Form 21-C : Permission to Use Dangerous Handling
That’s the form we have to use if we want to employ extreme measures to teach a moral lesson. It’s a monster of a form, and requires signing by a colleague of equal rank, and a superior. The form is at least 20 pages long, and requires going in to great detail regarding the means you’ve attempted to use, the degree of failure, and your projected outcomes from the treatment. There’s a risk/benefit analysis for the treatment, balancing the likely outcomes of leaving alone and the likely damage done. This requires talking to the angelic psych-profiling and projection team (PPPT, yes ghastly abbreviations are common up here too).
Then you’re required to go to a series of meetings to discuss what you’ve put in the form. Each meeting involves gradually more people, until eventually a few other guardian angels are required to form a committee to plan out the eventual form of the treatment. You’re not allowed to form part of the committee, but you do have to provide information about various characters in the life of the subject; people wronged, people neglected, possible people the subject thinks highly of. After a couple of weeks you get issued with a document describing what’s going to happen, and what actions (if any) you need to take to facilitate the treatment.
The document makes for grim reading in any case, and there’s always that guilt I get that perhaps this isn’t necessary. But, like a rock that’s just been thrown, this is entirely out of my hands now (ha ha, sorry ). I’m not involved in this treatment, and I’m glad of it, it’s not going to be pretty. No-one looks forward to meting out this kind of treatment; if we took pleasure in this sort of thing we wouldn’t be here.
If the extreme measures aren’t approved then the outcome is one of two things. Either you’re told to continue and given a review date, or the case is abandoned. Working with a review date is beyond pressured, as trying to reform a character to a deadline is nigh-on impossible. Abandoned cases have their own team, I guess I talk about the abandoned cases team (ACT, which is ironic really) if I need to.