Joint Committee on Justice debate -
Tuesday, 8 Oct 2024

The purpose of this meeting is to engage with Dr. Sharon Lambert, who is a senior lecturer in applied psychology at University College Cork, as part of the committee's examination of the drivers of violence and criminality. On behalf of the committee I welcome her to the meeting. I look forward to hearing from her, as do all the members.

The format is that Dr. Lambert will be invited to make an opening statement of three minutes. We have seen the opening statement but we would like her to read it into the record. This will be followed by engagement with the members. Before I invite Dr. Lambert to deliver her opening statement, I must advise her regarding parliamentary privilege, which is also advised to every member, and every Chairman has to remind every person coming before committees of this.

Witnesses and members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable, or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identical person or entity they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

I will call Dr. Lambert to make her opening statement. I will then call on the members of the committee, in the order they indicate to me, to put their questions. We usually operate a rota system, which provides that each member is given six minutes to engage with our witnesses, but I will give leeway in respect of that if people want to go on longer than that. It is important to note that the time period members have is not just for their questions but also for the answers and responses. When all members have indicated and they have had their initial engagement, and time permitting, a second round will commence with members being given more time every three minutes for both questions and answers. I invite Dr. Lambert to make her opening statement and I thank her very much for attending.

Good afternoon to everyone. There is no one type of person who participates in violence and criminality. For example, we know that gender-based violence exists across all age groups and all socioeconomic brackets. There are different types of violence and each of these can be driven by different factors: community violence; domestic violence; and political violence. Attempts to reduce our understanding of violence to single factors fail to understand the full spectrum of reasons people participate in violent and criminal behaviour and is frequently used to stigmatise groups by virtue of their social class or ethnicity.

The accumulation of psychosocial burdens and risk factors in an individual’s environment are the most important determinant of involvement in offending behaviour. In other words, while there are biological, psychological and sociocultural risks during development, it is the wider life experiences which will increase or mediate the risk of offending. Individual development is situated within the wider context of one's environment, including the impact of physical, emotional, family, educational, situational, cultural or political factors.

Research consistently shows that age is a significant factor in violent and criminal behaviour. Criminal activity tends to peak during adolescence and early adulthood, and then declines as individuals age. This phenomenon is known as the age-crime curve and applies to a range of risky behaviours in adolescence such as driving, drug use, accidents, etc. Gender differences in violence and criminality are also well documented, with men being more likely to engage in violent and criminal behaviour than women. This disparity is attributed to various factors, including biological differences and socialisation processes.

The family is both a risk and protective factor and one of the most important interventions in a child’s life trajectory is how well a society supports a family system to function. Ensuring that the core needs of housing, health and education are met in turn ensures an environment for flourishing. Social conditions can be a driver for crime. Many conditions create hopelessness and potential psychological trauma, such as poverty, homelessness, experiences of social exclusion, and lack of access to education and employment. Victimisation is heavily featured in the histories of those who are criminally involved, where experiences of bullying or violence have resulted in the victim becoming a perpetrator.

Trauma, mental health and substance dependence are significant drivers of criminal behaviour and violence. A number of research projects conducted by us in the UCC school of applied psychology have highlighted the higher prevalence of childhood trauma experiences in people struggling with addiction and-or justice involvement. The Irish Prison Service estimates that approximately 70% of people come into prison with addiction or substance abuse problems. Addressing the drivers of violence and criminality requires a multifaceted approach that considers the complex interplay of individual, social and environmental factors. By implementing comprehensive prevention strategies, some of which have been mentioned in my written submission, with a focus on mental health, education, employment, social inclusion and community development, policymakers can create conditions that reduce the likelihood of criminal behaviour and promote safer, more cohesive societies.

Policies and practices that only consider justice-related responses to criminal behaviour incur a large cost on individuals and the State and are ineffective at targeting the drivers for violence. Many international approaches have moved to viewing violence as a public health issue requiring a public health response.

Dr. Lambert is very welcome. I will focus on violence. Particularly over the past couple of years I have begun to explore responses to violence in other jurisdictions. Ireland is potentially way behind in understanding the core drivers. People get what the core drivers of violence might be to some degree, but, to date, we have always had shaming and punitive responses to violence. Dr. Lambert's last comment was about moving violence into the realm of being a public health issue. In some cases and in some communities, it may even be a public health crisis. In Scotland and elsewhere, those involved work on the basis that violence is preventable and not inevitable. To some degree, some of us expect that violence is part of human psychology or a human response to things. Some of the environmental factors and maybe the unmet needs in relation to housing and health can obviously create a very stressed mind. People can act irrationally within those very stressed environments and when people's needs are unmet.

I have been looking extensively at the work in New Jersey, New York and Los Angeles. In understanding the core drivers of violence, much of that work indicates that shame, humiliation and unmet need are the core drivers, but the response is to introduce harsher penalties and laws. In his book Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others, the criminologist Dr. James Gilligan shows how the level of violence increases under the Republicans and decreases slightly under the Democrats but never actually reaches an appropriate level. Neither party ever reduces it to the point where it is felt in people's lives. That ties into how policy impacts violence in communities. For a long time, the Irish response has been to be harsher or have a harsher rhetoric. However, one of the harshest of regimes in relation to violence in the western world is America which has the death penalty and a life sentence results in someone spending the rest of their life in prison without parole. An environment which has the harshest of laws still has the highest rates of violence.

Based on Dr. Lambert's work, both academic and outside the academic space, what would it mean for Ireland to move into that public health space where we start working with people who may have violent histories in their past or may have been in the prison system for violence and offering a bridge for young men? She stated that statistics show that young people will age out of crime and violent behaviour. What would it mean for Ireland to move from harsher rhetoric and a harsher policy to adopting a public health approach? This has been done in Scotland and policing is on board with that. Obviously, policing, politics and policy must be on board with a public health approach to violence. I ask Dr. Lambert to elaborate on a public health approach to violence.

I will pick up on a few points the Senator raised. She mentioned people acting irrationally. Actually, it is not irrational; it is rational. The very basic thing here is about understanding the impact of stress and trauma on feelings, thinking and behaviour. On the outside it can look like it is very irrational behaviour and it can be very uncomfortable to watch, very unpleasant and sometimes scary. However, for the individual and for their brain, this is a completely rational response to a perceived threat. I am going to have to explain that.

When we are faced with any kind of threat or risk, our brain does exactly what it is supposed to do: it activates the fight or flight response system. If that system did not work, we would be in danger every time we get out of bed in the morning because we would get hurt. Unfortunately, for some people, depending on their individual experiences or the community they live in, their brain can be permanently set on fight or flight and so it is constantly scanning the environment. The brain is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing in saying there is danger and the person must react.

Regarding policies to respond to that, nobody when they are in that state when the fight or flight response system is activated can think properly because they are not getting enough blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking brain. Nobody in that moment thinks about the laws of the state and the consequences because the part of the brain that requires planning ahead and understanding consequences has gone offline. The Senator referred to America as an example. America has really harsh penalties but these have had no impact on levels of crime. It is because in that moment when somebody's brain is not working as well as it ought to be, it does not work as a deterrent.

Everybody wants less victimisation. When we say that there has been an increase in violent offending in a particular area or something and we talk about harsher penalties, the problem is that will not prevent victimisation. If we want to stop victimisation, we need to get in at prevention stage. This can be done through investment in children and families and in communities and education.

The Senator mentioned Scotland as an example when it comes to public health responses. Other areas of the UK have adopted trauma-aware policing and trauma-aware responses to violence.

I went to a presentation by a superintendent - it has left my mind where it was - and what he and his fellow officers noticed was that they were dealing with the same people over and over again. They could almost predict which children would be with them in four to five years. The problems were intergenerational trauma, poverty and exclusion from education. That policing unit started to collaborate with the health service, education and other community-based organisations to get in further in order that they could do what everybody wants to do, which is to prevent victimisation.

In respect of the victimisation piece, I do not know if Dr. Lambert agrees, but in Ireland there needs to be a better understanding that being a victim and being a perpetrator are not mutually exclusive groups. A person can be both a victim and a perpetrator. Unfortunately when it comes to men and violent crime or to violence in general in Ireland, the moment a person goes from being a young boy who is experiencing violence within the home or community, to an adolescent with more of a presence in the world, who is taller, and begins to exert the manifestation of their own victimisation by becoming a perpetrator of violence, we tend to have a cut-off point. We see a person who has perpetrated violence on people and may be in prison serving a long or life sentence, who may have taken a life. We then have a cut-off point, decide that person is a perpetrator now and ignore the history. In doing so, we do not ever meet the needs of that individual to be able to go on and heal in a particular way in order that we do not have that cycle of violence perpetuated in generation after generation.

In the sphere of academia but also societally and politically, does Dr. Lambert see any way in which we can - sensitively as obviously there are victims and when it comes to manslaughter or murder there is a family without a loved one – create safer societies? That is the aim. We do not create a safer society if we do not recognise the individual who has committed harm and work with them. From a campaign or learning perspective or even that of community workers - and I have watched those at service provision level exclude the hardest to reach or hardest to work with who are potentially engaging in particular behaviours – does Dr. Lambert have any thoughts on how to raise awareness and understanding of the issue and to develop a skill set in front-line service workers and people working in psychology and academia in order to change the narrative of who is a victim and who is a perpetrator, as well as on an understanding of the core drivers of violence and how, if we do not meet the needs of those people, we are perpetuating the cycle? It is difficult to find the question there, but how do we enhance and empower people to understand that if we do not work with those who have potentially engaged in harmful behaviours, we will not achieve anything overall? How do we establish an understanding in Ireland of the correlation between victims and perpetrators? They are not different groups, they are one and the same.

I have picked out two things from that and one is victim and perpetrator. The other is good victims and bad victims.

In respect of victim and perpetrator, having done studies ourselves and from applied psychology, we know that 63% of young people involved in Garda diversion programmes have experienced four or more events of adversity during childhood, in comparison with 12.5% of the general population. Approximately 74% of them have experienced the loss of a parent in comparison with 23% of the general population and 54% of them have lived with a parent with a mental health difficulty in comparison with 19.5% of the general population. Women in contact with the Probation Service were three times more likely to have lived in a house where they experienced domestic violence. When we talk about children, we often say that they witness domestic violence. They do not. They experience it. When you are in the presence of danger, your stress response system is activated. You experience that violence; you do not just witness it. Our studies show that women in contact with the Probation Service are six times more likely than the general population to have been sexually abused. So, we have people who are victims and perpetrators. As we know they are victims, if we could catch them before they become perpetrators, we would have fewer victims.

The other point I want to pick up on is the notion of good and bad victims. We know - this is not my personal opinion but is from research across many different jurisdictions - that justice is not applied equally all of the time. There are biases within all of us as human beings and there are biases within systems. We know that people from culturally and ethnically diverse backgrounds and working-class communities are much more likely to end up in court for an offence then somebody from another community. I would never talk about specific examples as that is not appropriate, but certainly we have examples in Ireland of people who were considered to be of good character but who committed offences. Those offences can be violent, yet they receive an entirely different approach from everybody because they might be involved in the community, or sport or business. We then look at somebody who has been socially excluded from education and employment and they are seen as more culpable for their crime when the reality is that the science of stress says that they are less so. They have fewer resources and are therefore more at risk. There is a notion of a good victim and a bad victim and that comes down to education and awareness around our own biases and values, as well as education and awareness about the level of victimisation that occurs in people who do problematic things.

I remember hearing Senator Ruane speak about trauma on a podcast a few years ago and saying that it is messy. There is a children's charity which has a picture of a crying child on its poster. When we see that, we want to help that child. In reality, that is not what a child looks like when they come to a service. They can be cursing and giving out and slamming doors. That is what trauma looks like. It is messy. It is not the withdrawn, very cute child on the poster. That is not what trauma looks like in reality.

I do not know whether it is a philosophical question or whether there is a theory on it, but my question is about the illusion of safety. I have become a little bit obsessed with the subject. When I am doing community work in certain environments, people will say that we need more police on the streets. I am aware that more police on the streets does not reduce instances of violence over time. There is a book I tell people to read when thinking about crime, called Reflections on the Guillotine, by Albert Camus. It describes a public spectacle where people are invited to the town hall and they watch the person in the guillotine but it never reduces murder or stops it. The moral spectacle that we create out of people does not reduce instances of crime as it never looks at the core drivers of the different instances such as we have been speaking about. That makes me think about communities, understandably, calling for visibility of gardaí on the streets or harsher penalties around things. I am thinking about the importance of actual safety versus the illusion of safety. If we are looking at a flat complex or concentrated community where there are a lot of people housed, there may be people in that area who are experiencing instances of violence all around them. They may not be direct targets of it but they are experiencing violence all around them nonetheless.

The presence of additional police on those streets would give them the illusion of safety, but not actual safety. How can we begin to engage with the public around the idea that we probably need more progressive, targeted responses for working class communities than just having police on the streets? That might give ordinary members of the community an instant feeling that something is happening and that is probably good for their health and nervous systems. I am not saying it does not have any benefits. What I am really asking is how important is the illusion of safety versus real safety. Off the top of Dr. Lambert's head, does she know whether there are studies of what public safety looks like and what are the indicators to measure real safety and imagined safety due to particular measures being taken?

What the research tells us is that people who are least at risk of experiencing victimisation are the ones who are most frightened of crime. The people who are most likely to be victimised are the least frightened. I travelled through places today to get here where there are congregations of people who are psychologically unwell. They are in places where they will not receive supports. For example, outside a train station is not where people will get support for psychological difficulties. I see that members of the public are frightened by those people. However, the reality is that those people who are very unwell are at high risk of being assaulted or murdered today. Some of them will be dead by Christmas. It might be due to an overdose or as a result of being victimised. It is a reality that we are frightened, but people who have a family member who is very unwell and people who have ever known anyone who was substance dependent might be less frightened because they can see the human behind that person and know that this is an uncomfortable behaviour to see, but behind it is someone's son, brother or husband. However, I accept that for the public it is a bit frightening.

One of the things I have felt has been needed for some time is some kind of public health campaign that challenges the stigma about people who are depressed or anxious. People who are involved in substance dependence are ending up in the criminal justice system. They are the people who look a little bit scary to members of the public, so having access to treatment services and mental health resources would reduce how they are when they are out in public and make them not look as disregulated as they do. People see them and say "That person is scary". It is easy for me to say, because I am a psychologist, but when I see it I recognise that people are emotionally disregulated. Their fight or flight response system is activated. I understand that, but people who do not know that will just think it is a scary person.

One thing that is interesting is the visibility of people with lived experience of victimisation and offending. A good example is "The Two Norries" podcast. There were two young men from the northside of Cork - they will be delighted I said "young" - who both have experience of the criminal justice system. It challenged a lot of people. I know that because we did a study on it. Many people got to see the face of someone who had come through recovery from mental health and addiction issues. They both have been incarcerated several times. There was a face. We could see in the data we collected that people said it changed some of their biases and that when they saw people on the street who were very unwell they imagined they had the potential to be one of these men who had come out the other end. One thing that could be done is a public health campaign about addiction being a mental health issue and people sometimes being very unwell.

I thank Dr. Lambert for her responses so far. We are discussing this in a week when there was a death in Cloverhill Prison. I extend my sympathies to the Salinger family. I will not make any further comment on that matter.

Some questions asked by Senator Ruane reminded me of working in Georgia in the US where one of the district attorneys said that he would seek the death penalty in every case where someone had been killed. Dr. Lambert will not be surprised to hear that the murder rate did not decrease in his area as a result.

On the discussion about Garda presence on the street, it is important and communities all over the State say the part of the mission statement of An Garda Síochána about addressing the fear of crime is just as important as addressing crime and its causes. People need to be given some reassurance. Through a large public order event or in cities and towns on a Saturday night, the presence of gardaí does make a difference.

Turning to Dr. Lambert's opening statement, will she elaborate on what she means by socialisation of male offenders? She mentioned the Garda diversion scheme. Should the age limits on it be revised upwards? Does she have a view on the importance of restorative justice in the justice system? She is on the Parole Board. Am I correct?

Does Dr. Lambert have any suggestions about how the workings of the Parole Board could be improved?

There is a huge problem with recidivism. How can that be tackled? I know from working in the courts and with local county councils that there is a serious problem with people being released from jail having a housing need. Dr. Lambert mentioned housing, health and education. Does she have any views on resettlement passports and what additional work should be done to limit recidivism as much as possible? Dr. Lambert probably has more up-to-date rates than I do, but probably 80% of people who are in court for committing serious crimes have been there before.

The first question was about socialisation of young men. That is about how we as a society construct notions of what it is to be a boy. If a boy is involved in fighting for example, and we say things like "boys will be boys", those kinds of things not only hurt women later in life, they hurt boys. There is a huge amount of social psychology about how we socialise boys and girls. If children in a classroom are asked to draw a picture of a soldier, they will draw a man. If they are asked to draw a picture of a nurse, they will draw a woman. We still have a society where we say men behave in a particular way.

I know from working in services where boys were fighting that, when boys fight, parents and-or others will say "boys will be boys", instead of trying to talk to them about the fact they should not be fighting.

That is socialisation and there is a huge amount of research on that from social psychology.

On the age of the Garda diversion projects, we know that the human brain is not fully formed until somewhere between the 25th and 27th year. If one looks at anything, suicide, for example-----

For male and female, but men, for socialisation and biological reasons, are at increased risk for risk-taking behaviour. If one looks at things like suicide, road traffic accidents or accidents by any cause, one will see that there is a graph, and at age 15 starts to increase, it peaks in the early 20s and then it starts to decrease. In law, 18 years of age is an adult but that does not mean anything in psychology terms and is just this blunt instrument. There are some young people who are incredibly mature and are not risk-takers and there are others who are. When we are talking about a 21-year-old, for example, they are not neurologically equal to a 40-year-old. When we apply laws for over-18s to a 21-year-old, we are asking an apple to be a pear because we are asking them to adjust to adult services when they cannot. We know that across a whole range of services.

For example, when young people transition from health services into adult services, many of them drop off and go missing because they cannot make that leap between services for children and adult services. The first time anybody ever looked at this was within the United States during the HIV epidemic because they were concerned about the number of young people who were under the age of 18 who were HIV positive and at the time there was no treatment. They were very concerned about the disease being transmitted. They looked and discovered that there was a whole group of people who, when they turned 18, just disappeared from the services in diabetes, in mental health care, etc. What is happening is that the brain is not adjusted yet. One does not wake up one morning on one's 18th birthday and start planning one's pension. That is something that comes with maturity and maturity is something that happens over time.

At 25 years of age. I say this with regard to all of these services such as mental health, homelessness and justice services. One should have children's services, young adult-specific services and then adult services. In a young adult-specific service, it is not appropriate to have a 25-year-old and 15-year-old in the same place, for example, but should have young adults from 17 to 25 years of age where we apply a developmentally appropriate lens. We understand that they are developmentally different from an older adult.

We did a study, for example, on young adults in homelessness a number of years ago. These were young people who were parents themselves but they were all under the age of 25. We spoke to those young people and to service providers and the service provider said that these young people were not able to navigate the homelessness systems and structures in the way that somebody who is older is. They were sometimes viewed as immature and demanding but that is developmentally appropriate for that age as one is still going through the developmental stage.

On restorative justice, I worked in a Garda diversion project myself before I became a psychologist and we did practice restorative justice and it was extremely effective. There is much great work going on with regard to murder in Maynooth looking at restorative justice practices and they are very effective. I do not think that one should do restorative justice practices when it has been a sexual offence because it depends and one has to be very careful about what one is doing in that regard.

On the high levels of recidivism, yes, they are. If one looks at the group which has the highest level of recidivism, it is the 18 to 25-year-old cohort. By having a developmental psychology lens on what we do, we would target that group and have different policies and practices for them.

The Deputy talked about housing. When I started working in community-based services, we never had a young person who was homeless. I moved into academia in 2015 and that year was the first time we had young people where we could not find somewhere for them to stay. These were young people who were experiencing a significant amount of emotional challenges. They were involved in drug use but were not involved in injecting and other high-risk practices. They ended up in homelessness services, in emergency accommodation and they deteriorated very quickly because of the trauma of being in an emergency accommodation. I do not know if the Deputy has ever visited an emergency shelter but one has a group of very unwell people all congregated in one place. It can be very scary.

Deputy Daly then asked me about the Parole Board recommendations. I will not say anything about that because I could not speak highly enough of the CEO and the chair on the work we did in the Parole Board. It may have plans itself to do a review of its work and I do not have permission to discuss that. I did not have it on my agenda, if the Deputy does not mind.

Yes, one has to be very careful about what one is doing because there are different types of sexual offending. If one has somebody, for example, who is a paedophile, that is an entirely different process in what is happening in their brain from other types of sexual offences. I am not saying "never" but there has to be extreme care.

On some sexual offending, particularly where that involves a sustained sexual interest in children as an example, sometimes some people when they participate in processes learn more about how to navigate services and it actually increases harm. So we have to be very careful that whoever is doing it is really clear about what type of sexual offence is being committed here, what the motivation is, how entrenched it is and what the likelihood of rehabilitation is in this case. Not all sexual offences are the same.

Yes. The nature of sexual offending has also changed. We now have more younger people engaged in sexual offending than we had before because young people, unfortunately, are being exposed to inappropriate material on the Internet. Their understanding of whether that is inappropriate content or not is challenging. There are young people who are involved in quite immature but harmful behaviour. One wants to ensure that they have a happy, healthy future too. It is about ensuring that whoever is involved in the process understands the difference.

When I worked in the Garda diversion project, we had people, young people, who were not prosecuted. For example, we had someone who had an intellectual disability.

Yes, this involved somebody with an intellectual disability and their capacity to understand the consequence of what they had done. They were interested in the idea of the opposite sex but their understanding of how the mechanics of that worked was non-existent. If that person had been convicted, they would have ended up going down a different route that may not have been therapeutic. They were considered for the diversion programme and never reoffended. A huge amount of supports were put in around them to help them and to teach about psychosexual development.

I thank Dr. Lambert for the presentation. I want to pick up on a couple of points. The issue of drugs arises in every town and village in the country. Young people owe drug dealers money and the dealers are going to the families looking for the money if the young people cannot pay. The issues of poverty, education and employment are central. As Dr. Lambert said, the fact we are dealing with the same people over and over again tells us we are doing something wrong. An issue that I have dealt with is that when young people turn 18, they are often on their own. While they have the same mental health issues and the same problems they had when they were 17, when the family could vouch for them, once they turn 18, they can nearly tell their family where to go. That is a big issue. The parents should still have a say in the lives of those young people, even when they become 18 or 21. There is a large cost to the State and individuals. It is when they are young that we need to invest money in kids, whether that is through education, youth facilities, community groups or mental health services. We need to put a lot more money into those services to help people when they are young.

When people have served their time and comes out of prison, they need some kind of outlet so their first option is not to go back in again. Again, this goes back to housing and services. It is very easy for people to end up back where they were. I have dealt with people who have addiction problems, whether drugs or alcohol, but who were trying to sort themselves out. The homeless services in County Meath are now looking to Drogheda for services but the only places available are in locations where people have to be accommodated with others who have addictions. It is very difficult for them to have any chance to get away to where they want to be.

While gardaí are not the answer to some things, a Garda presence is important. There are Garda stations across the country that are manned for just a couple of hours a week. If gardaí are on the beat and out and about, they know what is going on and they know people, but that is no longer the situation in many parts of the country.

I thank Dr. Lambert for her work. I agree with the point on investment in children and families.

The Deputy raised a similar point to that raised by Deputy Daly on the Garda presence. I understand that a perception of safety sometimes does matter to people and that is useful if we are also tackling the problem at the same time. If the Deputy said there is an issue with challenging behaviour in a certain town at nighttime, and it was decided to give €5 million to policing but €5 million is not given to mental health and addiction in schools, I would say that €5 million is wasted because it has created a perception of safety but not a reality of safety, and it has pushed costs down further. An important point is the impact on policing. If we do not have treatment beds available for people who are experiencing addiction and we do not have mental health supports for those involved in distressing incidents, what ends up happening is that the emergency services - An Garda Síochána, the ambulance services and the fire services - are the ones responding to those crises when they are not the services for that. The appropriate services are the addiction services and mental health services. It is not good for An Garda Síochána members to be dealing with social problems that are beyond their remit and training.

At present, gardaí tell us they do not have the resources to deal with street-level drug dealing. If there are more community facilities and clubs, such as boxing clubs and other sporting clubs, it will help to attract young people before they get involved. What we are doing at the moment does not seem to be working.

There have been very positive developments in the funding of counselling spaces in education. When we talk to people working in primary and secondary education, they are struggling with the number of young people who have mental health difficulties. If we do not get in there at that stage, they are at increased risk when leaving school, and once they leave school, they are at increased risk in respect of the other issues that we have spoken about, such as drug-related debt. That debt did not exist prior to 2014. It just did not happen at that stage and if people wanted to use drugs, they had to pay for them. This issue emerged and it is a very significant difficulty for young people and their parents. There are people all over the country taking drugs who can afford to, so they do not get into drug-related debt, but there are other young people who perhaps do not have resources and are getting themselves into difficulties.

I will ask some questions. I thank Dr. Lambert for her opening statement and her answers to the questions set by my colleagues, which have been very interesting. One of the issues is violence. In her answer to Senator Ruane, Dr. Lambert said that irrespective of its illegality or immorality, the use of violence is sometimes rational and, obviously, violence in self-defence is rational. Dr. Lambert has correctly identified that this is a problem that predominantly affects men between the ages of 15 and 30. Many young men think that problems they face in their lives can be resolved through the use of violence, whether it is where somebody may humiliate them and they think they can deal with the person through violence, whether they can sort out financial issues through violence, or whether they can make somebody who disagrees with them agree with them through violence. How do we approach that issue? How do we try to persuade younger men that although they may think it is rational to engage in violence to get their way, it is inappropriate to do so? I would have thought the main reason is that we have to respect other people, we cannot use violence against other people and it is totally unacceptable to do so. How do we convince younger men that it is wrong?

It goes back to what I said in reply to Senator Ruane earlier. She said “irrational” and the Chairman has just said “think”. When the Chairman says they “think” they can solve an issue by the use of violence, the problem is that when the violence is occurring, there is no thinking going on because the stress response system has impacted on their ability to think. We all have the ability to lose our temper when we are very stressed, or most people have. The issue is why some people go that far and others do not. There are many young men who do not participate in violence. As I said, it is the cumulative factors. The more stress that is put on the system of the human body, the less ability the person has to think straight. Stress has a cumulative impact.

We might say that somebody thinks that being involved in violence is a way to act because somebody has slighted them and this is how they are going to respond to that. There are other stressors, such as poverty, social exclusion, chronic bullying and so on.

The issue will not have occurred on its own. There will be other stressors. The more we reduce the stressors on people, the more we reduce the number of violent incidents.

Some people, and we all know such people, have a very wide window of tolerance where no matter what is going on and no matter what the stressor is, they have a plan B, C, D and E and they can think really straight. Other people have what we call a very narrow window of tolerance, so when there is a stressor they leave their window of tolerance. When we leave our window of tolerance we can become hyper-aroused, that is, angry, irrational and irritated, or we can become hypo-aroused. The latter are the people who become very withdrawn. What is really interesting is that when we talk about trauma - we know all the signs of trauma and stress and how they impact on a body - two people could experience the same trauma but one of those people can become hyper-aroused, so very irritated, and the other can become hypo-aroused, so very withdrawn. Those in one of those groups are very easy to deal with because they just withdraw and disappear but you have exactly the same thing going on except their ability to manage stress is gone.

I will use an extreme example, although Dr. Lambert might think this is unfair. Let us consider the example of gangland violence where somebody uses violence against another person in a different gang. I would have thought that the reason for that is that the person perpetrating the violence adopts a rational decision that their problems can be resolved by inflicting violence on this other person and it is not really that they are under stress.

They are usually under stress. It might be stress from within their own gang. Often, they are under pressure themselves and this situation has emerged from that. The reality is that most of those who are involved in those situations do not expect to live very long. I have spoken to people who have been involved in gangland violence. It is really sad to meet an 18-year-old or 19-year-old who does not imagine that they will ever reach 30 because they will be dead by the time they are 25. That is not a brain that is thinking rationally. There is no long-term thinking there. They have no expectations for their future, in that they expect to be dead by the time they are 25.

Sometimes when we have conversations about justice-related issues there is a lot of emotion attached to them. In terms of policy, one of the ways of feeling confident about policy is by making policy that is based on research. Sometimes that might prove challenging but what you will get in the long term is more effective results. I think everybody is on the same page. Everybody wants to reduce the number of people who are victimised. By having evidence-based policies, you will do that. I accept that it is very challenging when talking about issues that are really emotional but when we go back to the research we can definitely make our society safer for everybody. We must remember as well that the perpetrators we meet have been victims themselves.

I think that would be a blanket statement. There are always going to be exceptions to the rule. Sometimes people pose a risk to themselves and others, so some kind of detention is required. With those policies what we are doing is fire-fighting. When we are talking about that there has already been a victim. Policies that catch it earlier are what we need to prioritise.

If we look at the statistics, a couple of years ago Oberstown looked at the profile of the young people who were in detention there. It found that there were many children who had experienced really awful social situations and many of them were not in education. It cost a lot of money to detain them in Oberstown. If they are in Oberstown, there are potentially victims. What if that money had been invested in trauma-sensitive education, youth and community work? One of the best things for young people is having a really good youth worker. We know from data that what many young people need is one good adult, and youth workers are frequently that one good adult, and then supporting parents. Thinking about the youth diversion projects, it is a fact that 54% of young people had a parent with a mental health difficulty. Where a parent is unwell and unable to access the services they need, that has a profound impact on the child. Supporting children in the context of their families, in their communities, will reduce victimisation.

The answers Dr. Lambert has given are really good. She drew a distinction and referred to prevention. Basically, if somebody dies through violence, the response, as a policy, should not naturally be a harsher sentence and that is not saying the person should not be held accountable. There is obviously accountability for crimes that have happened and the fact that there is a victim. I am thinking of my friend who in the last year lost her son due to knife crime. The trial will start soon and she talks about the devastation of going to the graveyard. We have done well in Ireland in having big and open conversations on gender-based violence but we have not even begun to have a conversation about class and violence, and I do not mean in a stigmatising way. When my friend visits her son's grave in Bohernabreena cemetery in Tallaght and looks along the row of gravestones she sees the names of young men who have died by violence. Sometimes it is as if their lives do not matter because they are potentially seen as if they somehow chose to be in a situation or chose to be part of a gang.

I do not like the word “gangland” because it feels like it refers to something separate from us, that is over there and describes this other world, whereas it is actually part of our communities and our lives in a way that we do not want. I refer not to my friend's son but to the others buried down the row in Bohernabreena. What type of investment do we have in strategies that are not punitive but that are about being able to have interventions in the lives of young men who engage in violence? There are massive stressors in their lives. Most people would say that they carry a knife for protection. If you are carrying a knife for protection, you are indicating that you do not feel safe. Whether you are involved in what is known as gang activity or not, the fact that is you generally feel unsafe. Protection is the biggest reason as to why somebody might carry a weapon.

We had legislation recently which changed the sentencing around knife crime. I was trying to collate evidence on knife crime, but there does not seem to be a huge amount of research available. I found a systemic review that pulled what is out there together. I have done a little research into the No Knives Better Lives campaign in Scotland. Some of it did not seem very real because it kind of said that knife crime increased, but yet there just seems to be better policing data that is able to capture the instances of knife crime. What I struggled to pull from the research I looked at is the characteristics relating to or the drivers of knife crime. They do not seem to be different than other core drivers of crime. The one thing that stood out was that women were likely to use knives in the home, which sounds like potentially a reactive thing in terms of what is closest to them. It has been stated that knife crime is on the rise in Ireland. I do not know whether that is true because there does not seem to be a massive amount of research or data that captures the incidence of knife crime.

Should we differentiate between types of violence, whether it is knife crime, gender-based violence, community violence or gang violence? Is there a differentiation to be made between those things? Are the core drivers or stressors potentially the same across all types of violence? Is there a differentiation at all between them? Is gender-based violence a thing on its own? If so, are the others all one and the same?

Gender-based violence does not have the patterns that exist in other types of violence. Gender-based violence occurs in many different types of homes. When we look at the street level violence the Senator is talking about, we can often see that there are patterns. For example, age and socioeconomic patterns exist. Those patterns do not exist in the context of gender-based violence. It can be anybody in any home, anywhere in the country, irrespective of the resources they have. Therefore, it is different. It is about attitudes towards women and about power and control. The socialisation piece I spoke about earlier does not help that. Gender-based violence almost always occurs within the context of an intimate relationship. Somebody who is supposed to care about you and love you hurts you. The types of street level violence that occur tend to be quite spontaneous. It is spur of the moment stuff. It sometimes may seem planned but it is frequently on the spot, with people who have few internal and external resources. By internal resources, I mean the ability to regulate their emotions. Perpetrators of gender-based violence are often perceived outside of the home as being respectable individuals. They have the ability to control those emotions in different contexts, whereas young people who are experiencing multiple stressors can misbehave in various settings and look problematic much of the time, which is why they are then excluded from the things that would keep them safe, such as education and employment.

I do not know the statistics on knife crime in Ireland. Over the past ten years, however, I have regularly heard people stating that crime is out of control. It is when they do so that I look at the statistics. Regarding youth crime, for example, in the last report that came out from the Garda youth justice section, crime among young people was down in every category except sexual offending, which was the only category in which it had increased. It is back to the perception of crime. Sometimes we perceive that there is more of it than there actually is. Those young people the Senator is talking about are much more likely to be victims of crime. They may have been victims of crime five times before they became perpetrators.

Deputies Guirke and Daly referred to people feeling safe. I understand that, and I know why it is important. However, it is effectively meaningless if we do not have two streams happening at the same time. That is the problem. What we do quite frequently when there is an issue is we go to the one that will make people feel better straight away, and we sometimes perhaps neglect those longer term investments that will ultimately make the difference.

I thank Dr. Lambert for coming before committee. It has been a very interesting discussion. We may return to this topic again in the committee at a future date. I thank Dr. Lambert for attending and for her opening statement. With the agreement of the committee, I propose that we publish her statement on the committee’s website. Is that agreed? Agreed.

Updated calendars have been circulated to members. Is there any other business that members would like to discuss? No. In that case, we will adjourn until Tuesday, 22 October at 4 p.m., when we will meet in private session to deal with a number of housekeeping matters.