Whither Sri Lankan Children? a newspaper article

Gnanaseelan, Jeyaseelan. (2001, April 30). Whither Sri Lankan Children? The DailyMirror, and The Weekend Express, (April 14-15-series 1; 21- 22-series 11; May 5- 6, series 111)

Whither Srilankan children? 

 We humans are the most complex and puzzling of living creatures. We can create, nurture, protect, educate, and enrich. Yet we also degrade, humiliate, enslave, hate, destroy, and kill. A man can tenderly hold his newborn and moments later beat the baby’s mother. Over the past decades in Sri Lanka we have ample incidents to state that Violence permeates our history. In all societies and in each culture, past and present, violence has played a role in shaping our sociocultural evolution. While no society has been able to break free from violence, there is tremendous variation in the type and degree of violence across cultures and time. In some cultures, random street violence has been suppressed with oppressive institutional violence, in others, inter-familial violence is rare, but intra-familial violence – violence to wives and children – is rampant.

Today, in Sri Lanka, despite remarkable recent advances in technology, social justice, and education, violence continues to be a permeating and pervasive element of Srilankan societies both Sinhala and Tamil. We are bathed in violent images at various levels such as political, lingual, religious, and social. Violence fascinates and repulses us. Whether journalist, producer, politician, or scholar, we consider, comment on and analyze violence. Srilankans never get tired of hearing news about violence. Significantly, after the escalation of our ethnic war, We have academic conferences, court hearings, special documentaries - we issue opinions, create task forces, assign commissions of inquiry, start programs, blame guns, blame media, blame parents, why, ironically speaking, blame bikkus, Christian priests, iyers and moulabis as well; indeed we have become sadists in the real sense when it comes to our ethnic war! Yet no simple solutions emerge. We continue to be shocked, enraged, and confused by the horrors of violence in our homes, educational institutions both universities and schools, streets, and regions on the social, religious, caste, and linguistic bases. Therefore, with the help of my professional and academic acquisition of the subject areas such as philosophy, educational Psychology, social psychology and psycholinguistics attained in both my undergraduate and postgraduate studies, I have tried my best to say some views related to this topic.

How can we truly begin to understand the heterogeneity and complexity of the violence that surrounds us – random violence and institutionalized violence, the violence in behaviors, the violence in ideas, the violence in words? Can we ever understand mothers killing their infants, husbands killing wives, children and themselves? Can we understand random bombing of civilians in the name of God and sovereignty of our country? Can we understand systematic or institutionalized rape, torture, slavery, and genocide? Can we understand deliberate killing in the name of freedom?

Violence and its associated factors are complex and multidimensional. The article will consider only one of many perspectives from which to examine violence: the impact of violence and fear on the development of the child and youth. More specifically I would like to review violence-related mental changes and functional consequences. This view is presented with the hope that some of devastating cost of violence to the individual child, family, community, and society of Sri Lanka can be illustrated from a psychological perspective.

Childhood is a dangerous time. For infants and children, survival is dependent upon adults, most typically, the nuclear family. It is in the family setting that the child is fed, clothed, sheltered, nurtured, and educated. Unfortunately, it is in this environment that children are most frequently manipulated, coerced, degraded, inoculated with destructive beliefs, and exposed to violence.

The home is also one of the most violent places in Sri Lanka. It involves family on family violence; Children are often the witnesses to, or victims of, these violent crimes.

Violent crime statistics, however, are difficult to measure in Sri Lanka. It is likely that less than 5% of all domestic violence results in a criminal report. Intra-familial abuse and domestic battery account for some of physical and emotional violence suffered by children in this country. Violence takes many forms. The child may witness the assault of her mother by father. The child may be the direct victim of violence - physical or emotional - from father, mother or even older brothers and sisters. There is an increase of children committing acts of violence against each other each year. The child may become the direct victim of the adult male if he or she tries to intervene and protect mother or brothers and sisters. While these all cause physical violence, an additional destructive element of toxicity is emotional violence - humiliation, coercion, degradation, and threat of abandonment or physical assault.

In homes where no physical or emotional violence is present, children are still bathed in violent images; the average child spends more than two hours a day watching television. Television, music, and film have become increasingly violent. There is an estimation that the average 18 year old will have viewed a number acts of violence on television. Even with solid emotional, behavioral, cognitive and social anchors provided by a healthy home and community, this pervasive media violence increases aggression and antisocial behavior. It contributes to a sense that the world is more dangerous than it is and desensitizes children to future violence. In children exposed to violence in the home, these media images of power and violence are major sources of ‘cultural’ values, reinforcing what they have seen modeled at home. 

 Much of what I have described goes to the children of the South of Sri Lanka. There has been a dramatic increase in juvenile violence over the last 10 years. Now let us turn to the children of the North and East. Much of this is youth on youth violence. The violence witnessed by the children and youth has become so pervasive in the N-E. All children had witnessed some form of violence. The most heinous violence in Sri Lanka has been widely publicized with the series of gang shootings and military operations. Yet the more common forms of violence are intimidation, threat and simple assault. For thousands of children, our country is not safe. For too many, the N-E province is a place of fear, dominated by the potential for harm and a sense of pervasive threat by government and non-government forces.

Thousands of children are victims of, or witness to, violence in the home, and community in Sri Lanka. While the majority of homes, communities and educational institutions are safe, far too many children experience violence in one or more of these settings. The highest-risk children of these areas, however, are safe no where; their home is chaotic and episodically abusive, their community is fragmented and plagued by gang violence and the schools and universities are barely capable of providing structure and safety from intimidation and threat, let alone education especially in the militarized N-E province. These children must learn and grow despite a pervasive sense of threat. These children must adapt to this atmosphere of fear. Persisting fear and their adaptations to this fear can alter the development of their personality, resulting in changes in physiological, emotional, behavioral, cognitive and social functioning. The core principles of child’s mental development provide important clues about the mechanisms underlying the observed functional changes in children exposed to violence.

  We have heard that neglect, brain injury, mental retardation, alcohol intoxication will increase an individual’s aggression, impulsivity and capacity to be violent. However, Surprisingly in Sri Lanka, much violence is committed in the name of some ideologies such as protecting religious, ethnic, political, and linguistic dignities! The capacity to moderate frustration, impulsivity, aggression, and violent behavior is age-related. With a set of sufficient motor, sensory, emotional, cognitive and social experiences during infancy and childhood, the mature brain develops a mature, humane capacity to tolerate frustration, contain impulsivity and channel aggressive urges. In contrast, A frustrated child or youth due to the impacts of the above-mentioned violence in the N-E will have a difficult time modulating and balancing the reactive state of arousal and will begin to indulge in violence.

A growing body of evidence suggests that exposure to violence or trauma alters the developing brain and its processes. Trauma influences the pattern, intensity, and nature of sensory perceptual and affective experience of events during childhood. Indeed, children are exquisitely sensitive to stress. In the war-torn areas, both Tamil and Sinhala youth and children are undergoing these violent experiences drastically; if it goes at this rate, the whole country will come to a standstill, resulting in debris of destruction!

When the child perceives threat (e.g., anticipating an assault on self or loved one- a usual event in the N-E), their brain will orchestrate a total-body mobilization to adapt to the challenge. Their emotional, behavioral, cognitive, social and physiological functioning will change. Infants and young children are not capable of effectively fighting or fleeing as seen in the war fronts of the North and East. In the initial stages of distress they will manifest a precursor form of a hyperarousal response. In these early alarm stages, they will use this limited behavioral repertoire to attract the attention of their parents, relatives, and community for protection! But who are there to provide that protection in the N-E? Their behaviors include changes in facial expression, body movements and, most important, vocalization, i.e., crying. This is a successful adaptive strategy if the supporters come to support, warm, and sooth, fight for, or flee with, them. Ironically, even these supporters are helpless and need support in the N-E. So in this regard all feel that they are defeated.

 This defeat response can be clearly characterized in stress reactivity and ‘learned helplessness’. This defeat reaction is a common element of the presenting emotional and behavioral phenomenology of many neglected and abused children in Sri Lanka. Indeed, adults, professional or not, often puzzle over the emotional non-reactivity, passivity, and ‘compliance’ of many abused children.

 Psychologists say that, in the face of persisting threat, the infant or young child will activate other emotional and functional responses. They will dissociate themselves from the environment. Dissociation is a broad descriptive term that includes a variety of mental mechanism involved in disengaging from the external world and attending to stimuli in the internal world. This can involve distraction, avoidance, numbing, daydreaming, fantasy, derealization, and depersonalization. In our experiences with young children and infants, the predominant adaptive responses during the trauma are dissociative.

The specific symptoms a child develops following exposure to violence, then, can vary depending upon the nature, frequency, pattern and intensity of the violence, the adaptive style of the child and the presence of attenuating factors such as a stable, safe and supportive home and peaceful environment with freedom. Within this heterogeneity, however, certain trends emerge. Observations suggest that there are marked gender differences in the response to violence. Females are more likely to dissociate and males more likely to display a classic "fight or flight" response. As a result, more males will develop the aggressive, impulsive, reactive and hyperactive symptom presentation (more externalizing), while females will be more anxious, dissociative and more internalizing; in the South it is acceptable but in the N-E it is not so. Many Tamil young women develop these responses.

Children raised with persisting violence are much more likely to be violent. This can be explained, in part, by the persistence of this "fight or flight" state -- and by the profound cognitive distortions that can accompany a persisting state of fear. A young man with these characteristics may misinterpret a behavior as threatening and will, being more reactive, respond in a more impulsive and violent fashion.

One of the most important elements of understanding children exposed to violence is that all humans process, store, retrieve and respond to the world. When a child is in a persisting state of low-level fear that results from exposure to violence, the primary areas of the brain that are processing information are different from those in a child from a safe environment. The calm child may sit in the same classroom next to the child in an alarm state, both hearing the same lesson by the teacher. Even if they have identical IQs, the child that is calm can focus on the words of the teacher and, engage in abstract cognition. The child in an alarm state will be less efficient at processing and storing the verbal information the teacher is providing and focusing on non-verbal information - the teacher’s facial expressions, hand gestures, when she seems distracted. And, because the brain internalizes (i.e., learns) in this fashion, this child will have more selective development of non-verbal cognitive capacities. The children raised in the vortex of violence have learned that non-verbal information is more important than verbal. I have seen and observed many displaced children in the war-torn areas exemplifying these characteristics especially in Vanni.

This means that hypervigilant children from chronic violence settings frequently develop remarkable non-verbal skills in proportion to their verbal skills . Indeed, often they over-read (misinterpret) non-verbal cues; eye contact means threat, a friendly touch is interpreted as an antecedent to seduction and rape, accurate in the world they came from but now, hopefully, out of context. Many a time I have found that it is difficult to establish friendship and trust with them. They are always suspicious of my attempt at maintaining good relationship with them. They are very watchful of my non-verbal actions. During development, these children spent so much time in a low-level state of fear that they were focusing consistently on non-verbal cues. In our population, children raised in traumatic war environments demonstrate them. This is consistent with the observations of teachers in the North and East that many of the maltreated or traumatized children they work with are often judged to be bright but can’t learn easily. Often these children are labeled as learning disabled. These difficulties with cognitive organization contribute to a more primitive, less mature style of problem solving - with aggression often being employed as a "tool.”

The Future

There are many important and effective treatment approaches to the child traumatized by violence. Yet even with optimal clinical ‘techniques’, treatment of maltreated children would overwhelm the entire mental health and child welfare community in this country. But who will be committed to come to the areas of battlefronts and serve these deprived children? Today the number of children that would benefit from intervention far outstrips the meager resources our society has dedicated to children exposed to violence in Sri Lanka on the whole. Even as we develop more effective and accessible intervention models, we must focus on prevention.

A society functions as a reflection of its childrearing practices. If children are ignored, poorly educated and not protected from violence they will grow into adults that create a reactive, non-creative and violent society. In a brilliant analysis of this very process, Hellie (1996) describes a dark age in Russia (1600 to 1700) characterized by excessive brutality, violence and pervasive fear that for generations inhibited creativity, abstraction, literacy and the other elements of humanity. All societies reap what they have sown. Is Sri Lanka marching forward to face the same fate?

Today, in Sri Lanka, despite the well-documented adverse effects of domestic, community, military and media violence, we continue to seek short-term and simplistic answers. In order to minimize the many destructive pathways that come from violence in childhood, we need to dedicate resources of time, energy, and money to these complex problems. And we need to help provide the resource-predictable, safe and resource rich environments our problem-solvers require. Too often the academic, public and non-for-profit systems asked to address these problems are resource-depleted yet have a mandate to "do something." Unfortunately, the solutions that arise from this reactive approach to complex problems are very limited and, typically, shortsighted.

Our problem-solvers must understand the indelible relationship between early life experiences and cognitive, social, emotional, and physical health. Providing enriching cognitive, emotional, social and physical experiences in childhood could transform our culture. But before our society can choose to provide these experiences, it must be educated about what we now know about child development. Education of the public must be coupled with the continuing research into the impact of positive and negative experiences on the development of children. All of this must be paired with the implementation and testing of programs that can enrich the lives of children and families and programs to provide early identification of, and proactive intervention for, at-risk children and families especially in the North and East.

The problems related to violence are complex and they have complex impact on our society. Yet there are solutions to these problems. The choice to find solutions is up to us. If we choose, we have some control of our future. If we, as a society, continue to ignore the laws of biology and the inevitable psychological consequences of chronic exposure to violence in childhood and youth, our potential as a humane society will remain unrealized. The future will hold sociocultural devolution - the inevitable consequence of the competition for limited resources and the implementation of reactive, one-dimensional and short-term solutions. That is what our policy-makers and politicians have been doing all the while. This need not be. Parents, caregivers, professionals, public officials, policy makers, and mainly our Srilankan politicians and Buddhist clergy do have the capacity to make decisions that will increase or decrease violence in our children’s lives. Hopefully, an appreciation of the devastating impact of military violence on the developing child will help all of us make the good decisions and difficult choices that will create a safer, more predictable and enriching Sri Lanka for our children.