Music Therapy with Sexually Abused Children JACQUELINE ROBARTS Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Centre, UK

Music is part of everyday life, and is generally regarded as therapeutic. There is increasing interdisciplinary interest in innate human musicality and the link between music and the emotions. Innate musicality is evident in the dynamic forms of emotional expression that both regulate and cultivate the foundations of meaning in human communication (intersubjectivity). This article discusses music therapy, drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives, and illustrated by case material of individual music therapy with a sexually abused child. Where the growth of mind and meaning is devastated at its core by early relational trauma, music, when used with clinical perception, may reach and work constructively with damaged children in an evolving, musically mediated therapeutic relationship. K E Y WO R D S affect regulation, childhood sexual abuse, musicality, music therapy, theory of change M U S I C H A S B E E N recognized for its therapeutic powers since ancient times (Gouk, 2000; Hordern, 2000; Tyler, 2000). The universality of music in every culture has its roots in human musicality which appears to be innate and functions in our everyday existence as a basic emotional resonance. Music is part of our human identity: ‘Many, if not all, of music’s essential processes can be found in the constitution of the human body and its patterns of interaction with other bodies in society ’ (Blacking, 1973). Musicality, as ethnomusicologist John Blacking asserts, is part of our humanness, intrinsic to our emotional and social everyday living, and not dependent on acquired musical skills