The Impact of War on Children

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The Impact of War on Children

• and promoting
• RESILIENCE

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FILM

• Just Peace voices of children in Sudan (11
  minutes)

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The impact of war on children

• In the past decade, an estimated two million
  children have been killed in armed conflict.
• Three times as many have been seriously injured
  or permanently disabled, many of them maimed by
  landmines. Countless others have been forced to
  witness or even to take part in horrifying acts
  of violence.

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Children damaged or resilient?

• There are two dominate discourses re children of
  war, one that focuses on the irreversibility or
  limited plasticity of children who are
  damaged by war experiences, with the outcome
  being that most interventions will have only very
  limited, if any, impact.
• An alternative viewpoint is that children are
  extremely resilient and as such, are likely to
  bounce back from adversity quite easily. In fact,
  some suggest that children adapt far more easily
  to new circumstances than adults and that most
  children spontaneously recover from difficulty.

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Resilience

• Some longitudinal studies, several of which
  follow individuals over the course of a lifespan,
  have consistently documented that between half to
  two-thirds of children growing up in families
  with mentally ill, alcoholic, abusive, or
  parents who have been imprisoned or in
  poverty-stricken or war-torn communities do
  overcome the odds and turn risk into
  "resilience.

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Resilience defined

• resilience is the term used to describe a set
  of qualities that promote successful adaptation
  despite risk and adversity.

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Resilience

• From research on resilience, from the literature
  on school effectiveness (Comer, 1984 Edmonds,
  1986 Rutter et al., 1979), and from a rich body
  of ethnographic studies in which we hear the
  voices of youth, families, and teachers
  explaining their successes and failures (Heath
  McLaughlin, 1993 Weis Fine, 1993)
• a clear picture emerges of those characteristics
  of the family, school, and community environments
  that may alter or even reverse expected negative
  outcomes and enable individuals to circumvent
  life stressors and manifest resilience despite
  risk.

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CARING RELATIONSHIPS

• The presence of at least one caring
  person-provides support for healthy development
  and learning.
• Werner and Smith's (1989) study, covering more
  than 40 years, found that, among the most
  frequently encountered positive role models in
  the lives of resilient children, outside of the
  family circle, was a favorite teacher who was not
  just an instructor for academic skills for the
  youngsters but also a confidant and positive
  model for personal identification.

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The role of protection factors

• There is likely to be a dynamic interplay between
  stressful experience and a childs available
  coping resources.
• Protective factors can limit the impact of
  stress, so many intervention programmes strive to
  promote enhanced development of protective
  factors (examples availability of social
  support, presence of family members, structure/
  normative routine such as school, adherence to
  political or religious ideology, etc).

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Re-establish routine

• Disruption of civil society (family, school
  routine, etc) has negative consequences on the
  intellectual, social, moral, and emotional
  development of children.
• The importance of re-establishing routine for
  children can not be overemphasized (ex sports,
  school, family religious activities, etc) in
  order to re-establish social networks within
  communities disrupted by war as well as restoring
  community networks/ building community capacity.

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The role of parents/ guardians

• In the case of children it is known that the
  presence of parents can have a very positive
  impact. Even having parents or at least one
  primary guardian is a protective factor that
  mitigates risk.
• Some suggest that it is not just the presence of
  the parents but the meanings that parents give to
  the war experiences that the children have
  endured which enables the children to integrate
  the experience successfully into their world
  view.

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Role of parents/ family

• Thus, the involvement of the parents becomes
  important on multiple levels in the recovery and
  rehabilitation process of the child.

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Family

• Reestablishing family networks reinstates a
  powerful agent of socialization for a child
  (ie-tracing and family reunification).
• Restorative programmes at the community level
  also have clear benefits (play groups, etc).

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Assisting children to adapt

• The fundamental purpose of interventions must be
  to assist in the development of means to re-equip
  children to function adaptively within their own
  cultural world.

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Adaptation is dependent uponthe process of
socialization

• Families are the primary socialization agent for
  children.
• Socialization can be defined as the process by
  which an individual acquires the behaviors,
  attitudes, values, and customs which are regarded
  as desirable and appropriate by society.

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Socialization

• Well-socialized children have developed is the
  capacity to inhibit or delay impulse
  gratification, and much of what we describe as
  good character or virtue reflects this ability to
  delay or inhibit impulse gratification.
• Well-socialized children have learned not to
  strike out at others to get what they want.
• Well-socialized children have learned to
  cooperate and share and listen to and obey the
  directions of legitimate authority figures.

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Oversocialization

• Taking on societal expectations to an extreme
  degree.
• A child may appear to be older than their
  years, have taken on adult-like traits (or is
  mimicking traits and assumed expected behaviors
  of adults) and has not been given the opportunity
  to act like a child.
• This can be damaging because the child may not
  have the capacity/coping skills (given their
  stage of cognitive and emotional development) to
  handle associated adult responsibilities.

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Oversocialization

• A child who is oversocialized in a particular
  value system (such as most child soldiers) may be
  perceived as extremely aggressive outside of that
  system adaptive behaviors in one situation are
  maladaptive in another.
• Research suggests that children in war time are
  more frequently undersocialized than
  oversocialized. The communal values can not be
  transmitted because the primarily socializing
  elements are not functioning.

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Undersocialization

• Lacking the age appropriate skill set necessary
  for social functioning. Stuck in an earlier
  developmental stageappearing to have an
  emotional or behavioral age much younger than
  ones actual age.

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Children and War/ Child Soldiers

• Children during war time may be conscripted into
  military service.
• Ex the LRA in N Uganda taking children in the
  middle of the night and forcing them to
  participate in violent acts (often while drugged)
  in order to minimize the harm to adult members of
  LRA. Children may be initiated into the group
  by being forced to kill and if they refuse they
  may be killed themselves. Many children sleep in
  the trees or leave the villages at night to sleep
  in the towns to try to avoid being kidnapped.

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Children and War/ Child Soldiers

• There are cases of children being forced into
  (para)military service and then being used to
  de-mine areas (ie- walk through the area to
  explode the mines).
• 8 of Mozambican children fleeing in one study
  (in the late 80s) had been forced to participate
  in military activity.

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Children and War

• (Ager) over socialized and under socialized
  children demand different intervention
  approaches.
• Boy soldiers at times assimilate the virtues of
  annihilation of the enemy. There may be a
  contradiction between the values and behaviors of
  the past and present, what is adaptive in one
  circumstance, becomes maladaptive in another.

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Reintegration

• The process of reintegration must help children
  establish new foundations in life.
• Re-establishing contact with the family and the
  community is important for former child soldiers
  who have grown up away from their families and
  who have been deprived of many of the normal
  opportunities for physical, emotional and
  intellectual development.

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Reintegration of child soldiers

• Providing educational and vocational
  opportunities for former child combatants may
  prevent them from rejoining military units, and
  at the same time improve the economic security of
  their families.
• For a former child soldier, an education is more
  than a route to employment. It can also help to
  normalize life and to develop an identity
  separate from that of the soldier.

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Traumatic experience and sleep disturbance in
children from the Middle East (Montgomery)

• Risk factors (for sleep disturbances) included
  family history of violence and stressful present
  family situation.
• The family environment is the natural healing
  environment of the child.
• The mere presence of both parents in this study
  was a protective factor.

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Traumatic exposure and psychological reactions to
genocide among Rwandan children

• High war trauma exposure constitutes a risk for
  childrens concentration, attention and memory
  performance and is associated with deficits in
  learning capacity.
• A majority of the 3,030 children interviewed
  (ages 8-19 yrs) believed that they would die
  (90), and some had to hide (15 under dead
  bodied) to survive. Many exhibited post-traumatic
  reactions.

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Fostering healing in children

• A number of activities have been identified as
  supporting healing by fostering in children a
  sense of purpose, self-esteem and identity.
• These include establishing daily routines such as
  going to school, preparing food, washing clothes
  and working in the fields providing children
  with the intellectual and emotional stimulation
  through structured group activities such as play,
  sports, drawing, drama and story-telling and
  providing the opportunity for expression,
  attachment and trust that comes from a stable,
  caring and nurturing relationship with adults.

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Healing in children

• Through training and raising awareness of central
  caregivers, including parents, teachers and
  community health workers, a diversity of
  programmes can enhance the community's ability to
  provide for children and vulnerable groups.
• Rather than focusing on a child's emotional
  wounds, programmes should aim to support healing
  processes and re-establish a sense of normalcy.

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Empowering families and communities in the
healing process

• The family is essential to children's care and
  protection and is an important social, economic
  and cultural factor in child development. But
  often, families are worn down by conflicts, both
  physically and emotionally, and face increased
  impoverishment.
• The most effective and sustainable approach to
  recovery is to mobilize the existing social care
  system.
• This could involve mobilizing a refugee community
  to support suitable foster families or extended
  family systems for the care of unaccompanied
  children. Another alternative is to provide care
  through peer-group living arrangements that are
  strongly integrated into communities.