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Introducing PACEs Connection's new resource for children and families displaced by war and violence

 

Although war, violence, and displacement have occurred as long as humans have engaged in conflict to solve their issues, it was the war in Ukraine that prompted us to create a resource guide for children and families displaced by war and violence. Estimates announced in May 2022 put the number of forcibly displaced people at 100 million, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “The number of forcibly displaced people worldwide rose to 90 million by the end of 2021, propelled by new waves of violence or protracted conflict in countries including Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Nigeria, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2022, the war in Ukraine has displaced 8 million within the country this year and forced around 6 million to leave the nation.”

The resources in this new guide—Children and Families Displaced by War and Violence— share truths about the consequences of trauma. Also included are resources to help providers of services, caregivers, parents, and children themselves help each other begin the process of healing and starting anew.

We encourage you to explore the resources and share them with colleagues and friends who have either experienced war and violence or are in a position to offer support and assistance to those who have.

We know the resources are not comprehensive, and we would love to hear from you if you know of additional items that should be added. Please keep in mind that resources should not be specific to any single conflict or region and that we are looking for timeless pieces, such as research articles, handbooks, toolkits, and websites with tools that providers, caregivers, and families can use. Please email rmaravilla@pacesconnection.com or naudage@pacesconnection.com with suggestions.

Thank you to Carey Sipp, Mindy Atwood, and Natalie Audage for their contributions to this project.

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Albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, there’s an inhumane devaluation by external-nation attitudes toward the daily civilian lives lost in long-drawn-out devastating war zones and famine-stricken nations: the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers. Often enough, those people will eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news. ...



Meagre Worth Measured Then Coldly Calculated Into Column Inches



With news-stories’ human subjects’ race and culture dictating

quantity of media coverage of even the poorest of souls,

a renowned newsman formulated a startling equation

justly implicating collective humanity’s news-consuming callousness

—“A hundred Pakistanis going off a mountain in a bus

make less of a story than three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.”

According to this unjust news-media mentality reasonably deduced

five hundred prolongedly-war-weary Middle Eastern Arabs getting blown

to bits in the same day perhaps should take up even less space and airtime.

So readily learned is the tiny token short story buried in the bottom

right-hand corner of the newspaper’s last page, the so brief account

involving a long-lasting war about which there’s virtually absolutely

nothing civil; therefore caught in the warring web are civilians most

unfortunate, most weak, the very most in need of peace and civility.

And it’s naught but business as usual in the damned nations

where such severe suffering almost entirely dominates the

fractured structured daily routine of civilian slaughter

(plus that of the odd well-armed henchman) mostly by means

of bomb blasts from incendiary explosive devices,

rock-fire fragments and shell shock readily shared with freshly shredded

shrapnel wounds resulting from smart bombs sometimes launched for

the stupidest of reasons into crowded markets and grade schools …

Hence where humane consideration and conduct were unquestionably

due post haste came only few allocated seconds of sound bite—a half minute

if news-media were with extra space or time to spare—and one or two

printed paragraphs on page twenty-three of Section C; such news

consumed in the stable fully developed, fully ‘civilized’ Western world

by heads slowly shaking at the barbarity of ‘those people’ in that

war-torn strife which has forced tens of thousands of civilians to post haste

gather what’s left of their shattered lives and limbs and flee …

Thus comes the imminent point at which such meager-measure

couple-column-inches coverage reflects the civil Western readers’

accumulating apathy towards such dime-a-dozen disaster zones

of the globe, all accompanied by a large yawn; then the

said readers subconsciously perceive even greater human-life devaluation

from the miniscule ‘hundreds-dead-yet-again’ coverage.

Consequently continues the self-perpetuation of the token-two-column-inch

(non)coverage as the coldly calculated worth of such common mass slaughter,

ergo those many-score violently lost human lives are somehow worth

so much the less than, say, three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.

Perhaps had they all been cases of the once-persecuted suddenly

persecuting or the once-weak wreaking havoc upon their neighboring indigenous

minorities—perhaps then there’d be far more compassionately just coverage?

The human mind is said to be worth much more than the sum of the

human body’s parts, though that psyche may somehow seem to be of

lesser value if all that’s left is naught but bomb-blast-dismembered body parts.


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