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Telling visual stories of loss and hope: body mapping with mothers about contact after child removal

Visual research methods reduce reliance on verbal communication and offer an avenue for non-verbal storytelling. Body mapping is a visual arts-based research method with its origins in art therapy and community development. It has been successfully used to explore embodied experiences of marginalised social groups. Participants engage in sensory and multimodal storytelling by tracing a life-size body outline and adorning it with fabrics, drawings and images to symbolise their views during a guided interview. This approach was used in research to explore birth family contact experiences in New South Wales, where children have ongoing direct contact with birth relatives in long-term care, guardianship and open adoption. Twelve mothers of children in permanent care took part in body mapping to explore their feelings about contact and the support they need to nurture a relationship with their children. Immersion in the artistic process of bringing a representational body to life granted these mothers access to hidden memories about their experience of child removal. They used evocative images to depict system violence and their fight against the erasure of their mother identity as well to envision a positive future relationship with their children. Body mapping potently revealed that traumatic loss resides in the body and resurfaces in encounters with child welfare systems. This has important policy and practice implications, highlighting a need for post-removal therapeutic services to process trauma and sensitive casework to rebuild parent trust and to help carers respond with empathy to their child’s mother at contact. This lends support to the usefulness of body mapping not only for research with vulnerable parents, but to its enormous potential as a creative engagement tool for child welfare practitioners.