CLEVELAND, Ohio – “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”
. . . And your tortured and your abused — beaten, raped, starved, shot, hung from trees, forced to drink boiling water and dig their own graves . . .
This addendum to the traditional welcome at the Statue of Liberty is a matter addressed by 35 centers in 23 states that treat survivors of torture, who come to the United States as immigrants and refugees.
The Center for Victims of Torture estimated recently that as many as 44 percent of those immigrants and refugees have been abused, with a potential 1.3 million torture victims now living in the U.S.
The national effort to aid these victims, funded by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, includes the first such centers in Ohio, established in late 2015 in Columbus (operated by the US Together agency) and Cleveland.
In the past year, the Catholic Charities of Cleveland’s Ohio Center for Survivors of Torture has provided free services to 175 individuals who have been tortured abroad.
- Read more: Torture survivors find haven and success in Cleveland
Utilizing a team of lawyers, social workers, mental health providers and employment specialists, plus links to community groups, the center offers such assistance as legal aid, mental health counseling, group therapy, job placement and employment readiness training.
Anyone contacting Catholic Charities’ Migration and Refugee Services is now screened for a possible background of torture abroad.
Camille Gill talks about helping survivors of torture
“We had known for a long time that many of the refugees we serve are survivors of torture, but we never had funding specifically to meet those needs,” said Camille Gill, managing attorney of immigration legal services. The center also can aid native-born U.S. citizens who have been tortured abroad.
In the past year, 33 percent of refugees seeking immigration legal services at Catholic Charities, and 17 percent of all individuals seeking the same aid have qualified for the torture survivors program, according to Gill.
To qualify, the act must have happened outside the U.S., been intentional, occurred while the survivor was held captive, caused severe harm (physically or psychologically), and have been committed under government control or authority.
The abuse could have been recent, or decades old. It is invariably horrific.
“The kinds of torture are anything you can think of, and more,” Gill said. “I had been working with immigrants as a lawyer for close to a decade and thought I’d heard the worst stories I would ever hear, until I started working with this population.
“You have individuals who are jailed and beaten, hung from a tree. We’ve had people who have been put in holes and forced to stay in that hole for days at a time in extreme temperatures,” she said.
“We’ve had lots of sexual trauma, a lot of rape, a lot of being forced to watch your family members being raped, people who have been shot, who were forced to watch their children being killed,” Gill added. “It’s rough stuff.”
Heath Rosenberger, program director, also noted, “We’ve seen a lot of cases recently where folks have had to dig their own grave and live in it, but were able to escape. It seems to be a trend with a lot of our clients coming from the (Democratic Republic of the) Congo.”
The center has handled cases involving children. “We have a number of children who are either suffering because of the direct things they experienced, or because they witnessed things that their parents experienced,” Gill said.
The impact on survivors of torture can be physical and/or psychological, she noted. “It varies. We see a lot of depression and anxiety. We also occasionally see individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder,” Gill said.
Future success stories could be affected by immigration policies of the new presidential administration.
Gill noted that recent reports of President Donald Trump planning restrictions on refugees from certain nations could affect the recovery process of center clients.
Fatima Adam, for example, has a goal of bring her family to the U.S., but Sudan is on the list of nations included in the restrictions, Gill said.
“Building family support helps recovery, and a big part of what we do is to reunite a family so survivors can move on and move forward,” she added.
“But Catholic Charities has been serving refugees since the 1940s, and we’ve heard nothing to this point that would make us think that we won’t continue to do so,” Gill said.
“Like everything, when it comes to immigration and the political climate, we just have to wait and see what progresses, and we have to be ready to tell our political leaders that this is something that’s important, and they need to continue to support it,” she added.
For the moment, the program could use more staff and funding, according to Gill. She said more than 200 people are currently waiting to be screened for possible qualification in the torture survivors program.
The Catholic Charities’ center is funded by a $237,000-per-year grant that expires in 2018.
Catholic Charities will host a workshop, “Crossing Worlds, Intersecting Services,” on April 24, featuring Dr. Hawthorne Smith of Bellevue Hospital in New York, who will present a program based on his work with survivors of torture and forced migrants. (For details, contact Mead Wilkins at 216-939-3727 or gmwilikns@ccdocle.org.)
One downside of offering services to torture survivors is the impact on providers who deal with the aftermath of a litany of horrors.
“It definitely makes me feel helpless when I’m listening to their stories. It’s just a lot to take in, I guess, because they’ve been through so much,” said Maggie Barnard, job developer. “All we can do is ask, How can we help?”
According to Gill, working with the survivors, “really puts into perspective your own life, because the things that you are worrying about today — Oh, I really need to work out more, I’d like to re-do my bathroom — these sorts of problems just seem totally insignificant after you realize what our clients have been through.”
Gill said a staff psychologist who helps torture survivors, also aids workers — teaching self-care techniques such as “reminding yourself that you don’t carry the weight of the world on your back. You have this limited gift to give and you need to protect yourself, and don’t get burned out and can’t give that gift any more.”
But the resiliency — a word repeatedly used by center staffers to describe their clients — that brought torture survivors this far can also be inspiring.
“It can get gloomy sometimes, but our clients do so much to energize us and to really keep us positive and keep us wanting to keep going,” Gill said.
And, “when you see them gain an immigration benefit, or get a job, or make such a big improvement in their mental health and well-being, it just makes you feel good about what you’re doing, and makes you want to continue,” she added.
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