Running time
 1 hour 19 mins

Presenters: Sheetal Amin in conversation with Dr Margot Sunderland

The webinar is essential for anyone thinking about working therapeutically with unaccompanied children/young people who are asylum seekers and refugees, including those who’ve been tortured or sold. Sheetal Amin (CAMHS Lead for asylum seekers) focuses on the importance of being culturally informed, so doing your homework before seeing the child or young person; establishing a working alliance when hyper-vigilance is a survival mechanism. Through powerful case examples, Sheetal explores the importance of meeting the child/young person’s needs for safety and belonging well before addressing their trauma. She discusses how to support unaccompanied asylum-seeking children to find a new community, a new ‘tribe’, and how to help them form networks in this strange new place, so that they feel they belong as opposed to feeling catastrophically alone, desolate and frightened. This is key to the alleviation of trauma symptoms.

Sheetal also considers key factors to support trauma recovery. These include holding in mind the system around the child, as well as the child; how to work with interpreters in the room; how to work with children/young people who find it difficult to tell their story without shame, due to religious or cultural taboos; and how to work with children who don’t have a language for trauma or mental health. Finally, Sheetal looks at how to prepare yourself as a practitioner to work with extreme trauma, such as with children who’ve been sold, or sex trafficked, so you can offer effective connection, compassion and empathy.