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referred to our service may present with behavioural challenges that position them as either ‘too aggressive’ or ‘too withdrawn’ to attend group programs, this presentation describes a model of group work that actively resists these discourses.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).