Young People's Resilience in Contexts of War: A Three- Part Resilience Framework

2.1 Transcending Assumptions of Trauma

Children’s capacity to cope with the destruction and loss associated with war has been the subject of study since at least World War II (Freud and Burlingham 1943).

This trauma literature considers that children’s extended exposure to conflict will result in a range of mental health disorders, from somatic complaints to “altered levels of cognitive functioning and moral reasoning” (Ladd and Cairns 1996, p. 14) as well as “anger, despair, and severe psychic numbing” (Garbarino and Kostelny 1996, p. 33). Yet such presumptions of psychological trauma tend to obscure individuals’ highly varied and complex experiences of war (Summerfield 2001), while recent research on children’s experiences of war in places as diverse as Afghanistan (Miller et al. 2009), Sri Lanka (Fernando et al. 2010), the West Bank (Al-Krenawi et al. 2007), and Chad (Rasmussen et al. 2010) has shown that the correlation between war experience and the expression of trauma is far less signifi­cant than assumed.

South Africa (Dawes 1990) show that children are generally able to adapt to and cope quite well with the daily risks and adversities associated with political violence.

2.2 Resilience and Individual Agency

Resilience theory offers insight into adaptive processes and how individuals may experience better-than-expected developmental outcomes and how they are often able to cope effectively with protracted conditions of violence and adversity (Ungar 2005; Annan et al. 2006; Zraly 2008; Seymour 2012). Resilience theory considers the qualities, factors, and conditions which protect individuals from the develop­ment of psychopathology (Garmezy 1985; Masten et al. 1990; Richters and Mar­tinez 1993; Rutter 2007). Drawing on the field of epidemiology, where resilience is defined as “the factors that accentuate or inhibit disease and deficiency states, and the processes that underlie them” (Haggerty et al. 1994, p. 9), psychological resilience is defined as a dynamic process of adjustment that leads to a “relatively good outcome despite suffering risk experiences” (Rutter 2007, p. 205). While early resilience studies were focused on the situation of children growing up at the margins of Western European or American society (Elder 1974; Werner and Smith 1992), or in families where parents were mentally ill (Luthar et al. 2003) and dependent on drugs (Barnard 2003) or alcohol (Werner and Johnson 1999), their findings offer a useful framework for understanding how young people living through experiences of high risk are able to adapt and adjust effectively.

Three core aspects of resilience theory have been drawn upon to establish a theoretical framework for examining how young people cope with experiences of protracted structural and political violence: individual coping capacities, social support mechanisms, and processes of meaning attribution.

While young people are able to play an active role in their own circumstances and can thus contribute to their longer-term outcomes (James and Prout 1997; Boyden and de Berry 2004), in conditions of protracted violence and entrenched poverty, individual agency can only do so much, and thus the broader structures and condi­tions in which young people live need to be taken into account. Understanding young people's experiences of violence and conflict requires an examination of the spaces at the “intersection between agency and social forces” (Christiansen et al. 2006, p. 16), a consideration of how young people may take advantage of the new and changing circumstances presented by war (Arnfred and Utas 2007), how social orders may be remade (Richards 1996), and how otherwise proscribed life trajectories can be negotiated, navigated, and reconfigured (Vigh 2006). Although at times conflict may present young people with opportunities to shift confining social norms, the collateral damage of war and the tactics and mechanisms adopted by young people as they cope - or “deal effectively with something difficult” (Oxford Dictionaries nd) - may also contribute to longer-term harm (Seymour 2014).

2.3 Social Support in Coping with Conflict

Beyond the individual, the second aspect of the resilience framework presented here examines the role of social support and how one's social environment can contribute to or weaken individual capacities for adapting to risk and adversity. Healthy family functioning has been shown to help children cope effectively with conditions of adversity (Garbarino et al. 1991). For example, early psychological studies conducted among children during World War II demonstrated how family support and social attachment are essential for mitigating the impacts of displace­ment and separation from parents, with the negative effects of war on children only becoming “significant the moment it breaks up family life and uproots the first emotional attachments of the child within the family group” (Freud and Burlingham 1943, p. 149). In more recent studies, children have been found to be better able to cope with the impacts of political violence in a “context of healthy family func­tioning and parental well-being” (Garbarino and Kostelny 1996, p. 43) and sup­portive family environments (Qouta et al. 2008; Macksoud and Aber 1996; Betancourt and Williams 2008).

Although families are usually considered to serve as a source of protection for young people, resilience research also shows how family breakdown can present greater risks to the healthy psychological development and well-being of children (Elder 1974; Garmezy 1985; Masten et al. 1990; Werner and Smith 1992; Rutter 1994). For example, disorganized family environments, alcoholism, and disturbed parent-child relationships have a clear impact on children's development outcomes, although these impacts vary by individual, in some cases leading to the develop­ment of some type of psychopathology while in others leading to a “steeling effect” in which the child develops heightened capacities for coping (Rutter 2007). Studies among young single mothers in the United States have examined the impact of stress levels among mothers on children's psychological situation (Cramer and McDonald 1996). The stresses associated with family breakdown can have long­term impacts on an individual's life course, and resilience research shows how “serious disruptions in the early relationships with caregivers - in the form of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse - strongly impair the chances of resilient adaptation later in life” (Luthar 2006, p.

Specifically in contexts of violent conflict, the constraints and challenges asso­ciated with survival can distort “the powerful socializing influence of the family toward abusive and malign effects” (Ager 2006, p. 50). Multiple studies have shown how violence can negatively feedback on parental capacities (Buka et al. 2001; Lynch and Cicchetti 2002), with research showing that the stress associated with violent conflict and its resulting social instability may lead to an increased incidence of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of children (Triplehorn and Chen 2006, p. 228). For example, as seen among young people in Palestine, domestic violence can have an even greater negative impact on children’s psychological well-being than political violence (Al-Krenawi et al. 2007). In Sri Lanka, the complex feedback between political violence and family functioning is demonstrated via pathways through which child abuse is linked to paternal substance abuse which is in turn related to the levels of exposure to war-related violence (Catani et al. 2008). Often the conditions associated with or resulting from violent conflict - for example, political uncertainty, forced displace­ment, food insecurity, illness, and death - increase the strain on available local resources (Ager et al. 2005) and leave caregivers unable to meet basic physical needs of their families (Ager 2006). In such situations, it is possible that “systems that are normally sources of support and protection, such as the family, become sources of risk and developmental damage” (Boothby et al. 2006, p. 5).

Resilience is an inherently “intersubjective” and relational concept (Delage 2008, p. 8), and social networks beyond the family are essential for supporting effective psychological adaptation, providing individuals with a sense of their place in the world (Garmezy 1985; Gilligan 2001; Masten and Obradovic 2006). A broadened perspective on the social allows for appreciation that the capacity to effectively cope is “not a condition of individuals alone, but also exists as a trait of a child’s social and political setting” (Ungar 2008, p.

2.4 Meaning Attribution and Coping

The third element of the resilience framework considers how the meanings attrib­uted to experiences of violence can have an impact on coping capacities. Meaning attribution is defined as the processes through which “people think about their experiences and how they incorporate them into their overall schema of themselves, their environment, and their relationships with other people” (Rutter 2000, p. 674). The psychologically protective attributes of meaning attribution are evident in how individuals connect themselves with the world around them: “People are meaning­makers insofar as they seem compelled to establish mental representations of expected relations that tie together elements of their external world, elements of the self, and most importantly, bind the self to the external world” (Heine et al. 2006, p. 89). Along these lines, Viktor Frankl’s (2006[1959]) foundational studies with Holocaust survivors attempted to understand how people were able to construct and reconstruct meaning of their experiences in the concentration camps. One of his main conclusions was that a “will to meaning” is the primordial drive which motivates human experience. Others have shown that an inability to attribute meaning to life events leads individuals to become “existentially frustrated” and mentally depressed (Crumbaugh and Maholick 1964, p. 200). The attribution of meaning thus serves to protect individuals from the development of psychopathol­ogy following experiences of extreme adversity.

Psychologists working with young people in contexts of political violence have shown that their long-term well-being is directly linked to the meaning that they attach to their experiences (Rutter 2000; Boothby et al. 2006; Slone and Shoshani 2008; Barber 2009), with the role of political ideology being especially important (Garbarino et al. 1991). The sense of coherence and predictability between an individual’s internal and external environment which is essential for coping with adversity (Werner and Smith 1992) can be derived from political or religious ideology, especially in contexts affected by political violence (Punamaki 1996; Hart 2008; Barber 2009). A comparative study conducted by Brian Barber (2009) of the psychological impacts of violence on Palestinian and Bosnian youth shows how “an ability to understand the conflict (i.e., interpret, make sense of it) was a significant parameter that distinguished the degree to which youth felt injured by the violence” (ibid, p. 289). Through his presentation of narrative data, Barber shows how the political, social, and ideological meanings applied to the conflict in Palestine are psychologically protective, helping young people to effectively cope with political violence. In contrast, Barber finds that in Bosnia, young people do not apply meaning to their experiences of war; as a consequence “the lack of this explanatory information - in any of the variety of cultural, political, historical, or religious systems that it could have been packaged - was what frightened, embittered, and traumatized the Bosnian youth” (ibid, p. 302). Although in some cases the attribution of meaning can be protective to young people, in others it can be damaging to their capacities for coping with violence. For example, a study conducted with more than 3,000 Palestinian secondary school students demon­strates that exposure to events which are perceived as “humiliating” and “unjust” are correlated with increased reports of subjective health complaints (Giacaman et al. 2008, p. 563). Research by Wessells and Strang (2006, p. 204) explores how processes of “enemy imagining,” such as the portrayal of political opponents “as demonic, savage and inhumane,” can lead to increased fear among young people, as well as to the rationalization of acts of violence against others. In this way, political ideology can contribute to the hatreds and enmities that perpetuate violence. As with ideology, identity has been shown to interact with young people's coping processes in contexts affected by violence, often serving a psychologically protec­tive function and providing meaning and coherence to experiences of suffering and loss - even as it can also contribute to continued violence.

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