Pioneering facility to deal with violence towards children
The Espai Niu is a space operated by the Psychotherapy Service for Children, Teenagers and Families as a pioneering municipal facility to attend to children and teenagers who have been mistreated at home. Located at Plaça Tetuan, 2, in the Eixample district, the new service takes an innovative approach to address violence towards minors in terms of the way it approaches their trauma, as well as recovery work with parents who have exercised this type of abuse.
The facility works to improve emotional welfare and repair the psychological damage to children and teenagers who have suffered traumatic experiences, recover the parental capacity of progenitors who have exercised violence towards their children and, in cases which progress positively, adjust the relationship between household members where the harm occurred.
These are the main goals of the team at the Espai Niu, made up of five professional psychotherapists, an administrative worker and management, forming part of the specialist support service for children and teenagers (SEAIA), which attended to 4,400 children in 2023.
The impact of violence towards society’s youngest
Children who are at serious risk or who are unprotected are a particularly vulnerable collective. Suffering violence and mistreatment has a strong impact on their neurobiological and psychological development: children who suffer violence are more likely to suffer a mental disorder during their lives. Fortunately, despite such an early trauma in life, different research on brain development also shows that with specialist treatment, the flexibility and adaptability of the brain means the impact of abuse can be reduced, new circuits stimulated, and lost functions recovered.
Espai Niu: an innovative facility
The Espai Niu is a pioneering facility due to its unique methodology and the way it is managed from other municipal facilities. The space has four fully equipped therapy rooms for children and teenagers, with specialist material on systematic individual trauma therapy for youngsters and equipment to be able to engage via video, a particularly valuable technique for attending to children and their families where abuse is suffered.
The service also has a Snoezelen room, which allows for multisensory work on the effects of trauma among children and adults alike.
Psychotherapy in a family setting
The psychotherapy treatment programme is aimed at children, teenagers and families when progenitors demonstrate a degree or circumstantial or transitory incompetence, or severe cases, but which allow for intervention. In cases where severe difficulties exist for parents and it is not possible to conduct a psychotherapeutic process, the psychotherapy programme will be exclusively directed at the child or teenager.
