Dr. Salome Mbugua:

I wanted to speak from a women’s perspective, because we get them every day in our organisation, AkiDwa. Any incident can trigger what they have gone through either before they came to Ireland, or on their journey and all that. It is when they are trying to seek asylum. In our organisation, we work with very vulnerable women who have, for example, gone through female genital mutilation, FGM, before they came to Ireland. This is very traumatic. We also work with women who are trafficked or women who are experiencing domestic violence. When they go to seek care services, the service providers are quite often not aware of what they have gone through, or they may not even understand what FGM and trafficking are. Therefore, their experiences when they go to seek those services, how they are treated, and how they are approached really trigger a lot of what has happened before. We had, for example, many cases of women who have had very bad experiences with the police. The police may be very brutal where we come from, but even here, the way they treat them when an incident happens actually triggers their mental health and it can be very traumatic. That is why we emphasise the need for cultural competency training for all front-line services.