Forensic Psychology For Dummies (135 page)

Teamwork,
learning to work with others, accepting and providing support.

Self- and peer-evaluation
of progress through the course of sessions.

The CALM programme is regarded as so successful that UK courts routinely order that an offender convicted of repeated assaults is required to participate in it, if he is thought safe to serve a sentence in the community.

Cognitive Self Change Programme (CSCP)

This programme targets high-risk violent offenders and includes group and individual sessions. It equips prisoners with skills to help them control their violence and avoid re-conviction. CSCP is aimed at offenders with a history of violent behaviour and is suitable for those whose violence is emotional and/or calculated.

The programme runs over six to eight months with two, two-and-a-half-hour sessions each week. It consists of acquiring and demonstrating the ability to perform four skills:

Paying attention to what and how offenders think in potentially violent situations.

Recognising when thoughts and feelings are leading an offender towards committing a violent or criminal action.

Cultivating new thinking that leads away from violence and crime, and that they feel is an acceptable way to think.

Practising using these new ways of thinking in real-life situations.

Participants also have to prepare a Thinking Report in which they report objectively the thoughts and feelings they experienced during the commission of past offences.

After a person finishes the CSCP, in some jurisdictions they’re encouraged to move onto the Making Choices Programme
,
which helps them to make sense of how they came to offend. It teaches them to recognise points in their life where they could have made a different choice and gives them skills to get a better outlook on life, and to think about positive aspects of themselves and their activities.

They’re helped to manage their emotions and situations better and improve their relationships, as well as live a life free from crime. At the end of the programme they’re asked to prepare a ‘safety plan’ that identifies particular situations in which they may have been prone to violence in the past. They have to prepare details of what they’ll do in those situations to ensure that they don’t act violently.

Reconstructing personal narratives

One innovative way of helping violent offenders to change their way of dealing with others is to help them reconstruct their personal narratives. The idea is that all people see themselves as living out some sort of story built around the roles they lead, for example, being a supportive parent, conscientious shopkeeper or gifted choirmaster.

These roles and their associated narratives evolve out of the individual’s experiences and interactions with other people. They’re supported by memories, especially of key episodes and points in a person’s history that signified changes to the unfolding plot (that is, their life story).

Many violent offenders see themselves as part of a
destructive narrative
in which their identity is defined by hitting out and other acts of violence (check out the nearby sidebar ‘The dangers of a destructive narrative’). They tend to think about and perhaps focus on past events that validate this view of themselves. This allows psychologists to get them to reconsider key episodes in their lives and interpret them in a new way in order to give them a different way of seeing themselves. The offenders are encouraged to reconstruct a more positive personal narrative, in which the violent character they had thought themselves to be no longer plays a role.

Managing Stalking

Stalking doesn’t always include violence, but it certainly generates a fear of violence and can lead in extreme cases to murder.
Stalking
consists of unwanted attention over a period of time that gives rise to fear by the targeted person; in about half of reported cases some physical act of aggression occurs.