Editorial

After nearly seven years—since the journal's beginnings in July 2019—The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy finds itself in the familiar position of having to change in order to continue. Journals, like institutions, have their own unconscious life: they are sustained not only by scholarship but by the persistence, imagination, and often unacknowledged labour of those who hold them together.

Carine Minne, as founding editor-in-chief, Jessica Collier, as joint founding editor-in-chief until 2021, and Annie Pesskin, as managing editor from 2022 onwards, have done precisely this. Under the auspices of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy—founded by Estela V. Welldon in 1991—they have worked to give the journal its shape, its seriousness, and its place in the academic and forensic world. The Board has now accepted their wish to step down, and has appointed us as co-editors. We do so with gratitude, and with the reassurance that Carine and Annie will remain close, especially through this transitional moment.

One of the journal's aims is “to provide an anchor for scholarly articles and reflections” on forms of social, extreme, sexual, terrorist violence, and genocide. The word anchor matters. We live in a time in which violence feels less like an exception and more like a climate. The pandemic, the resurgence of wars, and the erosion of collective hope have left younger generations facing a world that seems increasingly precarious and brutal.

We are witnessing violent behaviour emerging earlier, alongside the expansion of psychological distress and substance abuse. The question is no longer simply “Why does violence occur?” but “What is happening to the societies in which violence becomes thinkable, even ordinary?” Forensic psychotherapy, with its attention to unconscious compulsive repetition, trauma, and the limits of containment, has something urgent to contribute—not only to treatment, but to prevention, and perhaps to understanding what