Asylum Claims based on Sexual Orientation: A Review of Psycho-legal Issues in Credibility Assessments

The number of people seeking asylum based on their sexual orientation is expected to continue increasing. Assessing the credibility of such claims to determine whether asylum-seekers meet the criteria for refugee status is a complex task for asylum officials. These assessments involve several psychological aspects, affecting applicants’ disclosure and asylum officials’ determinations. Here, we present a narrative literature review of 47 original manuscripts to analyze credibility assessments in asylum claims based on sexual orientation. We demonstrate that asylum officials often make assumptions regarding human sexuality, sexual identity formation and sexual behavior that are either partially or entirely unsupported by psychological research. These assumptions are problematic as they undermine the validity of the asylum process and put vulnerable individuals at risk of severe harm. The challenges are aggravated in the cross-cultural context of asylum determinations, where applicants from different countries may manifest their sexual orientation in ways that deviate from Western expectations. We discuss the implications of our review’s findings for psychological research and asylum practice

The NGO handbook of volunteer management essentials

A short handbook that addresses why NGOs need volunteers, how they can benefit from them, how to effectively manage volunteers, tips on how to ensure that volunteers remain a benefit rather than a burden on NGOs, recruitment methods and tools, sample forms, and a list of recommended publications for further reading. This handbook was created as coursework for the community based learning anthropology and sociology course “Third World Development”, at The American University in Cairo, under the instruction of Pandeli Glavanis, during the Fall 2012 semester. It was created using Plan Egypt as our focus group. The inspiration for this handbook was the authors’ own experiences working as volunteers with various NGOs

A review of psycho-legal issues in credibility assessments of asylum claims based on religion

Religious persecution is a leading cause of global displacement. In the absence of supporting evidence, presenting a credible oral asylum claim based on religion is a difficult task for asylum-seekers. Asylum officials, in turn, face considerable challenges in evaluating the credibility of asylum-seekers’ claims to determine their eligibility for refugee status. We reviewed 21 original manuscripts addressing credibility assessments of asylum claims based on religion. We focused on (1) officials’ methods of eliciting a religious claim in the asylum interview; (2) their credibility assessments of particularly complex asylum claims, namely those based on religious conversion, unfamiliar religions, and absence of religion; and (3) issues related to the presence of an interpreter. We found deviations in officials’ assessment patterns from established knowledge in both legal psychology and the scientific study of religion. Closer collaboration between asylum practitioners and researchers in these fields is needed to improve the validity and reliability of credibility assessments of asylum claims based on religion

(In)credibly Queer? Assessments of Asylum Claims Based on Sexual Orientation

Queer asylum-seekers should be given an opportunity to have their claim evaluated in a fair and unbiased manner. Despite this, research shows they risk having their claims rejected based on stereotypes about sexual minorities. We investigated how the Finnish Immigration Service evaluated credibility in asylum claims lodged by sexual minorities, by analyzing 68 negative asylum decisions to assess the arguments made to reject the asylum claim. We found that asylum claims based on sexual orientation were typically rejected because the applicant’s sexual orientation was not found credible. We argue that officials have unrealistically high expectations regarding asylum-seekers’ abilities to provide detailed and consistent narratives of their sexual identity. Officials also appeared to hold assumptions around sexual identity development and interpersonal relationships that have no basis in established psychological science and overlook variability in human behavior, especially in a cross-cultural context

Urgent issues and prospects at the intersection of culture, memory, and witness interviews: Exploring the challenges for research and practice

The pursuit of justice increasingly relies on productive interactions between witnesses and investigators from diverse cultural backgrounds during investigative interviews. To date, the role of cultural context has largely been ignored by researchers in the field of investigative interviewing, despite repeated requests from practitioners and policymakers for evidence-based guidance for the conduct of interviews with people from different cultures. Through examining cultural differences in human memory and communication and considering specific contextual challenges for investigative interviewing through the lens of culture, this review and associated commentaries highlight the scope for considering culture and human diversity in research on, and the practice of, investigative interviewing with victims, witnesses, and other sources. Across 11 commentaries, contributors highlight the importance of considering the role of culture in different investigative interviewing practices (e.g., rapport building, questioning techniques) and contexts (e.g., gender-based violence, asylum seeking, child abuse), address common areas of cultural mismatch between interviewer–interviewee expectations, and identify critical future routes for research. We call for an increased focus in the investigative interviewing literature on the nature and needs of our global community and encourage constructive and collaborative discussion between researchers and practitioners from around the world to better identify specific challenges and work together towards evidence-based solutions