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Systemic and Narrative Work with Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children: Stories of Relocation provides a contextualised, research-based understanding of how to enhance and support the emotional health and well-being of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.The framework presented in this book is an innovative intervention that enhances the well-being of children who have experienced trauma by improving the therapeutic abilities for all who support and care for them. This book presents the evidence base for this new systemic and narrative trauma-informed framework of care, creates a wider understanding of working with trauma responses in unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and offers coherence for practitioners wanting to use this approach. The authors provide a physiological view, as well as identify embodied aspects of trauma experience, and describe a narrative approach developed from a clinical understanding of trauma, as well as presenting the words of children who took part in the project. Creating a common multi-disciplinary language, this approach can be used to improve coherence, coordination, and excellence within the whole system.This book is essential reading for all practitioners working with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. It will also be of interest to students and trainees of social work and other mental health disciplines, as well as other professionals seeking to understand the needs of this group.
List of contents
Foreword Life is a journey. 1. Introduction to the framework 2.Location, dislocation, and relocation. 3.A physiological perspective of trauma. 4. The distress screening tool. 5.Sleep. 6.Nutrition and semi-starvation. 7.Continuing Bonds Enquiry. 8.Fast Feet Forward. 9.Curiosity gave the cat nine lives? References.
Report
'Support for the mental health of child refugees is crucial. This book, written by professionals in the field, will help to raise the issue and be helpful to those working with these vulnerable children.'
Lord Dubs (Baron Dubs, of Battersea in the London Borough of Wandsworth), a labour peer.
'I have just finished the book and found it both a moving read due to the statements of the young people as well as offering helpful and useful interventions supported by research . I hope workers in the LAC field also read and consider how ideas can be used in their work.'
Dorothy and Barry Porter, systemic psychotherapist and supervisor
'A critical book at a critical time in the UK for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees where views and actions of a few are particularly in focus and operate in a way that re-traumatises and destabilises and dislocates those already vulnerable and traumatised. Where the place of safety they sacrificed and endured so much to reach is destabilised and imbued with threat. This book Relocates this vulnerable population in their humanity and need.'
Eleanor Osman, highly specialist systemic psychotherapist
