Editorial

This issue of The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy comes to you off the back of attending the thirty-first IAFP conference in May 2023 which took place in the genteel city of Turin, Italy. We gave thought to how seriously ill our planet is, with climate change and violence both being major public health issues. It is dismaying and alarming that the patient “earth” remains gravely ill and has not yet arrived at the intensive care unit. Over eighty per cent of the world's population presently lacks access to social protection systems of any form. The food crisis is a dual threat to health leading to malnutrition in young children and chronic diseases. Currently, 25,000 people (mainly women and children) are dying of hunger every day. Since the 11 September 2001 attacks in the USA, the wars unleashed consequently have, by May 2023, led to around 4.5 million deaths. This figure does not even take into account those who die as a result of damaged infrastructure or poor health brought about by war.

At the time of writing (May 2023), 13,900 people have been killed by gun violence in the USA and there were 184 mass shootings during the first five months of 2023. Certain countries are reversing their ban on the death penalty in a futile and violent attempt to prevent violence. These sentences above are only headlines, without references to gender, race and ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, but each and every person dying from violence, climate change consequences, poverty, or hunger, is a human being just like any of us reading this journal. Some don't survive babyhood or childhood. Others grow up with disabilities, physical and/or psychical, many without access to care. With such suffering all around us and no sight of an international community being able to work together as a team to address these horrors, things can feel bleak.

So it was apposite for the 2023 conference to be titled “From pain to violence” because most readers of this jour