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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Psychological support for children who are victims of abuse in Cambodia: Culture as a developmental tool of traumatic experience

subject

description

When psychologists step in the humanitarian field, they are confronted with cultural and language issues during their intervention. The way of expressing trauma is deeply linked with the cultural background, thus it should guide and shape the psychological support to make it more appropriate. Within a Khmer NGO, we have set up a psychological support based on different sorts of mediation. Our patients were eight children with the same set of symptoms: recurrence and massive anxiety, most of the time appearing through animist cultural representations. In this article, we will first present the situation of Bonat, witness of domestic violence and of his mother’s death, and then the situation of Kea, victim of incest. We shall focus on the effects of culture within the framework of the expression of trauma and its shaping during the psychological support.