Art therapy in abused children

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 suspected sexual abuse" (Drawings pp). 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 to them smiling told the psychologist that she and her sister were "cheering at a show," however the therapist claimed the picture actually indicated a "helpless posture," especially because the children in the drawing had no fingers on their hands, while the hands of the father were large (Drawings pp). The psychologist claimed that abused children typically put large hands on the drawings of their perpetrators (Drawings pp). Moreover, she claimed that the thick lines in the crotch of the father was meant to emphasis the penis and show the child's anxiety about the father (Drawings pp). Although the child continued to deny allegations that her father had sexually abused her, the therapist concluded that in fact she had been sexual abused by him (Drawings pp).

It is however, well documented that children have an increased tendency to recollect traumatic experiences as visual images that are portrayed through art, and artistic expression following a traumatic experience (Kozlowska pp).

Thus, making art in family therapy with young children takes advantage of children's spontaneous use of art to express themselves and immediately includes them in the therapeutic process (Kozlowska pp). According to some researchers, children are able to express unremembered as well as remembered memories through drawings (Kozlowska pp). Therefore, art serves to make "the invisible visible" and rescues non-declarative memorty from its wordless form by creating visible and palpable illustrations of experiences (Kozlowska pp).

According to Kasia Kozlowska, creating art is pleasurable and provides a contrary experience to the associated trauma, thus facilitating desensitization and processing of traumatic memories (Kozlowska pp). The actual art paper or work of art may act as a transitional space where intolerable feelings are able to be externalized in a concrete form that can then be manipulated, returned to and reworked as part of the therapeutic process (Kozlowska pp). Kozlowska points out that children are more likely to cope better with adverse events if they have an internal locus of control, and a strong sense of self-efficacy (Kozlowska pp).

Art allows the child to have control over the image and is "important in enhancing a sense of control, hope, competence, and mastery" (Kozlowska pp). Art allows for the symbolic representation of the child and others, "feelings, events, and specific sequences, and allows for exposure to traumatic cues in a less direct manner, anxiety to be tolerated, and the unspeakable or unthinkable to be contemplated in the image of the artwork" (Kozlowska pp).