Purpose
Human rights advocates play a crucial role in advancing respect for human rights around the world, through investigating alleged abuses and seeking reform, accountability, and justice through education, social movement organizing, litigation, and advocacy.
This work often exposes advocates to human rights abuses, traumatic events, and stressors of many forms. Advocates handle physical evidence, review documents that contain evidence or allegations of human rights violations, conduct interviews with victims of and witnesses to abuse, visit sites to examine physical evidence of human rights violations (such as mass graves, morgues, detention centers), and they may directly witness torture, killings, beatings, rapes, civil disturbances, armed conflict, and extreme poverty. Human rights advocates are often from the communities on whose behalf they are advocating, and are also at risk of being taken hostage, abducted, tortured, beaten, sexually assaulted, arrested, detained, or even killed in connection with their work. In many parts of the world, the space for organizing and advancing human rights is shrinking, as governments and non-state actors target human rights advocates.
These stressors are often exacerbated by the increasing digitization of human rights work, which exposes advocates to a constant stream of traumatic material, as well as online harassment and surveillance. In addition, advocates often experience high levels of stress resulting from organizational dysfunction, internal conflicts, and resource scarcity.
Given such stressors and trauma exposure, human rights advocates are at risk of a range of negative psychological impacts, including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. These often manifest in somatic ways, such as insomnia, anger outbursts, stomach ulcers, and may lead to high rates of “burnout” or professionals quitting the human rights field altogether.
Given such stressors and trauma exposure, human rights advocates are at risk of a range of negative psychological impacts, including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. These often manifest in somatic ways, such as insomnia, anger outbursts, stomach ulcers, and may lead to high rates of “burnout” or professionals quitting the human rights field altogether.
Many groups and advocates, especially those who routinely face oppression, discrimination and security threats, have used self-care, collective wellbeing strategies, and other coping mechanisms to protect themselves from the conditions in which they work, and as part of their political strategy to ensure the sustainability of their movements.
However, there has been little systematic research on the mental health of human rights; there are few trainings tailored for advocates; little funding is available for this work; and many organizations struggle to respond to the wellbeing needs of advocates. In addition, there remains a paucity of information sharing between human rights and mental health practitioners and researchers.
However, there has been little systematic research on the mental health of human rights; there are few trainings tailored for advocates; little funding is available for this work; and many organizations struggle to respond to the wellbeing needs of advocates. In addition, there remains a paucity of information sharing between human rights and mental health practitioners and researchers.
Through Resources for Resilience, the Human Rights Resilience Project seeks to contribute to a community of practice to promote resilience among advocates. This website seeks to serve as a resource for the human rights field by hosting a repository of resources and research, and as a platform for the human rights community to share resources and create opportunities for collaboration.