Impact of Counseling on Stress and Psychological Wellbeing among the Women Police Personnel

Police officers/personnel deal with variety of events which are negative and distressing. It has been strongly argues that the job performance of a police officer is affected when they undergo chronic stress. Since police officers, especially women are subjected to high levels of stress on everyday basis, it is important their stressors are handled efficiently. The aim of the present study was to develop and determine a counseling program by evaluating its impact on occupational stress and psychological well-being. A sample of 50 women officers was collected from Gurugram (Haryana, India) through snowball sampling. The women officers’ ages ranged between 30 to 45 years. The Occupational Stress Index (Srivastava and Singh, 1981) and Psychological General Well-Being Index (Dupuy, 1984) were used to collect the data. The participants were measuredusing the tools and then they were given counseling sessions for 8 weeks (once a week), and they were again measured on the two variables. The results revealed that counseling was effective in enhancing psychological well-being of female police officers and in reducing occupational stress. Implications of the study for the police personnel are discussed. Based on these results various recommendations have thus been suggested in the paper.

Introduction

A police officer’s job is more stressful in comparison with other occupations (Goodman, 1990). With the advent of globalisation, the opportunities of coming together for committing organised crimes have increased, along with international implications of crimes involving drugs, trafficking, intellectual frauds and cyber-crimes like phishing.

National Police Commission (1980) highlighted the importance of women in the police and suggested that they should be assigned investigations more often. Women have been able to present an image of themselves as being intelligent, sympathetic and finding non-coercive solutions to crimes (Pope & Pope, 1986).

Women police officers make use of the styles that rely more on communication and less on physical force. They have been found to use a community-oriented style of policing and have been proved to be better at handling incidents and cases related to domestic violence (Schuck & Rabe-Hemp, 2005).

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Impact of Counseling on Stress and Psychological Wellbeing among the Women Police Personnel