the UK as a child helped me relate with the residents at the camp. I knew how it felt to have to leave your home behind, knowing you cannot return and also feeling confused with the sudden and unexpected change of circumstance. Although I did not leave my country of origin in the exact circumstances as the children I was working with, there were some parallels in our stories and childhood experiences. Jacqui: During my clinical training, my awareness was raised to global events triggering migration combined with a political situation in the UK that I felt was becoming increasingly antithetical to values of a shared humanity. I therefore decided to contribute to a project supporting people on the journey of forced migration. Arriving in the refugee camp, we find
ourselves within a system of striking power imbalance, with the collective oppression of one group, refugees, by another, a group we find ourselves identified with. During reflective meetings, we frequently arrived at this and further ethical dilemmas; what are we doing, as representatives of the dominant group, to speak out against such oppressive contexts and discourses? What overall benefit do we bring to children and families, in contrast to the implications of these much wider forces? Were we losing sight of the wider political landscape and were we focusing our energies in less helpful places?
What we do Like many small non-government
organisations, the Schoolbox project runs with few staff and is entirely dependent on semi-skilled and transient volunteers. Due to the levels of distress in children and families, language barriers and cultural differences in parenting and education, volunteers often find themselves feeling disheartened and unskilled. While the project strives to recruit those with training in teaching, psychology or social care, the availability of skilled volunteers is low, and their experience rarely includes the extent of oppression and trauma found in this setting. We were also limited by resources, funding, and, due to being positioned within the camp, with little control over class group sizes. For example, the following atypical morning would shape the project for months to come:
Context 164, August 2019
Classroom (faces blurred) with Saran, Jacqui and Lotus We arrived at camp to unexpectedly
find 97 refugees on the kerbside by the camp entrance. Some had not eaten for several days, and all were carrying their few possessions in bags. Our class for 7 to 11-year-olds went from 12 children to nearly 40 children in a day. Faced with such unexpected situations,
the experience can be overwhelming for volunteers, leading to lack of containment and the potential for re-traumatisation (Hummer et al., 2010). As the camp residents experience ongoing stress and reliving of traumas from the past, children may also be exposed to further distress within their family environment. Some children could rarely make eye
contact and, while volunteers were visiting one family, the children began to carry out a mock execution. Other volunteers later expressed that they were afraid of some of the children as they could quickly turn aggressive.
In such situations, it is therefore crucial
for volunteers to be able to tolerate their own emotions and self-regulate in response to distress, a core skill in trauma-informed care that the project emphasises in its training.
Beyond trauma Diffi culties are exacerbated by the
context of the project within the local system: a position of limited power, in which permissions are dependent on approval by the host country’s authorities. This creates constraints on the ability of the project to infl uence statutory practices that could be seen as harmful to the wellbeing of individuals in forcibly displaced communities. These include cramped living conditions, access to healthcare, and, at times, unequal distributions of resources, such as food and nappies. On an organisational level, the lack of transparent communication between
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Refl ections on the value of trauma-informed care in a refugee-camp setting in Greece
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