Questionnaire for Ethical and legal consideration

Running head: PSYCHOLOGY
PSYCHOLOGY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

PSYCHOLOGY1
Questionnaire for Ethical and legal considerations when counselling children and youth
The interview has been conducted with a child counsellor practising in Queensland.
1. What ethical and legal concerns do you considering while counselling children?
2. How do you safe guard the interest of children while counselling them? Do you
maintain privacy and confidentiality while counselling? What guidelines do you
follow?
3. Under what conditions can you breach confidentiality, even after knowing that you
are going against the law?
4. “Duty to warn” and “duty to protect” are two very important concepts of child
counselling? Can you name any such instances?
5. You must have faced ethical dilemma, at any point of time during making decisions?
Can you name any such incident, where you have been faced with an ethical
dilemma? How do you resolve them?
6. During the course of a therapeutic relationship with the child, do you ever feel that
you might be crossing the professional boundaries? Do you consider it as an ethical
issue?
7. What is the legal perspective about getting an “informed consent” of the minors
during a session of the counselling? Do they have the right to give informed consent
or we need to collect it from the parents and guardians?
8. Can you explain the clause of the “Privileged communications” during the course of
counselling? Should a counselor walk the extra mile to resolve the problem in the
favor of victim or he should stick to the wishes of the parents (in the cases when one
among the parents is guilty)?

PSYCHOLOGY2
9. We have heard of group confidentiality. How do you educate children about the group
confidentiality?
10. We know the role of touch in the process of healing and counselling. How do you use
that in your practice? Can you discuss about any such instance how it has impacted
your counselling session and what ethical boundaries do you maintain while doing
this?
Critical summary and answers
1. “We generally take care of the child’s right to confidentiality, informed consent, children,
use of touch, children coming from diverse communities”.
It can be understood from the answer, that the counsellor is well aware of the ethical and
the legal considerations. According to Sori & Hecker, 2015) some of the common
concerns related to childhood counselling is the right of the child to confidentiality. This
involves signing of the consent release of the information or access to medical records.
Clinicians should not share any information with others without the authorisation signed
from the parents of the children.
2. “The basic principles of safe guarding that we follow in our profession is confidentiality,
maintenance of records and the recording of the sessions. We generally maintain
confidentiality of each sessions, however, there are few exceptions, when you have to
breach the law, may be due to some statutory obligations or to prevent the occurrence of
any harm to the clients or to the others”
According to Sori and Hecker, (2015) confidentiality can be considered as one of the
main foundation of establishing therapeutic relationship. Clients might disclose or share
confidential information with the therapist and will be more confident to do this, if they
are reassured that their personal information will not be disclosed. Again the legal rights