Position statements and media releases
CPUK statement of support and solidarity with the people of Gaza.
Community
Psychologists in the UK (CPUK) extend their support for and solidarity
to the people of Gaza. We are calling upon the British government and
the British people to take all feasible steps, beginning with immediate
boycotts, divestments and sanctions against the state of Israel, to
oblige Israel's political administration to: abide by international
law; dismantle its apartheid regime spanning both the occupied
territories and Israel; immediately and unconditionally end its assault
on Gaza; end the occupation of the West Bank; abandon all claims to
possess or control territory beyond its 1967 borders; and commit to
pursuing a long-lasting, just peace.
CPUK denounces as war
crimes and crimes against humanity the disproportionality of Israel's
attacks on Gaza, which includes the indiscriminate killing of men,
women and children. The Israeli Defense Force deliberately: targets
hospitals, civilian shelters and prevents medical aid reaching the
injured and medical supplies and equipment from entering the Gaza
Strip; uses white phosphorous munitions in civilian areas; and destroys
Gaza's infrastructure of roads, water supplies, sanitation, food
production, food distribution, food security, electricity, social
services, education services, health services, law and order, housing,
environmental services, and broader social support structures. These
actions suggest the Israeli political administration's has genocidal
intentions towards the people of Palestine.
The massacre of
civilians in Gaza is the latest phase of a war that successive
governments of Israel (supported by the USA and Britain) have been
waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years. The goal
of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military power to
eradicate the Palestinians as a political force capable of resisting
Israel's ongoing appropriation of Palestinian land and resources. CPUK
believes that for the sake of justice and global peace, th Israeli
State must not be allowed to achieve this. Our belief in the right of
the Palestinians to democratic self-determination, and to resist
military aggression and colonial occupation, obligates us to take the
side of the people of Gaza and the West Bank and to side against Israel.
Statement issued by CPUK (Community Psychology UK)
Monday 19th January 2009
The Birmingham Manifesto: Community Psychology in a Global Context. (April 2007)
Press Release from The UK Community Psychology Network on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy
For
immediate release
16 October 2007
Changing politicians' minds about changing our minds?
"Cognitive
Behaviour Therapy and associated approaches are comprehensively
problematic. Primary prevention is the only way to substantially
reduce socially, economically and materially caused distress. To
be effective primary prevention must involve social rather than
cognitive change. Reducing income inequality in our society would
be one of the most effective ways to reduce psychological distress and
ill health”, says the UK Community Psychology Network.
Read the full press release.
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York Statement on Poverty - September 2007"As
community and critical psychologists we believe that psychologists have
a fundamental responsibility to join with others to end both poverty
and societal inequality independent of absolute wealth, which we
believe are personally, collectively and socially destructive.
We
believe mainstream psychology to be complicit with the prevailing
psychologically toxic neo-liberal economic order and believe psychology
has allowed itself to be used to hide systemic effects of poverty and
inequality and instead position poverty as a consequence of individual
psychological dysfunction.
We call for the radical
transformation of psychology so that it has the resources necessary to
expose the personally, collectively and socially destructive effects of
poverty and inequality and the proactive deployment, with allies, of
this transformed psychology to end poverty and societal inequality and
the exploitation, exclusion, oppression, distress and illness which
result from them."
…on behalf of the UK community psychology network
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