I'm Chris Bosley. I'm the Acting Director for the Program on
Violent Extremism here at USIP. I'm Heidi Ellis. I'm the Director of the Trauma and Community
resilience Center at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Brandon Kohrt, Director for the Center for Global Mental
Health Equity at George Washington University. . My name is Sarhang Hamasaeed. I work as director of Middle East Programs
at USIP. It's been nearly four years since Baghuz which
is the last ISIS stronghold in Syr
ia fell, and tens of thousands of people streamed into
places like Al-Hawl in Northeast Syria. Just under 50,000 people from over 60 different
countries remain consigned to displacement camps and detention centers in the region,
where living conditions are dire and ISIS, views the population over half of whom are
children under the age of 11, as sources to reconstitute its ranks. Here and in too many other contexts worldwide
where we need to prevent more people from engaging in extremist violenc
e. We simultaneously need to support those who
have been affected, children who have been trafficked into the conflict and find viable
exit ramps for those who have already engaged in it. When I think about the children who are in
Al-Hawl, I think about two different types of problems that are going on. And the first set is around
the kinds of experiences that they're having and by that I'm thinking about exposure to violence, traumatic loss,
grief, the sorts of um trauma experiences that are
i
mpacting their lives. But the second set of problems that I think
about is what they're not experiencing. So here are kids who are moving through their childhood without
what I think of as some of the basic scaffolding that supports child development. So we think of kids as going to school and
coming home to families where there's a sense of safety and stability, having access to health care, food, water,
a sense of security when they walk outside their door. Without those kinds of experiences p
lus the
traumatic experiences these kids are having they're really carrying a double burden. In child development we have a concept called
developmental cascades and the idea here is that all these different parts of development
build on each other so that if something early on gets off kilter, a child lacks a sense
of safety, a child doesn't learn when they need to be learning, those impact all the
later stages of development. So the longer these kids remain in Al Hol
the more we're placing the
m at risk for these developmental cascades. If we're able to shift things, create a sense of safety, move them to a place
where they can begin to have those experiences that childhood needs, we can begin to see the positive impact roll
forward. Everyone throughout their lifetime is vulnerable
to psychological distress and mental health conditions. When you're someone who's been involved in
extreme violence, as either as a perpetrator or a survivor or in a community that's been affected you're ev
en more
vulnerable to psychological distress and a host of mental health conditions. When we think about these issues it's a whole
of society approach that we need. Everyone in a society needs greater awareness
and understanding about trauma the impacts on the body and on the mind. In addition there's increasing interventions
that can be done by people who don't have a mental health background. Even someone with
a high school education can be trained in a period of about 2 to 3 weeks to provide
some basic types of psychological
support and those can be very impactful and in some ways when an intervention is delivered
by a community member it works even better because it's somebody who knows your life
knows your community knows your family there's a shared lived experience. When we do that though we also need to realize
that some individuals may have higher levels of need that a community member may be
unable to independently support. So we can also support the integration of
mental he
alth into Primary Care Services for children and adolescents and also to adults
as well. In Iraq USIP is working with government and
civil society leaders to support uh return rehabilitation and reintegration of Iraqis
to areas liberated from ISIS. We have been using our problem solving dialogue
to remove communal and institutional barriers to return, specifically reducing stigma. This year we have really focused our emphasis
to introduce the Rise Action Guide, R.I.S.E standing for uh
Rehabilit
ation Reintegration through uh Individual Societal and Structural Engagement, So that we help uh our government and civil
society partners to have a a general framework that looks at the whole of government whole
of society response to this problem set. And in that context we are particularly help
helping raise attention to the behavioral mental health and psychosocial aspect of return
and reintegration. We are making preparations to um provide more
detailed training on the mental health and psy
chosocial support to those specialized
teams and resources permitting we hope to provide that training and capability to actors
in the communities of return in the next year.
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