Violence Prevention: Resources For Professional Training
Are you prepared, as a professional, to assist an adult pedophile who asks you for help in his consultation and who assures you that he has not committed any sexual abuse?
What if the question in question was something like the following?
-They accuse my son of having child pornographic material obtained on the Internet and they ask for a prison sentence, what can you do as a psychologist for him?
Think a little about the answers. It is very likely that this comes to mind: This is not my specialty, please contact an appropriate professional Are there any? Do you know who they are?
What if instead of such specific questions they ask you others, like the following?
-My partner attacks me, threatens me… but I want to continue with him, I love him and I don’t want to report him, I want him to change… What can you do as a psychologist for us?
Or, how are you:
-Can my patient, who suffers from an eating disorder, commit suicide?
-My teenage son hits his sister and his mother, and we don’t know what to do, should we call the Police? can you help us?
-In our organization there is a valuable middle manager who harasses the workers, or at least that is what gossip says, what can we do?
-A father of a family, who has just separated from his wife for being a partner abuser, but who, otherwise, does not show any personal or social problem, can he have custody of his children?
Issues of this type and others similar, all of them related to violence and its forms, These are appropriate (and difficult) questions for psychology professionals that must be answered
Unfortunately, many psychologists do not have specialized training about these problems, sometimes not even generic training. Every day it is more likely that a psychology professional will face problems derived from violence, because there is a great social demand to solve the problems generated by violence. And psychology professionals are on the front line of those called to this task.
Are you prepared as a psychology professional to intervene in issues of violence? If you have not yet faced this type of lawsuit, it will not take long for you to have it on the table And this statement is valid for almost any area of Psychology (clinical, forensic, sports, school, social…).
Training for the prevention of violence from Psychology
In undergraduate and university degree training programs in Psychology, somewhat less in postgraduate and master’s degrees, training on violence is very scarce and is always subsidiary to other topics (psychopathology, legal, social, school, etc.).
If we look today for the training offer on violence issues we will find a limited offer of subjects or university courses that have it at the center of interest. Fortunately, little by little, especially in the contexts of continuing and specialization training (postgraduate courses, professional courses…), this training offer is increasing and the panorama is changing. But professional demand is faster than training supply.
We want to deal, in this article, with the training of psychology professionals in the techniques and procedures for assessing the risk of violence the basic core of the intervention, the first step in preventing violence, this very harmful behavior.
We professionals are useful to the extent that, with our decisions and interventions, we solve the problems that arise. And the essential problem of violence – to prevent it – is its repetition. Violence must be prevented from appearing, but if it does, it is essential to prevent it from being repeated We professionals can help in this task as long as we know how to anticipate new or future violent events.
A first fundamental idea, the ABC of violence prevention training, is that the probability of serious violent behavior occurring is reduced, sometimes very reduced (although it may seem otherwise to us in the light of the media) and , therefore, effective prevention must adjust to that probability Neither overestimate nor underestimate the risk of it appearing.
But psychologists are not fortune tellers, we only know how (and this has enormous value) to estimate the probability of certain behaviors occurring or others. Getting the forecast right is our challenge, even though there will always be a range of error And the errors in the management of violence are very transcendental.
In professional practice, a false positive (warning that the wolf is coming when it is not coming) is as serious as a false negative (trusting that the wolf is not going to come when it is already peeking through the door). But if we have to choose an error, in matters of violence, a false positive is better than a false negative. The consequences of false negatives are always very negative, and sometimes irreversible.
All psychologists (juniors or seniors, with more or less specialized training) know that the problem of violence and aggression is serious and that the social tolerance that previously existed with this problem has disappeared. But we know that violence is a genuinely psychological problem. In the face of violence, in the face of the demands it produces, psychologists cannot avoid our professional responsibility even when the demand comes from the perpetrators of the violence or their environment.
Preventing violence is an important task of applied psychology. Demands of this type that are made to us must be met, because aggression and violence (in all its formats and types and whether we are talking about the aggressor or the victim) are behaviors, or fantasies, and are part of the beliefs, people’s attitudes.
Aggressive and violent behavior is accompanied by intense emotional changes and is strongly determined by feelings and affections. Criminological research informs us that 80% of homicides and murders are related to revenge and hatred, and many sexual assaults are also related. The expression of violence in patients with personality disorders or severe mental disorders and even in patients with neurodegenerative disorders is important and a source of many problems and discomfort.
To do?
In adults, young people and adolescents, and also in children, violence is a problem that Psychology knows how to prevent. But, as in any professional activity, the technician’s competence is directly related to his training and training. There is a general consensus that The best solution, if not the only one, for the problems of violence, is prevention Reading this phrase may irritate more than one, because it seems like a mantra that serves as a wild card to respond to almost all social problems. But that does not mean that it is no longer one of the basic premises to avoid violence. Violence prevention does not seek to find a solution to violence, but rather to prevent it from appearing and, above all, from reappearing, from getting worse and worse.
The prevention of violence is a process that has two components, two stages ordered in time, different: these are, first, risk assessment and, second, risk management (intervention) Generally, psychologists tend to think that prevention consists of intervening (in whatever meaning this term has), but intervention is really the second step. The first step is risk assessment. And to the extent that the first step is correct, the intervention will be more effective. TO
Before intervening, we must assess how, when, and with what intensity and frequency we have to intervene. That is assessing the risk. Sometimes this task is confused with diagnosing, but they are not the same A diagnosis involves assessing, but it is something more than that; It is to compare and decide on the, for example, presence of a symptom, syndrome or similar in relation to a previous classification system. But from this it is not automatically deduced what may happen in the future with a certain patient and at a specific time, much less with violence.
Irrigation assessment techniques
Unfortunately, in Spain we have witnessed three very serious filicides in recent months, committed by women diagnosed with serious depressive disorders, and who were responsible for the children they murdered. Could they have been prevented?
Anticipating what may happen is what we call forecasting, and in cases of aggressive and violent behavior it is essential, but in most cases, it is not subject to clinical diagnoses. So Other resources are needed for this type of forecasting, including risk assessment techniques
Risk assessment techniques consist of procedures (more or less formalized) of compiling information, selecting it, evaluating it and combining it to make decisions about the probability that a certain behavior, physical assault, sexual abuse, threat, self-harm or similar, happen again in a specific temporal context and scenario.
The most common technique for assessing risk is “unstructured clinical judgment.” equivalent to making a decision based on the expert’s intuition or judgment about the forecast. The second technique is the so-called “actuarial”, in which, through the use of a psychometric tool, the prognosis is based on a mathematical score.
Both techniques are common in Psychology and have their strengths and weaknesses. Thus, for example, a strength of “unstructured clinical judgment” is its adaptability to the clinical case, but its weakness is the subjectivity of its result. A strength of the “actuarial” technique is its reliability, but its main limitation is its poor adaptability to a single case.
There is a third technique called “structured clinical judgment”, which combines the strengths of the previous ones and aims to avoid their limitations The latter, risk assessment techniques based on “structured clinical judgment,” are those that gather the greatest current consensus among experts working on violence prevention, because they ensure greater effectiveness in prevention. One of the most important reasons is because they have higher levels of prognostic efficiency.
Learning and competence in the application of “structured clinical judgment techniques” to assess the risk of violence is, for psychology professionals, a need that requires specialized preparation and is not very complex. Due to our training in evaluation and other similar skills, Psychology professionals are, we are, very prepared to acquire a high level of competence in assessing the risk of violence and, therefore, to be able to intervene in the problems that the repetition of aggression and the violence they generate.
No one would argue that in these times continuous training is a necessity But, in our field, there is a lack of tradition of continuous training (both on the part of professionals and on the part of the entities in which they are part) that must be converted into a common practice. With the exception of professionals in the health world, who have well established the role of continued training in their professional field, in the fields of work with violence (lawyers, criminologists, social workers and educators, psychologists, etc.), this It is actually in the incipient development phase.
The Institute of Forensic Psychology (IPF) It has been established as a center of innovation and reference in the professional practice of psychology applied to the law. One of its tasks, in which it has been committed for years, is the specialized training of psychology professionals in the prevention of violence.
In particular, it offers courses and training in violence risk assessment practices in legal, clinical and social intervention contexts These training resources range from basic training in violence risk assessment techniques to specialized training in areas such as gender violence, sexual violence or interpersonal violence in organizations.
One of the training innovations in the professional field, in Spanish, is the development of so-called webinars, live training resources that take advantage of the facilities of the Internet and social networks to facilitate training processes. Webinars are one more step from what was previously called “distance or online training”. The IPF has been promoting this type of courses for more than 5 years and has had a large attendance of participants from Spain and Latin America. Of all those who use Spanish as a professional language.
Violence can be avoided, its very serious consequences (sometimes the loss of human life, permanent injuries, disabilities, etc.) suffered by the victims are preventable. Furthermore, the social demand of citizens is very clear, there is a total rejection (more widespread every day) of violence and its consequences. There is a formal commitment by politicians and social administrators to fight against this serious scourge that causes so much damage to society.
Both social demand and political-legal commitment crystallize in a requirement for professionals – psycho-, socio-, crimi-, educa-, legal – to intervene effectively in the solution of this problem. And all these professionals have to be prepared to be able to intervene in the prevention of violence. And ensuring that professionals perform well in prevention requires that these professionals are well trained and competent in the latest and most modern risk assessment and management strategies.
