Other Professional Interventions
There are other professional interventions that may come across your radar screen. Here's what you can expect from each of these types of interventions, including what works, what doesn't, and how to tell the difference before you sign up.
Classes and Support Groups
You may consider enrolling yourself or your child or both of you in a class or support group. In general, whenever you consider a treatment option, try to determine if the option has been proven effective. Organized, regulated programs usually have to document their progress if they want to continue receiving funding, so ask to see what their results have been in past years.
Essential
“Recidivism” (ruh-SID-uh-VIZM) is a term you may come across. Recidivism is the repetition of undesired behaviors after a person has been trained to stop them or has been released from treatment. You can ask a program coordinator about “rates of recidivism” to learn if the kids in their program improved or not.
Classes and support groups should be run by a licensed professional and consist of an organized curriculum or meeting format. A group of angry teens watching movies on Monday nights in a church basement with a well-meaning but unlicensed recovered criminal is a recipe for disaster — your child could actually learn how to be more defiant and find a peer group that reinforces the undesirable behaviors. Look for a program run by a hospital or clinic that is managed by a licensed and experienced psychotherapist or counselor who is present during the sessions.
Circles of Shame
Once in awhile, you'll find a type of intervention in which the offender is asked to be present with victims or people he has hurt, usually by sitting with them in a circle. This session is run like a ritual, with a leader controlling aspects of the environment such as lighting, seating, and noise levels. Victims get a chance to tell the offender directly how much they've been hurt, and the offender is supposed to listen and realize the extent of his actions.
This type of program appeals to victims and victim advocates as it helps victims recover from grief; however, it is not effective at stopping the offender's behavior. If anything, public shaming, embarrassment, and exposure makes the offending person angrier, more frustrated, and with a need to exert even more control over his life, which could result in more aggression. If this is not part of your heritage, it's probably best to forego it. If it is part of your cultural tradition, ask your elders to consider that it could make your child angrier and he could hurt someone else as a result, and ask if there are any other ways you can approach the situation.
