Young refugees arriving in Europe must reconcile with traumas

 

BRUSSELS, Belgium – Little Alan Kurdi became the icon for the suffering of children escaping war in the Middle East. But for many children and teens who have survived the hazardous journeys to Europe, what lies ahead may be a lifetime of trauma.

Inas, an Iraqi mother of three who fled the cycle of chaos and kidnappings in Baghdad to arrive in Brussels recently, told Rudaw that the hunger her children were forced to endure on their journey has left a mark on her two-year-old.

"My youngest son will scream if you go near him while he has food in his hand,” the mother explained. “He is afraid of being hungry again,” she said.

Hadil, a 25-year-old Iraqi mother who arrived in Europe with an eight-year-old son and six-year old daughter, recalled fears of drowning on the trip from Turkey to Greece.

"When the boat’s engine stopped and we started to take in water, we were so scared. My children and I started crying. They were screaming from fear. Now, my son has become a bed wetter,” she explained.

According to child trauma psychiatrist Eric Dachy, children can be overwhelmed by traumatic events, as in the case of the boy afraid to give up his food.

"They cannot regulate the emotion that overwhelms them at this very moment,” he said. "Children have a very good capacity for recovery and they are not necessarily more vulnerable to trauma. But when they have trauma they need to be treated because it may affect their development."

Dachy said that children and teens who have been traumatized badly need their families and a safe place to stay until they can receive proper therapy.

But among the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing wars in the Middle East and arriving in Europe last summer, many were teens traveling without parents or other relatives. 

"A teenager who traveled by himself and who has been facing very traumatic moments, who has been afraid to die, drown, shot, get lost or sent to jail should not be left alone with what he has gone through, because it will be absolutely impossible for him to recover from that by himself," Dachy told Rudaw at the offices of the Synergie 14 charity organization in Brussels.

"To be alone, to be lonely, to be isolated is definitely an aggravating factor," he added.

Since arriving in Brussels from the Iraqi city of Mosul, 16-year-old Ibrahim al-Daoudi says he is unable to sleep at night.

"I miss my mother and father," the strapping and fair complexioned Ibrahim told Rudaw, bursting into tears as he recalled his recent past.

He and his family left Mosul for Baghdad after the Islamic State group (ISIS) occupied his hometown in June last year.

Ibrahim, a Sunni Muslim, spent one year with his parents in the Shiite Kazimiyeh neighborhood of Baghdad before leaving Iraq in August with an uncle for the hazardous sea journey from Turkey to Greece.

He survived the boat crossing to Greece before traveling by land to Macedonia, where he and his fellow migrants had their first -- but not last -- brutal run-in with European police.

Ibrahim recalled how the Macedonian police clubbed him twice on his back and how he collapsed from the pain and the exhaustion.

Then, after they made it to Hungary after crossing through Serbia, the border police unleashed dogs their dogs and fired live bullets, wounding seven of his companions in the legs.

"Another 16-year-old boy who was traveling with me was bitten by a dog. The dog would not let go of his leg until the Hungarian police caught him and took him away," Ibrahim recalled.

"We were so scared we started running for a whole hour, only stopping for water," he added.

At one point in Hungary, he had to sever the last link with family because Ibrahim could not afford to travel with the same trafficker as his uncle.

In Brussels, Ibrahim told the doctor about his sense of humiliation, as well as the feeling of  suffocation and pressure that he feels in his chest.

Dachy said that, to be angry over the injustices he has experienced, is normal for Ibrahim. But that he must accept the way he feels to overcome it.

"When you feel that your self-esteem was injured there is a very important answer for that: all what you did was to survive and you did survive,” Dachy said about Ibrahim.