ABSTRACT
At the start of any training course I usually pose the question: ‘Have you experienced aggression within your work?’ At this stage many of the participants may not actually know what ‘aggression’ is. Some people think that aggression is purely physical, others that it involves either being purposefully damaged by another person or persons or having their lives put at risk. Some people think that an act is not really an aggressive act if it comes from someone who cannot understand what they are doing. Others think that ‘they’ (service users) have to do it as a means of expressing their frustration, and so, whatever the ‘it’ is, it is not categorised as aggression, even when this means that staff experience being scratched, pinched, spat at and so forth.
