Preamble
The following article by Peter Jenkins provides essential context and background to the current review by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) of its flagship policy document, the Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions (EF) (2018). The BACP is one of the largest professional associations of counsellors and psychotherapists in the UK, with 60,000 members, easily overshadowing its rivals, such as the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP), with its 11,000 members, by a large margin. In the patchwork quilt of regulated therapy provision in the UK, both organisations failed a decade ago in their chosen task of achieving statutory regulation, ie legal recognition of the title or practice of therapy, unlike other competing professional associations, such as the British Psychological Society. However, despite this crushing setback, BACP has come to dominate the fields of training, accreditation and employment standards for large sections of therapy in the UK.
A key contributor to this success has been via the development of a sophisticated framework for setting ethical standards within therapy, namely the Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions (BACP, 2018). This broke new ground, in providing a flexible framework for therapist practice, based on guidance and accountability, rather than via the traditional measure of setting standards as mandatory codes to be followed. The EF thus recognised that therapy dilemmas often require the balancing of competing ethical principles, such as autonomy versus avoidance of harm, rather than simply complying with inflexible rules which may prove to be incapable of allowing for exceptional circumstances.
The EF has not been changed since 2018, and is currently now under a process of review, with an expert team of ethicists and philosophers, and an open invitation to members to contribute to the process. All codes of ethics need review and updating from time to time, to take account of the changing landscape of therapy. However, there is an urgency and an agenda about this particular review which needs to be very carefully noted. The BACP has made a radical shift away from its original roots in pastoral care and the voluntary or non-governmental sector, to aggressively rebrand itself as a powerful vehicle for social change. The driving force behind the claimed need to shorten and simplify the Ethical Framework lies in its adoption of the BACP’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (2023a). According to the BACP, “Our desire for social justice determines everything we do…” (2023b: 5). This might be all well and good if the BACP was a political party or movement, gearing itself up to run for office, or to take to the streets to campaign, well away from its counselling rooms. However, it aims to politicise therapy, therapists and clients. To do this, it needs to dismantle the current Ethical Framework. The EDI strategy needs to reshape the EF’s acknowledgement of a complex interplay of different and sometimes opposing ethical principles, and replace it with one, namely Social Justice. Social Justice ethics can then be harnessed to promote the EDI campaign, without any carping by members unconvinced that this is the right political stance to adopt.
And yet, things do not seem to be running at all smoothly for the BACP with this dramatic change of role and direction. The UKCP has recently broken ranks to acknowledge the changing legal landscape for therapy, given a tranche of legal victories for free speech for gender critical views. It has issued a statement recognising the rights of gender critical therapists and the need for exploratory therapy with gender-questioning clients (Jenkins, 2023). This shift puts added pressure on the BACP to do likewise, but no change has been forthcoming so far on this key issue. Also, it seems that that BACP members are not at all happy with the recent spate of resignations by senior managers within the organisation, and by members of the board. There are, not just one, but two Open Letters to BACP now circulating, apparently supported by influential former key figures from amongst the BACP’s own ranks (CTUK, 2023; Therapist Concerns, 2023). It may therefore take a lot more than a revamped Ethical Framework for the BACP to weather this particular storm.
The following piece by Peter Jenkins begins by outlining 10 key steps that the BACP urgently needs to take in its review of the Ethical Framework, and then goes on to provide further supporting argument and a more detailed rationale for each of these essential changes.
10 things the BACP Review of the Ethical Framework really needs to do (but probably won’t!)
Reviewing the Ethical Framework (or any code of ethics) is an intensely political process, with winners and losers poring over every contested phrase and sentence. The current review of the BACP (UK) Ethical Framework (2018) is essential to complete the takeover by followers of Critical Social Justice Theory, in line with the BACP’s overarching Equality, Diversity and Equality Strategy (2023a). This article argues for BACP members to identify the overtly political edge to this review process and to resist the proposed radical ‘simplification’ of the Ethical Framework.
This resistance needs to take stock of a range of overlapping themes relating to the Ethical Framework (EF), including ethical principles, law, gender identity, free speech, research and safeguarding children.
The review of the Ethical Framework needs to address the following aspects.
Ethical principles
- Ensure that the six bio-medical ethical principles remain firmly in place. It is essential that they are not collapsed by the EDI Strategy into a lopsided reliance solely on the ethical principle of Justice, at the expense of other key principles, such as Non-maleficence, ie ‘First, do no harm’.
- Ensure that the EF is extended in terms of its remit from just covering its members to applying to all BACP staff and to the BACP itself as a legal body where relevant, in order to provide members with the basis to bring a formal complaint. This simple step will immediately increase the accountability of the BACP to its own members.
- Include a new section on ‘contracting requirements for clients in therapy’, in order to protect therapists from vexatious complaints eg for alleged conversion therapy, by current or former clients.
Law
- Remove the phrase “and strive for a higher standard than the legal minimum” from section 23 with regard to equality, diversity and inclusion law, in order to avoid the confusion generated by partisan attempts to reframe and rephrase existing law.
Gender identity
- Remove the coded reference to the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy in section 22e, by deleting references to ‘gender identity’. This term lacks any objective criteria. It simply reflects adherence to an unfalsifiable belief system.
Free speech
- Include a firm commitment within the EF to protect free speech as required by law and to end the current marginalisation of gender critical views.
- Ensure that the EF includes a specific commitment to protect the legal rights of gender critical members to engage in publication and debate at all levels.
Research
- Protect and enhance section 84, valuing research as an evidence-base for our profession, and reject attempts to undermine the creeping reliance on ‘lived experience’, ie anecdotal data, as an inadequate and partisan basis for our practice.
Safeguarding children and adults
- Strengthen the protective functions of sections 27 on working with children and section 10 on working with adults, by reinserting the key concept of ‘diminished capacity for autonomy’ from the Ethical Framework (2010), in order to limit the potential for children and vulnerable adults to make irreversible life decisions.
- Prevent any attempt by gender identity lobbies to remove or water down section 27 on working with children, in order to retain the crucial protective distinction between children under 18 and adults in terms of safeguarding law and practice.
Context
The Ethical Framework (EF) was first introduced by the Ethics Committee of the then British Association for Counselling (BAC) in 2002. At the time, the EF represented a herculean attempt to broaden the discussion around professional ethics and tether it more clearly to ethical principles, values and personal qualities, on a par with other professional groups. In part, it was also a reaction to the increasing divergence emerging between different sectors of the BACP, as more and more competing codes of ethics were developed for specific groups, such as workplace counsellors, supervisors, trainers and those using counselling skills.
Over time, the EF has been reviewed periodically in order to update it. However, this latest review has a very specific political context, namely the introduction of BACP’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Strategy (BACP, 2023a). The EDI will be critiqued in detail elsewhere, but it represents a thoroughgoing effort to politicise the profession on the flawed basis of Critical Social Justice Theory. This seeming political putsch must be resisted. The Ethical Framework stands as a barrier to this process of ideological capture by political factions within the BACP.
Given this EDI drive to revamp the Ethical Framework, it is curious that the membership of the latter’s review team seems quite atypical of the BACPs own membership. Seven out of the twelve members of the review team either hold PhD qualifications, or are actively studying for a PhD, i.e. 58% of the team (Therapy Today, 2023). This is in sharp contrast with the educational level of the overwhelming majority of the BACP membership, where only 2% of the membership hold a PhD, according to its own workforce data (2022b: 10). The review team presents a striking degree of over-representation of higher educational achievement level by a factor of 29 times, in relation to that of the vast majority of BACP members. This skewed result perhaps betrays the rather wooden conception underlying member selection for the review team. This might appear to be that the ethics review process is by definition an academic pursuit, and is primarily about philosophy, rather being directly about than the nuts and bolts of everyday counselling practice. Perhaps BACP needs to apply some of its own EDI medicine here, in order to represent its own membership a bit more fairly and accurately?
This brief article sets out what is at stake in the review process and what needs to be defended and retained in the Ethical Framework, in order to avoid the BACP’s rapidly growing irrelevance to real world of therapy.
Ethical principles
The EF is based on a combination of ethical principles, values and personal values. The core ethical values include autonomy, beneficence (welfare), non-maleficence (avoidance of harm), justice, being trustworthy and self-respect. In the past, the earlier BAC Code of Ethics appeared to stress autonomy as a key principle (BAC, 1992). This emphasis presented significant problems in resolving ethical issues relating to sex and suicide (Bond, 1991). The EF then recalibrated the stance of earlier codes by requiring that therapists apply a considered balance of competing ethical principles, rather than a simple reliance on just one principle, eg autonomy, to the neglect of all others. However, the EDI Strategy places unequivocal emphasis on one ethical principle, ie Justice, which is intended to drive all future professional activity with colleagues and clients. The EF and EDI Strategy are directly in conflict over this issue. To complete their takeover, the BACP needs to fillet the Ethical Framework and prevent it being used to block the EDI’s further progress.
The EDI strategy has effectively been in place for some time, evident in the skewed publication priorities of the BACP’s journal, Therapy Today, and in the curious tenor of the BACP’s Continuing Professional Development programme. Within CPD, BACP has promoted a workshop referencing the term ‘Terfism’, which is an offensive slur on female therapists who hold gender critical views (Jenkins, 2022). BACP has not responded appropriately to concerns expressed about this, even though this use of pejorative language breaches the EF section 56 regarding a “spirit of mutual respect”. This might suggest that the EF is seen as more of a means of keeping its membership in check, rather than representing a joint commitment by members, officers and the association as a legal entity to work on the basis of shared ethical standards.
The EF is rightly protective of clients, but the current balance in their favour has gone too far. The requirement to ‘put clients first’ has a convincingly ethical ring to it, but in practice, some clients may abuse the trust offered them within therapy, and can bring damaging vexatious complaints against practitioners. There are also clients who have been politicised and are hyper-alert towards any therapist who appears unconvinced that gender identity affirmative practice is ethical, effective, or evidence-based. Such therapists deserve proper protection within an Ethical Framework, given that it possesses the dual function of both setting ethical standards and also of acting as a portal to the professional complaints procedure.
Law
The EF has always accepted the law as an essential aspect of the framework for therapeutic practice. However, section 23 refers to taking the law on “equality, diversity and inclusion into careful consideration and strive for a higher standard than the legal minimum” (https://www.bacp.co.uk/media/3103/bacp-ethical-framework-for-the-counselling-professions-2018.pdf). The phrase “and strive for a higher standard than the legal minimum” is unnecessary within a code of ethics. It provides a classic invitation for misleading efforts to introduce ‘Stonewall law’ into therapy. BACP communications in the past have included potentially misleading reference to such supposed protected characteristics as ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’. Therapists should be required to know and work within the law just as it stands, nothing more, nothing less.
The MOU
The BACP was an early signatory to the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy (BACP, 2022a) and ratified the 2017 version which included the unverifiable concept of ‘gender identity’. The language is coercive (‘challenge assumptions’, ‘seek to suppress’) and quite meaningless outside of belief systems to which the concept of gender identity is a self-evident truth. The inclusion of section 22e in the EF can be misrepresented as requiring affirmative responses in therapy (https://www.bacp.co.uk/media/3103/bacp-ethical-framework-for-the-counselling-professions-2018.pdf). A legal ban on alleged conversion therapy is, in Janice Turner’s elegant phrase, “a solution in search of a problem” (Turner, 2023). Evidence from the BACP’s own complaints system does not endorse the convenient fiction that conversion therapy is being carried out by therapists on a broad scale and to the extent where criminal legislation is now essential (see Table 1).
Table 1: Outcomes of BACP Complaints Procedures 2015-22 (BACP, 2022c).
| Period | Professional Complaint Category | No Info Provided | Sexual Contact* | Conversion Therapy | Other | Total |
| 2016-22 | Prof. Conduct Notices | 1 | 2 | 0 | 16 | 19 |
| 2015-22 | Membership Withdrawal | 12 | 15 | 0 | 12 | 39 |
| Total | 13 | 17 | 0 | 28 | 58 |
*Sexual contact includes: sexual offences, or dual/sexual relationships with current or former clients.
According to this analysis of the BACP’s own complaints procedures data, sexual contact by therapists with clients continues to be a much more serious ethical problem for the profession, rather than the urban myth of widespread conversion therapy carried out by errant therapists.
Free speech
The EDI’s narrow focus on Justice as the sole driving ethical imperative means that diversity of voices and opinions is more and more likely to be eclipsed. A Justice-driven ethical agenda justifies moves towards imposing an authoritarian emphasis only on approved perspectives. This will produce an increasingly likely shutdown of the lively discussion normally expected within any professional association. It is essential that the EF makes a clear statement promoting the importance of open discussion and free speech within the BACP, rather than the ideological conformity we now seem to experience in terms of CPD and the dispiritingly monochrome coverage to be found in the pages of Therapy Today. As a first step in the right direction, the BACP could end the use of any corporate non-disclosure agreements, which have possibly contributed to the situation whereby most members have little real understanding of what is going on inside their own organisation, given the recent flurry of resignations by board members and senior staff. The BACP also needs to explicitly recognise the rights of gender critical and race-critical therapists, endorsed by a tranche of legal victories (Forstater, Miller, Appleby, Corby) by appointing a gender critical therapist to the Editorial Advisory Board of Therapy Today. This would be a step towards repairing the risk of further extensive damage to BACP’s reputation for free speech.
Research
BACP has invested considerable amounts of time and money in trying to orient its members towards the importance of evidence-based practice, by funding randomised controlled trials in school counselling, establishing a firm evidence base for Counselling for Depression within NIHCE guidelines and encouraging the use of outcome measures within university-based counselling. The post-modernist turn towards promoting the role of ‘lived experience’ in research is logically flawed (by definition, there can be no ‘unlived’ experience) and is calculated to value certain types of lived experience over that of others when viewed via a highly selective ‘intersectional’ lens. Classically, the experience of women, both as therapists and as clients, loses out in this kind of struggle for recognition against other competing groups with apparently stronger claims; to be sure, women’s experiences within therapy are likely to be consistently marginalised and dismissed within current discourse. Ethical practice requires scientific evidence of efficacy, rather than retreating to endorse the inevitable political bias of carefully curated anecdotal opinion.
Safeguarding children and adults
Safeguarding concerns are conveniently dismissed within gender identity therapy, whether in the case of leading advocacy agencies under investigation, unmonitored online chatrooms, the bypassing of safeguarding expertise within gender clinics, and the dismissal of students and staff for raising safeguarding issues. The term ‘safeguarding’ is also signally absent from the text of the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy, despite the issues this document raises with regard to capacity for informed consent to irreversible medical treatment (BACP, 2022a https://www.bacp.co.uk/events-and-resources/ethics-and-standards/mou/). Given these serious safeguarding red flags, the EF should reinsert the valuable concept of diminished capacity for autonomy, due to “immaturity, lack of understanding, extreme distress, serious disturbance or other significant personal constraints”. This phrase was present in the EF 2010 version, but was then removed from later versions (BACP, 2010: 3). This concept holds critical relevance to discussions about the ethical basis of children making decisions which are potentially life-changing such as social transition, and for vulnerable young adults making decisions which usually irreversible, as in the case of medical transition.
It is therefore of crucial importance to retain the current distinction made in section 27 between therapeutic work with children under 18 and with adults. There will no doubt be a sustained attempt to erode this ethically essential protective boundary; the MOU, as shown above, does not apply this necessary distinction, and consequently risks promoting ambiguity rather than clarity on this issue.
Summary
In a nutshell, the ongoing review of the Ethical Framework is essentially a political process to make the BACP’s ethics dovetail with the now-dominant Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy. This is likely to collapse the current finely-balanced structure of the EF into prioritising the ethical principle of Justice over all others. The EF needs to be made applicable to its officers and to the BACP itself as an institution where appropriate, in order to better promote accountability to its members. The emphasis on equality law needs to be accurate and restrained, not aspirational and open to misrepresentation. Reference to the MOU needs to be removed as being unworkable in practice. Members need to be better protected from spurious complaints of conversion therapy. Such coercive therapy practices lack evidence of prevalence, according to data from the BACP’s own complaints procedures.
A one-sided focus on achieving the wider social goals of Justice risks endangering free speech within the association. The legal rights for gender critical therapists to free expression now require explicit recognition and protection within the EF. The reckless tilt in research policy in pursuit of insights selectively garnered from ‘lived experience’ puts at risk the BACP’s hard-won reputation for working towards evidence-based ethical practice. Safeguarding needs to be significantly strengthened within the EF, by reinserting the protective concept of diminished capacity for autonomy in relation to certain forms of decision-making, and by holding fast to the critical boundary between therapeutic work with adults and therapeutic work with children under 18.
The future direction of the BACP is at stake here.
References
Bond, T. (1991) “Suicide and sex in the development of ethics for counsellors”, Changes: An international journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy. 9(4): 284-93.
British Association for Counselling (BAC) (1992) Code of Ethics and Practice for Counsellors. Rugby: BAC.
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) (2010) Ethical Framework for Good Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Lutterworth: BACP.
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) (2018) Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions. Lutterworth: BACP. https://www.bacp.co.uk/media/3103/bacp-ethical-framework-for-the-counselling-professions-2018.pdf
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) (2022a) Memorandum of understanding on conversion therapy. https://www.bacp.co.uk/events-and-resources/ethics-and-standards/mou/
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) (2022b) Workforce Mapping Report October 2021 to September 2022. https://www.bacp.co.uk/about-us/about-bacp/2021-2022-workplace-mapping-survey/
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) (2022c) Professional conduct notices: Complaints upheld under the Professional Conduct Procedure. https://www.bacp.co.uk/about-us/protecting-the-public/professional-conduct/notices/
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) (2023a) Equality, diversity and inclusion strategy. https://www.bacp.co.uk/media/17309/bacp-equality-diversity-and-inclusion-strategy-feb-2023.pdf
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) (2023b) Annual Review and Financial Statements 2022-23. https://www.bacp.co.uk/media/18997/annual-review-and-financial-statements-2022-to-2023.pdf
Counsellors Together UK (2023) BACP: Members letter of concern. https://ukcounsellors.co.uk/bacp-members-letter-of-concern-april-2023/
Jenkins, P. (2022) BACP and Terfism: Reaching the point of no return for ethical therapy. Critical Therapy Antidote: https://criticaltherapyantidote.org/2022/02/01/bacp-and-terfism-reaching-the-point-of-no-return-for-ethical-therapy/
Jenkins, P. (2023) Background on UKCP Guidance on Gender Critical Views. Critical Therapy Antidote: Background to the UKCP Guidance Regarding Gender Critical Views – Critical Therapy Antidote
Therapist Concerns (2023) Open Letter to Trustees and Senior Staff British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. https://therapistconcerns.co.uk/
Therapy Today (2023) “Meet the team”, 34: 9, pp. 42-44. https://www.bacp.co.uk/bacp-journals/therapy-today/
Turner, J. (2023) “Gender-confused teens need time and space”, The Times, 21st October. Gender-confused teens need time and space (thetimes.co.uk)
By Peter Jenkins, counsellor, supervisor, trainer and researcher in the UK. He has been a member of both the BACP Professional Conduct Committee and the UKCP Ethics Committee. He has published a number of books on ethical and legal aspects of therapy, including Professional Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy: Ethics and the Law (Sage, 2017). https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/author/peter-jenkins
Peter Jenkins is also a member of Thoughtful Therapists, whose scoping survey for the government consultation on conversion therapy can be found here: https://thoughtfultherapists.org/scoping-survey-pdf/
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