The young people traumatised by terror and left without help

Today’s report launch entitled 'Bee The Difference’, sheds a stark light on how aspects of trauma were not even considered when the Manchester Arena bombing took place in 2017.

22 people were killed and over 1,000 people injured with the majority of them being very young people who had come to watch the Ariana Grande concert, wanting to have a memorable night. Instead, they were met with death and destruction as a terrorist set off an explosive device.

The report makes for stark reading and was produced in collaboration with the National Emergencies Trust and researchers at Lancaster University. It states that 29% of the young survivors of the brutal terrorist attack received no support in the six years since the attack. Four in ten of them say that support was simply not offered to them. It goes on to describe how three-quarters (75%) of children and young people affected by the 2017 terror attack were psychologically injured by what happened to them.

Let’s be clear. We are not talking about the 1980s or 1990s, this was in 2017. What is particularly infuriating for me is that trauma is known to be a toxic and corrosive event or events that silently distorts thinking, life choices and perceptions. Trauma develops greater impacts on the mind and body over time if left untreated and it has significant impacts on a range of organs in the body, including on the cardiovascular system, raises the risk of diabetes (through greater consumption of sugars and carbohydrates that act as ‘comfort foods’) and triggers depression, anxiety and immune system disorders. The longer trauma is left to fester, the greater the risk of such diseases.

It is therefore baffling to read how statutory authorities, whether that be local authorities, local NHS trusts or agencies like the police, did not signpost the young people to support services that specialise in trauma.

We know that once trauma ‘beds’ into the nervous system, working to regulate someone’s nervous system and psychological world-view becomes difficult, though healing is very possible. Dysregulation of the nervous system could lead to panic attacks, phobias, night sweats, flashbacks, nightmares, low moods, irritability and a desire to disengage from daily activities to the point of what we would call clinical depression. Lethargy and bouts of rage and anger can take over people who have been in severely traumatising situations. Once again, if left untreated, the bouts of rage and anger can become ‘normalised’ reactions to even the smallest of irritating situations that a traumatised individual comes across. So, trauma has many wide-ranging negative implications on the life of an individual and the younger the person who suffers the trauma; the greater the impact and the greater the need for a quick and stable intervention. 

I can only imagine what those young people who were injured went through and it is a stain on the authorities and on the Government that the trauma support these young people needed was missing. Furthermore, signposting to secondary supportive mental health agencies was missing - showing that the mental health support to individuals was dire.

This report shows that a fundamental change in victim support is needed and that trauma support should always be available when a major national emergency takes place. Hundreds of young people struggled in the last six years simply because they went to a concert and were subjected to a murderous assault by a terrorist. We cannot allow young people to go through this again if a terrorist attack takes place in the future. How we could allow this to happen to young people in the last six years, is more than baffling; it is appalling.