Supervision and the Management of Vicarious Traumatisation Among Australian Telephone and Online Counsellors

Abstract

The present study investigated the effects of supervision on the management of vicarious traumatisation among telephone and online counsellors on BoysTown Helplines. BoysTown Helplines include Kids Helpline, a 24-hour national counselling service for young people aged 5–25 years of age, and Parentline (PL), a counselling service for parents in Queensland and Northern Territory. The services provide telephone and email counselling services and Kids Helpline also provides web counselling. All counsellors (100%) worked as Kids Helpline counsellors (N = 38) and 42.1% (n = 16) as PL counsellors. The counsellors conducted 50,979 counselling sessions in 2008, of which 38,703 were completed over the telephone and 12,276 online. Of these, approximately 44% involved trauma clients, putting the counsellors at risk of suffering some level of vicarious traumatisation. The findings from 38 supervised telephone and online counsellors showed that vicarious traumatisation fell within normal limits and positive coping strategies were above average. While correlations did not prove to be significant between supervision and vicarious traumatisation, the size of counsellors’ trauma caseload proved to be strongly related to both vicarious traumatisation and negative coping style.