Counselling Refugees: Risk and Resilience
In 2010, Canada accepted 7,265 government assisted refugees and 4,833 privately sponsored refugees. According to UNICEF (2012), almost 90% of war victims are women and children. Over one million children have been killed in war zones and 20 million displaced to refugee or internally displaced person camps. According to Amnesty International (1996), children’s traumatic events include but are not limited to bombing, shelling, sniper-fire, rape and force to become child-soldiers. Many of these individuals will require counselling to help them with challenges common to pre-, trans-, and post-migration processes. Counsellors may expect to provide services to refugees, even when counselling refugees is not their main area of focus (Arthur et al., 2010).