Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
Established in 1994, Salvadoran Asociación Pro-Búsqueda de Niñas y Niños Desaparecidos (Association for the Search of Disappeared Children) has located 384 children, often with the aid of DNA evidence, of the more than 500 who went missing or were abducted during El Salvador's civil war. Families in other countries who were unaware of the forced separations adopted many of these children. Between 2005 and 2009, we conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty-six children, now young adults aged twenty-four to thirty-four years, who had been reunited with their biological families. We found that we could conceptually categorize the process of separation and reunification into six phases: pre-disappearance, disappearance, separation, searching, reunion, and reunification. While these young adults said that reunification was extremely important, they often found this stage psychologically challenging, given their new identities and their uncertainty about how they would reintegrate back-if at all-into their biological families. We call this process "ambiguous reunification."
I. bACkGRoUND
Each year, millions of families worldwide are separated by war, natural disaster, immigration, and other causes, and are subsequently reunited.1 Understanding how family separation and reunification impact a child's health and well-being is critical, as children may be especially vulnerable to effects of prolonged separation from their families. The disappeared children of El Salvador represent an extreme example of family separation and reunification. These individuals, now young adults, were forcibly separated from their families during El Salvador's civil war from 1980 to 1992.2 Many of these individuals underwent family reunification several years later. Understanding the reunification experiences of these "disappeared" youth helps shed light on the process of family separation and reunification as a result of war, natural disasters, immigration, and other causes.
This article is structured as follows. Section II reviews the psychological theories that form the foundation for understanding children's experiences with family separation and reunification. Section III examines the descriptive and empirical literature on family separation and reunification, with an emphasis on separation and reunification in the contexts of immigration and war. The section also includes an overview of the historical context of the disappeared children of El Salvador. Section IV provides a description of the study design, data used, qualitative methods applied, and analytic approach engaged. Section V presents the final results. Section VI discusses...