Welcome to Probation Perspectives insights into
Community Justice, the podcast where we dive into the world of
probation, rehabilitation and community justice.
Each episode we explore the themes, challenges and skills
that underpin effective probation practise.
Whether you're just starting out on the P quip, have years of
experience in the field, or are simply curious about the
criminal justice system, this podcast is your space for
practical insights, expert perspectives, and meaningful
conversations. In today's episode, we're joined
by Doctor Madeleine Petrillo, an associate professor in
criminology whose work explores trauma informed approaches and
assistance, particularly in relation to women in the
criminal justice system. I don't think there's an area of
probation practise where we shouldn't be applying trauma
informed approaches. All probation work involves
engaging people who've experienced trauma inactivity
that could be re traumatising. I think good probation work has
to be trauma informed. We talked with Madeleine about
the realities faced by women in the criminal justice system, the
importance of recognising trauma in probation practise and the
innovative work being done through One Small Things Hope St
project. Hope St is trauma informed in
its entirety, so a really pioneering element of it is that
they Co produced the design of the building with women who'd
been impacted by the criminal justice system.
The workshop. What does trust look like in a
building? What does safety look like?
It's a thoughtful and informative conversation that
challenges us to reimagine how the principles of trauma
informed approaches can be built into probation practise.
Before we begin, please be aware that this episode includes
discussions of sexual violence and abuse, which some listeners
may find distressing. Please take care while listening
and feel free to pause or step away if you need to.
Let's get into our conversation with Madeline.
Welcome, Madeline. Thank you so much for joining us
on today's podcast. Would you be able to introduce
yourself and tell us a bit about your background and your current
work? Yeah, thanks very much for
having me on. My name is Madeleine Petrillo.
I'm an associate professor in criminology at the University of
Greenwich. But in my previous life I was a
probation officer. I worked in probation for 11
years, mainly in London. I did a two year stint in
downvue women's prison and a year in New Zealand.
But throughout my probation career I specialised in work
with women and at high risk men and then during my time as a
probation officer I did my Master's that looked at how
gender issues play out in supervision for women officers
who are supervising men who've perpetrated sexual and violent
offences. After that I came to the
University of Portsmouth and LED the Pequip programme for around
7 years and during that time did my PhD which was a gender and
trauma informed analysis of women's efforts to move away
from crime after prison. And since then, my work's
focused on trauma informed approaches to rehabilitation,
including examining trauma informed interventions in
prison, the implementation of trauma informed practise in
probation and most recently I've been working with Hope St in
Southampton, which is a trauma informed residential alternative
to custody for women impacted by the justice system.
Lovely, thank you. Yeah, sounds really interesting.
You might have covered it a little bit, but what really LED
you to focusing on doing research around women in trauma
informed practise and approaches?
Yeah. So I think trauma informed
approaches is quite new language for probation.
But my interest in it started from the very first person I
supervised as a trainee probation officer and she was
called Bintu and she had been allocated to me for an offensive
theft from employer. She'd stolen like £50 from
Sainsbury's where she was working at the time and she was
on six months supervision order. And when she told me her story,
I was just overwhelmed with a sense of injustice that she'd
ended up on probation. So what had happened was that
she'd was a refugee from Sierra Leone.
She'd fled the war there with her three very young children.
They were all underage. She'd found it really hard to
set herself up in the UK. She'd finally been found a job
and set settled down a little bit.
Then there were some problems with her immigration status
which meant that some of her benefits stopped and she was
only allowed to work a certain amount of hours, which wasn't
enough for to cover the costs for herself and her children.
And this is what led to her committing this theft from
employer. And she'd undergone so much
trauma in her home country. A lot of her family members had
been killed. She'd been raped by men in the
military. She'd had to flee and leave what
was left of her family behind with her children.
And after all of that, she ended up on probation for this theft
of £50 and it it just stuck with me so much that it was a really
helpless situation that I found myself in with her.
Like there was nothing I could do really to help her deal with
the issues that had brought her onto probation.
It was just really frustrating and I felt a real conflict as
well, that I was supposed to be enforcing this order of the
courts and in some way punishing her.
Yeah, all of this had gone on in her life.
So since then I think I've been really driven by this question
of how we acknowledge women's experiences of abuse and
victimisation without denying them agency, and how we respond
in a meaningful way to to that. You know, there's some really
big issues that you've drawn on there from that example.
Madeleine, do you think much has been achieved since the
publication of the Colston report to address some of the
issues that you've you've talked about experiencing when you were
a practitioner? I think what's happened since
Colston is that there is much more awareness and I think
sometimes when organisations, particularly agencies of the
criminal justice system talk about trauma informedness, what
they're actually achieving is trauma awareness.
The changes that we all really wanted to see with Karsten
haven't really materialised. And I think we're at a point now
actually where we're in exactly the same sort of optimistic.
This could be the moment period with the establishment of the
Women's Justice Board, particularly that finally we're
going to all this research on women's pathways to crime and
what they need from rehabilitation.
It's all there, It's been there for decades and that now we've
finally got this body that can implement it in policy.
So there's reason to be hopeful at the moment.
Trauma informed is often used and it's a bit of a buzzword at
the moment, but we just wondered whether you could define it and
maybe explain its relevance to probation practise because it's
used a lot but maybe not really clearly understood.
Yeah, sure. So being trauma informed means
individual practitioners and organisations as a whole
function in a way that takes into into account how trauma may
affect many aspects of a person's life.
So from their behaviour and their relationships to how they
experience their surroundings and their physical environment.
And the idea is that by applying the principles of trauma
informed practise, we can start to understand behaviour
differently, more compassionately, with a better
understanding of what is being communicated through the
behaviour and what the person is experiencing.
So Stephanie Covington, who's developed programmes for Justice
involved people, puts it really neatly.
She says when people behave in ways that are challenging,
instead of asking what's wrong with them, we can ask what
happened to them. And it's this perspective on
behaviour that's at the root of trauma informed practise.
I think it's important for probation in in so many ways.
We can all accept, I guess, that prisons are traumatising
environments, but probation is too right.
So if we think about even something simple like someone
turning up the process of going to a supervision appointment,
trauma can really like linger in the body and it can be triggered
by environmental stimuli. So what we see and hear and
smell. So probation offices can be
really triggering environments. You have no control how you move
around the space. They can be difficult to access
and navigate. They're often lots of blind
spots, so you can't see where people are going and where
they're coming from. There are lots of locked doors
and surveillance measures. There's lots of unexpected noise
and people behaving in unpredictable ways.
You've got no control over who's in the space.
And all of this is before you sit down with your probation
officer and talk about the most difficult aspects of your life,
all the worst things that have happened to you and all the
worst things that you've done. And you're going into this
carrying all that baggage of the harm that you've endured from
past trauma. And trauma reform practise is a
whole organisation approach as well.
And I think this is really important in probation and
sometimes forgotten. It's not just about the needs of
the people on probation, but the practitioners in probation as
well. So, you know, many of us have
experiences of trauma. They're not the reserve of
people in the justice system. We know just for example, that
one involved women over 16 have experienced sexual assault.
So, and there's been some recent research by Becky Shepherd on
vicarious trauma and the team at Sheffield Hallam have done some
work on emotional labour that talks about and really
highlights how different elements of the probation work
itself can be traumatising. So trauma informed approaches
are about making services as accessible and as safe as
possible for everyone who's in them, both the service users and
the practitioners. Thank you and the original.
Research about trauma informed approaches did focus on women.
Could you explain why the focus was originally on women?
Yeah, so it's particularly important for women because so
much of women's offending and offending related needs are
rooted in their experiences of victimisation.
And this is true for criminalised people of all
genders. Many justice involved men have
also experienced trauma and victimisation, but the nature of
their experiences are, I believe, gendered.
So in adulthood women are more likely to experience complex
trauma. You know, complex trauma is
repeated experiences of victimisation that take place
over a prolonged period of time in a relational context and from
which the victim can't psychologically, emotionally or
physically escape from. So two of the most common causes
of complex trauma are childhood abuse and neglect and domestic
abuse. And this is where the gender
difference shows up, because whilst there's a similar
prevalence of childhood abuse among people of all genders in
the justice system, criminalised women also have very high rates
of domestic abuse and sexual exploitation in adulthood.
They're much more likely to also experience other forms of
relational trauma such as the loss of children and
experiencing complex trauma. So these prolonged relational
abuse has specific symptoms beyond like the PTSD symptoms.
So in addition to flashbacks and low self esteem and hyper
vigilance, emotional detachment that come from PTSD, people who
experience complex trauma also often have difficulty regulating
emotions, have intense feelings of guilt and shame, can
experience dissociation, which is this disconnection from your
sense of self, your body, your emotions and the world around
you. And they have real problems with
trust. So if you're experiencing these
sorts of symptoms, you can see what a huge challenge it would
be to engage with probation and again, why trauma informed
practise is so important, particularly with women.
Thank you for explaining that. It would be interesting for you
to identify some of the key areas of practise where
probation staff should be applying trauma informed
approaches. I'm aware that you wrote an
inspectorate report focusing in on that and you were really able
to identify some real positive areas of practise.
So I don't think there's an area of probation practise where we
should shouldn't be applying trauma informed approaches like
everything probation does, assessment, supervision,
interventions, victim liaison, whatever it is.
All that work has to be trauma informed and all probation work
involves engaging people who've experienced trauma inactivity
that could be traumatising and re traumatising.
So I think good probation work has to be trauma informed.
What I saw with the inspectorate report was a real desire to work
in a trauma informed way from practitioners across the
organisation, actually from senior management through all
practitioner levels. And there were some really great
little pockets of practise going on, sometimes with specific
groups. So the women's cohort for
example, there's some really good work going on there, but
also just individual officers sometimes.
Like I remember from that research that there was a
probation service officer who developed a way of doing an
Oasis assessment in a trauma informed way.
So I think just individual practitioners applying the
principles in individual ways to their work that really
creatively, but the structures unfortunately around the
organisation just aren't in a place where they can support
truly trauma informed practise at the moment.
You know, it's very difficult to work in a trauma informed way if
you have a very, very high caseload, if you don't have
meaningful supervision, if you don't feel you have sufficient
training for the work that you're expected to carry out it
when the the organisations in a permanent state of restructure
or crisis or change, It's in that context trauma informed
practise becomes very difficult. So it's really challenging in a
lot of circumstances currently. There was another really nice
example where somebody had rewritten the language that was
used in somebody's report when they're in care as a three-year
old, and the language about that individual was really negative
about them being manipulative and violent or something.
And it was written about a three-year old.
But really recognising the fact that you can rewrite that
narrative and you can recognise that they were a child at that
point and how that can impact them as an adult seeing that
writing about them. And it's important, I think, for
practitioners to recognise actually, that might feel like a
small thing, but it can be a really big thing for the
individuals that are reading it about themselves.
Yeah. And it's a, a really important
element of trauma informed practise actually, that this
sort of retelling of the story of, of your life, really of your
trauma and experiences in a way that makes it more able to be
integrated into your sense of self.
You know, it's very hard to read a story about yourself that says
you're violent and you're an offender and you're, you're
addict or you know, all these negative things.
So it's going back to that question of what happened.
It's let's, let's retell this story from the perspective of
what happened and get a different story.
Exactly. And that language, it's often
used about people being manipulative and actually
they're they're speaking to different individuals and that
might not be a conscious decision of them, but that's
often language that's used, isn't it?
So and. When you've got.
When you lack trust in people, when you find relationships very
challenging, When you're hyper vigilant because every
interaction you've had with a professional has been ended up
with negative consequences for you.
All of that is what's behind the manipulation and inverted commas
that practitioners might see or feel.
So understanding those behaviours is very important.
So thank you for that. And that's what we're
encouraging people to try to unpick as their trainees and
then as probation officers to really understand what it means
to be trauma informed and to try and recognise that in their
approaches. So really focusing in on women
and your research, looking at women supervised by probation
and recognising that they are a much smaller percentage of the
people in the criminal justice system and supervised by
probation, could you explain why specific approaches are needed
to be effective when working with women on probation?
Yeah. So anecdotally, I don't know if
this is still around now actually, but when I was a
practitioner, very few probation officers wanted to work with
women. There was this received wisdom
that working with women was much more demanding and challenging
than working with men. And I think this is because we
are relying on interventions and approaches that were designed
largely by and for men, and they don't account for the way
women's pathways to crime and rehabilitative needs can be
gendered. So we've now got a lot of
research on women's pathways to crime, as I've said, and we know
that relational abuse that I talked about earlier is often
directly related to their offending.
So I can tell a story that will illustrate this.
I met a woman in prison when I was doing my PhD research, and
her story was that she'd been taken into care when she was
seven years old where she experienced abuse.
She started drinking to cope with this around the age of 10.
At 12 she was gang raped in a park.
She got pregnant from this rape and the baby was taken away from
her. She's now 13.
She was exploited into sex work. At 17 she met a partner who gave
her Class A drugs for the first time.
It was an abusive relationship and he also sexually exploited
her so we could get money for his drug use.
She got pregnant again and had this child removed from her
care. She describes from here going
from 1 abusive relationship to another, spending intermittent
periods in hospital or prison until she was around 20.
At this point she was released from a prison sentence and had
put things in place to help her terminate her drug use and to
get her out of sex work. She'd got a job in a cinema.
She got pregnant again but was again in an abusive
relationship. Her partner threw her down the
stairs and she lost the baby as a result and this triggered A
relapse into drug use and she was in prison when we met for
assaulting a man when she was sex working who'd refused to pay
her. So you can see in this story
these repeated prolonged experiences of trauma and that
there's a, a clear thread through those experiences.
And her offending, particularly in the last offence, which was
she assaulted someone who had not paid her for sex work.
And she was sex working because of her drug use and she was
using drugs because of all this stuff that had happened in her
past. So I think these experiences
among women in the criminal justice system, they're very
common and it means their criminogenic needs are
different, you know, developing cognitive skills, going to
education, training and employment, even some forms of
drug treatment or alcohol treatment.
They're not going to get to the root of what's causing the
behaviours that are causing the the involvement in.
Crime and there's some really important points that you've
drawn out there. And you you gave us an example
from your research that was focusing in on desistance and
why desistance literature needs to be gendered.
And you identified through your research the the fact that we
need specific understanding of women's desistance because it
wasn't wasn't really there prior to your research.
Could you explain about why women's desistance is different
to men's or more general desistance?
That was around before that time, yeah.
So when I started looking at this, I was just looking at that
question actually, how is it gendered?
How is this desistance journey gendered?
So I spoke to women in prison and followed up with a few of
them over a two year period after they were released and
that is where the significance of trauma and victimisation
really came out and became the focus.
It's like we can't talk about women moving away from crime if
we don't talk about the ways in which they're victimised and the
ways in which that victimisation impacts on their offending.
But interestingly, the DIS systems research hadn't really
mentioned anything about trauma apart from it had to talked
about people having experiences of victimisation and and
adversity. But it it was as if these were
things that they had to transcend in some way or that
they were experiences that they were able to integrate into
their lives by saying, well, this was a really bad experience
for me, but it's made me the person who I am.
And so I needed to go through it.
But if you think about the stories like the one I've I've
just related, the idea that you can simply integrate that story
into some tale of overcoming adversity was a bit jarring to
me. So yeah, it's.
What's different for the assistance for women?
I think there's a positivity to ideas around desistance which is
great and needed and stands in contrast to some of the sort of
earlier approaches to to rehabilitation.
But I think women's journeys are potentially more complex.
And I think you see that particularly in the importance
of how building relationships is important to desistance.
So the typical male desistor can come out of prison, do some
work, reintegrate with his partner who's been looking after
his children for him, and take on that role of a father and
create this new identity around being a father.
For women coming out of prison, the mother identity is often
unavailable to them. It's often tarnished by shame
and loss and is yet another traumatic experience that they
have to overcome. And as I've said that, you know,
women in the criminal justice system are so often in abusive
relationships with men as well. So just some of these ideas
around desistance, when you look at them from the perspective of
a criminalised woman, they didn't quite fit.
No really talked about marriage being a a positive and when you
look at women's experience, that's not always the case.
No, exactly. Thank you very much.
So you've referred to it briefly already, but you have been
involved in the One Small Thing project around building a trauma
informed residential women's centre in Southampton called
Hope St. Can you tell us more about this
project? Yeah.
So Hope St, as you said, it's a residential alternative to
custody. Something that's really
significant about it is that women can have their children
whilst they're there, they can stay there.
And this was specifically to address a real gendered pain of
imprisonment for women, which is that it can often result in the
loss of their children and family separation.
And that's bad for the women, obviously, but it's also bad for
the children. It means they are often taken
into local authority care or they're looked after by extended
family, which can mean them moving away from their home,
their school, their friends. It's disruptive and difficult.
So the idea behind Hope Street is that it's trauma informed in
its entirety. So a really pioneering element
of it is that even the design of the building itself is trauma
informed. And that's what I've been
working on most recently, like looking at the potential of
architecture to support trauma informed practise.
And that's meant going back to a question of what is a trauma
informed space? How do you create it?
And what they did at Hope St, which was really revolutionary
in architecture anyway, but definitely justice architecture,
was that they Co produced the design of the building with
women who'd been impacted by the criminal justice system or by
homelessness. So the architects got together
with the women and they just workshop what does trust look
like in a building? What does safety look like in a
building? What does empowerment look like
in a building? And they work together to
materialise these ideas in the design of Hope Street.
But also and obviously all the interactions that go on within
Hope St as a space, our trauma informed as well.
So it's a really interesting sort of radical intervention in
how we might work differently with women in the justice
system. It's like how we can really work
in a trauma informed way with women.
So those little pockets of practise I talked about earlier,
they're great, but they're always going to be limited if
they're in a system that isn't trauma informed.
So it's like, how do we to take this work out of that system,
put it in its own own place, own separate place and then see what
we can do, see what we can do there.
So it's hopefully it's been open for two years now.
It's been fully evaluated by a team from the University of
Southampton. It's undergoing A5 full five
year evaluation. So we've yet to know what the
outcomes are going to be for the women that are passing through
it. But from the interviews I've
undertaken with the women, they're evangelical about it.
It's this really small things as well, where they can start to
see themselves differently and start to heal from what's gone
on in their past. So there was one example of a
woman who had, because we were talking about the space and
principle of empowerment. And she would show me this
picture of these bins that had been put out by the residential
areas of the building. And she was like, those bins
were my idea. There's a different bin for
every flat. And I was like, Oh yeah, what
was it that made you want to do that?
And she was like, well, I've always lived in these places
where there's been really messy shared communal bin areas and we
didn't have individual bins. So I suggested to the team that
we have have these bins. And then they did it.
And then the next thing she said was, So then I started thinking,
well, what else can I do here? And there was a real.
It was a small thing, but just because of the way that she was
responded to, it gave her a real sense of achievement and control
and empowerment over the space Which?
Could then lead through to agency over her own life and
recognising that look if she's listened to in those
environments, then she can also has it have influence in other
areas and and will help her build and grow, wouldn't it?
Yeah, exactly. Really important and thank you
for telling us about Hope St And there's a real hope that it'll
be a blueprint and and recognise that other areas will be
following a similar approach, but.
You've touched on it already a bit Madeline, but for P quip
students that are listening and maybe aren't really familiar
with trauma informed principles, could you explain what the
trauma informed principles are and how they can incorporate
them in their practise? So the principles of trauma
informed practises that are used in criminal justice agencies
usually come from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration in the US and there are 6 fundamental
principles. First is safety.
This is that throughout the organisation, staff and the
people accessing services feel physically, emotionally and
psychologically safe. The second is trustworthiness
and transparency. So, according to this principle,
organisation operates in a very transparent way.
Decisions are made transparently with the goal of building and
maintaining trust with service users and staff.
The third one is peer support. So peer support is something
that's been very important to help people overcome trauma and
heal from trauma. So it's about encouraging and
maximising opportunities for mutual self help among people
who are in the organisation. The 4th principle is
collaboration and mutuality. So this is about levelling the
power differences in between staff and service users and or
between different staff members across the organisation so that
everybody in the organisation feels they are valued and have a
role to play in developing trauma informed practise within
the space. The 5th principle is
empowerment, voice and choice. So according to this principle,
it's really about recognising people's strengths and
experiences and building on those.
So it's really common when people experience trauma that
they are silenced in some way. So this principle is about
ensuring that everyone feels empowered and that their voice
matters and that their ideas matter and that they have some
degree of choice over how they either work in the space or
access the services that the the organisation providing.
And the final principle is cultural, historical and gender
inclusivity. So this is a more recent
addition to the principles of trauma informed practise that
recognises that lots of our understandings of trauma really
come from white, western, medicalised understandings of
trauma. So this principle is about
ensuring organisations actively move past cultural stereotypes
and biases and offer gender responsive services and services
that recognise that trauma is sometimes experienced
collectively because of structural oppression such as
racism or culturally, and that the organisation takes active
steps to meet those needs. Thank you for that, Madeleine.
For trainees who are training to be probation officers, they
might be concerned about how they can actively implement some
of those principles because there is obviously the power
dynamic. They are managing risk.
So sometimes we'll have to make decisions that the person
they're working with on probation will be unhappy about.
So I wondered if you had any examples or any tips about how
they can really work, use those principles in some of those
difficult decisions or difficult practise issues.
Yeah. So this, it's a real challenge
to deliver trauma informed practise in organisations where
people are forced to be there in what is fundamentally A punitive
system, you know, the criminal justice system.
So with hopes Jury, part of the rationale for I think was like
overuse of short term prison sentences for women and the
negative impact of that. But just thinking from a wider
public perspective that might not understand experiences of
women in the criminal justice system or the issue with short
term or long term prison sentences for women.
Or if people are concerned about their managing a woman whose
assessed is posing a high risk of harm, why would it still be
important to have a trauma informed approach?
Why is that still a positive thing?
Because I think this comes down to understandings of justice.
So often when a crime happens, the knee jerk reaction is that
we have to punish this person. But actually these women know
punishment. Like as I've talked about the
experiences of the story I showed, that woman knows what it
is to be punished. Her whole life has been
punishment. If we want to actually give
victims of crime what they want, which when you dig into it is
often that the person won't do it again, that they'll start to
feel safe. That's where responses and like
hope St can be really effective. We we know prison doesn't work
for anyone, definitely not for women and definitely not for
women who serve short sentences. Women fare better on community
sentences. But as I've said already,
community sentences are still designed around the needs of men
because they are the vast majority of people accessing
them. So having a specific gender
informed, trauma responsive approach to working with women
is something that seems to offer the best chance of both helping
the women recover from their experiences of victimisation and
in doing so, ensuring that they don't commit offences that are
going to harm other people. Thank you, a lot of the P quip
training focuses on reflective practise so I just wondered your
thoughts on how reflective practise can help P quip
trainees with their trauma informed work.
Yeah, trauma informed practise is absolutely dependent on
reflective practise. You can't be a trauma informed
practitioner if you're not a reflexive practitioner.
Much of trauma informed practise relies on how you as a
practitioner relates to the person you are working with.
It's all in that relationship really.
So this means having a really good understanding of your own
experiences, like what you were taking into that interview room
with you and how these might manifest in your interactions
with others. I think it also means being able
to reflect in the moment. So if a person's responding in a
way that is challenging, maybe because they're acting
aggressively or conversely they're just not communicating
at all, being able to go back to that question of what happened
to them, you know, what are they communicating here to inform how
you respond is really, really important.
And I think reflective practise helps us develop trauma informed
practise. So once you've got a good
understanding of trauma and it's symptoms, you can use reflective
practise to think about how to bring this into your work.
So I've already mentioned the example of the person who
thought about how to make an Oasis interview more trauma
informed. Another example from the HMIP
inspection was someone who'd reworded the warning letter.
So we stopped calling it a warning letter and instead I
think they'd called it an engagement letter or something
like that and reworded it so it wasn't such a threatening thing
to receive. And that might actually help
someone want to re engage if their attendance had been
dropping off. So I think reflective practise
is really important to be able to think about how you can use
these principles that are generalised and apply them to
little pieces of your work where possible.
I'm really starting to identify the power of language and how
language can harm people. And you might not realise that
at all, but just changing what feels like a minor thing like
that can have a really big impact on people that you're
working with. Yeah, absolutely important.
OK, so Madeline, we're now going to to give you a magic wand.
So if you had the power, if you had a magic wand that you could
wave, and you could implement one major change to improve
probation practise, what would it be?
So this is such a hard question. The one I'm going to go for is
clinical supervision for practitioners.
So I think I was lucky to have trained to be a probation
officer at a time where we did lots of supervision in lots of
different ways. So even case, the way cases were
allocated, we'd sit down once a week and I was senior probation
officer would have this pile of cases.
We'd talk through them and people would say I'll take that
one, I'll take that one from that to then I worked on the sex
offender treatment programme for a while, having very intensive
clinical supervision around that.
And I think so much of trauma informed practise is about
looking after the practitioner as well.
And I think if we don't look after practitioners, probation
can never be trauma informed. And when our organisations are
stretched financially and have to make cuts, often the first
things that go are the supports around the practitioners.
But this is hard work. It's challenging because there's
a lot of work, but the nature of the work is challenging as well.
You're dealing with difficult behaviours, people with very
significant problems. And of course everyone's got
their own stuff that's going on in their own lives as well.
And I think clinical supervision is just so important in terms
of, yeah, practitioner well-being that then can be
transferred into the practise with the people they're working
with. Thank you.
So a question we ask all of our guests is if you could recommend
one book or article for our listeners who want to explore
the topics you've talked about today further, what, what would
you recommend? I would immediately recommend
Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman.
So Judith Herman is a psychiatrist and she is the
person who kind of conceptualised complex trauma.
So she'd be done some work with war veterans and PTSD.
And she started noticing that women who were coming to her and
who were in abusive relationships or had experienced
sexual violence were talking about similar symptoms to PTSD
but with some slight variations. And this Trauma and Recovery is
such a great book. It explains about all different
types of trauma, but the second-half of the book is
really useful because it talks about how we can start to
support healing from trauma and she's got this very
straightforward 3 stage recovery model, which I think is really
transferable to working in probation actually.
So 100% if you want to understand trauma and trauma
informed practise, that is the book to read.
Great recommendation. Thank you for that, Madeline.
We'll also be putting details of your your research and your
publications in the show notes for this podcast episode as
well. So you didn't, you didn't have
to recommend those, but we'll be putting them in there.
So thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today,
Madeline. Yeah.
It's been great and really helpful for our P quick learners
to understand more about trauma informed approaches.
Thank you. Thank you for inviting me, it's
been great to speak to you. Thanks for listening to
Probation Perspectives insights into community justice.
We hope our conversation with Doctor Madeleine Petrillo
offered new perspectives on trauma informed practise and the
pathways to the assistance for women on probation.
From the realities of women's lived experiences to the
innovative design of Hope St, we trust that you came away with
ideas that inspire reflection and practise.
If you found this episode valuable, please subscribe,
leave a review and share it with colleagues or learners you think
would benefit, And do let us know your thoughts or who you'd
like to hear from next. A big thank you to Madeline for
sharing her insights and to the team behind Probation
Perspectives for making this podcast possible.
We'll be back soon with more conversations that shine a light
on the practise, purpose and people behind probation and
community justice. Until next time, take care.