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British Psychological Society Ethics: Lip-Service to Justice? This is a excellent article published with the kind permission of psycho-fraud.blogspot.com. The original article can be found here. We live in a world where the word 'justice' has become a rhetorical term which belies its original meaning: 1. The state of being just or fair The courts and tabloid newspapers have managed to create and report the lowering of standards of justice in the UK until the public - who once retained some moral imperatives of their own - are now rendered docile and complacent from being steadily fed on a diet of injustices and the rigged games of institutions that continue to present as one thing whilst actually being another. The war waged upon Iraq by the Bush and Blair administrations - in spite of huge public protests - being a prime example of how easy it is for institutions to commit daylight robbery in the name of human rights concerns. In such a climate, using institutional power in the service of a mercenary agenda whilst passing it off as a good deed seems to be the defining characteristic of the corporate mentality. Evading just and fair punishment for wrongdoing is now a well-established game played out under our noses every day. It is now commonplace, for example, to hear much of the institution's obligation to protect the human rights of those who have abused the human rights of the innocent. It is even more commonplace to learn of the outcomes of trials in which those who abuse the rights of citizens, commit crimes, breach ethics, lie and defraud typically never experience anything near the suffering they themselves have inflicted upon their victims. In the meantime, the victim continues to suffer long and hard well after the charade of the trial has ended. Clearly, in contemporary society any victim of crime or wrongdoing will go a long way before he or she finds any semblance of true justice as once originally defined. Indeed, it is arguable that more justice might be achieved with a crowbar than a corporate complaints procedure. Our newspapers are ridden with outcomes of trials that invariably result in less and less justice for the victims of those who break the law or ethical codes to which they claim to ascribe. Or is it the case that a simple association with ethics has become the only requirement for upright or professional status of those who, in reality, are actually driven, not by the spirit of human caring that moral concern exemplifies, but by ambition, vanity, the love of money and the fashion of moral apathy now passing for magnanimity? Not surprisingly, psychology and the ethical system which purports to guard against the wrongdoings of psychologists is just as tainted with the drug of complacency when it comes to dealing with ethical breaches. Take just a few examples of the outcomes of British Psychological Disciplinary (BPS) hearings in recent years, which illustrate the abject leniency with which unethical psychologists appear to be treated. For example, in August 2003, Dr Rajinder Singh Dyal was found guilty of the following: [...] Dr Dyal had inappropriately used neurological tests, failed to maintain suitable approaches in administering the tests, failed to keep raw data, [...] failed to check inconsistencies and errors in his reports, made falsely claimed to be a psychiatrist and to hold medical qualifications, wrongly advertised his qualifications and membership of the Society in other publications, and made incorrect claims in his CV. The response by the BPS to Dyal's lies and fraudulence was to "severely reprimand" him, suspend him from the Society for three years but with the opportunity to renew his membership after only twelve months if Dyal could prove that "his professional competence had been addressed". This is, effectively, the quasi judiciary equivalent of being sentenced to three years, ending up serving six months with a couple of weeks worth of community service to keep the offended neighbours happy. The pattern of 'reprimand, minor sanction and reinstatement' appears to be a common one in the published outcomes of BPS disciplinary hearings. In essence, this allows the BPS to appear to punish offending psychologists, whilst bringing them back into the fold thereby maintaining a lowly moral standard for professional practice whilst failing to address the real suffering, distress and extended pain for psychology's victims. Effectively, what we see here is typical of the punishments given to criminals in lower courts or those corrupted by a latter day apathy typifying our society. One need only glance through the BPS's publicised outcomes of Disciplinary Hearings to glean the distinct impression that 'justice', according to the BPS, is of the post-modern variety, and such conclusions from Conduct Committee Hearings would not look out of place in any tabloid newspaper. However, such proceedings rarely reach the national press, even if the general public were to be as interested in the injustices perpetrated by unethical psychologists as they are in the wrongdoings of Rottweilers and sexually-deviant Tory Politicians. One is left to wonder what a psychologist has to do to be expelled from the British Psychological Society - kill someone? Unfortunately, there seems to be little by way of a moral that can be drawn from such a situation, apart from 'beware of psychologists when you are vulnerable'. The particularly vulnerable victims of psychologists and psychotherapists in the UK form the underclass to what is, at the moment at least, a shopfront ethos whereby ethics are held up as little more than the velveteen lapelle of the old boy's club blazer - a business logo attracting customers as similarly used by plumbers, gas-fitters and double-glazing salesmen using the emblems of their 'regulatory bodies'. Ethics were once rules born of a shared sense of morality by which we sought to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. They once formed the rules which protected the standards by which professionals claim to be professional. The spirit of morality has gone and now morals and ethics have as much in common as a hotdog and a warm labrador. The goal posts are moveable ones in cases such as Dyal and others, depending upon largely mercenary interests. Institutions such as the BPS appear to 'want their cake and eat it' by paying lip-service to 'ethical codes' amidst the theatricality of lengthy, expensive legalistic hearings of little value. Such hearings rarely capture the true nature of the actual, on the ground, transpired abuses and simply serve to provide the entertainment value required of the pomp and ceremony of rhetorical debate - to create the appearance that justice has been served whilst pragmatically filling the legal profession's coffers and keeping the unethical psychologist in a job. In actual fact, whatever their crime and whatever the theatre within which it is heard, unethical psychologists are invariably returned to their former positions after a token slap on the wrist once public attentions have fallen elsewhere. In the end, it seems that it is the appearance of justice - preservation
of the corporate logo, emblem or facade - that has become the new standard
by which we measure professionalism in the psychological world. Justice
in psychology circles is dead so long as the corporate interests of the
BPS continue to operate upon a foundation of moral relativism.
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