Moses Zombo and Theresa Betancourt discuss her new book "Shadows into Light" during an event at the Social Work Library in April 2025. Photos by Tim Correira.
Theresa Betancourt, the inaugural Salem Professor in Global Practice at the ĀŅĀ׊”æÉ°® School of Social Work, has spent more than two decades studying the lives of over 500 children who were forced to fight in Sierra Leoneās brutal civil war from 1991 to 2002.
What sheās found is that the strength of family and community bonds play a crucial role in shaping life outcomes over time, providing social support and encouragement that can help young people recover from wartime experiences.Ā
As director of the Research Program on Children and Adversity at ĀŅĀ׊”æÉ°®SSW, Betancourt recently turned her findings into a book that provides insight into mental health and resilience in the aftermath of extreme trauma.
She recently discussed at the Social Work Library, where she engaged in a thoughtful conversation with Moses Zombo, one of her closest colleagues, who grew up in the Sierra Leonean city of Kenema and helped people forced to flee their homes during the war.Ā
Here are five takeaways from their talk, which explored everything from Betancourtās motivation for studying resilience in vulnerable children to the deeper meaning behind the title of her book.Ā
Betancourt's new book came out in January 2025, published by Harvard University Press.
Betancourtās upbringing, as well as her academic trajectory, shaped her interest in understanding what helps people recover from trauma
Betancourt grew up in Bethel, Alaska, a remote community that sheās described as being āhaunted by cultural loss and collective trauma that often manifested in high rates of suicide, family violence, and threats to human capital.āĀ
When Betancourtās family settled in Bethel following her fatherās service in the Peace Corps in the 1960s, violent crime per capita in the region was much higher than the national average. Binge drinking was common. And a large percentage of the 3,000 people in the city who needed therapy never got it.Ā
Betancourtās mother worked in early childhood development, giving her the opportunity to see what happened when kids with serious conditions such as fetal alcohol syndrome were denied the care they needed.
āI had always been thinking about children living in the context of violence and was interested in that,ā Betancourt told Haitisha Mehta, a doctoral student at ĀŅĀ׊”æÉ°®SSW who moderated the discussion.
She went on to study psychology at Linfield University in Oregon, expressive arts therapy at the University of Louisville, and maternal and child health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she earned her doctorate in 2003.
Her doctoral adviser was child psychiastrst Felton Earls, a major influence on her work whose large-scale, interdisciplinary study of Chicago youth looked at how families, schools, and neighborhoods affect child development.
And she completed an internship at the United Nations, where she worked on the first big study examining the impact war has on childrensā health and well-being.
Betancourt connected with Zombo in 2002, while she was still working on her doctoral degree. āWe were quite a motley bunch of people, different ages, different professional backgrounds,ā Zombo recalled. āWhat united us was, I think, our understanding of the culture and maybe the levels of curiosity based on what work you did, what circumstances you were faced with. So we just came together and we went for it.ā
A childās future may be shaped more by his or her postwar environmentāsuch as family support and communityāthan by experiences endured during war
Betancourtās research shows that the lives of former child soldiers are influenced not only by their individual hardships but also by the responses of their families, peers, and larger communities.Ā
āI think research in resilience has come a long way,ā said Betancourt. āThere was a time when resilience was treated like a trait of certain people. Like, this is a super kid, highly resilient kid. Letās study that without really thinking of the ecology around the child.ā
Over time, under Betancourtās leadership, the field has evolved and become more nuanced. Resilience is now understood less as a personal trait and more as the result of the influence of an individualās close relationships.
āInstead of thinking of resilience as something that one individual holds, itās really about your interaction with your family, your community, your cultural ecosystem,ā said Betancourt.
From left to right: Moses Zombo, Theresa Betancourt, and ĀŅĀ׊”æÉ°®SSW Dean Gautam N. Yadama.
The title of Betancourtās book is steeped in symbolism
Zombo, who penned the foreword to āShadows into Light,ā recalled the story of a young boy, whom he had interviewed in the early days of the study. The boy was well-dressed, he said, clad in a stylish denim jacket, but he hid a missing eye with handcrafted glasses and appeared to be sad, cheerless.Ā
āHe could talk to you all right, but you would see he was not a happy person,ā said Zombo. āHe was a gloomy person at that time.ā
A few years later, Zombo interviewed the boy again as part of the second wave of the study. This time, the boy was overseeing a group of even younger boys stacking firewood in the back of a truck. Zombo noticed the boy smiling, that he was less self-conscious about his missing eye.Ā
āThe best thing was to see him smile, to see him happy, to see that he didnāt feel that it was a defining thing about him anymore,ā said Zombo.Ā
This young boy, once so sullen and now so self-confident, typifies the kind of transformation that Zombo and Betancourt have seen in many of the 529 children whom they have recruited for their now 23-year-old study. Perhaps they were not part of a ālost generation,ā as the prosecutor for the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone described them in 2004. Perhaps they had emerged from the shadows of a bloody war and into the light of a new life, filled with families that loved them and cared for them.Ā
āAnd that is maybe the story for most of them,ā said Zombo. āSo āShadows into Lightāāfor me itās an apt title.ā
From left to right: Haitisha Mehta, Theresa Betancourt, and Moses Zombo.
Writing āShadows into Lightā had been on Betancourtās professional bucket list
Betancourt carried one big professional goal into her position as Salem Professor in Global Practice, which she landed in 2017: To write a book that told the story of how the study came about, its core intentions, how she did it, and what she learned.
The process wasnāt easy. Betacourt said it took her four years to write the book, carving out time in between running her lab and teaching to pen chapter after chapter. She finished the book on sabbatical at UNICEF Innocenti in Florence, Italy, and published it in January.Ā
āEarly in writing the book to just validate some of the points I was making, we would have calls with Moses and I would say, āI'm sort of drawing this conclusion and hereās why,āā Betancourt told an attendee who had asked her to reflect on her writing process. āAnd then he would think out loud and give his opinion. So Moses was always my validation check. And then heād remember a story or start to tell a new story that I hadnāt heard before.ā
Betancourtās study is now focused, in part, on the children of the the former child soldiers
As part of her fifth wave of data collection, Betancourt is currently studying the biological offspring of the former child soldiers. She hypothesizes that, in an effort to control their kids, parents who have experienced trauma and struggle to regulate their emotions may resort to physical punishment and coercive tactics such as yelling.
āWe don't know that yet,ā said Betancourt,Ā whose study has been funded, in part, by several large grants from the National Institutes of Health. āBut we do have some correlational data from wave four that indicates that when the parent has high levels of emotion dysregulation, they use less positive parenting practices. And when the parent has emotional dysregulation, you see higher levels of externalizing problems in the kids.ā
Her goal, she said, is to provide interventions that promote early childhood development while reducing family violence. As she put it: āWe want to make sure that parent-child interactions stay away from violence, are nurturing, and are connected.ā