Arts Based Methods As Culturally Sensative Intervention with Arab Juvenile Delinquents

• This presentation co produces knowledge with Arab Bedouin indigenous juvenile offenders in home detention, in Israel, to learn how they experience the use of arts-based methods. It explores how arts- based methods in group work can be adjusted culturally to the traditional indigenous culture of these young men, and how it can be a useful tool to amplify their voices and to cope with the challenges of home detention.
• Methods: In this pilot study, twelve Bedouin youths under restrictive conditions participated in an arts-based support group. After the group, they participated in qualitative interviews about their experience of using the arts as self-expression: The group process, art products, and post group interviews were analyzed through thematic analysis, using phenomenological and ethnographic theoretical lenses and in the context of group work:
• Results: Findings indicate that the arts were experienced b the young men as facilitating the exploration of their emotional world. The themes were that it was a culturally relevant form of expression, because it enabled them to connect to collective Bedouin symbols, to express emotions indirectly, and to engage in the action of art work that is more culturally and gendered appropriate for young men than verbal sharing of private feelings with a stranger or in a group context. Additionally, the young men experienced the spatial element of arts as allowing for the exploration of a spectrum of complex emotions on the same page. The arts were also a way to experience adaptive rather than violent emotional expression and coping strategies.
• Implications for practice from this research is that artsbased methods, that are often associated with women rather than men, can also be a useful tool for young traditional and indigenous men and for offenders in the prison or home detention system and for men in when it is culturally adjusted. Methods such as focusing on collective and gendered symbols of identity, in relation to Western culture, helps to describe their conflicts between this culture and the Western judicial system: This research reminds us that also arts-based methods, that are very popular in social work today, need to be culturally adjusted