A situation as horrendous as war can invoke a remorseful scenario for anybody, be it, adults or children. However, children undoubtedly the worst hit in the lot. Women are a close second. With people dying all around, blood spilling all over, and corpses floating from one place to another, it will be abnormal to not be affected by this dreariness.
When you see your loved ones entering the jaws of death in front of you, a helpless situation arises. Even in these helpless situations, there is nothing that a child can do. When a repeated call for help goes in the drain, and blood replaces the pure entity of clean water, a child’s life is doomed forever.
The after-effects of war range from inevitable physical changes to emotional and mental impacts. Let us go through brief underlining of various impacts by putting special focus on children.
Physical Impact
The most harrowing effects of war without a doubt revolve around the physical body of the person. Two sides engaged in war do not let anybody escape. When in war, people lose their ability to think rationally. All they become is bloodthirsty and revengeful. For them, while in war, they become bereft of any emotions and thus, do not spare anybody who comes ahead. Even newborn children are not pardoned.
Due to war and its terror, numerous children either die due to gunshots and bombs or become living corpses for life. For instance, little girls are raped in the name of revenge and slaughtered to teach a lesson to the other side.
Children are maimed, or injured in such a way that they are put to bed for the remaining years of their lives. The physical harming is so deeply intense, that a child’s mental health is also traumatized by the same. Just imagine a ten-year-old child losing his eyesight or any of his body parts in war. What was his fault?
Image by Annette Jones from Pixabay
Mental Trauma
It is often said that a person’s physical well-being in one way or the other accounts for a person’s mental well-being. During the tender growing years of a child, children are most connected to their parents and loved ones. They crave the love, attention, care, and empathy that their family members give them and at the time of war this inflow of compassion is disrupted.
This can happen due to many reasons. Either parents get busy in finding a subsistence for their running their families in such times, or they die while fighting the battle of arms. In any case, children lose the affection of the ones they love the most, and henceforth, it arouses a sense of loneliness and depression.
By viewing such horrific scenes of killing and murder, they tend to lose their sense of mental sanity and hence slide into the rampages of helplessness, loneliness, and depression. All these feelings take a massive toll on their mental health and disrupt it on a large scale.
Images of their parents dying and suffering tend to always remain intact in the back of their minds. Due to this, most of the war orphans suffer from, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Emotional Stress
When war strikes in, a lot of things go on. Death and dreariness are the primary attacks. Apart from this, there are a lot of hits that one gets owing to a war-like situation. In this situation as well, children are the worst targets. Imagine a child losing his ability to walk or losing his cognitive capacities. What will he go through?
A person’s entire bodily equilibrium is connected in all ways. Just like the physical and mental inter-connection, the emotional and mental connection is also thoroughly connected. If a person is mentally unwell and in a very bad mental space, there is no way that he can feel good emotionally. He must go through numerous emotions at one point and can many times have an emotional breakdown.
When things do not appear right and everything seems to fall apart, feeling emotionally drained is obvious. Even feeling no emotion at all is quite right. Children who have barely seen life and who barely know what emotions are can often feel overwhelmed. This emotion of feeling emotionless can even amplify because they have nobody to calm them down. This is an exact situation that arises out of war where people start to lose all their caring and warmth for the world. A perfect example of being emotionally numb.
Social Baggage
War is a different story altogether. However, children also have to face social disequilibrium. Their social structure gets disrupted and they are thrown into a social space where they feel lost. For suppose, let us talk about a little girl who was raped at the time of war. She did not have any fault in whatever happened with her. However, society has put her under a scrutiny lens and judged them for all of it.
Henceforth, due to the judgmental view length of the society, she will never gain back her earlier social acceptance. This is just one out of the many lives that get affected socially due to war battles and clashes. Sometimes, children also lose their entire community and culture in wars, and getting it back in refugee camps or other adverse places is nearly impossible.
It is a complete loss for people, be it in terms of social diaspora or emotional and mental health structures. Everything gets badly harmed in situations like military action and war.
Conclusion
War has never been a solution to anything. It has only been an enabler to cause disruption, death, and disaster. The amount of havoc it creates in the life of children is beyond the measure of horrific. It produces a sense of fear and deprivation in the child forever.
Even if children survive the horrendous stages of the war, they struggle to live happy lives. They lose everything they have and their life becomes full of shallowness and darkness. Their life gets finished at the very moment a war starts.
Children start belonging more to the dead category rather than the living boundaries.
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