Report: 38 million people internally displaced by violence

Conflict and violence have displaced a record-high 38 million people within their own countries, according to an annual report released Wednesday.

Of those 38 million, at least 11 million people were displaced in 2014 alone. The 15 percent rise in the total number of internally displaced people suggests an estimated 30,000 people fleeing their homes every day during 2014, according to the report.

The 2015 Global Overview report covers people forced to flee their homes by international or internal armed conflict and communal, ethnic, political or criminal violence, according to the Council.

The Norwegian Refugee Council and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre said they have not seen such a high number in their ten years of collecting data.

The report is based on data collected during 2014 in 60 countries and territories around the globe.

Violent conflicts in countries like Iraq, South Sudan and Syria forced more than 4.5 million people to flee their homes last year.

Ten countries — Syria, Colombia, Iraq, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, South Sudan, Somalia and Turkey — make up 77 percent of the world’s internally displaced people.

Iraq and Syria also made up 30 percent of new displacement that occurred during 2014.

Iraq and Syria contributed the highest numbers of internally displaced people. The war in Syria has forced at least 7.6 million civilians to flee their homes as of the end of 2014, the highest number in the Middle East.

The brutal reign of the Islamic State terrorist group, which expanded from Syria into Iraq, and Iraqi forces’ response forced an estimated 3.3 million Iraqi civilians to flee by the end of 2014.

Osama Hamdi, a junior bioengineering major at the University of Maryland, knows firsthand the effects that the conflict in Syria can have on family members caught in the war in Syria.

“Most of my family left the country because of the revolution in Syria,” he said. “A lot of them aren’t in the United States but they fled elsewhere.”

In the report, the Norwegian Refugee Council explains the failure of national authorities to prevent displacement and protect those fleeing, and the role they have played in exploiting and instigating conflict for political or economic gain as the underlying causes to this issue.

Colleen O’Neal, an assistant professor of school psychology at the University of Maryland, said a lack of international concern in addition to politics has made the more important issue of emotional effects on those who flee worse.

“I think it’s up to the entire world to see how hard it is and actually help,” O’Neal, whose work focuses on preventing emotional and mental health problems among international refugee students and teachers, said. “We’re trying to do advocacy to raise awareness on this issue. Hopefully that awareness will bring attention and that will bring more concern.”

From her work training teachers of Malaysian refugees, as part of a study conducted alongside Fulbright alumni, NGOs and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Malaysia, O’Neal said she has seen some of the serious mental and emotional side effects of fleeing one’s home.

“They are internalizing issues like depression or withdrawal,” she said. “Some say it’s trauma due to staying in a hostile country and the trauma of being a refugee. In terms of policies, we’re realizing that it’s unfair.”

Photo by David Ohana for U.N., via Creative Commons 2.0.