Effects Of War Trauma Research Articles

Women and the Trauma of War in Beirut Hellfire Society: A Gender Study

This article examines the traumatic effects of the Lebanese civil war on women in Rawi Hage’s novel Beirut Hellfire Society (2018). It explores women’s madness and gender identity disorder as two effects of war trauma and examines how indulgence in orgiastic acts of self-annihilation and sexual transgression is a means of countering this trauma. The article also depicts sexuality as one cause of women’s exclusion in war making their bodies simultaneously vulnerable and defiant to all forms of sexual assault exacerbated in times of war. The gender studies approach that focuses on women identities in real wars is used to analyze the women characters in this novel. It aims to show how these traumatic effects and the civil war repercussions pertain to the gender hierarchy of power and the gendered social constructions prevailing before and not during the civil war.

The protective role of maternal posttraumatic growth and cognitive trauma processing among Palestinian mothers and infants

War survivors use multiple cognitive and emotional processes to protect their mental health from the negative impacts of trauma. Because mothers and infants may be especially vulnerable to trauma in conditions of war, it is urgent to determine which cognitive and emotional processes are effective for preventing negative trauma impacts.” This study examined whether mothers’ high posttraumatic growth (PTG) and positive posttraumatic cognitions (PTC) protected (a) their own mental health and (b) their infants’ stress regulation and sensorimotor and language development from the effects of war trauma. The participants were 511 Palestinian mothers and their infants living in the Gaza strip. The mothers were interviewed in their second trimester of pregnancy (T1) as well as when the infant was four months (T2) and twelve months (T3). Mothers reported posttraumatic growth (PTG; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996) at T1 and posttraumatic cognitions (PTCI; Foa et al., 1999) at T2. They also reported their exposure to traumatic war events both at T1 and T3 and described their mental health conditions (e.g., PTSD and/or depressive and dissociation symptoms) at T3. The Infant Behaviour Questionnaire (IBQ) was used to measure infants’ stress regulation at T2 and sensorimotor and language development at T3. The results, based on regression analyses with interaction terms between trauma and PTG, showed that high levels of traumatic war events were not associated with high levels of PTSD, depressive, or dissociation symptoms among mothers showing high levels of PTG. This suggests that PTG may protect maternal mental health from the effects of trauma. In turn, positive maternal PTCs appeared to protect the infants’ stress regulation from the effects of war trauma. The study concludes by discussing ways to develop and implement preventive interventions for mother-infant dyads in war conditions.

Mapping Memory: Moving Between Trauma and Terror in The Yellow Birds

ABSTRACTKevin Powers’s elegiac novel The Yellow Birds (2012) formally maps the bereavement of a modern American soldier serving in the Iraq War. Powers’s novel charts the psychological cartography of Private John Bartle, illustrating a journey that renders both the mental and physical effects of war trauma. Through Bartle’s nonlinear narratology, Powers critiques the experience of bereavement while also adumbrating the difficulty of representing that experience. This article investigates the ways in which the expressions of bereavement in the novel expose the very terrors and traumas that define post-9/11 America. Bartle’s narrative illustrates a soldier who becomes a victim not only to the violence of a seemingly endless war but also to the social and political deceit that defines the United States’ contemporary war politics. Therefore, The Yellow Birds conveys a dislocated narration that stresses both a soldier’s individual mourning and the national mourning that characterizes the United States’ role in the Global War on Terror.