War-affected children and psycho-social rehabilitation

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the concept of psycho-social and psycho-social programmes emerged and evolved. Further, this paper expects to identify the basic elements in a psycho-social rehabilitation programme, by using global level discourse regarding the effects of war on children and how they can be rehabilitated. According to literature, the impact of war on children was mainly given attention after Second World War and initially more attention was given on negative psychological effects. But later it was found that, due to war children faced another social risk as well and the different viewpoints which exemplified based on research findings on ‘war-affected children’ caused to re-strategize psycho-social interventions. As a result, two main components were identified as important dimensions when conducting a psycho-social rehabilitation process in war context. First is the diagnosis of the impact of war on affected children. Second is analysis on ‘social context’, which refers to the immediate physical and social setting, including culture, religion, traditions, beliefs, people, structures and institutions. Finally, this study concludes that in order to heal war-affected children in a successful way three main components should be taken into account. As the first component the psycho-social rehabilitation programmes should ensure that they attend to the most vulnerable children who are in need of psycho-social care. The second component is resource adequacy and the third component is selection of suitable rehabilitation approaches and methods.