Sexual violence is a term that applies to a number of crimes including sexual assault, sexual harassment, rape, and any other scenario where a person has experienced unwanted sexual contact or the threat of unwanted sexual contact. At Durham College and UOIT, I sat on a Working Group that drafted a new “Sexual Violence Response…
Category: Counselling and Service Delivery
Improving Your Helpline Work
As a volunteer or paid helpline worker, we all endeavour to improve our work on the lines. Whether you have 100 or 1000 hours on your helpline there will always be things you can learn and strategies that you can apply to better connect with callers. Listed below are a few strategies you can implement…
Declining Empathy in Social Work Students
I read an interesting article recently, from the Journal of Social Work Education, the title was “An Evaluation of Prepracticum Helping Skills Training for Graduate Social Work Students.” The abstract is reproduced below: “Although foundational practice classes play a key role in helping prepracticum students develop counseling skills, we know little about the effectiveness of…
Marge Simpson and Church Counselling
In the long running show, “The Simpsons”, the main characters Homer and Marge take on a variety of jobs across the series. These virtually always finish with the main characters back in their careers at the end of the episode, Marge as a housewife and Homer as a Nuclear Safety Technician, but they provide an…
Assessing Elder Abuse with the Caregiver Abuse Screen (CASE)
The purpose of the Caregiver Abuse Screen (CASE) is to detect potential abuse of seniors by caregivers. It is a screening tool, not an assessment tool, so like other screening tools it should be administered to all caregivers whether abuse is suspected or not. The CASE tool was created by Myrna Reis and Daphne Nahmiash…