Download The Juvenists Blog for 11 July 2013 Rather than continuing to

The Juvenists
Blog for 11 July 2013
Rather than continuing to discuss the quiz questions, I thought I’d talk some more about ‘traumainformed practice’. This topic seems not to have been raised a lot in New Zealand – correct me if I’m
wrong about this – despite being widely discussed elsewhere. As Lesley Laing, an Australian writer, said
in 2010: 'Increasingly, children's exposure to DV (domestic violence) is being conceptualised within a
trauma framework'. i
Here’s a brief resumé of one poignant American case study from a paper on residential care of children,
which graphically illustrates what can happen if we’re not trauma-informed:
A 10-year-old girl was brought into care and placed in a therapeutic residence. Staff found that she was
frequently making a huge noise at bedtime, banging furniture around angrily and disturbing the other
children. This went on for some weeks, until it emerged that she was in fact pushing her dresser up
against her bed. At that point her social worker recalled the girl had told her that she had been tied to
her bed and raped by her mother’s boyfriend on numerous occasions. To quote:
Here we have a little girl who has a history of being terribly abused at bedtime. She is scared and
anxious and tries to manage these emotions by building a barricade in her room each night. The
staff are not attuned to the trauma history and view this behavior as disruptive and try to stop it.
The child resists and ends up in a conflict with staff. The situation escalates to the point that the
staff restrain her and straddle her on the floor of her bedroom. When confronted with the reality
that we were engaging in a reenactment with this child and that nightly our "treatment" program
was retraumatizing this little girl, we were horrified.
Children who have been hurt like Latisha are trapped in the past and repeatedly replay their
conflict and struggles in the present. All too often the response they receive from those of us
charged with helping them to recover is a recapitulation of past experiences and past trauma.ii
Had the staff been working to a trauma-informed model, as they were subsequently trained to do, the
social worker would have immediately highlighted the girl’s disclosure and the staff would have made the
required connections to her behaviour as a result and taken action to ensure she felt totally safe at night.
Hence (from the abstract of an IPSCAN paper): ‘Trauma forces individuals to rely on basic survival
skills that can often lead to a lifetime of chronic maladaptive behavior and interpersonal relationships.’ iii
Situations such as this one can and do occur, in different forms, all too easily in school and community
contexts.
It may be useful to consider the interactions between trauma, attachment and child development
theories. A booklet produced by the Victorian Child Safety Commissioner entitled ‘Calmer Classrooms:
A guide to working with traumatised children’ does an excellent job of explaining this. Trauma can
disrupt both attachment and development and disrupted attachment and development can increase the
risk and effects of trauma. Because of this, children are more vulnerable to trauma than adults, as their
sensory, emotional and cognitive development and developing coping skills (resiliency) are impacted.
Thus chronic abuse, neglect and traumatic experiences, without the soothing and positive affect
regulation inherent to a trusting relationship, can interfere with the ability of a child to make sense of
things, leading to developmental delays and erratic and unhelpful responses to further stress, often
throughout their lifetimes.
As the booklet reminds us, trauma can occur to children through a wide range of experiences.
If we look behind the acting-out behaviour of abused and neglected children we see that many are
suffering from deep and long-lasting pain. This pain comes from:
 Grief and loss
 Abandonment and neglect
 Emotional abuse
 Persistent anxiety
 Fear or terror of the future
 Depression and dispiritedness
 Physical self-mutilation
We see then that much of the behaviour of traumatised children is pain-based, and it is not that
they won’t behave like other children, but that they can’t.iv
The classic text on trauma is, of course, Judith Herman’s ‘Trauma and Recovery’. I recommend it as an
excellent background to the recognition of trauma and a guide for working towards recovery.
Here’s a sample quote:
Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom.
But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult
life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She
approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened
by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to
form stable relationships.
She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the
trauma.”v
An outline of her steps for recovery for adults can be found on http://1in6.org/men/getinformation/online-readings/recovery-and-therapy/stages-of-recovery/judith-hermans-stages-ofrecovery/ . More on identifying and treating trauma in children in the following weeks.
Deborah Yates
Laing, Lesley (2010) No Way to Live: Women's experiences of negotiating the family law system in the context of
domestic violence University of Sydney p23
i
ii
http://www.sanctuaryweb.com/PDFs_new/Harrison%20&%20Yanosy%20Traumatic%20Reenactment%20ISP
CAN.pdf
iii
http://www.sanctuaryweb.com/PDFs_new/Harrison%20&%20Yanosy%20Traumatic%20Reenactment%20ISPCAN.pdf
http://www.ccyp.vic.gov.au/childsafetycommissioner/downloads/calmer_classrooms.pdf
Judith Lewis Herman, (1992)Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political
terror’
iv
v