Protective Behaviours: safety, confidence and self-esteem

Journal of Mental Health Promotion, Mar 2004 by Rose, Jocelyn

ABSTRACT

Protective Behaviours is an empowerment process that raises self-esteem and self-confidence and increases assertiveness in the context of feeling safe. Developed in the US as a response to legislation around the prevention of child abuse, it was initially designed to be taught to young children in the classroom. Other ways of using it have subsequently been explored and it has been recognised as having a wider application than child abuse prevention: notably with victims (and perpetrators) of bullying, domestic violence and peer pressure. A key element of Protective Behaviours is empowering those who have been marginalised, excluded or denied a voice. This paper outlines the history and process and attempts to establish an evidence base for its effectiveness.

Protective Behaviours began in the mid-1970s in the US. It was devised originally by Peg West, a school social worker in Madison, Wisconsin, partly in response to her own feeling that the young people who were corning to her for help did so because they were not feeling safe and partly because the state legislature was evaluating school-based child abuse prevention programmes and finding most of them wanting. In devising a programme that would fit the State of Wisconsin's criteria, West found that she had created something that addressed the wider agenda of safety. Protective Behaviours is not 'about' child abuse, or bullying, or stress within relationships, or social exclusion, or lack of self-esteem: it concerns whether or not an individual feels safe, how they identify that, and what they can do about it. So it may address child abuse but it also provides a context for tackling other problems or difficulties where someone is feeling unsafe.

Within the US, Protective Behaviours programmes are still usually found within schools settings. In Australia it was taken up in the 1980s and promoted by an organisation concerned with community safety initiatives, in which the police, social services and health services all had a role. It was subsequently expanded to encompass therapeutic as well as preventive work, one-to-one and small-group work as well as classroom lessons, and the whole community, not just the community of a school. all these elements were in place when Protective Behaviours was introduced to the UK, through a police connection, in the early 1990s. It is also being used by child psychologists and therapists, by youth workers and social workers, by those working in the community, in peer education and peer counselling initiatives and by young people themselves.

The process in brief

The Protective Behaviours 'process' starts with the individual and teaches that: 'We all have the right to feel safe all the time.' This is the first and central theme of the process. The idea is one of inclusivity: everyone is included, and the right to feel safe operates all the time. In a typical training session, the idea of 'rights' will then be discussed. This encompasses rights and responsibilities, then perhaps a list of what people feel are basic human rights, in which the right to feel safe is included. Discussion points include access to human rights and what constitutes a right. The underpinning idea is that, even if people are not feeling safe, even if feeling safe is not a usual condition, there exists the opportunity to feel safe, because it is a basic human right. The message is positive, and the rest of the process explores how an individual can keep themselves feeling safe and what, if they're not feeling safe, they can do about it.

Feelings, and the way different people feel differently about different things, are also central to Protective Behaviours. Because some people do not ever feel safe, participants are invited to take part in an exercise that demonstrates what feeling safe is like. The Safe Place exercise is a 'guided fantasy in which people imagine themselves in a safe place. It elicits a list of feelings such as warm, comfortable, secure, peaceful that, crucially, the participants have just experienced for themselves: their Safe Place is somewhere that can be visited at any time, because it is in their own heads and belongs to them.

The next exercise is Fun to Feel Scared activities: did participants (perhaps when they were younger) ever do anything where it was fun to feel scared? This generates another list, of things like fairground rides, watching Dr Who from behind the sofa, Knock Down Ginger and so on. Participants are then asked what the two lists - Safe Place feelings and Fun to Feel Scared activities - have in common. The purpose is to raise the issues of choice, control and time limit.

The programme then goes on to look at the various ways in which people s bodies let them know when they are not feeling safe. Protective Behaviours calls these Early Warning Signs and suggests that it is a useful technique to be able to recognise our own personal early warning signs, because they are often the first indication that something unsafe is happening. Throughout the Safe Place, Fun to Feel Scared and Early Warning Signs activities, two important ideas are reinforced: that our own ideas and feelings are both unique to us and important, and that other people's ideas and feelings may be different to ours and need to be respected. What is a fun-to-feel-scared activity for one person may be no fun at all (or not scary at all) for somebody else; similarly, not everyone experiences the same Early Warning Signs - but everyone does experience them.