The puzzle is why even more young lives aren't destroyed

It's a case where the picture does tell the story: no-one really needs research to demonstrate that war is damaging to children; the bigger puzzle is how and where so many manage find the inner resources to withstand the trauma, and why some cope better than others.

These children are playing in a street in an old city area of Kabul, where 63,000 homes have been damaged during two decades of war. Similar scenes of social concussion can be found every day in Dhafur, Baghdad – or in Gaza where researchers are studying the long-term effects of stress on the young population.

Despite widespread interest in resilience, there is scarce research evidence on what promotes it. Samir Qouta of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme [1] and colleagues from Finland and Denmark have begun to shed a little light on this topic through their study of Palestinian adolescents.

Their report in Child Abuse and Negect [2] describes how they followed 65 children for over seven years, starting in 1993 during the First Intifada when the children were 10-11 years old.

They surveyed the children and their parents again in 1996 during the relative calm of Palestinian Authority rule, and finally in 2000 before the Second Al Aqsa Intifada, collecting information about how characteristics of the children’s environments, families, and their own personalities were related to psychological trauma and to well-being.

They found that traumatic and stressful experiences were related to poor mental health and low life satisfaction – and succeeded in identifying just a few factors in the children’s lives that helped to mitigate the impact of war.

The more intelligent were less likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder (ie. severe and ongoing emotional reaction to an extreme psychological trauma). But intelligence did not appear to protect young people from depression or low life satisfaction. Moreover, neither children’s coping styles nor their mothers’ parenting styles were related to kids’ psychological adjustment.

So the riddle of resilience remains to be solved. This small study suggests that children’s cognitive capacities might help them cope. But other factors, yet to be discovered, must also contribute.

Summary of "Predictors of psychological distress and positive resources among Palestinian adolescents: Trauma, child, and mothering characteristics" by Samir Qouta, Raija-Leena Punamäki, Edith Montgomery and Eyad El Sarraj, in Child Abuse & Neglect Volume 31, Issue 7, July 2007, p. 699-71.