Thank you for the question. You raise lots of great issues here.
What I can tell you is that for younger children, I think there is a bit of an assumption, not that you're making it at all.... You seem very clued into this, and I thank you for that, but there is sometimes an assumption that a child will come out of a war zone and in fact somehow that has always resulted in a mental health challenge. That's not actually supported by the evidence.
Actually, what many children do experience, especially adolescents, is a lot of difficulty transitioning or integrating in during this phase of their resettlement, but because they maintain connections with family and a positive identity, they feel that they're not necessarily the cause of their being dislocated—it's not like they did something personally wrong—and a lot of those attributions and patterns of thinking actually are quite protective.
I just want to reassure the panel here that a lot of these children do need care, but many actually come with many of the resources to cope well. Our wonderful settlement organizations that are national in scope, many community groups, our religious organizations that adopt these families in their communities, the service clubs and educators, all of that creates, if you will, an environment rich in that kind of mental health supports. My estimate is that maybe one in 10 of these children, or perhaps two or three in 10, may need some sort of tertiary-level mental health intervention, and then you're right: It is a challenge to find culturally competent, linguistically appropriate interventions that would actually match.
Now, the good news is that across the country there are people, such as social workers, who act as cultural brokers. There are community organizations through faith communities that are reaching out to families and children. There are a lot of grassroots initiatives. I like that, because it takes away the necessity to always focus on a Ph.D. in child psychology who has to treat.... What we're actually understanding is that there's a relatively small number of children who would need that level of care, mostly because we as a Canadian society are incredibly good at wrapping communities and educational facilities around the children who are coming. We're seeing that. We saw that with the Syrians, and we certainly have seen that with the Ukrainians as well.