I sit, listening to the hum of the coffee machine and checking my email. Editorial routine: a press release about a new niche perfume, an invitation to some festival, and in between – a report from the journal Nature Communications. And at that moment I break out in a cold sweat. You understand the absurdity of the situation when you are editing a column about choosing a perfume, with the numbers on the screen: 470 million children in the world are growing up in zones of armed conflict.
An international team of researchers from the universities of Berlin, London and Greenwich did what science does best: turn human grief into data. They surveyed 35,000 adolescents and young adults in nine African countries to confirm one grim truth.
Mathematics of the obvious
Did it take a massive research grant and years of work to prove that violence begets violence? It sounds like a question from someone used to looking for a loophole. But I look at this data and think: did we really need empirical verification to understand the basic mechanics of trauma?
Researchers have concluded that political violence (what we usually call war, coups, or terror) is directly related to domestic violence. Physical, emotional, and sexual. And it is not committed by people in military uniform, but by relatives, teachers, and neighbors.
Why do such obvious things only become apparent when they are packaged in a spreadsheet? The answer is unpleasant but pragmatic: because institutions don't fund compassion. They need evidence. Save the Children has suspected this connection for years, but without percentages and graphs, their words were just emotions on paper. Now they have numbers.
The half-life of humanity
Here lies the most interesting and perhaps most frightening detail of this study. The researchers found no significant link between war and domestic violence in the short term. That is, if the conflict occurred a couple of years ago, there is no direct correlation.
But if you take a fifteen-year period, the statistics start to scream. Even in countries where political violence seems to have declined (like Côte d'Ivoire or Namibia), the echoes of war still smack children in the face with their parents' hands.
Why does this happen? Probably because the human psyche has inertia.
As politicians shake hands and sign peace agreements, the cameras turn off. The journalists leave. For the world, the war ends.
But for a man or woman who has lived in survival mode for years, it simply goes into a chronic phase. Anger, helplessness, and fear don't go away, they get bottled up. And over time, they find the nearest, least protected target—the child.
The war does not end, it simply changes scale: from state to kitchen.
The problem of “next steps”
The study’s authors, Drs. Tilman Bruck and Olusegun Fadare, rightly point out that this report is important for the development of future youth protection measures. And this is where my inner critic starts asking the same uncomfortable questions.
What exactly are they referring to? The data is collected. The correlation is proven. What's next?
The problem with such fundamental works is that they often stop at the stage of stating a fact. The scientists did their job flawlessly. But how do you convert an article in Nature Communications into real protection for a teenage girl? For her, the crisis is not about finding her own identity or detoxing from social media. Her crisis is about the inability to return home without fear.
So far, this research seems like a perfectly accurate diagnosis without a prescription. Collecting data on past violence is a colossal task. But the real challenge is how to break this chain of pain transmission. And statistics do not provide an answer to this question. Because it is impossible to pass a law against the traumatized psyche, and you cannot put a police officer in every family that has experienced conflict.
Life goes on, divided into parallel worlds. In one of them we discuss trends in what to smell like, and in the other – the consequences of gunshots. And the only benefit of me writing about this now is probably to remind you: peace treaties stop the destruction of infrastructure, but they do not repair people. People will have to be repaired for a very long time.
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⚡ Readers' Pulse
Is it possible to break this chain of transmission of pain, or are we doomed to live with the consequences of gunshots for generations to come?
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❤️🩹 Healing is possible ⛓️ The trauma is too deep 💬 I have a different answer
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❤️🩹 Healing possible 0% ⛓️ Trauma too deep 0% 💬 I have a different answer 0% 💡
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