Political violence gets under kids’ skin’and may stay

ANN ARBOR'When children are victims of political violence, they tend to become more aggressive with members of their own peer group, and that aggression tends to linger as they age, according to a University of Michigan study. When children encounter violence in their lives, whether at home, through television or their neighborhoods, they tend to behave more aggressively. When these children encounter political or cultural violence, this violence tends to affect them in addition to other kinds of violence they may encounter, say researchers at the U-M Institute for Social Research. "When kids are exposed to violence over time, they develop a way of thinking, a way of accepting violence as a norm," said Eric Dubow, research professor at ISR's Research Center for Group Dynamics. "They begin to develop perceptions about the world as being a hostile place and develop scripts for behaving aggressively." The study examined groups of children in Israel and Palestine over a period of six years, and was based on in-home interviews with 600 Palestinian children and 450 Israeli Jew and Israeli Arab children. Children aged 8, 11 and 14 were interviewed once a year for three years, until they were 10, 13 and 16. The children were interviewed again when they were 14, 17 and 20, but that final assessment was not the subject of this research report.