At a time when expectations and assumptions about the delivery of services to children and adolescents are being reconfigured - for example, around the rights of children and adolescents as young citizens - adults are seeking to ensure that they deliver services in creative and empowering ways, ensuring that the opinions of young people are actively solicited and encouraged. Action methods - communication methods using the body as well as speech - provide non-threatening ways of communicating which can be understood by children of all ages and from many cultures. This book places action...

As a probation officer and social worker, Anne Bannister has successfully used creative therapies with abused children for 25 years. Combining her practical experience and recent doctoral research she reflects on how and why these therapies actually work in the healing process. She shows how in 'the space between' children and their therapists, the child and adult can each use their creative skills to aid developmental processes, reverse negative brain patterns and affect positive behavioural changes to heal the damage caused by severe abuse in childhood. The author presents a practical model...

This text sets out the main theoretical and practical approaches of dramatherapy. Beginning with the notion of play and its importance for children, the author discusses how children use play as a method of investigation and rehearsing for reality. Role play is then illustrated as a means of discovering a child's intellectual and emotional development. Chapters specifically on abuse and trauma throw light on how children develop particular responses and behaviour patterns as a result of being abused, with victim and controlling behaviour revealed as the most common. Therapeutic work is...