Uploaded : June 2020

Keywords:
Elspeth McAdam, Peter Lang, Dianne Henoa, children, sexual abuse, Appreciative Systemic Inquiry, Wittgenstein, Ricoeur, victim, victimisation, ability spotting, dreaming, interviewing internal voices, role-playing, play-therapy, flashbacks, nightmares, back-lighting, Protection Interview, public masturbation, boys.

Elspeth McAdam

Child and Family Psychiatrist, and systemic therapist retired now from the UK National Health Service (NHS) after 30 years of service.

With her experience as a systemic therapist and consultant psychiatrist, she has been on the cutting edge of developments in both the therapeutic and organizational world.

In her NHS work, she has used systemic, narrative and appreciative practices in working with tough situations. She has specialized in working with children who are on the criminal edge and also families in which there has been violence or child sexual abuse. With her collaborator, the late Peter Lang, she has developed some unusual and very effective ways of working with these situations.

She now supervises all over Europe in complex situations, where therapists or families have felt unable to move forward.

Elspeth has worked as an Organizational Consultant in Sweden, Denmark and Finland as well as in Southern Africa and Columbia. She has been involved in organizational development programs of the public and private sector organizations. Her style of working is to validate and appreciate the strengths and skills within the personnel of an organization, recognizing what each person can contribute and using these strengths and abilities to create dreams of an ideal working situation. Practical plans are created as to how these visions can be actualized.

Among her activities has been her involvement in the rethinking of three towns in Sweden where there had been a considerable degree of violence and vandalism. School children were invited to interview all members of the community, generating energy and enthusiasm to create the community in which they would choose to live. A sense of autonomy and pride and personal responsibility resulted. Similarly, she was involved with Peter Lang in working with communities in Helsinki to create more integration and community spirit in deprived areas of Helsinki. She has done similar projects in Columbia, Brazil, Chile, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

She has also been involved in an HIV Prevention program in Tanzania, where HIV positive people are being trained as the agents of community change.

Additionally, she is involved in a research project on effective ways of working in situations of drugs and alcohol misuse in young people, involving their communities and families.

Working both organizationally as well as therapeutically, she draws on both her systemic and appreciative inquiry skills. Appreciative Systemic Inquiry has been used extensively in the organizational world. Elspeth McAdam together with Peter Lang has enriched the process by adding her extensive psychotherapeutic experience to motivate and get the very best out of the people with whom she works.

Elspeth co-authored with Peter Lang the book: Appreciative Work in Schools.

Her latest (unpublished) book (that is a life book for her, and she wrote with Peter Lang and Dianne Henoa) is titled: The Smoke that Thunders: Releasing the Tangled Web of incest: a Dignifying Way Forward for the Child, the Family and Professionals. (This book has been uploaded in Greek and English, in series, onto Metalogos, since 2018. It’s uploading approaches its completion by the end of 2020).

Peter Lang

Co Principal Kensington Consultation Centre

Dianna Henoa

Social Worker

Abstract

Hearing children’s voices

In chapter 12, the writers do precisely what its title writes. They describe how they listen to the voice of children, who have been (or there might have been) sexually abused. Elspeth McAdam, offering a lot of detailed examples, shows her way of working with children, adolescents and families, in which sexual abuse might have (or has) happened, focusing on the children. She takes special care not to see the child as a victim or to victimise it with her stance. Following the principles of the Appreciative Systemic Inquiry, with respect and dignity, from the first meeting, Elspeth focuses on the capabilities and resources. Her aim is the children (but the other involved persons too) to regain a sense of dignity and self-worth. In such difficult situations, she considers inevitable the existence of contradictions, which she welcomes and uses them creatively. She describes the mixed feelings of the abused children very vividly and the heavy sense of responsibility they bear when they reveal or decide not to disclose what has happened. In this chapter, Elspeth also describes the particular practices of the A.S.I. (ability spotting, dreaming, back-lighting etc.) and ways of dealing with specific problems, such as the child's guilt, flashbacks and dissociation. At the end of the chapter, she refers to the sexual abuse of small children and boys.