Reactions of Indian adolescents to the 9/11 terrorist attacks

There is information about the impact of disasters and trauma on children, but little is known about the effects of terrorism particularly in India. (i) To assess the knowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the school going adolescents of India who were miles away from the actual incident. (ii) To compare the reactions to this event among the boys and girls.

The study used a survey design with a self-report questionnaire administered to 406 students in 6 schools of standards 9-12. The questionnaire was administered within 3 weeks of occurrence of this event. The mean age of the subjects was 16.34 years (SD= 1.22; range= 13-20) and 44.1% were boys.

All the students were aware about this event. Awareness that the twin towers were hit was in 81.06 but only 51.94% knew that Pentagon was also hit. All the children knew who the prime suspect was although only 12.62% were aware about the country to which he belonged. The source of knowledge of the events was the television in 74.7% of the adolescents and 17.95% of them viewed foreign news channels additionally to the Indian channels to gather details about the event. Newspaper, radio and internet were the sources of information in 44.17%, 3.4% and 3.5% children respectively. Of the adolescents who gathered information from the television, 84.7% agreed that there had been an increase in their TV viewing time since the event and it was more than one hour per day in 47.5% of them. None of the students supported the terrorist attacks. The number of students with negative stressors was significantly more than the ones who were unaffected (p 0.0001). The girls were significantly more affected than the boys and while the former expressed anger the latter were more fearful and sad. (p 0.05) The idea of USA going for war against Afghanistan was supported by 69.4% and one third of them believed that such an event might adversely affect India. The adolescents who had witnessed the events on television were more fearful and shocked than the ones who read about the event in the print media (p 0.05).

This study emphasizes the adverse reactions in the minds of adolescents in India to terrorist events even though they did not directly witness the events of September 11,2001. The role of media exposure in causing stress is also revealed. Pediatricians should be aware of the adverse effects of terrorism in the minds of the children and should be able to identify and help those who are in need.