Jacqueline Lee-Martinez
Professor: Dr. Danilo Mandic
SOCI S-11
8, August 2018
The Effects of War on Children
Exposure to war trauma and terror has been found to cause high levels of stress among children which has been associated with the development of a wide range of psychological problems. Worldwide children affected by armed conflict are confronted with exploitation and fear. Consequently, many children are forced to flee their homes. Communities are ripped apart and can no longer provide a secure environment for children. Adults are busy surviving on their own, most parents have little time to protect and nurture their children. It is impossible for children to go through any violent disruption of this kind without showing their effect in difficult behavior in variations from normality. Infantile nature has certain means at its disposal to deal with shocks, deprivations, and upsets in life. In these circumstances, some children experience abnormal withdrawal from the world. Children exposed to death and destruction at a developmentally early age are perpetually traumatized expressing emotional and hysterical outbreaks becoming indifferent to the sufferings of other victims. During a conflict, children’s rights are violated on a massive scale; their rights to be protected from violence, neglect, dignity and be supported to develop to their full potential are nonexistent.
The substance of life is advanced by meeting survival needs and restoring basic protective systems for child development, such as safety, quality parenting, education, and interaction with other children. However, in the environment of armed conflict, war produces long-term effects. Children victimized often need long-term care due to the physical and psychological impact of war. Socially, necessities are held back and advancements become halted as survival becomes the only priority. Effects of war also include the mass destruction of cities and have long-lasting effects on a country's economic standpoint. Armed conflict has important indirect negative consequences on infrastructure, public health provisioning, and social order. In most of the world, the activity of states has created an unexpected contrast between the violence of the state's sphere and the relative non-violence of civilian life away from the state. “Men obey the same law. In the same city, different occupations can co-exist without being obliged mutually to destroy one another, for they pursue different objectives. The soldier seeks military glory, the priest moral authority, the statesman power, the businessman riches, and the scholar scientific renown. Each of them can attain his end without preventing the others from attaining theirs. It is still the same even when the functions are less separated from one another. The occultist does not compete with the psychiatrist, the shoemaker with the hatter, the mason with the cabinet maker, the physicist with the chemist, etc. Since they perform different services, they can perform them together” (Durkheim, p. 154). Traumatic unforeseen changes affects the physical and mental development of all humans. Affected children eventually create emotionally detached society. Within any particular state, local and regional power holders have ordinarily had control of concentrated means of force that could, if combined, match or even overwhelm those of the state. Regardless of the formal state of war and peace, landlord-dominated agrarian powers live shoulder to shoulder, dispute over control of land and labor. At moments of disputed succession which typically precipitate a resort to arms such powers escalate more frequently. “Rulers have managed to shift the balance decisively against both individual citizens and rival power holders within their own states. They have made it criminal, unpopular, and impractical for most of their citizens to bear arms, have outlawed private armies, and have made it seem normal for armed agents of the state to confront unarmed civilians.” (Tilly, p. 69). Moving from century to century, we see the number of great power battle deaths per state rising from just under 3,000 per year during the sixteenth century to more than 223,000 during the twentieth century. With aircraft, tanks, missiles, and nuclear bombs, the death toll of twentieth-century wars far out shadows those of previous centuries. The numbers are only approximate, but they establish the heavy involvement of states in warfare, century after century. Over the millennium as a whole, war has been the dominant activity of European states. “The direct supplying of armies, the imposition of taxes, and the management of royal credit all went more easily in commercialized, capital-rich economies. Wherever they occurred, however, they multiplied the state’s civilian servants. A major war effort generally produced a permanent expansion of the state’s central apparatus – the number of its full – time personnel, the scope of its institutions, the size of its budget, the extent of its debt.” (Tilly, p. 89). As states generalized their wars, conflict on land became more important, and the ability to field large armies more critical to a state's success. On the basis of military business, Frederick II built an end to despotism complete with poor relief and maternity hospitals; most of the programs collapsed as the American war ended and as Europe's states turned to recruit their own national armies. Highly commercialized states draw some important advantages from the effect of war on society.
Acts of war and terrorism are increasingly widespread in contemporary society. Throughout history, weaponry has become more efficient, accurate, and powerful, resulting in more devastation and loss of human life. Children are often overlooked as victims of such violence. The democratic United States has more infrastructural state power than did the authoritarian Soviet Union. “A German Problematik was being exported at a time of massive economic, military, and political crisis, not a recipe for socializing European youth into pacific liberalism. There was also a generational contribution. New rightist ideologies were also suffused with the moralizing characteristic of youthful idealism.” (Mann, p. 87). From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, monarchs were claiming state sovereignty in foreign policy, Upper-class nations were emerging, and religious wars might produce Nations of the soul. But the mass of the population became real members of the Nation more recently. Eighteenth-century states monopolized the surging function of military violence. State activities also had the unintended consequence of consolidating networks of social interaction, civil societies, substantially bounded by the territories of each state. Any child affected become emotionally unstable, thus grow up into an adult world not knowing how to survive on an emotional level. Organic nationalists came to believe in an enduring national character, soul, or spirit, distinguishable from that of other nations, their right to a state that would ultimately express this, and their right to exclude minorities with different characters, who would only weaken the nation. Marx's notorious silence on the post-revolutionary state claimed the state would wither away and that the working class had no nation. Sentiment typical of the left's indifference toward the emerging nation-state. Though state functions were widening, most conservatives saw the state as little more than the preserver of order and the aggrandizer of territory. Fascist Regimes Fascism providing a discontinuity, reversing the flow of power by adding to corporatism mass movement centered on paramilitary, while also increasing coercive powers from the top. Corporatist regimes were stealing fascist ideas in order to be able to repress real fascists, and su survive. As subsequent economic development became more rapid and dislocating, it generated more class confrontation amid more interventionist states. The Modern total war had also introduced a series of tensions between state power and mass military citizenship that in the circumstances of possible or actual defeat could radically destabilize states. Regardless of the degree of autonomous power wielded by state elites, the institutions and the crises of states may have an autonomous influence over political outcomes. Children associated with armies often become stigmatized because of their participation in the war. Meanwhile, hostile environments prohibit some children from attending schools and parents from earning money to provide for their children. These major shifts in the parliamentary side of the state were not accompanied by comparable changes within the executive, which remained dominated by "Old regime" elements that controlled most of the repressive apparatuses of the state. There were old imperial nations, more recent imperialists, Proletarian nations, newer sub imperial nations, and minorities of all these in the majority states of other nations. Fascism reflected a crisis of the dual state, the Semi-authoritarian, semi-liberal state found across one-half of Europe, faced with simultaneous transitions to liberal democracy and the nation-state just as these countries were beset by economic and military crises. In the northwest, their education systems had been merged into the state or existed in harmonious tandem with the state system. The difference declined in the late 1920s since fascists and authoritarians reaching power in Italy and Hungary deliberately reduced the numbers of turbulent students. Extreme nation-statists promulgated the cult of youth, fascists above all. “Military power is the social organization of physical violence. It is universal in human societies because of the need for human groups for organized defense and the ubiquitous utility of aggression. Those who command military resources may acquire social power more generally. Conversely, when dominant military institutions decay, this opens up new opportunities for others, including other armed groups, to seize power.” (Mann, p. 64). Highly educated people turning fascist were not those suffering the greatest economic hardship. Their Fascists networks of ideological communication also seem to have added the distinctively youthful fascist blend of moralizing and violence that is usually considered to be its Non-Rational side. The advantage in warfare; as a consequence, their sort of state – the national state won out over city-states, empires, urban federations, and other forms of state that had sometimes prospered in Europe. Empire overseas did not build up state structure to the same extent as land war at home. The connection between state and empire ran in both directions: the character of the European state governed the form of its expansion outside of Europe, and the nature of the empire significantly affected the metropole operation. The capitalist strategy added relatively little bulk to the central state, How apparatus grew up to wrest military men and resources from a huge but not commercialized economy. The Dutch Republic which relied heavily on navies ran its military forces on temporary grants from its city-dominated provinces, easily drew taxes from customs and excise, and never created a substantial central bureaucracy. Exposure of such obscene violence to children influence horrible acts of violence during key developmental years, the same children begin to accept violent acts as a normal part of life putting young people at risk for continuing cycles of violence in means of dealing with conflict.
War and other massive trauma experiences can have devastating effects because of effects on parents, survival needs, and harm to fundamental systems that nurture and protect child development. When danger and devastation end and basic needs are met, children show remarkable resilience and recovery from disaster. Social class has an important impact on the cultural logic of raising a child. Parents see these activities as transmitting important life skills to children. Parenting strategies emphasize the accomplishment of natural growth believing that as long as they provide love, food, and safety, their children will grow and thrive. They do not focus on developing the special talents of their individual children. “The use of directives and the pattern of silent compliance are not universal; in interactions with peers, verbal displays are distinctively different than inside the household, with elaborated and embellished discourse”. (Lareau, p. 932). The pattern of concerted cultivation, with stresses individual repertoires of activities, reasoning, and questioning, encourages an emerging sense of entitlement in children. The pattern of the accomplishment of natural growth, with its emphasis on child-initiated play, autonomy from adults encourages an emerging sense of constraint. In a historical moment where the dominant society privileges active, informed, assertive clients of health and educational services, the various strategies employed by children and parents are not equally valuable. In sum, differences in family life lie not only in the advantages parents are able to obtain for their children but also in the skills being transmitted to children for negotiating their own life paths. Adults feel comfortable issuing directives to children, which children comply with immediately. Children do not live their lives inside of the home; Instead, they are legally required to go to school, they go to the doctor, and many are involved in church and other adult-organized activities. In children’s institutional lives, we found differences by social class in how mothers monitored children’s regimented experiences. While in working class and poor families children are granted autonomy to make their own way in organizations in the middle-class homes, most aspects in the children’s lives are subject to the mother’s ongoing observation. When a parent becomes aware of a problem, they move quickly, drawing, on her work and professional skills and experiences. The parent displays tremendous assertiveness, doggedness, and, in some cases, effectiveness in pressing institutions to recognize their child's individualized needs. Parents’ proactive stance reflects their beliefs that they have a duty to intervene in situations where they perceive that the child’s needs are not being met. “My purpose in undertaking the field observations was to develop an intensive, realistic portrait of family life. I wanted to compare children across gender and race lines. Adopting the fine-grained differentiation of categories characteristic of current neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian empirical studies was not tenable” (Lareau, p. 928). Class shapes worldview and how class affects economic and educational resources. It is stressed how social class dynamics are woven into the texture and rhythm of children and parents’ daily lives. Class position influences critical aspects of family life: time use, language use, and generational bonds. Working-class and middle-class mothers may express beliefs that reflect a similar notion of intensive mothering, describing sets of paired beliefs and actions as a cultural logic of raising a child. When children and parents move outside the home into the world of social institutions, they find that these cultural practices are not given equal value. Effects vary by degree of exposure, the degree of damage to basic systems for human development, and degree of understanding by the individual child; as well as previous traumatic experiences. For young children, quality of care is the most important protective factor; caregivers play a critical shielding role as does the lack of understanding or awareness of the full meaning of the situation.
As a consequence of the conflict between children affected by war, they become anxious, depressed and withdrawn, or rebellious and aggressive. Reunification programs should be the main priority in all new and existing relief operations. Refugee camps should be located far from conflict zones to reduce the risk of children being enticed or recruited into warring groups. They should have food and water sources in locations that can be easily monitored to prevent further victimization. The recovery time depends on some factors such as the extent of damage, treatment in the post-traumatic period, and the coping capabilities of the child which is further dependent on the age of the child. Despite media attention, the response has been limited. Immediate measures for increased protection and security are necessary and being actively pursued, but the more regenerative responses like those of child-focused psychosocial and trauma rehabilitation are not being appropriately supported or implemented despite the demand and need for these interventions among affected communities.
Works Cited
Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labour
Tilly, Charles. How War Made States and Vice Versa
Mann, Michael. Explaining the Rise of Interwar Authoritarianism and Fascism
Lareau, Annette. Unequal Childhoods