Authors: Akello, G., Reis, R., Richters A. Social Science and Medicine, 71, 213-2020.
In this highly thoughtful article, the complex social and contextual processes impacting upon children’s expression of emotional distress are carefully analyzed. Ethnographic data deriving from semi-structured questionnaires, interviews, workshops and participant observation with 9-16 year olds living in the Gulu district of northern Uganda, illustrate the high rates of exposure to extreme events common in that context: death and disease, sexual violence, child abduction and poverty. Interviews with adult key informants, such as nurses, teachers and clinical officers, allow the authors to examine parallels between the attitudes of the children themselves towards emotional distress and those of the adults charged with helping them.
Initial quantitative analyses highlight the resilience of these children – they were functioning well in their daily lives and their psychological distress was neither evident nor talked about. In contrast, the qualitative data derived from creating spaces in which children felt safe to talk about their experiences, revealed that high levels of emotional distress were present. The children identified various manifestations of distress such as sadness and deep emotional pain and were able to link these to particular traumatic events, to social injustices and to their, largely, physical symptoms. The focus of this article is on what factors contribute to the children’s reluctance to talk about their distress, and whether the self-help strategies they had developed were effective in alleviating it.
Four key processes that act to silence children are identified by the authors – victim blaming, self-blame, mimetic resilience (in which children are urged to consider others worse off than themselves) and mirroring resilience (whereby children protect those around them by refraining from expressing distress).
The author’s analysis of the interplay between these processes and the social, contextual and political forces that impact upon children’s choice of strategies make compelling reading. Their findings remind us of the complex forces at all levels that shape and influence expressions of resilience – and that resilience and emotional distress need not necessarily be mutually exclusive.
In accordance with Publisher permission conditions, we have withdrawn this article one calendar year after posting it on our website. The article can be found at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleListURL&_method=list&_ArticleListID=-226019902&_sort=r&_st=13&view=c&_acct=C000228598&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=64df3c6a79a56ce68770b5d24fe7cf22&searchtype=a
Dr. Linda Dowdney
Editor Psychosocial webpage
March, 2012