Children face deep trauma
The Star Online
Saturday September 4, 2004
PARIS: The children ensnared in the three-day hostage drama in North
Ossetia will have probably suffered major psychological damage and
some may never get over their ordeal completely, a French expert
warned yesterday.
Gilbert Vila, a paediatrician who specialises in child trauma at Necker
Hospital, said a child subjected to a deep shock of this kind was
likely to show a long range of symptoms, including anxiety, depression,
turbulence at school and problems in his family relationships.
“This case is of the gravest kind,” he said. “The psychological
problems will be major.”
Vila has authored several studies into the psychological impact on
children who suffer a catastrophic shock, including a group of primary
schoolchildren taken hostage at their school in the Paris suburb of
Neuilly in 1993.
Detailed research into Cambodian children who were tortured under
the Pol Pot regime and Armenian children who survived an earthquake
shows that, for most victims, the big symptoms will gradually ease
but for a minority, the problems will be lifelong, Vila said.
In those cases, 90% of the children showed significant trauma symptoms
during the first few weeks after their trauma.
That figure fell to 50% after six months, and to around 15% two or
three years later. Some, though, were never completely cured.
In the Cambodian study, “some children who were aged between eight
and 12 years at the time of their ordeal were still experiencing
problems at the age of 30,” he said.
More than half of the children in this category had problems that
seriously hampered their daily life.
As for very young children and babies, “we still lack data” on the
long-term repercussions, said Vila, noting however that there had been
cases of children younger than four “who showed the same post-trauma
symptoms as (US) Vietnam vets.” – AFP