Care for children who have experienced child abuse & neglect The relevance of innovative and integrative prevention and treatment programs

This thesis aimed to examine reasons why children who experienced child abuse and neglect (CAN) drop out of trauma treatment and to investigate how innovative interventions with integrative, multidisciplinary approaches and techniques can contribute to the existing body of interventions for children who experienced CAN. We provide an overview of risk factors identified in literature for children dropping out of evidence-based trauma therapy after CAN; we evaluate a trauma-informed drama therapeutic program (‘Time for Tony the Turtle’) in domestic violence shelters by exploring the experiences of mothers, children, and professionals involve; we conduct a first experimental study into the effectiveness of Integratieve Gehechtheidsbevorderende Traumabehandeling voor Kinderen (IGT-K) on attachment problems, posttraumatic stress symptoms, behavioral problems, and emotion regulation difficulties in children who experienced CAN in the past.
Given the severity of symptomatology after CAN, it is important to develop a continuum of adequate care that is suitable to target and engage all children who are at risk for developing CAN-related symptomatology or are already struggling with it. For certain groups of children, this requires integrating (existing) interventions or innovating techniques to better match their needs. Our findings show that efforts, both in the field of research and in the clinical field, can contribute to the improvement of knowledge and foster insight in factors that influence the risk for evidence-based trauma-focused treatment dropout. Besides, our results show that through further developing and examining treatments, more children can be engaged in either prevention or specialized treatments.