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Guest Article... |
Dark Secrets!
by
Elizabeth Lee Vince Professor of Human Development
Co-Director, Family Life Development Center
Cornell University
OUR CHILDREN LEARN THREE DARK SECRETS FROM THE DISASTER OF SEPTEMBER 11
Many children will mark September 11, 2001, as the end of innocence. On that day many children learned some dark secrets about the human experience that as a child psychologist who deals with trauma and violence around the world and at home I would prefer they not know, not yet, perhaps not ever. Memory of the emotions of trauma does not decay; it remains fresh. Once you have the feeling of danger, it takes very little new threat to sustain it. For most children in the United States the world is a different place than it was on September 10. It is a world exposed to American kids as never before. Our kids are little anthropologists as they watch and listen to what goes on around them. What are they learning? They are learning that the world is a very dangerous place.
Safety flows from a feeling of security. Of course we as adults know that there is danger in the world. We know that there is cancer, that there are serial killers loose among us, that horrible things happen every day. But we also know that children need childhood. They need to be sheltered from the dark side of life until they are grown strong enough to recognize it and not be traumatized by it. When adult society is working well we conspire to keep some dark secrets from children, because we owe them that innocence. In my travels around the world and here at home I pay special attention to three dark secrets.
The first of these three secrets I call Snowden's Secret. The reference is Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, which tells the story of American bomber crews during World War II. During one of his plane’s missions Yossarian receives a message over the intercom that another member of the crew -- Snowden -- has been hit by anti-aircraft fire. When he goes to help Snowden and opens his flak jacket Snowden's insides fall out on the floor.
This is Snowden's secret, that the human body, which appears so firm and durable, is really only a fragile bag filled with gooey stuff and lumps, suspended precariously on a very fragile skeleton. Violence reveals this secret, and it is traumatic in the sense of being an experience "from which you never fully recover." It requires all of your emotional, spiritual, and philosophical resources to cope with Snowden's Secret, as people who work in emergency rooms or at Ground Zero in New York will attest.
Children learn Snowden's Secret from experiencing -- particularly witnessing -- violence, when the human body meets bullets and knives, when plans crash into buildings and people are crushed by the impact and the falling debris. And this process of witnessing need not be first hand. When I traveled to Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War on behalf of UNICEF, I interviewed kids who learned Snowden's Secret first hand. They had seen atrocities -- shootings, hangings, beatings -- and some of them had unwittingly brought down violent trauma upon themselves -- like the boys I met who had been playing with a hand grenade until it exploded and tore open the chest of their cousin. Many of these children were experiencing the package of symptoms we call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
That these children were traumatized was no surprise. What was surprising, however, was that a year later, when more systematic follow-up research was conducted, another group of Kuwaiti children was identified as demonstrating trauma symptoms. These children had not witnessed atrocities firsthand. They had been shown videotapes of Iraqi atrocities in an effort to indoctrinate them politically about the origins and meaning of the Iraqi invasion. And seeing the atrocities on the video had an unfortunate side effect -- they had learned Snowden's Secret by remote control. Now our children know it the same way.
The second secret is Dantrell's. Dantrell Davis was the little boy who lived in Chicago until he was shot to death on his way to school in 1992. As he walked the 75 feet between his mother and the school where his teachers awaited he was shot in the back of the head and killed. His death sends an important message to other children: adults can't protect you; you are on your own. And it is a message that many children learned with particular poignancy on September 11, as they watched the plans crash into the Trade Towers, over and over again, and again as they saw adults watch helplessly as the buildings collapsed minutes later.
If Snowden's Secret teaches children something disturbing about the human body, Dantrell's Secret teaches them something at least equally disturbing about the social fabric, and about adult authority in particular. It teaches children that you may be left alone in the face of threat. Alone, because adults cannot protect you.
One of the truisms of research on children growing up in war zones around the world is that the first line of defense against fear and trauma is parental protection. As one observer put it after examining children in England during World War II, "children measure the danger that threatens them chiefly by the reactions of those around them, especially by their trusted parents and teachers." This has certainly been my experience traveling to a dozen war zones around the world in the last two decades. Children enter into a social contract with adults. The terms of this contract are roughly these: "I will obey and trust you, and in return you will protect and care for me." Dantrell's Secret voids this contract.
Milgrim’s Secret is the third secret learned by children exposed to traumatic violence via the images of September 11. The reference here is to psychologist Stanley Milgrim's research in the late 1950s and early 1960s on the willingness of normal adults to inflict torture on others if they are ordered to do so or if they believe there is some other justification. Before he conducted his research, Miligrim asked samples of adults if they thought normal young adults were capable of sadistic behavior against defenseless victims. The respondents overwhelmingly replied, "it is not possible." Then Milgrim did the studies and found that most people were wrong. The subjects in his study were quite capable of inflicting horrible pain and suffering if he ordered them to do so. It was possible.
And that is precisely Milgrim's Secret: when it comes to violence, "anything is possible. Angry fanatics can take control of an airplane and crash it into buildings with the intention of killing people whose only "crime" is to be at work, doing their jobs, in their home town. Children learn it, and they and the larger community are jeopardized by that learning because kids sometimes react to this knowledge in ways that are self-destructive or anti-social. They are angry and sad to know this secret.
How many ways are there to kill and maim a human being? The news confronts children with the varieties of death and dying. Is there any form of mutilation that is out of bounds and beyond human possibility? Survivors of Nazi death camps, the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge terror in Cambodia, all the individual serial killers of the world know that the answer is "no." Now children and youth who watch TV know too. Anything is possible.
We will be a long time helping our children deal with what they all now know.
Based upon Parents Under Siege: Why You Are the Solution, Not the Problem, in Your Child's Life (NY: The Free Press, 2001) by James Garbarino and Claire Bedard.
Copyright 2001 James Garbarino. All rights reserved
James Garbarino is the author of .
Click here to read the first chapter.
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