COPING WITH PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: SOME MORE SUGGESTIONS

Essentially a re‐write of Jamieson (1984) ‘Coping with Physical Violence: some suggestions’, this paper attempts to up‐date practice on the subject of dealing with potentially aggressive and certainly very troublesome EBD children and young people. It takes as its starting point that there are no ‘quick fixes’ for challenging behaviour but still manages to list a number of valuable guidelines which at least some of the time, in some circumstances, will work for some children. In addition to commenting on how to deal with acting‐out behaviour of an extreme sort, or better still to prevent it occurring in the first place, an attempt is made at providing a framework for understanding aggression and violence. An interactive model of challenging behaviour is favoured. Some of the guidelines are simply a rehash of those in the 1984 paper while others are new and tackled from an altogether different perspective. Although it is written primarily with teachers and care staff in mind, it is equally applicable to workers in any setting where children are being looked after in groups.