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Message: <blockquote data-quote="guywhofishes" data-source="post: 276001" data-attributes="member: 337">Here's a little light reading for those of you on the fence about Somali refugees. They're no ordinary people. Their culture/experiences make them an inherently "high maintenance" people. They're basically pissed off, they've been treated like garbage by their home country, and they're culturally the type of people who settle things by making someone pay. Bismarck better have monstrous resources at the ready - or things are going to go poorly. And guess who pays the price for that? Yep - taxpayers and the average guy - not the commissioners - not LSS employees/executives.<a href="https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/252135.pdf" target="_blank">https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/252135.pdf</a>Above is a link to the justice department's findings on what goes wrong and why. What I can tell you is that LSS is NOT prepared to properly support these people. The refugees, and your community, are going to pay a price for LSS not being capable of properly supporting these poor people. a snippet of what Bismarck can look forward to.Unaddressed Mental Health NeedsSomali-Americans reported that many community members suffered trauma and otheradversities as a consequence of their refugee experiences, leading to unresolved mental healthissues. Community members talked about the impact of the civil war, “people facing difficultiesand hardship during the civil war. They lost family members; they became destitute when itcomes to economics. They’ve been in refugee camps. They have lost their personalities, theylost their culture, like when you become a refugee and you become hopeless, you are no longerthe person that you used to be. It’s a bad thing and that’s what’s taking place out there.”35This resource was prepared by the author(s) using Federal funds provided by the U.S.Department of Justice. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.Yet, mental health concerns in many ethnic communities, including the Somali-American, areassociated with stigma, and tend to be suppressed or ignored. Persons who exhibited symptomscould be negatively labelled and rejected. The stigma associated with mental health problemsled to reluctance to seek mental health services. Somali-Americans reported that mostcommunity members would be unwilling to seek mental health services, thereby revealing theirmental health issues. A community member reported that “there’s a lot of stuff that mycommunity, they don’t like to bring out the issues on the table. They keep it inside.”Somali-Americans also reported that within their community, mental health issues weresometimes associated with the potential for criminal activity and radicalization. Communitymembers stated that youth with mental health issues may be more vulnerable to recruitment,“they can have depression, anxiety, addictions, if mom rejected them and then the gang acceptsthem.” Because youth with such problems were linked with the potential for social failure, thecommunity tended to exclude them.Further, many interviewees noticed that Somali-Americans did not believe mental healthproblems existed, nor did they subscribe to the possibility that mental health treatment couldhelp. In the words of one interviewee, “it is just something that Americans made up or believein.” Community members reported that even if mental health services were widely accepted,because of the general lack of knowledge around them, people “wouldn’t know how to look forresources… and stuff like that.” A community member reported that some Somali-Americans“do not do really well with emotional stuff so like if he heard about like, ‘Oh I am feelingdepressed’ or he would be like, ‘You do have a house, you have food like you are fine, what areyou talking about?’” As long as life was better in the U.S. than in Somalia, community membersseemed to remain willfully ignorant to those at risk and write persons off as being weak.The interviews also demonstrated some Somali-Americans’ misunderstandings of women’sabuse and its harmful mental health impact on women and children. A community advocateexplained, “The definition of abuse is different in Somalia versus the U.S. Physical abuse is thesame, if someone gets hit, but in Somalia there is no term for mental, emotional, verbal, financialabuse. They don’t understand that those are all forms of controlling someone. So emotionalabuse is not seen as an issue, only physical abuse.” Lacking a full understanding of violenceagainst women, its mental health consequences, and the fact that such abuse was criminalized inthe U.S., the community did not work towards preventing these issues. Police officers relayedhow in responding to complaints of wife battering in Somali-American households, the abusivemen tried to prevent them from talking to the women, demanding instead that the officer talk tothe man of the house.</blockquote>

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