Dr. Amanda McCormick discusses youth crime, systemic racism, intimate partner violence, and the complexities of gambling addiction, all within the framework of the criminal justice system.
Dr. Amanda McCormick is an Associate Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, specializing in Criminology and Criminal Justice. She is deeply involved in research on policing strategies, family violence, and at-risk youth, among other public safety issues. With over 30 research projects and numerous publications to her name, she also actively participates in committees focused on domestic violence awareness. Dr. McCormick teaches various courses and is currently working on several research projects centered on intimate partner violence.
Dr. Amanda McCormick discusses youth crime, systemic racism, intimate partner violence, and the complexities of gambling addiction, all within the framework of the criminal justice system.
Dr. Amanda McCormick is an Associate Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, specializing in Criminology and Criminal Justice. She is deeply involved in research on policing strategies, family violence, and at-risk youth, among other public safety issues. With over 30 research projects and numerous publications to her name, she also actively participates in committees focused on domestic violence awareness. Dr. McCormick teaches various courses and is currently working on several research projects centered on intimate partner violence.
Welcome back to another episode of the Bigger than Me podcast. Here is your host, Aaron. Crime has always been a fascinating topic to me. Today we will be exploring youth crime, policing, intimate partner violence and gambling. My guest today is Dr Amanda McCormack. Amanda, it's such a pleasure to be sitting down with you. I'm so excited. These are all topics that I care so much about. Would you mind introducing yourself?
Amanda McCormick:Sure, thanks. Hi, I'm Dr Amanda McCormack. I'm an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of the Fraser Valley. I've been there for many years now, actually since about 2009. Can we start with?
Aaron Pete:what made you interested in crime? It's a guilty pleasure for so many. Netflix knows it. They know our streaming habits. What made you interested?
Amanda McCormick:Well, it's a job that's never going to end. I know there's a lot of work we can do to reduce crime, prevent crime. There's a lot of things that we need evidence-based practice. We need to know what's causing these problems so we can address them and prevent these things from happening in the future. But I kind of came into this backwards. I actually started out doing a business degree at Quantland, so this is a very different approach for me. I wanted to go into tourism, I wanted to learn languages, I wanted to travel the world, and then I had to do math and I decided this was not the career path for me. So I ended up taking courses that I just thought could be interesting. I just wanted to learn a little bit more about different concepts in the world, and I took a criminology class and just fell in love with the content. It just clicked, it just made sense, and then that was my new career path from there so switched over to SFU, to a degree, and kept on going until my PhD was finished.
Aaron Pete:What are some of the stand-out topics? Crime is so complex and there's so many different areas. What were some of the stand-out topics for you?
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, again, I've kind of switched my approach. So there's different ways to approach criminology and the understanding of what causes deviance. Sure you remember that from your time at U of E. So there's sociological explanations, so looking at how society contributes to crime. There's psychological explanations, so mental health issues, for example. We're moving into biology, geography, so there's many different approaches you can take. I've always been more of the crimpsyke kind of approach, so trying to understand how even very early on during development, prenatal development, things can happen that can actually set you on a antisocial trajectory without interventions happening or appropriate sorts of supports as you're growing up. These are children that are very vulnerable and unfortunately that's the pathway that they may be set on for life. So understanding that and how to do those interventions and prevent that pathway from being followed was really intriguing for me.
Aaron Pete:Let's start there. What are some of the stand-out pieces for you that you think of when we're talking about?
Amanda McCormick:this Sure. So when we're talking about prenatal development, for example, there's things that can go wrong with just malnutrition, for example, people not knowing how to take care of themselves. Early birth can be a problem as well, because it can increase risk for low self-control, for example, is something that's been associated with birth-related complications and lack of malnutrition, or malnutrition, what not. And then there's things that can go wrong during the birth process and after the birth process. It's actually kind of frightening as a parent to think about all the ways that you can actually kind of set your child off on the wrong pathway for life. So, yeah, so when we're talking about early childhood, I think that's where a lot of the focus is on now.
Amanda McCormick:So you've had a baby. You need to attach to that baby, you need to care for that baby, you need to show that baby essentially that you'll be there for it when it needs you. That's the foundation of attachment and then growing up, just being there, being an authoritative parent. So setting expectations for your child, helping them to reach those expectations and not abusing them are some of the key ingredients to having that successful. You know, pro-social sort of development happening Is there a particular crime.
Aaron Pete:When you're talking about this, I'm thinking of people who struggle with delayed gratification, and that's what you're sort of talking about. Less the financial crimes and people planning things like that. It's more of these more reactionary type crimes.
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, we're having an issue with what's called prolific offenders, and so these are people that they may have significant addiction issues and often that stems from these challenges with low self-control. But what we're really understanding is it all comes down to early childhood trauma and the experiences that children are unfortunately put through via ACEs. I don't know if you've heard of ACEs before, but it's adverse childhood experiences. So these are things that happen really early in life and there's a variety of them that have been identified. They include child neglect, abuse of children. It can include things as well like a parent being incarcerated or having contact with a criminal justice system, being removed from the home, parents abusing substances, mental health issues, time in child welfare. There's a whole host of things that can contribute towards ACEs, which actually is known now to impact your neurodevelopment. So basically, it impacts the way that your brain is developing and puts you at risk of things like, again, low self-control, impulsive types of behaviors and a desire for that instant gratification.
Aaron Pete:When we think of this, it seems like a domino effect and everybody wants to feel like they're in control of their own destiny, that they're free to make their own decisions. But things start to move you on a path and it can be hard to get off this path and carve out a new one. How much of this is determining people's futures? How much freedom do they have to steer themselves in a different direction?
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, well, you know some of the things that we've learned about early interventions and support, so that if you identify that there's an issue and you support that family through whatever the sports are that they need whether it's a psychologist or social workers get involved and provide supports for the family as well.
Amanda McCormick:Those are things that can help wrap the child with these different interventions and deflect that pathway from happening. So it certainly isn't setting you in stone. This is the way you know, the path you're always going to follow. There are things that we can do and we know some of the things that work. The challenge is the funding right being able to provide funding for, you know, nurses to visit families, for example, or families to be able to put their children into preschool. That costs money and it's a lot of money and so many parents, you know, cannot afford that, and a lot of parents may choose in the end to stay home because they can't afford to put their child in a daycare or preschool setting, which is absolutely fine, but then you're lacking some of that social development potentially.
Aaron Pete:Do you see this as working with individuals you can see it in them or is this just a checklist that we go off of and we go? You're starting to show some signs of concerns here, and this is what's concerning me, Like how much of this can you see in a person or in a child and go? This person might not be on the right path.
Amanda McCormick:So nothing is set in stone, but certainly some things are harder to address than others. So if you have underlying mental health conditions that are more biological in nature, you know there may be medications that can help, but it depends on the underlying condition. So I years ago developed a class at UFV called Psychopathy in the Criminal Justice System and that's where we have more of a personality disorder which is much harder to treat than something like an underlying, you know, anxiety condition for example, where you can go through treatment and you can go through, you can take some medication and, you know, learn strategies, cognitive, behavioral strategies that can help. Something that's more of a personality disorder is much harder to address and fix but thankfully that's relatively uncommon.
Aaron Pete:Right and when we're dealing with people. How often are we seeing significant changes? Is it on average that we're able to steer people out of this life, or is there a lot of people who are disadvantaged at childhood who end up unfortunately ending up in these circumstances?
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, again, that depends. It's hard to say you can't like. Even two children growing up in the same family can follow completely different pathways based on their experiences. So while earlier I said I tend to follow more of a psychological sort of approach to understanding crime and deviance, that is not to say that I mean there's interactions, right. So the way that your mental health is can interact with the environment that you're surrounded by.
Amanda McCormick:You know, if you have, you're born into a family where there's a higher risk for anxiety or depression, for example, but you have access to parks, you know, and lots of nature. You get lots of physical exercise and sleep. You have, you know, a role model like a preschool teacher. There's lots of ways that we can address these challenges and put those kids back on those pathways. So I think I don't know if you're going to ask me about it later but one of the things that we're seeing a lot of success with now actually is our Youth Criminal Justice Act and how we're trying to identify youth who are more vulnerable for those kinds of pathways and actually address what the underlying reasons are for that sort of deviant pathway or criminality, and we're having a lot of success. So very few youth these days are actually incarcerated in our Youth Criminal Justice System.
Aaron Pete:Can you contrast that with what we were doing previously?
Amanda McCormick:We had actually higher incarceration rates for youth in Canada that we did in the United States, which is a pretty shocking statistic that people aren't aware of. But one of the challenges that we talked a little bit about self-control, and you see lower levels of self-control amongst youth who are involved in crime and deviance, and so, if you think about that, you've got a youth who might have come into conflict with the justice system. Maybe they broke into a car or they tagged a building with graffiti, for example, under our previous Youth, young Offenders Act. What might have happened is that youth might have been held in custody temporarily, they might have even got a custody sentence where they're being exposed to a variety of different types of youth and they're coming out with a record or they're released into the community, but they're given conditions that they have to abide by. These might be don't go to this area, don't be out at night time, don't hang out with certain people.
Amanda McCormick:But these are youth who are wanting to spend time with their friends and have fun and they're not going to be constrained by these requests that they see from the criminal justice system, and so they would violate those conditions and what would happen is then they would get charges for violating probation, for example, and then they'd be back in the custody center, and so it ended up creating this very long cycle where kids were in and out and getting what are known as administrative criminal histories so they're not actually committing violent offenses, but they are violating their probation order and going to custody for that, and then it creates a cycle so we're not doing that any longer. The ability to hold a youth in custody is very restricted and most youth now, I think probation officers are educated to work with that family to try to find solutions that are outside of the criminal justice system and not just revoke their bail, for example, and put them back in the custody.
Aaron Pete:There was this show called like Scaring you Straight, trying to move people and show them what a violent criminal offender looks like. To get them scared, so they go. I don't want to go down that path and avoid it. It wasn't very successful.
Amanda McCormick:No, the research on those programs show that for the most part they don't work. They don't actually effectively scare youth off, because most youth don't ever think they're going to be in that position. Maybe they think they won't be caught, maybe they don't think that the behavior that they engage in is serious enough to warrant those kinds of outcomes. They just don't perceive it as being relevant to them. And it's similar to the DARE program, right? So the DARE program wasn't very effective because, you know, police officers would come into schools and tell kids this is what's going to happen if you use drugs and then they use marijuana and nothing happens. And they don't see that connection, they don't see the warning as being realistic. They're just trying to scare me. So they underestimate sort of you know what might have as a result of these kinds of behaviors and they just don't apply it to themselves.
Aaron Pete:So it doesn't work. This is really interesting to me because we often don't think about broad policy implications when we talk about being tough on crime or being soft on crime. It's hard to delineate whether or not things are working, because we have a felt sense that things are less safe right now. There's a lot in the media about not feeling as safe, and so when you say like that we're putting less people in custody, it can feel like, well, I feel like things are less safe right now, so are these policies working? How do you process that when you see this in the news and maybe the research isn't overlapping with how people are feeling?
Amanda McCormick:It's different when you're looking at the youth system versus the adult system. I think, again, we've seen a lot of success since the YCGA came in in 2003. For many youth not for all youth we're still seeing over incarceration of Indigenous youth, for example. That's still an ongoing issue, but for the most part, we are seeing these massive declines in custody, and we are seeing that youth are being successfully rehabilitated through the various programs and connections that they're making. So we are seeing a lot of success there.
Amanda McCormick:But, of course, when you have a youth or a gang of youth or a group of youth who engage in something that is more shocking or unusual, the media is going to pick up on that and they're going to give it more of the coverage, because it's sensationalized and people are drawn to that kind of content. What you need to look at, though, are whether the statistics support whether or not violent crime is increasing, and it hasn't been for youth. Another thing that comes with policy change. So we saw an uptick in I think it was sexual assault committed by youth, but that was actually not a real uptick in offenses. It was the way that these files were being coded by police and recorded in statistics. It was just a definitional change, so you have to be aware of how these kinds of data are collected, how they're defined and how that might change or impact the policies.
Aaron Pete:Interesting. You mentioned that over-incarceration of Indigenous people, youth specifically. This is a complicated one for me, as I am a native court worker and there's so many challenges with this topic, one of which is over-incarceration. Can you describe that?
Amanda McCormick:So when you have, say, let's, 4 or 5% of Indigenous youth in the Canadian population yet they make up, you know, over a third of the youth correctional facilities it will range as well. Bc has a certain percentage, saskatchewan will be higher. For example, that's over-incarceration, so they're represented in the prison population at a much higher rate than they should be, given their proportion in the population. And there's so many complex factors that go into that. Obviously there's concerns around systemic racism and that Indigenous youth are more likely to receive charges late against them, more likely to be convicted. They might already have a longer criminal history and so the court is more likely to go towards a custodial sentence.
Amanda McCormick:But you also have to consider all of the underlying factors that may lead to delinquency as well, and lack of services, for example lack of access to resources, particularly when we're talking about youth that are maybe in more of the Northern communities in BC where they don't have access to as many things as youth in more urban areas do. There's a sense of boredom. There's a lack of support, potentially An inability to get help when you need it. That's critical. We need that early intervention and if you don't get it then it's really hard to be successful on your own, without that family and society support wrapped around you.
Aaron Pete:Maybe it's something I didn't learn, or maybe I don't remember, but why do we map on population rate to incarceration rate and assume that they should overlap?
Amanda McCormick:I think if nothing else is different right, like if police aren't policing in a biased sort of way and there's no sort of underlying difference between the rates of crime amongst indigenous people versus, let's just say, caucasian people, then what you would see is equivalent rates in the prison population to the rates in the population. So if there's about 4% of indigenous youth in BC, you'd think that there would be 4% of indigenous youth who are incarcerated because nothing is being done differently towards policing them or the court outcomes that they're seeing.
Aaron Pete:The reason that I don't know if I'm firm on that is because there is a completely different world in which indigenous people growing up on being on reserve, and so it seems like the resources on reserve working with my community as a council member the quality of housing is worse, the resources are less, the support systems aren't as strong, the amount of economic gain isn't there, so it's just like living in a whole different society. When you're living on reserve, so it seems like inevitably you're going to have more challenges because these people are more disadvantaged than the average Canadian, so it wouldn't map perfectly onto what their exact population rate would be.
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, you're absolutely right these are all the gaps that I've been mentioning that you just don't have those wraparound services that you need If you're facing a challenge in life. It's like the domino effect that you said. If you're facing challenges with impulse control, for example, and then you're in the school system and the school system doesn't have the resources to assign you a support worker to help you develop the skills that you need, you might get in trouble at school, you might get suspended or expelled from school even, and then that shuts down your various options going forward for success in life, because you have a lack of employable skills, for example. So it's a cumulative disadvantage, is what we call it, and you certainly see that certain locations in British Columbia you're going to have more of that cumulative disadvantage and it's definitely not equivalent across the province.
Aaron Pete:So it's consistent among these communities that we see these differences as a consequence of some of their economic circumstances and the resources they have.
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, I wouldn't say it's consistent. I think each community is different in terms of its resources, its structure, what it has available to it. It's the same. So I do a lot of research on intimate partner violence and I would say that the rates differ amongst communities all across BC for a variety of reasons, whether it has to do with the available resources that are in the community, whether it has to do with the way the community has responded to these kinds of forms of family violence, for example, their relationship with the government. Even these are all things that can contribute to that macro picture about causes of crime, causes of delinquency.
Aaron Pete:There is another piece to this and it's policing, and it seems like some communities have more challenging relationships with police. But as a consequence of my education, I'm almost more protective of understanding where police are coming from, with the hours that they have to work, with the challenges that they face. They're going into circumstances every day that are harrowing. I have friends that are police officers who have literally held people as they pass away and then they have to go back to work and work this four-day-on, four-day-off work cycle that you're not going to get the best of a person. On that fourth day You're going to get a drained person that's not thinking clearly, that hasn't had their REM cycles respected, that haven't had their circadian rhythms, like taking care of their eating unhealthy foods in order to cope with the schedule.
Aaron Pete:They face so many challenges and so it's so easy to look at police officers and go you didn't do enough, why didn't you go further? Yeah, they're going into situations where there's such clear disadvantage to begin with that they have to try and cope with and manage, and sometimes you don't get the best of a person, and we sometimes look at them and we talk about systemic racism without recognizing that some of the behaviors you're seeing. If you removed all of these disadvantages, you might not see the responses that you get from police. You've worked on some of this. Can you talk about that?
Amanda McCormick:Sure, yeah. So with the Center for Public Safety and Criminal Justice Research Dr Irwin Cohen, dr Darrell Pleckis we've actually done that research. We actually put about 40 students in cars with RCMP officers over the course of a summer semester doing full shift ride-alongs where they monitored everything that the police were doing during that 12-hour shift, including what they ate, when they took breaks, how often they were sitting versus running, versus coding information into the computers, and so we did find what you're saying. We collected data on sleep as well and absolutely that fourth shift, your sleep average is quite down, quite down low, especially if you have kids, because that's not, they don't let you sleep. Trust me, I've got to. I understand that. So, yeah, you see that they're coming to work and Darrell's actually done some really interesting research with Greg Anderson. He used to be a UFE prof where they actually had the officers wear heart rate monitors and they looked at what happened with their heart rate and their blood pressure coming onto the shift and even before they went out on the road, their blood pressure, heart rate was already high. So it's anticipatory stress about what that next 12 hours is going to bring.
Amanda McCormick:And then you see police are sitting in the car for hours on end and then all of a sudden they're running after somebody, they're chasing after that person and so they go from these kind of peaks to valleys in terms of the demands on their system. They don't drink enough water, which is something that people don't actually realize, because what happens when you drink water? You have to take a pee break, and it's really difficult for them to be able to do that If they're at a call where they can't leave. They have to be there for nine, 10 hours watching over a scene, for example. They can't stop and just go to the bathroom. So they're not drinking enough, so they're dehydrated. They might just be eating fast food because that's all they have time for. So you're absolutely right, these are all demands that people don't realize on the police.
Amanda McCormick:On top of that, of course, as you mentioned, there's the mental health aspect of it, and Greg Anderson is doing some of that research. Now there's national studies looking at post-traumatic stress disorder, post-traumatic symptoms amongst first responders, and police, particularly the RCMP, are notoriously bad for that. People are on the job being exposed to really traumatic incidents. Whether or not they get the help that they need is debatable, and they're coming back to that job without necessarily having fully recovered from that, and so that builds up over time and really causes a strain not only mental health-wise but also physically on the body, and so it's a rough job. It's absolutely a rough job. So I can see absolutely that side of things.
Amanda McCormick:The other piece that you're alluding to is just so many demands. Police are expected to be the jack of all trades. They are now social workers, they're mental health workers, they're police officers, they're family counselors. They're expected to do everything, and that's just not a feasible approach to take to policing. So what's critical is that police get the training that they need. But we're seeing more and more on top of the training to understand what they should be doing and how they should be doing it. We're also seeing more and more of these collaborative partnerships developing where police partner with, for example, a social worker to respond to a call concerning intimate partner violence so that they can secure the physical aspect of the scene, but then the victim survivor can get the emotional support that they need from somebody who's trained to give that. So we need more of those kinds of collaborative approaches. But again, that costs money and so not everywhere has developed those kinds of partnerships.
Aaron Pete:When you look at the policing system. We've just seen Suri go through this as well. What are your thoughts on the new approaches taken by like Abbotsford Police Department, this idea of municipal policing versus an RCMP approach? Do you have a preference?
Amanda McCormick:Not particularly. I think we need to see what the data says. I'm always very data driven. I think that there's advantages and disadvantages to these different approaches. So obviously the advantages for somebody who wants to go into the RCMP many more career opportunities in terms of different roles that they can play, different jurisdictions that they can work in, being able to go from municipal policing up to the federal level and maybe even travel the world.
Amanda McCormick:That might be something that's of interest to somebody in the RCMP. And you don't necessarily have those opportunities as a municipal officer unless you get seconded to a unit. But at the municipal level, of course, then the city has much more control over things like the number of officers that you're going to be able to hire and put into the field. The training that you develop and offer to your officers may be more controllable at a municipal level as well. So there's benefits to that, I think for the city at least. So, yeah, it depends on what perspective you're taking it from In terms of the quality of policing. I think that that's not RCMP versus municipal. I think that comes down to police leadership and what they're expecting of their you know their frontline police officers to be achieving.
Aaron Pete:Right, and so when we look at this, there's also talks of provincial policing and different styles. And so I'm just curious do you think it's been told to me over the years that we have some of the best police officers, highest trained, they have some of the best educations, they're coming into the field? Are you pretty happy with how we train and support our police?
Amanda McCormick:So I'm an academic so I answer nothing straight Right. There's always has to be an angle. So I'm going to talk from the angle of intimate partner violence, because that is where I do the bulk of my research these days, and what I would say is, looking across Canada, something people don't understand we don't have a national framework for intimate partner violence. You know it's subsumed under the criminal code in terms of the different criminal offenses people can commit, but there's no national approach to training. There's no national approach for police risk assessment or response.
Amanda McCormick:So I think in BC, that is one of the areas where we do excel compared to some other jurisdictions.
Amanda McCormick:We're the only province that has a singular approach to training on intimate partner violence. So no matter where you work whether you're in indigenous policing, whether you're with the RCMP or one of the municipal police agencies all police officers need to do the same training online on intimate partner violence, and we're one of the only jurisdictions to date that have been training police officers about some of the more well the nonviolent forms of intimate partner violence that we're starting to realize are actually quite dangerous and problematic, primarily coercive control. So about two years ago or so, BC developed new training for police officers and required them all to take it, and so we are now actually having police officers educated about coercive controlling behaviors, which is more of a dynamic approach to understanding intimate partner violence, whereas officers and other jurisdictions may be looking very much at a singular incident. Did violence happen? Was there a physical assault? What can I charge this person under the criminal code? So there are different approaches to training, and that's one area that I think we're maybe ahead of other places.
Aaron Pete:Course of control. Can you describe what police officers might be looking at now in comparison?
Amanda McCormick:So this is challenging for police because it isn't just an obvious strangulation, for example, or a bruise on the face. This is a pattern of isolation, domination, exerting control by one partner over the other partner, really dominating their life and taking away that individual choice. There is research that shows that actually the victims or survivors of intimate partner violence identify these forms of violence as being much more traumatizing and damaging than a physical assault, which, again, is probably shocking to some people to think about. But when you're isolated from your family and your support systems, whether it's geographically, socially, you don't have the ability to make choices about how you want to dress, what your weight will be, how you want your hair to be cut, whether you can work, where you can work. You're being stalked or harassed by your partner. Every decision that you make has to be run through them.
Amanda McCormick:This is not a way of living right, it's not a good quality of life, and so that brings the mental health consequences that can be quite damaging and quite difficult to recover from. So for police to be able to understand the nuances of these types of relationships and how having a partner control aspects of your life is actually a form of abuse is quite difficult because they have to be more conversational. It's not just looking for is there a broken lamp that might indicate that an assault occurred. It's understanding the dynamics of that relationship. So what we're trying to do now is educate police officers about how these tactics of power and control are used to dominate victims and survivors, prevent them from ending an abusive relationship, prevent them from being able to seek support, prevent them from seeking help and understanding how that might impact their ability to engage with a criminal justice system. It's quite complex.
Aaron Pete:This makes me think of. I was listening to a podcast on trigger warnings and one of the big problems with trigger warnings If you're genuinely triggered by something emotionally, you have no idea what that's going to be. It can be a smell, it can be how somebody walks up the stairs, it can be a sound. It can be so many different things that to say like, oh, this is going to trigger you is you have no idea whether or not, and the statistics on whether or not saying beforehand this is going to trigger you actually impacts emotional resilience is not very correlated. So there's this challenge of understanding that, like how somebody goes upstairs and that pattern when you're a kid you think of. Like when you're supposed to be asleep and you hear your parents walking up the stairs or opening a door and you're like, oh, I've got to pretend I'm asleep, that this is what can eat somebody's life up after they've left the relationship.
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, it's the ongoing trauma that people are experiencing, it's the flashbacks that they're having. It's absolutely forms of post-traumatic stress disorder that can develop over time, you know, after months or years of this abuse. These are just the ways that you've adjusted to living and you can be very easily triggered by these things. But what struck me when you were talking about these trigger warnings is what triggers one person won't trigger another, and so this is what also makes it quite complex and we've seen this issue when it comes to police investigations of harassment. So in Canada we don't have a stalking offense. What we have is either criminal harassment or harassing communications, which is a similar concept, but it's persistent, unwanted attempts to communicate with a person.
Amanda McCormick:And so for police to understand sometimes what triggers a person to feel fear is difficult, because it could be as simple as flowers being left on the doorstep of somebody's house. Well, why would that make you fearful? You have to again engage in that conversation and really understand what the intent but the meaning is behind that, because it could be a message that's being sent by an ex-partner who, let's say that you've got a victim, survivor of intimate partner abuse, who managed to leave that relationship and move to a different city and their partner doesn't know where they are. But now they've found them and they've let them know by putting flowers on their doorstep, the flowers they always used to buy them on their anniversary. That's going to trigger fear in that person, whereas it wouldn't trigger fear in a different person. So our criminal code has tried to articulate that by seeing, given the circumstances, is what a reasonable person would experience fear from, and so it's going to be.
Amanda McCormick:We've not criminalized course of control. We're having those conversations right now because other jurisdictions have moved forward and criminalized it. But it's that understanding that living in this kind of a relationship results in somebody living in distress and experiencing fear, anticipatory fear about what might happen if I violate a rule, if I make too much noise going up to the stairs to bed one night, is that going to trigger violence? Is that going to trigger some sort of retribution against me? The partner might take my kids away for the week and not let me see them. That's coercive control. So it's these kinds of understanding the bigger picture. It's not a singular incident. It's about what's happened over a period of time to build you up into this level of ultimate control where you fear that anything can happen if you simply step out of line.
Aaron Pete:When I think of, I think it was either Gabber Mate or Brene Brown who talked about how the dark things in a relationship can still form bonds with the person that you've gone through things together, you've survived things, even if it is the person you're with perpetrating crimes against you. That can still create an emotional bond of like we've been through things and we're getting through things together where, if nothing happens and everything is pretty bland like a cracker, it doesn't feel like anything happened, so there's no meat to the relationship. So even though it's tragic and it's dark and it can be challenging, it somehow still creates this emotional bond. How do we make sure that we support victims in getting out from this, because sometimes it's hard to see the opportunity to leave. It seems like this person is your whole world. Is there processes where we start to support someone in removing them from the grips of?
Amanda McCormick:a criminal? Absolutely Such an important question and I'm so glad you asked that because one of the things in my family violence class at UFE that I teach is about the barriers to leaving an abusive relationship and helping students to understand. This is not just a simple oh he hit me, I'm out. Sometimes it's years of this course of controlling behavior. You become entrapped, you're gaslit. You become entrapped in this relationship before you know it. All of a sudden you are now in a relationship that you are starting to understand as abusive. But you formed these emotional bonds, you formed economic dependence, you have a family.
Amanda McCormick:It's not so easy just to get up and walk away. I think there's statistics that suggest that on average it takes about seven attempts to leave an abusive relationship before you're able to do so. Similar to addiction, right, it takes multiple attempts to stop that cycle. So it is absolutely a challenge and I think what we have to understand are all the complex reasons that go into a person staying in a relationship, whether they're being physically abused, sexually abused, economically abused, emotionally abused. It's not so easy to just say I've had enough and to walk away. There are sometimes cultural reasons. Some cultures frown very heavily on separation and divorce. You might be shunned by your family if you walk away from your partner, and so you're giving up potentially all of your support systems if you were to end that relationship. There's a lot of fears as well about children, because abusers have rights as well. If the children aren't being abused and there's no reason why a judge foresees that the children are not safe in their presence you're not going to be able to prevent them from having access to those kids, and so a lot of abusers will actually use that as a form of abuse over the victim's survivor to threaten them into staying in the relationship. If you try to leave, I'm going to get full-time custody of the kids. I'm going to tell them you're unfit. I'm going to tell them you're addicted. I'm going to tell them that, for whatever reason maybe you're abusing or neglecting the kids. So there's that fear that if they walk away from their relationship, they may lose their children as well, whether or not that actually happens and most of the time it doesn't but it just takes one time right For one story to happen for someone to legitimately fear that that might be the outcome for them.
Amanda McCormick:Then there is, of course, a lot of abuse. If I do get out and I get my kids and they're living with me. How am I going to support them? I don't have a job, or my job doesn't make enough money or I can't find housing. That's a huge issue right now People not being able to find affordable housing. You've got people families at risk of living in cars together because they can't find safe and secure housing. And the shelters and the transition homes that we have are often quite full. There's restrictions on some of them as well.
Amanda McCormick:Pets are a big thing that abusers will use. They will threaten to abuse or kill the pets as a form of keeping that victim in the relationship. If you leave, you know I'm going to, you know kill your horse or your dog or whatever it happens to be. And if you have, you know, a pet that you can't take to a shelter. That is actually a very effective form of forcing that person to stay in the abusive relationship, because you also have an emotional bond with that animal. That's a form of support system for you.
Amanda McCormick:So there's all these complex and that's just a handful right. There's so many more circumstances that might prevent somebody from leaving an abusive relationship and it's important that people understand that. And I think. Going back to your training question, I think we've come a long way. At least in British Columbia, where my research is being conducted, police do understand this. We're not seeing as much of the stigmatic sort of attitudes while you, you know, chose to stay in the relationship so you're at fault for this. Police are being trained about these barriers. They're understanding them. They may still be frustrated when they're receiving repeat calls to the same address, but that frustration is not necessarily with the perpetrator and the victim's survivor. It's also with the justice system and just the lack of effective intervention into those relationships and the lack of, you know, supports to help that family get back to where they need to be to be successful together.
Aaron Pete:That was going to be. My next question is what do we do about the person who's perpetrating this? How do we like it seems like just locking this person in a jail cell is not going to change these approaches and you think about how people get into their rhythms and their flows, on how they interact with people, and then that becomes who you are over time. How do you move someone from a way of wanting to control and manipulate and getting people's heads to being a healthy, normal individual?
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, so that again very complex sort of question. Here there's two things we need to do. One, obviously, is prevention. We need to teach these skills, you know communication skills, emotional regulation skills, conflict resolution skills. We need to model healthy behaviors in childhood and adolescent years. So there's opportunities to demonstrate positive relationships in a way that will help people to, you know, form different expectations If they've grown up in a home where there is this cycle of violence and they see their parents engaging in these kinds of relationships. That's their model, that's what they come to understand as forms of communication. So trying to intervene and teach and understanding that this is not a healthy relationship, that's a critical step that we need to take and we are starting to develop, you know, dating, violence, healthy relationship, kind of programs for elementary school and middle school.
Amanda McCormick:On the other end, when we have somebody who's already entrenched in that cycle, it really comes down to what is the source of that unhealthy relationship. A lot of perpetrators, like I mentioned, grew up in homes where they were exposed to aces, right. So they did see they were exposed to violence as a child and that is a form of ace is seeing, you know, your parents engaging in violence, whether it's bi-directional, unidirectional. Being exposed to violence in the home is a form of a childhood trauma, and so these individuals will grow up and that's what they've known. It's affected their neurological development, it's affected just the way that they're, they see the world. It's very hard to fix that as an adult. So we need to, you know, get more people into counseling and address these underlying traumas.
Amanda McCormick:Many people, as you probably know, cope with trauma through substance abuse. So it may be alcohol or drug use. If that's an issue, we need to address that, but not just treating the addiction. You need to treat what's causing the addiction. So that's going back to Gabor Maté and the sources of addiction. So we need to treat those things.
Amanda McCormick:We also need to again model healthy relationships and there are some programs that will do that. There are some programs that will teach communication skills, emotional regulation skills, mindfulness is something that I think could be, you know, a potential successful approach as well. But unfortunately the research today it really shows that these kinds of treatment programs, at least coming out of the US, are just not effective. We see high rates of recidivism because they're not really getting at those root causes. But it depends again on why that person is doing what they're doing, are they doing it out of a psychological need to dominate and control somebody? That's going to be a challenge to fix when you're an adult, versus if it's childhood trauma that we can try to start addressing now and give you healthy coping strategies. We might see some more success with that.
Aaron Pete:With somebody who understands this, who's seen the darker elements of the mind and what people go through and the challenges that they face. Can I just ask your personal experience, knowing these traits, knowing how people behave, have you navigated who you build rapport with, relationships with work with in a different way? Because now you start to see, oh, I actually understand that on a deeper level, I know what a healthy relationship looks like. I sort of know what you're up to, even if you're not willing to admit it.
Aaron Pete:Are you able to incorporate this into your own life?
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, I think that if you come across more of a narcissistic personality, that's something that you can pick up on quite quickly, where somebody is very self-focused and everything is about them, very self-centered approach and harming others in their attempt to get to where they want to be. That's something that puts up some red flags, absolutely. So you start to pick up on certain personality traits but at the same time yeah, if I saw somebody who gave me all those red flags, I would certainly be careful approaching them. But we talk about personality as a continuum. You're not just one personality type. There's strengths and challenges to everybody's personality, so it's just learning how to work with those individuals.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, I have one example in my head where I'm thinking of this couple, and it's fascinating to me how individuals cannot really consider who you're letting into your world, like who your partner is is who influences how you think about things. And so, watching this couple develop, the female just lost the ability to discern truth because every day she was being gasped you were doing this? No, I wasn't. You don't understand, that's not what was going on. And so over time, truth became irrelevant, and to me that exposes people to the vulnerabilities of conspiracy theories, the extreme ones, where there's a cabal of people running our lives and controlling everything.
Aaron Pete:Because you don't have that grip on what is real, because understanding what is real and what's happening in a relationship is a two-way street you say this is what I think you did, and the other person says this is what I think you did, and you try and find a middle ground of what actually occurred. And if somebody's willing to not play by those rules, you no longer have that grip to reality, and seeing people every once in a while you go over to your friend's house for an hour is not going to bring you those roots back to what is really going on in the world, and so that individual who you let into your world can change everything for you. They can change how you see things, how you understand things, what you're allowed to do, and so it's one of the most vulnerable decisions a person can make.
Amanda McCormick:Absolutely, you're right, and this is unfortunately. These people that are more of the narcissistic perpetrators of abuse are very skilled at manipulation and it's not something where they just come right out and say this is my beliefs and you're going to follow them, or we've had it. They manipulate you over time towards believing in the same beliefs that they have right. It's that slow process of manipulation where they will do this gaslighting and start to slowly control the way that you believe things. So, yeah, absolutely trying to pick up on that as a support system. You know, if you have a friend that's going through that, these are the red flags you maybe want to bring to their attention, and just do it from a place of concern.
Amanda McCormick:I'm concerned about you. I think you're losing a little bit of yourself and I really love who you are as a person and I don't want to see you become like this person. I think it's you've got a really strong identity and I'd love to see that that part of you. You know it's coming from a place of concern. That's all you can really do to help somebody who's getting in that process of becoming coercively controlled and becoming gaslight into believing something that is not true about themselves or not true about society, but yeah, it's a challenging situation absolutely to be in. How much do you?
Aaron Pete:think is conscious, because I think of some circumstances that are a little bit more clear, where somebody's like oh, I really like your sandwich and you're kind of like, oh, you're bringing up, like you might want some of that. Like, how much do you think is planned and deliberate by these individuals and how much do you think is again how they were raised, viewing this as normal, viewing this is like something that you just do, where if you were like, hey, abcdefg thing you're doing is a manipulative thing to do, and they'd be like I'm not a manipulator, I'm not that person, I would do something like that to you.
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, that takes us a little bit back to psychopathy. So, which is where I actually started my graduate studies on criminology was understanding these traits, understanding these personality types, and so what you see is that there is a lack of insight amongst adults who have psychopathy or psychopathic traits. They don't realize that these are the things that they're doing. It's just that that's the way they found. Success is by reading people, understanding what makes them respond positively, understanding how to get what they want. It's this manipulative personality style that they've honed over years and years, so it's something that if you challenge them on it, they're not going to recognize that that's what they're doing. It's just the way that they are. It's the way that they interact with other humans.
Aaron Pete:So I'm going to give you an example. As a court worker, I deal with a lot of domestic assaults.
Aaron Pete:Like that is probably 60% of my caseload is people in that specific circumstance, and the one thing that is very common and, for my understanding, the research supports is that first it starts as a verbal argument and then, actually to a lot of people's surprise, the woman actually makes the first swing and it's not effective at all. And then the male responds and it is very effective. And this is where a lot of my clients are coming from. They come with this story. They don't know the research, they're just saying this is what happened. We were arguing back and forth.
Aaron Pete:She pushes me and then I respond and then the police show up and I get arrested and the first challenge for them is accepting the fact that it's a different thing when you do something versus when they do something, and you do not need to level that up so often. My response is to sign them up through First Nations Health Authority. They get funded counseling that they're able to go through and start to develop skills on anger management, on good, healthy relationships to work through, to start to gain that, and that, to your point, has a lot of success where I see people not come back because A they've interacted with the criminal justice system and they don't want that to happen again. And then B, they now have a support that they don't have to worry about getting funding through me, through my organization, it's forever. You can go attend this counseling if you're an Indigenous person.
Amanda McCormick:But why do we have to get to the criminal justice system to get to that point of getting those skills? This is why we need the earlier prevention approaches is developing communication skills, emotional regulation skills, like you're saying, conflict resolution skills, because that's what's causing these arguments to become physical in many cases. So I think there's a there's a distinction between these different forms of abusive relationships. There are some where a quick intervention from the criminal justice system is sufficient to get people the help that they need and to address those underlying factors and to successfully rehabilitate both parties in that relationship. So we see in Calgary, for example, they have a docket court where, at the very first instance, people will get that early intervention. They'll get recommended kind of programming that one or both parties might be able to attend and if they're successful, they're not going to proceed with those charges against that individual, they're going to stay them and then you're not going to have that criminal record. So that can be a very successful approach.
Amanda McCormick:When it's more of what we call, like situational couple violence, where it might be that you know you're drinking too much and so you lose control over your emotions when you're drinking and you're more likely to fight, or when there's stressors that you're not dealing with effectively, like financial stressors are a big thing. Conflicts over how to raise the children are common as well, but people don't know how to engage in healthy conflict resolution. You resort to pushing and shoving which escalates and absolutely you get the situation where you know the male is likely to be blamed for that because they can cause more damage usually than the female can. So these are challenges where it is more situational and it's, I don't want to say, an easier intervention. But if you get the people the skills that they need, the help that they need, you can be successful.
Amanda McCormick:Then there's the other forms, the course of controlling relationships, which has also been labeled intimate terrorism. So you can see, it's a very different understanding of the dynamics of abuse in that relationship. It is one sided, it's usually gender based, it's the male perpetrating it against the female and it's this ultimate, again active of power and control, not as easy to just intervene with. That person normally doesn't want a criminal record, but that doesn't mean they'll stop doing what they're doing. They'll just find ways of doing it that are not easily detected by others. So there's different approaches that we need, depending on the causes of that violence, the nature of that violence.
Aaron Pete:How much does culture, ethnicity, background play a role in this? Because my understanding is they developed the habits for courthouse uniquely to try and start to respond to some of these challenges of interactions in the courthouse and some problems that can arise.
Amanda McCormick:I wouldn't say it's cultural in that sense I mean every single culture, every single. You know gender, sex, race, income level everybody's at risk of experiencing an abusive relationship. In fact, the Canadian statistics suggest that in the lifetime, women I think it's 14 years of age and older about 40% of them will report some form of an abusive relationship, so it's not uncommon to have this happen. I think what Abbotsford has been really successful at doing is they've got dedicated K-file crown, and so these are crown counsel who only handle intimate partner violence files, and so they have a very thorough understanding of the dynamics of these relationships. There's many of them now who have been working in this area for many years, and they are invested not in convictions per se, but in developing healthy relationships. They want to see people get the help that they need, and so they are following that that Calgary approach of okay.
Amanda McCormick:So charges have been recommended against, you know this this individual. Let's figure out what's going on in this relationship and, if it's something where we think we can actually intervene, get them counseling, get them treatment, get them into a men's support group through Archway. You know these are things that we're going to again. Try to wrap that family with the services that they need and address those challenges and ideally then it will become a healthy family and not a family broken apart because now they've had to go and testify in court or you know the the usually it's going to be.
Amanda McCormick:The male partner has been convicted and may not be able to have their job now or maybe in custody. This is going to break the family apart and also put the remaining family members at risk, because of financial challenges, of being able to survive without that other income. So they're understanding the complexities of intimate partner abuse and trying to address, I would say more uniquely, what those, what those needs are for each family. So that's Abisford. It's a fantastic situation in Atmosford. We are not seeing the same in other places across British Columbia because those resources, those you know, skilled Crown Council they're just not there.
Aaron Pete:I definitely agree. Living in the Fraser Valley, I definitely feel like Crown Council gets it and definitely don't get the praise that they deserve in terms of their mindset that we see behind the scenes. It's so easy to look at like prosecution rates and try and make decisions off of that, but when you see the innovative approaches be taking place it's so exciting.
Amanda McCormick:It is. It's a really. I really enjoy working in this community because they have such a strong collaborative approach to understanding violence and abuse. People, you know, will share resources freely with each other. They will share information, support each other's work. We have opportunities, like we were mentioning, training before.
Amanda McCormick:So the Atmosford Police, I would say, are amongst the more highly trained police officers in British Columbia. All police must do the course online, which I can talk about. There's some challenges with that, but at least they're getting they're getting the training. But Atmosford Police have actually had even more training because they've actually brought Crown Council into their watches to talk about investigating and documenting these, these files and making charges more likely or here's what we need to have, you know, for you know a strangulation offense to go forward. But they also have the forensic nurses and there are some amazing forensic nurses in the Fraser Valley with some of the most highly skilled training available who have actually gone in to again the watches with Atmosford and they've trained them on things like non-fatal strangulation, brain injuries amongst victim survivors of intimate partner violence, what to do in those search in those situations and what the risks are for for that, that victim's well-being Incredible it is, yeah.
Aaron Pete:Would you like to dive into gambling?
Amanda McCormick:Sure, that's a totally 180. Yeah, let's do it.
Aaron Pete:Okay, so you've been researching gambling. I'd like to first start with why do people gamble? I look at those screens, I look at those bright lights and I just I don't understand the personal appeal to me to wanting to do something like that and spend hours at a place by yourself sitting and hitting a screen. So can we start with? What pulls people into this?
Amanda McCormick:Well, like you said, the lights and the screens, the sounds, actually that does trigger a neurological response in some people where it gives you those feelings like the dopamine rush, for example. Some people get it from going and spending thousands of dollars on shopping, for example. Other people enjoy gambling. It just makes some people tick, it just makes sense to them. Some people are at higher risk of developing a gambling problem because of they were it comes down to again being introduced to gambling at an early age and this becoming sort of like a schema in your mind about things that bring you happiness.
Amanda McCormick:Other people you know use gambling to cope. So seniors or elders, for example, if they've lost a loved one, that might be an outlet for them because they have, you know, a lack of other sort of opportunities, and so they might go to gamble as a way of distracting themselves or passing the time. So I think some people just, you know there's different games for different people, but the music, the lights, it's all sort of designed to bring you in. The time goes very, very quickly and you're not necessarily aware of that because of all the other forms of stimulation that are impacting your brain.
Aaron Pete:Is there any tragedy to? I think of also the check cashing places as tragic because they hit specific communities. Again, I would say a lot of members of my First Nation community gamble a lot.
Aaron Pete:These are people who cannot afford to gamble when we know the odds of them actually succeeding, and then there'll be one person who succeeds and then everybody will want to get more involved. And there's a tragedy that some things that we say are like, oh like, if you do it responsibly you'll be fine, but the people who pay the biggest consequence if we're talking alcohol, if we're talking gambling, if we're talking drug use impact a disproportionate segment of our population the worst and increase all of what we've been talking about in regards to crime. Is there any tragedy in that?
Amanda McCormick:Oh, of course there's a tragedy in that, absolutely. I mean, they often say that the people who you know casinos are making the most money off of are, like you said, the ones that can't afford to gamble in the first place. Tying it back to what we were talking about earlier, though, there is research now, you know, finding that people who are at greater risk of developing gambling problems later in life have had, again, childhood traumas. It's another response to ACEs, it's ways of giving yourself that dopamine surge because of the neurological impacts that you've experienced through trauma as a child. So there is that research starting to say that people who you know have the ACEs are at higher risk of all sorts of problematic outcomes, including physical health outcomes like obesity, diabetes, for example, high blood pressure, early death, suicide. Then there's also the substance abuse risks, and then, of course, there's these problematic behaviors promiscuity being another one, and then problem gambling. So there's all sorts of different pathways that people can follow. So, yeah, absolutely, there are these risks for people to develop problems with gambling, and certain segments of the population may be more at risk for, again, a variety of reasons.
Amanda McCormick:So the research that we've done, we've looked at people who've excluded themselves from gambling. So they've said you know, I've had enough, I need a break. I'm just going to take, you know, whether it's six months or three years, I'm going to exclude myself from gambling, and we've talked to them about how that's gone for them. And it's really interesting when we hear from people up north who say you know, I've excluded from the casino but one of the biggest impacts that has had on me is my social life has suffered because the casino is one of the only places we can go to to actually have dinner with friends or to have a night out on the town. And so you know that might become a form of dependency for them to be able to go and have that social interaction. But it comes with the lights, the sounds being drawn into the games, spending more money than you can afford to. So it's it's absolutely again, a resource challenge.
Aaron Pete:It's interesting to me that people can choose this path for themselves. It's really admirable that somebody's able to look at their circumstances and go. I do not want to be led in to like imagine if, like liquor stores did that and started to help people who are taking steps in their lives and saying I don't want to be involved in this, is it interesting to speak with these people who've identified the problem and now it's just like trying to disconnect themselves from the dopamine rush, trying to take those steps?
Amanda McCormick:Yep, it's incredibly interesting to hear the different stories about what led them to make this decision and how that's gone for them. So again, some people are incredibly successful that first time in the program they've committed, you know, they access problem gambling counseling. They're addressing the reasons for what has led them to develop this problem in the first place and they're successfully developing other coping strategies. Or they're looking at, you know, all the money that they're saving or the trip they've been able to go on, or the gift they've been able to give to their families. They're looking at sort of the positive outcomes of not gambling. But then of course we see it's like the criminal population.
Amanda McCormick:There's a subgroup of people who we call chronic problem gamblers who even once they've excluded from the program, they still have immense control issues and you know driving past a casino might be too much. They might, you know, decide to try to go in see if they can re-enter the casino, even while they're excluded, and we'll do so multiple times a day. When you're excluded from, let's say, a casino in Chilliwack, if you drive down the road to Coquitlam, you're also not going to be able to get into the Coquitlam casino because your information is shared province-wide, which is a really good approach. But these people that are, more you know, really struggling from the urge to gamble, the addiction to gambling. They'll drive to multiple casinos in a day until they can find one that they can sneak into or get into. So it is a challenge where you find that there are the part of the population really struggles with trying to address these underlying urges.
Aaron Pete:Is it the lights and that environment? Or are they starting to try and gamble on, like betting on how many cars are going to go by in the day, like is there a switch to their standards or is it pretty consistent among how they want to?
Amanda McCormick:So this is a pastime for a lot of people. Actually, the reason I'm laughing is because I'm thinking about. We've conducted research with youth who are incarcerated and I've looked at the research on adults who are incarcerated and this is a very common pastime in custody facilities. They will gamble on things like what's going to be for dinner tonight, or they'll be watching a show and what's going to be the outcome. They'll gamble on it, and so it's just a way of interacting with others and just enjoying a challenge, I would say.
Amanda McCormick:But it can become problematic for some where it's an unhealthy coping mechanism, especially when you're putting your life savings on it or you're risking your job. You mentioned tragic circumstances. There have been cases where people have embezzled, for example, from their company to fund their gambling because they're addicted to it. They can't stop doing it, but they've run out of their own money. So there are these tragic circumstances and absolutely some people find it more difficult than others to to abstain. So the program works well for a lot of people, the self exclusion program, but it's not 100% effective. There are some people that will still continue to struggle with those urges and maybe it's neurological. That's the way that their brain lights up when they hear those noises and it triggers a reaction in them. Or it may be again that they just haven't learned healthy coping mechanisms using other kind of approaches.
Aaron Pete:What I loved about your research is in the criminal justice system. I'm always thinking of the smallest micro things that do have a large impact that you don't pay attention to. So for one, when I was developing a resource guide for local resources, putting an image of the building on it, is important because most clients who are homeless don't have Google Maps.
Aaron Pete:So I love when I'm going into a place. I like seeing what the building looks like that I'm pulling up to and knowing what I'm going to see. Not doing that and saying, oh, go to 455 Yale Road is not enough information for the average person. They don't know which door to go into, and these are all very teeny, tiny barriers that you could be like we'll just get over it. But one of the pieces that in your research was that telling people that there's counseling available but not making it clear whether it would be in their language, whether or not they needed to pay for it, whether or not there would be support services available, all of that information hindered their ability to accept that counseling resource, and I think that that's so brilliant, because it's not always we need a giant program. It's sometimes we just need to be a little bit more clear.
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, it's effective communication of information and letting people know what's out there. We actually went even farther and we recommended that, rather than ask people if they would like to consent to problem gambling counseling and having a counselor contact them, we recommended that they take the approach of saying we're going to give your name to a problem gambling counselor who will call you in the next day or two and talk about what we can do, offering you know problem gambling counseling is free, available in multiple languages. We'll meet you in your car. We've heard people say that they've met their counselor in their car because they didn't feel comfortable going into the building or having the person meet them somewhere else. They're very flexible and they'll get to you However it works best for you. But when you're, what we find is that a lot of people will sign up for the self exclusion program after like a huge loss.
Amanda McCormick:I've just lost, you know, $10,000. How am I going to explain this to my family? They go and they sign up for the self exclusion program. In that moment you've just experienced a trauma, right, you're very emotionally dysregulated. And to sit there and to hear a security or game sense advisor explain to you the various options that you might want to think about participating in, like problem gambling, counseling. Your brain is not taking any of that information in. It's not the best time to be asking somebody to make that kind of an informed decision.
Amanda McCormick:So you know we recommended that. Tell them that you're going to call them in the next day or two. They've had, you know, 24 hours to to come to terms with what's what's happening and this decision that they've made, and they'll be in a better mindset to be able to understand what the off, what the opportunities are that they can avail themselves of. So that was one recommendation. Another one is obviously to do mandatory education about the risks of gambling and how you mentioned before. You know the odds of winning are very, very low, but you see one person in the news. They're from Abyspher. They just won a million dollars. Well, that means I could win a million dollars too. Well, understanding the odds and the risks that you are going to face, you know, trying to replicate that situation that's part of what the mandatory gambling education is about is understanding the odds and that you're not likely to win, you're more likely to lose, and that's just the way these games are made.
Aaron Pete:Can I just ask about your personal philosophy on this, because it's very confusing to me to think of somebody losing $10,000, the government institution where they literally could just hit a button and you didn't win that. There's some sort of arbitrariness here to saying that this person lost money. When it's a government institution, we know it's just sitting in an account, it's right there, it's just a button. We could undo this whole thing and we could stop doing this to people. And it's a big question for communities. When a casino is looking at coming into town because it's like this is going to destroy 10% of our population's lives forever, like, is this a worthwhile endeavor?
Amanda McCormick:Yeah, so there's responsible gambling. Strategies have been developed now to try to address some of these. So, yes, you have. It's actually more. About 5% of the population is at risk of developing a more severe pathological, what they call gambling disorder now. So I guess that's the more macro level sort of perception of it. Is that do we need to say that 95% of the population can't gamble because 5% of people are going to develop pathological addiction to gambling? Right, that's the question.
Aaron Pete:But the other 95% is probably going to lose their money.
Amanda McCormick:I said a limit and played with him, but most of the people who are going to gamble are going to do so responsibly. They might go. We've asked people about the responsible gambling strategies that they use. Do you leave your bank card at home when you go to the casino? Do you set a limit for time as well as money? And if you set a limit, do you actually stick within that? And so we find that most people do, but the people that don't are the ones that have the issues that go on to develop the gambling disorder, for example. So in terms of, I can't remember what your question was.
Aaron Pete:Now I'm just trying to go back to it. This is just about the philosophy of like oh, people do this. And like I agree with gambling if it's like between your 10 friends and one of your friends wins, that's great yeah. But this is basically donating your tax dollars to the government and it's just. It's a wild thing that we just agree to wholesale and we don't really think about like, does this make any sense? We're saying people lost money, but they had a button, like it really.
Amanda McCormick:I think, yeah, it's a sense of, it's a personal choice for many people to make that decision, to put their money at risk, and they're going into it, in many cases, knowing that they're going to lose it and they're not likely to come out ahead. I think a lot of people that are responsible gamblers do understand that. So it's a night out on the town, I'm going to put, you know, 100 bucks aside and it'll last me 30 minutes at the casino, for example. But yeah, I think it's interesting because you know it's communities the government, for example, municipal governments that want to see these casinos come into their community because it does actually raise money. You know there's jobs for people. Many people are employed, whether it's through, you know, being a dealer or a game sense, you know, advisor or of its security staff at the casino. So there's, there's employable options there. And casinos will also give money back to communities through community gaming grants and that kind of thing. So that's their sort of pro-social way of using the money. Of course, it's used for profits as well. Absolutely. Corporations are making, you know, billions of dollars off of this, but they are giving some of that back to the community, reinvesting it.
Amanda McCormick:I was sort of laughing earlier because you were mentioning you know, people are coming in and maybe losing $10,000. And how can we do this? There was actually a court case that happened because people were coming in and gambling their money. Then they sign up for a self-exclusion program and the agreement is that I will stay out of the casino and the casino will do its best to prevent me from being able to re-enter well excluded. So somebody went back to the casino, got in successfully without being detected as an excluded gambler and was able to gamble, and they lost again thousands of dollars and they sued the casino. They said you signed a contract with you, you're supposed to keep me out of that. And unfortunately they lost because the agreement is that the casino will do its best but will not guarantee that they will keep you out.
Amanda McCormick:And so what they do with that funding now is if a person gambles well excluded, they can't win any of the money. If they win a jackpot for $10,000, they won't be given that $10,000 because they are not legally permitted to be in the casino at that time. If they gamble and they lose $10,000, the casino will keep it, and so that was the nature of the court case. So now what they do with that $10,000 is they will actually take that and fund research into problem gambling or responsible gambling education. So the casino is not keeping it directly, they're turning it over to a nonprofit or a research agency. But that still rubs a lot of people the wrong way. That how can you let them lose the money but you don't compensate them when you know they weren't supposed to be there in the first place?
Aaron Pete:That's kind of the ethical debate there.
Aaron Pete:It is a very weird topic whenever I think about it. I really appreciate you being willing to do this. The last thing that I want to end on is this work in teaching, educating people and supporting them, developing this deep understanding, because I think the unique thing that I've always found about the criminology program and about criminal justice in general is you really start to understand the dark side of the human psyche of the world, and it just, it almost grounds you in something real. There are bad people, there are bad influences. How do you navigate this world knowing that? And I think it is important to kind of wake up to the fact that not everybody's on your team. The world isn't all rainbows, but there's a, there's a gift in that, when good things happen, you're able to embrace that more so, and so I'm just curious as to what you're teaching careers, yeah, that's interesting.
Amanda McCormick:I'm naturally an optimist by nature, so you know I tend to see the good side of people, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, and you know I really enjoy teaching because I get to meet so many different students, personalities, you know, different experiences. It's a really unique opportunity to get to know, you know, a wide range of the student population. I wouldn't say I've necessarily come across a lot of, you know, dark personalities. There's always something in somebody that is worthwhile getting to know, worthwhile getting to save. You know whether they're, you know, a violent youth offender, for example. Once you start to hear, you know their background stories and you understand how they got there in the first place, you feel a lot of empathy for these individuals. So, yeah, I wouldn't say that it's something where I've really guarded myself against these kinds of you know relationships or getting getting to know people. Everyone's had different experiences growing up. We've all experienced challenges, some much more than others, and so it's just understanding how that's contributed to making you who you are these days.
Aaron Pete:How can people follow your work and keep up to date? Sure.
Amanda McCormick:Sure, well, you can take one of my classes at UFV. I teach you know a range of different classes on young offenders and youth justice system, family violence, mental health as well. We have a master's program for working professionals in the criminal justice system where we talk a lot about these issues and try to really dig deeper into understanding why people do what they do. I'm on Twitter AV McCormick would be my handle, I suppose and of course, people can just email me if they'd like. Amanda McCormick at UFVca.
Aaron Pete:Well, I appreciate all the work you're doing. This is always a fascinating conversation to dive into how people think and what brings people into contact with the criminal justice system.
Amanda McCormick:Thanks so much for having me. It's been a great pleasure talking with you today.