This can lead to extremes of anxious avoidance or of risk-taking behaviour, as well as to depression, sleeplessness and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. This in turn impacts upon children’s ability to pursue their needs (for support or resources) later in life, which can in turn impact upon their mental health, creating a vicious cycle of marginalisation. But war instills in countless young children – either through the violent death of a parent, through physical injury, or the loss of safe spaces to sleep and play – the fear that nobody can in fact protect them.

Healthy emotional development relies upon us knowing that we can trust our parents and caregivers to protect us from harm and meet our basic needs, which is the basis for secure attachment and growing independence. There is evidence that this affects the individual’s educational progress more significantly even than being exposed to violence directly in later years.įor the youngest children, exposure to violent conflict can produce long-term ill-effects. But research shows that, when a pregnant woman is subject to violence, it can have an impact upon the unborn child’s physical and cognitive development. Children in many parts of Syria, at war for nearly 11 years now, are sometimes described as a ‘lost generation’ when it comes to schooling.

We know that war impacts children’s access to education, but it also hampers their learning from the earliest stages of life. Here are five you might not have considered: The effects upon children of living with violent conflict are numerous, devastating, and not always obvious. As of 2018, 357 million children (nearly one in six children in the world) were living in conflict-affected contexts. No child should have to experience the horrors of war, but so many do. Mark lays out some of the lesser-known dangers to children affected by the conflict in Ukraine and in all the other active conflict zones around the globe.

Non violent solutions to armed conflict