How to prevent young men’s violence — lecture by Linda Coates and Allan Wade

Many abuse-prevention materials are reproducing the problem. They’re making the abuse invisible, they’re reducing the responsibility of the offender, shifting blame to the victim, and minimizing the harm done by interpersonal violence.

Potential Trigger Warning — Some readers might find descriptions in the video or the transcription of the video triggering.

How to prevent young men’s violence — video lecture by Professors Linda Coates and Allan Wade, Canada, 2018

Below is the overhead displayed in the lecture. Apologies for the poor screenshot but it was the best I could get. Socio-ecological Model. From left to right it reads Individual, Relationship, Community, Societal.The descriptions below each area are:

Individual: Biological, Personal history, Demographic, Substance abuse, Experience of violence

Relationship: Peer relations, Intimate partners, Family members

Community: Schools, Workplaces, Neighbourhoods

Societal: Social and cultural norms, Men’s dominance, Child status, Economical and social inequality

Note added by ACFJ Editors: For readers who might be unfamiliar with ACFJ and the work of Allan Wade and Linda Coates — while most of the following transcript refers to female victims of abuse, we know there are male victims of abuse, although there are more female victims of abuse than male victims of abuse. When reading the following transcript, the reader might need to reverse the gender.

Transcription of the lecture, starting at 1:00

Linda Coates: We’ve been working together for a very long time. We started working together over 20 years ago and started developing the model that we now use in our work in doing research, intervention, and prevention in the area of violence. So we’ve slowly been articulating it over the last 20-some years. We are very speedy.

Allan Wade: Linda is primarily a researcher who’s been doing therapy treatment, and I’m primarily a therapist and consultant who’s been doing research. So we’ve been hanging out together for quite a long period of time. And trying to sort our way through the mine field that is interpersonal violence. What it means to me is I work with lots of individuals, couples, and families. I work with people who have been subjected to violence and also people who have perpetrated violence individually and in groups. I’ve been doing that for about 30 years. And I’m still trying to figure out how to do things in a good way.

So when we started talking together, Linda and I, we were doing microanalysis and face-to-face communication. We were both studying microanalysis where you are looking at very small segments of interaction very closely. Then I took that into the context of my work with individuals and families and started paying attention to a certain level of detail that I hadn’t noticed before. So I worked with people who were armed-robbery victims, victims of gang beatings, sexualized assaults, and so-called intimate partner violence — I guess that’s the degendered term. I normally say wife assault. — and other forms of violence, and violence in the prison camps in Canada; prison camps for aboriginal children that were originally called residential schools.

And so finding that when you look into real fine detail that help people respond during attacks, assaults of different kinds and immediately after, for us it’s very difficult to avoid the conclusion that where there is violence people always respond to the violence and resist in some way, shape, or form. Often that is not overt because if you’re an eight-year-old boy getting raped by your uncle the option of punching him in the face is not really viable. You’re going to get abused a lot worse so you might wear three pairs of pajamas to bed. You might get a stomach ache every time he comes over. You might refuse to eat anything he cooks. You might never have your photograph taken with him with your family. And these are all understandable as forms of resistance in that kind of context.

Coates: Once you begin looking at victim resistance what also becomes pretty inescapable is the fact that violence is very deliberate. And you can see that because when you look at victim resistance you can then see what the perpetrator does really, really clearly at the moment and before and later to suppress and overcome that resistance. So if you’re raping that eight-year-old boy you had to set it up so he would be alone. What did you do when he began to scream? Right? That’s why perpetrators put their hands over victims’ mouths or other things to make sure the victim can’t scream.

Wade: Abusers will isolate their partners and keep them away from family or control the money or take her shoes in the trunk of their car when they go to work so she can’t leave the house. Not just from some abstract need for power and control. It’s much more purposeful than that. Offenders, people who perpetrate violence, are already anticipating what kinds of social responses they might receive if they are caught and what kind of social responses the victim might receive if the violence is disclosed. So in other words when you look at violent behaviour you see not only deliberate suppression of the victim resistance, but you see deliberate intention to the social context and the possibility of social responses.

Coates: So what that meant for us is that we discovered pretty quickly that victims and perpetrators knew way more about violence, and were operating on a way more accurate set of assumptions about violence, then anything we read in any academic literature. So we understood that they had a lot to teach us.

Wade: Paradoxically it would seem that men who perpetrated violence are often operating under a much more accurate set of assumptions about victims then are the vast majority of criminal justice and mental health professionals. You know men are not real stupid. And there are reasons that men who have been or would be violent don’t go walking up to a woman in the coffee shop and say, “Hey, bitch, what do you say we go to my house and I’ll smack you around a little bit, call you a few dirty names — it will be great.” Because men know that women are not attracted to abusive men. Men actually know that. So I think as a field we have to probably catch up with the men a little bit — as odd as that sounds.

Coates: If you look at professional literature you’ll begin seeing all sorts of major problems with how we represent and do personal violence. For example, even though victims always resist, in the field they’re overwhelmingly portrayed as passive. And then that passivity is used to blame and pathologize them, which is of course one of the things that happens on a massive scale in the psychotherapy of violence.

Wade: In spite of Liz Kelly’s 1988 book (Surviving Sexual Violence) talking about women’s resistance, women are still massively portrayed as passive submissive: they don’t have boundaries, they don’t have enough self-esteem, they were raised in a dysfunctional family, they invite abuse or unconsciously attract it. You hear all kinds of stuff. All that claptrap comes from the false assumption that women do not respond to and resist violence. The other thing about this is that when you see how people respond and resist then you see how offenders work to overcome and suppress that resistance. What that actually means is that if you don’t have a clear analysis of how the victim responds or resists you also do not have a complete and clear analysis of violence. Because if you don’t see how that the victim is resisting you will not notice that the offender is acting deliberately to overcome and suppress that resistance and the more deliberate and strategic aspects of the abuse will recede from view.

Coates: So what happens then it is that perpetrators are very, very frequently portrayed as, for example, out of control. The other way they’re overwhelmingly portrayed is as if there are forces acting upon them compelling their behaviour. So once again they’re not responsible. In fact what we do here is we change victims into perpetrators of their own misfortunes and we turn perpetrators into victims — those outside forces that act upon him and make him do the things he does.

Wade: The resistance to violence is a response. Resistance is a response to violence, not an effect or an impact of violence. So if you want to learn how people resist you have to ask them questions about how they responded: what did they do? how did they manage? what was going on in their mind? what were they thinking? what were they concerned about at that point? So these are all responses to violence not effects or impacts of it. And the violence is often described as an effect of some other force: anger, dysfunctional childhood, tension, an argument that broke out, and socializing forces that act upon the person who perpetrates and compels them against the grain of their otherwise good character to use violence. So the language of effects and impacts, the language of determinism is used to conceal the victim resistance and to mitigate and reduce perpetrator responsibility. And the language of effects and impacts is without question the prevailing language of the helping professionals. That is to say in the prevailing language of the helping professions we are concealing victim resistance and reducing perpetrator responsibility.

Coates: As part of that overall problem we see a lot of problems with terminologies that are used to represent violence. For example, even though violence is unilateral — so it’s one thing one person does against at least one other person, against their will and well-being — it’s overwhelmingly represented as mutual — something that two people do together as partners. For example, forced oral contact, where you grab somebody and you force your mouth on theirs, that’s called a kiss. But it’s clearly not a kiss. Right? Stabbing somebody with a knife, is not a knife fight. Hitting someone over the head with a frying pan is not cooking.

Wade: Smacking someone upside the head with a 2 by 4 is not carpentry.

Coates: And attacking someone with your genitals is not sex. It is rape. It’s not unwanted sex. It’s not sex. It’s rape.

Wade: So terms like sexual violence or sexual assault are actually oxymorons. Apologies to New Zealanders and Australians — it’s like delicious marmite. These are terms that don’t belong in the same sentence. Or socially-just capitalism, those kind of terms that just don’t go together very well. So yet you find this type of terminology used a great deal of the time. Sexual violence — it could be violence done in a sexualized way, but it’s not sex. Sex is mutual and consensual. Violence is unilateral — an action by one person against another. And yet we find this kind of confusing terminology used a great deal of the time in courts, in psychological reports, in psychiatric reports, and child protection case files, in museums, so on and so forth.

Coates: So a lot of the prevention materials then are reproducing the problem. They’re making lots of this violence invisible, they’re reducing the responsibility of the offender, shifting blame to the victim, and minimizing the harm done by interpersonal violence.

We might ask or some people in the world [might ask] not so much as we are Canadians, how is this possible in Canada? Because we’re known on the world scene as having embraced human rights and so we think something different would be happening in Canada. But, of course, it’s not. And I think to understand why it’s happening on the scale that it is in Canada you need to know something about our history because we come from a colonial nation. And it still actively is a colonial nation. And so what does that mean? Well, I guess the brief history is, that you probably know a bit, the Europeans came over and colonized North America. And in Canada what that meant is that our First Nation’s people’s landlord was taken, people were organized into reserves, pieces of land that they were allowed to live on. They then set up what was called on the policy level the Indian Act. Where among many other atrocities committed in that Act was it gave the government the right to set up what they euphemistically called residential schools. These were prison camps and what they did is they would go in and kidnap the aboriginal children and force them into these prison camps where they were humiliated, debased, beaten, and raped.

Wade: Roughly 80% of the children who were in prison camps report being subjected to sexualized violence as well. And this occurred over a period of about 110 years. The last of these prison camps closed in 1992. By 1983 and the middle of the 1980’s most of them closed. So this is not the past. It’s so interesting in European museums you see two categories. We have history which is what we want to remember and we have the past, that we don’t. It’s interesting when we’re looking at this kind of history in language not only do you find that, say, sexualized violence and part of the violence is obscured by the use of language, but that it’s actually quite traditional in the Eurocentric culture of North America.

Coates: Euphemistically the term that is used in Canadian history is to call this settlement, which is of course a complete, complete misrepresentation, a false description of what was done. We wanted to talk to you about the colonial code, as we call it. So what did this result in? This resulted in a three-part message. The first is that as a European I am proficient — as an indigenous [aboriginal] person you are deficient. And I get to operate on you for your own benefit. I get to fix you.

Wade: So they say the culture that brought us prison camps brought us the talking cure. It would be surprising therefore if there isn’t an intimate linkage between the mental health professions and the colonialism. And indeed there is. So the colonial code says: you are deficient, you’re even a savage, aboriginal. I am proficient and white, closer to God. Therefore, I get to perform certain operations upon you for your own good. Turns out that that message is a mimic to much of the mental health professions as well. You are deficient, disorder, dysfunctional. You have a mental deficiency of some kind. I am proficient. I’m the master and engage in discourses in the mental health professions. Therefore I get to perform certain operations upon you: prescription, advising, seclusion, isolation. And I think that we can probably say that the same code of relationship probably characterizes gender relations. You are deficient: woman, whore.  I am proficient: male, powerful. Therefore, I have the right, the duty, the obligation, the space, the entitlement to perform operations upon you. So I don’t need consent. Before we get to teaching people what consent is we almost have to pre-step where we get to the point that consent matters. Because in the colonial code it doesn’t matter. You might try to obtain consent, but if you don’t, you don’t. But you go ahead.

Coates: So there is just misrepresentation after misrepresentation after misrepresentation. So we started studying some of that. In the area of sexualized violence against children, for example, the attacks on children are often called fondling, as if they have anything to do with affection. Men attacking women are often called a relationship or relationship violence or an abusive relationship. Complete misrepresentation. The predatory entrapment of children is often called ‘men taking advantage of the situation’.

Wade: A man forcing his penis into the body of a child is called ‘sex with child’. We have continual references to child prostitution which according to your own consent law and ours could not exist in principle. The same thing with sex tourism. You know it’s not about sex. It has nothing to do with sex. And it’s not about tourism. A whole bunch of people get on a plane and go to Thailand and children are dragged into hotels upon threat of the death of their families if they try to run away. Adults abuse them unspeakably, and we in the western nations call this ‘sex tourism’. We could probably have a committee to meet for six months to not come up with a more disturbing description. We are a direct collusion with offenders. That’s who we are protecting. We don’t need child prostitution or sex tourism laws, we need international child rape law.

Coates: In terms of prevention one of the things that we argue is we really need to pay attention to our social responses. So not only what the individual is doing, but what the rest of us are doing. We argue that social responses are the most important, potent preventative force.

Wade: So when you have been subjected to violence you phone up your folks and you say, “My husband hit me,”  and your folks say, “Honey, you made your bed you need to lie in it.”  You phone up the child protection worker and they come and apprehend the child from you because you won’t leave the man who has been abusive because you can’t control his behaviour. You phone the police and they want to come and they say something like, “How come you attract these guys?” or it’s going to be defined as a marital problem. And so there’s good literature that shows the vast majority of victims of violence — inter-partner violence, sexualized violence, and even interestingly armed robberies — report receiving negative social responses from authorities. This research also shows that the quality of social responses is the single best predictor of the level of victim distress; a better predictor than the severity of the violence, and a better predictor than the relationship between the victim and the offender. So that means if we are going to try to prevent violence we need to obviously reform institutional responses at every level.

Coates: We’d like to get to a point where perpetrators can actually predict that they would receive negative social responses if they choose to be violent. Once we have that in place it will go a long way towards prevention.

Wade: So if you are a woman and you’re beaten up by your husband and he decides to crawl on your body and, as one woman said to me, “have sex on me” after he beats you up — the difference between whether or not you knee him in the groin, punch him in the face and run out of the room and down the hallway, or whether or not you go limp in your body and go elsewhere and your mind — the difference is whether or not you think your neighbours or the police are going to help you. And if when you first disclose abuse your mother took you by the head and put your head underneath the water and said, “Your brother would never do that to you.” Do you think you’re going to tell somebody? Because when you tell somebody about violence your life gets worse not better. And most people on the ground understand that. We like to think that people’s lives get better when they disclose abuse, but you talk to group after group after group of people and that’s not what they’ll tell you. So we are asking people to come forward and their lives are getting worse.

Coates: So if we want to do prevention we‘ve got to have social responses which actually increase safety. In other words where there’s actually responses that the rest of us are standing in solidarity with the victim, and where we are giving swift and clear messages that this will not be tolerated and not accepted to perpetrators.

Wade: I had an interesting experience in the Northwest Territories a while ago. I was asked to go give a talk to a bunch of police. So I did because the women’s shelter told me to. So that’s about being an ally, right? Because you’re a garden variety, middle age, hetero-ish, sort of type of guy that people are often going to make space for you that they don’t make space for other people. And I can often say stuff that other people are going to get attacked for.

So I go to talk to the police and there’s one guy, big old guy about 23 years old, working in the north. The population is about 70% indigenous people. And he’s a white kid from the south and hasn’t been up there long. And I’m talking and I’m noticing that he’s slouching down in his chair like this with legs wide open, his arm over the back of the chair and he’s looking at me like “Hey, buddy, check out my package.” You know it’s this kind of performance of expansive masculinity. It’s like “I’m going to fuck all the fear from you.” Yeah, that’s what it’s about? So I’m thinking and looking at this guy and I’m getting pissed off. So naturally when you’re a therapist and you’re getting pissed off you go, “Oh, look at me I’m getting pissed off.” (audience laughter) Who the hell do I think I am to get pissed off. And then you are trying to carry on a conversation at the same time. And then, you know, you’re like, “Oh Allan, get out of your own way for goodness sake.” You get this internal dialogue going on here and that’s when you hope your parents rescue you or something like that. Anyway, so what I did is I said, “You know what I would like you to do is to actually give me an example of your police practice that you’re really proud of.” I got some great stories then left. (And thought, “Oh, good, I didn’t yell at that kid.”) Anyway, it occurs to me later that he wasn’t the problem. You know what I mean? Well, I was probably, but he wasn’t the problem. If you have a police officer, a young police officer behaving that way, the problem you have is command.

So then a little after this two police officers in a small town in the north of Canada get charged with raping a nurse. At the same time an aboriginal man dies in police custody. At the same time that aboriginal woman who had been abducted and held in a cabin for two days and repeatedly raped goes to court (the accused are in court) and the defense for the accused asks the judge for permission to ask her about her sexual history. The judge says okay. So the woman stands up and goes, “What?” The judge says, “Sit down.” She says, “You know what, Your Honour, fuck you.” And he says, “Sit down,” and she says, “Fuck you,” and she walks out of court. So this happens in a period of about three weeks. Now there’s a crisis. The police to their credit understand they have a crisis. They get in touch with the women’s organization. The women’s organization get in touch with myself and Kathy Richardson, and they say, “Will you facilitate a process with us of meeting with police?” So because of that experience with the young constable we say, “Well, yes, on one condition that the entire command structure of the police are at every meeting, Blackberrys turned off, no exception.” And they go, “Okay.” So we have the entire command structure of police and the young constables, and the young constables know they are under surveillance from the superintendent. Do you see what I mean? There’s a whole very powerful command structure. There’s good research in the States [the United States], by the way, that shows if you want to get police to change their behaviour, get their commander to tell them to. That’s way more effective then training them. However, it just operates that way, right? You got to get the power in the room. So we have this meeting every eight weeks for two days at a time for two years. And the police were completely overwhelmed by the generosity of the indigenous elders. They were totally defenseless.

Coates: We should also mention here the context. It was the police, the R.C.M.P. [Royal Canadian Mounted Police], who would go and they were the agent of the state that ripped away those children and sent them to the prison camps. So this is a very big thing — the generosity of the First Nations people.

Wade: Long story short — two years later we had just done an evaluation there. Now there are women sitting on the hiring committees of the police. They participate in the annual review of police performance. Police now contact the women’s shelter and the women’s coalition in the Yukon and White Horse before they make statements to the media. There are now police who operate a specialized unit and if they know that someone is going to come and try to arrest a woman because she’s not letting her children go visit with a violent man sometimes the police officer will phone up with a code: How are you doing today? Thank you (click). Let’s get that woman out of here. So you actually have police behaving as allies with women in a context of gender equality and problematic state responses. So, that’s an example of social change project, institutional change project, in the Yukon.

Coates: Which has created huge increases in safety for men and women and children in that area.

Now a different project we’d like to talk about is the “Men’s Desisting project.” A colleague of ours was working for a big national research firm and she contacted us because they had just gotten a contract to do this kind of anti-violence project where the goal of the project was to get men to stop being violent. And so we were brought in as expert consultants on the project and so what we said, “You know what? Probably the best thing you can do here, rather than have our ideas about how men could stop being violent, was why don’t you interview the men up north (because this was a project for men up north). Why don’t you find men in the community who have desisted being violent and interview them on how they did it. And so that’s what they did. They went around and interviewed all these men and they made a DVD of the men’s stories. And then. . .

Wade:  . . .they looked to certain themes. There’s a really interesting part in it where — one of the themes was spirituality, very important for our aboriginal folks — one man was talking about spirituality and said, “Yeah spirituality, religion. I was raised to have religion. Yeah, religion is for people who don’t want to go to hell. Spirituality, that’s for people who have been there.” That’s not a bad analysis.

Audience member: I think it’s important because that spirituality is a sense of belonging, and that’s missing often from life.

Wade: Yeah, totally.

Coates: So then a really interesting thing happened, which was that word kind of got out about this DVD. So there is this really interesting police officer operating in this remote area. So he was already doing really interesting, really dignified police work. And so one of the things that happened is that everything is flown into these remote communities. There aren’t roads that function in the summertime. And he would get a manifest that would list whether alcohol was coming into this community or not.

Wade: Of course people living there didn’t understand that. They thought they were sneaking in booze, but the police knew who is getting what.

Coates: So, of course, this is a problem because what tended to happen is that adults will get drunk and the children would be at risk of all sorts of things. So what this police officer started doing is when he found out that alcohol was coming in — he, of course, would know whose package it was — he started going to the families and saying, “Okay, what are you going to do this weekend? How are your children going to be safe here? What conditions have you put in place for the safety on your children?” And so eventually what it got to is when people brought in alcohol, they would go to the police officer and say, “Okay, this weekend we’re basically going to have a party. Can you help us out with the kids?” So in that community like the schools and things like that were acting as kinds of shelters and spots of safety for the children. So things will be arranged so the children could be kept safe while they had these parties. So through this police officer it got known about this DVD that all these men talking about how they stopped being violent. And how they had been moving on in their lives and acting in very kind of different ways. And so the men in the community got interested. And they got copies of the DVD and they started watching them. And they started circulating it around. And so what happened in the community is that the levels of violence decreased.

Wade: The elementary school became a shelter for the kids. And like in the Yukon, the women’s shelter is called the bingo hall. And for the library — it turns out that the librarian for about ten years was having a private shelter in her house. I knew her for ten years before she told me that. So you know things are done in an informal way like this — women are working for safety all the time. That kind of thing is going on. And another thing that happened later is this guy, a police officer who’s been there for a long time, goes to this big gathering, a big healing gathering. There’s like 600 people there, and there was not supposed to be any drinking. When this aboriginal guy starts drinking the other people there start getting concerned. So the police officer goes up to him and he says, “Hey, Billy, you know you’re not supposed be drinking. Hey, how about you hop into my car and I’ll take you back to your house?” And Billy says, “I don’t want to get in your car.” So the police officer, understanding dignity, says, “Okay, I’ll tell you what. How about I go drive over to your house. I’ll meet you there. So he just gets in the car and drives to the house. And Billy walks over to the house. And he’s a little bit pissed, but before he walks in the house he comes over and reaches his hand into the window and goes, “Thanks man.” That’s dignified police work. Yeah, I love that. So that created a whole bunch of better solidarity, right? Between average men and police officers which was kind of sorely lacking.

Coates: So you can see those projects kind of span this level across the socio-ecological model of responding to violence.

Wade: And that concludes the dignified presentation. Are there any questions?

Coates: Three minutes for questions or comments or anything like that.

Wade: Accusations are welcome.

Audience member: In the example of the crisis and getting the hierarchy to buy in — In your experience does it take a crisis to get the hierarchy to buy in?

Wade: In my area, yes. I couldn’t speak for other places, but what happens is that there are these coordinated response teams that are supposed to happen — police, nurses, shelters. All these kinds of folks are suppose to get together. But what happens often is that the police are highly unpredictable so maybe the third or fourth in command would show up sometimes. People organizing the meeting never know who’s going to come. Could be a different person each week. So in other words they would, rather than committing themselves institutionally to being a key player in, they kind of show up — maybe they’ll show up — and that’s a serious problem. And you know you’re working for the women’s shelter and you need the cops. You need to be working with them, but you never know if they are going to show up. So that means you don’t trust them. You know they’re not committed. You know you can’t rely on them. And you know they don’t take violence against women seriously. And so at the same time it’s hard to confront them because you’re trying to get cooperation from them. So it creates a tricky situation. We need to have governments tell the superintendents of police, “You need to be at every meeting. You know what I mean and that’s not optional. That’s a part of your job.” That’s what needs to happen in my area. Maybe it does in other places.

***

Dr. Allan Wade is an internationally recognized expert on responses to interpersonal violence, broadly defined. He and his colleagues at the Centre for Response-Based Practice in Canada, conduct original research and analysis on social responses by state institutions, such as courts, specialized panels, police, child protection authorities, and others. They also provide direct services to individuals and families where interpersonal violence is at issue. Dr. Wade has received numerous awards for his work in Canada: The President’s award of the B.C. Association of Clinical Counselors for Distinguished Contributions to Counseling Psychology; the Tulip award for Distinguished Community Collaboration of the Calgary Women’s Emergency Shelter; the Innovative Practice award from the British Columbia Ministry for Children and Family Development (Child Protective Services); in partnership with Dr. Linda Coates, the award for Best Student Paper from the Canadian Psychological Association. Recently, Dr. Wade was on the Expert Panel on Domestic Violence and Family Law, in British Columbia, where he served with senior Judges and other experts.

He is an expert witness in forensic proceedings involving domestic and other forms of violence. With colleague Dr. Cathy Richardson, Dr. Wade designed and facilitated a two-year project with R.C.M.P. (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and Indigenous women’s organizations, to improve Police responses to Indigenous women and children in remote communities. The Government of the North West Territories invited Dr. Wade and Dr. Linda Coates to analyze conversations between Justices of the Peace and women requesting Emergency Protection Orders.

For many years, Dr. Wade has served as an advocate and consultant for Indigenous people, and their legal counsel, involved in the “truth and reconciliation” process, to provide redress to Indigenous people who endured violence in State and Church run “residential schools” in Canada. In this context, Dr. Wade had the opportunity to closely examine the procedures developed by the State, and the responses to those procedures, of the Indigenous people who participated.

Dr. Wade is in contact with academics and professionals internationally who study similar state procedures. At the same time, Dr. Wade continues to practice family therapy in his home community, on Vancouver Island. He believes the close work with local families is the core of his practice and informs his research and international consulting work. Dr. Wade provides training to police, lawyers, judges, psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, child protection teams, shelter and transition house teams, and administrators. Dr. Wade is no stranger to the Australian context. He consults and presents regularly in Western Australia, Victoria and N.S.W. and is able to review work in Australia in relation to practice in other parts of the world.

Dr. Wade and colleagues have published numerous articles and book chapters, many of which can be viewed at Response-Based Practice.