A boy looks out the window of an evacuation train at a train station in Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainian children have had to leave their homes because of the war.Image: IMAGO/NurPhoto / Artur Widak
Analyse
Trigger warning: The following text describes acts of violence that can be stressful and re-traumatizing.
“Grandfather died and I have a wound on my back. My sister had her head cut open. My mother had a piece of flesh torn off her arm and has a hole in her leg.”
They are notes in a diary. The author of these words is a little boy from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. What reads like a horror story became reality for eight-year-old Yehor.
Seine Story publishes the platform “Museum of Civilian Voices”, founded by the Ukrainian non-profit Rinat Akhmetov Foundation. She documents a number of stories from civilians who fell victim to Russia’s war on the Ukraine suffer – from it too Kinder like little Yehor.
In his “Mariupol Diary” he describes the horrors of war and paints some pictures of explosions, tanks, dead people and destroyed houses. A traumatizing experience that, according to the child psychologist Eva Möhler, has serious consequences for the children.
A boy plays with toys in an underground bomb shelter in Ukraine.Credit: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire / Alex Chan Tsz Yuk
War experiences can lead to cancer in children
“Experiences of violence and war of any kind displace the Body into a biological alarm state with increased stress hormone release,” explains Möhler in an interview with watson. Although this is not directly visible from the outside, it has significant health consequences in the long term, says the director of the clinic for child and adolescent psychiatry at the Saarland University Hospital.
She further says:
“We have known this since the large ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ study from the USA, which demonstrated a strong, direct connection between aversive childhood experiences and serious physical illnesses such as cancer and diabetes.”
But brain development is also affected by “traumatic stress” – such as war. According to Möhler, “stress-induced disorders” of brain maturation have been demonstrated in children. Stress that Yehor also felt when the Russian army attacked his home.
“We started praying again, for the hundredth time, or the three hundredth time, I don’t know,” says Yehor’s mother. “You think about what you hear and pray at the same time. Suddenly it felt like putting the roof on my back.” A Russian missile hits the house – it destroys everything the family owns.
The roof was swept away and the entire ceiling collapsed. “Yehor screamed that he had some kind of rock stuck in his back,” says the mother. The grandfather broke his leg and bled to death within the next two weeks. Little Yehor records it in his diary: “Grandfather died and I have a wound on my back.”
War is traumatic stress for children that needs to be dealt with
Fear of death, mourning for family members and the destruction of the home – according to Möhler, traumatic stress of any kind can cause massive social costs. It must be uncovered and treated in a professional and trauma-sensitive manner.
The psychologist says:
“In addition to cancer or diabetes, alcohol and nicotine addiction as well as most psychiatric diseases are strongly associated with the traumatic loss of significant others in childhood.”
According to Möhler, however, there is good news: the child’s brain is very plastic, so “trauma therapeutic interventions” promise good results. The specific trauma therapy is based, for example, on trauma exposure. In other words, the child goes through the experience again.
A boy sleeps next to his father as they are evacuated from Mariupol’s Azovstal to Zaporizhia.Credit: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire / Alex Chan Tsz Yuk
According to Möhler, however, this is only advisable if the child lives in a psychosocially stable, safe situation and has stable future prospects. “Unfortunately, that’s not the case for all refugees,” she says. That is why there are specific offers aimed at these children in unstable life situations. Yehor is probably one of them.
After a hundred days of war, his family managed to escape from the besieged Mariupol to the peaceful territory of Ukraine. in one Interview with “Museum of Civilian Voices” in June 2022, Yehor says of his diary entries: “I thought someone would find it and read it. I wanted everyone to know what was happening in Mariupol.”
His mother didn’t know about his writing for a long time. “We thought he was going to paint. And then I found it by accident,” she says. Yehor’s notes came as a great shock to her and brought tears to her eyes. Her son’s words are “hard and painful to read.”
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When the child’s soul suffers from war experiences
Shame and guilt are the most common trauma-associated feelings, explains child psychologist Möhler. But sadness, anger and justified annoyance can also be present. According to her, the child’s organism reacts “stressed”, it is constantly tense due to the stress hormones. This has long-term consequences for the children.
Moehler says:
“The children get jumpy, sleep badly, ‘freak out’ easily, are always ‘on alert’, so they constantly scan their surroundings for dangers. This condition is very unhealthy for the child’s body and brain in the long run.”
In the brain, stress hormones primarily affect areas that are responsible for action planning, impulse control and emotion regulation, explains Möhler. Accordingly, these functions suffer permanently from the “stress of abuse”.
A Ukrainian boy plays in a playground destroyed by Russian bombing in Kharkiv, Ukraine.Bild: IMAGO/EFE Agency / Esteban Biba
According to the child psychologist, a disorder of impulse control and emotional regulation can develop in the long term. This means that the children tend to have violent emotional outbursts such as self-injury or aggression. According to Möhler, they also develop a very negative self-concept based on shame and guilt. “Their self-esteem often suffers greatly from what they have experienced,” says the child psychologist.
She elaborates:
“The so-called ‘trauma-specific developmental heterotopia’ states that almost every child psychiatric disorder, but especially social behavior disorders such as ADHD and borderline disorders, can and often arose from severe trauma, war, death and loss.”
Yehor’s fate is one of many. The “Museum of Civilian Voices” platform documents the experiences of numerous children in the war zone of Ukraine. About the stories of two young siblingswho in the Russian attacks their Parents lose, bury them in the garden, and then make your way to the safe areas on your own.
Children stand by a crater hit by Russian missiles in a Ukrainian village. Bild: IMAGO/SNA / Viktor Antonyuk
Children who talk about the artillery fire, all the blood, the fear and grief for dead relatives or friends: These children need support to process the trauma of war.
“Stress resilience training” is intended to help children with war trauma
According to Möhler, there is now an internationally known and common “stress resilience training” specifically for refugee children and young people. It’s called Stress-Trauma-Symptoms-Arousal-Regulation-Treatment (START for short). A similar program START-Kids was developed for children from 6 to 12 years. The programs are now also available in Ukrainian Language.
A boy with his mother and aunt on the evacuation train in Ukraine.Image: IMAGO/NurPhoto / Artur Widak
At the moment Yehor is in Kiev with his family. The war determines everyday life there, too. Shrill air raid alarms and Russian rocket attacks won’t let the boy rest. However, hope remains: “Maybe one day we can go back to Mariupol,” says his mother. The family really wants to go home – to her roofless house and Yehor’s teddy bear buried under the rubble.
