Lynne Jones is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and a technical advisor in mental health for the International Medical Corps. She is a senior research associate at the Center for Family Research in Cambridge, England, and a tutor at the International Institute for Humanitarian Affairs at Fordham University.
"The Bosnian conflict was not a mad, irrational, civil war in which people just reverted to ethnic tribalism, as is sometimes portrayed—a myth perpetrated in the media," Jones explains. "It was an extremely rational war in which Serbia attempted through fascist aggression to take other parts of the former Yugoslavia. They took 70 percent of Bosnia in six weeks, perpetrating appalling human rights atrocities, and the people who fought back fought for survival."
To learn how children were making sense of the Bosnian conflict, Jones focuses on the children of the perpetrators as well as the victims. She is surprised to discover that it is as bad to live under the conditions created by a fascist community as it is to live in a town under siege.
According to Jones's study, having views that are not in accordance with your political community can make you feel unwell. The children who have a more "feminized" position on the war—who welcome the idea of their neighbors coming back, who have empathic thinking about the other side—are the least well children in her study. And the girls and boys who avoid those issues and don't want to discuss them are doing very well by every psychological measure.
Jones says her research confounds all of her stereotypes on gender and war and concludes that both women and men can buy into a fascist project.
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