19 - War-Affected Children, International Crisis of Meaning, and the Limits of Rehabilitation Programmes

Summary

WAR-AFFECTED CHILDREN AND INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOSOCIAL PROGRAMMES

‘Child psychology is a luxury which only a small section of the world's parents can afford’, the childhood researchers Elizabeth Newson and John Newson argued back in the 1970s. Yet the early 1990s witnessed an explosion of international trauma and other psychosocial therapeutic programmes. Their astonishing rise followed Western expanding therapeutic programmes and diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which was formally recognised as a condition by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Why did global policy-makers make therapeutic programmes previously considered a luxury a humanitarian priority for war-affected populations? Therapeutic programmes were offered by international organisations in developing countries suffering acute health needs evidenced in high infant mortality rates and low life expectancy rates. The PTSD advocacy literature had previously argued that therapeutic interventions were needed in western societies because they lacked the traditional communal support relations, which remained in the developing world. International imperatives to provide psychosocial programmes to war-affected populations was not therefore a selfevident communal priority given so many other urgent basic needs.

International psychosocial interventions became promoted as a policy priority because of how the causes of violent conflict and war had become psychologised and increasingly sought in communal relations and norms. We may contrast Clausewitzian approaches seeing war as the continuation of politics, that is, conflicting political causes and interests to psychosocial approaches seeing war as the continuation of unhealthy psychology. Social psychology commonly approaches social problems as cycles of intergenerational dysfunctionalism, tracing back social pathology to primary socialisation. Essentially, social psychology believes that the construction of culture and personality is key to both comprehending and addressing social problems. So psychosocial approaches are concerned with children's development and socialisation as part of promoting social function. Underlying international psychosocial approaches is the cycles of violence thesis: war is seen as deriving from cultures or cycles of violence and the solution as breaking vicious cycles by changing cultural attitudes and instilling non-violent conflict resolution skills. The new psychosocial model located the origins of ethnic conflict in the ‘powerful reservoir of traumatic memory’.