Tag: Rape

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Anna, a 15-year-old girl is raped by someone in her home. However, she spends countless hours of her school day running away from the one person who would be most qualified to help her, the guidance counsellor. 

“I don’t want to see her, Miss,” she says to me, almost in tears. “I don’t want her to find me. Hide me, please!”

Why this frantic desperate plea?

Anna is not her real name but this story is absolute truth. Anna spent an entire year in hiding. She had revealed her situation to the guidance counsellor who, as duty demanded, immediately reported the incident. However, after baring her truth to the counsellor, Anna found her to be no comfort and felt more vulnerable than before. Furthermore, Anna did not wish to testify against her rapist in court and the counsellor hounded her day by day trying to convince her to appear for the trial, threatening that if she didn’t, the police would come and take her to trial bodily.

This case broke my heart. While I decided not to fume until I got the other side of the story, especially because the counsellor in question was my colleague whom I knew and respected, I could not help feeling a small tinge of visceral rage at the injustice of this student whom I cherished dearly firstly having the right to her body stripped away by wicked hands, secondly, being forced to relive and rehash this trauma in front of a room of strangers and thirdly, feeling caged and hunted in her own school, a place that should have felt like a haven, a home away from home.

I am sure the guidance counsellor was doing what she was duty-bound to do and what she thought was best but I questioned her methods. I mourned at the idea that a student would reject the help she so desperately needed to get a handle on her emotional turmoil because she did not find her helper, her counsellor to be genuine and approachable. And a new thought struck me. I had never noticed that students at my school, students whom I knew to have serious issues, rarely ever brought their burdens to the school counsellors. For whatever reason, I never even thought to recommend my students to the guidance counsellors.

“No one can be the perfect therapist for everyone but anyone can be the perfect therapist for someone.“

Emily Nagoski, Ph.D.

While I never went to see a school guidance counsellor in my time, I did see a psychologist when I was in high school. I had a teacher who put me on to a therapist when I was 18 and I desperately needed one, even though I didn’t know it. I hit it off immediately with my therapist. Even now, she is so beloved to me and I to her. However, I know that there are people who have to endure a lot of searching, a lot of trial and error before they find that perfect fit. One of my students, whom we will call Naila, had to be hospitalised as a result of a physical and mental breakdown caused by a prolonged battle with an eating disorder. While in hospital, her attending physician insisted that she had to see a therapist who specialises in eating disorders, the only eating disorder specialist in the country, in fact. Though this woman came highly recommended and was no doubt very qualified, Naila HATED her and thought of endless malicious things to do to her. She did not find her genuine nor did she believe her method of counselling was doing her any good. Every session was like having her teeth pulled one by one. However, her doctor forced her to see this specialist and ordered her not to see the therapist she had been seeing before, one with whom she had a very warm productive relationship. As a result, Naila had to endure these pointless painful sessions where she was not getting the help she needed.

Maya Angelou said, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” So there are psychologists out there who know their stuff and are extremely qualified but a client can’t really engage with them unless they make them feel cared for in the way that they need to be cared for at the time. It’s the age-old Jamaican concept of “mi spirit jos tek yu.”  

Dr. Emily Nagoski, trained psychologist, author of the book Burnout and one of my personal favourite speakers, says that one of the first things she and her cohort learned when training to become counselling psychologists was this simple rule: No one can be the perfect therapist for everyone but anyone can be the perfect therapist for someone. She says she learned that most clients seeking therapy have to “shop around” visiting several therapists before they find the best fit and she says it was drilled into them very early on as psychology students not to be offended or dismayed if a client comes to you for one session and never comes back. It’s nothing personal. It doesn’t mean you’re not good at what you do. It’s all a part of the process.

That being said, think about this: in a population of roughly 1,500 students, all with different backgrounds and personalities, is it likely that all or even half of them will find that their spirit aligns with (“tek tu”) the one or two guidance counsellors there are in the entire school? And no matter how much they are going through, in the face of rape, domestic abuse, not having enough to eat or to travel to and from school, struggles with insecurity and bullying, stress, learning disorders, eating disorders and the host of other issues the modern teenager faces, they will not bare their fragile souls to someone with whom they do not have a connection, no matter how highly qualified the counsellor may be. Are we willing to have our young people carry the weight of all these woes by themselves simply because, as a people, we are afraid to take mental health seriously and to invest the resources that demonstrate that we take it seriously?

Good guidance counsellors are becoming more important than Deans of Discipline

The palpable shortage of approachable and highly qualified guidance counsellors is one of the reasons why the burden of counselling our nation’s young falls so squarely on the shoulders of our teachers. Teachers interact with students every day. They get to know them personally. And somewhere along the line, students often find a teacher who their spirit will just align with or “tek tu.” Some students have a first form teacher whom they still visit and share their problems with even in sixth form or college. They just have a connection. I have ended up being “that teacher” for many of my students. In fact, I have even ended up being “that teacher” for students I don’t even teach who just see me on campus and think that they would like to open themselves up to me. While I am extremely honoured and grateful that little people trust me so much with their hearts, sometimes I feel that I am not the best fit. I provide them with a listening ear, empathetic probing, a laugh and a warm hug (pre-COVID) and for some, that is all they need. For others though, I feel that I am only stopping a gap as these students need more time, resources and professional expertise than I am able to provide in dealing with their deep and torturous emotional pain.

So what’s the solution? As with the other myriad of problems that face our Jamaican education system, I don’t have all the answers. What I do know is this: in this age of insecurity and turmoil, of school shootings and terrorism, of children being kidnapped on the daily, of overexposure, of social media, of bullying and cyberbullying and revenge porn and all the chaos that faces our young people, good guidance counsellors are becoming more important than Deans of discipline or vice principals. We need to treat them as if they are the first line of defence in saving our children’s lives and so they have to be top-quality and it starts from the hiring process.

Here are the principles at the core of the issue:

1. Hire a variety of guidance counsellors: Guidance counsellors need to be emotionally accessible to students; they need to be “kid-friendly.” Furthermore, there needs to be a variety of counsellors, not just 2 or 3, but counsellors of different sizes, shapes, genders, colours, personalities and backgrounds. This initiative may look different in different places. For example, in an American school where there are Latinos and Blacks, all the guidance counsellors can’t be upper-middle class White people. Students will be less likely to confide in a counsellor who does not look like them, talk like them or appear to understand their story. Similarly, in Jamaica, counsellors need to come from different backgrounds, have different personalities, dress differently, act differently, talk differently from each other so as to create a variegated pool from which students can choose a best fit.
2. Two counsellors per school is simply insufficient: This might be ambitious in an age where schools don’t even have enough adequately qualified teachers but my suggestion is that there should be at least two guidance counsellors assigned to each grade level. This will minimize the counsellor to student ratio and will make it more likely that every student will find at least one counsellor whom they feel comfortable approaching with their issues.
3. Free up counsellors to counsel: One counsellor colleague of mine explained to me that school counsellors are often so swamped with Ministry-mandated paperwork and classes to teach that they often have little time or energy to actually help students in the way that they would like.
4. Ensure counsellors themselves receive adequate ongoing counselling: To see and hear devastating stories every day and bear the emotional burden of little people, to hold their secrets, to sometimes be powerless to do all that you want to do for them and to know that your own life is often in danger (at some schools) is a lot for one human — no matter how trained or qualified — to bear. Counsellors need counsellors too.

This initiative needs to be a joint effort between the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education. It would take a lot of work, time and resources but it would drastically improve our students’ functioning and overall well-being in school and in their future lives. School is a place where students should feel safe and loved and the way the school treats students’ mental health is an important ingredient in that process. While the value of mental health care is not yet fully appreciated in Jamaica, we’re getting there and we need to. Mental healthcare in schools is crucial in bringing up little people who will become fully functioning happy, healthy adults. Guidance counsellors are key partners in the big picture, in making a future for all of us that feels safe and whole and bright.

Photo credit: Counselor helping student draw her future. NPR. (https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/01/06/492874846/9-questions-for-the-nations-top-school-counselor)