But the plight of children struggling with severe emotional trauma in the world's war zones and poverty-stricken communities remains largely hidden, despite ongoing efforts by groups like the U.N. children's agency UNICEF to reach out to them and their families.

Amanda Melville, a UNICEF child protection officer whose background is in social psychology, said that there are no figures on how many such children now exist in the world "because it's very subjective".

Melville, who has been doing field work for UNICEF for the past six years in places like Haiti, Indonesia, Iran and Palestine, told IPS that "reactions (of children in war zones) can vary widely. Psychologically, they can be withdrawn while some will be rebellious. Some boys are forced to become the head of the family because the father has been killed, and these boys don't have the maturity."

Unlike the Virginia Tech shooter, however, experts say that only a small percentage seek to take revenge against their perceived enemies. The concept of revenge, it seems, is one fostered in adulthood, not childhood.

"They perceive that revenge, in and of itself, is negative. Through maturity and exposure to life outside the (violent) event which they processed, they're able to figure out ways of framing their experiences without violence or revenge," said Dr. Charles Figley, a psychiatrist who runs the Psychological Stress Research Programme at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

One of the last major reports submitted by Kofi Annan in the closing days of his tenure as U.N. secretary-general dealt with the subject of children in war zones. According to the report, from 1996 to 2006, two million children were killed in conflicts and six million were injured. As a result of the report, in late November 2006, the U.N. Security Council issued a ban on recruiting children as soldiers.

What are some of the mental conditions experienced by such children? Dr. Teri Elliott, an Alabama-based psychiatrist who has worked with traumatised children in Bosnia and Hercegovina, said that many experience flashbacks and anxiety.

"Many of these children were born in war zones," she said. "If you've grown up in a war zone, you're used to it. How a child handles a war-zone experience also depends on how the children's parents handle it. The better the parents do, the better the kids do, and that is applicable no matter where the country is located in the world."

Figley said that the most widely seen mental illness afflicting such children is post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Such things as bright colours or loud noises can be alarming to these children," he told IPS. "Much of how these children deal with these experiences depends on the age at exposure, but it also depends on how they look at the world after the event has taken place."

Figley, himself a veteran of the U.S. war in Vietnam, noted that "for some countries, mental illness is a social abstraction. What is important is the cultural conception. For example, in about one week from now, I'll be in Kuwait. How Kuwaitis view the world and also the subject of mental illness is different than that of the United States."

Melville explained that "the kinds of problems for these children vary from area to area. In Palestine, where I did work, the children are under a lot of social pressure to discuss these issues. So we (UNICEF) created a team mentoring programme. There would be discussion groups that discussed other things than the political situation. They (the children) wanted to discuss violence among their peers."

She said that the UNICEF unit she works with encourages "play therapy, then talk therapy, and sometimes, depending on the age of the child, group therapy."

And while many U.S. citizens may believe that children who become socially or psychologically disturbed due to growing up amid extreme violence is an international problem, there is evidence that such a phenomenon exists in the nation's capital, according to a psychiatrist who has done field work on the subject.

Dr. Rona Fields, an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Howard University in Washington and a psychiatrist with decades of experience in this field, told IPS that she has done research on children who witnessed gruesome killings while walking to and from school in the District of Columbia "and some of these cases had similarities with children in other countries who have seen what happens in war."

"Poverty and ongoing violence exacerbate the situation with these children, and some of what they see every day resembles what a person would see in a war zone," Fields said.

Source: IPS - Inter Press Service News Agency