Psychologists and torture: critical realism as a resource for analysis and training

ABSTRACTThis article introduces the challenges of providing psychological assessments of people seeking asylum in the wake of their reported torture. These challenges invite professionals to consider ontology (what happened to people, physically and psychologically) and epistemology (the reports about what happened and how those reports are interpreted). Critical realism is well-positioned to underlabour for the process of understanding a human rights violation, in which the complainant is both the key, and often sole, witness and claimed victim. For instance, the layered reality of critical realism allows practitioners to use retroduction to describe deeper structures and mechanisms of torture. The judgemental rationality of critical realism allows practitioners to distinguish between competing interpretations of the evidence. Critical realism also avoids both the positivistic assumption that assessors can be value-free; and the relativist social constructionist position that, because assessors cannot av...