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The author is to be applauded for venturing into the difficult and murky territory of sexual exploitation of clients by therapists and counsellors. Her two main objectives were firstly ‘… to inform the practitioner about what sexual exploitation within this context is and how it might occur… ‘and secondly’… to look at how the professions involved might begin to consider the subject and to introduce strategies to deal with and prevent such exploitation as far as possible.’ It seemed to me that she was more successful in the former than the latter for a variety of reasons.
Early on, the author quotes from clients' verbal accounts of the experiences that they had gone through with counsellors and therapists. (She uses the two terms interchangeably throughout.) I found these accounts shocking and disturbing to read. It was thoroughly uncomfortable to be confronted with descriptions of members of ‘our’ profession perpetrating acts of sexual abuse with their clients. I found myself inwardly trying to distance and defend ‘my’ orientation (psychoanalytic psychotherapy) from any such accusations. However, Russell does not allow the reader any such easy escape route, suggesting that the sexual exploitation of clients knows no such bounds and crosses the different theoretical schools freely. Such an assertion clearly needs to be backed up in some way, which brings me to a fundamental weakness in the book.
Both in its style and structure, the book has a quasi-social psychology feel to it but lacks any measure of standardised methodology or empirical analysis. Indeed, the number of participants in the research totals only 40 and it is unclear how they came to be selected for inclusion. All the research evidence is thus anecdotal and, while very powerful and emotive, leaves the book vulnerable when it comes to questions of objectivity and rigour. This would have been forgiveable had the author made use of the subjective accounts to further understanding so that clinical practice co