Society & Culture - Posted by Carla Capizzi-Rutgers on Thursday, August 23, 2012 15:49 - 1 Comment 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Mideast unrest spills into kids’ daily lives
Because political struggles can spill over into the everyday lives of families and children, intervention may be necessary in a number of different social areas to protect children from the effects of exposure to ethnic-political violence. (Credit: Jose Mesa/Flickr)
RUTGERS (US) — Ethnic and political violence in the Middle East can increase violence in families, schools, and communities, boosting aggressiveness in children, especially among 8-year-olds, new research shows.
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“The study has important implications for understanding how political struggles can spill over into the everyday lives of families and children, and suggests that intervention might be necessary in a number of different social areas to protect children from the adverse impacts of exposure to ethnic-political violence,” says Paul Boxer, associate professor of psychology at Rutgers and adjunct research scientist at the University of Michigan.
For a study published in the journal Child Development, researchers conducted three yearly waves of interviews with a large group of children and their parents living in the Middle East—600 Palestinian Arab families, 451 Israeli Jewish families, and 450 Israeli Arab families.
In the first wave, a third of the children were 8, a third were 11, and a third were 14. At each interview, children and parents provided information about the children’s behavior and exposure to family, school, neighborhood, and ethnic-political violence.
Ethnic-political violence was defined as loss of or injury to a friend or family member, experiencing security checks or threats, and witnessing actual violence (seeing someone held hostage, tortured, or abused), among other examples.
Palestinian children were at the greatest risk for exposure to violence and showed the highest level of aggressive behavior. Boys were at greater risk than girls for all forms of exposure to violence and for aggression. And the oldest children tended to experience more violence than the younger ones, but were not uniformly more aggressive.
According to developmental theory and the overall pattern of findings, younger children appear to be more sensitive to the impact of violence than older children. This chain of events was consistent across all three ethnic groups studied—Palestinian, Israeli Jewish, and Israeli Arab.
Other researchers contributing to the study, which was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, were from Bowling Green State University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Palestinian Center for Survey and Policy Research, and the New School for Social Research.
Source: Rutgers
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1 Comment
JohnWV
Besieged Palestinian Gaza is an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly…and, surprise, surprise – they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment? Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now under attack you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn’t possibly reach an accommodation. And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.