Filed under mental health

Britain will follow a policy of reducing aid to countries- such as Malawi, Uganda and Ghana- that persecute and imprison gay people, David Cameron has announced. “The Week” reports,

The southern African nation of Malawi has already had its payments sliced by about $30 million, after it sentenced a gay couple to 14 months of hard labor for holding an engagement party. Fellow “anti-gay” countries Uganda and Ghana could lose millions, too. “I want Britain to be a global beacon for reform,” says Prime Minister David Cameron.

See here for the full article.

Much research into the effects of forced migration look at migration into developed countries. Most migrants, however, live in low or middle income countries, close to the borders with home. Oxford researchers have sought to expand our awareness of people living in such situations, and their research has unearthed often overlooked challenges and especially worrying figures regarding children’s mental health.

Mina Fazal, a co-author of the research (published in The Lancet) explains that children in developing-country refugee camps or settlements “are at high risk of mental-health problems because they are likely to have been exposed to violence, which is the strongest predictor of poor mental-health outcomes”. Furthermore, families in these circumstances generally have very poor access to mental health treatment, and little protection from further risk.

IRIN’s article on the research details,

In Sudan’s Darfur region and in Chad, both boys and girls reported having been raped, usually while collecting firewood. At least 75 percent of children interviewed in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Darfur met the diagnostic criteria for post traumatic stress disorder and 38 percent had depression.

Local people, poor themselves, can be hostile and threatening towards newcomers competing for scarce resources. And just being close to home does not always diminish the culture shock. The report says, “Evidence suggests that adaptation to apparently similar settings is not necessarily easy, and refugees themselves draw attention to cultural dissimilarity in settings that western researchers judge to be similar on the basis of religion and language.”

See here for IRIN’s article on the report and here for the research in The Lancet.