Art therapy helps child abuse victims

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Art therapy helps child abuse victims

2006-07-06 16:15

New Delhi:

Child abuse victims often find it hard to express their feelings. But something as simple as drawing a picture can be healing now. Researchers in Hong Kong have taken Art Therapy a step further by combining it with Virtual Reality.

An eleven-year-old boy was a victim of alleged physical and emotional abuse by relatives. He had become so aggressive that it became too much for his parents to handle him.

They ultimately turned to Art Therapist Julia Byrne for help. “He was very closed. Closed up both in body and emotion,” Byrne says.

Instead of traditional therapy, she’s treating him in the Virtual World. This form of therapy is called Smart Ambience Therapy, which is a high-tech program that blends Art Therapy and technology. “We have two cameras, one at the top and one at the side by. With these two cameras, we are able to calculate the three dimensional position of the human; his speed and his acceleration and his gesture,” Professor, City University of Hong Kong, Horace Ip says.

In this kind of
treatment a child is brought into an interactive, 3D environment, where
movements are transformed into colours on the screen

The activity may feel like a video game to
the child, but it’s a really safe place to express emotions. The
program is still in an experimental stage at City University of Hong
Kong but social workers say that it is promising.

“Through the play they can express
themselves. So this is really a good way to help them relax and engage,
and then start working on the problem,” HK Family Welfare Society,
social worker, Shirlay Tang says.

Experts also believe that this high tech approach to Art Therapy could also be used to treat trauma and phobias.

Amrita Tripathi

Source:  http://news.moneycontrol.com/india/newsarticle/stocksnews.php?autono=225472

Children channeling emotions through HeartSpeak art therapy

Chidren channeling emotions through HeartSpeak art therapy

Elise Rambaud

Assistant Lifestyle Editor

Midland Reporter-Telegram
07/01/2006

In situations of violence and trauma, children are said to suffer the most.

But they suffer in silence because many children feel they have no voice.

A group of Midland children were recently given the tools to channel their emotions into forms of artistic self-espression in hopes that they could find their own voice.

Centers for Children and Families hosted HeartSpeak, an art therapy program for children who have experienced trauma, June 12-16. Kids ages 7 through 14 met at the Fredda Turner Durham Children’s Museum to bring forth beauty and hope out of crisis and emotional pain.

About 15 area kids collaborated with mental health professionals including Pam Smith, a therapist at Centers, and Fort Worth artist Jo Dufo to create “kid art from the heart,” Smith said.

“Many children here have been touched by violence. Our goal is help them find symbols that can help them express their reaction in a healing direction toward hope,” Smith said. “Often times children who have had experiences so traumatic, words as symbols are inadequate to express their response. What we’ve done is expose them to many different symbols as we taught the basics on how to create art to help them center themselves and find a calm, peaceful place within themselves. Continued…

New book captures the voices and art of African child refugees

16 Jun 2006 12:32:11 GMT
Source: UNHCR
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa,

As the young refugee “Jenny” read out the traumatic experiences she had faced in her journey from tribal massacres in Burundi to a new life in South Africa, her voice grew increasingly strained, faltered and then halted.For the audience assembled at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, there could not have been a better demonstration of the emotional power conveyed by the personal stories appearing in a new book, The Suitcase Stories: refugee children reclaim their identities.

The book, a by-product of an innovative programme providing art therapy to refugee children, contains both their stories and the drawings they made of their experiences.”Then my parents died. They just burned the house of my family,” reads the transcript of the story told by Jenny, who like all the participants chose the name used in the book. “All my family was living in that house – my mother, my daddy, my other aunty, my mother’s sister, my brother, my sister.

I don’t know why, still now, why they burned the house. I wish to find out.”Just three years old at the time, she survived only because she was with another aunt during the attack. In the following years she faced life in exile in both the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. One day when she was 11, she had the sudden realisation that she would never see her mother again.”I asked God: ‘Why did you take my mum away from me?’

And it was like, what can I do next? Let me do some action here that I will never forget in my life,” Jenny related. Taking her younger sister, she made her way south to a country about which she had only the vaguest knowledge.Eventually arriving in South Africa – where they did not speak the language – the two girls lived on the streets of Johannesburg for weeks before they were taken in and given shelter.

Now 20, she sells clothes in an informal market.Jenny was just one of a group of children who Glynis Clacherty, a South African child researcher, saw needed psychological help. The aim – when she first thought of the project in 2001 – was not a book, but to let the children come to terms with their experiences by speaking about and drawing them.Children were given old suitcases and told they could decorate the outsides with paintings about their lives. At the same time, Clacherty recorded long conversations with the children in which she let them tell of their experiences.

Both the artwork and their words are in the book, which was unveiled six days before ceremonies for World Refugee Day are held globally on June 20.”When I first met this group of young people, one of the young women said to me: ‘I want you to help us with a book so people will know why we came here,’” Clacherty said. “And that is what we did. Each one of these children has a remarkable story to tell.”Proceeds from sales of the book will go to fund the continued operation of The Suitcase Project for more refugee children. In addition, T-shirts inspired by the art of the project were unveiled at the book launch.

The profits from the clothing line, designed by Johannesburg-based Frances Andrew, will also go to the project.”They are not just victims, they are survivors. They have overcome difficulties with remarkable courage,” said Clacherty. “They are real human beings, they are not just refugees.”Clacherty started the project with art teacher Diane Welvering, subsequently gaining support from the UN refugee agency and other organisations. It also merged into UNHCR’s study into violence affecting refugee children, which in turn provided insights that will be used in the UN Global Study on Violence

Against Children due out later this year.The children from The Suitcase Project were included in UNHCR workshops using artwork to draw out children’s ideas and experiences on violence. Subsequently five were included in a regional UN meeting in which children not only discussed their experiences as a group, but proposed solutions to protect against further violence.Many who were children when Clacherty launched her project are now young adults and the plan is to draw in a fresh group with the resources from the book and T-shirts.

Many of those who took part joined Clacherty on the stage at the book-launch and their painted suitcases covered the tables.”None of the children want to be labelled as refugees in their present lives, so they have chosen to remain anonymous,” Clacherty wrote in an introduction to the book, “The names they chose to replace their own all have significance for them; they are names of lost parents or special friends from their home countries.”As

I have worked with these stories I have been struck by the sadness, the loss, the displacement that the children have experienced, but also overwhelmingly by their resilience, their ability to make a plan and often to see the funny side of what is happening to them.”

Further information on The Suitcase Project, the book and the T-shirts is available at: www.suitcase.org.zaBy Jack ReddenIn Johannesburg, South Africa

Reuters AlertNet – New book captures the voices and art of African child refugees

technorati tags:trauma, Africa, therapeuticarts, children

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Mural depicts road to recovery at Sunrise House

New Jersey Herald

www.sunrisehouse.com.

Using the Arts to Tame Katrina’s Emotional Force

Using the Arts to Tame Katrina’s Emotional Force | Connect for Kids

Using the Arts to Tame Katrina’s Emotional Force

Published: June 12, 2006

by: Martha Pitts
[Final products of the Whole Schools/Dream Yard kite-building project take flight.] Final products of the Whole Schools/Dream Yard kite-building project take flight.

A high school sophomore in New Orleans takes a picture of the green mold covering the walls of her house and writes in her journal about the much-anticipated day she and her family can return home permanently.

A young boy from Pascagoula, Mississippi sits in an art center in Fairhope, Alabama during a “hurricane healing” workshop. He draws a picture of a face, colors it blue, and draws waves under the eyes.

And another young boy, one of many displaced children living in a trailer park in Baker, La. with their families, makes an ant out of pipe cleaners and tells a therapist the ant is scared of drowning.

In the nine months since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, many children have used art and other creative activities to express themselves and to cope with the traumatic events associated with the hurricane. The concept of art therapy rests on the idea that creative activities offer ways for children and young people to revisit a traumatic experience in ways that are healing. And in the aftermath of Katrina, there’s a whole cohort of kids who need ways to process terrible loss on a large scale.

Why Art Therapy?

“Because of its interdisciplinary qualities—art, psychology, child development, arts education—art therapy is uniquely positioned to assist children with trauma,” said Paige Asawa, therapist and co-author of the book A History of Art Therapy in the United States.

Asawa and several of her colleagues from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles have taken numerous trips to the Renaissance Village, a FEMA trailer park in Baker, La., to work with children displaced by Katrina.

And while Asawa has worked with both children and adults who’ve experienced different kinds of trauma—death in the family and witnessing violence, for example—she says the experience of Katrina was different.

“You can’t compare them,” Asawa said. “You’re talking about the displacement of hundreds of thousands of kids, and the trauma went for days, in some cases for weeks and months. Families were relocated and torn apart.”

Because the complexity of the disaster was incomprehensible to many of the children, art therapy has been especially beneficial, allowing the kids to express the inexpressible and to unlock hidden feelings.

Simply by re-telling a story, Asawa said, a child can be re-traumatized as he or she vividly remembers troubling events. However, if they have something else to do in the context of remembering—drawing, playing with clay, for example—they are less likely to become traumatized again.

Initially, Asawa and the other therapists provided art supplies to get the participants—ages 4 to 21—engaged in a creative activity. When they were ready to tell their stories, Asawa helped them do that through art.

“We sit with them, hear what they say, and take what they’re saying to a therapeutic level,” Asawa says. She explains that by asking questions about a piece, or encouraging the children to use a different art medium, the therapists help the children understand the emotions the artwork is expressing. Continued…

Art Therapy Helps Children Affected by Cancer

Art Therapy

From OncoLog, December 2003, Vol. 48, No. 12

Art Therapy Helps Children Affected by Cancer Express Their Emotions

by Karen Stuyck

Simple lines, bright colors, and primitive shapes give the artwork a decidedly childlike quality, but the scenes the young artists portray are disturbing—a floating house, a person jumping from a burning airplane, a sinister bee that drinks blood.

The art that these young patients and children of patients create is “a window into the less-conscious mind,” said Estela A. Beale, M.D., a child and adult psychiatrist and associate professor in the Department of Neuro-Oncology at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

The premise behind art therapy—using a young patient’s art for a psychotherapeutic purpose—is that creating pictures allows children to express what is uppermost in their minds more genuinely and spontaneously than they are apt to do in a discussion with the therapist. “What is really important is to let the children express themselves without any influence from an adult,” Dr. Beale said.

Pictures help the therapist understand the children’s perceptions and feelings about what is happening to them and explore possible alternatives to solving problems, Dr. Beale said.

Sometimes the child’s art expresses this information quite graphically, but often the young artist’s thoughts and feelings are “concealed, disguised, or expressed metaphorically,” Dr. Beale said. Continued…

Group Analytic Art Therapy (book review)

Book Fills Gap in Art Therapy Literature – OhmyNews International

Book Fills Gap in Art Therapy Literature
Providing both insight and encouragement

Ambrose Musiyiwa (amusiyiwa)
Article
Published on 2006-05-20 15:10 (KST)

Group Analytic Art Therapy

By Gerry McNeilly

Jessica Kingsley Publishers

240 pages
GBP £18.99. US$24.95

Gerry McNeilly’s “Group Analytic Art Therapy” fills a gap in group art therapy literature on both sides of the Atlantic.

It highlights the deficiencies in group art therapy literature, and the sparseness of research in art therapy, in the United Kingdom.

The book reinforces the need for art therapy theoreticians and professionals to continue researching aspects of their profession and writing about their efforts.

It encourages them to reflect on their practice and to share those reflections with the wider community of professionals working in therapeutic enterprises.

McNeilly observes: “There is only one art therapy journal in the U.K., ‘Inscape,’ and this has published little on group art therapy … I’m aware of only two books that address groups specifically from a psychotherapy perspective: ‘Group Interactive Therapy’ (Waller 1993) and ‘Art Psychotherapy Groups’ (Skaife and Huet 1998), which covers a wide range of clinical settings from a number of British art therapists.”  Continued….

Schools use art to heal wounds left by violence

MiamiHerald.com | 05/15/2006 | Schools use art to heal wounds left by violence

EDUCATION

Schools use art to heal wounds left by violence

A project at Campbell Dive Middle School confronts violence through art therapy in search for avenues toward peace and reconciliation. 
BY PETER BAILEY
pbailey@MiamiHerald.com 

Every weekend, 13-year-old Rondarious Smith heads to the beach at Homestead Bayfront Park and gazes at the turquoise tranquility stretching before him. He sits daydreaming as the waves rush in, staring at the approaching ripples until they lap at his feet.

”It’s where I go to get away . . . It’s an escape from the violence at school and in the community,” said Rondarious, a sixth-grader at Campbell Drive Middle School.

He recreated his beach safe-haven in a painting emblazoned on a mural in the school’s media center. The artwork — and more than 100 more from other Campbell Drive students — is part of a project called Art for Peace, an exhibit that uses art therapy to address campus violence.

”Through art, the students were given an opportunity to express their intimate feelings on violence,” said Morgen Chesonis-Gonzalez, a clinical art therapist with the Miami-Dade school district. Continued…
View slide show:

Smallest Witnesses: the crisis in Darfur through children’s eyes

Committee on Conscience | Podcasts

SMALLEST WITNESSES: THE CRISIS IN DARFUR THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES

Friday, June 3, 2005

NARRATOR: The images are grim and all too familiar to those whose lives have been destabilized in the Sudanese region of Darfur. These are scenes of villages being burned, of murder, rape, and destruction, of thousands of people turned into refugees on the Sudan and Chad border. All are captured on crayon and paper by Darfur’s smallest witnesses, the children.

See videocast here: http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/podcasts/
Article with more drawings here: http://www.hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/

Artwork shows horror and healing (hurricane Katrina)

2theadvocate.com | News | Artwork shows horror and healing

Artwork shows horror and healing
Pictures allow children to recall hurricanes safely and adjust to their new lives
By CHARLES LUSSIER
Advocate staff writer

Published: Apr 9, 2006

photo by Kerry Maloney
Katrina's Children

In a corner of the cramped library at Progress Elementary in north Baton Rouge, two girls in burgundy shirts and navy blue pants pull out crayons and start to draw pictures.

“We express what we’re feeling in drawings,” fifth-grader Javonté LeFlore explains.

Their guide in exploring those feelings is Folly Shaffer, an art therapist working with dozens of children like Javonté and Darrylneka Thomas, another fifth-grader forced to relocate from New Orleans to Baton Rouge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Affectionately called Ms. Folly, Shaffer is one of 10 additional social workers for the school system funded by a $200,000 grant from the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. Shaffer, however, is the only one practicing art therapy.

She is able to work with only a handful of the 4,000 evacuee children in East Baton Rouge Parish, many of whose emotions are overwhelming their coping skills.

“If we had 40 more of me, we would all still be busy,” she said.

“It’s not a question of trying to get them over the experience,” she said. “It’s trying to get them to a point where they de-emphasize the experience so that it’s a positive part of their future.”

Progress Elementary Principal Sarah Henry said she’s starting to notice a difference in the children receiving help. At first hesitant to leave their mothers, these children now come to school and fit in with their peers.

“They’re not as worried as much about what happened,” Henry said. “They haven’t forgotten it, but they can be kids now.”

By late January, Shaffer had spent several months working with a handful of children at Progress, which at one point took in more than 100 displaced children, including those living in the Groom Road FEMA trailer park known as Renaissance Village.

The plan is simple: Each week, Shaffer asks them to draw the things that are on their minds. No judgment, just free expression. She’s never had any child refuse.

“If you sat the same group down and said, ‘How do you feel about what happened?’, they would just look at you,” she said.

“They are not the most articulate children, even before the storm.”

Shaffer helps them match feelings with colors and words. After completing the drawings, they talk about what they drew and what it means.

She also has noticed children experiencing secondary trauma as their parents struggle to find housing or jobs.

On this day in January, Javonté and Darrylneka need no coaxing to get to work. Like runners in a relay race, the girls grab their crayons and start scribbling.

The pictures inevitably deal heavily with the storm and are suffused with sadness. Unlike their earlier drawings — which overflow with dark colors, dead bodies, damaged buildings and stormy weather — these are more balanced.

The girls divide their drawings in half, one side showing Katrina memories and the other half showing their happier lives now.

“The work is more positive now,” Shaffer said.

“You see more growth, flowers and trees, and more things put together.”

Both of their drawings portray their old homes damaged by the storm and their current homes, which they associate with happiness. They portray rain falling black or red in oversized drops. The children mixed words into the drawing. Shaffer said she’s seen children compose poems in the course of drawing. The words are often misspelled.

Source: http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/2602306.html