ABSTRACT
During my counselling training, a fellow practitioner, Ruth Hunt, who was studying at the same institute as me was raped and murdered in her home by an ex-client. This event impacted brutally on our local learning community and also, more widely, on the counselling profession as a whole and, briefly at least, practitioner safety came more sharply into focus. More recently, though, it is a topic that often is not covered in much depth in professional trainings where the issue of client safety is prioritised. Even though ‘zero tolerance’ programmes and attitudes have been imported to Britain from America, practitioner safety, whatever the helping profession or context, is often not given the same priority as client or patient safety. In this chapter, I discuss a range of risks and offer practical and relational measures to maximise safety, which might otherwise be learned about through trial and error, endangering the practitioner in the process.
