This report treats violence against staff in the Norwegian Correctional Service during 2004, and is a part of a larger and continuous knowledge- and experience giving work. The report consists of four parts: preliminary considerations of relevance to the interpretation of the findings; descriptive thoroughfare of the 2004 status; the statistic description in light of selected,
relevant theoretical perspectives; and fi nally, an assembling and forward looking summary.

Function

The report may and shall cover several needs. It is based upon a new form that is worked out on a more thorough empirical, theoretical and methodological ground of concrete everyday conditions in the prisons, than before. The elaboration of the form will continue however, as it needs to be dynamic to refl ect everyday-life in the correctional service. One of the changes in the new form concerns the diff erentiation of violence from threats; we have found the differentiation misleading in this context, and have chosen to disregard it. Furthermore, possibilities for indentation in special topics and signifi cant sub-problems are given by the new arrangements.

This is of importance to the measures of care, as well as to works of preventive and subsequent nature. The form can now also be fi lled in a little time-demanding way, at the same time as it is possible to go more into detail and spend a good amount of time on it, if opportunity and need is at hand.

Methodological remarks

The report refl ects self-reporting and the victim’s reported experience of violence. From the strategy of self-reporting utilized, it follows that the report can not be said to give an objective and representative picture of all the actual violence that occurred against staff in the criminal
ward in 2004, but it reveals the informed-about violence. It is is not necessarily a weakness of the report, but on the contrary a strong po int if the report is read as a description of incidents the staff themselves experienced as violence. Besides, our understanding of the act of violence
is based upon seeing the individual and his surroundings/life-conditions as interrelated. In some singular cases, available reports has also been used for the studies.

Tendencies in the analysis

The problem of violence is complex and manifold, and must be understood from this point of departure. The most severe type of bodily assaults seems absent this time. It is, however, an important registration that (as former examinations showed) many struggle with significant problems in relation to the diff erent forms of violence they have been exposed to. Moreover it
is worth to notice tendencies in the point of time of the assault in connection with staff -situation, and for instance during locking up for the evening. With regards to the staff , it is important to remark that as many as 1/4 distinguished the violent assault as “distressing”, and 1/2 as “a little distressing”. Only 14 of 140 feel confi dent that the threat was not real, and not one of the exposed to psychical violence, has stated that the experience was not distressing. Many also suff er from after-eff ects - to which extent we can not know from this material. This must be taken seriously in the subsequent care. In addition, the response shows that there is still too
many who does not receive necessary debriefi ng. It seems like many is not confi dent with the routines of debriefi ng, and what debriefi ng imply. More eff ort must be put into this line of subsequent care, and better institutionalisation of debriefi ng as a system seems needed.