Effect of Witnessing House Raids and Arrests on Child Behavior: Evidence from Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

ABSTRACT

This study utilizes self-reported data on exposure to conflict, collected in the West Bank, to examine the exposure effect of house raids or arrest of household members on child behavior. We show that exposed children are more likely to engage in violent behavior. We also show that the exposure effect is independent of gender and that its magnitude is greater for older children. We propose that altering personality traits, mainly exacerbating neuroticism is a channel through which exposure to conflict affects children’s behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Israeli raids
• house arrest
• violent behavior
• the West Bank

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I12
• I15
• I31

Acknowledgments

The useful comments of two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Psychologists differentiate between two types of children’s behaviors and disorders based on their reactions to stressors. The externalizing behavior includes symptoms of aggression and delinquency while the internalizing problems measures symptoms of depression, anxiety, somatic complaints, and social withdrawal (Foster, Garber, and Durlak 2008).

2. According to estimates of Yesh Din Institution, 88% of recorded house raids (126) took place between midnight and 5:00 am. Also, in about two third of the cases, the Israeli army carried out multiple raids per house. This data was collected between March 2018 and May 2019 (see Yesh Din 2020).

3. Social scripts are set of rules that govern the sequence of expected responses related to dealing with various situations, including conflict (see Anderson and Huesmann 2003; Huesmann and Miller 1994). Violent individuals are those with repertoire of violent social scripts. Schemas are considered as database that individuals use to evaluate surrounding environment and evaluate intentions of the others. Individuals with aggressive schemas often see the world as a hostile place and thus regard others’ intention as hostile. Normative beliefs are cognitions and perceived social norms that regulate aggressive behavior and evaluate what is right. Emotional dispositions cover emotions related attributes such as overall level of arousals, ability to control and regulate emotion, and propensity to angriness. See (Huesmann and Kirwil 2007) for more discussion on long terms observational effects.

4. Other researchers show that neuroticism is associated with adverse health outcomes such as depression and less ability to control self-motivation (see Digman 1989; McCrae and John 1992)

5. To identify a longer list of references on the linkages between child behavior and house arrest see Shehadeh et al. (2015).

6. Other studies also emphasize the consequences of the Israel-Palestinian conflict but looked at other outcome indicators. These include education attainment (Brück, Di Maio, and Miaari 2019; Di Maio and Nandi 2013; Di Maio and Nisticò 2019; Saad and Fallah 2020), physical and mental health (Mansour and Rees 2012; Jürges and Westermaier 2020; Jürges et al. 2019) and school performance and non-cognitive skills among children (Jürges et al. 2020).

7. The data set used in this study was collected as part of the research project entitled ‘Determinants of Cognitive Development in Deprived Environments: Evidence from the West Bank’, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant number JU 2769/2.

8. see http://www.hbsc.org

9. UNRWA stands for the United Nations Relief and

Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

10. In the robustness check section, we provide more discussion on using this proxy to control for neighborhood effects

11. All tables and figures are reported in the appendix.

12. To the best of our knowledge, comparable nationally representative data on violent behavior among school children and house raids are not available at the individual level. However, we can compare house raid data from our household survey with that of PCBS’s Violence Survey in the Palestinian Society of 2011. Data from the household survey show that the share of households that experienced a house search (raid) and sealed or destroyed houses over the past years are 38% and 6.5%, respectively. Data from the Violence Survey in the Palestinian Society show that over past years the share of households that experienced house raids by the Israeli forces or settlers is 30% and the share of households that the Israeli forces demolished completely or partly their houses is 6%.

13. In what follows, children and student are used in the text interchangeably.

14. The standard living index reflects whether a household owns fixed assets such a TV, mobile phone, DVD player, air condition, cars, among other belongings.

15. Area C include areas in the West Bank that are still under full Israeli military and civil control based on the Oslo Accords of 1993, while the PA has civil and security control in area A. The PA has civil autonomy but no security control in area B (Vishwanath et al. 2014). For more details, see www.btselem.org/topic/Area_c.

16. The Israeli West Bank barrier or wall is a separation barrier built by the Israeli government in the West Bank along the 1949 Armistice Line known as the “Green Line“ (B’Tselem 2012). The barrier divides Palestinian communities, encircles some, and isolates others from their surroundings, while separating East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank (UNSCO, 2014).

17. The share of students who only witnessed an arrest of a family member is 14%; only witnessed a night raid is 6%; and only witnessed a day raid is 4%.

18. The sample of this model exclude children who witnessed both incidents.

19. ,The effect of household head arrest is estimated relative to those were not arrested.

20. The effect of house seal/demolition variable is estimated relative to households that did not experience incidents of house seal/demolition.

21. Fatalities data was obtained from: B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories)

https://statistics.btselem.org/en/all-fatalities/by-date-of-incident/pal-by-israel-sec/west-bank?section=overall&tab=overview.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economics Research Forum, Contract Agreement for Research Project No. 2020-006.