Build supportive communities around children who are at risk from violence
Empowering children through a creative approach to skills development.
Using forum theatre techniques children practice refusal & resistance skills and develop help seeking behaviours. We focus on developing positive bystander intentions and also actively engage parents, teachers and other adults in a child's life in ways that challenge them to reflect on how they can best support a child needing support.
Use animations and drama to create safe spaces to explore challenging issues, including gang-based grooming, consent in teenage relationships and violence extremism.
Deliver positive impacts for children; both improved awareness and improved skills. Evidence shows positive changes particularly in help seeking behaviour.
Strengthen communities around the child. Using forum theatre techniques to 'stop and rewind' the action, we actively engage parents, teachers and others in an interactive performance designed to get them to reflect on how they would respond to a child asking for help.
| “When acting it out, it helped because it spreads awareness on what to do when facing issues.” | “It’s made me be more careful on the internet and who I send pictures to, or whether I send them at all” | “I think it’s great to have these discussions with our children - it’s happening every day and we need to talk to them about it in a mature way.” |
| Child, Year 10 | Child, Year 11 | Parent, St Helens |
Ariel Trust is a child-centred organisation delivering creative programmes, which are co-created with children from the communities that we support. A key outcome is to improve children’s likelihood and ability to seek help, particularly in response to risks associated with grooming, exploitation and violence. However, help-seeking is relational, it’s about the child (what they ask and how they ask) but critically also about the adult (how they respond). Ariel Trust therefore thinks it’s vital to focus on ways of engaging and strengthening the community around the child as part of our delivery.
Ariel’s team of Theatre Practitioners deliver creative workshop programmes, usually over a 12 week period. The programmes start with one of our animated scenarios, used to introduce a violence prevention theme, and then children use the idea of stepping into the lives of the characters as a safe way to explore what can often be challenging issues.
We use techniques from forum theatre to enable children to explore the potential consequences associated with grooming and exploitation but then to rewind the story to a point where they can make different choices to those made by the characters and avoid these negative outcomes. Our focus is on practicing positive communication strategies; building confidence and resilience, and achieving positive outcomes.
Our workshop programmes build to a ‘Parental Engagement Performance’. This is a session, which is lead by the children, who ask their parents to step into roles and become part of the help seeking conversations that they have been rehearsing. Our practitioners help to facilitate honest discussions with the adults, getting them to explore how they might feel and react in a real-life situation and to reflect on how they can communicate in a way that is supportive of their child.
Our programmes are delivered in community venues across Merseyside; typically as after-school activities or as drama clubs. Our target age group is 9-12 year olds, although we can adapt our approach for slightly older or younger groups where required.
We currently offer programmes responding to the following topics:
- Gang-based grooming for criminal exploitation
- Peer pressure and consent in teenage relationships
- Child-to-child sharing of indecent images
- Grooming in relation to hate and violence extremism
The following case studies provide more detailed examples of our projects:-
