Group counseling: methods, applications, and outcomes

Psychology

Creating a Workplace Psycho-Educational Group for Sexual Assault

According to Nina Brown, the creation and management of this kind of group demands care and expertise.

A variety of groups fall into the category of psychoeducational, the conditions addressed are vast and emotionally sensitive, and there is a wide range of intended audiences. The leader of these groups has to be extensively prepared with information, skills, and a deep understanding of the group topics and the intended audience. Leaders are not just presenters of information. They are also facilitators who are responsible for the following:

Guiding participants' personal learning

Showing group members how to interact to reduce isolation and to help each other

Providing opportunities for emotional expression in a safe place

Capitalizing on and fostering development of hope

Directing and implementing learning for members

Implementing strategies to promote members' self-understanding

Creating opportunities to practice new learning (Brown, 2004, p. 1)

Considering the environment of the workplace, even more care must be taken to assure that nobody feels threatened or embarrassed. People need to be more private in the work place, so anonymity may also be important.

Such a group's purpose would be to serve the employees' needs concerning sexual assault prevention and treatment. Public reaction and the fostering of healthy but sympathetic attitudes are also important. Planning is everything when creating such groups, and the first step in planning is to clearly define the purpose of the group. For this exercise I am assuming that the group's purpose is twofold: to promote education concerning the prevention and reaction to sexual assault among the employees and their families, and to aid employees who need help. Then the selection of group members must be carefully done to insure the needed organic synergy will develop to make the group useful.

Recruiting group members is not terribly difficult these days, but screening the selection might be problematic. One needs to take care not to turn away potentially useful members nor to injure feelings in the process. It should never be made public who applied and who was not chosen. For this reason, an initial screening with a survey which all employees fill out using numbers instead of names would probably be the most useful initial recruitment tool. The surveys could be labeled confidential and distributed in such a way that the counselor would know who each one is, but nobody is ever told they can be identified by the counselor. They will probably assume they are totally anonymous.