ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the range of psychological reactions to serious violent and traumatic events in which children may be involved. Children, like adults involved in traumatic events, can react with symptoms of psychological distress. Sleep disturbance, the loss of newly acquired developmental skills, concentration difficulties and memory impairment may all be particularly prominent in children who have experienced trauma. Reactive attachment disorders, or degrees of separation anxiety, may result in clinging behaviour, crying on separation, hostility to the parent or carer, or sleeping, toileting and eating disturbances, especially in younger children. Traumatic experiences become encoded differently from non-traumatic events, since only part of the traumatic experience can be processed with the ‘conscious’ focal attention required for explicit memory processing. Children are the innocent victims of adult violence and man-made and natural disasters and appear to be at the same or higher risk of post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychiatric disorders compared with adults.
