Children impacted by family violence and other traumas frequently present to services with highly pathologised behaviours, and the psychological literature is quick to label this cohort as aggressive (Zarling et al., 2013), emotionally dysregulated and incompetent (Callaghan et al., 2017), and difficult to include and accommodate (Orr et al., 2023). Group work is often locally developed ‘on the ground’; however, there is a paucity of literature on effective child-focused group interventions, children’s voices is routinely absent from the research, and this work is underfunded and under-evaluated (Bunston et al., 2016). Consequentially, while many practitioners are attempting to support children's relational worlds, few are informed by documented practice examples of meaningful groupwork.  

While children referred to our service may present with behavioural challenges that position them as either ‘too aggressive’ or ‘too withdrawn’ to attend group programs, this presentation describes a model of group work that actively resists these discourses. Our group intervention integrates the creative arts to address themes of safety, connection, and growth with ‘challenging’ children who have experienced relational violence. The program is co-designed by art, music, and drama therapists and aims to honour children’s capacity to communicate what has happened to them through their creative voices. The paper will elucidate the following processes and outcomes: adapting Lahad’s (2017) 6-part-story model into an intervention for children to tell their stories; employing response art (Fish, 2012) and therapeutic songwriting (Fairchild & McFerrin, 2019) to hold children’s disclosures of violence; challenging the expectation that children need to be regulated in order to belong in the group; and supporting children’s acts of resistance and sharing. We aim to initiate a dialogue that supports practitioners to amplify and listen to children’s creative voices as they share, resist, and make sense of the traumatic experiences in their lives (Halliwell & Shannahan, 2024).

The effects on young people of witnessing or experiencing family violence can be life-long. As Safe Steps seeks to align family violence practice with state and national policy focussed on providing services to children and young people as victim survivors in their own right, it is critical to recognise the diverse needs and experiences of young people. 

Thanks to a Churchill Fellowship, Chelsea Tobin, CEO of Safe Steps, engaged with diverse organisations, academics, commissioners, governments and services specialising in crisis response for young people affected by violence in more than a dozen countries. 

This session will showcase innovative and effective responses that acknowledge and respond to the distinct challenges that young people face – including transformative approaches to working with trauma. Drawing on hundreds of conversations, Chelsea will offer fresh perspectives, sharing insights into co-design, recognising unique needs and vulnerabilities to tailor services and ensuring systems, programs and clinical responses share a trauma-informed philosophy. 

One Saturday morning long ago, a deranged 52-year-old man attempted to shoot the family of a suburban squash centre manager at their home, and then to destroy the nearby crowd-filled centre using his car's jerrycan-loaded cabin and brimming fuel tank as an improvised explosive device. Through the combination of an over-ambitious endgame, the extraordinary courage and decisiveness of several bystanders, and an abundance of blind serendipity, only the perpetrator himself was killed.

'Armed man amok, dies in car blaze', screamed the tabloid headline.   

Precipitating this rampage was a seemingly minor (squash-related) disagreement between this man and his own fifteen-year-old son—the principal intended target.

I was (and remain) that son. Later, I became (but for mental health reasons am no longer) a medical doctor.

For my two siblings and me, trauma ensued less from the day of denouement than from our shared preceding early-life subjection to unremitting domestic tyranny, ever-hidden from the wider world. We had faced incessant hostile scrutiny from (within an ambience of intractable and increasingly murderous hatred imposed by) a singularly paranoid, misanthropic monster—our father. Devoid of psychotherapy-seeking insight and (notwithstanding occasional police interventions) never having crossed the criminal sanction threshold, he had evaded mental health and judicial system constraints. While he lived, my physical survival had necessitated continuous self-surveillance and self-straitjacketing, despite which the inevitability of mortal violence had crescendoed.

And the aftermath? Since my father's ostentatious demise, my self-doubts have been perpetuated by the shame of cascading failures in attaining rites of passage, life skills and personal goals. A life constrained by complex post-traumatic stress, anxiety/depression, and avoidant personality traits has been compensated by glimmers of redemption.

Enduring an act of overt ultraviolence may constitute merely the 'iceberg-tip' in a parental abuse survivor's experiential journey involving lifelong vulnerability to further (including occupational) trauma—along with healing opportunities.