Critical Evidence: The Politics of Trauma in French Asylum Policies:
Estelle d'Halluin
Didier Fassin
However obvious it might seem today that victims of persecutions suffer
from psychological consequences of the violence inflicted on them, its political implications
are a recent phenomenon. In the last decade, asylum seekers in France, as in
other European countries, have been more and more often subject to demands of psychiatric
expertise to prove the cogency of their claim to the status of refugee. This
social innovation results from the convergence of two processes: on the one hand, the
rapid decline in the legitimacy of asylum, leading to increasing expectations for evidence
to establish the reality of persecutions; on the other hand, the emergence of
trauma as a nosographical category legitimizing the traces of violence. At the crossroads
of these two histories, a social field, mainly occupied by NGOs, has developed
to answer this new need for proof from state institutions, with an increasing specialization
on victims of torture and on psychic trauma, the two dimensions being partially
independent. The final paradox is, however, that in a context of generalized suspicion
toward refugees, the recognition of trauma at a collective level is counterbalanced by
its limited impact on the evaluation of individual cases.