How child soldiers heal after the trauma of war
Shadows into Light
Theresa S. Betancourt
Harvard Univ., $35
For more than two decades, Theresa S. Betancourt has followed the lives of children (now adults) who returned home after being forced to fight in the civil war that ravaged Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002.
Thousands of children unwillingly participated in the violent conflict as soldiers, spies and laborers. Many took part in attacks on their own neighbors and relatives, many faced sexual violence, many witnessed unspeakable atrocities. In her new book, Betancourt, director of Boston College’s Research Program on Children and Adversity, shares what she has learned about the factors that have helped some of these people recover and even thrive.
Shadows into Light is both heart-wrenching and heartening. It tells the stories of the trauma these children faced, their reunion with family, their reintegration into their communities, and their ongoing struggles and healing.
Sahr, for example, who was kidnapped as a toddler and spent four years with rebel fighters, returned to rejection and isolation. He was teased and criticized by community members, and his tendency to lose his temper reinforced people’s suspicions that he was dangerous and perhaps permanently damaged by his experience.
Then there is Isatu, age 12 when rebels attacked her village, capturing her and her sister. Isatu’s experience upon her return was much different. Initial support from her family and community, combined with her own motivation, led to more help from an extended network. “Isatu’s perseverance generated additional ripples of support, soon to become a self-fulfilling virtuous cycle,” Betancourt writes. Isatu is now a doctor.
With great care, Betancourt weaves together portraits of the people and the country with her own backstory and research effort. One research finding is the importance of family, community, and societal and cultural influences on a person’s trajectory — what psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner described as “social ecology.”
Betancourt and her team were surprised that girls tended to face more stigma and have poorer mental health immediately after the conflict than boys, but the girls did better in the long-term. Some may have benefited over time from “the ties that bind women and girls to one another.”
Betancourt puts her own learnings in context with the existing literature on childhood development and trauma. Readers learn about research on intergenerational trauma in Holocaust survivors, studies of children leaving Romanian orphanages and the healing power of narrative storytelling among the Lost Boys of Sudan. She also addresses head on the controversy around the concept of post-traumatic growth, essentially the idea that suffering can beget success.
Betancourt has a clear passion for the topic and people. Yet the book avoids sentimentality. There are horrors, but the aim is never to horrify. There are triumphs, but they don’t fit the superhero trope or any other simplification. If anything, Betancourt’s writing is measured and pragmatic. “Everything we have learned about resilience in the face of extreme risk,” she writes, “has helped us to develop and test group mental health interventions for youth, as well as family-based preventive interventions to break cycles of violence across generations.”
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