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  • Children face deep trauma

    Children face deep trauma

    The Star Online
    Saturday September 4, 2004

    PARIS: The children ensnared in the three-day hostage drama in North
    Ossetia will have probably suffered major psychological damage and
    some may never get over their ordeal completely, a French expert
    warned yesterday.

    Gilbert Vila, a paediatrician who specialises in child trauma at Necker
    Hospital, said a child subjected to a deep shock of this kind was
    likely to show a long range of symptoms, including anxiety, depression,
    turbulence at school and problems in his family relationships.

    "This case is of the gravest kind," he said. "The psychological
    problems will be major."

    Vila has authored several studies into the psychological impact on
    children who suffer a catastrophic shock, including a group of primary
    schoolchildren taken hostage at their school in the Paris suburb of
    Neuilly in 1993.

    Detailed research into Cambodian children who were tortured under
    the Pol Pot regime and Armenian children who survived an earthquake
    shows that, for most victims, the big symptoms will gradually ease
    but for a minority, the problems will be lifelong, Vila said.

    In those cases, 90% of the children showed significant trauma symptoms
    during the first few weeks after their trauma.

    That figure fell to 50% after six months, and to around 15% two or
    three years later. Some, though, were never completely cured.

    In the Cambodian study, "some children who were aged between eight
    and 12 years at the time of their ordeal were still experiencing
    problems at the age of 30," he said.

    More than half of the children in this category had problems that
    seriously hampered their daily life.

    As for very young children and babies, "we still lack data" on the
    long-term repercussions, said Vila, noting however that there had been
    cases of children younger than four "who showed the same post-trauma
    symptoms as (US) Vietnam vets." - AFP
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