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By Mark Weisenmiller Inter Press Service/Global Information Network  May 31, 2007 TAMPA, Florida (IPS/GIN) -- Children in war zones and very impoverished regions often struggle with severe emotional trauma. Despite the UN's ongoing efforts to reach out to them and their families, their plight remains largely hidden from the global public. Amanda Melville, a UNICEF child protection officer whose background is in social psychology, said there are no figures on how many such children now exist in the world "because it's very subjective." Ms. Melville, has been doing field work for UNICEF for the past six years in places including Haiti, Indonesia, Iran and Palestine. Speaking from experience, she said the reactions of children in war zones can vary widely. "Psychologically, they can be withdrawn, while some will be rebellious," she said. "Some boys are forced to become the head of the family because the father has been killed, and these boys don't have the maturity." UNICEF notes that, "Children in armed conflict also routinely experience emotionally and psychologically painful events such as the violent death of a parent or close relative; separation from family; witnessing loved ones being killed or tortured; displacement from home and community; exposure to combat, shelling, and other life-threatening situations; acts of abuse such as being abducted, arrested, held in detention, raped, tortured; disruption of school routines and community life; destitution; and an uncertain future." One of the last major reports submitted by Kofi Annan in the closing days of his tenure as UN secretary-general dealt with the subject of children in war zones. According to the report, from 1996 to 2006, 2 million children were killed in conflicts and 6 million were injured. As a result of the report, in late November 2006, the UN Security Council issued a ban on recruiting children as soldiers. Dr. Teri Elliott, an Alabama-based psychiatrist who has worked with traumatized children in Bosnia and Herzegovina, said many experience flashbacks and anxiety. "Many of these children were born in war zones," she said. "If you've grown up in a war zone, you're used to it. How a child handles a war-zone experience also depends on how the children's parents handle it. The better the parents do, the better the kids do, and that is applicable no matter where the country is located in the world." Dr. Charles Figley, a psychiatrist who runs the Psychological Stress Research Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, said the most widely seen mental illness afflicting such children is post-traumatic stress disorder. "Such things as bright colors or loud noises can be alarming to these children," he said. "Much of how these children deal with these experiences depends on the age at exposure, but it also depends on how they look at the world after the event has taken place." Afghanistan and Iraq, the two war-affected countries getting the most attention from the world's press, have no statistics available about how children in those countries have been affected by the ongoing fighting "and it would be tough," offered Ms. Elliott, "because these people's first priorities are the basics: Food, clean water, shelter. Analyzing a person's mental health in such an environment is not high on these people's priority lists." Many U.S. citizens may believe that only children in other countries become socially or psychologically disturbed due to growing up amid extreme violence. However, there is evidence that such a phenomenon exists in Washington, D.C., according to a psychiatrist who has done field work on the subject. Dr. Rona Fields, an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Howard University in Washington and a psychiatrist with decades of experience in this field, said she has done research on children who witnessed gruesome killings while walking to and from school in the District of Columbia "and some of these cases had similarities with children in other countries who have seen what happens in war." "Poverty and ongoing violence exacerbate the situation with these children, and some of what they see every day resembles what a person would see in a war zone," Dr. Fields said. URL: story url
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