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This book should be in the knapsack of every international administrator. Imagine you are nine years old. Imagine you are ten years old and have to cross a snow-covered mountain range at night in order to escape the soldiers who are trying to kill you. How would you deal with these memories five, ten, or twenty years later once you are an adult? Jones, a relief worker and child psychiatrist, interviewed over forty Serb and Muslim children who came of age during the Bosnian War and now returns, twenty years after the war began, to discover the adults they have become.

Psychological trauma cannot be looked at as a mechanical event, equivalent to bullet hitting bone, where caliber, velocity, and bone strength can predict the amount of damage.

THEN THEY STARTED SHOOTING by Lynne Jones | Kirkus Reviews

Children are not passive recipients of experience. They are actively engaged in making sense of their environment, and acting to change it, from an early age. They gather meanings from what is around them, first from their parents or caretakers and then from the world beyond—friends, school, community—as well as from their own previous experiences. The changes in sense of identity, feelings of trust and security, and connection to others that I found in the Bosnian children may have a profound impact on well-being.

Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Then They Started Shooting: Compelling stories of Serbian and Muslim children who came of age during the Bosnian wars of the s come together in an examination of how the war has affected them and an analysis of the implications of wartime experiences for children's lives. Hardcover , pages. Published January 1st by Harvard University Press. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Then They Started Shooting , please sign up.

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Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. A must read for anyone interested in child psychiatry in disaster, war and post-conflict zones, as well as in history and humanitarian work.


  1. Befragung von Kindern und Jugendlichen: Grundlagen, Methoden und Anwendungsfelder (German Edition);
  2. Questions??
  3. Miss Me Not!
  4. Then They Started Shooting: Children of the Bosnian War and the Adults They Become.
  5. Children of the Bosnian War and the Adults They Become.
  6. Babys Breath;

Part way through the first part I found myself perusing maps and Wiki pages to give myself a better understanding of the entire scope of the wars. I actually thought I had a good grasp on what happened at the time, although I was only in my early teens: I suppose this is a good example of how we tend to focus on areas that the media focuses on. In terms of being an educational source, Then They Started Shooting is exactly that in more ways than one.


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  • Lynne Jones was stationed in Gorazde in by an aid agency to work as a child psychiatrist. She made it her mission to gather narratives from children who had found themselves on different sides of the war in Bosnia. She divided her time between Gorazde predominantly Muslim and Foca predominantly Serb in order to gather narratives from about 40 children.

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    She then followed up with some of them years later, using the voices of about 8 of the children for this book. Careful to be balanced, she also listened to the Serbian children in the neighboring town, and revisited these children on both sides of the conflict years later. This remarkable book not only contributes to social history--including our understanding of the genocide in Srebrenica--but also to psychiatry.

    Her astonishing work challenges the medical model in understanding human responses to cruelty.

    Then They Started Shooting: Growing Up in Wartime Bosnia

    On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty "Profound This is a moving, well written and above all, deeply disturbing book. History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia "Part narrative, part analysis, part thoughtful reflection, this book belongs among the classic accounts of children and war. The book not only deepens our understanding of what happened in the former Yugoslavia but contributes greatly to our more general grasp of the consequences of death, loss, and dislocation, and the stubborn human persistence in the face of them.

    Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide and Witness to an Extreme Century "One of the most illuminating books to have emerged out of the embers of the Bosnian war. Few outsiders have acquired such an inside knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of ordinary Bosnians, on both sides of the wartime divide. A Short History and Chairman of the Bosnian Institute in London "Then They Started Shooting upends the traditional discourse on the victims of war by continuing the narrative long after the violence has ended.

    The stories in this book are eloquently and poignantly recounted, and offer a vital, complex portrait of what the long road to peace looks like. Rarely do we have occasion to look at the aftermath. Lynne Jones adds the dimension of time. With remarkable insight and sensitivity, she follows a group of young Bosnians from both sides of the Serb-Muslim conflict as they grow up.

    We see how they try to cope with, comprehend, and transcend the horrors that their elders have visited upon their communities.

    Then They Started Shooting : Children of the Bosnian War and the Adults They Become

    Their successes and failures deepen our understanding of human resilience and how people rebuild their lives from tragic circumstances. Her description of the legacy of the savage war in Bosnia is a shattering but necessary read This book should be in the knapsack of every international administrator.

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