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| About VTAP | |
| VICTIMS OF TORTURE ASSISTANCE PROJECT (VTAP) According to the latest figures, Vietnamese continues to rank among the largest refugee populations resettled to the Washington Metropolitan Area. For example, in Fairfax County figures from the Refugee Data Center in New York indicate that more than half of the total number of refugees resettled in 1997 came from Vietnam. A large proportion of these Vietnamese refugees entered the country via the "HO" program for survivors of Communist Vietnam's system of gulags commonly known as "re-education" camps. Many of them had been subjected to a variety of types of torture. At the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, some one million Vietnamese were put through such "re-education" camps. These political prisoners were subjected to forced labor, harsh physical abuses, brain-washing indoctrination sessions, and different forms of torture. Some 60,000 may have died or have been executed. Of those who were eventually released, many returned home completely broken--physically, mentally and spiritually. There is a large body of literature on Vietnam's system of re-education camps and on the types of torture employed by the camp authorities. Attachment 1 provides one sample of the existing literature. The extent of physical and mental damages caused by such forms of torture on the victims has prompted a systematic study in the United States: "Researchers at Harvard, led by Dr. Richard F. Mollica, a psychiatrist at the Harvard School of Public Health, have developed scales for assessing the aftermath of torture in Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese refugees, particularly hard in these cultures, where people rarely talk openly about their own suffering." ("A Promising Medical Specialty Emerges to Help Torture Victims," The New York Times, Page C3, July 9, 1996) In 1991, psychotherapist Pauline Tran at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, Minnesota, conducted a study of the needs of Vietnamese torture survivors. Her study found that "Vietnamese culture tends to stigmatize the concept of 'mental health,' and any kind of psychological evaluation or assessment conjures up stereotypes of the mentally ill as crazy or deranged." As a result, there is a high degree of reluctance and resistance among these survivors to even acknowledge that they need help. This study was funded by the St. Paul Foundation and the Office of Refugee Resettlement. From the some 1,500 refugee cases that it has handled, BPSOS has encountered a significant number of victims of torture among Vietnamese refugees.
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bpsos@aol.com Web Site: Boat People S.O.S Inc., |
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