Absorbing the pain of traumatized children

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)