War And Effectson Chlidren

War affects children in all the ways it affects adults, but also in different ways. First,

children are dependent on the care, empathy, and attention of adults who love them.

Their attachments are frequently disrupted in times of war, due to the loss of parents,

extreme preoccupation of parents in protecting and finding subsistence for the family,

and emotional unavailability of depressed or distracted parents. The child may be in

substitute care with someone who cares for him or her only slightly вЂ" relatives or an

orphanage. A certain proportion of war-affected children lose all adult protection вЂ"

“unaccompanied children,” as they are known in refugee situations.

Second, impacts in childhood may adversely affect the path of children far

more than adults. Consider children who lose the opportunity for education during war,

children who are forced to move into refugee or displaced person camps, where they wait

for years in miserable circumstances for normal life to resume, if it ever does. Consider a

child disabled in war; they may, in addition to loss of a limb, sight, or cognitive capacity,

lose the opportunity of schooling and of a social life. A girl who is raped may be

displaced by her society and lose the opportunity for marriage. Long after the war has

ended, these lives will never attain the potential they had before the impact of war.

Listing the impacts of war on children is a sad straightforward task:

Death -. Hundreds of thousands of children die of direct violence in war each year (1).

They die as civilians caught in the violence of war, as combatants directly targeted, or in

the course of ethnic cleansing.

Injury - . Children suffer a range of war injuries. Certain weapons affect them

particularly.

A landmine explosion is more likely to kill or seriously injure a child than an adult (2).

Thousands of children suffer landmine injuries each year (3).

Disability -. Millions of children are disabled by war, many of whom have grossly

inadequate access to rehabilitation services. A child may have to wait up to 10 years

before having a prosthetic limb fitted. Children who survive landmine blasts rarely

receive prostheses that are able to keep up with the continued growth of their limbs.

Illness -. Conditions for maintenance of child health goes down during war time вЂ"

nutrition, water safety, sanitation, housing, access to health services. There may lose

immunity to diseases with population growth. Refugee children are particularly

vulnerable to the deadly combination of malnutrition and infectious illness. There is also

interruption of immunization programs by war which may be responsible for increases in

child mortality.

Rape and prostitution for subsistence. - These happenings which often occur in situations

of war, ethnic cleansing, and refugee life leave lasting physical impacts in sexually-

transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS, psychological impacts and changes in life

paths.

Psychological suffering. - Children are exposed to situations of terror and horror during

war вЂ" experiences that may leave impacts in posttraumatic stress disorder.

Severe losses and disruptions in their lives lead to high rates of depression and anxiety in

war-affected children. These impacts may be prolonged by exposures to further

violence in refugee situations.

Moral and spiritual impacts. -The experience of indifference from the surrounding

world, may cause children to suffer loss of meaning in their construction of themselves

in their world. They may have to change their moral structure and lie, steal, and sell sex

to survive. They may have their moral structure forcibly dismantled and replaced in

training to kill as part of a military force.

Social and cultural losses. - Children may lose their community and its culture during

war, sometimes having it reconstituted in refugee or deplorable situations.

Child soldiers -. It is estimated that there are tens of thousands of young people under 18

serving in militias in about 60 countries. They are particularly vulnerable to all of the

impacts listed above (4).

Many studies have been conducted to examine the above effects of war on

children. Rosenfeld (1993) conducted a small naturalistic study of how affluent

American children responded to the Gulf War. Rosenfeld interviewed many

children and found that the war had a deep impact on the majority of them. He

found that the images that they saw on television saddened them a great deal. He also

noted that the same images they viewed on television made them proud to be Americans.

Costello (1994) also examined the effects of war on children explaining that