The project involved extensive archival and literature-based research conducted in archives and libraries in Italy and Slovenia, including Trieste, Nova Gorica, Ljubljana, Kranj, Izola, and Koper. The research focused on patient records, court files, ego-documents, conference proceedings, institutional reports, and publications produced by welfare institutions, mass organisations, and international organisations such as UNESCO. Additional materials were obtained through interlibrary and postal services, while oral interviews were conducted with experts and with individuals connected to the professional and institutional networks examined in the project. Particular attention was devoted to tracing processes of knowledge transfer and the circulation of concepts related to child mental health, using approaches from transnational history, the history of emotions, microhistory, historical anthropology, and the medical humanities.
The research confirmed the project’s initial premise that concepts of the “child victim of war” and children’s psychological suffering were historically and politically shaped rather than universal categories. Significant differences emerged between Italy and Slovenia (Yugoslavia) regarding the timing, forms, and intensity with which children’s wartime experiences entered expert and institutional discourses. In Italy, including the border region, several institutional solutions aimed at addressing the psychological consequences of war on children were established, or at least actively discussed, immediately after the war. In Slovenia (Yugoslavia), children’s psychological needs also became the subject of expert debates during the postwar period, although these discussions emerged somewhat later and, with some important exceptions, rarely referred explicitly to wartime trauma.
The project demonstrated that these differences were partly rooted in distinct pre-war psychiatric traditions. In Italy, postwar initiatives concerning children in need of psychological care could build on a longer pre-war tradition of child psychiatry, which had developed through close connections between psychiatry, pedagogy, and educational institutions. Before the Second World War, Italian child psychiatry focused especially on children with intellectual disabilities and evolved alongside the expansion of public education and medico-pedagogical institutions. This institutional and professional infrastructure remained influential after 1945 and facilitated the development of psycho-pedagogical and child guidance initiatives in the postwar period.
The research showed that pre-war Slovenian psychiatry relied predominantly on biosomatic interpretations of mental illness and devoted relatively little attention to environmental and social factors such as war experiences or family conditions. Children were frequently institutionalised together with adults, and specialised child psychiatric services remained underdeveloped before the Second World War. This, however, partially changed during the war. Institutional and intellectual continuities nevertheless partly explain why children’s psychological suffering did not immediately become a central topic within Slovenian postwar expert discourse. The field of child psychiatry developed more slowly in Slovenia after 1945 than in Italy, which also shaped initiatives in the border region.
The analysis further demonstrated that wartime experiences and their effects on children were initially interpreted predominantly in moral, social, and educational rather than medical or psychological terms. Nevertheless, patient files, petitions, and court records on both sides of the border revealed recurring references to nervousness, irregular sleep, emotional distress, and behavioural disturbances among children affected by war and postwar instability. These findings led the project beyond a narrow trauma/resilience framework toward a broader analysis of the institutional, political, and scientific processes shaping the treatment of orphans, abandoned children, and juvenile delinquents.
Despite following different temporal trajectories, developments in child welfare and child mental health in both Italy and Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia) were shaped by similar international scientific and organisational models originating in Switzerland, Great Britain, France, and the United States, as well as by the growing influence of international organisations, particularly the WHO. In both contexts, the child guidance clinic movement served as an important point of reference.
In Italy, comparable institutions known as centri medico-psico-pedagogici addressed, often directly, the psychological suffering of children affected by war and its aftermath. In Slovenia, the Educational Counselling Centre, established during the 1950s, became a key institution for children with behavioural, emotional, and learning difficulties. However, references to wartime experiences were considerably less pronounced, partly because the war was already becoming more temporally distant and because postwar social and political priorities increasingly shifted toward broader questions of education, adjustment, and child development.
The project also demonstrated that in both countries the immediate postwar period was primarily concerned with the care and control of abandoned children, orphans, and juvenile delinquents within closed institutional settings. By the 1950s, however, critiques of institutionalisation increasingly emerged, emphasising the potentially harmful psychological and social effects of long-term institutional care and promoting more individualised, family- and community-based approaches. The findings suggest that “psy” experts, welfare institutions, and mass organisations played an important role in initiatives aimed at reducing excessive institutionalisation and promoting alternative forms of care. These initiatives drew extensively on Western authors and experts who, informed by wartime experiences, critically reassessed institutional care and its psychological consequences for children. The project demonstrated how such models and theories, which in some Western countries were used to restore traditional conservative values, were selectively adapted to socialist contexts and reshaped in accordance with the specific social, political, and ideological conditions of Yugoslav socialism.
