Violence prevention: resources for professional training

Are you prepared, as a professional, to deal with 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?

-My son is accused of having child pornographic material obtained from the Internet and they ask for a prison sentence, what can you do as a psychologist for him?

Think about the answers a bit. It is very likely that this occurs to you: this is not my specialty, contact an appropriate professional. Are there? Do you know who they are?

And if instead of such specific questions they ask you others, like the following?

-My partner assaults 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:

-My patient, who suffers from an eating disorder, can he commit suicide?

-My teenage son hits his sister and his mother, and we don't know what to do, shall we call the Police? can you help us?

-In our organization there is a valuable middle management that harasses the workers, or at least that's what the gossip says, what can we do?

-A father of a family, who has just separated from his wife due to partner abuse, but who, for the rest, does not show any personal or social problems, can he have custody of his children?

Questions of this type and other similar ones, all of them related to violence and its forms, are appropriate (and difficult) questions for psychology professionals that must be answered.

Unfortunately, many psychologists do not have specialized training on these problems, sometimes not even generic. Every day it is more likely that a psychology professional is faced with 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 professional psychologist to intervene in issues of violence? If you have not yet faced this type of lawsuit, it will not take long 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, the 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 issues of violence, we will find a scarce offer of subjects or university courses that have it in the center of interest. Fortunately little by little, especially in the context of ongoing training and specialization (postgraduate courses, professionals...), this training offer is increasing and the landscape is changing. But the professional demand is faster than the training offer.

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 nucleus of the intervention, the first step for the prevention of violence, this harmful behavior.

The assessment of the risk of violence

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 happening again. Professionals can help in this task as long as we know how to anticipate new or future violent acts.

A first fundamental idea, the abc of violence prevention training, is that the probability of a behavior occurring serious violence is reduced, sometimes very reduced (although it seems the opposite to us in the light of the media) and, therefore, effective prevention must be adjusted to that probability. Neither overestimate nor underestimate the risk of it appearing.

But psychologists are not fortune tellers, we only know (and this is of enormous value) to estimate the probability that some behaviors or others will occur. 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 far-reaching.

In such serious professional practice it is a false positive (alert that the wolf is coming without going to come) as a false negative (trusting that the wolf is not going to come when it is already peeking out of 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 The problem of violence and aggression is serious and that the social tolerance that existed before with this problem has missing. But we know that violence is a genuinely psychological problem. Faced with violence, with the demands it produces, psychologists cannot evade 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 of us must be addressed, because aggression and violence (in all its formats and types and whether we speak of the aggressor as of the victim) are behaviors, or fantasies, and form part of the beliefs, of the attitudes of the people.

Aggressive and violent behavior is accompanied by intense emotional changes and it is strongly determined by feelings and affections. Criminological research informs us that 80% of homicides and murders are related to revenge and hatred, as are many sexual assaults. The expression of violence in patients with personality disorders or severe mental disorders and even in patients with neurodegenerative disorders are important and a source of many problems and discomfort.

To do?

Both in adults and in 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 education 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 can 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 ceases to be one of the basic premises to avoid violence. The prevention of violence does not seek to find a solution to violence, but 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 any of the meanings of this term), but intervention is really the second step. The first step is risk assessment. And to the extent that the first step is successful, the intervention will be more effective. TO

Before intervening, we must assess how, when, and with what intensity and frequency we must intervene. That is risk assessment. Sometimes this task is confused with diagnosing, but they are not the same. A diagnosis implies an assessment, 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 does not automatically follow what can happen in the future with a certain patient and at a specific moment in time, and even less so with violence.

Irrigation valuation techniques

Unfortunately, in Spain we have witnessed three very serious homicides in recent months, committed by women diagnosed with severe depressive disorders, and who were in charge of the children they they murdered. Could they have been prevented?

Anticipating what can happen is what we call forecasting, and in cases of aggressive behavior and violent is essential, but in most cases, it is not subject to diagnoses clinical. 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 behaviour, physical aggression, sexual abuse, threat, self-harm or similar, will happen again in a temporal context and scenario determined.

The most common technique for assessing risk is “unstructured clinical judgement” equivalent to making a decision based on intuition or expert 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 frequent in Psychology and have their strengths and weaknesses. Thus, for example, a strength of the "non-structured 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 the 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, the risk assessment techniques based on "structured clinical judgment" are those that gather the greatest current consensus among experts who work in the prevention of violence, because they ensure greater effectiveness in the 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 necessity that requires specialized preparation and is not very complex. Due to our training in evaluation and other similar competences, Psychology professionals are, we are, very prepared to acquire a High competence in assessing the risk of violence and, therefore, being able to intervene in the problems that the reiteration of aggression and violence generate.

The need for continuous training

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 the professionals as well as by the entities in which they are integrated) that must be converted into a practice usual. With the exception of healthcare professionals, who have well established the role of continuing education in their professional field, in the fields own work with violence (jurists, criminologists, social workers and educators, psychologists, etc.) this reality is in the development phase incipient.

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 law. One of his tasks, in which he 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 training specialized in areas such as gender violence, sexual violence or interpersonal violence in the field of organizations.

One of the training innovations in the professional field, in Spanish, is the development of the so-called webinars, live training resources that take advantage of the facilities of the internet and social networks to facilitate the processes of training. Webinars are one more step away from what was previously called “distance or online training”. The IPF has been promoting this type of course for more than 5 years and with a great 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 life injuries, permanent injuries, disabilities, etc...) suffered by the victims are preventable. In addition, the social demand of citizens is very clear, there is a total rejection (every day more widespread) of violence and its consequences. There is a formal commitment from politicians and social administrators to fight against this serious scourge that does so much damage to society.

Both the social demand and the political-legal commitment crystallize in a requirement for professionals – psycho-, socio-, crimi-, educates-, legal – to intervene effectively in solving this problem. And all these professionals have to be prepared to be able to intervene in the prevention of violence. And making professionals perform well in prevention requires that these professionals be well-trained and competent in the latest and most modern asset valuation and management strategies risk.