Absorbing the pain of traumatized children

JAKARTA (JP): In a corner of a refugee center in Halmahera, North Maluku, a group of children chased and caught a small dog, and started mutilating the animal while emitting loud, angry noises.

Another group of children caught rats with spears and burned the rodents alive in a small bonfire they built. These children are the witnesses of the killing, raping and burning of their parents, siblings, and relatives during the nearly two-year-old sectarian conflict between Christians and Muslims in Maluku.

They are acting out the pain that they feel and cannot express in words.

"One of the children in my care play-acts the war commander during day time, and experience terror and nightmares, yelling hysterically every night," says Syska Widawati, a young doctor affiliated with Medical Emergency Rescue Committee (MER-C) which has been sending volunteers to the conflict areas shortly after the violence broke out in January 1999.

The group recently evacuated 33 children--mostly orphans--from Maluku to Jakarta in order to give them time to recover from the shock before they were taken to their adoptive parents and introduced to normal life.

MER-C chairman Joserizal Jurnalis said the organization's database recorded 700 other children in need of assistance in Halmahera. "Surely there are thousands of other children who are also in need of help," he says.

"Unless we help them now, we will reap problems related to these children within 10 to 15 years time," says Dwi Indah Handayani, a lawyer in charge of the legal matters pertaining the evacuation and adoption of the children.

The children need better physical care, but also psychological treatment. Intensive accompaniment is needed for those traumatized by the violence. Panca Setiawahyuni and Lenni Saraswati, two young social workers, stay almost 24 hours in a house in South Jakarta where the children have been placed recently.

One of the young children in their charge witnessed Christian mobs stab his mother and brother. Another was running to escape an attack in her village when she found the head of her teenage brother; she did not have time to seek his body.

"The kids do not open up easily. They talk only when everything feels safe and snug, for example when we gather around for bedtime stories," says Panca. "Then, they talk. They cry, and we cry along with them."

Another volunteer is Mrs. Rodhiah, 46, who has for the past eight months dedicated her time to help and accompany child victims of the violence in Maluku.

"After one month in this safe place, the children began to show improvement. They are not as tense as before," she says. But anything could spark off the bitter memories in the minds of the children.

"Once the imam of the mosque where we were praying started to cry while reciting the last verse of Sura Al Baqarah -- which Muslims usually read when in need of divine help and which the children are all familiar with," Rodhiah says, "The children began crying, hysterically. Some of us adults also cried. It took us hours to calm them down."

Rodhiah and her friends all admitted that when they were caring for the children, they were absorbing the children's pain as their own.

Separation

Experts agree that specific factors adversely affecting the development of refugee children include long periods of separation from primary caretakers, long periods in hiding, having to keep secrets, physical deprivation, and lack of education.

Refugee children are particularly liable to suffer emotionally and developmentally from direct experience and observation of violence, alongside the loss of emotional availability of a parent.

According to Sh. Melzak who wrote in Children--War and Persecution (1993), this may lead to annihilation anxieties and abandonment anxieties; identification with the aggressor (perpetrator of violence), racism or other forms of oppression; and difficulties in managing change and stressful events.

The children may also suffer from huge rage and anger, feelings of being overwhelmed, regressed, disintegrated and helpless and an inability to make sense of the world. Refugee children characteristically show uneven development, with unusual strengths characteristic of older children and unusual vulnerabilities usually displayed by younger children.

Fundamental to the experience of refugee children is that they have a much less defined perspective on history, society and relationships than refugee adults and less choice than adults, said Melzak.

"Some refugee children have in addition to deal with enormous changes in their parents and consequently lose the idealized notion of a perfect authority figure essential to normal development," said Melzak.

Fortunately, "disturbances shown by refugee children may be temporary and may be remedied by both external changes and therapy," said Melzak.

"Refugee children are not just victims, irrevocably damaged and traumatized but individuals with strengths who have the capacity to develop coping mechanisms and potential to oppose persecution and survive psychologically. They have the will and need to use their community, family and the healing rituals of their society to deal with trauma, loss and change."

Further, the children are able to cope by finding some meaning in traumatic events either consciously or unconsciously, through the internalization of bizarre experiences and feelings: by using natural and community healing processes (play, dreams, mourning rituals) to work through painful experiences.

They also cope by finding culturally symbolic forms of expressing loss and celebration of life (e.g. holding on to political and religious ideas and beliefs), and by having access to biological or surrogate parents or a community and social network in order to contain their anxieties.

These are the very things that the volunteers mentioned above are striving to do. (swe)