The Effect of Brief Sex Offender Training on the Graduate Counseling Students’ Scores on the Discrete Emotions Questionnaire and Working Alliance Inventory

Abstract

Clinicians who treat sex offenders commonly struggle with the tension between conceptualizing them as rehabilitative or instinctively predatory. On the one hand, there is the well-intended goal of forming an alliance with the offender and helping them develop into more functional human beings. On the other, counselors experience common emotional reactions such as anger, disgust, and even fear of sex offenders that negatively impact their perceptions and attitudes. Forensic clinicians are trained to treat sex offenders; however, with the continuing trend of treating more sex offenders in the community rather than in the prison system, some community clinicians will inevitably counsel sex offenders after they are released into the general public. Despite the presence of comorbid and treatable psychiatric symptoms, the disturbing crimes committed by sex offenders can make them morally intolerable to some counselors. In these circumstances, there is little guidance to help clinicians carry out their treatment duties competently and ethically. Participants in this study were graduate counseling students. The graduate counseling students were divided into two groups and asked to examine and evaluate a Tier I sex offense. Next, the participants completed the DEQ, which documents the participant's emotional reaction to the offense. Afterward, they completed the WAI-SRT as a pretest that assessed their confidence in establishing a relationship with the offender. A 45-minute sex offender training intervention (independent variable) was given to one group and no training to the other. After the training, each group examined and evaluated a Tier III sex offense. The DEQ and WAI-SRT post-tests (dependent variables) were given to each group to compare the change over time between the training-treatment and the no training-control groups.