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PST 321 INSTRUCTOR'S NOTES WEEK ELEVEN- SCHOOL AND WORKPLACE VIOLENCEWelcome to week eleven. This week we cover areas that are familiar to all of us: school and the workplace. The negotiation process is the same in a workplace or school setting as it would be anywhere else. There are certain dynamics of the situation that change in the workplace or school. This is what we will address in this week’s lesson.
Workplace Violence Every workday, an estimated 16,400 threats are made, 723 workers are attacked, and 43,800 are harassed. These figures are from a May 1995 study by the Workplace Violence Research Institute, and they point out the real dangers, dangers employers and law enforcement cannot afford to ignore. Incidences such as these are many times the precursors to barricade/hostage situations. When most people hear of violence in the workplace, they tend to envision a disgruntled employee bringing an AK-47 to the job and shooting several people and then taking hostages. However, statistically most homicides that occur in the workplace in this country are armed robberies at convenience stores. Therefore, this is the area where you are most likely to be negotiating for the release of hostages in a workplace environment. Chapter eleven in the text covers customers that carry out violent acts in the workplace. It also discusses employee violence as well as violence against intimates at work. Usually, employee vs. employee violence is dealt with internally by the company and will rarely involve police action except for extreme cases. However, situations where intimates are stalking their victims at the workplace usually do involve police actions. Therefore, you may very well find yourself dealing with a hostage/barricade situation involving intimates in the workplace. When negotiating with a spouse or boy/girlfriend, I have found it best to try not to focus initial attention only on the perpetrator. Usually when you negotiate with a hostage taker you focus your attention on him to try to understand his motivation and how stable he is mentally. With a hostage situation involving victims that know the hostage taker intimately (not just in the workplace but domestics as well), I have found that it is best to focus on the relationship rather than the individual mentality of the hostage taker. Remember, we are trying to determine what motivated this person to go to the extreme of taking hostages and threatening to kill other human beings. In the case of intimates the quickest route to determine that motivation is usually through examining the pre-incident relationship or the perceived relationship between the hostage taker and the hostage(s). School Violence A 1996 Children's Institute International Poll of American Adolescents revealed that 47 percent of all teens believed their schools were becoming more violent, 10 percent feared being shot or hurt by classmates carrying weapons to schools, and more than 20 percent were afraid to go to restrooms because these unsupervised areas were frequent sites of student victimization (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1998). Because of the increase in school violence incidents in recent years, it is imperative that emergency personnel adopt policies and train to deal with different school violence contingencies. From the standpoint of negotiations there is little or no difference in the negotiation strategy where it applies to the school setting. As stated in the text, in many school hostage situations you may find yourself negotiating with a juvenile instead of an adult. This is the area where most negotiators will have to learn to remember to consider the audience while negotiating. “Leveling” (putting yourself on the intellectual level of the other person) comes into play in this situation. Be careful not to talk over or down to a juvenile hostage taker. You do not want to challenge or put pressure on the adolescent ego. The juvenile HT may decide that he needs to gain your respect by proving he is capable of violence. This “need to win” attitude mentioned in the text is a very real thing to a teenage adolescent (ask any parent of a teenager).
Negotiation Golden Rule : “A child doesn’t care how much you know until he knows how much you care.”
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