Discussion
This study showed that children registered as internally
displaced presented significantly worse mental health than
non-displaced children residing in the same deprived
neighbourhood in Bogota´. Primary caretaker’s mental
health and family functioning were strongly and independently
associated with displaced children’s mental health.
Compared to a normative sample from Peru, mean
scores on CBCL scales were higher in displaced and nondisplaced
children which suggest that the children in this
study were at a relatively high risk of mental health
problems compared to Latin American peers [28]. Displaced
children presented worse mental health than nondisplaced
children which is in line with related studies
conducted among older populations [7, 9, 10]. As also
found by others [6, 29], caretaker’s mental health explained
this relationship to a greater extent than child exposure to
traumatic events. There may be several explanations for
this finding. Firstly, both displaced and non-displaced
children in this study resided in a deprived neighbourhood
where exposure to violence may be highly prevalent [30].
Secondly, the studied children were very young and in
young children maternal proximity to traumatic events has
been found to be a better predictor of infant PTSD than
child proximity [6, 29]. It is argued that young children that
are exposed to a traumatic event often look for reactions of
caregivers as a means of interpreting the threat [31]. In
turn, maternal exposure to a traumatic event may influence
maternal-child attachment which is of great importance for
child mental health [6].
Another interesting finding of this study was that children
directly exposed to forced internal displacement (the
1st generation) presented different mental health problems
than the 2nd generation. Compared to the non-displaced
group, we found that the 1st generation group presented
higher scores on the stress and internalizing problem scales
while the second generation group presented higher scores
on the externalizing problem scales. Though these findings
need to be confirmed by research with larger samples of
children, this may indicate that the impact of forced
internal displacement unfolds differently in preschoolers
that are directly and indirectly exposed to the event.
Alongside the mental health differences, it is of interest
that both generational groups presented significantly more
problem behaviour than unexposed children. This implies
that preschoolers that were not directly exposed to forced
internal displacement are nonetheless impacted by the
event; there is a so-called ‘intergenerational risk’.