A Case Study of The Rape and Sexual Abuse Counselling Service - Essay Example

?A CASE STUDY OF THE RAPE AND SEXUAL ABUSE COUNSELLING SERVICE College Services offered The service the organization offers mainly concerns women and girls that have experienced rape and sexual abuse in one way or another. These women are of different ages, from different ethnicity, and from different families. Each individual patient has his or her own self-experience of what the individual has gone through. The present issues that the organization receives include many people who try to harm themselves, those who have eating disorders, those with suicidal feelings, which are the most common, and those persons with the inability to establish trusting relationship with other people because they have been hurt before in their previous relationships. The women tend to blame themselves for what has happened to them and it is their fault because they were stupid to put trust on persons they should not have. This makes it difficult for them to rely on their own feelings because they misjudged the situation. It also makes it hard for them to make decisions for themselves, as they are afraid of making the same mistakes again. In these situations, there is involvement of many feelings. These feelings include the body image of the victim. What this means is that when a woman is raped or she has been sexually abused, it is very hard for her to go and tell anybody what she has experienced and even more unlikely to report to the police. This is mainly because they want to protect their body image and the respect that people have for them. From the statistics of the organization, at least 85% of rape cases are on the report of the concerned authorities but only a tiny minority cases are on the report. What women try to do is to make the situation normal and try to internalize what happened to them and try to move on with their lives and assume everything is okay which the actual sense is not. She will not go anywhere to get help or tell anyone who can talk to her and help her in one way or another. There are aged patients but they had experienced sexual abuse a long time ago. Some of them try to seek help because of reasons best known to them or because of some trigger that makes them realize they have a problem and they need help. Many of the patients try to use various dangerous and unhealthy ways of coping such as self-harm, abuse of alcohol and drugs. Many of them find it difficult to sleep, walk around without fear, or socialize with other people. By abusing alcohol and drugs, it makes them forget the ordeal they went through and even get some sleep but this lasts for a short period. This is not the recommended solution as the alcohol and drugs will cause them bodily harm, problems in their relationships and even find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Another service that the organization offers is providing counseling to the families of the affected women and girls and even educating them on ways of how to support and help the victim to recover easily and quickly. It is upon the victim if she can report the matter to the police or not. If they want to report it then the organization provides them with the support they need. The services that this organization provides are very important as they go a long way in saving people’s lives and making the live a social and healthy life. Aims of the services The organizations provide a range of service, which includes helpline services, which is for anybody. Men normally call through the helpline and we inform them on service which are for men but also provide information and support to the relatives of women. Friends and relatives of victims also call for help when they are terrified or when there is a problem with the victims. The main aim of the organization’s service is to help women and girls who have experienced rape and sexual abuse to recover and live a normal life. Another aim is to help the victims to gain self-confidence, trust, and self-acceptance. This can be achieved by convincing the victim that what happened to her was not her own fault, she should not blame herself for what happened, and that it could have happened to anyone. Another aim of the organization is to encourage family support and support of the community to the rape and sexual abuse victims. Reducing rape and sexual abuse cases is also one of the aims of the organization and this is by educating the public on the effect of rape and sexual abuse to women and their families. Staff selection and supervision The staff consists of a team of 17 trained and qualified counselors, in which they have their own individual approaches in terms of theory they work on. The selection of the staff is on their academic qualifications and years of experience. The staff also undergoes training after employment on how to deal with victims and the appropriate approaches to use. They also attend annual seminars and training sessions that relates to their profession in various parts of the public including hospital and in other health organizations. The staff members have a supervisor who is the head of the counseling department and he is responsible for assigning duties to the senior and junior member of the staff. The junior staff members report to their fellow juniors in case of a problem and if they cannot solve it, they inform their seniors who then finally inform the supervisor. Diane, who is the managing counselor, had this to say about supervision of the staff and I quote “Okay, All the counselors here are members of the BACP under their rules they are required to have a certain amount one to one supervision per clinical hours. Therefore, we pay a contribution of ?35 a month for each counselor towards it to help with that. Therefore, each counselor has their own personal supervisor they see on a monthly basis, but we also provide group supervision here. So we pay for an external supervisor once a month to come to meet the counselors as a team if they want as it can be isolating only working with their clients and if they work in the evenings not seeing anyone else in the team, so they can get peer support from one another.” Location and accessibility The organization is located within the city centre on a building that is very easy to identify. The strategic location of the organization makes it easy for victims and the public to access it. The good and open roads are an added advantage to vehicles and ambulance to reach the organization premises at the shortest time possible. The organization is open twenty-four hours a day. This makes it accessible to anyone at any time of the day and night to get any services or help. The organization mostly takes self-referrals; a person has to contact them to go there. The organization prefers to get referrals through a third person because the organization has found out that persons tend to freak out when they realize someone has been raped or sexually abused and they call for counseling for the victim. This has to be when the victim is ready and wants the counseling done and not to please the concerned person but for her own benefit. The organization receives about 2000 calls on the helpline a year and about 60 referrals for counseling within a month. From this statistics, we can say that the organization fairly meets its objectives in terms of victims accessing its services. Target population The organization mainly targets women and girls who are victims of rape and sexual abuse. The other target is the friends and families of the victims who need assistance on how to help the victims to live a normal and healthy life. “Some of these friends and family members are very concerned about victims and therefore come to seek help.” As said by the counselor. Approaches used The staff use the person centred approach. Some of them integrate other approaches but the overriding and main approach is the person centred approach. The organization considers this approach as the most optimistic approach to human potential. Tough it is a lengthy therapy its aim is to develop a client-therapist relation. The counselor is to give the conditions necessary for the client’s growth: unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and mutual understanding. The counselor must be transparent, open, willing to express his or her own feeling in the process. There is no ignoring expertise and degrees in this type of approach. Counselors must be consistently doing their own inventory. Unconditional positive regard is typical with acceptance and appreciation of the client. The basis of empathic understanding is the ability of the therapist to see the world through the client’s eyes, to move into the client’s world at the deepest and greatest levels and experience what the client feels. In most cases, this process works and the client moves to back towards self-being. This approach is more appropriate compared to other approaches such as Gesalt Therapy in which the counselor asks the client questions and suggests experiments, which will increase the awareness and sensitivity to the many parts of the client’s total self. This approach is not as efficient as the person-centered approach as the client feels uncomfortable in answering the questions. The person-centered approach is also more efficient than the Alderian approach. This is because the Alderian approach is all about the counselor helping the client to identify mistaken goals, and to help the client do away with self-centeredness, egoism, and isolation, and to develop positive relationships with others. It is therefore obvious that this approach is not the best for dealing with rape and sexual abuse cases. The Some people use a little bit of CBT sometimes to help them. The organizations insist on the use of person centred approach because it is about having a partnership between the staff and the clients. The underlying factor is that the organization bases its services on the idea that rape and sexual abuse are the fundamental things that happen and that the woman has no choice in the situation. the organization tries to do is to re-establish that right over her body and over what happens to her an enable her get her ability back. The organization thinks that this approach is not direct, it is what the person needs as it gives the person control in the counseling room, and it is important in the recovery process. The organization also uses other ways such as relation exercises to help the clients when they have anxiety. Another approach is the neurolistic programmimg when a person has a state of anxiety or has feelings that they cannot control. This was from a form that clients fill on how they found the counseling session to be and if their session was useful and beneficial to them and the response from the clients was very positive. It is beneficial to the clients when they talk about what happened to them and they get a positive, encouraging, and reassuring response and finally enabling them to believe in themselves and accepting that what happened was not their fault. After addressing, the fear then ways of establishing cooping behaviours is the next task. The success of these approaches is from the many positive responses from the clients giving the staff members appreciation card and letters and gifts or by simply saying thank you. Sometimes the organization notices significant positive changes within the person’s development and understanding of issues and behaviours. Monitoring of efficiency The organization monitors its efficiency by using its clients. This is through looking at the progress of the number of clients if it is high or low. A high number of clients with good recovery progress are an indicator of efficiency of the services. Positive attributes of the service The service allows the establishment of a good relationship between the counselor and the client. This allows the client to be completely honest with the counselor about their thoughts and feelings. Another positive attribute is that the clients are able to make their own decisions and changes in their lives. This service also helps the clients to make positive changes in their relationships with others, helping them to overcome their fears. It also provides the clients with effective communication skills, allowing for honest exchanges with friend and family in their lives who may be causing them emotional pain. This service also enables the client to obtain insight about their own thoughts and behaviours that may have eluded them before. The clients are able to trace and identify patterns in the way they act, trace their and sources and identify barriers to their happiness that they may have unwillingly created. The result of the service is personal growth of the client that empowers them to control their life and enjoy positive and good relationships with others. Negative attributes of the services One of the negative is the lack of progress in the recovery of the clients. . Another negative attribute of this service is the long queues of clients as it takes a lot of time for on client to be through with one counseling session depending on the attitude of the client. The counseling specialist had this to say about the long queues and I quote “We’ve got a waiting list of about four months. We overwhelmingly, see women, who have had childhood sexual abuse or have had experience of rape or sexual violence, but not very recently maybe as an adult in the past but not recently, that is because Manchester has a sexual assault referral centre. Therefore, if you do report a sexual rape or abuse then you are automatically taken to the Saint Mary’s because they do all the sexual health checks and the forensic evidence. So we tend not to see women who have been raped recently like yesterday or a few days ago and if we do get someone, we advise them to go the Saint Mary’s centre if they think they need sexual health checks. They do have counseling services there but it is time limited” Another negative attribute of the services is that it only deals with women and girls yet there are men and boys in the society who are victims of sexual abuse. The implications of the above criticisms are that it will discourage women and young girls who are victims or sexual abuse. They will also make victims of rape and sexual abuse not to trust the organization’s services and the staff in general. It will also discourage male victims from visiting the organization for help. Recommendations There are several ways of reducing the negative attributes of the services. The services are to be from many qualified staff members in order to reduce the long queues. They should also use several approaches depending on the one, which best suits, the client since different clients have different attitudes and personalities. The organization should also come up with better and effective ways to deal with clients who have lack of progress in recovering. The organization should come up with a department that deals with sexual abuse among men and other psychological problems. We also recommend that this organization to be allocated more funds to enable them to hire more qualified counselors. The counselor had this to say about the funding and I quote “ We get funded by the city council, the organization has had the national lottery funding we have another two years of that and we get funding from the home office” We also encourage the public to give donations to this organization because it offers services free of charge. Conclusion The evaluation process turned out to be a success and very important in having firsthand experience in the counseling field. The construction of the assignment is also excellent since it covers all the aspects starting with the organization to the clients and the services offered. It also shows how the practice of is important to the society and the community and we should encourage people with not only problems related to sexual abuse but anyone with psychological problem to visit counseling centres. The information above was from the interview done on Diane who is the managing counselor and Christine who is a practicing counselor. Bibliography CHRISTENSEN, E. (1989). Counselling on rape and sexual abuse of children: report of a workshop. London, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Europe Region.Top of Form SULLIVAN, G. (1986). Rape crisis handbook: counselling for sexual abuse. Hamilton, New Zealand, Rimu on behalf of the Wellington Rape Crisis Centre. PELLAUER, M. D., CHESTER, B., & BOYAJIAN, J. A. (1987). Sexual assault and abuse: a handbook for clergy and religious professionals. 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