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 on Friday.
Gilbert Vila, a paediatrician who specialises in child trauma at Paris’s Necker hospital, said a child subjected to a deep shock of this kind is likely to show a 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-school children 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 about 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”, Vila 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 that there had been cases of children younger than four “who showed the same post-trauma symptoms as [United States] Vietnam vets.” — AFP