Social Justice Therapy Is Teaching Clinicians That A Child’s Race Matters More Than Her Abuser’s Crimes |
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Social Justice Therapy Is Teaching Clinicians That A Child’s Race Matters More Than Her Abuser’s Crimes
The sacred obligation of therapy — to restore dignity and offer healing — is being replaced by an ideological agenda that evaluates victims according to their ‘privilege.’
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You aren’t angry enough about what’s happening in therapy rooms across the country. It’s not hyperbole to say that at the clinical level, Marxist activism and social justice ideology are harming children or adolescent clients in the therapy setting.
Imagine this scenario: a non-white adolescent female, we’ll call her “Dellah,” is seen for counseling following a period of sexual abuse and possible trafficking while in foster care. The perpetrator, another foster teen living in the same home, is a non-white sexual minority. Dellah arrives at counseling with what trauma experts recognize as a complex constellation of psychological and physical injuries: terror, shame, confusion, profound violations of bodily autonomy, and a shattered relationship with her own sense of safety and worth.
Dellah is sent to a community mental health center for therapy. The therapist is a kind, eager, knowledgeable, and recently graduated clinician. She is excited to use her training to help the deeply wounded Dellah to heal and become the most empowered version of herself possible. Using the rule set of social justice therapy (SJT), a framework now codified in graduate training programs and professional competency guidelines across the country, Dellah’s sexual abuse and trafficking are not a clinical problem, they’re an ideological one.
As UK psychotherapist Val Thomas has documented in her book Cynical Therapies, SJT trains practitioners to view clients not as individuals but as “representatives of particular identity groups located within a matrix of power.” Viewed through this lens, Dellah’s race and the identity of her abuser become the central organizing facts of her care. Because Dellah is non-white and her abuser belongs to multiple intersections of marginalization, the framework is structurally predisposed to resist acknowledging his actions as the primary cause of her harm.
The implicit and explicit clinical message is that what is most consequential about Dellah’s suffering is not what was done to her personhood, but what her intersectional identity represents within an ideological taxonomy. Her racial and intersectional status is first, and her victimization of sexual abuse........