Compulsory/Voluntary

In the current furore about making voluntary work compulsory I wonder if counsellors might have any thoughts on the subject? Counselling has a long, unthinking history with voluntary work. We are compelled to volunteer in order to train, something that has never been questioned. ‘Compulsory’ and ‘voluntary’ are two ends of a spectrum and various principals support each description. It’s the difference between volunteering to join the army and being conscripted: the motivations and outcomes for each are going to be very different.

Organisations in the voluntary sector – other than counselling organisations – have long recognised this:

But if you force someone to volunteer, it's not volunteering.

John Ramsey, head of volunteering at Age Concern England, 2007

Any future legislation would need to address the distinction between volunteer service that is willingly undertaken and can be completed at will, and community service that is the fruitful engagement of those who may face consequences if they fail to show up.

Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, executive director of volunteering charity CSV, 2007

The Police Service had a brief struggle with this issue too when it became clear that in order to join the Service two years of voluntary work as a Special Constable had become a prerequisite. This was purely because of funding issues i.e. police were needed but the money wasn’t available to pay for them and so civilians were taking on a policing role. There are obvious and historically appalling problems with this, rather summed up in the police recruitment puff reassuring potential volunteers that they will

Wear the same uniform as regular police officers

Whichever Service is doing the recruiting; having the same uniform as real police officers is offered as the primary benefit of volunteering. That this hasn’t resulted in massive objections from every corner of the educated land suggests that our understanding of history and basic civic participation is dead; being part of a society that unthinkingly consumes everything it's fed, perhaps counsellors can't be expected to do or think or consume anything different from the rest of that society. Catherine Bennett offers some analysis of the police and other compulsory voluntary work.

I don’t know what the answers might be to counselling’s current sleepwalking through the voluntary process but a first step might be: Wake Up. There’s no questioning at all of the principals behind the foundations of who we are and what we do: people with good intentions jump through hoops, people with good intentions set the hoops up and we all know what the road to hell is paved with.

Orientation

Counsellors are expected to be reflective and reflexive about our work, we’re expected to reconsider our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, our clients and the relationship that develops between us. We’re given a vocabulary and specialized terms in which to frame reflexivity, which is undoubtedly helpful and can also serve, as all specialized language can, to obfuscate true meanings even from ourselves. This is especially likely when thinking about and working with people who are on state benefits.  A search of the literature shows that there is a paucity of research or even commentary on what has become known as The Underclass, itself a derogatory term, rather like calling gay men ‘Confirmed Bachelors,'

The socio-economic boundaries around counselling mean that counsellors are only ever likely to encounter people on benefits as clients rather than as peers which means that teaching about class, where it is rarely attempted, is purely theoretical. Although there are proportionately few non-white counsellors, non-white counsellors exist and can speak directly to the experience. The same can be said for gay, lesbian and transgender counsellors, counsellors who have experienced child abuse, domestic violence or drug and alcohol abuse. Those people who have the experience of long term poverty remain unrepresented and thus unheard.

This blog aims to offer an experience of living in poverty to counselors who have not had that experience. I hope that, if it doesn’t directly alter some of the commonly held opinions about the poor, it will add to the complexity of the so far very limited debate on how best to understand and work with an enduring experience of poverty. I don’t aim to be an apologist for every person who is living in poverty since every individual will have an intricate and complex multifaceted existence. There are, however, important parts of the life of being a person who lives with poverty that have a direct effect on our wellbeing, our view of ourselves, our view of others. Having an insight into some of these aspects will, I hope, offer food for thought.