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Photo by Christopher Soldt |
Theresa S. Betancourt is the author of the new book Shadows into Light: A Generation of Former Child Soldiers Comes of Age. She is the Salem Professor in Global Practice at the Boston College School of Social Work.
Q: Over how long a period did you research this book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: Shadows into Light describes a study that has now been underway for more than 22 years--following the lives of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone from the end of its civil conflict in 2002 to the present.
The study provides rare insights into the ways in which not just personal trauma but also family and community relationships shape life outcomes and mental health over time.
Over the years we have learned a great deal about resilience. We have come to see resilience as a process, not a trait of individuals.
Our study reflects how the long-term psychosocial adjustment and social reintegration of young people who have been through some of the worst trauma imaginable is shaped by both individual factors—age, gender, violence exposures, and individual trauma histories but also by layers of risk and protection operating at the level of the family, the community, and the post-conflict environment.
We advocate for more family and community-based approaches to integration for children. The lessons learned in Sierra Leone are timely and applicable as well to other forms of family separation.
Intervention responses often fail to consider longer-term follow up and the need to attend to the post-conflict environment. Yet, the nature of family and community relationships in the post-conflict environment appears just as important if not more important than what children experience during the war.
Additionally, how these relationships play out can also impede or accelerate access to life opportunities such as getting back into school or finding gainful employment. Our findings are valuable for understanding the processes which shape trajectories of risk as well as resilience over time.
Relatedly, this book emphasizes a socio-ecological perspective on reintegration and recovery from war-related trauma and loss with particular attention to family and community relationships as well as processes underway at the societal and policy level
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Even in the darkest of times, some glimmer of light –even hope—can be found. I chose the title Shadows into Light as I began to reflect on how the lives we followed have unfolded over the years.
These young people faced some of the most intense horrors imaginable, but in the end, it’s their spirit to persevere and their ability to look forward and make something anew of their lives that stands out the most.
As a scientist, studying the processes that can be targeted by programs and policies is also of keen interest to me, so the reference to bringing discovery of phenomena “into light” was also appealing.
Q: The scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. called the book “a gripping human drama and a brilliant, passionate call for change commensurate with hope.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I do agree with Dr. Gates’s assessment that the lives of these young people truly are astounding and that it is time for a change in how we think about helping survivors.
As the book details, the contributors to resilience are ultimately quite complex, but also filled with potential for re-envisioning programs and policies that can make a difference. While we cannot undo the traumas of the past, there is much to be done about the post-conflict environment.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: It has been common for many to assume that children who face the extreme trauma of war are simply “lost generations.”
But what if changing our ways of thinking and reconsidering our approach to bridging the humanitarian, peacebuilding, and development nexus might allow many of these young people to not just recover, but thrive?
It takes all of us to help others get through extreme challenges; we all have a part to play to support children and ensure that they grow and thrive.
The book is meant to have appeal to a broad readership interested in risk and resilience in the lives of children as well as the fields of child development, global public health, psychiatry, social work, law, humanitarian response, and appeal to other human service professionals.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My team and I are highly motivated and taking action to expand on our research and implementation science initiatives on a wider scale.
We have now advanced several partnerships to expand reach and adapt the Youth Readiness Intervention (YRI) for other groups of youth affected by war and violence in other settings, including young people in Colombia and South Sudan as well as Somali refugee youth residing in Kenya.
In Sierra Leone, we are continuing the intergenerational study of war and now expanding our research to examine parent-child relationships and parenting among adults who experienced extreme trauma in childhood.
We have been able to engage in very exciting community based participatory research with war-affected populations, training individuals from the lived experience of refugee resettlement to be researchers in their community as well as co-developing family-based prevention models that can be done by peers to support newly resettling families.
In other settings, such as post-genocide Rwanda, we have used implementation science methods to scale out home visiting interventions to promote health parent-child relationships and reduce violence by linking evidence-based programs to social protection systems and baking in methods for monitoring and improving quality.
Our home-visiting intervention in Rwanda is now on course to reach more than 10,000 families. Such things are possible when working in partnership with local actors and growing the leadership of individuals with a lived experience.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Given that, in our lifetime—with wars from Gaza and Ukraine to South Sudan and Yemen, we are now facing the largest humanitarian disaster since World War II, it is imperative that we now to shift our focus and build on the growing body of research on the effectiveness of interventions to now begin to ask research questions about testing implementation strategies, building systems where they have not existed, and strengthening those community and natural support systems that do exist in ways that can reach the staggering numbers of war-affected children, youth and families, facing forced migration, trauma, and lives disrupted by war globally.
From much earlier on in the acute humanitarian crisis we need to be thinking of the future needs and considering how to build on the political will and resourcing that does exist in acute emergencies to develop deployment-focused interventions that are feasible, acceptable, effective and scalable in resource constrained environments…and envision in the aftermath of destruction and trauma to be “building back better” and strengthening trauma-informed systems and services for children, youth and families globally.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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