A Special Issue Dedicated to Working With Clients Who Offend
✍ Scribed by W. Bryce Hagedorn
- Publisher
- American Counseling Association
- Year
- 2008
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 40 KB
- Volume
- 28
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1055-3835
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
A Special Issue Dedicated to Working With Clients Who Offend I am pleased to present the Journal of Addictions and Offender Counseling (JAOC) readership with a special issue about counseling clients who offend, with a particular emphasis on counseling sexually offending clients. We had several intentions in putting together this special issue. First, of the client populations with whom clinicians work, those who offend tend to elicit all varieties of clinician bias, fear, and downright revulsion. Even among clinicians who specialize in addictions and offender counseling, few relish the opportunity to work with someone who has perpetrated a sexual crime against another person (whether an adult or a child). Therefore, we sought articles that would offer readers new insights, treatment modalities, and client conceptualizations in the hope that the information would help them to move beyond their comfort zone to help clients who truly need the assistance of an experienced clinician. Two articles found in this issue speak to the need for new insights, modalities, and conceptualizations, particularly those that have proven useful with the sexually offending population. In the first article, "Empathy-Promoting Counseling Strategies for Juvenile Sex Offenders: A Developmental Approach," Calley and Gerber present us with a proven treatment protocol for fostering movement in one of the most challenging client populations: juveniles who sexually offend. Calley and Gerber note that the attainment of victim empathy is a developmental process that requires specific and creative interventions at each stage of treatment. Readers are presented with a case example that highlights how each technique has been implemented, thus demonstrating how this five-step approach is both innovative and clinically sensible.
Then, in "Motivational Counseling: Implications for Counseling Male Juvenile Sex Offenders," Patel, Lambie, and Glover blend the technique of motivational interviewing with the practice of motivational enhancement theory to help clinicians move beyond their natural tendency to try to convince clients to change their behaviors. Rather, motivational counseling offers a shift in conceptualization and serves as a powerful reminder and proven system for helping both client and clinician recognize who is ultimately responsible for changing behaviors-that is, the client. This protocol can be summed up in one of my favorite sayings: Counselors are change agents-we are not fixers but facilitators.