Thanks very much everyone for coming out um it's a weird experience sort of doing an inaugural when I first sort of heard about um doing it I sort of had two thoughts one was bit of imposter syndrome but I didn't feel sort of deserving really or or in a position to be able to give an in augural lecture um and the sort of second thing that sort of went uh through my mind was I'm only partway done uh I feel quite young to be given sort of an in AAL lecture then I sort of thought to myself well I've got 25 years left of doing work and that was sort of a depressing thought it's like oh my God another 25 years.
But it's really good to be able to sort of be here and part of what today is about is for me reflecting because if one of the things that actually doing in oral sort of makes you do is to reflect uh reflect on projects that I've been involved with people that I've worked with uh and the many sort of sort of cherished experiences that have happened so far and hopefully I'll be able to give a little bit of an insight into those and some of the projects that that I've I've been involved with so that's a little bit of the focus of of what I'm going to be talking about.
I'll do a little bit of an introduction there's some mushy family stuff for a couple of slides to bear with me through that there's uh the main sort of Hub really is about rehabilitation of people with convictions much of that is going to be about the work I've done on interventions intervention services I'm going to talk a little bit about my work in prisons particularly around prison climate and I'll talk a little bit about what that is and then the prevention of sexual abuse is some of the later work that I've been involved with but actually that's the theme really that sort of galvanizes sort of everything together really which is um the prevention of sexual abuse and then some sort of personal Reflections you know you come to an end of an orle there's got to be some sort of philosophical musings and so I'll do that as well at the end.
So when you sort of doing this you sort of see others you try and get some inspiration I think part of what that process is about is about thinking about actually where you've come from and where you're going um as as part of this process you know and for me as an individual I think of myself as a as a personal construct psychologist a narrative psychologist I'm interested in people's stories and where people come from and how people navigate different turning points in their lives and so that got me thinking about where I where I came from so this is uh early Nick this is from 0 to 12 is where I grew up I grew up in intake Doncaster um Doncaster is a small sort of mining town and intake is how would you describe it mom pretty awful really it's say it's a sort of council statey sort of area we lived in the nice part you can't really tell it about what they've done to the Brit wall there um but what he did do was we we lived in AR road which is actually quite funny because a lot of my family are from um oh look um of of as an Irish contingent uh to it and um my grandma used to always say that we were related to to Barry mcguan so I was sort of hoping that maybe tonight he'd have turned up and we could have had this beautiful reunion but I'm pretty sure that everyone in Derry makes this claim that they're related to Barry mcgwier this world famous boxer but my early life was all about football and actually you can sort of see in the background of the field and I spent literally all of my time playing in that field I'd get my dad's old trophies and we'd scribble out his name on them and stuff and we'd put like thingy cup and and the other part is we live very close to Doncaster Royal infirmary and Doncaster Roy infirm is the big hospital in Doncaster what was really cool about that was it was like an Adventure Playground for kids you would just sort of go well you'd be chased by security guards and stuff like that but it was fantastic for as as young kids sort of in in in the area so that was by sort of sort of early experiences. So my parents got divorced at when I was 12 I'm over it now just about you know we just ask some M's here I'm just joking uh I got over it last year um football play continues to play a massive part of my life this is me with my youngest son with just getting an award because he I say we I didn't do anything I just coach but they as a team got um got an award for coming second in in the league it's a cute picture although his hair it's a complete mess there sunshine and this you can't really see this is my eldest son but this this this made me laugh when I watched it simply because Dylan he plays Academy level football if you if he play when he plays for us on a Sunday he'll come off he'll come off for five minutes at the most but he's always like that Mis able but I've done a little action shot to make up for it d as well um and family is so very very important to me it's the crooks of of who I am it's the sort of Bedrock of who I am it's the foundation everything I I I am is is is about my my family really uh so I've got my stepdad there um and my mom and our dog Reggie he's not really a dog he's sort of a human straps in fur um and that's my dad and Karen who AR even here only rang me an hour in a bit ago but anyway so my dad's not here unfortunately but we can at least tell him that he did get a mentioned because he's always a bit sensitive about that um my dad he's he's actually a real inspiration for me on on a number of levels my dad but the the thing that I've really got from him was this a work ethic of working hard and you think you got that from that area that we sort of grew up in really which was about like hard work beats talent and actually it's a lot of it is about hard work and you needed to work hard in those sort of areas uh and this is the bit that I was worried I'd get a little bit emotional about because um that's my mom and my mom is boy and pretty much everything that's good about me is is is from Babble um and this is my family I've got a wonderfully supportive wife Emily who's been through everything with me um loving and supporting the moral compass of a family and my two wonderful ads so I'm really really blessed to have a family and I think sort of understanding me is about understanding just how much that's shaped my career really because actually when Dylan was born I'd start just started working prison so all of his life all of his trajectory is sort of happened as my sons have got older and the family's got older so it's a really interesting thing so that's some of the mushy stuff but there is one last slide of of mushy stuff.
I really want to pay uh Ham's respect to Dr Ruth man Dr Ruth man was a a real mentor of mine she was a Pion the in the area of forensic psychology she sadly died a few years ago um her Legacy and work lives on the way she treated people the way she always had time for the Next Generation the effort that she put in with people and she gave me an opportunity when I had absolutely no right to have such an opportunity she was just phenomenally sort of pioneering the other person some of you might recognize in here is Professor Lin Saunders OB but a picture from the internet there Lynn Lynn has has a saying um Lynn's been a massive influence in my career a massive influence on me she has a saying the truth will do her integ she's the most honest has the most Integrity of any person I've ever met I'm phenomenally blessed to call her both a colleague uh and a friend so I hoping your vote of thanks is reflective of that as well when you sort of say some words after this and I also have to sort of pay respect to sort of blind the white I pay respect she's still alive um uh honest she gave me my first start she's always been really supportive in my career we've done a lot of work um together um so I wanted to sort of pay respectable in so these sort of three sort of Powerhouse women have really shaped and defined my career and again you sort of get thinking about the projects that you've been a part of and as you start thinking about it I started mapping out the different projects that I've been involved with and and actually over the last 15 years I've been involved in so many really interesting really diverse projects I've been really blessed to work with wonderful people across a wonderful spectrum of projects you know from the prevention of of sexual abuse crime assistance prison climate understanding sexual interest in children the impact that that has on therapy uh even done some work on intimate partner violence um on reintegration of of people so I've been able to do a lot of really really applied work in in the last sort of 15 years and I'm I'm phenomenally grateful um for that I don't have time obviously to talk about all of them so what I'm going to do is I'm going to distill it down into sort of three main projects.
The main one of the main sort of projects that um firstly defined and camil mentioned it in the the introduction was understanding Denial in people with sexual convictions so this was the Bedrock really of my PhD and was my sort of first real um work that had sort of impact really on on the field and so this is just a selection of some of the work that I did which was about reconstruing Den at the time when I was doing this in therapy and in programs if you denied your offense you were refused treatment typically people who denied serves longer prison sentences had outstanding treatment needs and were pretty much just abandoned by the criminal justice system so much so that this was a this was a genuine assessment you would go up to a person and say it says down here you're in denial is that right they would say yes then you would say well we'll see you in six months time and then you go back in six months time he still says here that you're in denial it's still in denial yes I am okay we'll see you in six months time that for me was just not a constructive way of going about working with IND individuals I mean first off saying it seems like you're in denial really doesn't seem like a fruitful way of starting a a therapeutic relationship so but this was at the time so much of the work and research was about sort of understanding actually just understanding why we deny understanding how we use Deni in an everyday sense.
This is one of my sort of um favorite if the favorite is the right sort of word um book chapters The Importance of Being Earnest rethinking the problem of categorical denial what I really liked about that is this was a a piece of work that Ruth and I spent years and years and years going back and forth on it was a slowburn project and unfortunately we didn't get it published before she passed away which was quite sad so again thinking about so how it D was particularly looked at by the sort of Criminal Justice System and when you got into prison it people would say Well they're not motivated for treatment it's poor progress It's pathological it needs to be broken down first and then intuitively felt risky so there was this thing about oh well I don't know it just feels risky so this sort of intuition about it and so there were refused treatment and this was as much as 35 to 40% of of those who were eligible for treatment um at the time so much of my work was about thinking okay well let's think about people who had been through the process people who were denied what kind of things were they saying and they were saying things like well it gives you a lifetime tag you know if you're a sex offender you're a lifetime it's a lifetime tag it's it's like being branded what's the worst thing you can say to someone I'm Hitler it'd have been easy if I'd murdered her less stigma the whole character of him portraying is shattered so by that it's like the whole identity who you are ceases to be the moment that you say I'm a sex offender right the your whole identity who you are completely goes and if you sort of think about it even from a cost benefits analysis what is the benefit of admitting at that point you could lose family you could lose friends you could lose standing you could lose everything and the main reason I died is because I thought no one was would speak to me ever again so this sort of thing of like being isolated and lonely and ostracized so when you sort of think about it actually they're pretty good reasons to deny anything really and if we're going to work with people in settings adversarial settings like the criminal justice system perhaps we're best off doing it by not directly going at saying well you should be admitting another sort of still in picture here um I kept this in because this picture has been with me around the world uh I've done training and presentations of denial and this picture makes it through every single presentation that I do uh on denial and it's a nice way obviously of keeping your your little boy close to you even though he's a older than that now.
Anyone with experience of children will know that from a young age they learn how to deceive lie deny right so a toddler comes in and they've got chocolate around their face and you say you've been eating chocolate and they'll say no daddy no even though chocolate's around their face and so why are they saying why are they denying it is it because you know I'm such a terrible Dad that I'm going to you know beat them I'm going to do horrible things to them no really the consequences are going to be quite minor we might even sort of laugh about it but you learn at a young age that actually if I deny if I pitch it in a slightly different way then perhaps I get out of trouble or perhaps I don't have to explain myself so we learn from a very young age to lie and deceive from an evolutionary position.
We've actually evolved to be the dominant species because of this you know if you think about how you when you meet someone maybe you go on a first date maybe you're meeting a group of people for the first time it's like a form of social poker no one's ever completely honest they're always portraying a certain Identity or a certain way of of being no one's sort of fully themselves and that's part of these sort of tactics that we use all the time it's just ubiquitous of Being Human so we and also as well the other sort of aspect to this is that biologically end to end we are programmed we have evolved to belong so biologically end to end we've evolved to to belong and when we think about this in other terms you look it from a health sort of perspective the effects of loneliness um a comparable to major risk factors like early mortality for smoking or obesity. So being lonely literally kills us so that again could make us think about sort of denial actually make us think okay I can understand why someone might be denying the worst part if I was to sort of say to you all now want you to think about the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to you the most thing that you're ashamed of let it sink in let it Mash around a little bit and then I said you know hands up who wants to talk about it it's going to no one who's going to be really rushing to sort of put their hands up because we don't want to so maybe one of the ways that we can work with this is thinking about actually well what's what other things can we work with what do we what can we focus on and if actually if you looked at the literature you would find that actually intuitive beliefs though these times have been talked about as correctional quackery the things that we sort of think oh these must have an effect it's a no-brainer never work out in the way that you think they're going to work out so it's anecdotal evidence really doesn't Stack Up and what you actually find in the really high-profile big Metro analyses is that denial doesn't predict recidivism and that actually neither denial or be or excuse making is criminogenic and actually trying to get people to accept more responsibility can actually work the other way like excuse making can make people at more of a risk so things don't work the way so you know in tongue in cheek we could say instead of spending all this resource and energy trying to get people out of the now we should be trying to get them in the a because actually that's more protective and that's the whole idea of this idea of making sense.
So actually when we looked at that and we looked at people's lives if we took a lives approach rather than a criminogenic approach what did we find these are if you work in um correction settings if you working prison in probation you'll be really familiar with what are the most empirically supported risk factors what are the risk factors that when but stack up with evidence so we have the central eight the central eight are the Andrews and bonter four of which are antisociality stuff to do with antisociality then we've got family and intimate relationships employment use of lure time and substant dispute and then you look at what's empirically related to people with sexual convictions offense supportive attitude lifestyle impulsiveness poor problem solving lack of emotionally intimate adult relationships negative social influences again it's stuff to do with sort of self-regulation social skills again it's to do with relationships all of these can be addressed I all of these can be addressed without someone having to disclose without them having to say yes I am this individual yes I've done this offense this is me you can exam exam in people's relationships and this was the thing about people with denial we we did this in in the work we just asked them about all kinds of stuff relationship problems hostile thinking poor problem solving lack of emotionally Intimate Relationships it was all there there was all this stuff there so you could do really informed risk assessment and really informed clinical work without them having to admit and this was really the success of this work so the success of this work was that because of this the um the newer iteration of programs no longer made denial a um a mechanism for you're not allowed on treatment and also not only that but we moved away from disclosure focused so it wasn't about anymore about people admitting and talking about their offenses talking about their offenses instead it moved to lives it moved to actually what do people want out of their lives what does that look like for people how can we help people with the self-regulation problems how what does that look like for someone and so some of the recommendations was from this was about investing in relationships building trust and and that really relationships matter.
That phrase is going to get repeated on a few occasions honestly and actually what we should do is really think about Deni as a responsibility factor that actually we just need to be we need to respond better to it and this idea of moving away from this is focus on risk and instead focusing on on lives and better outcomes on what the people want out of life and how can people be successful in life so that was the first sort of main project.
The second sort of main project that I want to talk about is um about prison climate again I don't know why I sort of decided to sort of put like loads of research look at all the research I've done on this but hey I'll put it in there so when I first started doing this we there's so much work out there in terms of offender behavior programs what risk factors are important what's important for people as they transition from prison to community what are the most important risk factors so we time and time again in the literature we find that in prison settings we don't find an effect for treatment that means that treatment doesn't have an effect in prison it's one of the few truisms that we can sort of say in the criminological literature there isn't a great deal of evidence for it and one of the reasons for that is because the you've got to sort of ask the question are prisons the right sort of environment to be doing Correctional therapy this was the whole idea around this work which is um people's experience of imprisonment and the impact that that has on on therapy this looks really complicated all all you have to know is that in red in all the different studies is the um is the effect size for recidivism so does it have an impact and basically just to say if you reading the graph you rarely find an effect for prison in any of the liter that you that you find and yet we still put loads and loads of money in programs in prison so much of the focus of this line of work was really thinking about okay we've got to get the wider prison climate right we've got to get the setting right the context right that's the important thing if we're to have successful programs and so I was part of research that really looked at the impact of of prison climate and we looked if you look at it and look through the literature what you find is that it's related to attitudes towards offending dropping out of treatment programs which is a really big no no because that's then elevates risk mental health issues adjustment during um prison whether or not people have an empathetic response is related to prison climate treatment motivation is associated with that whether people feel safe is associated with prison climate but people are ready for treatment and readiness for treatment is a barometer whether people are going to be successful in treatment this is all related to prison climate when we looked at this we did this in um four different prisons we looked at prisoners and staff's perspective Ives of um how they experience particular prisons loads of measures that sort of looked at this so this is looking at at prisoners we looked at different measures such as prisoner relationships prisoner staff relationships attitudes Readiness for treatment and change beliefs that they can change so a bit of a locust of control thing experience safety and the thing that was the biggest predictor of a really good climate was Prisoner and staff relationships now anyone that sort of works in the environment is probably thinking this is belongs to the Journal of the things my mother could have told me prison and staff relationships are really important for the feel of a prison but programs have been really slow on the uptake in terms of utilizing prison officers much more effectively in The Wider context outside of programs.
This is a path analysis it looks way more complicated um than it actually is all you need to know is that the thicker the line the stronger the positive impact um and the really important thing about this so the this is about what predicts readiness for treatment. Readiness for treatment is I I say a really good marker for whether people are successful in terms of that of their treatment and what this shows is hold and support which is Prisoner and staff relationships is totally mediated by rehabilitative climate and then onto sort of Readiness of treatment so we've got to get the climate right to get the relationships right to get the Readiness for treatment right and hopefully this is this is a paper that even I know she's she's there even I uh have put together and hopefully will be published soon when you ask people about the environments particularly these environments that was that were seen as much more positive we had guys saying things like what made them positive it was things like um it was a prison officer on my wing and to have that it was like wow it was amazing because she said you know what I respect you more and having that feedback I can't put a price on it when I came to my wing and I sat and then I sat down and one one of the tables just me on my own and the officer sat next to me and said how you doing everything all right I was just BL away because you don't get that in these other prisons like no they treat you like being treated like a human this was just part of like you know what it meant for good prison and staff relationships what makes them positive the honesty the honesty that comes from doing the courses for being open about what we're doing so actually in prisons that had a good climate where they had good relationships when you sort of talk to people about them what were they well these weren't sort of like relationships that was like this isn't mind blowing stuff this was thing being treated like being treated like a human this is really important whether people are feel adjusted this is important for when people do programs the Therapeutic Alliance is is is is really um important in this as well and a recognition as well where people go through programs that change is hard any meaningful change in your life is hard yeah and we can all sort of think about that and we can all think of times like how easy should it be to lose weight yeah move a little bit more eat a little bit less but how often do we struggle with that you know how often do we put barriers in the way what about others sort of changing your life you know even sort of just eating a little bit more healthily or just making small changes or small gains in your life change is bloody hard to do so people are trying to make Quantum shifts in how they think perceive how they're working with things how they you know there's a viol encoun it on a wing how they're taking a step back and reconstruing it and rethinking it in the moment these are massive things so change is hard so treating people like humans is a fundamentally compassionate response promotes feeling valued if we can get that and the the sort of treatment angle together and these work in tandem then we can make much more meaningful relationships and reciprocity is key in this as well so reciprocity is one of my sort of favorite words within criminal justice because it's about shared problem solving shared sort of experiences there used to be this this thing where if you were working with someone you weren't allowed to tell them anything about yourself like you no background knowledge no nothing like you were a robot um but then you're asking people to make these massive disclosures about the most personal things of their life and actually and this actually came up because I was looking at at Luke in some of the work that we just been doing on one of the cognitive skills programs is that actually sharing with facilitators problems sharing working through problems so that reciprocal nature is really really important and again it's a compassionate sort of response and actually what we find is giving people trusted roles so prisoner prison to prisoner to prisoner that element of reciprocity where they're helping each other out they've got a stake in the environment and a stake with each other is really really important as well for personal change because it's and this is part of the problem with the old programs like it's not enough to talk about change you have to do change right change is out there in people's behaviors in what people are doing right it doesn't happen by accident you can see it yeah if you're going to the gym War you can see you're going to the to the gym more if people are managing relationships different you can see that and relationships matter like tenfold in the criminal justice system um what I would say about this is that um I'm a psychologist now in in a criminology Department wherever you go in the criminal justice system and and actually any Walk of Life right relationships matter in Psychology we're brilliant at coming up with three letter therapies CBT DBT CFT SLT we've got the ABC model any you think of a way of working with people we can come up with three letters for it no problem at all but the one thing that really um is the most successful when you look at like what what is actually about successful outcome of something the biggest accounts of the variance the thing that really matters is the Therapeutic Alliance it's the nature and quality of relationships the same with denial same with the sort of programs same with the sort of prison work it's all about relationships and that's actually very true of the work that I do like it's all about relationships with with other people. The last little bit that I'm going to talk about is um about preventing sexual abuse I'm going to talk about some of the projects and a little bit about the the safer living um foundation and then I'll I'll draw it um to a close so before this I just as a little bit of context and overview generally speaking when we work with individuals we work with what's called tertiary prevention this basically means that we work with individuals who are already known to the criminal justice system so these are individuals they've been through the criminal justice system they've been sentenced um they've been sent to prison and now the the and they've already created victims yeah that's tary prevention we're dealing with them once Something's Happened secondary prevention or sometimes primary prevention depends on your sort of definition but secondary prevention is about trying to intervene with individuals before an offense has actually taken place so is there a way instead of creating victims is there something we could have done with this individual before they offended is there something that we can we intervene with individuals before they actually offend and this is the crooks really of what we're sort of talking about so what can we do in the community to help people with a sexual interest in children who may be really bothered by that worried that they're going to offend and everyone before they offend is a person worried that they're going to offend until the day it happens and then they're an offender but there's a process before that where people are struggling with it where people are trying to seek help so how do we get that into the to the mainstream one of the things that I think he's actually quite interesting to think about is okay so if we're working with people um with a sexual interest in children what are we pitching at here what are we what are we aiming at um how many people does that equate to well the prevalence statistics that look at this suggest it's between 1 and 5% of of men have an in interest in children have a sexual interest in children um these statistics are somewhat debatable michaelo for example you know will often say that this sort of 1 to 5% is is a bit tenuous but we think it's a it's around there when we look at it in terms of nationally representative studies we find that 4.1% of males report sexual fantasies having pre-present children with 5.5 reporting pedophilic interest in a recent sort of met analysis that's much higher the variance actually is between two and 24% that's that's so no longer we talk about atypical sexual interest anymore right you can't call 24% sort of like this is a small number of people this is a this is a large sample of individuals and if you look at some degree of sexual interest in children so you include things like propensity to offend if I could get away with it would you offend those sorts of things then it's bit as high as sort of 23% in samples so this is a large number of people that may have sexual interest in children it's really important to stress at this point that sexual interest in children is neither sufficient nor necessary condition for child sexual abuse not everyone who commits offenses against children in fact the vast majority of people who commit offenses against children do not necessarily have a sexual interest in children but what we do know is that the presence of it can Elevate people's risk so we have to really understand it we've got to think about what does that look like in the community what does that look like for a particular service user and how could we intervene how how can we intervene we first of all have to understand it and it's important because it's deviant what what used to be called deviant sexual interest or atypical sexual interest is one of the few empirically supported risk factors for sexual offense recidivism so it's important for whether or not people are re reconvicted and in the dimensional model of sexual deviance from Carl Hansen there's three dimensions to it so there's the atypical sexual interest itself which is the preference over deviant or non- deviant sexual behavior I would say atypical I'm just using the language of what was used in the model at the time sexual self-regulation someone's ability to manage it so people might have thoughts I mean people can have thoughts about absolutely anything there's um there's nothing wrong with there's nothing wrong with thoughts it's the the actions that are the that are the issue so people's and some people aren't distressed by it so people how they can manage it the feelings that come with that and people consistent with how they manage it and then the intensity of sexuality some people by experiencing that intensely others it may be overwhelming like sexual preoccupation for example and these things are then related to to offending so again we have to understand the client group so I've nicked this slide from a colleague of ours Kenza Kenza hwen we've just published or about to publish a it's just coming out a new study on the treatment needs of um people with a sexual interest in children to really understand okay again we need to understand the client group to be able to pitch successful intervention so what does it look like what does our typical sort of service user look like well I need help with uh coping with life or or of loneliness and we've already talked about social isolation being a sort of risk factor and also a risk factor for life as well there's a stigma that people feel you know no one hating me more than myself even people who don't offend still have high degrees of stigma just experiencing it is enough to be high highly stigmatized this is you know and they haven't done anything wrong that at this point you know they're experiencing maybe a sexual interest but they haven't done it they haven't acted on it but they still feel high degrees of Shame and stigma then there's this urge that people have to Surf then there's this sort of mental health aspects which is of sort of comorbid really with a sexual interest in in children need help dealing with these problems and help dealing with social emotional isolation and then the shame and then the next part of this so is we understanding that then we wanted to understand what does it look like for people who have been convicted so what about people who have offended against children who have gone through therapy what about understanding their trajectory so we can apply some of this into sort of our into our lives into our lives into our into our interventions into thinking about this sort of client group and this is a study that we did in terms of making sense of pedophile sexual interest in in children one of the things that you know when you asked a guy you know what is it you want from life this is what they said an appropriate mutually rewarding intimate relationship with a consenting adult that involves sex once a week honest and my thought was sign me up like who doesn't want that like that's that's what we all want it's say it's not something like wow that's really alien from some sort of other dimension or there's something there that isn't quite right that was like yeah yeah I can get on board with that I sort of understand where you're coming from with with that so what they wanted and what people want out of life we're human beings right we're made of the same stuff so it's unsurprising to me that actually when you ask people about it that actually they're saying that's pretty much the same thing that kind of everyone wants really so it was about well how do we work with people so that we can help manage the sexual interest and help people build the skills so that they can have lives that look like this and so that we don't create victims and that's the important thing here that we're trying to intervene and work with people before victims have been created one of the ways we're trying to do this at the minute is through a European project that I'm a part of Camille mentioned it in in the introduction as part of this program I'm responsible for coming up with training and risk packages across Europe for people that work with individuals with a sexual interest in children and what we don't have and particularly Frontline professionals don't have and I'm thinking you know Social Services uh and and related professionals don't really have Universal tools across Europe This is to help them with one interacting with the client group two having the knowledge base so they can signpost people to service and three to be able to make appropriate evidence-based risk decisions so this is part of what we've called uh with colleagues I've done this with in with thej in Switzerland we've come up with what's known as the risk and dis desistance hexagon hexagon because we focus on three risk domains and uh six um protective domains and it also sounds pretty cool the last thing I want to talk about um for the next I about five minutes or so um is the safer living Foundation the safe living Foundation is an organization really close uh to my heart um we've been in business as an organization now for 10 years as a charity we've formed as a charity in 2014 it's an organization that um myself um and Lyn Saunders who's the chair of of of the trustees and and very much the sort of pioneer behind it at the time colleagues from NTU and and prison and the probation service um and Lynn's really good at sort of telling the origin story of it but essentially it was being really dissatisfied with the lack of support that our that men had as they transitioned from prison into the community having no support whatsoever just sort of dropping off the face of the cliff and actually what can we do to help facilitate that support what support can be put in place because again that's the risk factors the risk factors for people are in that sort of those vulnerable times those transitional times as people are going from one thing to the next these are really important um markers and if we intervene there we can stop Victor we're doing this to sort of protect the public and keep communities safe as well as helping our men reintegrate back into the community over the last 10 years we've had a number of of projects we've had circles of support and accountability which is where you have um a core member which is a guy that's um been a highrisk guy generally speaking who's been released from prison um and is then with a trained set of volunteers te and we help them readjust and reintegrate back into Community we've started that in prison before we started that at hmp Waton at the time it was the only um um was only in Europe I want to say the world but was Europe a better sort of thing world yeah I thought so so we were the only ones in the world running it at the time prison based Circles of support and then we did Community Based we've had young people's projects I'm going to talk a little bit about our prevention project uh and the safer Living Center used to be called the the Corbit Center I want to talk a little bit about the safer Living Center partly because there could be students here and perhaps you're involved want to get involved with uh work in the criminal justice system or perhaps you want to work with um individuals because you're want your career path to go that way the safer living Foundation we we are always looking for volunteers we're always looking for people to sort of um give their time to help Ben sort of reintegrate in our Nottingham City Center we're also looking at at doing stuff in Darby as well we offer practical skills um practical support cookery classes it computer classes Financial advice religious services and there's a big part of this which is active citizenship approach which is okay guys what do you want what do you want this this this Center to look like what kind of things do you want and that's given a whole new stream of things from debate clubs mindfulness more sort of cookery stuff we've had had students before you know come in and do sort of like you know cooking on a budget that sort of thing so it's become a very um so it's really grown like camil said we had we've had over 300 referrals we've had over 50 active service users that use it um there's my dad by the way he he got a mention earlier on youve literally come in for the last two minutes but it's it's good to have you here Dad you were missed everyone was talking where is he anyway um helping preper work helping people as they sort of helping people whatever they sort of really need really to sort of reintegrate to keep them safe in the community um and to help them sort of reintegrate um and so they don't reoffend and this is part of the sort of stuff that we do we've got Pets As therapy and cooking sounds a really it sounds in some respects you could start think oh cooking that sounds lame but what we've found is that this is one of the most profound things that our men do right so often most of them can't cook or have literally no Independent Living skills and have been living on sort of digestive biscuits and cooking if you sort of think about in your own homes and perhaps you have this sort of thing if you're cooking you're normally in the kitchen in the family kitchens are usually a hub for sort of stuff and that's what it is in the safe living Foundation Center it's like a hub it's a hub for people talking they talk about risk related stuff that's not sort of sat opposite them saying you know how's things going and have you thought about this have you been here or been there it's done in a much more sort of informal setting and people talk about all aspects of their lives just while doing this so cooking is just one aspect of it but the process gives us so much more and gives them so much more as well it gives them hope and anyone that seen sha Shank Redemption when reads that sort of letter you know hope is a good thing maybe the best of things and no good thing ever ever dies is so important and and it again sounds a little bit hope sounds really Airy fairy but hope is a protective Factor having hope being believed in is related to people not offending is related to successful outcome so hope is as well as you know it it sounds a bit fluffy is actually really really important and there's a whole load of literature that backs that up and I'm going to focus very very last little bit on our prevention project so this is an intervention that is for people who are struggling with a sexual interest in children who are worried that am they may offend and it's pitched at people who um are not part of the Criminal Justice System some of our good proportion of our service users have had access you know have had issues with the criminal justice system or have been in prison or have convictions but you don't have to have a conviction it's so people who are struggling with those thoughts um and this is um an approach that is bedrock is compassion focused therapy and acceptance and commitment and comes from uh our clinical lead uh Dr kenah hawan and around this work is about refu reducing it's about it's basically an approach which is about Des shaming working on people to reduce fusion with unhelpful thoughts so this is this idea that you're not your thoughts you know often the times we compare ourselves with really unhelpful thoughts you know I'm not a very good lecturer and you sort of say it enough and you fuse to it and you suddenly start you start believing it it may be true um it's probably not a helpful thought right I need to diffuse I need to work I need to disentangle that you may think I'm a this kind of a person but actually these are unhelpful thoughts and spirals that we get into so part of Act is about what's called thought diffusion you are not your thoughts and you can do this by just creating distance in your mind by creating a little bit of a gap and it's just enough as a little bit of a gap to then think actually I'm Not My Thoughts I'm I could think anything I could think I could run out of here I could think I'm G to do whatever it doesn't make it real yeah it's not who I am it's not my identity and then with this is about developing other skills for emotion regulation skills for sexual self-regulation you could build a really good program just on self-regulation impulse control we talked about the central a four of which about antisociality we just need to make people better skilled at dealing with emotions dealing with their sort of sexual urges urge surfing and then developing skills for values based living one of the sort of key things I suppose as an organization that we do which is about living to our values I mentioned about Lynn being a really a person of really high integrity and high honesty this is these are values that cut through um our service like you know Blackpool through a stick of rock they're really really integral and actually if you help people build lives for values based living what do you want out of life what are your values how do you live to your values this is how you get people to to live towards that and this is from uh work that uh my PhD student who's in the second row there um looking at the some of the early evaluation work of our project and the big thing that could comes out of this is that actually the red is before they go on to the intervention and the blue is post and what you see is the big thing that the thing that we're really pleased about is shame comes down an awful lot hope increases and so does uh self-esteem and well-be and particularly shame and hope in sort of significant degrees so these are really important early markers for us of course we Face challenges um this was actually about our charity sexual abuse victim slam lottery funded charity that asks pedophiles to drink asks volunteers to drink with pedophiles to stop them getting lonely and this is part of the challenge we face in terms of media backlash um and the way things are sensationalized our client group don't live in hermetically sealed vacuums they know exactly what the community thinks of them even if they haven't committed an offense this is a big challenge for us I think all of us at some point have received death threats or had to deal with with those abuse that's come from some of challenges and finally and very very quickly I'll just sum up with some sort of Reflections so thank you very much for the people that you that come out and you've sort of indulged me as I've sort of gone through sort of aspects of my career um the sort of key Reflections that I have really is that collaboration is key there absolutely No Way Out have done any of completed most of these projects any of these projects without collaboration collaboration with colleagues who've become friends who've become friends like throughout life or with partner agencies prisons NHS third sector collaboration is key you have to put the work in in those in those networks it is so particularly crucial particularly in my world if you want to do applied work and you want to do good work collaboration is key reciprocity is key I've said that a few times shared problem solving working together is the only way that you can get this work done compassion is key sometimes compassion is hard sometimes it makes you reflect and turn towards things that make you feel really uncomfortable make you ask difficult questions when I first started working with people with sexual convictions my son had had just been born and I was having intrusive thoughts about you know was changing his nappy and and things and things like that so it will push you in certain directions but compassion is the way that you you get through it connection is key connection because we need connection like I say we're biologically programmed and to end to belong hard times when You Face them don't last and that living by your values is pretty much a superway of of living a good life I would say and that people remember how you made them feel and that really really matters so there's this saying that I sort of live by really which is that old saying of people don't remember for what you do or say but for how you make them feel and I look back to the sort of first slide and I look back to family and I look back to the really important people that have shaped my life in my career and it's people that have made me feel valued and trusted and given me those positions and that's really mattered to me how you make other people really feel really really matters and I think that's probably a good place to end it thank you very much.
Nicholas Blagden's Inaugural Lecture: Prison, Rehabilitation and Transition into the Community video
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