Public service reception areas often display notices reminding us that it is unacceptable to shout at, intimidate, or threaten staff. And rightly so.
Neuroscience shows that being shouted at or threatened activates the brain’s threat system and can have lasting effects on physical and mental health.

Yet, across UK public services, there are still settings where vulnerable people are routinely shouted at, intimidated, or threatened; and where the behaviour management system is built to allow or even encourage this. Such regimes become part of the harm.

This contradiction is striking. On the one hand, we’ve developed complex safeguarding systems to protect people in vulnerable circumstances. On the other hand, some of the very services charged with safeguarding are operating in ways that actively increase harm when people are vulnerable. The contradiction deepens when we recognise that we are living through a time of collective challenge, uncertainty, and trauma. More people are vulnerable now than ever before; and every one of us will experience vulnerability at some point in our lives.

In the 1980s, the “Pindown” regime in Staffordshire children’s homes used deprivation and isolation to enforce compliance. It was a widely accepted practice at the time by local authorities, some professionals, and even parents. Yet the adverse effects and long-term trauma it caused became painfully clear. The public inquiry led by Allan Levy and Barbara Kahan exposed the deep harm this punitive system inflicted, even though it was originally framed as care.

We must be equally clear today: punitive regimes cause harm. They are a safeguarding concern.

This is especially relevant in schools, prisons, and other public services where behaviour management has, in some cases, become synonymous with punitive regimes. These are settings in which the prime aim, it would be reasonable to suggest, is to enable people who may struggle to self-regulate and manage their own behaviour, to become more able to do so. Yet they are sometimes subjected to systems that rely on intimidation, control, or exclusion.

These approaches may result in short-term compliance, but the long-term effects are often damaging. At best, they produce a dissociative state, a kind of compliance rooted in fear, not growth. At worst, they cause lasting trauma.

It is time to move on. We must enable and encourage every setting caring for people when they are vulnerable, whatever the cause of that vulnerability (age, youth, trauma, physical or mental ill health or disability and so on) to recognise that safeguarding is about ensuring that fundamental human needs are met; and the neuroscience is clear about what those three needs are in order to sustain the health of our brain and nervous system:

1. To feel safe.
2. To belong.
3. To matter.

Punitive regimes undermine all three. They leave people feeling unsafe, excluded, and insignificant; particularly those already struggling with adversity.

The good news is that we know better ways. There is growing evidence that services which actively meet these core needs support recovery and resilience. Behaviour is really not the issue – people who are living in a disconnected state of fear and vulnerability behave badly, people who are living in a connected state of flow and resilience behave well. This is true for service users, and it is true for staff and practitioners too.

Many professionals in public service settings are working under immense pressure, in systems where fear and anxiety have become normalised. They need support to move on from that fear to establish and sustain an environment that nurtures the humanity of everyone within it, and that genuinely meets the requirement to safeguard people when they are vulnerable. Any system that consistently causes fear or harm should be recognised and challenged as a safeguarding concern.

As a KCA trainer I talk to school staff all the time about behaviour as a communication of need. I describe the Fight/ Flight or Freeze response we evolved as a way to keep us safe from predators and how getting stuck there can be displayed as behaviours which others can find at best difficult and at worst downright antisocial or threatening.

I talk about the way to help those stuck in survival modes as being through the development of self-regulation and that this does not happen through the teaching of regulation techniques – useful as they are – but through repeated experiences of “co-regulation”. What I am describing here is the way in which having a connected person meet our stress with their calm can pattern our brains to regulate better ourselves.

Linked to this is the notion that if we see all behaviour as an expression of need, we are more likely to find a compassionate response to the person exhibiting this behaviour. This means assuming the person was doing their best in that moment, given who they are and what they have had in life. The ability to feel for others is always related to our own capacity to regulate our survival response and no one can manage it all the time.

When I put it like that and illustrate it with lots of examples, participants like the idea – it is a simple enough one – we all know that the last thing we need when we are overwhelmed is a stress response in the person trying to help us.

Yet after a while of letting this sink in, some participants often have worries about what I am saying. These worries are understandable and natural given both the historical culture around the way we respond to children’s behaviour and the intense, overwhelming high-pressure environment some schools have become.

This blog is an attempt to put some of these worries in context, offer some alternative views and hopefully settle some of the concerns.

A common concern is expressed something like this:

• What about the children who are not struggling to self-regulate and are just being naughty or making bad choices?

Before looking at these concerns it's important to say that worries are there for a good reason. Humans are designed to scan for threat and when we experience some sort of anxiety, fear or concern our nervous systems tell us that we need to be on alert in some way. If we are calm and internally connected, we then evaluate the threat using our memories, thoughts, and values.

Inherent in this concern is the notion of choice. It is a word we hear a lot in the media – politicians talk a lot about people making bad choices and having to take the consequences. Whilst no one can deny that as conscious beings humans do have the capacity to make choices about their behaviour, it can be problematic when we start to think of choice as being a simplistic concept.

The ACE’s study in the late 1990’s strongly demonstrated the biopsychosocial impact and correlation between adversity in childhood and life outcomes including a propensity for risk taking behaviour to self-soothe in distress. Are we saying that it is a coincidence that most of the people who end up in prisons, drug rehabilitation and psychiatric hospitals also tend to have multiple ACE’s? This puts the black and white rhetoric of “making bad choices” in context. We know from research that our behavioural choices are affected by environmental and psycho-social factors. This is not saying that an angry child who throws a punch at a teacher is not making a choice, but it is saying that it is not a free choice.

American neuroendocrinology researcher Robert Sapolsky takes this notion even further claiming that there is no neurological evidence for the existence of free will. Sapolsky concludes that our choices are largely determined by our genetics, experience, and environment and that the common use of the term free will is erroneous.

I don’t think we need to go as far as to unpick the complexity of choices made by children in a school environment. Choice is complex. When we feel stressed or threatened, our stress response system is automatically activated and so for some children, there is no choice involved in their behaviour. A child may have responded automatically, and logic, language and reasoning were not involved in the process – in other words, they did not make a conscious behavioural choice. Therefore, when children are repeatedly asked – was that a ‘good or a bad’ choice – they are often unable to answer and can then be deemed unresponsive or even truculent. Further, overtime, such a child may draw the conclusion that they must be bad as they are being told they are always making bad choices. This becomes the child's narrative and identity of themselves.

Even when a child is regulated, the choices they make about how they express the feelings evoked by being in a social environment will be influenced by multiple factors:

• The behaviours they have witnessed both at home and within the classroom

• Their level of energy at that time – often related to rest, sleep, diet and if they are hungry

• Their perception of how the behaviour may impact on relationships both with peers and adults.

No doubt you can think of many more.

A further fear is commonly mixed up with the notion that we might not offer the right consequences for “wilful” behaviour if we respond with compassion. This is the notion that compassionate responses will lead to chaotic children with no boundaries and no ideas about pro-social behaviour. This concern is fuelled currently by the lobby against trauma informed practice as a way forward in schools.

At our best moments, most parents and teachers know that there are other responses than the polar ones set up here of either:

• Responding with empathy but offering no guidance (what Emotion coaching calls a laissez-faire approach), or

• Responding with guidance (which might include shaming and shouting) but not empathy – (“disapproving”)

When we as adults are well enough regulated, we have the capacity to respond in a way which combines compassion and empathy with reason and guidance. We can understand the reasons behind the behaviour and see what it is expressing – but instead of reacting to it punitively, we validate feeling and provide co-regulation. Only once the child is regulated and their brain is functioning optimally i.e. both thinking and feeling, do we set limits to behaviour and problem solve with them to find future alternatives. This is what we mean when we describe the “Authoritative parenting “style.

There is no imaginable scenario where this compassionate response to disruptive behaviour can be describe as easy. We are all triggered by it and on many occasions the reaction of seeing the behaviour as a “simple choice”, fits with our need for an immediate containment. We can only contemplate the complexity of these behavioural “decisions” when we have enough time and support to reflect on them – both individually and collectively. These are currently scarce resources.

My hope is that those who have the power to influence such things, can create the space for this much needed pause in the interest of wellbeing for all.