Resource

English National Opera and the Helen Bamber Foundation are partnering for the West End transfer of Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Angel’s Bone. The partnership connects the opera’s central themes with the Helen Bamber Foundation’s specialist work supporting survivors of trafficking, torture and extreme cruelty, helping audiences engage with the real-world issues explored on stage.

Drawing on our lived experience of torture, trafficking and other forms of extreme cruelty, we - the Ambassadors for Change - are a committed group of campaigners working to ensure the UK is a welcoming and fair place for people seeking safety. In recent years, we have noticed a shift in how people discuss survivors, particularly those who are in the immigration or asylum systems. The focus has changed from trying to identify, support and protect people, to implying that they are all liars. This rhetoric risks discrediting survivors, discouraging people from coming forward and reinforcing harmful stereotypes.

This study, conducted by academics at Birkbeck, University of London and co-authored by Cornelius Katona (Helen Bamber Foundations’ Honorary Director of Medical and Research) involved semi-structured interviews with six UK-based therapists about their experiences of working with people seeking asylum and refugees, in particular those from Ethiopia or Eritrea. It calls for a rethinking of a therapeutic approach that considers people within the context of the systemic issues they face.