Unissula’s Psychology Program Uses Dancing Therapy to Cure Trauma of Rape Victims

Tuesday, July 9th, 2019 | [post_view]
Image: Unissula Psychology Students learned dance techniques as an effort to treat rape victims.

Image: Unissula Psychology Students learned dance techniques as an effort to treat rape victims.

In 2017, from January to February, there were 58 cases of rape and 72.31% of women became victims of rape in the city of Semarang. These data showed that the rates of rape in women are still high. Sexual violence has very serious effects, one of them is PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).

PTSD causes symptoms such as emotional disturbances in the form of nightmares, sleeping difficulty, loss of appetite, depression, fear, and stress. Many victims of rape also experience serious trauma as a result of rape, such as fear of contact with the opposite sex, feeling guilty, feeling excessive caution, and so forth. They also feel ashamed and afraid to seek psychological help for fear of the views of others and were reluctant to follow psychological interventions.

The aforementioned reality motivated the Student Creativity Program (PKM) from Faculty of Psychology, Sultan Agung Islamic University, to provide new innovations for the handling of PTSD for rape victims using dancing method, known as Dance Movement Therapy which abbreviated as DEMEN. The team consisted of Fahrool Khanafi, Fia Sari Kusumawati, Fitria Khoirunnisa, and Diany Ufieta Syafitri, M.Psi., as the supervisor.

Dancing is one method of art therapy that rarely developed in Indonesia. Dancing was chosen because it was considered as a mild and expressive method which also different from the usual psychotherapy methods. DEMEN’s therapeutic method does not emphasize the beauty of movement, but combines free movement, emotional expression, and imagery.

The DEMEN implementation held on 24 April – 8 May 2019 had a series of 6 meetings with duration of 120 minutes each. The first meeting was an introductory session in which the participant introduced herself and shared her rape stories. Meeting 2 was the Stress Release Movement which taught clients the movements to release stress, namely body shaking.

Meeting 3 was a dance of feelings that aimed to teach client the recognition of emotions through body movements and aware of emotions that had been felt through movement. Meeting 4 was a wound dance, where the client was invited to imagine the traumatic event that he experienced and express her injury through the dance. The wound dance II was in the 5th meeting in the intervention, in this session the client was asked to remember his traumatic experience and gave the client an opportunity to confront her trauma.

Meeting 6 was the final session. This session was intended to foster the positive feelings and grow hopes to continue the client’s daily life. All intervention activities were carried out at the Faculty of Psychology, Unissula together with psychologists and the PKM Team.

The research method was carried out through experiments with single case single subject ABA with 3 times measurement before and after the intervention. This study involved one woman (age 23) who had been a victim of rape. The results showed a significant decrease in PTSD between before and after the intervention.

After following DEMEN treatment, the client’s burden feeling and stress/pressure decreased. The subject was able to express her emotions through movement. The subject felt no longer afraid to remember the rape scene that had happened to her. The subject also felt she had discarded the memories that had been a nightmare and considered the incident of raping that happened to her to be used as learning to live a better life.