Play therapy is a valuable therapeutic approach for child victims of crime, particularly those who have experienced trauma. It utilizes play as a non-threatening way for children to process their experiences, express their emotions, and begin the healing process. Through play, children can safely explore their feelings, build emotional regulation skills, and develop coping mechanisms.
Safe and Non-Threatening:
Play therapy provides a safe and controlled environment where children can express themselves without feeling pressured or retraumatized.
Symbolic Language:
Play acts as a symbolic language for children, allowing them to communicate their experiences and feelings in a way that might be difficult through verbal therapy alone.
Emotional Regulation:
Play therapy helps children develop emotional regulation skills, enabling them to better manage their feelings and behaviours.
Cognitive Processing:
Play allows children to process traumatic events, make sense of their experiences, and reconstruct their understanding of the world.
Social Skills Development:
Play therapy can improve social skills, problem-solving abilities, and the ability to form healthy relationships.
For children who have experienced crime, play therapy can be a crucial part of their recovery, helping them to process trauma, rebuild their sense of safety, and develop the resilience needed to move forward.
See the link to Directive Trauma Focused Play Therapy which suits older children and can be very helpful inprocessing events via project based creative strategies.
Child-centered play therapy as a means of healing children exposed to domestic violence.
By Hall, Jennifer Geddes
International Journal of Play Therapy, Vol 28(2), Apr 2019, 98-106
Increasingly, domestic violence is being recognized as a major concern for children today. Witnessing physical as well as psychological–emotional violence within the family can cause serious detrimental effects to children. Younger children respond to domestic violence by having higher levels of psychological disturbance and display lower self-esteem than do older children. Likewise, other issues related to mental and physical health may manifest. Additionally, child witnesses of familial violence are taught to maintain the secret of violence; therefore, alternative forms to verbal expression are important in supporting this population. It is imperative that these child witnesses receive interventions that are developmentally appropriate and meet their unique needs. Play therapy has been proven to be a statistically effective means of treating externalizing and internalizing problems in children. Therefore, it is proposed that child-centered play therapy interventions be applied when working with children exposed to domestic violence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)