Royal Navy children are the Overlooked Casualties of Conflict

11:00pm Thursday 5th November 2009

By Steve Sowden

A NEW report has revealed that children of Royal Navy personnel are struggling with a unique set of challenges caused by the service lifestyle.

The report, The Overlooked Casualties of Conflict, launched by the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Children's Fund, has said that the needs of youngsters are being frequently overlooked.

The report is supported by a nationwide survey from the charity which reveals that one in two UK adults naively believe service children are no different from their peers, and only 16% think they are significantly affected by their parent being deployed to a warzone.

With no dedicated Government spending in place to help service children, the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Children’s Fund is calling for better research, targeted funding and emotional support for these children, to ensure they do not continue to be overlooked in the coming years.

The report, which combines the charity’s 100-year experience with research from the UK and US, highlights ten challenges which service children often face – from worrying when a parent is absent for a long time in a warzone and then readjusting when they return, to regularly moving schools or dealing with a parent’s injury or death.

In a survey by the Ministry of Defence, 83% of Naval families said their children find it difficult when their serving father or mother has to go away for a long time.

This difficulty can manifest itself in changes in the child’s behaviour, with Naval parents saying the most frequent changes are children being ‘more naughty’, ‘more emotional’, having ‘difficulties sleeping’, ‘more tantrums’, and ‘more argumentative’.

New research commissioned by the charity and released yesterday reveals the key words quiet, pensive, detached, independent and adaptable to change are those most commonly used to describe children whose parents serve in the Armed Forces.

The ‘Overlooked Casualties of Conflict’ report also discusses the educational problems generated by service children frequently having to move homes, schools and communities.

* 43% of Naval families have experienced problems finding a place for their children at the school of choice.

* 64% of Naval families have experienced problems with the differences in the standard of their child’s education when changing schools.

* 62% of Naval families have experienced problems with the difference in syllabus content when their child changes schools.

* 52% of Naval families have experienced problems with the information available on schools prior to a change in draft.

18% (one in five) of Naval families said their school was ‘not very helpful’ in understanding Naval family life and the strains sometimes experienced by service children.

Monique Bateman, director of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Children’s Fund, said: "Over the last 20 years we’ve seen service children experience the repercussions of the Falklands War and we have no intention of sitting back and watching it happen all over again.

"We have therefore commissioned this report to share our knowledge as we predict we are sitting on a ticking timebomb of problems for children whose parents have served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan."

* To understand and better appreciate the impact of service life on children, their development, and their long-term psychological health; since they are the future.

* To help local authorities improve their outcomes in identifying and helping children with special educational needs.

* For schools to be more attentive to the needs of service children, such as knowing when a service parent has been deployed, or providing time off school for family bonding if a parent returns from a deployment during term time.

The Royal Navy and Royal Marines Children’s Fund will continue its work supporting service children and their families and in the last financial year has assisted 1,909 children at the cost of £1.2 million.

Plans for the coming 12 months include finding the funds to be able to continue assisting the growing numbers of applications the charity is receiving.