Narrative exposure therapy in a child protection context: Breaking intergenerational cycles by providing a pathway through past trauma

Abstract

Trauma is a central theme in child protection. Responding to and preventing traumatic harm to children is a key function of statutory child protection agencies and systems in Australia. Parents who encounter these systems are also known to be a highly traumatised cohort, often experiencing trauma throughout their own early development and into their adult lives. Despite these being broadly accepted principles amongst practitioners, there are limited pathways for parents to undertake trauma-processing therapy as an integrated part of current child protection practice. Narrative exposure therapy (NET) is a manualised therapy model that has been used successfully to support individuals with life-threatening trauma to process these experiences and take agency over their lives. The successful use of this model by non-traditional therapists such as community health workers, in brief timeframes, has made it a valuable approach in settings with a high need for therapeutic support and low resources, such as refugee accommodation. Although these themes also have synergy with the child protection setting, there is relatively little research on the use of NET in this setting. This paper is written by practitioners and for practitioners and examines the real-world application of NET with parents involved with a non-statutory reunification service in the South Australian child protection system, grounded in a trauma-informed model of practice. As such, the paper considers extending the possible value of NET into an area of limited previous use. The paper highlights observational findings suggesting that NET has the potential to be an effective tool for bringing focus to the trauma experiences of the parent, so that they may process these and develop greater capacity to parent safely as well as engage more productively with the demands of the child protection system.