people who have witnessed or been victims of horrible human rights atrocities. This notebook may provide tactical ideas to those assisting these communities trying to rebuild their lives.

Even as the world has witnessed substantial gains in the development of international mechanisms to monitor human rights violations and prosecute offenders, mass atrocities continue to plague many countries, including Sierra Leone. The nation’s people endured more than a decade of civil war, suffering brutality and massive rights violations aimed at ripping apart the social fabric, undermining cultural and family values and destroying community leadership and structures. Sierra Leone, a country of approximately six million people, is composed of 20 tribes following a variety of faiths–Muslim, indigenous and Christian. The country gained independence from Great Britain in 1961. Despite rich mineral and human resources, by 1990 Sierra Leone had one of the most skewed income distributions, with 82 percent of the population living below the poverty line. An eleven-year civil war provoked in 1991 by the Revolutionary United Front resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and the displacement of over one-third of the population.

The conflict caused more than 450,000 people to flee to neighboring countries–mainly Guinea and Liberia–and left an estimated one million people internally displaced within the country. With the RUF conducting systematic and brutal assaults on the civilian population, survivors had witnessed or survived brutal atrocities including mutilations, amputations, forced recruitment of children and adults as soldiers, forced labor and horrendous sexual crimes. International observers described the situation: "The rebels sought to dominate women and their communities by deliberately undermining cultural values and community relationships, destroying the ties that hold society together. Child combatants raped women who were old enough to be their grandmothers, rebels raped pregnant and breastfeeding mothers and fathers were forced to watch their daughters being raped." Girls as young as seven or eight were used as sex slaves.

At the time the Center for Victims of Torture was launching its program in Guinea, there were more than 300,000 Sierra Leonean refugees and more than 120,000 Liberian refugees in the country. Conservatively estimating that 5 to 10 percent of the refugee population could benefit from mental health interventions and needed more than social opportunities or skills training to regain their life functioning, 20,000 to 40,000 people were in need of such assistance. Sierra Leonean communities were broken apart by the atrocities of the war. And many of the individuals who endured and survived such atrocities remembered their experiences in silence.

View full notebook in pdf format.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.