I'm just pondering that post and making sense of what I saw at school.
The primary school that I went to had two childrens homes feeding kids into it. The council owned home tended to have "nice" well adjusted kids, say from a loving single mum who was having medical problems
The charity owned home used to get wards of court. Those kids typically had abysmal attention, learned next to nothing and had explosively violent temper.
They also had typically abysmal personal hygeine - clearly partly neglect by staff - apart from a girl who was in my class, who used to note in her school diary that she used to have a bath before her apparently very frequent visits from her social worker.
With hindsight, I can see what all of that was about. The girl was calmer and friendlier than the boys - perhaps what I now strongly suspect was CSA, was less harmful than the complete neglect and abandonment that the boys suffered.
At secondary school, in the mid and late 1970s we had some Lebanese kids. Lebanon had been and continued in bitter civil war, pitting the Christian and Moslem communities against each other (and to a lesser extent extent the sects of each religion against each other too), in a proxy war between all of the stirrers and backers of the wider middle eastern conflicts.
Same thing, those kids had shit attention to class, weren't absorbing much and had very short and explosively violent tempers. IIRC personal hygiene wasn't brilliant either ("sweaty Arab", was a common term of derision there).
Later on we had Iraqi and Iranian kids, who hadn't actually been in the war zones but generally had relations and siblings in the Iran-Iraq war. They were less screwed up than the Lebanese kids.
We also had a bunch of kids who were there, funded by local council social services, who were sort of on a spectrum between the completely traumatised Lebanese kids and the more general population of kids there. There were also some showing the much more self destructive developmental and CPTSD crap. I'm pretty sure that one of them became an AIDS statistic in mid 1980s Edinburgh.
Yup, war certainly screws kids up and traumatizes them.
