ABSTRACT
Children are particularly vulnerable to traumatic events because their brains are developing at a rapid rate. A child’s brain is much more malleable to experience than an adult brain. Although experiences can alter an adult, they can literally shape a child. In childhood, over onehundred billion neurons are organised to sense, process, store, perceive and act on external and internal information (Perry et al, 1995). The more frequently a pattern of information is experienced (whether it be soothing, nurturing, frightening or shameful), the more the brain ‘hard wires’ these patterns, creating a ‘processing template’ through which all new information is fi ltered (Perry et al, 1995, p. 275). Because of this process, even a single traumatic incident can have a profound effect on a child’s development because a child’s brain may generalise aspects of a trauma — ‘a man with a moustache hurt me’ — to other situations
— ‘if one man with a moustache can hurt me then any man with a moustache may hurt me so I need to avoid or not trust all men with moustaches’. Louise Nicholas tells how she was raped by a policeman in uniform when she was thirteen years old. From that day on she says she felt fear every time she saw a blue uniform (Nicholas, 2007). As far as the brain is concerned, the trauma can then be re-stimulated or triggered by ‘similar’ stimuli — any male with a moustache or a blue uniform — even in the absence of actual further incidents of abuse. In this example, the child may grow up generalising their fear or dislike of men with moustaches or all men in blue uniforms.
