Credit: Алесь Усцінаў from Pexels
Morgan Sherburne, University of Michigan
Nov. 24, 2023
Thousands have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war since Oct. 7. And watching, and experiencing, all of this violence unfold are Palestinian and Israeli children.
Researchers Rowell Huesmann and Eric Dubow of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research have studied the effects of exposure to political conflict and war violence in Israeli and Palestinian children since 2007. They followed 1,500 kids in three different ethnic subgroups: Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank.
The children (8-year-olds, 11-year-olds and 14-year-olds) were interviewed by Huesmann, Dubow and colleagues in annual waves the first three years, and then a final time four years after the third interview. The researchers found among both Israeli and Palestinian kids, exposure to ethnic political violence is related to aggression, desensitization and post-traumatic stress symptoms in both groups of children.
"The more the kids were exposed over the first three years, the more aggressive they were. The aggression we initially measured was toward one's own peers," Dubow said. "It's this idea we're always talking about, which is that exposure to violence, and in this case it was definitely political violence, leads kids to have a certain way of thinking about aggression and violence.
"It leads to normative beliefs that it's OK—it's sanctioned by the highest levels of society, by your government. It leads kids, when they start to think about how to solve situations, to come up with aggressive solutions to problems, and it leads them to become emotionally callous to violence, desensitized."
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READ MORE: MedicalXpress