The author is director, programming and research, Legal Aid Services, West Bengal

Counselling is gaining ground as an instrument of mediation and conflict resolution in individual and social lives. Problems of marital disharmony, adolescent and youth development and geriatric care are now being addressed through professional counselling. We are beginning to realize the need to go beyond the confines of sympathy and condescension for the person in distress. Empathy is what makes counselling achieve wonders. It makes people feel confident of sharing with counsellors their inner-most feelings and emotions.

My initiation to the academic study of counselling happened more than a decade ago. I was called upon by my teacher, Ratnabali Chatterjee - ex-director of Calcutta University's Women's Studies Research Centre and a member of the West Bengal Commission for Women - to devise a curriculum for a 10-day certificate course in counselling for women in distress for WSRC. She had felt the need to impart some basic knowledge of psychological and legal counselling to students, development sector professionals and inclined lay persons who would deal with problems of women in difficult circumstances in different family, community and wider social settings. One of the main purposes was to get practical exposures to the work of Calcutta-based legal and psychosocial service providers.

Beginning with the personality types, defence mechanisms, stress management and strategies for combating physical and mental violence against women and girls and their sexual harassment, abuse and assault, we went on to cover an entire range of crimes and offences against them. Our sources were the Indian Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code of this country. The main focus was on the nature and extent of punishment and methods of arrest and trial. By 2007-2008, we were covering the issue of domestic violence as a paramount problem of marital discord. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act was passed in 2005, and by that time we had become aware of the fact that different types of physical and mental violence committed on women and girls within the confines of four walls could play havoc with their emotional and material well-being.

The participants of this course were mostly students from various departments of Calcutta University. There were NGO functionaries, housewives, school teachers, just a handful of practicing young lawyers and law students. The gender divide has always been the same. At the beginning I found that women from their early 20s to late 30s to early or mid-40s used to constitute the majority of participants. Men were always in a minority, and the same situation prevails now. For field visits, we used to take the participants to places like the Family Court in Calcutta, the West Bengal Commission for Women, Manovikas Kendra, various courts of law in Alipore and short-stay shelters for the mentally challenged. I felt that there was a distinct, though not intentional, element of tokenism in our attempt to familiarize these enthusiasts with the strengths and inadequacies of the work our legal and other types of human service providers were doing in the very celebratory or self-congratulatory milieu of Calcutta's NGO work. In all the counselling courses I have remained associated with, budding counsellors have been found to remain under the spell of this seemingly universal aphorism of "selfless NGO service", equating counselling with one such "benevolent social service" to be accomplished more as voluntary service at will than as remunerative professional work.

In the closing months of 2009, I was asked to direct the six-week-long family counselling course of Legal Aid Services, West Bengal, which was one of the oldest of it's kind in the country. LASWEB was known to have been one of the premier Calcutta-based legal-aid-providing NGOs involved in an entire range of legal awareness and sensitization activities for lawyers, members of the higher and subordinate judiciary and social activists. In collaboration with the National Committee for Legal Aid Services, India, and legal services authorities and judicial academies of other Indian states, it was doing the same in other parts of the country as well. In addition to law and psychology, LASWEB's course covered relevant topics from sociology and physiology.

Types and compositions of family as the basic social unit, methods of social control and changing social norms were considered to be essential to a counsellor's repertoire of social knowledge. Some basic knowledge of the functions of the male and female sexual organs, aspects of parental care and child-parent interfaces, sex education for adolescents and young people, therapy for couples, holistic health and HIV/AIDS-related matters were considered important subjects for budding counsellors. There have been expectations of some basic knowledge of the functions of the brain and of the use of medicines prescribed for various neurological and psychiatric ailments. We could not do the needful in this matter because of the participants' markedly dissimilar academic backgrounds. Apart from this structural reason, we have felt strongly about the need to restrict the service jurisdiction of the counsellors we were grooming. Beyond a certain point, matters were expected to be referred to qualified medical practitioners and professionally certified counsellors. Our budding counsellors were expected to offer only preliminary care and support. Their job was to go for empathetic communication and confidence-building. Anything more than that should become matters requiring referral services.

The tokenism ingrained in organizing field visits and imparting practical knowledge of the craft of counselling has always been a serious problem. It was more sharply felt when LASWEB's certificate course was upgraded into a one-year diploma programme by the Calcutta University in 2014. There was a lack of clarity of purpose and also an obvious tendency to draw upon already existing institutional connections and readily available professional resources. Visits to places of palliative psychosocial work could not be organized in ample measure. Most counselling courses are marked by these inadequacies, which prevent them from gaining the requisite exposure to professional handling of real-life situations in institutional settings.

Practice counselling sessions are extremely important, most courses remaining markedly deficient in this regard. So is the need to build a perspective on political realities. Counsellors' understanding of the lived realities of the people they counsel depends on what the latter may be forced to do in today's politically charged and polarized local conditions. Perpetrators of abuse and violence against women and girls enjoy almost full impunity owing to their connections with local party functionaries. Police inaction or overaction is becoming so rampant that established modes of confrontation with the wrongdoers may turn counterproductive. I have often found participants to be discernibly apolitical. Many of them tend to idealize the role of governance and the rule of law, and remain unaware of how situations unfold at the local level. At the same time, there is a need to develop a critical outlook on feminist perspectives and the internalization of patriarchal norms to avoid counselling in a male chauvinistic manner.

Most of these counselling courses never follow proper screening procedures for the selection of deserving candidates. The standard argument is that we must encourage members of the inclined citizenry, less endowed and interested laypersons from all walks of life to acquire these essential skills and techniques for interpersonal mediation and intervention of all sorts. Specialized and quality academic backgrounds must not stand in the way of the democratization and social application of a particular kind of knowledge. But that is also one of the main reasons why medical practitioners and certified professionals in counselling regard the products of these courses as trespassers and quacks. Indeed, there can be a risk of mishandling cases and creating false impressions of professional support. One way out could be to engage at least a segment of the more successful products of these courses as trainees or probationers in clinics, nursing homes and hospitals. But we are still far away from such arrangements.

Participants in these courses remain extremely worried about assured job opportunities. Proposals have been mooted for recruitment of counsellors in various lower district and sub-divisional courts of law where judges and lawyers often feel the need for counselling to work out arrangements for alternative dispute resolution. But there are people with vested interests who oppose such schemes designed to decrease the growing burden of pending litigation. The protraction of law suits is an intractable and perennial problem in our justice delivery system. So there are systemic obstructions in the way of counselling becoming a viable alternative method for the resolution of legal disputes.

As quality general counselling by non-professionals and non-practitioners faces insurmountable challenges in today's social set-up, these counselling courses are bound to have a rather bleak future. In my opinion, thoroughgoing market surveys should be done for effective assessments of need along with mapping and taking stock of impact. To empower inclined citizens and other stakeholders with counselling skills, we need to introduce shorter, single-discomfort-specific crash courses like the management of distress, anxiety, anger or marital disharmony for targeted groups and at affordable prices.

It is also not necessary to weigh these short-term exercises down with huge loads of bookish knowledge. For the more academically oriented degree and diploma courses of longer duration, the necessity of screening for merit and genuine career aptitude should not be overlooked. Full-fledged counselling courses should be based much more comprehensively on handling issues of emotional intelligence (EI) to prepare both the budding counsellors and their prospective counselees for what Daniel Goleman's "Mixed Model" identifies as the five main "EI constructs": self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy, and motivation. We do not need half-hearted efforts at creating an ill-equipped army of soldiers to combat the rapidly expanding social malaise of distress and disharmony. Let these efforts be founded on the management of emotion.