Stop-Torture-Report

Telephone Calls
Most torture survivors we interviewed said they feared calling home because
they believed the calls were monitored by the intelligence services in Sri Lanka.
They felt anything they said on the phone would put their families in danger.
Several have never called their families because of this fear. Others
communicated through a neighbour or used another person to pass on
messages. Conversations were very brief and covered general topics.
In this environment of terror, the connection with the family is disrupted. This
exacerbates the loneliness of exile and the asylum process and makes full
recovery from torture impossible. This is more so in a culture where the family is
a central support for coping with crises 70 . This witness is describing harassment
of her parents in June 2015:
“They are old, my parents, so they just harass them saying if I come back they
must hand me over. I don’t speak to my parents on the phone unless they are in
Jaffna because I don’t think it’s safe and when we speak it’s my brother who
initiates the call in such a way that it hides where the call comes from.
(Witness number obscured for protection)
The fear of telephoning home is so extreme that when this young asylum seeker
finally received the news that he had been granted asylum in the UK he was
unable to tell his mother straight away:
“My mother and younger sister are in Sri Lanka. I don’t phone my mum; I wait
for her to call. She doesn’t know I have asylum yet. I haven’t been able to tell
her the news. My mother has changed her address and is living in a different
place but she hasn’t told us on the phone where she is for security reasons.”
(Witness 3, speaking in 2015)
70 Professor Daya Somasundaram writes of the family being paramount in non-western 'collectivist' cultures. He says, “Tamil families,
due to close and strong bonds and cohesiveness in nuclear and extended families, tend to function and respond to external threat or
trauma as a unit rather than as individual members. They share the experience and perceive the event in a particular way. During
times of traumatic experiences, the family will come together with solidarity to face the threat as a unit and provide mutual support
and protection”. From: Collective trauma in northern Sri Lanka: a qualitative psychosocial-ecological study, Daya Somasundaram,
October 2007, International Journal of Mental Health Systems 2007, 1:5.
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