in·tern·ment
inˈtərnmənt/
noun
- The state of being confined as a prisoner, especially for political or military reasons.
“He was threatened with internment in a concentration camp”
I’d like to start this with a caveat: I am a licensed clinical social worker, of 15 years experience, who has literally taken children from parents and taken those parents to the High Court, to have the best interests of the children met. I have personally removed children from abusive parents, and I have taken children to a place of safety following parental suicide. I have done so in accordance with the existing law, and under the instruction of research driven intervention; intervention that acknowledges removing children is inherently harmful, and must only be done in the most dire of circumstances with clearly defined plans in place. I am speaking from a place of direct and intellectual understanding.
We are currently seeing the internment of children, en-mass, in the United States as families attempt to cross the boarder — some illegally and some within legal means as set out by law. We have political discourse that is attempting to lay blame at the feet of either party; the politics of immigration policy are not my direct concern here, though they are of relevance. I’d encourage everyone to read the reporting of other countries in conjunction with a U.S. news source to better understand these policies.
The U.N. Counsel has called for an ‘immediate halt’ to the internment and separation of migrant children as they cross the boarder. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child came into effect September 2nd 1990, giving universal legal rights and protection to all children throughout the combined United Nations. Currently the U.S.A is the only member country to have not ratified the agreement, meaning that the U.S.A is the only country (it used to be U.S.A, Somalia & Sudan) that does not have to abide by international law, as it pertains to children. U.S. lawmakers state that ratifying the convention would mean ‘impinging’ on U.S. sovereignty.
The call to ‘immediately halt’ the internment of children, essentially by the rest of the world, is a moot point. We simply do not have to follow instruction, direction, or request. We are left with our own policy, our own law, our own ethics, our own values, and our own ability to advocate for or against what we (with tax-payer money) are doing to children who seek asylum and assistance in our country.
I have read and heard many people (lay and political) speak about the ‘resiliency’ of children — that despite being removed from their parents the children appear to be thriving. They are seen to be playing and drawing, seeing to be taken on field trips and they are allowed to speak to their family members. The children are resilient and the situation is temporary.
I have come to understand that applying the term resilient to children is largely ignorant. Children appear to be resilient, but what we (as adults) interpret as resiliency in children is actually the most primitive of coping skills.
We might say that an animal who becomes caught in a snare and chews off its own leg, only to find new balance and return to an augmented yet functional life, is demonstrating resiliency — and we would be right. An animal that chews off its own leg, yet keeps going, is transcending circumstances and adapting to thrive onward. An animal must do this; it has no other choice as it is driven by instinct, by primal survival. It may learn to avoid future traps, but it will never come to understand exactly what the trap is. It will also not take being caught in a trap personally — animals do not have the capacity to process information in this sense. We anthropomorphize them and we believe they do, but they do not — they experience a continuum of circumstances, referent to their own survival, and they adjust and augment accordingly. It is only in the most extreme of conditions that prolonged stress and discordance creates permanent psychological distress in animals.
I have come to understand that we fall into a similar situation with children; we (generally) consider their psychology from an adult perspective, we label them as resilient when in actuality they are resorting to primal survival drives as they lack the emotional and intellectual capacity to truly process their experience. We know that pre-frontal cortex development finalizes in our mid 20s, and that this area of the brain is responsible for affect regulation and social condition/operant behavior. The ‘executive functioning’ present in this region of the brain helps us to differentiate between causation, to plan for effect, and largely to learn how to not take things personally. As we develop this region of the brain we learn that being ‘referential’ is not the same as being ‘central’ — essentially having a functional resiliency to understand that experiencing something is not exactly the same as a phenomena occurring specifically because of us.
Children largely lack this inherent capacity — actually they absolutely lack this capacity intellectually because we have to explain to them (repeatedly) that the world does not revolve around their needs. We teach children the necessity to develop ‘executive functioning’ because it serves a social purpose, it does not serve us very well in survival, which is why that part essentially ‘goes offline’ when we flick into survival mode. We teach children the existence of another option, of another mode of interpretation, but this is not inherent to their condition, and it exists because we nurture it to exist. Children trend toward homeostasis as a matter of survival, not as a matter of intellectual functioning. Saying children are ‘resilient’ is the same as saying they are ‘malleable’ — it is a consequence of a lack of executive functioning; as much a flaw to them as it is a benefit.
Children who experience high levels of distress, danger, stress and uncertainty are faced with a number of veiled psychological ‘choices’, though these occur in a largely unconscious manner and are somewhat indicated by pre-existing conditioning.
I have personally removed children from their homes and taken them to a place of safety — sometimes this is a family member, but sometimes it is a to a stranger’s house. I remember initially being shocked at how ‘resilient’ these children were. Once the circumstances were explained to them the children largely went through a period of distress and upset, but then returned to a place of balance. They began asking me questions, or telling me about their favorite things, or invited me to play, or engaged in drawing.
What actually is happening here is that children are resorting to their primary survival drives, they come to realize that exhibiting distress is not eliciting a change, and they are sufficiently stable in their psychology that a schism does not occur, so they adjust to the circumstances. They augment their reality and they attempt to thrive. We might even see a child become defiant, refuse to talk or to eat, in an attempt to elicit change, to enact power — but void of significant psychological distress the child will always eat and will always seek out social interaction, because it is in their nature to do so. It is literally coded into their survival drive. What I witnessed was primitive resiliency, not intellectual resiliency, and children trend toward primitive resiliency because the alternative is unmanageable psychological distress.
Infants who grow up in dangerous settings learn to mitigate unmanageable psychological distress by augmenting their behaviors to elicit the greatest chance of survival — they learn to become very quiet, or hyper-vigilant, or more vocal — and this test/retest mode of experiential conditioning shapes the child they become. We know that children who are unable to augment their behaviors to match the environment tend to not thrive; they trend toward withdrawal, dysfunction, abnormal growth, severe psychological distress and ultimately consequential-death. Children who cannot adapt literally cannot survive. Children’s brains direct them to augmenting behavior and affect — this is instinct driven, it is not directed by intellectual resiliency.
Children who are exposed to prolonged circumstances of stress are subject to ‘toxic stress’ — children who are exposed to repeated circumstances of stress and who are not able to regulate through a stable and loving relationship are also subject to the impact of toxic stress. During toxic stress children’s stress-systems become overloaded, leading to negative physical and psychological outcomes. Some of these outcomes follow children throughout their life-course. Toxic stress comes from prolonged and or repeated instances of uncertainty that includes direct and indirect threats/acts of: violence (to self or others); loss of sovereignty (rape and molestation); loss of safety (home, shelter, food); loss of agency (choices, freedom); loss of caregiver (drugs, domestic violence, crime, neglect, kidnapping, work, death).
Children who are presented at boarders have already begun to experience toxic stress, they are likely to have originated from environments of poverty, uncertainty, violence, age-inappropriate responsibility, physical stressors, and psychological triggers that have caused them to use all of their primary coping skills, strategies, and drives to sustain themselves up until this point.
Children who are presented at boarders for asylum are already at risk children — they are at risk of: psychological distress; physical, emotional and sexual abuse; severe psychological deterioration; maladaptive coping strategies (ticks, self-harm, self-neglect); stress-system overload (hyper-vigilance, anxiety, depression); loss of family of origin; loss of primary care-givers; loss of sense of self; loss of self-worth.
Children who present at borders have already experienced stressors to their brain architecture, to their ability to construct, referrer and build upon experiences in order to create adaptive and ‘resilient’ models of action and reaction — essentially children who experience prolonged uncertainty, coupled with extreme stressors, are weakened and prone to under-development and or maladaptive development. This is usually seen as a return to prior functioning states (regression) or an augmentation to a more primal state (aggression).
Children who demonstrate resiliency in circumstances of toxic stress are children who are pushed to a limit — the ‘veiled choices’ they have are driven by factors that are not readily available to their conscious mind. It may appear that the children are ‘making their own choices’ and that they are ‘doing OK’ but in reality they are responding to the capacity of their stress system in managing the circumstances. While this may appear as resiliency it is only true in the same sense as an animal responding to its own environmental stressor. Resiliency here is a code word for survival drive. Children’s appearance of resiliency in situations of high and toxic stress can be seen as a primitive ‘reaction-formation’ — where one takes agency and formulates a contradictory or opposite response to circumstances because the true response would cause psychological distress. In children this is the realm of neurotic behavior, of dissociation and displacement. In children this is the way they cope with circumstances that would otherwise cause a schism in their psyche.
We might imagine the afore mentioned animal in a snare as an extreme case, that it doesn’t refer to migrant children as they are not ‘pushed’ to such a severe augmentation or action in order to survive — but we can also look to the passivity in animals, how when trapped an animal will often become limp, will stop moving, will even ‘play dead’ — this is so that an animal can conserve its strength and make an attempt to flee when it is able. A trapped animal will fall into flight, flight or freeze. Animals do not take these situations personally, they don’t wonder if what happened to them is because of who they are, they wonder if it is because of what they have done — they work to resolve patterns and to formulate new alternatives to survive. This is the ‘living evolution’ of their survival drive.
Children do not operate with a singular mode of resiliency, children correlate their experiences and process them through reference to self — they formulate ‘being’ and ‘doing’ as part of experiencing, they internalize their environment and attempt to ‘master’ it in the most simplistic of ways. This leaves children vulnerable for harm. Children are as malleable as they are resilient, and in adult terms children are neither of these things — not as we understand them. When we see resiliency in children it is because the alternative is psychological collapse — they augment their action and they regulate their behavior as a means to survive, not because they have ‘figured out’ an adaptive strategy.
Interned children are faced with a limited number of loaded choices — they can either attempt to elicit change through rage (screaming, crying, fighting), they can attempt to elicit change through escape (fleeing, withdrawing, psychological collapse), or they can attempt to elicit change through submission (behaving as resilient children). The majority of children will fall into submission, not because it is the most logical thing to do, but because it is the instinctual thing to do when faced with overwhelming circumstances that are beyond their control and reasoning. The majority of children will fall into submission because they are subjected to abusive circumstances and the ‘little animal’ inside them tells them to ‘play dead’ until they have a chance to escape, or until their psyche breaks.