Peshawar killings leave deep scars; Indian children spending sleepless nights as gruesome images haunt them

NEW DELHI: “Mummy, we don’t even have benches in our school. Only chairs. Where will we hide?” Richa Sharma struggled with her emotions when her sixyear-old daughter posed this question as she attempted to put her to bed on Wednesday night.
Kavya, who studies in Class 2 in a posh South Delhi school, had heard about the brutal massacre of 132 school kids in Peshawar the previous day, and TV news-fed images of kids trying to hide under benches to escape death stayed in her curious impressionable mind.

Since that day Kavya, who has been having problems sleeping at nights, has been asking her mother all sorts of questions. “She wants to know ‘How far is Peshawar from her school?’ and ‘If all the bad people have been killed’,” says the mother, who, while trying to allay the child’s fears, is struggling with her own cocktail of emotions triggered by the tragedy that has hit parents across the world hard.

She is not alone. In another part of the city, sixyear-old Aarav Sawney has refused to go to school — a suburban branch of the Delhi Public School — unless his mother Rina accompanies him and waits until school ends. “I am more scared that they will kill my teacher. She is very nice,” he told ET. The Peshawar incident also left nine teachers dead, including one lady who was burnt alive in front of her wards by the Taliban militants who attacked the school ostensibly to take revenge for attacks on them by the Pakistani armed forces.

Aarav’s mother said her son has been having disturbed nights. “We are taking him out of Delhi this weekend to help him get over it.”

And Richa and Kavya and Rina and Aarav are not the only ones trying to cope. Across the country, schools are reporting increased absenteeism while parents and teachers grapple with all sorts of questions thrown up by the fertile imagination of children, assaulted by a flood of information in the age of real-time media and Internet access.

After the initial shock and outpouring of empathy for the slain students in Peshawar’s Army School, it is mostly fear that dominates the response of school children.Arjun Kashyap, who teaches political science at Modern School in Delhi’s Vasant Vihar area, says many children in his school have been absent after the incident and parents have expressed fears too. “Older children keep googling about the incident. When you tell them such an incident cannot happen in India, they say with disdain, ‘It happened in Sydney’.”

What has helped, however, is providing children the reassurance they need about protection. Most schools have deployed stringent entry measures since the incident, for instance, barring anybody without a valid photo-ID from entering the premises. “We kept telling them how active the police are. We showed them policemen are on the roads and there was nothing to fear,” said Kashyap, whose school like many others has decided not to cancel its year-end fete to distract its children who are still shocked at the tragedy. “We have told our kids to be strong to fight terrorism. We need to move on for that,” he added.

Psychologists too advocate not pussyfooting around the issue and encouraging children to tackle it head-on. “The school for a child is his second home and when schools are targeted by terrorists, children are affected more,” said Pooja Bakshi, a child psychologist in the city, adding that children must be encouraged to express their fears rather than avoid talking about the issue because it can be disturbing.

“Children are bound to know about the incident anyway, so it is better that parents and teachers talk to them about it before they learn distorted versions of the same. Asking little children to draw their feelings and getting adolescents to talk it out helps,” says Bakshi.

Children have reacted to the tragedy in different ways. Rajat Sahu, a Class 12 student in Delhi’s Mother’s International School, is more philosophical even though he admits that initially he too was frightened when he heard the news. “I feel very sad about this incident. This is all because of lack of proper education.

That is why all children should be sent to school, and education can liberate and remove all fears.” Aishwarya Chowdhury, a class 12 student of Kolkata’s GD Birla Girls’ School, said: “I am not worried about my safety. We were agitated after the incident, but there is no fear of safety in school and we are not worried at all.” In Mumbai, Punita Bhalla, whose two daughters aged 8 and 15 study in the Bombay Scottish school, said her younger daughter was very upset after hearing about the incident.

“As parents, we are always worried but these attacks could happen even in a mall,” she said, adding that her kids’ school had strict safety measures and parents were notified when their children board the school bus and when they reach school.

Another mother, Chitra Iyer, who has two children, one in class 5 and another in class 8 studying in Mumbai’s Hiranandani Foundation School, approaches it more matter-of-factly. “It was an unfortunate event and every one is sympathetic, but we have not discussed amongst parents as well. Some parts of Pakistan are more volatile but I am not worried about safety.” Meanwhile, experts have a word of advice for parents.

V Jayanthini, former professor at the Child Guidance Clinic, says parents need to ensure that children are not shown visuals of dead bodies because that could affect them the most. “Many children also take days to react,” she said, adding that some children could have nightmares after many days and brood over the incident.

Jayanthini also added this is the time when some children would try to tease sensitive classmates by spreading rumours about bombs and killings, which could affect them even more. “It is very important that families take care not to analyse these issues in the presence of children but tell them in simple words and provide them the support they need. While the younger ones might cry and express it out, the older ones would just ruminate about them.”Schools, on their part, too have been going out of their way to counsel children.

Tagore International School, for instance, asked its teachers to speak to every student about the incident. “We took special care to make sure the children were told this was an act of terrorism and that we must fight it, without giving it any religious colour,” said Preeti Chadha, director of the school.

There are children from Pakistan studying in this school that makes it all the more important for them to be sensitive, she added.

(Additional reporting by Devina Sengupta and Prachi Verma)