Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / The Psychology of Adolescent Criminality. Episode 1. When A Teen Breaks The Law

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The Psychology of Adolescent Criminality. Episode 1. When A Teen Breaks The Law · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, this is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to episode one of the psychology of adolescent criminality.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: In the introduction, I spoke about the figures within the UK, certain principles that relate to how we understand criminal behavior and the different ways in which those find expression.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: What I want to try and do in this series is to look more deeply, sort of more microanalytically, at how these things come together, how we understand them, and how we can hopefully intervene and prevent.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's a moment that arrives without warning.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: A phone rings, or school makes a call, or there's a knock on the door, and suddenly something enters the household that was never meant to be there.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Your child has been involved in an incident.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: That is a sentence most parents will dread.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And in that moment, everything you thought, everything you understood begins to shift.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: In this series, we're going to explore something that many parents live through quietly and often with a mixture of fear, confusion, and shame.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that's adolescent criminality.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Not as headlines, not as stereotypes, but as something that emerges in the real lives of real children and families.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I've spoken about the statistics in relation to this, but I want to look at it from a different point of view.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because what we're looking at is phenomena that's not just about experimentation.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: We're looking at something deeper.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Inside the consulting room, we we don't start with statistics.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: We start with the child.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now he's been caught shoplifting, not once, but repeatedly.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we understand that his shoplifting serves potentially a larger purpose because he can sell the goods that he steals and use the money to fund a developing drug habit.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And his parents aren't what we might stereotypically expect.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're thoughtful, engaged, trying to understand, and they ask him why, and he shrugs and says, I don't know.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: We we sit together and I say, So tell me what what what is what is it about for you?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: That moment when you take something and he says, It feels good before I do it just before, not after, not during, but before.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now that that moment isn't about the possession of the object, it's about the build-up of internal tension and a surge of anticipation, and for him, a sort of sense of a feeling of aliveness in the moment.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And for some young people, uh the internal world can for a variety of reasons feel flat, empty, under stimulated, conflicted, and b the behavior comes because of what is going on, but it also becomes a way of creating feeling where there wasn't any.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when we hear that thousands of young people are being arrested, it's easy to imagine something distant.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: But each one of those numbers, each one is a real person.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say that, I mean a real moment where something couldn't be contained, it couldn't be thought, it was something that had to be done.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: A reaction, not a response.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, adolescence isn't simply a stage of defiance.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly there's plenty of that in there, but it's also a period of neurobiological imbalance, extreme emotional intensity, identity formation, a variety of pressures, and crucially a time when the capacity to pause, reflect, and regulate is still under construction.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about a growing and unfinished brain.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I think for parents, moments like this are shocking.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: They can arouse a great sense of shame, fear of judgment, and a quiet, sometimes not so quiet, internal question, but that is what have I missed?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I think really this isn't one of those why would my child do this questions?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because quite simply, what couldn't be held finds expression through action.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, adolescent criminal behavior is often an action where a thought could not yet be formed.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: In the moment that it takes place, young people are not thinking this is a criminal action and it could have consequences because they're acting on an impulse.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I would go so far as to say that when these kinds of actions happen in what seems like a premeditated way, yes, there may be planning, however, the impulse moves into view rather than the reasoned, how could this pan out?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: What could happen?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is it okay?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is it and so on?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: We also have to remember the influence of peer groups.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're caught up in the mood of the moment or the normal, and I say normal within the context of normalizing behavior within an adolescent group, no, you don't stop and you don't question it because the rules of the group are you follow the group.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think sometimes we move far too quickly to punishment as if somehow that by punishing the action, by punishing the behavior, it's going to make a difference.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, people talk about deterrence.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, repeat offenders don't do that.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: And young people who start out with what we might consider to be minor offenses can go on to become repeat offenders.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we also know that sometimes the offenses can be very serious.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we have to look, if if if we look at the behavior in isolation, that really tells us nothing.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely nothing.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: We have to take an intelligent view, and that's harder work than taking the headline view.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Headline, young person does the following.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: But what's the story?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: What's underneath that?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: What do we know about the context?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because once again, if we don't pay attention to and take into account what the context is, we miss the meaning, we lose the opportunity to gain understanding, which then denies us the opportunity of intervening and changing trajectories.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And furthermore, if we move too quickly to blame, we risk losing the child.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: So before we ask what they've done, we must ask what could not be thought, spoken, born, or even recognized.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody has a part to play, and this isn't about allocating blame.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's about realizing that criminality, criminal behavior will does not happen out of the blue, very, very rarely.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: It happens as part of a longer process.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: There will be clues, there will be indications that the young person is moving in a direction which potentially puts them at risk.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: If we don't pay attention to those things, well then the outcomes speak for themselves.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I know of cases that I've been involved with with where I've made very clear the trajectory this young person is on ends up in a particular kind of way.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Drugs, alcohol, criminality, promiscuity, violence.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And because it seems beyond the reach of immediacy, people very often don't hear the full meaning and the impact of what I'm trying to describe.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: I remember one father who said to me some years after his daughter had been admitted to rehab for the third time, and she was 18, 19, and I'd been working with her, I stopped working with her when she was 12, and I made very clear that certain things really did need to happen, and that was to do with what was going on in the family.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember saying something like, there is a very real risk that left as it is, this girl's situation with being excluded from schools, having violent outbursts, being oppositional and sometimes physically threatening, is a very real risk this is going to develop into the following things.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Some years later, he came back asking me if I would see his daughter again, having then told me, you know, what had happened, and he said, I hate to say it, but you told me this was going to happen.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I felt great sympathy because, you know, we therapists tend not to say, Well, I told you so, because that's not really smart or helpful.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's not for us to take a moral stance.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: But it it it I I felt sorry for them because they ended up in a situation that was so destructive, and one where there have been multiple suicide attempts, and uh I find it, you know, it may be a fact of life, but I work with real people in real pain, and my intention is to try and do everything that is reasonably possible to help people avoid these kinds of outcomes.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that relies upon me asking questions, asking myself questions.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: What is the behavior telling us?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: What is the relationship with alcohol or drugs telling us?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Is this self-medicating?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Why is this ch young person disenfranchised?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Why are they in opposition?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: What is happening?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know the story.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: But on that note, I will close this particular episode and I hope that it's uh begun to uh move us in a direction where further understanding is possible.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: I do want to say that understanding is not the same as excusing, it's about explaining.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: The behavior, whatever way we look at it, is still wrong, it still affects others.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: We know that, but that's just the beginning.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: So in the next episode, we are going to take a look at the developing brain and the risks associated with impulse.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.