Therapeutic Support for victims of CSA

Hope from Hurt provides therapeutic support to children and young people, aged from 4, who have disclosed sexual abuse.

It is a service based on choice, the child’s choice, giving choice and control back to the child, who had it taken from them by their abuser. That’s one reason. The other is that not every child needs/wants support, especially immediately after disclosure. So a child chooses to engage if and when they are ready. Their choice continues throughout the service, they choose which traumatic impacts they work on, and they choose when to end the work.

I never ask the child about their abuse. From my experience in this work, and also best practice guidance, it is clear that this in itself is abusive. A child should never have to ‘tell their story’ over and over again, and I’ve had so many children ask me why they had to tell what happened to them to so many different people. I get my information from the referrer, so I understand what happened to the child, my work is to then understand the impact of this on the child, what it did to them, and support them as they begin their recovery. That is what I work on, at the child’s pace.

A child needs to be, and importantly to feel, physically and emotionally safe in order to engage in this work. This means having believing and supportive parents/carers, focusing on the needs of their child. That’s why I offer support to (non abusing) parents/carers and siblings also. It gives parents/carers the opportunity to work through their own feelings and emotions, but also to be able to understand and support their child in their recovery. Siblings can have very complex and conflicted emotions too, which they need support to understand and work through. I can undertake the work with parents even when their child is not ready, it still helps support the child.

I provide the service locally. Therapeutic services for children are something of a postcode/eircode lottery, and often mean long journeys for the child. This is not therapeutic. I travel across Northern Ireland and Donegal in order to provide the service as close to the child’s locality as possible. Being able to avail of support in a familiar place is so important to children, and conducive to their recovery.

Doing this work is a privilege, and the children are amazing, but the best part is when the child is ready to end the work, when they don’t need me in their lives anymore, when their trauma no longer has the hold on them and their lives that it once did. When they have hope for the future.