With her chestnut hair tied in bunches, Irina Gurieva might be any eight-year-old girl. But her outward appearance masks the trauma she experienced. For six months, Irina has not uttered a word.

I came to know her earlier this month when I visited Beslan, the town in the shadow of the Caucasus mountains that has become synonymous with meaningless murder. Sitting with a psychologist, she blew up a balloon and drew a dark and frightening face on it, the face of one of the terrorists who extinguished the lives of her friends.

Gurieva motioned to the doctor to prick the balloon with his needle. As it exploded she finally found her voice after many weeks of silence. “I’m glad you killed him,” she said.

Sadly, Irina’s case is not unusual here, for Beslan is now known around the world only for the appalling massacre perpetrated in a school last autumn. Out of 1,000 hostages, 330 were slaughtered, 180 of them children, when a two-day siege ended with Russian special forces storming the building.

The grief of some who have suffered has found an expression in recent days at a court at Vladikavkaz, where the trial has opened of Nur-Pashi Kulayev, the only captured survivor of the terrorist gang responsible for the atrocity. But the more common reaction to the events of last September has been a mute shock.

Into this traumatised and embittered environment has stepped a small team of Scottish childcare specialists, health and social workers. Their task, built on years of experience at home, is not to work directly with the victims of the disaster, but to train and advise their Russian counterparts who quite simply have been overwhelmed by the events in Beslan. It is Britain’s ghastly caseload of incidents — in Dunblane, Hungerford and Omagh — that has equipped the Scots for their overseas mission.

The visits began earlier this year and, on my trip, I joined Stan and Liz Godek, a husband and wife team who had been sent out as part of an initiative launched by Duncan MacAulay, Edinburgh city council’s social services director.

Stan, a trainer with senior healthcare professionals, said: “None of us has dealt with an atrocity of this magnitude. All we can do is give them a bit of professional insight into what has worked before.”

The importance of what they are doing is nowhere more apparent than at the Beslan school itself. At first the scene looks for all the world like a rubbish tip; then you realise that the rubbish includes dozens of plastic bottles filled with water, stacked up against the crumpled walls. They have been left there for the victims, whose captors hadn’t allowed them to drink for three days; survivors and relatives hope this water “will quench the thirst of their spirits”. For children, each corner of the building is a haunted playground. Some have come just to play war games with long-gone enemies. Against this dreadful background it is hardly surprising that, when Stan addresses a seminar of Russian doctors, the hall is full of intense faces. He has a depressing caseload to draw upon — from individual instances of child abuse and domestic violence, which rarely make headlines, to the mass murders that horrify public opinion.

One of the subjects he is keen to address is anger. Anger management is a theme that his Russian audience is desperate to understand. The Scot uses a mundane example to make his point. “Often it’s the feeling of being out of control that turns to anger, so start giving the child some control of his life, what he eats or what he does during the day,” he said. “Even what goes into the shopping basket. Once he is involved he regains control and the aggression may subside.”

The Russian psychologists he is addressing want to know more. “So what happened to him?” “What would you do if . . . ” They are especially keen to hear examples of the children Stan and Liz have worked with in Scotland.

So, through a translator, Stan details his cases and goes on to talk about giving the children the language of emotion, giving them the words to express themselves, reading their gestures and their use of eye contact. All the time frantic notes are being taken.

“They are highly qualified but they have little hands-on experience,” says Stan. For some it is their first year out of university, yet their first job is to treat some of the most damaged children psychologists have ever seen.

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