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.

This study is based on the group sandplay therapy that we provided to Burmese Chin children living in Malaysia as ethnic and religious refugees and our analysis of the themes in the children’s sandboxes using an art-based research method. All the participants were Burmese Chin refugee children aged 10 to 13 years old, attending an international refugee school in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Participation was voluntary, with written consent from legal guardians. The sample chosen for the study comprised 12 children, with six males in one group and six females in the other group. Altogether, the children took part in five sandplay sessions, which lasted 120 minutes each. During these sessions, all the participants expressed individual the sandtray and then gathered to share and talk about the scenes they had made in the sand. After each session, it construed the children’s sand scenes, imaginative stories and symbolic image from an analytical psychology perspective and categorized the contents by common themes. As a result, six themes emerged: the loss of a place of life, abandoned children, bystanders, safety bases, and liberation/resettlement. Through the sandplay therapy, the refugee children could express their trauma in a safe, supportive environment. Sandplay provided these children with an opportunity to identify their trauma, independently overcome that trauma, and grow.

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