By Sabina Kadic-Mackenzie, Associate partner, Charlotte Street Partners
IT’S a big ugly world out there. and our ability to navigate it successfully can be determined to a large extent by our childhood experiences.
For the lucky ones, those formative experiences were generally happy and will have enabled youngsters to thrive into well-functioning adults. Unfortunately, less fortunate people are haunted by their childhood memories, traumatised by them throughout adulthood. I am Bosnian – and I know too many of the latter.
Having just finished translating a book written to help child refugees of war deal with their trauma, I was struck by an article I read about a mystery illness that has affected the children of asylum seekers in Sweden. I was interested to learn that over the last two years there have been reports of hundreds of cases of perfectly healthy children suddenly withdrawing completely, ceasing to walk or talk, or even open their eyes. They’re not always new arrivals, either. In many cases those affected have lived in Sweden for years, have learned the language and have apparently adjusted well to their new, Nordic-lives.
Experts say this Resignation Syndrome is a way for these children to protect themselves from what they’ve experienced. And yet it seems these migrant children have become political pawns in Sweden, much as immigrants are in many other countries around the world.
Whether you’re here in Scotland or in Sweden, the derogatory accusations hurled at asylum seekers and refugees are very similar. They are often said to be trying it on, lying about their age; they’re stretching our schools to breaking point; they’re pushing crime rates up. This to me is fake news, and the intention of these headlines appears to be to cast suspicion on these children and their families, only adding further to the agony they are trying to escape.
The question so rarely asked, however, is why 50 million children across the world are still forced to flee their homes in this, the 21st century.
According to the Refugee Council, world events often correlate directly with asylum applications; last year people were most likely to seek refuge here from the Middle East, desperate to escape on-going conflict and the murderous advance of Islamic State.
And, while the pictures we may see on TV perhaps make us think that most refugees are coming to Europe, it simply isn’t true. The UN’s Refugee Agency estimates that nearly 90 per cent of the world’s refugees are sheltered by developing countries.
But go back and think about your own childhood experiences. While they certainly play a part in building our resilience in adult life, they can’t protect us from losing everything in the future.
Always remember that many asylum seekers and refugees who come to our shores once thought of themselves as the lucky ones. My parents, who are very much in the “happy childhood” category, certainly never thought they’d be forced to leave our home, their successful careers, family and friends, to leave that all behind at a moment’s notice. When we left Bosnia in the 1990s, first my mother and my sisters and I escaped on a bus, and only much later was my father able to leave the country. Most of all, they never imagined in the years before that time that their three children would experience the trauma of war at home and then the stigma of being refugees abroad.
Given my experience of fleeing a war-torn country, where would you imagine I’d rate my childhood on the ever-so crude scale? Well, despite everything, I undoubtedly class myself as one of the lucky ones.
I also know not to take any of it for granted.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here