Introduction

Working with violent offenders can be professionally exciting, offering real opportunities to understand, and potentially change, complex human behaviours. At the same time, work with violent offenders can be daunting. It carries with it an associated responsibility to protect the public from harm, in a culture that is increasingly risk focused, where that responsibility is carried out in a changing and pressured organisational context.

This challenge is increased because violent offending is so diverse. As Bush (1995) points out, criminal violence is not generally an isolated and distinct form of criminal behaviour. Many violent offenders engage in other types of offending. In order to make sense of this diversity it is important to understand patterns of violent behaviour and the risk factors associated with them, but it is also necessary to be able to relate this knowledge to the detail of the behaviour of particular individuals and their lives, lived out in particular sets of circumstances.

This chapter provides practitioners with an understanding of the range of violent behaviours and how they are developed and supported by social processes. It looks in more detail at some specific areas:

• • Alcohol and violence.

• • Women and violence.

• • Domestic violence

• • Racially motivated offending.

The chapter then looks at how best to intervene and engage with a violent offender and how to manage the worker–offender relationship.

Range of violent behaviours

To begin with it is helpful to clarify and define what is meant by violent offending: crimes that involve “the exercise of physical force so as to injure or damage persons or property” (Archer and Browne, 1989: 3). Prins (2005) goes on to identify the limitations of this definition, suggesting that violent offending can also be seen to include sexual assaults, such as rape, and non-contact offences, like harassment.

Second, it should be acknowledged that men commit the majority of violent offences. This gender difference, as the chapter considers later, for some offenders helps in an understanding of the function of violent acts for the perpetrator. Although women's convictions for violence are increasing, up by 14% between 1994 and 2003 (Home Office, 2004), as Batchelor (2005: 360) points out, “the overwhelming majority of female offending is non-violent … while the number of women convicted of a violent crime is increasing, violence (particularly serious violence) is still an overwhelmingly male activity”.