Dear Editor,
This is the first question because it carries all the others inside it. At present, most audits follow the money, not the people. They tell us how funds were allocated, how many workshops were held, and how many returns were facilitated. They are tidy, correct, and incomplete.
What is missing are independent, publicly available audits that walk alongside a returned young person for years, not weeks. Impact cannot be measured at the airport gate or at the end of a training course. It must be measured in time. Did the young person find work that lasted?
Did they remain in their community? Did they attempt the journey again?
Did they heal? Without this, success is counted too early and too easily.
What does migration related to MPTSD mean for reintegration? Many returnees come back carrying memories that do not fade. The desert teaches fear without words.
Detention teaches helplessness. The sea teaches how small a human life can feel. This is not ordinary stress. It is trauma layered upon trauma migration related to MPTSD, and it changes how a person thinks, trusts, sleeps, and hopes.
A traumatised mind struggles to plan a future. It struggles to hold a job. It struggles to believe that staying will not simply lead to another kind of suffering. When reintegration programmes do not begin with trauma informed care, they ask broken wings to fly. Is specialised trauma care available at the scale required?
No, and this absence shapes every outcome. Mental health support remains limited, under resourced, and often inaccessible. Community based, culturally appropriate trauma services are rare, and long term follow up is almost nonexistent. Reintegration without psychological recovery becomes administrative, not human. It looks complete on paper, but it unravels quietly in real life.
How does the Lunacy Act of 1917 still affect today’s reality? Law shapes language, and language shapes care.
The Lunacy Act of 1917 was written in a time when trauma was misunderstood, when distress was something to be controlled rather than treated. Though practice has moved forward, the legal foundation remains rooted in the past. Modern migration produces modern wounds MPTSD, depression, and moral injury, yet the framework meant to respond still carries colonial assumptions of confinement rather than recovery, silence rather than support.
Until this framework is modernised, trauma will continue to fall through the cracks.
How does EU investment sit alongside these gaps?
Here, the question becomes sharper. Over €200 million of EU taxpayers’ money has been invested in migration management and reintegration in The Gambia. And yet remittances still make up 20–30% of GDP. This tells us something essential. Leaving remains one of the most reliable economic strategies available to families. If reintegration were truly working at scale economically and psychologically, this dependence would be easing. It is not.
How are outcomes currently measured, and why does that matter? Outcomes are often measured in outputs returns completed, grants distributed, trainings delivered, interceptions recorded.
But output is not outcome. Outcome is what remains when the programme ends.
Without measuring mental health recovery, employment durability, social reintegration, and repeat migration attempts, we measure movement, not stability. Where are the publicly available, independent audits??? This is the quiet centre of the problem.
There is no clear, accessible audit trail that allows the public in Europe or The Gambia to see whether reintegration leads to lasting safety and dignity. Without independence and transparency, trust weakens. And when trust weakens, young people stop believing promises and start believing smugglers. How do we ensure reintegration leads to stability rather than repeated irregular migration???
By changing what we value.
Stability requires
* Trauma informed care as a foundation, not an add on
* Livelihoods linked to real markets, not temporary projects
* Time measured in years, not reporting cycles
* Legal migration pathways that remove the sense of final, desperate choice
Reintegration must become a bridge, not a pause. What happens if these questions remain unanswered? The social fabric stretches thinner. Families continue to invest in risk.
Young people leave younger, more determined, more silent. And policy hardens where compassion should guide. Is asking these questions an attack? No. It is an act of care.
Constructive scrutiny is not criticism it is how policy learns to tell the truth. Only policies grounded in truth can protect life, dignity, and hope. Until we measure what matters, we will keep counting returns and losing futures.
Adrian Corish
