ABSTRACT
In recent years, many people from a range of countries, including Lebanon, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Tibet, Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia and Khurdish homelands in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, have applied for asylum in the United Kingdom. In 1993 alone, some 22,000 applications were received by the Home Office (Home Office Statistics 1994). The anonymous distress and suffering of refugees which the media brings into our lives on a daily basis is barely manageable, but we find our defences more substantially challenged when these upheavals are embodied in the account of one particular individual, or form part of the life history of the child sitting in front of us. Thinking about the experiences and needs of refugee children can be daunting and disturbing. In these moments, it is often the voice of our own fears, conscious and unconscious, that speaks loudest, as in our imagination the sufferings of these young people come to represent our own worst phantasies of atrocities and terror. Through our identification with these survivors we ourselves feel traumatised, and, as a consequence, our capacity for rational thought gets interfered with. We may experience an impulse to turn away, unable to identify what we can offer that would be of any use, whilst simultaneously hankering to respond to the need that has been evoked in us. Confronted by the recent arrival of so many refugee youngsters, schools have been turning to psychological services and other specialist agencies for help in identifying ways in which they can meet the needs of these young people and the staff working with them.
