Edition 35 - 13th May 2024

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Are you feeling safe and secure?

The terms safety and security are often used either together or confused as being the same thing.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, security is the ‘protection of a person, building, organisation, or country against threats such as crime or attacks by foreign countries’, whilst safety is defined as ‘a state of being protected from danger or harm’.

In simple terms, we might argue that safety is a feeling, whilst security is a physical action.

Feeling safe is critical because without it, our performance drops. This applies at home, at work and in public life. Feeling unsafe causes us to be distracted. An example might be a professional footballer, playing for their country in an international tournament overseas. If they feel that their families are unsafe at home, as criminals who know they are overseas may target their homes, they are unlikely to be fully focussed on the game. Closer to home, a person going to work where they are subjected to harassment or bullying, will be feeling anxious and unsafe, and are unlikely to perform at their best.

You can make sure that your home is 100% secure, ensuring that you have the right windows and doors, proper functioning locks, alarm systems and all the other elements of home security. Despite that, you may still feel unsafe.

Safety and security are not always aligned. When staying in a hotel, you may have been advised to use a door stop to prevent anyone forcing the door open. However, that advice may contravene health and safety and delay the fire service entering your room if there is a fire, causing you to be less safe.

A business may open the fire doors in the event of an alarm to ensure a speedy evacuation, allowing an intruder unfettered access to the building to commit a crime.

One key concern of many people is unwanted attention, which can develop into overly intrusive, harassment and even stalking behaviour. A biproduct of unwanted attention are the feelings of paranoia and hypervigilance. This can cause people to feel constantly unsafe, reacting to unknown noises, with their mind going to dark places and causing them to feel anxious. This constant feeling of being unsafe is draining and will cause them to lose sleep, question their decision-making, and act differently. It might be argued that safety is a perception rather than a reality; it’s an internal experience.

This was apparent when I looked after MPs in the UK Parliament during the Brexit debates. Despite working in a secure site with armed police officers and a dedicated policing team, some MPs felt unsafe due to the volume and toxicity of abuse they were receiving. This then caused some to question how they were going to vote on a Brexit debate, as they felt that by voting with their conscience, they’d attract further abuse and threats.

Communicated threats are often just ‘noise’ rather than a sign of an impending incident. Additional security may cause some to feel less safe and is unlikely to tackle the actual cause of concern, acting as a sticking plaster, when what is required, is the problem to be solved.

These feelings of being unsafe were understandably increased following the murder of Jo Cox MP, despite the level of security having increased significantly.

I remember being first posted to Northern Ireland as a teenager soldier fresh out of recruit training. I arrived at Belfast International Airport and was driven from there to where I would be based. The general feeling amongst our group was one of apprehension and expectancy of seeing bomb craters and soldiers everywhere. We were being deployed as ‘security forces’; my perceptions were quite different from reality. Initially, I felt scared, as if armed gunmen would immediately confront me. As I became more experienced, I felt safer and less scared. Nothing had changed other than my perceptions, my feelings, and my skills. The levels of security hadn’t changed. I had.

The murder of Sarah Everard has had a significant impact on how safe some women feel in the UK. In that specific case, the very people they should be able to trust, the police, had, in fact, betrayed that trust and became the monster they feared. That incident was followed by several others that further damaged the trust the police previously enjoyed, causing some women to publicly state that they would not approach or trust a male police officer in the event of an emergency. The reality was, and remains, that most police officers are good, honest, hardworking, and trustworthy, but the perception has changed.

Organisations spend fortunes on their security protocols, with fencing, CCTV, alarms, biometric passes, and a team of security professionals, but the same investment is not always made in their employees feeling safe from harassment, bullying and toxic behaviour.

The key to safety and security is to find a balance where they act in harmony, with one supporting the other.

Next public speaking appearance - Wednesday 22 May 2024.

Click here for tickets.

The Defuse Podcast - Psychology 101 - Part 1 - Demystifying Psychological Labels: A Deep Dive into Narcissism, Psychopathy, and Personality Disorders with Dr. Caroline Logan

In this episode, the first of a two part series, we learn about what exactly a psychologist is, the differences between a Clinical and a Forensic Psychologist. Dr Logan talks to us about the meaning of psychological terms such as personality disorders such as narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, whether they are the product of nature or nurture and he those affected behave.

Caroline Logan is a Consultant Forensic Clinical Psychologist.

For nearly 30 years, she has worked as a researcher and honorary senior lecturer at the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester in the UK, as a lead clinician in secure forensic mental health services in the north of England and Norway, and as a consultant/contractor with law enforcement services in the UK and elsewhere.

Dr Logan has ongoing clinical and research interests in personality disorder (including psychopathy), risk, violent extremism, and forensic clinical interviewing, and she has a special interest in gender issues in the range of offending behaviour.

She has published five books and over 70 articles on these subjects, including?Violent Extremism: A Handbook of Risk Assessment and Management?[uclpress.co.uk], co-edited with Randy Borum and Paul Gill, published in November 2023, and a second edition of?Managing Clinical Risk: A Guide to Effective Practice?[routledge.com], co-edited with Lorraine Johnstone, published in December 2023.??

Click here to listen and download this episode.

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