| JOURNAL |

The Curious Case of War Refugee Children 

Published 11/5/15

Refugee children awaiting departure to a
safer region in war-torn Ukraine
Image source: The New York Times

Like a Homeric epic that weaves threads of despair with threads of triumph, the story of war refugee children forms a checkered tale. According to an extrapolation of the brain-plasticity theory, a widely-held theory that asserts that the younger the brain, the greater its capacity for adaptation, war refugee children occupy a peculiar position of frightening vulnerability and extraordinary possibility. With their highly impressionable minds, war refugee children prove to be prime targets for both the forces of ruin and the forces of repair.

Due to the plasticity - and thus vulnerability - of an undeveloped brain, poverty, violence, and loss, all tragic by-products of war, can wreak great havoc on the mind of a child, impairing its development and predisposing it to numerous deficits. For this very same reason, however, psychologists and psychiatrists can work great repair on the traumatized mind of a child, reestablishing its equilibrium and precluding it from sustained trauma. Just as how a slab of clay can be shaped for the very same reason that it can be flattened, the mind of a child can be rescued for the very same reason that it can be damaged.

Though despair looms large over the thousands of war refugee camps that dot the European and African continents, hope remains. Just as how, according to literary luminary J.R.R Tolkien, "not all who wander are lost,” not all who are broken are beyond repair.