BMJ 1998;317:1249 ( 31 October )

Letters

Protecting children from armed conflict

    Children affected by war must not be stigmatised as permanently damaged
    Repaying debts takes precedence over health care in many Third World countries
    Are most casualties non-combatants?

Children affected by war must not be stigmatised as permanently damaged

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR---Southall and Abbasi quote Unicef when they state that the psychological consequences of armed conflict on children are so great that they can rarely be repaired.1 Unicef indeed says that "time does not heal trauma," but there is no sound empirical basis for a generalisation that risks stigmatising whole populations of children affected by war as sick or permanently damaged. Even child survivors of Auschwitz did not turn out like this as a general rule, and there are no published studies of children from non-Western war zones to support such a conlusion.

Unicef and other agencies need to review such claims and costly interventions based on them; the claims owe more to prevailing sociocultural assumptions in the West than anything else. Over the past 50 years psychological explanations for life events and the medicalisation of distress have grown hugely. Because many people believe, for example, that rape or other . . . [Full text of this article]
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Relevant Article

Protecting children from armed conflict
David Southall and Kamran Abbasi
BMJ 1998 316: 1549-1550. [Extract] [Full Text]

This article has been cited by other articles:

  • Salama, P., Laurence, B., Nolan, M. L (1999). Health and human rights in contemporary humanitarian crises: is Kosovo more important than Sierra Leone?. BMJ 319: 1569-1571 [Full text]  
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