‘If we just focus on paramilitaries, we’re missing the bigger picture': Study on trauma in Northern Ireland shows need for concerted action

For Dr Colm Walsh, it’s the stories of vulnerable children and young people that are particularly revealing.

Stories like that of the young woman who, when aged 14, was lured into working for paramilitaries.

“They used to make me push a pram with the drugs away at the bottom, because nobody would stop a wee girl with a pram … they beat me up, threatened to do my knees, eventually put me out of the area.”

Or the young man who explained, “I don’t remember there not being violence, it’s always there … when I was wee, I never had no one looking out for me. I was always suspended, on a reduced timetable for mucking about, hitting teachers … so I was out all the time, getting caught up in it.”

These accounts may be fictionalised but they are closely based on the experiences of young people gathered during research undertaken by Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). They are “exactly what you hear, particularly in relation to what’s now called child criminal exploitation”, says Dr Walsh, a lecturer in criminology at QUB and the lead author of a groundbreaking study into adverse childhood experiences (Aces) in Northern Ireland, published on Thursday.

Aces encompass various forms of abuse, neglect and household dysfunction occurring before the age of 18, and can also involve exposure to violence, particularly in areas affected by conflict.

The study found that six in 10 adults in the North have experienced at least one such experience, and almost a fifth have experienced four or more, a critical threshold that is more likely to lead to poorer health and educational outcomes.

It also found 30 per cent of respondents experienced adversities specific to conflict, and younger adults, even those born after the peace deal that ended the Troubles in 1998, were still affected by ongoing paramilitary violence.

Describing the report’s findings as “shocking”, he says “we see activity ranging from transporting drugs to engaging in sexual activity through to engaging in riots, and whenever you speak to the young people themselves, sometimes they don’t even recognise they’re being exploited, that they’re the victim, and it’s all done in this wider context of harm”.

But, Dr Walsh adds, “if we just focus on paramilitaries, we’re missing the bigger picture … we also need to take account of what is going on at home, what is going on in school”.

According to the study, people who are exposed to more adversities are more likely to have “really poor outcomes across a whole range of areas”. “It ranges right from physical health right through to things like being exposed to violence and having issues with drug use, chronic mental health issues.

“There is this whole ripple effect, not just within an individual, but right across generations as well.”

Adverse childhood experiences have an economic as well as an individual and a social cost; £1.7 million (€2 million) a year to Northern Ireland’s economy, Dr Walsh estimates. “So there’s a real impetus to pay attention to this and to do something about it.

“This is cross-cutting. One government department can’t solve it all.

“We need to think about how we join all this up in policy, in practice, and in commissioning. We need to recognise what the research is saying, and it’s saying this is all connected.

“One of the more hopeful messages of the study is that positive childhood experiences can counteract adversity, and if we create safer spaces we can mitigate against a lot of the effects of this.”