All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

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support, caregivers being in actual control of
the children’s daily life, and having a group
goal that drives the war or conflict.
How Art Supports Children
in War Zones
Drawings from the Spanish Civil War (1936-
1939) to the present, a period of over 70
years, show that through the visual arts,
children illustrate and bring meaning to their
experience of war. The act of drawing taps
imagination, which is a vital developmental
expression and tool throughout childhood
that helps support the child’s effort to make
sense of the world in which she lives and
her place in it. It can be of particular value
to children as they try to make sense of
their experience of living in a war zone. In
addition to artwork providing a means for
finding comfort and achieving a level of
understanding of the catastrophe of war, it
can provide a means for the child to express
inner turmoil and explore ways to cope with
threats to her psychological well-being. How
does this work
First, child art achieves self expression and
its components: emotional release and a
sense of one’s individuality. Second, child
art can provide a means of coping through
mental exploration of imagined solutions to
extremely threatening events.
Self Expression and Affirmation
of Individuality
An important characteristic of child art is
that it is not tied to language. A child can
express confusion and fear nonverbally.
Huxley (1939) writes of drawings by those
evacuated to the safety of children’s camps
during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939):
“Their drawings are more eloquent than
their words, better than their syntax (n.p.).”
Of Sudanese child refugees, the Associazione
Volontari per il Servizio Internazionale
(AVSI) (1998) reported that drawing was
part of the recovery process: “The words
and drawings flow from what is uppermost
in their minds; they receive no direction
(n.p.).”
The child’s psychological needs for
emotional release and affirmation of
individuality are given little room during
the chaos of war when avoiding danger
and meeting basic physical needs demand
intense attention from both children and
adults. Child artwork offers a possibility
for meeting these two psychological needs.
It can offer emotional release, for example,
by locating fear in a dreaded object such as
a monster, creating frightened self portraits,
or by depicting explosions and destruction.
It can affirm individuality by providing a
means for the creation of one’s own unique
personal world on paper, preserving a sense
of self, of being “me,” the person of action,
who makes the picture.
In the early 1940s, Jewish children deported
to the World War II concentration camp
Terezin, northwest of Prague, drew over
7,000 pictures under the direction of a
fellow inmate, the artist and teacher Friedl
Dicker-Brandeis. Milton (2001) addresses
the way in which such child artwork was
able to alleviate the constant awareness
of adults and children that their lives
were under the complete control of their
captors. She argues that in Terezin, Dicker-
Brandeis used art as an outlet for children’s
imaginations and as an escape “enabling
them to gain control of their own personal
space and time” (p. 30). That is, controlling
a part of one’s life, what one draws, shows
children that they remain vital and capable,
an alternative perception to the reality of
having all aspects of their lives determined
by the enemy in charge of the concentration
camp. These children were provided
moments of freedom to explore themselves
and their inner world. They also signed
their artwork, which recognized agency, the
exercise of individual will, of being effective
in having an impact on the material world.
Mental Exploration
With art materials, children can re-envision
their world in ways that portray timeseparated
events and confusing experiences.
For example, drawings can combine
elements of the child’s life before war with
life under attack. Drawing 1 showed a
transitional moment: a peaceful town under
aerial attack, mothers walking holding a
child’s hand, two wounded or dead among
the neat buildings, one building shattered, a
child covering her eyes. It is an illustration
of the child selecting elements that are
incongruent, in this case, peace and aerial
attacks, which can form a step in meaningmaking
by first portraying the incongruency.
This makes available to the child the
discordant elements which had disturbed her
understanding of what she perceived.
Children also can depict imagined scenes of
defeating the enemy. Two drawings from the
Spanish Civil War collection demonstrate
this approach. In Drawing 13, the enemy
portrayed as an animal is actually leashed
and under a child’s control. In Drawing 15,
enemy airplanes are targeted. These uses
of art for mental exploration illustrate the
potential value to the child of a preferred
personal story, explanation or wish. This
can be soothing to a threatened child.
Children’s war drawings selected for this
paper illustrate the clear ability of children
to depict what they see and recall, create
visual representations of their war-based
fears, and use the medium as an ally in their
effort to use their minds and imagination to
envision and cope with the atrocities that
they have witnessed.
References
Apfel, R. J., & Simm, B. (1996). Minefields
in their hearts: The mental health of
children in war and communal violence.
New Haven, CT: Yale.
Associazione Volontari Per Il Servizio
Internazionale (AVSI) et al. (1998).
Where is my home Children in war.
Kampala: AVSI: Gulu Support the
Children Organisation (GUSCO): Red
Barnet: United Nations Children’s Fund
(UNICEF): World Vision.
Fox, C. (2001, Dec. 16). Artist gave hope to
children during Holocaust, Visual Arts
Review. Retrieved from http://www.
jewishatlanta.org/page.aspxid=26053
Gangi, J.M., and Barowsky, E. (2009,
August). Listening to children’s voices:
Literature and the arts as means
of responding to the effects of war,
terrorism, and disaster. Childhood
Education, 85(6), 357-364.
Huxley, A. (1939). Introduction, They still
draw pictures. Southworth Spanish
Civil War Collection, Mandeville
Special Collections Library, University
of California, San Diego. Retrieved
from http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/
tsdp/
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011