Introduction
Human trafficking affects millions of people throughout the world. Hundreds of thousands of people are victims of human trafficking in the United States. Human traffickers develop new means to attract and oppress others as society expands and advances (Bonilla & Mo, 2019). Human trafficking is evolving into a new form of enslavement, robbing people of their freedoms and basic rights while avoiding the legal concerns of ownership and slavery. For instance, female sex trafficking survivors have often endured many forms of trauma, such as sexual assault, violence, psychological abuse, and extortion, over lengthy periods. This is because when women fail to achieve their quotas, they are frequently beaten, starved, and threatened by their traffickers. These acts of abuse amount to systematic torture, which may explain why so many trafficked women are traumatized.
Questioning Techniques Used In Counselling
Survivors of such events often seek counselling in order to recover from their trauma. For them to trust their therapists in sharing their experiences, they have to feel comfortable in those session rooms. Therefore, counselors must learn to assess possible victimization and respond appropriately by creating rapport and intervening effectively. When questioning such victims, they must be wary of using stigmatizing labels or language that may cause clients to feel ashamed. They can utilize a variety of questioning techniques to make their patients feel at ease and willing to participate including; Appreciative Inquiry, Bloom’s Taxonomy, process design, facilitation, or dynamic questioning. Appreciative Inquiry (AI), for example, is concerned with finding the best in a person, their strengths, and opportunities around them. AI is a method for engaging groups of people in self-directed change. It concentrates on what works rather than what does not, and it leads to people co-creating their future (Morris & Atkinson, 2018). It is difficult such victims to remember pleasant events, but it is far easier to recall unfavorable ones. This is one of the reasons why counselors employ these techniques to assist clients in discussing what is going well and doing so frequently to make them feel better.
It is important to remember that human trafficking survivors require individualized treatment (Litam, 2017). Counselors should be prepared to use a variety of trauma-sensitive interventions to empower clients to develop trustworthy relationships, overcome challenges, decrease rates of self-harm, and remove themselves from dangerous situations. Clients may not believe or understand that they have been trafficked (Clawson & Dutch, 2008), or may feel as though they are helping their boyfriend or girlfriend by selling commercial sex to earn money (Litam, 2017). Thus, counselors must be mindful of avoiding stigmatizing labels or language that may promote feelings of shame in clients.
Secondly is the use of bloom’s taxonomy questioning technique. It aids the counselor’s critical thinking in attempting to understand the client (Merisier et al., 2018). It uses six hierarchy levels; knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation, which helps in guiding the questions to ask such survivors. The counselor uses knowledge questions to get information about the victim’s present position. After that, he will go on to comprehension questions, which help the counselor understand what the client has said. In terms of application skill, the goal would be for the counselor to apply what he or she understands about managing clients with such conditions in general to the specific victim. When the counselor has a good understanding of the client’s issue, he or she can move on to analysis questions, which are designed to assist the therapist in breaking down the case into smaller components or analyzing the relationships between them. Moving on to synthesis, the counselor’s goal is to establish a broad case conceptualization as well as a grasp of how all of the case’s components are interrelated. Finally, the therapist attempts to assess her or his success with the client during the evaluation stage.
Furthermore, the counselor can use process design technique when counseling their patients. Regardless of the therapeutic approach used by the therapist, the basic counseling structure includes relationship development, evaluation, action planning, response, and termination. To increase the victim’s well-being, the counseling technique uses a steady flow from one stage to the next. The first step provides the foundation by establishing a relationship and defining the problem; thereafter, the middle steps concentrate on identifying solutions to the victim’s situation, while the final step concludes the process by ending the collaboration once the client has accomplished his or her main objectives.
Counselors can also use facilitation questioning techniques. It entails carrying out the planned program while also watching and influencing individual/group processes to achieve their objectives. Whether they are as a group or individual, someone with good facilitation skills may bring out the best in them. To assist victims making their own judgments regarding change, counselors employ techniques such as empathizing, asking open-ended questions, contemplative listening, and summarizing. This is a useful ability in counseling since it allows the victims to feel heard and recognized. Finally, dynamic questioning in therapy makes use of what happens in your interaction with your therapist to help you think about your problems (Merisier et al., 2018). This means your therapist will frequently direct the victim’s attention to how you are feeling during the session. The idea is that by looking into their connection with their therapist, they would gain a deeper understanding of what is bothering you. It provides a safe environment in which one may communicate frankly about how they are feeling and figure out what is causing their problems. All these techniques helps the victims to feel comfortable to engage with their counselors.
The Architecture of Powerful Questions in Therapy
As a result, a counselor can create powerful questions using any of these questioning techniques. Powerful questions change the power dynamics in a conversation, making the one who is asking more of a facilitator for the other person to find their solutions rather than the person in charge of the entire conversation. They include open-ended questions that pique the listener’s interest, inspire introspective dialogue, invite creativity and new ideas, generate energy and forward movement, stay with participants, touch on a deeper meaning, and elicit further inquiries (Vogt et al., 2020). When these sexual survivors are asked such powerful question they feel heard, recognized for being capable of discovering their solutions, in charge of their circumstance, and free to make a decision. Powerful questions have three dimensions: structure, scope, and assumptions.
The way a question is constructed can have a significant impact on whether it broadens or narrows the range of alternatives we can explore. We have a habit of asking yes/no questions that do not get us anywhere. We occasionally ask who, when, where, and which, but these are quite limited questions. More exploratory questions begin with how, what, or why, and can lead to better findings (Breaux, 2019). Therefore, the counselors can use more exploratory questions to make the victims more engaging. Furthermore, it is critical to understand not only how the words we choose affect the success of our query, but also to match the breadth of a question to our requirements. As a result, the scope must be handled with caution to assist you to uncover the information you require. If a counselor need additional inspiration, asking questions like, “Why are you here today?” will be more helpful. This boosts creativity and gives freedom to how the victim chooses to respond to the question. Finally, we all make assumptions regularly. Examining our assumptions may reveal a different perspective or a better question to concentrate on (Vogt et al., 2020). As a result, it is critical for the therapist to become aware of their assumptions and use them appropriately while formulating effective questions
Putting all of this into account, it is still critical to establish a connection and apply therapeutic discretion before asking difficult questions while testing for sex trafficking. Counselors can assess a client’s willingness by first asking common questions, which decreases the risk of getting false information or re-traumatizing the victims (Chen & Giblin, 2017). Certified counselors are very well equipped to support sex trafficking victims in any situation due to their specialized training in empathy, compassion, cultural sensitivity, and unconditional positive regard to clients’ desires and customs. Counselors are recommended to use deliberate and compassionate language when assessing clients for sexual trauma, particularly minors. When compared to closed-ended inquiries, open-ended questions that assume the occurrence of a certain event may be effective in generating a correct response. “Tell me about a time when you were forced to do something you did not want to do,” and “Tell me about a time when you felt terrified or unsafe,” are two instances of open-ended questions that counselors can use to assess sex trafficking survivors (Merisier et al., 2018). Victims who are not familiar with this type of crime may gain from having parts of their problems highlighted.
If the victims are unwilling to provide information about traumatic experiences, counselors should put those questions on hold and focus on other aspects of the evaluation. Specialized counselors must set aside their emotional responses to the facts that victims may reveal and use the same terminology that patients use to discuss their experiences with human trafficking. Furthermore, sex trafficking screening should begin early in the counseling process and continue throughout the treatment. Trauma survivors, for example, may forget the specifics of their painful experiences or be hesitant to reply to questions about their trauma. Rather than depending exclusively on client reports, counselors can utilize their therapeutic expertise to evaluate potential trafficking indications e.g., detecting closed body language, distractibility, hypervigilance, and avoiding eye contact, (Chen & Giblin, 2017). If clients appear uncomfortable throughout the session, therapists may reword questions for clarification or take short breaks in between.
Conclusion
Therapy’s ultimate goal is to facilitate psychological and emotional recovery along a continuum from the problematic to a sense of improved mental well-being. Deep, penetrating questions do not have to be kept for therapy sessions. There is no reason we cannot have more of these therapeutic dialogues in our lives, but it is both an art and a science that takes time to master. We can all improve our ability to ask powerful questions that require answers, and applying such a therapeutic approach to sex trafficking victims can be beneficial.
References
Bonilla, T., & Mo, C. H. (2019). The evolution of human trafficking messaging in the United States and its effect on public opinion. Journal of public policy, 39(2), 201-234.
Breaux, J. (2019). The Art of Powerful Questions. Linkedin.com. Web.
Chen, M. W., & Giblin, N. J. (2017). Individual counseling and therapy: Skills and techniques. Routledge.
Merisier, S., Larue, C., & Boyer, L. (2018). How does questioning influence nursing students’ clinical reasoning in problem-based learning? A scoping review. Nurse education today, 65, 108-115.
Morris, R., & Atkinson, C. (2018). How can educational psychologists work within further education to support young people’s mental health? An appreciative inquiry. Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 23(3), 285-313.
Vogt, E., Brown, J., & Isaacs, D. (2020). Sparc.bc.ca. Web.