Editorial

Our regular readers will know that our journal is dedicated to supporting the main aim of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy (IAFP)—to rehumanise the dehumanised—across the broadest possible range of social settings. In our previous issue, published just before the COP26 Climate Change conference, we emphasised how the climate crisis disproportionately affects people living in conflict zones and in poverty. We referred to how displacement from war increases the existential threat for everyone. Today, there are estimated to be around eighty-five million people forcibly displaced worldwide, of which thirty-five million are children. Since then, a further catastrophe has erupted with the Russian regime aggressively invading Ukraine.

On the morning of the 23rd February, the people of Ukraine woke up as usual, went to work and school, returned home for their evening meals. They checked in on their elderly relatives. They played with their pets. They laughed, argued, and watched some television. They were aware of the tension building up over weeks, months. They nevertheless went to sleep. That night, their lives changed forever when a dreaded nightmare materialised. People have been killed in their homes, their cities flattened. Families are separated and literally millions of Ukrainians are on the move. Atrocities have been carried out that will impact on those affected for generations.

In Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Yemen, to name but a few, where military and civil unrest make a regular daily life impossible, such violence by people to people has been going on for years. Their suffering should not evaporate from the daily headlines, but it does. Many questions have been raised about why this war in Ukraine has received so much more media coverage in Western countries than conflicts elsewhere. Is it that white Europeans identify more easily with the plight of the Ukrainians, not only because the threat is geographically closer, but because they