Traumatic experiences harm children for lifetime

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” New York Yankees famed catcher Yogi Berra once said. Berra may be right about baseball; he was wrong about wars. Wars don’t end when someone wins. They end only when the last generation of victims dies.

That’s what makes the recent UNICEF report on child victims so disturbing. Child victims will live longer than adult victims. UNICEF’s statistics are staggering. The deaths are bad enough: 700 children killed by conflicts in Afghanistan; 135 children forced to act as suicide bombers in sub-Saharan West Africa. But — pardon me for even saying this — at least they’re now dead. They won’t carry their experiences with them for the rest of their lives.

Not so the survivors. In Ukraine, 220,000 still play amid landmines and unexploded ordnances. In Yemen, 5,000 children injured by war against terrorist factions. In Myanmar, almost half of the 650,000 Rohinga refugees forced from their homes into Bangladesh are children. In the (grossly misnamed) Democratic Republic of Congo, 850,000 children have been driven from their homes.

You think they’ll recover easily from these traumas? Kids are resilient, aren’t they? They’ll bounce back and be fine…

Think again! If American women can testify that sexual harassment 40 years ago (by Roy Moore, for example) has affected their lives ever since, imagine what gang rape by a dozen armed soldiers does to a girl’s life image.

Google “Rape in Congo,” and see how much you can read before you throw up. One soldier bragged of raping 53 women, some as young as five-years-old. Read it for yourself.

And then there are the kids forced to become those soldiers — to kill, maim, and rape on command. UNICEF estimates 2,000 children a year recruited into armed groups in Somalia, almost 5,000 a year in South Sudan.

Here in a much less primitive world, we don’t train our military to rape as a tool of conquest and humiliation. But we’re slowly beginning to recognize the long-term repercussions of being trained to kill — and/or seeing your buddies killed, maimed, disabled for life.

U.S. figures are easiest to obtain. There, it’s clear that far more American personnel have killed themselves in the last 15 years than were killed by enemy combatants.

Officially, 4,486 Americans died in Iraq, 1,950 in Afghanistan. Total over 15 years, 6,436. Currently, past and present military staff are killing themselves at a rate of 22 a day — more than 8,000 a year. Their war was not over when it was over. Comparable figures are harder to come by for Canadian military. Canadian data seems deliberately written to obfuscate.

Still, after two days of trying every conceivable combination of keyword searches, I found a Globe and Mail report that “1,486 former military members ended their lives from 1976 to 2012, with one-third of the suicides occurring after 2002, when Canadian troops were entrenched in the Afghanistan war.”

Male suicides ranked about 40 per cent higher than the general population; female suicides about 80 per cent higher.

Compare that to actual deaths in action — 158 in Afghanistan; 23 in Bosnia.

Again, it would seem, the after-effects of war have been more deadly than the war itself.

Maybe I asked the wrong questions.Or maybe the Armed Forces don’t want to know how many of its veterans have been left emotionally handicapped by their experiences.

But my point seems supported — a war does not end when Johnny comes marching home. The trauma continues.

How long? No one knows. No one bothered keeping track of these things after the two World Wars and the Korean War.

And how long will the children in the UNICEF report have their lives harmed by their traumatic experiences? Until their deaths, I suggest. My own grandchildren recently demonstrated their ability to remember events from the age of two or three.

I see no reason to expect that children in Syria and Somalia, in Yemen and the Congo, in Myanmar and Ukraine, will be able to erase their darkest memories of being uprooted, abused, wounded, and victimized.

Their war will not end when someone signs a peace treaty.

“Brutality cannot be the new normal,” said Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF director of emergency programs. “As these attacks continue year after year, we cannot become numb.”

Maybe it’s too much to dream of achieving world peace. Maybe we need to apply the tactics that worked for eliminating smallpox and almost eradicating polio — raise one generation free of violence and conflict. Is that too much to hope for? Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca