Behaviours versus traits and learning the difference: what this web resource will make easier to understand
My name is Mil Williams and I love enabling people to be their best selves: not changing them so much as transforming the circumstances they find themselves in, so that they can work and live fulfilled, with joy.
I choose to focus differently but not elsewhere:
not on normalising behaviours but, rather, with a neuro-divergent focus,
working to transform human traits, ensuring first we understand them
before we work out together how to enable and expand the innate abilities everyone has, whatever the nature of their brain.
Because it's my firm belief that there is no such thing as irrational: only that which we still do not fully understand.
If I am right, it's our professional obligation to always comprehend more, because if we decide we don't need to we will surely have less right to act.
Even in a less than perfect world, we should only act when we know what's going on. Anything else runs into the brick wall of becoming a knee-jerk response, indicating a prior lack of connected and/or proactive thinking.
Finally, I have become conscious of all the above in two formative moments of my life, and lately as a result of three statistics.
During my MA in International Criminal Justice at LJMU, there were several standout statistics:
Statistic 1
Those most vulnerable to committing crime in all criminal justice systems are 18 to 26-year-old males.
After the age of 26 or around this age, in all criminal justice systems the incidence of crime in young males drops off, whatever we do.
Our goal, therefore, should be to ensure we support as many people as possible — of all genders but particularly the male — to stay out of the criminal justice system until this threshold age is reached.
This should start at the youngest of ages: as a result of my second formative experience, this time in residential young-adult autism & related social care during pandemic and after, I find it a lot easier to sense the potential risks in even very young citizens.
Statistics 2 and 3
In UK schools in 2024, up to 50 percent of all children are considered to have additional learning needs.
In English & Welsh prisons, up to 50 percent of all prisoners are defined as neuro-divergent.
I wonder if this is what happens: assessed as only behavioural during their education (remember: in England & Wales the school determines this, not a medical professional: if the school believes the challenges are behavioural, the parents and/or carers cannot even take the problem to the child's own GP), potentially driving elements of neuro-divergency are never recognised to any extent, and criminal justice becomes an inevitable destination for life.
What therefore drives me most in particularly the age range of 5 to 11 is ensuring that what we do in the day-to-day — strategising broadly and tactically as well as tweaking and adapting incisively and compassionately — not only prepares our young citizens for our National Curriculum but also keeps them the enabling sides of law enforcement, criminal justice, and mental health, amongst quite a number of other institutions.
