Name: What I’ve learned about PTSD in children from war zones | The Global Story
Uploaded: 2026-03-17T16:33:02.000Z
Duration: 22 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

How does living through war affect children?

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It's a question that Fergal Keene, one of the BBC's most experienced foreign correspondents, has been wrestling with for almost 40 years as he's been reporting from some of the most violent conflicts around the world.

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It's as pertinent as ever as we see the conflict unfold over Iran.

UNICEF says that more than 1100 children have been killed or injured across the region.

And Fergal's come to understand the impacts of trauma on young minds the hard way.

He's experienced his own mental breakdowns and been diagnosed with ptsd.

And so we sat down with him to understand the lessons he's learned from the BBC.

And welcome to the global story on YouTube.

Before we start today's episode, it contains some distressing details of children's experiences in war.

Also, we spoke with Fergal before the situation in the Middle east seriously deteriorated.

So Asma caught up with Fergal a second time to get his latest reflections.

And you'll hear that in the second part of the episode.

Fergal, you've written this quite gripping article and quite, quite overwhelming article for the BBC about how living through conflicts affects children both in the short term and later in life.

Why did you decide to write that story right now?

I've been sort of covering the conflict in Gaza since the Hamas attack on October 7.

And it became clear to me that all of the trauma that I had witnessed being inflicted on children in the previous more than three decades of reporting as a BBC war correspondent, I was seeing it again day after day.

And it kind of moved me to reflect on where we were now in terms of the kind of legislation that would try and protect children, the kind of care that should be available to them, and

the consequences, principally the consequences of that kind of daily experience of trauma, where you had Hamas and the Israelis battling it out in a largely civilian environment, where you had children suffering because of Israeli blockades, which, you know, made drastic limits on food, which put severe limits on medical care, the destruction of so much of the health care system in Israeli attacks, the Israelis say that's because Hamas are hiding in hospitals.

But whatever the consequence of these has been to create an environment where children have lived from day to day.

So many of them wondering if they were going to wake up the following day.

Today, there are kids dying in wars in Ukraine, there are kids dying of diseases in Gaza, and

And they are people mostly they're people who live beyond our concern in the West.

Furgle, what made you realize that there were these untold stories of children, children's stories in particular, that you.

That you wanted to tell, that you felt, you know, you ought to tell these stories of children being traumatized by experiencing war?

I grew up in, I suppose, what people would call a broken home.

And that was a home that was disrupted by alcoholism, where I was traumatized by the presence of my father's alcoholism.

And it was an environment where sudden disruption was always possible.

Fear was constantly present, tension was constantly present, and

where I learned very early to be quiet, not to speak up.

You know, I was feeling ashamed because of how alcoholism was affecting my home.

And it's a very common thing in the children of addicts or children who experience that kind of severe dysfunction in their home environment.

And so I was conscious when I went into journalism of feeling a needle and later, as my kind of social conscience developed a responsibility to tell the stories of those who could not readily find access to media, who could not readily express themselves in a manner that.

And those were particularly children, you felt.

Yeah, yeah, in a manner that adults would stop and listen to.

It's about listening to their stories and allowing them to be told with a very important caveat.

And that is, of course, that in the telling of the story, you don't re.

And so for nowadays, I will not interview a child without having carefully gone through the ground beforehand with their guardian, hopefully with a mental health practitioner.

And when we finish the interview, we always now make sure there is someone there who is.

Who is in a position to counsel the child and comfort them.

Fergal, in the mid-90s, you reported from Rwanda in particular, this horrendous genocide where 800,000 people, including children, were massacred.

And then around the same time, you had your own child.

It'll be 30 years since you wrote a quite famous audio essay called Letter to Daniel about your own son.

My dear son, it is six o' clock in the morning on the island of Hong Kong.

You are asleep, cradled in my left arm, and I am learning the art of one handed typing.

Your mother, more tired yet more happy than I have ever known her, is sound asleep in the room next door.

And there is soft quiet in our apartment.

Like many foreign correspondents I know, I've lived a life that on occasion has veered close to the edge.

War zones, natural disasters, darkness in all its Shapes and forms.

In a world of insecurity and ambition and ego, it's easy to be drawn in, to take chances with our lives, to believe that what we do and what people say about us is reason enough to gamble with death.

Now, looking at your sleeping face inches away from me, listening to your occasional sigh and gurgle, I wonder how I could ever have thought glory and prizes and praise, the were sweeter than life.

And it's also true that I am pained, perhaps haunted is a better word, by the memory suddenly so vivid now of each suffering child I have come across on my journeys.

To tell you the truth, it's nearly too much to bear at this moment to even think of children being hurt and abused and killed.

And yet looking at you, the images come flooding back.

I wish I could claim the credit for having the idea, but it wasn't my idea.

It was Tony Grant, a man called Tony Grant, who was the editor of From Our Own Correspondent, this wonderful program on the BBC which is heard all around the world.

It says to the, the correspondent, write what you've experienced very unusually sometimes what you felt.

You know, we don't, we don't express our feelings in the day to day news reporting quite rightly.

Tony Grant rang me and he said, look, you've had a kid.

Would you write what it's like being a foreign correspondent, having a child in Hong Kong, as I was living then?

And I kind of hummed and hauled and I said, well, I'm not sure, you know, is it really what I should be doing?

And I wrote it in one sitting with the kid sitting in, in one arm and typing with the other hand.

And I was absolutely blown away by the beauty of this child.

I was just overwhelmed at what he represented, at the possibility of new beginnings.

And it brought up memories of the, of the children that I had seen, so many of them who didn't enjoy the protection that my child had in my arms in a nice comfortable apartment in Hong Kong, looking out at the dawn, knowing that his future was going to be one.

Surrounded by love, surrounded by care and security.

I was very, very emotionally moved, churned up in the process of writing it because it brought together so many different strands of my experience as a war correspondent over the previous decades.

I'm just leaving Tanzania ahead of me, the border With Rwanda, the country where some of the worst crimes against humanity of this century have been committed.

You wrote that letter to your son in the mid-1990s, and

that's around the same time period that you were reporting on the Rwandan genocide.

And that has been a huge focus of your reporting over the years.

And while you were there in the region, you.

You met a 13 year old girl named Valentina who had lost her entire family.

Back in Nyarubuye, the killers had finally finished their work.

After four days, they left, believing they'd killed all of their 1,000 Tutsi neighbors.

But at the end of this trail, next to the church, badly wounded but still breathing, Valentina lay hidden among the corpses.

For days and nights, she laced, still listening to every sound.

I stayed there for some time over a month.

When I tried to get up, I would fall down.

I figured that if the killers came, I would pretend to be dead.

Her hand had been cut in half by militiamen, and

it got so badly infected that it seems that.

That she would die, that she would not have any way really of surviving.

You went back and in 1997, you found that she had indeed survived, and

you interviewed her about what she had been through in Yarabuye.

Valentina and the other orphans knew nothing of what was happening in the world beyond.