ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book offers helpful insights that can inform future research and intervention with child soldiers, whether those involved in international paramilitary groups or those involved in youth gangs in the United States. Although distortions in meaning-making are a core target of evidence-based treatments for trauma in young persons, further advances in this book—particularly, but not only, in international and cross-cultural contexts—will require understanding and using to good effect the tensions between individual meaning-making and the social ecology of development. Cultural and community attitudes toward mental health and healing as well as the meanings given to the experience of war itself might be quite heterogeneous, and symptoms cannot merely be assumed to have the same connotations and significance across cultures.
