I like Geneva. What’s not to like about a city that celebrates chocolate, watches, flowers, and Heidi? However, on this visit to attend meetings of the Global Advisory Group on Nursing and Midwifery at the World Health Organization (WHO), I used some of my free time for more serious pursuits as well.

At United Nations Square, just across from the Palais des Nations, a sculpture of a 12-meters-tall straight-back chair with one broken leg looms over one corner of the square. Commissioned by Handicap International, “Broken Chair” (by artist Daniel Berset) is a monument to those who have lost limbs from land mines. It’s a powerful image.

Just off the square and up a small rise is the Musee International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (so much better in French than the “International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum”). As you walk up the ramp to the museum entrance, you encounter a group of shrouded, life-size figures by Swiss artist Carl Bucher. The piece, called “The Petrified,” represents the faceless victims of human rights violations. The effect of the figures is sobering—a high school class walking up the ramp, clowning and laughing and chatting loudly, literally stopped in their tracks and fell silent. The teenagers behind them started yelling for them to move on, but then they too quieted down when they came into view of the […]

In October 2004 AJN published “The Fear Is Still in Me” by Kathleen McCullough-Zander and Sharyn Larson, an article detailing how nurses might identify, assess, and treat the approximately 400,000 to 500,000 survivors of torture now living in the U.S. (I was the editor). It’s not a subject most people like to think about, but there it is.

And now here it is again, according to a “long-secret” report by the International Committee of the Red Cross that was completed in 2007 and only recently published online by the New York Review of Books. Only this time, it’s health care personnel—a group that “should be understood to include physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and other para-health staff”—who allegedly participated in torture. No, they weren’t there to safeguard the victims. As an article about the report in Monday’s New York Times notes, the role of such professionals “was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners.”

Does it matter that those tortured were suspected of terrorism and were being held by the CIA overseas? Not to the International Council of Nurses, which has issued and twice revised a position statement that calls for nurses to actively oppose torture; I can find no exceptions named. Indeed, many nurses—including McCullough-Zander and Larson—have argued that the prevention of human rights abuses is itself a nursing responsibility. It’s an […]