Welcome back. One of the greatest threats to child development throughout world history up to the present day, is the experience of war, terror, and political conflict. Wars can take an enormous toll on children in many different ways. They cause outright death and injury, but they also cause extreme terror and fear. Children starve during and after wars. Children frequently are orphaned when their parents are killed in wars or through bombing. They often get separated from their families and sometimes have to move into refugee camps or migrate. Children experience imprisonment and they're also either re-enlisted or volunteered to be child soldiers, which puts their lives and health at great risk. And they also, especially older children, lose their sense of hope in the future from the incredible devastation and loss. War in this kind of conflict, undermines development in multiple ways. Some of them are direct through injury or starvation, or all kinds of things that children witness, and some are indirect because wars also destroy the fabric of societies, and cultures. They disrupt all of the support systems that provide the kind of environment children need to develop and flourish. Ranging from the economy to the school system. World War II brought global devastation and also growing awareness of the terrible cost of war to children and child development. Millions of children were killed and injured during this war and millions of additional children lost their families, their homes and their societies. Children were victims of genocide in Europe particularly Jewish and Roma children, and children were victims of bombing on both sides of the war. Children were victims of bombing in Great Britain and also throughout the European theater of the war. And of course also in Japan, where the first atomic bombs were used. Children were placed in concentration camps and many of them died there, although some children were rescued at the close of the war and evacuated out of the concentration camps. Children also suffered the effects of radiation and little was known at the time about the impact of radiation on child development. And research has followed the child victims who survived the atomic bombs at Hiro, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in order to understand better the long term consequences of these terrible bombs on the health of individual humans. Children are particularly sensitive to radiation, and radiation can have a profound effect on the developing fetus. So mo, the, for the mothers who were pregnant at the time of these atomic bombs, the radiation could alter the development of the fetus. There could be malformations or other diseases that developed as a result of prenatal radiation, and then, children were also exposed, older children. And later on, through contamination of the food supply, and milk, for example. People didn't understand how much impact there would be from radiation itself on human development. Children, for example, are particularly likely to collect radiation in the thyroid and this can cause thyroid cancer in development. Children also, as a result of the bombings, were evacuated. And they also were, had to go into sh, air raid shelters during war and this still happens today. And, going into an air raid shelter is protective on the one hand, but it can be extremely frightening on the other hand. The children in this photograph of kids who were evacuated during the Blitz in London look pretty cheerful, but there were many other children who were very frightened by the separation involved to protect their lives but separating them often from their family. Some children actually had to go back home, despite the danger because they were so traumatized by the separation. But about one in ten, I understand of people who were killed during the bombing of the blitz were children. Children also were placed for safety in air raid shelters. This photograph is from a nursery with very young children. So these babies, this photo was taken of babies during an air raid in Great Britain. Children also participated in the war as child soldiers. Some were enlisted or forced to join, but a number of other children volunteered to join. These are photographs from World War II of very young children participating in the War, on multiple sides of this conflict. And there also were children in countries like the United States, that had rules about how old you had to be to be in the War, where children snuck into the war. They lied about their age in order, in order to participate. So many children participated in World War II around the world as as children in the role of child soldiers. Wars often ha, come along with famine and starvation. And one of the most famous instances of this occurred during World War II during the, towards the end of the war during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. [COUGH] And this famine is called the Dutch famine. And, or sometimes the Dutch hunger winter. And there was so little food during this period, that people were starving, including pregnant mothers. So their fetuses were not getting quite enough nutrition to flourish. And research has been done over the years since that time, to try to understand the impact of starvation during a particular window of development on long term health, because the hunger winter lasted a specific period of time. Some children were exposed to starvation early in the first trimester of pregnancy and that appears to have had the greatest effect. Other children of course were much older. And these children have been followed and the results of that research suggests that there are fetal programming effects that we as an adaptive species, our body even when we're developing in the uterus, is trying to read the expected environment. And if there's starvation, the fetus er, changes itself so that it gets ready for an environment where there's scarce food. But of course, the war shortly thereafter ended, and the children that had been programmed for an environment with limited food, it changed their metabolism and other things about their body. They had plenty of food growing up, and what happened is that they grew up with a risk for developing obesity and related health problems. And these children have been followed into adulthood to try to understand the early impact of these kind of experiences. Many orphans came out of World War II. There were devastating losses in this war. Multiple tens of millions of parents were killed in this war, and additional civilians were killed throughout all of the areas involved in this conflict, leaving many, many orphans and many humanitarian agencies tried to help with the care and relocation of orphans after the war. Among the jobs that UNICEF started to provide was trying to help out with these orphans in the aftermath of the war. UNICEF was founded in 1946, in large part to respond to the needs of children who were orphaned or starving after that war. And of course, UNICEF continues to provide services to children all over the world to this day, particularly children involved in problems of armed conflict. Children also in wars witness all kinds of terrible things. They witness horrible deaths and injuries, sometimes to their own parents. They see destruction on a massive scale and they also can read, or understand the panic, and terror that their parents and friends are experiences, experiencing. And these kinds of traumatic experiences affect how children develop. They can develop trauma symptoms, that we've talked about before, and post traumatic stress disorders. The effects of these kinds of war experiences are strikingly similar to the effects we've talked about in the situation of natural disasters. The main differences between war and natural disasters is, how prolonged, how quick the onset, how prolonged the experiences are. Wars and civil conflict tend to go on for very long periods of time. And so you often end up with a much more, a much higher piling up of adverse life experiences in children caught up in these conflicts. But just as in natural disasters, studies of the effects of war on child, children in childhood have indicated that dose matters. What you actually experience and how severe it is. How often you experience traumatic events. Development matters. It, children are affected both physically and psychologically in very different ways, depending on where they are in development. Even before they're born, and long after. And also, individual differences matter. So, some children just respond differently to trauma than others, because of their nature, their personality, how sensitive they are to experiences. So those were found for natural disasters and they have been repeatedly found in research on these kind of war and terror experiences. Of course, war and terror have continued on into the 21st Century. We opened the century with, you know, a terrible terror attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, shown here in this photograph. And, many millions of children today around the world, live in areas where wars have been going on for years, where there's armed conflict. We have millions of child refugees right now, in different regions of the world, due to displacement from conflicts and various political situations. What we're going to discuss in the, in the rest of this week, are what we have learned from research on the impact of these experiences on children and how they recover over time. What have we learned about resilience from research on children in war and terror?
