Storytelling as a means for healing children's trauma: Peace education in Southern Thailand

One of the most devastating legacies of the ongoing intractable ethnoreligious conflict in southern Thailand is the polarisation of social relationships between Thai Buddhist and Malay Muslim communities at the grassroots level. The conditions of human insecurity in the southernmost provinces of the country - Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala - have contributedto social mistrust and acute social prejudice between the two warring parties. According to Robert LeVine and Donald Campbell (1971), such a dichotomy between in-groups (us) and out-groups (them) helps people to construct their own threatened world that then creates the circumstances in which identification and interdependence with the in-group are directly associated with fear, trauma and hostility toward the threatening out-group.