For Further Reading
At the Side of Torture Survivors: Treating a Terrible Assault on Human Dignity
This book provides an intimate portrait of the difficulties facing torture survivors and the therapists who strive to help them. It covers topics ranging from physical rehabilitation to advocacy for those seeking asylum and justice.
Counselling And Psychotherapy With Refugees
This concise book is an essential tool to help counsellors and psychotherapists understand and engage with the experiences of persecution, violence and exile often faced by refugees.
Broken Spirits: The Treatment of Traumatized Asylum Seekers, Refugees, War and Torture Victims
The volume is an excellent handbook for all those who are interested in the treatment of traumatized asylum seekers, refugees, war, and torture victims, including the educated general reader or policymaker with an interest in contemporary work on trauma.
Empathy in the Treatment of Trauma and PTSD
This book examines how professionals are psychologically impacted by their work with trauma clients.
Cross-Cultural Assessment of Psychological Trauma and PTSD (International and Cultural Psychology)
Recent advances in trauma treatment, coupled with ongoing traumatic world events, point to a critical need for global standards in assessment. But despite the best intentions of Western psychology, one model does not fit all cultures. Cross-Cultural Assessment of Psychological Trauma and PTSD addresses key issues in the field to help fill this knowledge gap.
Text discussing recent advances in government sanctioned torture and offering practical approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of torture victims.
The Trauma of Psychological Torture (Disaster and Trauma Psychology)
It is, in some circles, called "No-Touch Torture." Yet it brings pain and damage that can last a lifetime.
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, te book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it.
Articles:
Torture victims find U.S. a source of hope and new fears
Hear the voices of broken people, torture and war trauma survivors who gather at the Advocates for Survivors of Torture and Trauma in Baltimore. The organization serves as a safe house for more than 200 people displaced by war and terror.
This paper seeks to explore the potential value of qigong and t'ai chi practice as a therapeutic intervention to aid in the treatment of survivors of torture and refugee trauma. The conclusion is these practices merits further investigation.
Complementary therapies for treating survivors of torture.
Rehabilitation programs for survivors of torture require cross-disciplinary knowledge and expertise, including of complementary therapies. This article explores the use of complementary therapies in which psychotherapy, in concert with either physiotherapy or bodywork, is offered.
Novels
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare.
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
"Hutus kill Tutsis, then Tutsis kill Hutus--if that's really all there is to it, then no wonder we can't be bothered with it," The author explains why the Rwandan genocide should not be written off as just another tribal dispute.
Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak
This book features the testimony of 10 friends from the same village who spent day after day together, fulfilling orders to kill any Tutsi within their territory during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. While their anecdotes are shocking at first, they detail how an ordinary person with an everyday life in a farming village can be transformed into a killer.
Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America
A study in human persecution, courage, and survival that reaches well beyond Southeast Asia. . . . The author explores the cultural, linguistic, and religious challenges Cambodian refugees face in this country and the long-term impact the violence and turmoil will likely have.
Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War
The photojournalist McKelvey tells how soldiers, in the prison of Abu Ghraib acting in an atmosphere that encouraged abuse and sadism, were unleashed on a prison population of which the vast majority were innocent civilians.
Tears of Blood: A Cry for Tibet
From the author of Kundun, a powerful work that reveals the true horrors behind China's "liberation" of Tibet.
Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land
Prizewinning British author French does not allow his compassion for the long-suffering people of Tibet to cloud his sharp perceptions or derail his quest for facts and his commitment to telling the truth, however painful.
Whispered Prayers: Portraits and Prose of Tibetans in Exile
Inspiring narratives combined with 100 exquisite duotone photographs poignantly bring to life the inner experience of being a Tibetan refugee. These riveting tales of extraordinary journeys are skillfully interwoven with seven commentaries on the nature of man.
The Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk
If you've ever wondered what it's like to walk in the shoes of a Tibetan monk, you're in for a shocker. By his mid-20s, Palden Gyatso ound himself behind the bars of a Chinese communist prison. For the next 30 years, he would endure interrogations, deprivation, starvation, beatings, and psychological torture.
The Voice That Remembers: A Tibetan Woman's Inspiring Story of Survival
Ama Adhe's spirit soars over national and cultural boundaries. Her tenacious struggle to remain human in the face of inhuman torture and deprivation while imprisoned by the Chinese for 27 years inspires any reader lucky enough to encounter this remarkable woman's story.
Sorrow Mountain: The Journey of a Tibetan Warrior Nun
In 1958 the Chinese occupied Eastern Tibet; the resulting distress contributed to her father's death and prompted Pachen to take a leadership role in the resistance. She was captured and spent 21 years in brutal Chinese prisons as her country and culture disintegrated at the hands of the occupiers.
DVDs
A clear-eyed look at the Rwandan genocide is offered in Sometimes in April, a frank take on the 1994 slaughter that claimed upwards of 800,000 lives.
