The Effect of Sandplay Therapy on the PTSD Symptoms and Resilience of Street Children in Uganda

Poverty has forced over a million children in Uganda to live on the streets. These children often come from families where they suffered violence and sexual abuse. Besides starvation and unhygienic conditions, street children face physical and sexual abuse. The perpetrators range from adults such as the police to other street children. For our study, we recruited sixteen former street children, eight boys and eight girls. They were living in a child welfare facility at the time of research. We used the mixed research method for our research design. For quantitative research, we used two measures: CRIES-13 (Children’s Revised Impact of Event Scale-13), CYRM-28 (Child & Youth Resilience Measure). We used a qualitative case research method to analyze the themes in the sandplay process. The quantitative results indicated that the group sandplay therapy improved PTSD Symptoms and resilience. The qualitative results revealed several common themes such garbage, salvation and big project.