M
I met Maurice Berger in 2011 during a conference about childhood traumas.
This psychologist studied the effects of childhood violence on millions teenagers since twenty years.
Since ten years he maked a link between jihadist thinkings and childhood trauma.
This interview in a French newspaper summarize his observations.
(This paper was choose before Strasbourg’s assault)
Not all jihadists have the same psychological profile. Some, leaders, theorize, direct from abroad, recruit. They can be graduates. No one is directly risking his life. Others are used by previous ones to kill and be killed. They often have one thing in common: tormented childhood. Mohamed Merah, Medhi Nemmouche (the killer of Brussels), the Kouachi brothers, Hayet Boumeddienne, were all be placed in an institution at least once during their childhood.
I was responsible for 35 years of the only French child psychiatry service dedicated to the care of extremely violent children. Our research shows that the violence of a subject is most often constructed during the first two years of his life, when he cannot put words on what he feels and records in the rough repetitive emotional trauma.
There’s two kinds of traumas:
- One: abuses witnessing. The most violent children are not those who have been hit directly, but those who have been exposed to scenes of domestic and fraternal violence.
- Two: negligence. The one on childrens we do not talk with, we do not smile at, we do not cuddle, we do not play with, children who lives in an unpredictable environment. For example children raised by a parent suffering from serious psychiatric disorders.
These traumas prevent the subject from constructing aminimum sense of identity. Child needs examples: a calm, predictable adult who sends him a reflection of his facial expressions, his gestures, his emotions. Otherwise, caught in such a maelstrom, the child will looks for an external model that will serve as a backbone. The most attractive are the sectarian models with certainties about “good and evil”.
In addition, the hypersecretion of cortisol, due to repeated stress, reaches the brain, especially the amygdala, place of regulation of aggression, and the control of emotions that is built mainly between eight months and two years old.
For these very violent childrens, we’re impressed by the lack of protection they have suffered, the lack of a serious evaluation of their emotional development, and by insufficiently protective judicial decisions, until their violence lead to late and uneitable placement.
“Terrorized children, terrorizing adults”
Political will equal to the one used to uproot frailadolescents from jihad calls would be necessary to protect early childhood from irretrievable trauma. In 1992, I wrote: “For the next forty years, we will continue to” fabricate “thousands of future adults who will turn to various forms of violence.” We are there: insufficiently protected and terrorized children have no choice but to become terrorists.
My point of vue is not absolutely predictive. It means that certain situations should be considered very early as particularly at risk. It does not insinuate these murderers, or those who take advantage of their fragility to propose a barbaric model, incarnation of absolute evil.
More informations and details:
Maurice Berger, pédopsychiatre : « Voulons-nous des enfants barbares ? », Dunod, 2008.