Art Therapy for Abused Children
Art therapy is a psychotherapeutic discipline using plastic and graphic art expression as a means of expressing thoughts and feelings that an individual may be unable or unwilling to verbalize (Di Maria pp). Each client's diagnosis, needs, interests, and capabilities are formulated in the goals of the therapy (Di Maria pp). Art therapists encourage their clients to express personal concerns through the creation of art, and the work can be viewed as a tangible record of progress, as well as an indication of where further therapeutic interventions should take place (Di Maria pp). This art may server as a springboard for verbal communication and also a source of pride of accomplishment for the client (Di Maria pp). Audrey Di Maria says that children often come to their first art therapy session expecting to fail because they are afraid of messing up or that their work will be compared unfavorably to work by other children (Di Maria pp). As an art therapist it is important to help children see how special and extraordinary their own ideas are (Di Maria pp). The goal of art therapy is to celebrate the diversity of each child's unique crease and help raise his or hers sense of self-esteem (Di Maria pp).
Children's drawings may provide information about perceptual-motor abilities and developmental level of the child, however children's drawings are also used to assess possible sexual abuse (Drawings pp). Since emotionally disturbed children are believed to reflect their problems in art work, the drawings of abused children is assumed to differ from those of non-abused children (Drawings pp). Any number of approaches, whether free drawing, house-tree-person, draw-a-person, and kinetic family drawings, are used and qualitative features of the drawings, such as colors, size and detail of body parts, as well as the shape of the figures may be interpreted in terms of the presence or absence of sexual abuse (Drawings pp). According to one 1981 study, drawings in which a child exhibits a shift from age-appropriate figures to more disorganizes objects or drawings with "repeated stylized, sexualized figures indicate...
Some researchers recommend using drawings as part of the evaluative interview of abuse victims, while others believe that human figure drawings can be analyzed for emotional indicators in young children who cannot verbalize their trauma (Drawings pp). A 1996 study reveals that distress and trauma, including sexual abuse, is reflected in drawings that include such signs as:
"large heads, large, empty eyes, abundant hair, shaded clouds, knotholes in trees, large hands, large heads, large pointed teeth, abnormally tiny eyes, eyes without pupils, crossed eyes, excessive details, box-shaped bodies, poorly integrated body parts, lack of gender differentiation, hair that is long at the sides or thinning at the crown, wedge-shaped windows, extraneous circles, and large smoke trails coming out of the chimney" (Drawings pp).
However, researchers caution that trauma cannot be determined by a single characteristic, but rather from a series of drawings that include a number of these signs (Drawings pp).
Most studies conclude that the presence of genitalia is often viewed as a sign of sexual abuse because it is thought to be rare for normal, non-abused children to include genitals in their drawings, thus many researchers believe that the presence of genitalia in drawings means possible sexual abuse (Drawings pp). For example, it has been found that incest victims either exaggerate or minimize sexual features in their art work, suggesting that the child possesses sexual knowledge beyond his or her years (Drawing pp). However, empirical support for these claims is fairly weak, and most experts believe that other factors, such as family nudity, the birth of a sibling, or being exposed to an X-rated video may affect a child's tendency to include sexual details in a drawing (Drawings pp).
There have been many examples of drawings by children that have been erroneously interpreted as supporting a conclusion of sexual abuse (Drawings pp). For example, one-seven-year-old girl who drew a picture of herself and her sister with their hands in the air and the father standing next…
