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Safer Tomorrow Podcast
The Safer Tomorrow Podcast aims to reduce crime and violence today by raising awareness about solutions while providing practical tips, strategies and stories that inspire and empower change makers and peace seekers (regular citizens) to effect change.
As someone who has conducted research in this area, Dr. Jo is convicted about civil society's role in the crime problem and our responsibility to be part of the solution. Change is possible, and so Safer Tomorrow provides actionable and doable steps, everyone can participate in to create a safer, more compassionate, and equitable world.
When a crime is committed, trust is broken, the person who committed the crime has to prove themselves to earn trust.
But it's not just up to them. We must rethink the way we categorize people who make poor decisions and everything we think we know about them, their story, and their future. We must rebuild broken possibilities and connections and provide new potential. And we must reach out to become the community that helps others walk a healed path.
It may push us out of our comfort zones, but it's within our capacity.
Let's take action and create positive change together.
Safer Tomorrow Podcast
Beyond Sexual Offenses: Insights from the Good Lives Model
Unlock the enigma of human behavior as Mr. David Prescott and I, Dr. Jo, thread together a narrative that bridges the dark world of sexual offenses with the light of rehabilitation. Our latest episode weaves through the Good Lives Model, my own PhD research's foundation, and how it offers a path for offenders to change their behaviour.
Venture through the intricacies of sexual offending behavior with a conversation that challenges and informs. We scrutinize the paradox of immutable sexual desires versus the potential for behavioral modification, illustrated through the narrative of a man named Paul. His story, colored by early trauma and relational disruptions, underscores the essential components of SOAP—Stability, Occupation, Accountability, and Planning—as we articulate the importance of understanding and compassion in the complex process of rehabilitation.
In our final chapter, we contemplate the diverse tapestry of factors that can usher an individual towards sexual offenses, contrasting the stories of two hypothetical men, Frank and Paul, to underscore these differences. We unravel the threads of tailored treatment, the significance of addressing criminogenic needs, and the universal potential for profound change. Join us as we harmonize the Good Lives Model with trauma-informed practices, recognizing Tony Ward's contributions and the synergy with desistance theory, to provide a comprehensive view that transcends traditional boundaries of correctional rehabilitation.
What makes someone commit a violent sexual act, can they change and what tools can help support this change? Join me today as I talk to Mr David Prescott, a licensed clinical social worker who has worked with persons who have committed violent sexual acts, who has authored several books and has won numerous prizes on the treatment of persons with sexual abuse. Hello and welcome to the safer tomorrow podcast, where we find strategies from around the world to reduce crime and violence and create more peaceful societies. I'm Dr Joe. I'm a criminal justice researcher and a community social work educator, and I'm very passionate about finding solutions. The STEM discouraged the challenge of crime and violence in my nation. Today I have Mr David Prescott. He is a mental health practitioner of 39 years. He's the director of the safer society continuing education center. In that capacity, he has overseen more than 90 live online CE trainings and 80 webinars, with a combined total of 37,000 participants. Mr Prescott is the author and editor of 25 books in the areas of understanding and improving services to at-risk clients. Mr Prescott is best known for his work in the areas of understanding, assessing and treating sexual violence and trauma, including with adolescents and young adults. He is a recipient of numerous awards for the treatment and prevention of sexual abuse. Mr Prescott currently trains and lectures around the world. His published work has been translated into several different languages. He has served on the editorial boards of four scholarly journals. He has been the co-author of the monthly neary and masoch newsletters since 2007, which are read by several thousand professionals who work with adolescents who have been sexually abused. Since 2011, he has served as co-blogger for association for the treatment and prevention of sexual abuse Blog, which has been read over 850,000 times and was recently rated among the top blogs in the world on the topic.
Speaker 1:So you know we have an expert here today. All right, so welcome, it is so good to have you. I mean, we have been talking for some time, maybe one or two years now, particularly because I have an interest in the good lives model and I think, based on the research that I did for my PhD, I encountered research and literature on the good lives model and it is part of the strength-based ethos that I personally believe in and that I see evidenced in the Desistence research that speaks about facilitating leaving a life of crime. So I thought, boy, I really need to have Mr Prescott on here with me to share more about the good lives model, but also your work.
Speaker 1:You've done a lot of work on with persons who have committed sexual offenses, and I don't know, apart from violent offenses, sexual offenses are one of the more difficult offenses to grapple with, and so I really wanted to dig in so that my listener could really hear more about. Is it possible for persons who have committed sexual offenses to change, and what can that change look like and how can we support it? So, but first I want to ask you how did you get involved in this area? What sparked your interest?
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for that question and also for the introduction. What sparked my interest really was that it was the 1980s and the mid-1980s and all of a sudden this was being talked about all over the United States and we had TV shows. I think even Oprah Winfrey, back when she was brand new, was talking about this, as well as other just the media in general. And at the same time I was just out of school, I needed a job and people said to me would you like to work with sex offenders? Now I'm a social worker by background, I'm trained and I'm licensed to do diagnosis and treatment, so I function very much like a psychologist.
Speaker 2:People tend to call me doctor a lot. It's OK, but I'm Mr Prescott and at the time I guess I sometimes make the joke that I was missing the part of my brain that was supposed to say no, and I said this is true to my social work values. I will work with all human beings unless I have a specific reason that I'm not able to. And here we are all these decades later and I've even thought about doing something else. But sometimes things are like a calling and the circumstances have just always been, have always asked me to return, so here I am.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean what an area it is. Were there any barriers as you started to work with persons who had committed sexual offenses? Were there any internal barriers that you kind of had to jump over in order to be able to serve them? So yes, as a social worker, we know what our values are and how important it is to be able to serve anyone, but still we are human beings. Was there a process for you?
Speaker 2:Yes, that is an excellent question that nobody has ever asked me, and I think the answer is at first, the first barrier I was up against is when I started, nobody knew what they were doing. Really, there was almost nothing written, and so I had some people who would talk to me and I said this is what you need to do. And I would say I'm not sure I'd even want to go out to lunch with this person, much less have them be my therapist. They're really kind of frightening. That was the first barrier. So eventually I became addicted to research. I started reading the research as it came out, and everything gradually turned out to be different from what we thought and I'll get into that in a moment.
Speaker 2:And honestly, my second barrier was that I started doing this work and then I got married and then I started my family, and I'm kind of glad that I did it that way, because it gave me a chance to think about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a husband and a father, and how much there is to learn about these things that we don't necessarily teach our sons.
Speaker 2:And so for me, I had to. As I started my family, I had to do a lot of thinking at the time about what my values were, what I thought about this work and where did it all fit in? Because I was going to work and dealing with people that had done terrible things. And yet the research fills me with hope and optimism that we can build a safer tomorrow, a safer society, and at the same time, I was going home and singing my children to sleep every night and thinking about what precious and wonderful creatures they are and were. So it's a difficult balance, but I think also it's a practice skill that all professionals can do, and so, honestly, there are other things that affect me more deeply these days, just because I have so much practice dealing with this clientele.
Speaker 1:Wow, thank you. I love what you said about starting your family and how that played a role in your own understanding and working with persons who have committed sexual offenses, because there's something about us being able to experience different aspects and stages of life and being able to use some of those experiences and understandings of how the world works to inform, how we intimate, how we serve persons in our field, and so I think that was such a key and important vantage point. And, of course, if you don't have children, you can empathize and you can empathize you can really feel the pain still of the victims of sexual offenses, but also when you have your own children, it can really deepen it. So I see just the importance of understanding and being able to navigate that balance. So can you tell us a little bit more about what your experience has been like working with sexual offenders? It is so, as I said before, it is so difficult to believe that persons who have committed sexual offenses can change. I mean, you're always on the lookout, you're always. It's hard.
Speaker 1:So, could you tell us a little bit more about your experience?
Speaker 2:Sure so well. I entered the field not knowing what I was doing or what I was really being asked to do, and one of the first things I think we all have to do is confront our own sort of attitudes and beliefs, and at the time, everybody believed that all of these people were going to go on and do it again for the rest of their lives, and I think we became confused, because it is true that there's certain things that are part of who we are. All human beings are sexual beings in one way or another. Now, that doesn't mean everybody wants to have sex, and some people want to have lots and lots of sex, and so it's all different for all of us. But the important thing is that we cannot get rid of our own sexuality, even if we're not sexually active. Now. At the same time, it's a little bit like, perhaps, an eating disorder, because on the one hand, you want to fix the eating disorder, but everybody has to eat. So it's not as simple as just stopping eating. Now, with non-sexual violence, it is as simple as stopping the violence.
Speaker 2:What I found is that there's some aspects of sexuality that none of us are ever going to change. I'm married and I have a lifetime history of I prefer to be in the company of women. That's just. That's a funny thing about being a man, but that's kind of how it is, and I couldn't change that if I tried. On the other hand, it's actually quite easy to get people to change their behavior. So number one is we're not trying to change anybody's innate sexuality. We are trying to get them to change how they behave. Just like, I love ice cream, but at my age ice cream is not healthy for me. So I can't stop the fact that I love ice cream, but I can certainly change how I behave around ice cream, and that's what we're asking these individuals to do. Now, what I found getting into this work is once I could sit down and actually listen to these people and put my own personal thoughts aside. Once I accepted them as a fellow human being. They didn't want to go on to hurt people either. They didn't want to hurt children, they didn't want to hurt adults, and for the most part, they may sometimes say well, there are some laws I would like to break around drug use or whatever but most people do not want to be the pariahs that we seem to see them to be. So that's one piece.
Speaker 2:Then something else that happened, which was in the 1980s. There was this research that was done. It was sort of almost secretive in a way. What they did is they confidentially interviewed all of these people who had sexually abused and found that they'd all done it lots and lots and lots of times before. But that turns out to be different from after somebody's been caught and they've had a judge or some authority say that was not okay. Then actually, the rates of people doing it again are much, much lower than most people think. So everybody's got their job in life and I've always found that once I get to know these individuals, once I've heard their stories, once I've heard all the incredibly tragic experiences that they've been through, I can better understand them. That does not forgive the behavior the behavior is unforgivable but I can understand and have a compassionate relationship with these individuals and help them to build a better life, a lifestyle that is incompatible with offending, a lifestyle in which hurting other people is undesirable and unnecessary.
Speaker 1:And that's really what we're working on, and the research shows that we can be pretty effective at that under the right conditions, I should say yeah, okay, I mean, what's important and interesting to me is that one of your findings was that persons who had not been convicted tended to perpetuate and continue, persist, but those who were convicted eventually had some kind of reduction in frequency or they stopped. And that's so important, because sometimes we don't necessarily understand the importance of the justice system in that way and its effect on behavior. However, though it may reduce, there are other things that perhaps need to happen in order to ensure that the change has sustained or is sustained. So I would like to hear in your just from your experience, research perspective, could you take us on a journey of how someone becomes a sexual offender and then how do they live this life?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, I'll take a sort of semi-fabricated case and I'm going to call him Paul for no good reason, just Paul. And so, as a child, paul grew up in a home where there was drug abuse and illegal behavior and heavens knows what happened to his parents. But life was not particularly kind to his parents. So they had a baby Paul. And as Paul was growing up, eventually the authorities had to come in and take him away. His mother maybe said I can't handle him, I need to come to terms with my own drug use. The father maybe goes back into prison or something like this.
Speaker 2:There's often, so often, these really really sad cases. Now, sometimes they're not so sad, but I can talk about that later. So Paul then, from having early life experiences, the first thing that happens is his disrupted family relationships mean that his relationships, his ability to have relationships, has been harmed. He's learned early on that the world can be a quite dangerous place, that authorities can't always be trusted. Now, whether true or not, these are the beliefs that he's developed. So basically, all of his capacity for relationships has been vandalized, if you will. Now, when I was 12, I was going about the business of trying to figure out how do I ask Eliza out on a date, how do I try to make myself look attractive to Christina over there or whatever? But Paul, on the other hand, was saying this is really dangerous. And so he gets shipped off to an uncle in another part of the country who then sexually abuses him and he learns about sex way earlier than anybody else and he gets, becomes confused because being abused can have some side effects, as I'm sure you well know. If you go up to a child and you tickle them, even though they don't want to be tickled, they will still laugh and they will wonder why do I laugh when I don't even want to be tickled? Well, it's just something that happens with your body, and the same thing happens sometimes with kids who've been abused. So Paul grew up on the one hand, I don't trust anybody and on the other hand, this abuse kind of strangely felt pretty good. Maybe I can try to understand this a bit better by getting kids to have sex with me.
Speaker 2:And so he does this a few times as a teenager gets into trouble, gets sent away to some school or a juvenile detention center or whatever where the authorities are hostile and controlling, where he doesn't have any relationships and where he spends so much time keeping himself safe and scanning the environment for evidence of wrongdoing that adults see him as impulsive and paranoid, having a poor self-regulation style, et cetera, et cetera. He becomes an adult, he gets back out into the community. He learned a few skills in treatment, but not that many. So now he's spending his whole time trying not to offend, trying not to break the law, but he doesn't have enough skills inside him to prevent breaking the law. And then finally, something happens. It's a hot day, he drinks too much alcohol, he sees a child in the community, he starts talking to the child and he reaches a point of no return and he tries to have sex with the child. It's observed by a parent who immediately calls the police and then he's off to prison for a long, long, long time.
Speaker 2:So in the field of criminology and within what we might talk about the principles of risk and need and responsivity, he presents with a lot of risk factors that, if he doesn't manage them, are going to get him right back into the same amount of trouble. He's got poor self-regulation skills, he's impulsive, he's got attitudes and beliefs that support child abuse, he has a history of failed relationships and doesn't know how to become close to other people. In short, his life is an absolute mess and he lacks the internal skills. Now, if you interview him, he'll say I don't wanna do it again. And he might be so ashamed of his actions that he doesn't know how to talk to you and he says I didn't do it. I didn't do it. I don't even know why I'm here. So it might be something like this.
Speaker 2:So what we need to do, and what we do in the Good Lives Model, is we say these are the risk factors. They're almost like little tiny engines that might drive a re-offense process. We need to find some way to help him manage these things when he's in the community, and that means we need to give him skills. But in order to have those skills, he also needs to have goals. And I don't know about you, dr Jo, but for me the promise of better self-regulation is not very motivating. But becoming a better man, becoming a more attractive man, becoming the man that I truly wanna be, becoming better at things, getting a job, being able to support myself, being able to at least talk to a woman, these things, these kinds of things I would be interested in if I were in Paul's shoes, and so what we do is we sort of flip the process on its head and we try to sort through what are the goals that he was trying to achieve through his offending, that he never should have used offending for, but those goals that aren't so bad.
Speaker 2:Now, if you look at Paul, you see he always wanted to have relationships. He always wanted to be able to be close to people. He probably wanted to be a good student, but couldn't be. He wanted to be able to keep himself calm at all times, but he couldn't because he was too busy looking out for abuse. He wants to feel as though he can live and survive safely in the world. But the way that he went about getting those goals hurt a lot of people. So we're trying to figure out what are the goals that he has and, by the way, that are the same goals that everybody else has and figure out how can we help him get those. And that means that the professional has to be warm and empathetic and has to really drive treatment forward and at the same time, we have to have one eye focused on the risk factors over here and one eye focused on how can we help him become his best self and have the future that he wants.
Speaker 2:This is why I say a lifestyle in which offending is unnecessary and undesirable. Now let's just say for a moment that Paul has a deep sexual interest in children. Instead of trying to change that interest, what I'm going to try to do is get him to a place where he can say I have an interest that I can never act on. I didn't ask for this interest, I don't want it. I did not choose this, but I still have it and I need to manage it. Now I will tell you, I have medical conditions that I have to manage as well. I did not ask to have high cholesterol, but it runs in my family. So I have to do things to look after my cholesterol and Paul has to look after his sexual interests, which go into some unhelpful directions. So I hope I'm making sense up to this point.
Speaker 1:Yes, definitely, definitely. And I mean I'm glad you pointed it out that the desires that you are exploring with the client are desires that we all have and sometimes what happens is that we, because we perceive them as fundamentally different from us the rest of us, you know, we don't believe that their process of change is similar to ours, you know. But what would I, what would you say are some of the factors, the processes, what helps somebody to really move away from this lifestyle?
Speaker 2:Sure, I'm going to answer that question in one second For the purpose. I never know who's watching these things. So I do want to say there is a belief that many people have in society that that problem sexual interests. Some people think, for example, that being gay is a choice, that it's a lifestyle that people develop, and I think all of the research in all of the world and all of my clients have always said none of this is anything that we chose, that I can't choose to be straight. I can't. You know, I never chose to be heterosexual, but I certainly am. I could not make a different decision about who I am inside, and so I think many of us. I do sometimes hear people say well, this person has adopted a gay lifestyle. Well, I don't know how they you know about lifestyle, about where they work or how they decorate their home or whatever, but I do know that nobody that somebody who's attracted to the same sex. That is not something that people ask for, that something that emerges. I just, I just wanted to make that that clear. That's why I say I can help people manage their behavior, but not their identity.
Speaker 2:So, in terms of so how do we work with this? I'd say it actually boils down to four or five things, and I can even count them on my fingers. The safest person who's caused harm to others, the safest person is someone who is stable with their behavior. They have stability to their behavior, they are occupied with a job or education, they have supportive people to whom they are accountable for their actions, they have plans for the future and they have everything to lose by doing it again. If I could, I'm going to break that down just a little bit. So behaviorally stable, that means with Paul, we need to help him be better at self-regulation. He wants to be stable, and part of being stable is to have a sense of inner peace, to be able to always become even in the eye of this and perhaps to even have some happiness and pleasure along the way. So just behaviorally stable and then occupied.
Speaker 2:Now there's a few things to this. One is when people are. When people are busy, they tend not to get into trouble. It's a joke that I commonly tell I stole it from somebody else, but it's look, when am I going to get into trouble? My calendar is booked halfway into next year, so it's just not an option for me. So there is a piece of that, or it could be. I'm getting my PhD and I have big dreams for the future, but that's maybe a little bit different.
Speaker 2:Now, the supportive people to whom they're accountable. What I mean by this is, in my case, I have a family to whom I'm accountable, and there was a time when I bought some music. It's a story I've told many times. I bought some music when our children were babies and I realized I'd spent money that we were supposed to spend on our electricity bill on music. So I had to go home and say I'm really sorry If it's any consolation, the music is really good, but you know, I had to be accountable.
Speaker 2:Now, there's many ways that people do this, and one of the ways in the US that I like is having really good probation officers. Sometimes a supervising agent is the first person to whom our clients are actually accountable. But the idea here is then how do we expand that into either family or friends or new peer groups, but the idea here being that we're accountable? I have a friend of mine who said David, you're a really good bass player, but you don't practice enough. What do you think? I said I know I'm really busy, okay, and then so stable, occupied, accountable, and then the plans for the future, as well as having everything to lose by doing it again.
Speaker 2:I think all of these kinds of things. So what we do in treatment, I think one of the things is we try to help them have the better life and all of this. But one of the places we really start is giving them skills. I'm often surprised at how few skills our clients have just forgotten by in daily life. And you know job skills, skills for finding an apartment or a place, you know place to live, skills for paying bills, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Oh by the way.
Speaker 2:Just one more, one more thing Stable accountable, stable occupied accountable plan Stands for S, for stable, o, for occupied, a, for accountable, p, for plan. That spells the word soap, soap, soap. So the joke is, how are you going to keep yourself clean, soap?
Speaker 1:Okay, one of the things when you were charting the journey before you mentioned that not everybody has a tragic story in the way you had described that leads them into committing sexual offences. Could you describe another case, another?
Speaker 2:perspective. Yeah, we do sometimes get these cases where we're not quite sure how it happened. But something happened somewhere. Maybe it was a neurological issue, maybe it was something, but I will call him. Let's see Frank.
Speaker 2:And so Frank was born and in early intelligence testing placed IQ at 150, a very smart man and he grew up and got a PhD. But somewhere along the line, despite an otherwise acceptable upbringing, somehow he developed a sexual interest in children, probably sometime before he reached puberty, and nobody knows. It could have been just the right combination, or the wrong combination of some media at the same time that his hormones started racing. Nobody entirely knows. But sometimes this person might carry around a secret of I'm attracted to children and the way that things will work under those cases, under those circumstances. In some cases now I'm talking in sweeping generalities, but in some cases, so Paul, he's impulsive, he doesn't know how to manage himself, he's lacking skills, and so sometimes, if he sees the right circumstances, he goes and he abuses a kid and to the outside world it looks like it came from out of the blue and people are saying how did that happen? Oh my gosh. But with Frank it might look a little bit more like he's saying I want to abuse a child and I don't know how to do it. So I'm going to develop a plan. I'm going to figure out when the opportunities present themselves and this is when they turn into the people that we are often the most frightened by where we see the clear evidence of purposefulness. How did this guy do it? He worked for months to ensure trust, worked his way into a position of trust. Around the world. We see this happening in religious institutions and police departments and other positions of trust, and I don't mean to be offensive, I'm just telling the truth. And people say how did this level of betrayal happen? Well, one way that it does happen is this is a person whose self-regulation is perfectly intact and they had a terrible secret that this was something that they were interested in and worked hard to do. I will say that kind of person tends to be more in the minority than the other kinds that are out there, but it does happen, and I wouldn't feel that I was giving a balanced overview if I didn't say that.
Speaker 2:However, most of the people that I've worked with have very often had situations in their lives where things just went desperately wrong. They have high rates of maltreatment by their parents. They have exceptionally high rates of verbal abuse, emotional abuse, emotional neglect and all of these kinds of things. I do believe what the trauma expert John Breyer said. He once said if we could get rid of child abuse today, in 15 years our prisons would be nearly empty and the diagnostic and statistical manual would be a pamphlet. I think there's really really really something to that. My message to society is I don't tolerate abuse either, but we've got to go about this in a different way because it's in our communities, very often in our families. We are never a stone's throw away more than a stone's throw away from a survivor of abuse and very often, people who have perpetrated abuse.
Speaker 1:Is it possible for somebody like Frank to change? What would it take for somebody like Frank to change their behavior?
Speaker 2:Interestingly, I think Frank is actually lower risk than Paul, because Paul is gonna need a lot of skills to be able to manage and to self-regulate. At least with Frank, we can give him some education about the harm of abuse and we can raise his consciousness about how his interest in children and his pursuit of children is coming into direct conflict with his liberties, with his capacity to live independently, and that it will also come into conflict with his relationships with others. That he may act on that interest, but over the long term he's going to have a lonely, unhappy, miserable life. So it's more about you. This is taking the guy and saying let's use your superpowers for good.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay. So thank you very much for those stories. It really does bring to light and clarified my own understanding of persons who have committed sexual violence acts. So I want to go a little bit more now into understanding what goes, what's underneath, what's underlying this approach. So there is a body of work that we call what works literature that speaks about rehabilitation and approaches to justice involved individuals. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how it speaks to and has evolved into speaking about the risk needs, responsibility, approaches, as well as the good lives model?
Speaker 2:Sure. So very, very briefly, in the beginning we did not know what we were doing, and things didn't always turn out so well. I've already spoken about that. Somewhere in the 1980s a lot of researchers, particularly in Canada, said we know the treatment does work, but we don't know how it works. And we don't know why it works, and so it was called something works. And then gradually people said okay, now we're really getting a clear idea of what works. And so they said and the top three things that work is give the most amount of services to the people who pose the highest risk High risk, high levels of services, low risk, lower levels of services.
Speaker 2:That seems simple, but when we give the exact same service to everyone, then sometimes we can actually make matters worse, and some people won't even be touched by the levels of service that we give them. So high risk means high levels of services. Then we have something called the need principle, and what that basically says is get rid of your pet theories, follow the science. There are some kinds of things that you need to work on in treatment self-regulation, relationships, reckless excitement, seeking behaviors, peer groups, all of these kinds of things, and so those are known. The technical term is criminogenic needs. These are the things that result in criminal behavior. And then the third one is called responsibility, which basically means do your treatment in a way that your client can respond to. So if I go into a treatment program and I tell them all that they're nothing but a bunch of sex offenders and it'll be a miracle if they ever can change, guess what they won't change. So it's how do we do treatment in a way that they can respond to? So, risk, need, responsibility, v3 principles.
Speaker 2:Now, unfortunately, there's been some fights in the literature because the people who adhere, who promote risk and need and responsibility, sort of talk about it in a way as though that's what you need and they therefore don't trust other models that come along, like the good lives model. And in some cases the people with a good lives model have felt a bit disrespected by this and have said, yeah, and they insult them in scholarly ways Well, your principles lack explanatory depth in the philosophical literature. That's what I've got to say. So it's sort of the academic version of this and in fact what I would say is to do good lives model with risk, needs and responsibility means give the most amount of good lives model to the people who pose the highest risk. They should get more treatment and more of it.
Speaker 2:Okay, the need principle means, if you look at the risk factors, that the risk needs responsibility people have published on. They're actually kind of the flip side of the coin from all of the good lives model goals that we've written about in our articles. So if you're really working on those goals guess what? And if you have an idea about what the big eight of risk factors are, you'll find that they're sort of two sides of the same coin. And then, finally, that one reason people love the good lives model is it is so positive and strength-based that it's easy for clients to respond to. So my answer to all of this is the good lives model is a way to do risk and need and responsibility.
Speaker 2:There are other ways to do risk and need and responsibility, and I know some people in Canada that say we had one of the best risk needs responsibility programs in the world. We studied it, we published on it it's called the IRATS model and then they decided, well, we'll try the good lives model, but they didn't like it. Now what they came away with is they said they had the good lives model is perfectly okay, but we don't like it. And part of me says but you already had one of the best treatment programs in the world and it worked with all the same things that make the good lives model effective. So it's not as though there's one that's better than the other. It's that the good lives model is a way that professionals can get themselves anchored in what's gonna work with their clients and it's a way to adhere to these principles. So I see these things as going hand in hand. But sometimes there's professional competition and jealousy. That I think is unnecessary, but it's also to be expected because it's human nature.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean it does mean that we are more critical and we dig deeper when we have these kinds of debates and discussions. So could you go a little bit more into the good lives model First of all, what is the kind of underlying theory research that undergirds this approach? And then can you take us a little bit more into what it actually is? What does it comprise of?
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay. So let me just illustrate it by through sort of a thought exercise, and it's not directed to Jew, it's really directed at every read, every viewer for this. And the first question is did you ever do something in your life that you really, really wish you didn't do? And you know it's even better if you don't speak out loud about it, because, but everybody's got something that they really, really, really wish they hadn't have done. So I'll take my electric the time that I bought this music instead of paid my electricity bill. So you know I really regretted it.
Speaker 2:But and then ask yourself, as, when you think about this, what were you really trying to accomplish? Like, for me it wasn't just about the music. I wanted to know about the music. I wanted to know, and also I knew a lot about this artist, the guy named Miles Davis, who's a famous jazz artist, okay, but I also had an excellent Miles Davis collection and I wanted to keep it. Excellence. So I was pursuing excellence and I was pursuing knowledge, and Miles Davis music from the 1960s makes me feel calm. So it's a way to be calm, okay, and it gives me a certain amount of happiness and pleasure. I just love 1960s jazz, some of the best in the world. Okay, so it wasn't just the music, it was all of these other kinds of things, and so I wanted to pursue that.
Speaker 2:Now ask yourself, when you think about that time, when you said something horrible to your partner or maybe something even worse, or you were violent, when you kicked the dog or whatever, what kinds of things really were going through your mind and what? What were you hoping to accomplish through that behavior? Because I bet what you were trying to accomplish probably had something to do with goals that we all have in common. Everybody wants to have better relationships, but having sex with children isn't a way to do it. Everybody wants to have good relationships. Everybody wants to be good at something, and we everybody wants to be competent in our relationships, in our sexual behaviors, whatever. Everybody wants to be independent, and that means everybody wants, in a while, just wants to make their own decisions and do what they want to do. But you got to be careful how you do that, or you're going to hurt somebody or get into trouble. Everybody, everybody in the world wants a sense of inner peace or happiness and pleasure. We all want to feel good in our body. We don't always get the opportunity to. But there's these kinds of goals. Now, people who want to feel good in their body very often turn to drugs or sex under the wrong circumstances. Inner peace same thing. Independence and autonomy. Let me ask how much domestic violence has happened, because somebody said, right now, I just want to be the one that makes the decisions around here.
Speaker 2:So we see, once we study these overarching states of being experiences that everybody wants to have for their own sake, we see how people can make mistakes. That's the good lives model. Ask yourself, what were those goals in your life that resulted in this bad behavior? Now, last part of the good lives model is there's some kinds of obstacles that we all run into. We lack the skills to get what we want out of life. Okay. So I, in that moment, when I bought the box set of Miles Davis, I forgot. You know, I was lacking the skills to say hold off, david, you can buy this online Once, once you have more money. Okay, but I was. I happened to be tired that day. That's how I made my mistake.
Speaker 2:So the lack of internal capacity Sometimes we don't have the opportunities. Now, I don't know about life. You know on the streets of Kingston or you know other cities where people are watching. Sometimes we don't have the opportunities and we have to adjust accordingly. Sometimes we focus on one goal to the expense of other goals. How many women ever focused on a relationship at the expense of their own independence, and how many men ever focused on their own independence at the expense of their relationships? So sometimes our focus is too narrow.
Speaker 2:And then I believe the last one is a second to last is sometimes our goals come into conflict with each other.
Speaker 2:I wanted to be independent and lay down the law in my house At the same time as I wanted to have a good relationship with my wife, but I went about it the wrong way.
Speaker 2:My goals came into conflict with each other and it ended up being a terrible mistake and I regret it a whole lot.
Speaker 2:And then the last one is really simple, which is sometimes we just use the wrong ways to go about what we want. How many people end up only knowing how to get happy or have inner peace by taking drugs or drinking alcohol and the next thing you know, you have several problems in your life. So these are what we call the obstacles to a good life plan. So there's all these goals and they because some of them are implicated in our worst behaviors, because we were trying to achieve these goals through wrong, the wrong behaviors, and sometimes it's because we were living our lives with some obstacles along the way. Now, if we go back to the case of Paul, very often these obstacles and these good life goals, what they resulted from early life experiences, early life adversity, can turn into maladaptive ways, harmful ways of getting through life, which then turn into risk factors which themselves are barriers to becoming our best selves and leading our best lives. That's the good life model.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that explanation and I truly appreciate how, as you explain it again, it's couched in this very general human development perspective. You know, and just how essentially we are all seeking to achieve the similar goals, but some of us are able to do it through legitimate means and others take illegitimate means or use illegitimate means to achieve the same goals. So as a social worker, correctional officer, just persons working within the correctional system, as well as community corrections. How can we take now you spoke a lot about the trauma, like childhood trauma how can we use a kind of trauma informed practice care to serve persons who have been involved in sexual violence? And I should ask what you have described here, does that also include violence against women, violence against men, you know, in terms of adults?
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely so. Violence results, I think, from all of these same things, and there's also the added element of social learning. We live in societies that tolerate a lot of violence, and that's the unfortunate reality. Yeah, you just asked a question and I lost track of it. Yes, no problem so.
Speaker 1:I was asking for social workers, for, you know, persons working within the correctional institutions, as well as community corrections. How can we take a kind of trauma informed approach to serving persons who have committed acts of sexual violence?
Speaker 2:Okay. So, yeah, let's go. So I'm the professional. I'm looking at my client and I'm saying what the heck happened here, okay, and I'm saying, whoa, this guy's impulsive. Whoa, he's got a foul, dirty mouth. Whoa, he's got attitudes that seem to support violence and other kinds of things. Whoa, this client is really something else. Now I stop and I say what is he trying to accomplish with all of these kinds of things? What goals is he getting? Well, being rude to me is an act of independence. Now, I can't let him to be rude to me, but I can see this is how he pursues independence. Okay, whoa, he's testing me to see if he can trust me, because trust is huge for all of our clients. So he's being independent. He's testing me to see if he can trust me. He's testing me to see if he can have a relationship with me. How am I going to respond to him? He's behaving like this because he wants to know more about me. Am I going to become a bad person? But I've got my checklist of what goals is he trying to accomplish through this behavior, and I am zipping it so that I don't insult him. I just want to understand. Then, once I see what goals are important to him.
Speaker 2:I'm going to ask myself and what life experiences have interfered with his ability to get these goals? What life experiences have acted as obstacles to his developing the skills that the rest of us all seem to have? At the time I was asking my wife to marry me, this guy might have been saying not having those same skills, and might have been saying sit down and shut up. I'm in charge around here, very, very different lives. How is my life different from his? How has adversity ended up with his inability to get these kinds of goals? Then what I want to do is say where is the ambivalence? Where does he feel two ways about these things? I might try to reflect this back, as if I will. Actually I'll even show you. Here's the client. I'm going to reflect back my understanding of him.
Speaker 2:I'm going to say, on the one hand, you want to be free. That's why you're talking back to me. You're speaking truth to power. You want to be independent and, on the other hand, you may elect all the skills for getting what you truly want. On the one hand, you want to be free and, on the other hand, you might not have always had the opportunities to develop the skills you need to stay free in the community. Pardon me, you see what I mean. On the one hand, you want to have the best relationships that you can have and yet, on the other hand, all your relationships in the past ended up in disaster. On the one hand, you want to build a better life. On the other hand, you wonder if you can trust me, given this track record of relationships.
Speaker 2:So what I do is I walk into a room and I think, tick, tick, tick, tick. Which of these risk factors am I seeing? Which of these good lives model goals are they attached to? What role has trauma played in this person's life with each of those goals? And therefore, what do I have to offer him? And along the way, I want to reflect back that ambivalence that I'm seeing. Where does he feel two ways about his life? And then I want to show it to him, and I do that for a couple of reasons. His number one I want to demonstrate I'm trying to understand. But number two, I guess I just want to also demonstrate that maybe things are, there's more in it for him to change than he realized. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, it does. It does give a very an understanding of how to engage with the clients, because you're hearing the good lives model, but it's like how can this actually work? I mean, when we hear things that are new and work with persons who we don't immediately think it would work with, it's kind of like you're seeking to overcome that barrier of all of the questions in your mind that will prevent you from truly agreeing or understanding or believing that this is a good approach to take. Yes, yes, okay, thank you. So how can we encourage persons who have not? So perhaps the better question is all the persons that you've worked with or who use the good lives model or benefiting from the good lives model, are they already on a desistence journey? Have they already decided to leave this life of crime, or does the good lives model help to be a trigger that starts or sparks this journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, the good lives model. I think what happens is that people aren't sure that they're even able to change and that the good lives model is hopeful and says, okay, it not only suggests the change is possible, but it has some beginning steps on how I can make some changes. And that's probably the key part to all of this. And you know, if I could, I just want to work in. I don't know how. I haven't said his name yet, but I just want to say that Tony Ward in New Zealand was really the person that started all of this and I just want to give him credit from New Zealand. He's originally from Australia. It got some traction down under in Australia and New Zealand and then in Canada and the UK and the US. So, although I'm an American, the good lives model is truly international and has international research to back it up. I always feel that's important because I know America exports a lot of stuff around the world. This is an international collaboration.
Speaker 2:So I just wanted to say that and I mentioned it because Tony is very interested and a strong proponent of desistence theory and so, yes, I think the pathway to desistence already exists in our clients and all of what they need to accomplish. Desistence, to some degree, already exists within them. It needs to be strengthened, it needs to be elicited and brought out. It needs to be talked about. New skills need to be demonstrated, but I think the good lives model is a way of inviting desistence and offering a pathway forward to the client that's sitting there saying this is my third time locked up. I don't know if I'll ever be able to change. Maybe this is just who I am. Those are the words I never want to hear clients say so instead. This is why I emphasize that let's reflect back their experiences and figure out how they can develop a better life.
Speaker 1:So, after you've developed like a good lives plan, what would you say are some of the next steps that happen after that?
Speaker 2:Oh. So I like to really examine each of these goals and try to figure out how have you tried to meet this goal. These goals in the past go one goal at a time. How are you trying to meet these goals in the present? How can you meet these goals in the future? What kinds of skills do you need? What kinds of obstacles do you need to overcome? What sorts of challenges do you anticipate? How will you know when things are getting better? How will you know when things are getting worse? How will others know that things are getting better? How will others know that things are getting worse? And how can you and others celebrate progress as it happens? So that's sort of a nutshell version.
Speaker 1:So during, for example, if they're incarcerated at the time they've completed the plan. You've worked through some of these questions with them. How do they begin to enact on some of the parts of the plan?
Speaker 2:How do they enact it and act on it? Yes, and how do we?
Speaker 1:support it as social workers, as officers that are working with them.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm a big behavior in rehearsal. Let's spend some time in our sessions, maybe even role playing some kinds of things. Let's role play how do you deal with an angry partner, and not just counting to 10, but what do you say? Let's do a little action, a little bit of action here. Then let's send them off with some assignments that they can come back and talk about. How have you put some of these skills into practice in your daily life? Let's look at them. What worked, what didn't work so well, what are some things that you want to make sure that you keep doing? What are some things that seemed like a good idea at the time but probably didn't work out so well? And let's talk about how we can change those things so that, if it's working, keep doing it, if it's not working, figure something else out, and let's basically practice building some muscle at the skills that do work. So I think it's sort of one day at a time, one step in treatment at a time. As you may know, I actually wrote some workbooks. You don't have to use them, but I like them myself. I think I might have sent you one of them. And so there are exercises and things that you can do.
Speaker 2:Here at Safer Society. We also have a whole webpage devoted to the Good Lives Model for people that want to learn more about it. I'm not here to sell things.
Speaker 1:The website- no, actually I was going to ask you about some of the resources that people could access and, for example, I know Safer Society has webinars, but whole persons could have further training in this area because it is so useful.
Speaker 2:I can send you a link separately, but we have a whole page that's got deep dive trainings for five hours or more, and we've also got the free webinars. We have some books that you can buy I know shipping internationally could be a little bit expensive. We have some things that can get you started that you can buy for not very much money, that are available as a PDF file that you can download immediately. So we're a nonprofit foundation. Yes, we sell things because we need to eat and on the other hand, we try to do free public services as much as possible too. So we can't afford to be Santa Claus, but we do our best to come close. So maybe it's things like that. But we have workbooks, we've got professional books and certainly there's a lot out there in the literature as well, in the scientific journals, but there's free webinars that you can watch, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Thank you so, so much, mr Prescott.
Speaker 1:I mean extremely enlightening, really unpacking areas that I also wasn't sure about and really wanted some additional understanding of, and what I'm recognizing again is just how important it is to what's the word here.
Speaker 1:But justice, justice is important and convicting people of the behaviors that are incorrect, but not stopping there, continuing to serve them, to help them, to improve them, their own lives, their well-being, improve their quality of life, improve their understanding of what life should be like and the ways in which they may need to amend their behaviors so that they can function well in society, being indistinguishable from the rest of society. I also recognize how important the social aspect of life is in treating and in serving clients in this space. You know just the importance for them, yes, of learning and understanding how to function, but just how building relationships and building new relationships, healthy relationships, can help to improve not just their own standard of life but their understanding of how life works and how person should be treated in healthy ways. But as we close, I want to ask you what is one thing you would want the viewer to remember coming out of this conversation?
Speaker 2:Oh sure that on its own, punishment almost never works. We have proof and that people can change, that treatment can help them change. And treatment is even more effective when it's taking place in collaboration with other people to whom the client is accountable. And then the last point would simply be that we've now learned so much about early life experiences and adversity that some of our past models just aren't enough. We need to understand the role of good and bad experiences in terms of shaping our responses to sexual violence and non-sexual violence.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Thank you so much, mr Prescott. Thank you, my Safer Tomorrow viewer listener, for tuning in with us. I trust that you really learned a lot in this session, and one of the things that are important in this session in Safer Tomorrow is to challenge some of the mindsets that we have, because it is in challenging and changing some of our mindsets and I say ours, because it's not you alone, it's our mindset and we will also change our behaviors to be more accepting and to work with persons who have committed offenses, and so I want to encourage you to comment on this particular episode, to subscribe, to like to share, and I really want to hear from you, particularly in terms of some of the lessons you would have learned, insights you would have gained from this session. So, thank you so much and remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel that's Safer Tomorrow podcast to our Instagram and Facebook pages that's Safer Tomorrow pod, both at Instagram and Facebook. Thank you so much again for joining us. Have a good day, bye.
