ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the fate of nearly 80,000 Finnish children transferred to families in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway during the course of World War II. The great majority of these ‘war children’ travelled back to Finland in the years directly after the war. The author analyses the psychiatric responses to the question of war children, focusing on the period after their homecoming. He argues that when the profession eventually acknowledged war children as a special group, this came to challenge the more socially prejudiced and/or biology-based explanations of mental illness and health. The way psychiatrists evaluated and assessed many of these children’s cases reveals a continuity of older ideas, and many sources show varying degrees of socioeconomic bias. The chapter shows how the supposedly ‘scientific’ objectivity of the experts in fact often betrayed a certain social prejudice, lack of understanding, and in some cases simply repulsion, as they described the situation from their own perspective which was very far from the grim reality that the parents of war children often had to face.
