Who is Behind The Safe Approach

Safety awareness is an ongoing process

Field workers in the helping professions, such as nursing or social work, are regularly exposed to interpersonal contact which places them at risk from hostile people.  Roughly 30 percent of all people working in this area are assaulted in the course of their duties.  Most of those social workers who have been killed have been field workers.  Yet few agencies train their personnel to face such risks.  No academic has ever written a book specifically intended to teach field workers how to deal with this problem.

Until now.  Veteran child protection worker, Janet Douglas, and police officer, Charles Ennis, have written The Safe Approach to fill this need.  This book walks the reader through methods of evaluating situations, recognizing behavioral cues which may precede a work place assault, working tactically with co-workers to reduce risks, and disengaging should a subject become physically hostile.

 

 Charles Ennis and Janet Douglas have almost 50 years of combined law enforcement and social work experience.  They have worked together for more than 10 years together investigating high-risk child abuse complaints where there were concerns about the potential for violence.  During his career, Ennis was a member of the Emergency Response Team Tactical Unit and the Gang Crime Unit for the Vancouver Police Department.  Douglas has been a frontline child protection social worker in Vancouver, BC, for the past 21 years, working with families in crisis.  The authors have trained numerous agencies and their staff on how to be safe when working in the field and co-wrote The Safe Approach:  Controlling Risk for Workers in the Helping Professions. (Idyll Arbor Publishing)

Det. Charles Ennis at the Justice Institute of BC