Testimonials, narratives, stories, and drawings: child refugees as witnesses

Abstract

An estimated 80% of the world's war victims are women and children, a significant proportion of whom suffer from social and psychiatric sequelae of traumatic experiences. Various treatments for psychiatric symptoms related to trauma among refugees have been studied. This article summarizes the literature on therapies involving the creation of stories, such as narrative therapy and testimonial therapies, and other storytelling techniques described on the World Wide Web in the absence of an academic literature. At this point, longer and larger studies of the efficacy of all these approaches are warranted.