Journal of Intellectual Disabilities and Offending Behaviour

Social Information Processing-Based Intervention for Aggression in Offenders with Mild Intellectual Disability

Pochampalli Deepthi (1), Nimesh Raj (2), Dr. Gautam Dhokia (3), Maithili Chaudhury (4), Garima Dhaka Sangwan (5), Kashish Gupta (6)

(1) Centre for Multidisciplinary Research, Anurag University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India
(2) Centre of Research Impact and Outcome, Chitkara University, Rajpura, Punjab, India
(3) Assistant Professor, Department of Forensic Medicine, Parul Institute of Medical Sciences & Research, Parul University, Vadodara, Gujarat, India
(4) Assistant Professor, Department of Law, SOA National Institute of Law, Siksha 'O' Anusandhan (Deemed to be University), Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India
(5) Assistant Professor, Department of Law, Vivekananda Global University, Jaipur, India
(6) Department Of Biotechnology and Microbiology, Noida international University, Uttar Pradesh, India
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Abstract

Aggression in offenders with mild intellectual disability (MID) poses a severe problem to forensic rehabilitation, which can lead to marginalization in the system and recidivism. The study is an evaluation of a specialized intervention, Social Information Processing (SIP), that is intended to surpass conventional punitive interventions in an attempt to affect the sequential processing of social cues encoding, intent interpretation, and response decision. With a multidisciplinary approach that combines the neurobiological understanding with forensic psychology, the research relies on virtual environments and storytelling methods to reconstruct the maladaptive social reasoning. Based on the initial statistical investigation, it was found that the participants in the SIP intervention group experienced a major decrease in reactive cases of aggression (38%) in comparison with the group under regular custodial care. Highlighting results suggest that the intervention was effective in raising the amount of latency between perceived social threats and impulsive responses, which allowed the intervention to mediate a switch in hostile attribution bias toward prosocial problem-solving. Moreover, the findings address the need for trauma-informed care and recognition of linguistic signs in the treatment of externalizing behaviors. The study finds that the proper reintegration of neurodivergent offenders is only possible when the factors that lead to the lack of social mind-reading are tackled instead of imposing behavioral compliance. This study proposes the change in the criminal justice policy towards more equitable, disability-responsive rehabilitative approaches by offering an evidence-based model of cognitive restructuring.