(upbeat music) - (speaking in foreign language) - (speaking in foreign language) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Migration Compass Podcast about War Crimes in Ukraine. Today, we have a very special guest. It's Eva Velthausen Ojodmichanova, who is a forensic psychologist, specializing in child sexual abuse and exploitation, and trafficking in human beings, and who works for the organization Kind, where she works as a child protection specialist. Thank you so much for accepting our invitation. - Thanks for having me. - Thank you so much, so before we start, could you please introduce yourself and maybe tell us a bit about your background since this is such a specific field of expertise? - Yeah, of course. So, yeah, you mentioned correctly, I'm a forensic psychologist by training. In my past life, before I joined Kind, I worked in a couple of different areas and surrounding human trafficking and international crimes, particularly things like sexual and gender-based violence, including with the offenders to detect, prevent and rehabilitate, but also with victims and the witnesses. So I've done this as part of research institutions, as well as with international organizations, like the International Criminal Court, the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime Interpol, and UNICEF to name a couple. Yeah. - So, if we talk about war crimes and war crimes in Ukraine, what is the psychological impact of the war on children? - Well, the impact of work can be tremendous on children, both in the short, the medium and the long-term. It's not hard to imagine why in the short-term children might be witnesses to the direct war. They might have had to leave family, friends, their neighborhood communities, their homes behind. They might have had to flee in very difficult conditions in crowded cars, spending time at transit points with adults who are panicked. And those are the best-case scenarios. Then there's, of course, also children who are exposed to or victimized by war crimes, as well as conflict-related crimes, like human trafficking. But then in the medium term, some of their members, family members, particularly fathers, brothers, uncles, they might have been conscripted into the war effort. Children might be worried about them. Their parents might be struggling to find work in accommodation. They might be placed into the hands of authorities whose language they don't understand, placed into schools full of new children, all the while, of course, missing their friends and family from back home. Plus, in the current age that we live in, they might continue to be exposed to war in the fighting via their smartphones and TV channels from back home, which could continue to affect their sense of safety and security, even when they're not directly exposed to the fighting. And then finally, in the long-term, even after conflicts ended, we can see that children who have been exposed to war have higher risk of developing things like post-traumatic stress disorders, anxiety-related disorders, and depressive disorders, which is all to do with something that we call trauma. And it's also important to mention at this stage that while children might all be exposed to similar stressful situations as a result of the war, their reactions to this exposure are vastly different. In psychology, we have something that we call risk factors for trauma, things like exposure to war, fighting, displacement, crime, and we balance those with what we call protective factors, like having a loving supportive family around you, having grown up in a safe environment, having access to a stable daily routine, and having good coping mechanisms for stressful situations. Most children have at least some of these protective factors in their environment to ensure that they recover fully from what they experienced. That's not to take away from the immense stress that these circumstances of war can cause children, but it's important to add so that we don't stigmatize all children who have been affected by war, or think of them all as having been irreparably damaged by their experiences. Children can and they do have the capacity to recover. - Right, and when you talk about these horrendous traumatic events, how do the children process this and what does trauma cause for their development? - Well, I think to answer that question, we really need to understand as a basis how the human stress response works. So I'll try to distill the neuroscience of it very simply. Our brain most core function is to help us to survive. And one of the ways that it does this is through detecting threats in our environment and helping us to respond to those. For this, we have one part of the brain that's called the amygdala. And that helps us to decide whether a threat in our environment is urgent or not. If it is, seeing a bomb go off or being faced with violence or having to flee somewhere, our amygdala triggers what we call a fight or flight reaction. We can see that the heart rate increases, blood pressure increases, and our level of alertness in general increases, because stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline and noradren blood are bodies. One of the brilliant things about this threat detection system is that it's adaptive. It can adjust based on common threats in our environment to become then quicker at reacting. But when it comes to trauma, that threat detection system goes into overdrive and starts working against us. When we're exposed to severely traumatic events, and especially if we're exposed to those repeatedly, our amygdala adapts to that situation and becomes very sensitive. That means that it's much more easy to trigger the feeling of threat and make us feel like we're constantly in danger. Feeling like we're constantly in danger then makes it difficult even for adults to regulate their emotions. And it can lead to symptoms like anxiety, flashbacks, and hyper-vigilance. So that state of constantly feeling like you're in danger. But in children, their threat detection system is still developing, and that makes them even more vulnerable to the effects of trauma. And because of this, it's maybe not completely surprising that academic research has shown us consistently that trauma in children can disrupt their brain development, in particular systems that relate to emotion regulation, to memory, and to learning. So what that means for us, looking from the outside, is that we can see children who have been exposed to trauma, who exhibit a range of emotional and behavioral issues that include anxiety, aggression, difficulty concentrating, problems in school, problems making friends. And of course, like I said, not everybody will experience the same events as traumatic. What could be traumatic for one child doesn't necessarily mean that another child finds the same event traumatic. But what we do know that exposure to some events, like sexual violence, like conflict, are much more likely to be perceived as traumatic. And that children who experience multiple, potentially traumatic events, are more likely to develop that traumatic response. - So one thing I've seen in Ukraine as a journalist was that I have met some families who have been through horrendous things, like the death of loved ones, and who were under attack, or lived on occupied territories. And I have noticed that some of the children really had difficulties to acquire speech, and that they would learn to speak at a much older age. And then I interviewed some psychologists and school directors, and I asked them about it, and they told me it's frequent, and that the trauma slows the development down. Is that true? - Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So what I mentioned earlier in terms of children's emotional development, their memory, their learning being affected, this is definitely one of those things. It really depends per age group. So we see that younger children are more likely to regress in some behaviors like speech, but also wetting the bed, for example. They might have stopped wetting the bed, and then after the traumatic event happens, go back to that, while in older children, we see slightly different symptoms. In girls, particularly, we tend to see more internalized symptoms, so things like anxiety, depression. We can see that self-harm rates increase as well. And in boys, we're more likely to see externalizing behavior, so aggression, violence. And we also see that in a lot of these kids that substance misuse rates go up as well, so things like alcohol and drug use that that increases. And we think that that's mostly to do with them trying to regulate these extreme emotions that they're feeling as a result of being in that state of being in danger. So the substance abuse then becomes a way for them to regulate those emotions, to bring them back down again. It's not a particularly adaptive form of coping, but it is one form of coping that we see happen. - Yeah, and so here are forensic psychologists. When you have to interview a child about war crimes, how do you go about that? - Yeah, that's a great question. With interviewing children, interviewers have a sort of double purpose. On the one hand, we want to get as much factual information about the event as possible to assist in the investigation of a particular crime. But on the other, we want to make sure that we don't trigger a traumatic response from a child. When children report crimes to the police or to an NGO or to a lawyer or to a helpline, this experience can be their first step towards their pathway to recovery from a potential trauma. But if we use bad interviewing practices and we risk recreating the same kind of feelings that the trauma elicited in them, like giving them the sense that they have no control, that they can't trust us, but they aren't safe. So what this requires is a basis, is what we call a trauma-informed interviewing style. That means that we first recognize the effects that trauma can have on a child. Second, that we recognize that trauma can really impact children's ability to feel safe and to trust others. And see that we try as much as we can to avoid re-traumatization by creating an environment for that child and a relationship with them that is safe, predictable, trustworthy, collaborative, and that focuses on the child's strengths. But by being trauma-informed, we also simultaneously improve our chances of getting useful information for an investigation as well, because by allowing that child to feel safe, less of their brain is occupied by stress, which means that they have more brain capacity to focus on accurately retrieving memories for the interviewer. There's lots of really great guidelines for interviewing. The MENDAS principles, for example, are a great basic set of international guidelines that aim to prevent ill treatment during interviews. But in terms of interviewing children specifically, we currently have around 30 evidence-based interview protocols available. One protocol that we use in Europe, also in the Netherlands specifically where I come from, is the revised NICHD, the National Institute for Child Health and Development Protocol. And that provides a basic set of steps to guide the interviewer from the beginning of their contact with a child to the closure of the interview and then planning next steps. That interview protocol is currently the one that's showing the best results in terms of the quality and the quantity of evidence that we obtain from children during an interview and paired with that trauma-informed approach, of course. But having said that because these 30 interview protocols are all based on the same body of evidence that we have on children's memory and the impact of trauma on memory, they all have some basic core similarities between them. Two of which are the most important for me. First is that they focus on building a rapport. So these interview protocols all put a substantial emphasis on making sure that a trusting working relationship is built up between the interviewer and the child to make sure that they're as relaxed and comfortable as they can be before the interview starts. So the NICHD protocol that I mentioned that has a specific explicit rapport-building phase that's built into the interview. And the interviewer there takes the time to talk about the child about a neutral topic. So a birthday, what they had for dinner last night about the sport that they play before they start the interview. And that stage is incorporated into most forensic interview protocols because a good rapport between the interviewer and the child has been shown to ensure a supportive and child-friendly environment that helps children to feel less anxious and intimidated by the interview setting. And like I mentioned before, when the child's anxiety declines, this frees up mental capacity to then remember events about the past. But this phase is also a really useful tool for the interviewer to start to build an understanding of the developmental level of that child. So their level of vocabulary, their ability to think about past memories, their ability to tell those memories to the interviewer and their attention span. Rapport is also then maintained throughout the interview, of course, by, I mean, there's many techniques, but one of the witches, for example, acknowledging feelings that children have, like saying, hey, I can see that you're upset or providing positive reinforcement, things like, hey, you're doing really great. It's not always easy to talk about these kind of things. Apart from rapport building, there's also a second critical part of the interviewing of children, and that's the questioning style. Children's memories, adults do, for that matter, they don't work like a camera recorder. Every time we experience something and store that in our memories, and every time afterwards that we think about that memory, that changes the memory slightly, putting it through the lens of other experiences, our new knowledge, what our friends think, or in this case, what the interviewer thinks. And because of this interview has to be really careful about how they frame questions during their war crimes interviews with children. Asking a child, okay, tell me what happened next is very different than, surely you must have said no, right? The first question, tell me what happened next is what we call open-ended. That allows the child to respond with whatever they remember. They can talk about the event itself, people that were there, for example. But if you ask them, surely you said no, right? That's much more closed. The interviewer there shows that they're expecting the child to answer. Yeah, yeah, I said no. So in other words, interview protocols are designed to be dominated by these open-ended question styles to give the child as much opportunity to tell the story in their own way, in their own words. These kinds of questions also, they steer away from interviewer bias, but they've also been shown to elicit answers that are longer, more detailed, and more accurate than other question types. Right, 'cause in journalism we have this phrase that says, you can either be part of the trauma or part of the healing, because journalists often have to ask difficult questions. And that can go very wrong as well if you're not trauma-informed. And I think it's probably the same. What are the main risks if you ask the wrong questions with the wrong tone? And if you essentially re-victimize or re-traumatize the child, what can happen? That's, yeah, great question. So there's a couple of different parts to this. Children's memory, like I said, are very suggestible. So you might risk altering that memory through your own lens, for example. So if, for example, let's say there was sexual violence committed against a child, and the interviewer at some point during the interview said something like, "But you told them to stop," right? And the child says, "Yeah, yeah, I told them to stop." But they know that that didn't really happen. That can really change the child's remembering of that event because they might suddenly remember it through the lens of, "I should have said no, "but I didn't say no." And so it reframes their experience as something that they should have acted on. So that's one part of it. You could change the memory. You could induce feelings like shame and blame and guilt in the child that might not have been there before. And importantly, for the investigation, of course, you could get incorrect answers. And that's bad for two reasons. It's bad because if you wrongly accuse somebody of something that they didn't really do, that's, of course, terrible. But on the other hand, if a child's been shown to say something in an interview, and that turns out not to be true, then it could make their testimony as a whole sound less believable. And so in a court, they could not be believed, even when something did actually happen. - Right. And so let's move on to another field of work that you are an expert on. And that's child trafficking, child sexual exploitation and human trafficking. Do you see any of that in the Ukraine war? - So unfortunately, war has been shown time and time again by academics, by international organizations, by law enforcement agencies to increase the incidence of human trafficking. There's a really great book that was published by Dr. Alicia Hayes from the Wilberforce Institute in the UK, and that distills the relationship between trafficking and war into two things. So decrease in opportunities that people have and a decrease in the support systems that are around them. We know that both of those variables are at play in Ukraine. People have fewer opportunities to generate income, fewer opportunities to access healthcare, fewer opportunities to find food, housing, education, friends, family, support. And at the same time, the war has caused a separation between particularly male family members that have been conscripted into the war effort, separation from communities because people were displaced, both inside Ukraine and outside its borders and for children potential separation from their parents and guardians completely. And that's also, of course, even when parents and guardians are physically there, we also have to account for the fact that they are also dealing with the consequences of war. So while they might be physically present, they could be emotionally absent for that child. To think of it in the psychological sense, that means that a lot of the protective factors that could have prevented children from, let's say, responding to a misleading advertisement for a waitressing child or the snapshot that they received from an older gentleman that promised them some kind of accommodation, the offer of education in Slovakia from not so trustworthy organization that they found online, all of those are risky situations that could lead or are situations of trafficking. So the options of those children are just more limited and the people that are around them that could have, during peacetime, told them to be more careful, might just not be there anymore. So yeah, it's unsurprising that we have cases of trafficking that have already been reported. However, what I would say is that Ukraine is still a country at war and we in Slovakia are not used to being in a country that is next to a country at war. So Ukrainian anti-trafficking organizations have done a really phenomenal unprecedented job at keeping their operations running. But it's inevitable that they are reducing their capacity to detect, prevent and respond to cases of trafficking. And even without being at war, trafficking is still a very difficult crime to detect, given that a lot of traffickers tactics lie in convincing their victims not to contact law enforcement. So in other words, all of our evidence from previous wars tells us that their risk of trafficking have increased exponentially as a result of the full-scale invasion. But it might still be a couple of years before we understand really the scale of child trafficking that has occurred as a result of the war. - Right, thank you so much for the interview. Sadly, we've heard some sad news too, but thank you so much for your work and thank you for accepting our invitation. - Thanks, thanks for everyone seeing me. 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Pozvanie prijala Eva Veldhuizen-Ochodničanová, ktorá je odborníčkou na ochranu detí v organizácii KIND.
Eva Veldhuizen-Ochodničanová je forenzná psychologička, ktorá sa vo svojej práci venuje psychológii detí vo vojnových zónach a konfliktoch. Slovensko-holandská odborníčka na ochranu detí v súčasnosti pôsobí v organizácii Kids in Need of Defense (KIND). V minulosti spolupracovala s Medzinárodným trestným súdom, Interpolom, UNICEF a ďalšími inštitúciami.V podcaste Migračný kompas opisuje, aký vplyv má vojna na detskú psychiku a čo spôsobuje trauma pre ich vývoj. V rozhovore s Ligou za ľudské práva tiež vysvetľuje, ako vedie rozhovory s deťmi, ktoré zažili vojnové zločiny. Rozhovor je v anglickom jazyku.
