Announcements

CALLING FOR PAPERS!

2022-06-13

CALL 1: INTEGRATING LIVELIHOODS INTO REHABILITATION

Pau Pérez-Sales, Editor-in-Chief
Berta Soley Daró, Guest Editor & Editorial Associate

Background

There is an on-going discussion about the need for a holistic approach to torture rehabilitation, claiming that psychosocial and medical services are not effective if basic needs remain uncovered. Mental and physical health has been a primary focus of rehabilitation programmes, but many found that progress was difficult to maintain without socio-economic support as well. Survivors still have households to feed, battled unemployment and disabilities caused by the atrocities committed against them.

Recognising the complexity and inter-connectivity of social, economic, medical and psychological sequelae of torture, where one aspect can negatively or positively affect the other, this special edition of the Torture Journal seeks to explore how the integration of rebuilding a life project and the livelihood’s component can influence rehabilitation processes. Indeed, additional academic contributions are required to better understand how healing processes can be enhanced by including socio-economic support in rehabilitation programmes.

Call for papers

The Torture Journal encourages authors to submit papers with a psychological, medical or legal orientation, particularly those that are interdisciplinary with other fields of knowledge. We welcome papers on the following:

  1. Defining livelihoods and its relationship with the concept of development in the context of the work with torture survivors. Going beyond a definition centred in material outcomes and working with the idea of life projects and finding meaning as part of the work with torture survivors.
  2. Survivor participation in the design and implementation of livelihoods programs
  3. Innovative experiences in livelihoods programs: evolving from a business perspective to livelihoods programmes for social change.
  4. Transcending the individual or family perspective: from cooperatives to collective forms of organisation in livelihoods programmes.
  5. Beyond vulnerability: innovative approaches to resource allocation in precarious environments.
  6. Ensuring sustainability of livelihood programs. The role of the State and civil society.
  7. Working in unstable contexts: livelihoods programs under conflict situations.
  8. Barriers to livelihoods programmes: limitations to work and employment integration in asylum seekers and refugees.
  9. Transnational experiences connecting refugees, relatives and comrades in the country of origin.
  10. Effects on the overall well-being and quality of life resulting from the integration of a socioeconomic component into the rehabilitation processes.

Deadline for submission: 15th February 2024

Submission guidelines and links:
• Submit your paper here: https://tidsskrift.dk/torture-journal/about/submissions
• Author guidelines can be found here: https://irct.org/uploads/media/2eefc4b785f87c7c3028a1c-
59ccd06ed.pdf
• Read more about the Torture Journal here: https://irct.org/global-resources/torture-journal
• For general submission guidelines, please see the Torture Journal website. Papers will be selected
on their relevance to the field, applicability, methodological rigor, and level of innovation.

For more information:
Contact Editor-in-chief (pauperez@runbox.com) if you wish to explore the suitability of a paper
to the Special Section.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

CALL 2: TORTURE IN PRISON AND OTHER DETENTION FACILITIES

Pau Pérez Sales, Editor-in-Chief, Torture Journal

About the call

This call for papers aims to examine prisons and other detention facilities (immigration detention centres, juvenile detention centres, etc) as torturing environments

Torture Journal encourages authors to submit papers with a psychological, medical or legal orientation, particularly those that are interdisciplinary with other fields of knowledge. We welcome contributions related (but not limited) to:

  1. Conditions of detention as environments of torture: overcrowding, food, inhuman treatment, etc.
  2. Carceral geographies: emotional cartographies in detention spaces.
  3. Impacts of isolation and closed regime units. Alternatives.
  4. Use of mechanical restraints, chemical restraints and other methods of control and coercion. Intervention programs to abolish restraints.
  5. Challenges of forensic documentation in prisons and other closed institutions.
  6. Studies on reprisals against persons deprived of their liberty following monitoring visits to investigate allegations of torture.
  7. Violent institutional cultures. Generating and perpetuating factors, and intervention programmes on violent milieus.
  8. Violence by other inmates and staff. Methods of detection and prevention.
  9. Effectiveness of torture prevention measures: videotaping, civil-society monitoring, medical documentation of injuries and others
  10. Sexual torture and abuse in closed institutions.
  11. Short or adapted forms of the Istanbul Protocol for documenting torture during monitoring visits or short-time evaluations in closed institutions.
  12. Self-harm and suicide. Self-inflicted violence in closed institutions.
  13. Severe Mental Illness and Torture in closed institutions.
  14. Legal contours of torture in detention centres: legal reviews with a special focus on the intentionality and purpose criteria

Deadline for submission: 15th March 2024

Submission guidelines and links

For more information

Contact Editor-in-chief (pauperez@runbox.com) if you wish to explore the suitability of a paper to the Special Section.

About the Torture Journal

Please go to our website (https://tidsskrift.dk/torture-journal) devoted to Torture Journal readers and contributors – to access the latest and archived issues

Read more about CALLING FOR PAPERS!

Current Issue

Vol. 33 No. 3 (2023): Torture Journal: Journal on Rehabilitaiton of Torture Victims and Prevention of Torture
					View Vol. 33 No. 3 (2023): Torture Journal: Journal on Rehabilitaiton of Torture Victims and Prevention of Torture

We take a look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Jana Javakhishvili introduces the concept of “substitutive trauma,” which refers to the utilisation of unprocessed collective traumatic experiences by political leadership to create shared feelings of victimhood and vengeful attitudes within a population. The analysis explores how a substitutive trauma-based psycho-political dynamic culminated in February 2022 in Russia’s war against Ukraine. The article argues that the commu­nity of traumatic stress professionals, studying and understanding macro-societal processes, can contribute to reducing and ameliorating such destructive psycho-political develop­ments. Most of Jana’s reasonings can surely by applied to the situation in Gaza.

 

Lopatina et al., present an analysis of the impact of the Russian occupation on the activ­ities of Berdyansk State Pedagogical University in Ukraine, explaining the different challenges faced by the university community under oc­cupation, particularly emphasising human rights violations and academic freedom and institutional resilience mechanisms to manage to maintain classes despite the invasion.

In a qualitative study with survivors and legal practitioners, Rud et al. also present data on resilience, but in this case of victims of torture in Russia. They analyse law en­forcement institutions and ways they chal­lenge an individual’s resilience as torturing environments and how it is faced, regardless of the vulnerabilities of the individual, their social status and institutional context. It is a path-breaking study that provides fresh per­spectives on a subject that has been scarcely addressed in the anti-torture field.

Also on resilience in torture survivors is the editorial, with reflections, learnings and ways forward in a field that lacks more scien­tific research.

The issue also addresses the topic of tor­turing environments. Alejandro Forero’s paper reviews prison overcrowding as ill-treatment or torture under international law, focusing on three aspects: minimum standards with respect to living space, the use of tools to establish the existence of harm caused by inhuman con­ditions of incarceration and some corrective, restorative measures for prisoners that inno­vative jurisprudence is introducing.

Stroppa presents the work of Physicians for Human Rights Israel and Antigone on an International Guiding Statement of Alter­natives to Solitary Confinement, proposing global guidelines for reducing and overcom­ing the use of solitary confinement in prisons.

Finally, a research study presented by Bar­bieri et al. examines the prevalence of hallu­cinations in a sample of treatment-seeking trauma-affected refugees. It analyses the rel­ative role of torture and some other interper­sonal traumatic events (i.e., imprisonment, sexual assault, non-sexual assault) as well as PTSD severity and a range of socio-demo­graphic variables in the emergence of hallu­cinations.

Additionally, Castilla conducts a brief review of the recently published General Comment No.1 of the Committee against Forced Disappearances in the context of mi­gration as a new opportunity to re-humanise the management of migrations in all regions of the world.

Published: 2023-12-29

Research and Scientific articles

Letter to the Editor

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PLEASE NOTE: A new website for the Torture Journal is under construction.

The Torture Journal is an international scientific journal that provides an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of original research and systematic reviews by professionals concerned with the biomedical, psychological and social interface of torture and the rehabilitation of its survivors.