WASHINGTON – The fear and violence spawned by the sniper has become an everyday nightmare for most Washington-area residents – but for children whose families came to this country fleeing violence in their native countries it is a recurring nightmare.
Counselors who work with immigrant and refugee children from war-torn countries like Somalia, Afghanistan and El Salvador say that the shootings trigger a psychological recurrence of the traumas of war.
“With these kids this is what life is all about,” said Dennis Hunt, executive director of the Center for Multicultural Human Services’ International CHILD program.
His Northern Virginia program provides services in 29 languages to clients who have survived civil wars, incursions and military regimes and are susceptible to recurrent trauma. Hunt said that his most vulnerable clients come from Sarajevo, where snipers regularly picked people off in the streets.
“For them, it really is the reliving of a nightmare,” he said.
Children who experience violence that was not the precisely targeted, random shootings of the recent sniper attacks can still be shaken, counselors said. Even children born in the United States to refugees of war have shown signs of recurrent trauma.
“It is very hard to keep parents from contaminating children,” with their fears, said Gloria Elliott, a psychiatrist who serves as director of mental health services at La Clinica del Pueblo in Washington, D.C.
Elliott has seen numerous cases of intergenerational trauma in the Salvadoran community that she works with.
Parents are apt to react to the sniper attacks the same way that they learned to react to violence in their home countries, she said. One woman told Elliott that she wanted to go on the roof every time she heard the news, “because in my country when the militia came, the roof was the only place you could go.”
Hunt said these anxieties in children are often “reinforced by parents who are very discouraged about what is possible in life.” In the worst cases “it plays out in domestic violence,” he said.
The metropolitan region is home to many families who came to the United States to escape violence in their home counties.
Census figures show that 27 percent of the population is foreign-born in Montgomery County, where a majority of the shootings have occurred. In Prince George’s County — where the sniper shot a 13 year-old student — 14 percent of the population was born outside of the United States. Statewide, the figures drop to just below 10 percent.
Area schools have stepped up counseling services to accommodate the emotional fallout from the sniper shootings. Yet they still may not reach the children who need help the most, experts said.
Montgomery County’s school system, for example, has translated a parent tip sheet into five languages and posted it on the Web. But Elliott said that such initiatives fail to take into account socioeconomic factors affecting the community she serves.
“The problem with literature campaigns is that a lot of parents are illiterate,” she said.
Most parents are trying to cope with their own fears and help their children to do the same. But the signs of trauma in children vary by age and individual and may be difficult to recognize.
Many symptoms are psychosomatic, like loss of sleep, nightmares and stomachaches. Some children display regressive behavior like thumb-sucking. Older children and adolescents may manifest their trauma through violent behavior or substance abuse.
Hunt said that for children who are exposed to chronic violence, the experience of stress is not simply an emotional reaction. There are actual changes in their brain’s functioning.
“When a person experiences trauma chronically that person operates on a self-defense mode with adrenaline pumping . . . he becomes a somewhat different person,” he said.