Intentional burn injury: Assessment of allegations of self-infliction

Abstract

This study investigates the question of whether there is evidence that suggests the possibility of self-infliction, or self-infliction by proxy, of burn injury among a group of asylum claimants in the UK who have attributed such injuries to torture, and how such evidence might be assessed. The question arose from the observations of doctors at the UK-based charity Freedom from Torture that increasing numbers of individuals from Sri Lanka who described a history of torture had suffered severe and disfiguring burn injuries from heated metal objects, and the suggestion from asylum decision-makers that in some cases such injuries could have been acquired deliberately by self-infliction or self-infliction by proxy rather than by torture as claimed. This suggestion has not been confined to Sri Lankan cases, but due to the large numbers of Sri Lankan asylum claimants referred to Freedom from Torture in recent years, including many with this type of injury, the case set for this study was drawn from this population. As many of these injuries are found to be on the back, where self-infliction would be extremely difficult, the possibility of self-infliction by proxy was specifically investigated.An observational data set was examined in detail, comprising medico-legal reports for Sri Lankans with heated metal object burn injuries documented in 2011–14 by the Medico-Legal Reports Service at Freedom from Torture. All had described detention in Sri Lanka since the end of the civil war in 2009. The study reviewed the documented evidence of these injuries alongside other physical and psychological evidence attributed to torture and relevant contextual factors documented in each case. Findings were compared with previous research on torture in Sri Lanka and patterns of injury identified in forensic medicine for both self-infliction and self-infliction by proxy. Thorough examination of the evidence found no indication in this data set to suggest the possibility of self-infliction or self-infliction by proxy and supported the view that, as indicated in the Istanbul Protocol, the overall conclusion on likelihood of torture should be made on evaluation of all the physical and psychological evidence over and above the scrutiny of an individual lesion.