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

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