UCalgary Class of 2025: Transforming trauma education

New University of Calgary PhD graduate Dr. Kate Beamer identified an unsettling pattern while volunteering at a rape crisis hotline.

Older women, sometimes in their 70s and 80s, would call in to disclose, for the first time, an assault that had occurred decades earlier. As these women shared their stories, it became clear to Beamer that their entire lives had been shaped by these unspoken traumas. 

“There has to be something to help this population,” she recalls thinking.

Aesthetic paths to healing

Disclosure leads to treatment, and it was these late-in-life disclosures coupled with the fact that many of the individuals were unaware of how significantly they had been impacted by the sexual violence that spurred Beamer to pursue graduate studies at the Werklund School of Education. 

But, with most child-abuse survivors never revealing the offence, how could she help encourage help seeking behaviours?

“If I went to a classroom and talked for 20 minutes about child sexual abuse, and then was like, ‘So, anyone have any questions?’ not one person's going to raise their hand, because it's almost implicative,” says Beamer, MA’10, PhD’25.

Instead, she turned to philosophical hermeneutics, which uses the aesthetic, including music, novels, short-stories, movies and other works to facilitate understanding.  

“If you have a novel, and you're talking about ‘Mary,’ who was abused as a child, and you have a discussion about that, it takes the pressure off,” Beamer says. “It removes some of the personalization to a sensitive topic, and it facilitates more of a dialogue.”

Beamer explains that this approach was successful because artwork, particularly music, provides an accessible venue where survivors can learn about trauma. 

“It's transformative,” she says. “With the hermeneutic concept of play, you sort of forget yourself in that moment. You become immersed and that leads to a deepened understanding of the self.” 

This insight helps survivors recognise that there is a root cause for their actions and feelings.

“When they find out how common child trauma is, or when they realize that they’re not crazy but instead impacted by trauma, that's what leads them to help-seeking behaviour, so they don't end up like the 80-year-old women I talked to on the phone,” Beamer says.

Perseverance through adversity

In 2017, Beamer was accepted into the PhD program at UCalgary. Her plan was to further her work by doing research with adult survivors of child sexual abuse.

But, just days before entering the program, tragedy struck. Her partner died suddenly. This life-altering event was devastating to Beamer and her two young children. 

“I started seeing impacts that I had learned about when studying child sexual abuse manifest in my children,” she says. “They had not experienced abuse, just sudden loss.”

Now a widow with a family to support, Beamer was not sure she could continue her degree. With the support of Drs. Colleen Kawalilak, MEd’00, PhD’04, and Nancy Moules, BN’95, MN’97, PhD’00, she not only persevered, but excelled, earning the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship and Werklund Doctoral Scholarship.

Why education? 

Witnessing the suffering and grief her children were enduring and having to impart this information to their teachers every September prompted Beamer to shift her research focus to the impact of non-disclosure on child-trauma survivors as they move through the school system.

Beamer says she has been asked why she chose the education faculty for her graduate degree rather than psychology or social work. Her answer is that she is acutely aware that most child-trauma survivors never seek professional care. 

“I'm here for all of the survivors that will never walk through those doors,” she says.

Beamer believes the way to reach these individuals is through the school system, because, while children may never enter a counsellor’s office, they must walk through school doors.

Accordingly, it is essential that educators be prepared to address difficult issues in their classrooms; however, Beamer acknowledges teachers can be reluctant to discuss trauma due to concerns about causing additional harm.

“There's such a fear around the topic, which is fair,” she says. “People don't want to re-traumatize someone. So, I understand that the fears are coming from a place of care and protection.”

For her research, Beamer interviewed eight adult child-trauma survivors who remained undisclosed until adulthood, and all said it would have been extremely helpful to learn about trauma in school. One participant even said it would have changed the course of her life.

“There's a real misunderstanding about how trauma is triggered,” Beamer says. “Trauma isn't often triggered through dialogue. Triggers are sensory nature. It's the smells, the touches. I think we have to overcome the fears of talking about it.”

Beamer receives her degree this week and is already helping a number of different populations. 

In addition to providing recommendations for how educators can broach abuse and trauma, she is working with Calgary Communities Against Sexual Abuse to develop preschool educational programming, webinars for the College of Midwives of Alberta that detail how child sexual abuse can impact pregnancy and early parenthood, and programming for health-care professionals when engaging with patients who have experienced child trauma.