Organizational and Professional Competences Preparing Counsellors for Working with People Who Have Experienced Sexual Violence
Organizational and Professional Competences Preparing Counsellors for Working with People Who Have Experienced Sexual Violence

Summary/Abstract: This article addresses the issue of the competence of counsellors working with people experiencing sexual violence. The theoretical part of the article describes the basic concepts related to institutional (professional) counselling and describes a professional counsellor and his/her competences in a descriptive way. The subject of the research includes the competences of counsellors in the field of working with people who have experienced sexual violence. The purpose of the study was determining and describing their competences – both organizational and professional ones – from the perspective of the experience of individual listeners preparing for counselling work. The study uses a narrative method with content analysis. The research problem took the form of the following question: what are the competences of a counsellor in accompanying a sexually abused person from the perspective of the personal experience of future counsellors? The research was conducted in 2019 among 23 postgraduate students preparing for counselling work. The results made it possible to select subcategories within the examined categories that show the specificity and value of the competences described by the respondents, and allowed us to emphasize the importance of the interdisciplinary knowledge and skills of counsellors. In addition, the conclusions of the study are valuable for pedagogical practice, especially in terms of enriching the offer of studies addressed to counsellors working with people who have experienced sexual violence.

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