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I work as a counselling psychologist in a care setting, with children who have endured neglect, abuse, and terror. Often these are children with no safe place in the world. I’ve seen first-hand the evidenced impact¹ of early trauma reshaping the brain because of amygdala dominance leading to persistent states of fear, anxiety and heightened stress responses and hypervigilance.  Reduced connectivity in the prefrontal cortex makes rational grounding and impulse-control for these children and young people harder, impacting their attachments and making it difficult for them to thrive in the world around them.

We have been witnessing daily in all media, such conditions inflicted on a massively amplified scale, on a generation of children in Gaza.  In September 2025 Save The Children reported that since the start of the most recent phase of conflict in October 2023, twenty thousand children have been killed and a further twenty-one thousand permanently disabled².

When I work with a child who has endured bullying resulting from the neglect that left them with head-lice, or who has no mattress to sleep on, I instinctively imagine being the safe adult they need to make them feel heard and validate their suffering, taking some action to remove them from it. This response is hard-wired into to me through my ethical framing and humanity, as well as my training.

In her article published by the British Psychological Society in July 2025³ socio-developmental psychologist Dr Aneeza Pervez challenges the psychological professions to consider the ethics and morality of selective safeguarding, when the principle that childhood is a protected and universal category is compromised by a failure to acknowledge and take a principled and professional stance against an unfolding Genocide.

But what does this mean for me, a counselling practitioner working with children in the UK and with no direct links or connection to Gaza?

Even if I cannot be a safe, rescuing adult for the children of Gaza, I cannot turn away from the suffering child whatever their nationality, and at the very least, offer safety in the way I speak, listen, and bear witness. To do this, I need to humanise what I see in the headlines and to remember that any child, whatever their heritage, has the right to live free from fear, violence, war and deprivation. These rights are enshrined in the United Nation Convention of the Rights of the Child⁴.

Our profession is rooted in empathy and the protection of human dignity. My silence, risks abandoning both. The Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions requires me to respect human rights and dignity and to have the moral courage and capacity to act in spite of known fears, risks and uncertainty⁵.  So, this is not a political viewpoint. It is an anti-oppressive viewpoint on human suffering, and one supported by the foundations of my profession - against the targeted starvation and killing of civilians, the displacement of families, and the perpetuation of the hatred and prejudice that damages us all. In recognising and naming the brutality and harm that war forces onto children I am striving to strengthen my professional candour, reaffirm the universality of the rights of the child, and protect the ethical grounding I require to continue my work with the trauma of my young clients.

Íø±¬ÃÅ’s Statement on conflict by visiting Statement on conflict.