Counselling psychologists working in Human rights & social justice

Abstract

We argue in this paper that counselling psychologists have been championing human rights and social justice in different ways and since the Division was first being considered. We draw on counselling psychology historical literature, and from responses from our colleagues within the profession. As part of our preparation for this paper we put out a call to counselling psychologists through the Division of Counselling Psychology to invite our colleagues to share with us the work they are engaged in relating to Human Rights and Social Justice. In this paper we share themes from the responses we received on the various areas covering human rights aspects of counselling psychology and social justice, for example championing climate justice, equality, diversity, and inclusion. Our call was operationalised through a Questback survey which comprised of 10 questions. These included demographic questions, questions which enquired about areas of respondent’s work which covered human rights aspects of psychology and social justice. The responses for example included mental health work with refugees, asylum seekers, trafficked people, torture survivors; Black and Minoritised Ethnic adults aged 18+; people from what one respondent noted as ‘the profoundly deaf community’ who use BSL (British Sign Language) as their first language; and other aspects of equality, diversity, and inclusion. Furthermore, we enquired whether our counselling psychology respondents had faced experiences in which they have wanted to engage with human rights-based/focused work but had been prevented from doing this. These questions could be responded to through qualitative responses, and we offer example of quotes from respondents throughout different sections of this paper. The respondents also replied at a specific time period and the issues raised might differ if the questionnaire was answered at an earlier or later time period.