Violence Prevention: Resources for Professional Training

Today, more than ever, it is necessary for psychologists to be trained in violence prevention.

Are you prepared, as a professional, to deal with an adult pedophile who asks you for help in your office and assures you that he has not committed any sexual abuse?

What if the question in your office were something like the following?

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

Give some thought to the answers. You will most likely come up with this one: This is not my specialty, go to an appropriate professional.Do you know who they are?

What if instead of such specific questions you are asked other questions, such as the following?

-My partner assaults me, threatens me... but I want to stay with him, I love him and I do not want to report him, I want him to change. .... What can you as a psychologist do for us?

Or, like these:

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

-My teenage son beats his sister and 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 female workers, or at least that's what the rumors say, what can we do?

-A father of a family, who has just separated from his wife as a partner abuser, but otherwise does not show any personal or social problems, can he have custody of his children?

Questions of this type and others like it, all related to violence and its forms, are appropriate (and difficult) questions for psychology professionals to answer..

Unfortunately, many psychologists do not have specialized training in these problems, sometimes not even generic training. Every day it is more and more likely that a psychology professional will be confronted with problems derived from violence, because there is a great social demand to solve the problems generated by violence. And psychology professionals are in 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 demand, it will not be long before you have it on the table.. And this statement applies to almost any area of psychology (clinical, forensic, sports, school, social...).

Training for the prevention of violence from Psychology

In undergraduate and graduate programs in psychology, less so in postgraduate and masters programs, training on violence is very scarce and is always subsidiary to other topics (psychopathology, legal, social, school, etc.).

If we look for training on violence today, we will find a scarce offer of subjects or university courses that include it in their curriculum. or university courses that focus on violence. Fortunately, little by little, especially in the contexts of continuing education and specialization (postgraduate courses, professional courses, etc.), this training offer is increasing and the panorama is changing. But professional demand is moving faster than the training on offer.

In this article, we would like to focus on the training of psychology professionals in techniques and procedures for assessing the risk of violence.The basic core of the intervention, the first step in the prevention of violence, this very harmful behavior.

Assessing the risk of violence

We professionals are useful to the extent that, with our decisions and interventions, we solve the problems presented to us. And the essential problem of violence - in order to prevent it - is its repetition. It is necessary to prevent violence from occurring, but if it does, it is essential to prevent it from recurring.. 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 small, sometimes very small (although it may seem otherwise to us in the light of the media) and, therefore, effective prevention must be adjusted to that probability, effective prevention must be adjusted to that probability. Neither overestimate nor underestimate the risk of occurrence.

But psychologists are not soothsayers, we only know (and this is of enormous value) how to estimate the probability of some behaviors occurring or others. Getting the prognosis right is our challenge, even though there will always be a range of error.. And errors in the management of violence are very transcendental.

In professional practice, a false positive (warning that the wolf is coming without actually coming) is as serious as a false negative (trusting that the wolf is not coming 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 used to exist for this problem has disappeared. But we also know that violence is a genuinely psychological problem. In the face of violence, in the face of the demands it produces, we psychologists cannot shy away from our professional responsibility, even when the demand comes from the victims.even when the demand comes from the perpetrators of violence or their environment.

Preventing violence is an important task of applied psychology. The demands of this type that are made to us must be dealt with, 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 and attitudes of people.

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, 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.

What 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 competence of the technician is directly related to his or her education and training. There is a general consensus that the best solution, if not the only one, to the problems of violence, is prevention.. Reading this phrase may irritate more than one, because it seems a mantra that serves as a catch-all to respond to almost all social problems. But it is still one of the basic premises to prevent violence. The prevention of violence does not seek to find the solution to violence, but to prevent it from appearing and, above all, to prevent it from reappearing, worsening and worsening.

The prevention of violence is a process that has two components, two stages ordered in time, distinct: these are, first, risk assessment, and second, risk management (intervention).. Generally, psychologists tend to think that prevention consists of intervention (in any of the meanings of this term), but intervention is actually 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. A

Before intervening, it is necessary to assess how, when, and with what intensity and frequency we have to intervene. This is risk assessment. Sometimes this task is confused with that of diagnosis, but they are not the same.. A diagnosis involves assessing, but it is more than that; it is comparing and deciding on the presence of, for example, a symptom, syndrome or similar in relation to a previous classification system. But it does not automatically infer what may happen in the future with a given patient at a given time, and even less so with violence.

Risk assessment techniques

Unfortunately, in Spain in recent months we have witnessed three very serious murders committed by women diagnosed with severe depressive disorders, 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 behavior. other resources are needed for this type of prognoses, among which risk assessment techniques appear..

Risk assessment techniques consist of procedures (more or less formalized) for compiling information, selecting it, evaluating it and combining it to make decisions about the probability that a certain behavior, physical aggression, sexual abuse, threat, self-injury or similar, will happen again in a given time context and setting.

The most common technique for assessing risk is the "unstructured clinical judgment", which is equivalent to making a decision based on the risk that the behavior will happen again. equivalent to making a decision based on the expert's intuition or judgment about the prognosis. The second technique is the so-called "actuarial" technique, 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 the "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 the single case.

There is a third technique called "structured clinical judgment", which combines the strengths of the previous techniques and aims to avoid their limitations.. The latter, the risk assessment techniques based on "structured clinical judgment" are the ones that gather the greatest current consensus among experts working in 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 becoming competent 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. Because of our training in assessment and other similar skills, psychology professionals are very well prepared to acquire a high level of competence in the assessment of the risk of violence and, therefore, to be able to intervene in the problems generated by the repetition of aggression and violence.

The need for continuing education

No one would argue that in this day and age, continuing education 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 integrated) that must be reconverted into a habitual practice. With the exception of health professionals, who have well established the role of continuing education in their professional field, in the fields of work with violence (lawyers, criminologists, social workers and educators, psychologists, etc.) this reality is in its early stages of development.

The Institute of Forensic Psychology (IPF) has established itself as a center of innovation and reference in the professional practice of psychology applied to the law. One of its tasks, to 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-based violence, sexual violence or interpersonal violence in 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 training processes. Webinars are one more step in what used to be called "distance or online training". The IPF has been promoting this type of courses for more than 5 years and with a great attendance of participants from Spain and Latin America. From all those who use Spanish as a professional language.

Violence can be avoided, the very serious consequences of violence (sometimes the loss of human lives, permanent injuries, disabilities, etc...) suffered by the victims are preventable. Moreover, the social demand of citizens is very clear, there is a total rejection (every day more generalized) of violence and its consequences. There is a formal commitment of politicians and social administrators to fight against this serious scourge that does so much harm to society.

Both the social demand and the political-legal commitment crystallize in a requirement to the professional - psycho-, socio-, crimi-, educa-, legal- professionals 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 getting professionals to perform well in prevention requires that these professionals are well trained and competent in the latest and most modern risk assessment and management strategies.