Brandon on Fire

2007-06-06T09:42:00.000-04:00

Beware of Novelty Cigarette Lighters Resembling Toys!
By Delores Lekowski
Burn Survivor and Fire Safety Advocate
Author of The Hurting Angels
and The Power Angels

Do adults need or even want cigarette lighters to look like toys? Cigarette lighters are a source of ignition and not a source of playtime, so why should they have to look like cars, motorcycles, ladybugs, dinosaurs, dogs, cameras and numerous other eye-catching and child-pleasing designs in vibrant colors. What age group are these lighters targeting? Why are the manufacturers making lighters attractive to children?
Make no mistake: This is not a marketing issue. This is a fire safety issue. These fun-looking lighters can cause injury, death and destruction of property.
As it is, anything with wheels seem to attract young children. Most lighters have the small wheel that ignites the lighter when you rub your thumb across it. It was brought to my attention by a firefighter at the Tennessee Public Fire & Life Safety Associations annual meeting that even the child-resistant lighters can be ignited if they are pushed along the floor. Isn't this exactly what a child does with something that has at least one wheel, such as a lighter has? If the child is pushing the lighter along on a bed, carpet, upholstered furniture, or some other flammable object, the consequences can be dire. This is frightening, but it is even more frightening when you think that the dangerous item has been disguised as a non-threatening toy.
Recently, I was standing in line at a check out counter. I am sure you have noticed the items arranged there, which the store hopes that you will buy on impulse while waiting in line. These impulse items have created many unhappy children as their mothers tell them to return the items they have grabbed of the shelves. On this particular occasion, I was standing in front of a mother and her child, when the child leaned over from her seat in the cart and picked up an item that looked like a toy cell phone. She asked her mom if she could have it, and, not paying much attention to her daughter, the mother continued to put her items on the conveyor belt. Her mother asked her what it was, and her daughter said a toy cell phone, so without looking she said "yes" to her daughter. But the "toy cell phone" wasn't a toy - it was a cigarette lighter!
I watched as the little girl tried to rip open the package. I asked myself, Should I say something? I did not think the mother knew her daughter had a lighter in her hands. As I was paying for my purchases, I noticed the mother took the cell phone lighter from her daughter, and I sighed with relief until I heard her tell her tearful daughter that she could have it back as soon as the cashier rang it up! I visualized this mother putting her daughter into her car seat with her new "toy" to occupy her while her mother loaded her trunk. That's when I knew I had to say something. I turned to the mother and said kindly, "You know, that little cell phone isn't a toy - it's a lighter." She picked it up and said, "OH MY GOD! I thought it was a toy!" Then she became upset. "I can't believe they made this to look like a toy," she said. "Thank you for saying something!"
Today I had to pick up something at a convenience store near me, and sitting at the end of the check-out counter was a display box with lighters made to look like a small toilet. I have no idea why would anyone want this, but judging from the half-empty display box, it obviously appeals to some people. I picked up the lighter and noticed it didn't have any wrappings or warnings around it - it was ready to use. If a child picked it up without his mother noticing, he could light it without any problem, since these lighters don't seem to come with a child-resistant mechanism. And if you don 't think that children are interested in potties and enjoy their share of toilet humor, then you haven't been around a young child for a while!
I heard another story about a child's birthday party, at which the goodie bags contained a small action figure that the parents had purchased at the local dollar store. Unbeknownst to the parents, the action figure turned out to be a lighter! I don't know anymore about the story than that, but I only hope that none of the kids ended up starting fires, and that the parents of every child at the party were contacted as soon as the problem was discovered!
Also, it is important to remember that even child-resistant features are meant to deter kids only up until about age 5 - after that (and in the case of some kids, even before), they can figure out how to defeat the mechanism, and they have the strength and manual dexterity to do it.
The rule with anything harmful to children is to keep it out of their reach.
This rule should apply in stores also. I just don't understand the concept behind the manufacturing of an ignition device made to look like a safe, non-threatening product. A product that can severely injure someone should never be made to look like an innocent cell phone or other safe or fun objects. I have never seen harmful liquids in containers made to look like a car, so why make a fire-producing device look like one?

The purpose of this article, as with all of my articles, is to inform and alert you to fire hazards, and these novelty lighters certainly fall into this category. To learn more about these lighters and see pictures of some of these lighters check out www.sosfires.com Click on "What's New," scroll down to "Call for Action on Novelty Lighters Resembling Toys" and click on this. This will bring up "Hot Issues" in Adobe Reader. Here you will find a wealth of information and a picture gallery of these lighters. While visiting the SOS Fire site please visit their memorial page, here you will find the names of children who have lost their lives because of fire. This memorial page is the reality of what can happen to children when fire is put into the equation.
Lighters and matches have always been a fire threat in the hands of children. My children were raised with the knowledge that these items were not toys and they should never touch them. Now we have novelty lighters made to look like toys and parents have to tell their children these are not toys they are just made to look like toys! This explanation must be very confusing for small children!
If you are a parent with small children, DO NOT buy these lighters! Even if you don't have children and you have one of these lighters please, keep it out of a small child's reach. Safer yet, don't buy them at all!
Hope this makes your web site.

Submitted by:
Sgt Paul T Zipper #2096
Massachusetts State Police
Fire & Explosion Investigation Section

Internet videos and firesetting

2007-05-25T13:25:00.000-04:00

I came across a video article from WESH (Orlando, FL) about the dangerous videos that kids can find on the Internet that show people playing with fire.

http://www.wesh.com/news/13376337/detail.html

There is also an interview with a boy who was disfigured by a fire (set by other boys) when he was 8.

Collaboration on Fire - Thoughts after the Conference

2007-05-25T11:19:00.000-04:00

My question to the firefighter as he handed it his evaluation form at 4:00PM was “What did you think of the conference?
“This has been the best conference I have attended. It was awesome because I got to meet people I’d never usually get to meet and talk about kids who set fires and what we could do together.” I heard the excitement in his voice and I saw once again someone experiencing the power of collaboration. I was smiling in that knowing way when what you hope will happen, actually does. I had wanted to see collaboration across the many disciplines attending the conference, and here was living proof that it had.
I was helping at The Northeast Juvenile Firesetting Conference in Worcester on May 11th as a consultant to The Brandon School, one of the conference sponsors. My practice focuses on helping firms to increase revenue, improve productivity, or implement change using various techniques that all revolve around social networks, knowledge sharing and collaboration. The Brandon School has developed very successful assessment and treatment tools for Juvenile Firesetters and I have been helping them with marketing, but not in the traditional ways of PR and brochure creation. Rather I have focused on building a network that will become a community of professionals who have an interest in various facets of juvenile firesetting and have a desire to collaborate across their various disciplinary boundaries in order to address the epidemic. That network could include mental health professionals, firefighters, insurance executives, physicians, firefighters, teachers, real estate agents, social services, community agencies, and others. A key success factor of effective networks and communities of practice is knowledge diversity - it is not what you do that matters as much as what you know and how you share your knowledge and learn from others; ie. How well you collaborate.
Now collaboration is an often misunderstood word: It is not about playing nice with others, it is not the same as teamwork, it is not a sign of weakness, and it is not about having common goals. As my colleague Dr. Jeff Shuman wrote,
“Collaboration is an inclusive and reciprocal approach to getting what you want. Its goal is to accomplish something that cannot be accomplished alone through leveraging resources that are accessed by coordinating activities and communicating within the context of trusting, purposeful, and mutually beneficial relationships between people.”
In the context of Juvenile Firesetting, this means that various disciplines can, if they collaborate, leverage each other’s resources without giving up power or control over those resources. What is required is communication and coordination across the disciplines. Today many organizations have learned the value of collaboration: Whether it is the US military services learning how to successfully collaborate with each other to address the new threats our country faces, to national health services collaborating on fighting the SARS virus, to Apple collaborating with six other companies to bring out the iPod, it is always that case that more gets done and the successes are greater through intentional collaboration.
I am neither a firefighter nor a mental health professional, but I am passionate about how the relationships that we have (business, personal, professional) and the networks that we are part of can be leveraged to create change, develop new best practices, and solve problems that have up to that point been intractable. Most things in life get done only because we create meaningful, trusting relationships that are part of broader networks and in collaboration with others go about our “jobs”: knocking down fires, treating the sick, teaching the students, or managing the social services apparatus. In any endeavor with more than one person we are always collaborating whether we think about it or not and at the conference I saw the early stages of a network or community of practice forming. When people engage in conversations with others around topics of common interest it always amazes me how collaboration starts to build.
That was what made me smile after my conversation with that firefighter. He saw the first glimmers of what could be accomplished through collaboration and I know that he was not alone at the conference. Now the next step is to continue those conversations across the disciplines and in September, the Juvenile Firesetting Task Force will be meeting for the first time – I hope that you can be there and see the process of “Collaboration on Fire”

Northeast Juvenile Firesetting Conference

2007-04-23T12:58:00.000-04:00

On May 11, 2007, Brandon, in partnership with Massachusetts Dept. of Fire Services, Massachusetts Safety & Fire Educators (MA SAFE) and Parents for Residential Reform, is hosting The Northeast Juvenile Firesetting Conference: Pathways to Collaboration and Intervention.

Learn more and register online at www.brandonschool.org.

Key speakers include:

MA Dept. of Social Services Commissioner: Lewis H. Spence
MA Dept. of Mental Health Assistant Commissioner: Dr. Robert Kinscherff
MA State Police Fire & Investigation Unit: Sgt. Paul Zipper
FirePsych, Inc President & Brandon Consulting Psychologist: Dr. Robert Stadolnik

CEUs are available!

Workshops are focused on working with parents and guardians of children with firesetting behaviors, how to respond to fires & explosions in schools, intervention and assessment options. Additionally, ALL workshops are aimed at spring boarding cross-disciplinary collaboration on preventing and treating this dangerous behavior.

All those who mention BRANDON ON FIRE Blog will receive 'early registration' of $125

Novelty Lighters

2007-04-23T11:12:00.000-04:00

There are hundreds of novelty lighters being disguised as toys that are being made available to our children. They look like animals, balls, and key rings or have flashing lights or sound effects that make them so attractive to young kids. Unfortunately many of these same kids cannot tell the difference between a toy and a lighter capable of causing great destruction and harm.

The Oregon State Fire Marshal and The Idea Bank have teamed up to jumpstart a national effort to have these lighters banned from the United States. Ten countries in Europe have done exactly that. Visit the attached link at The Idea Bank and get involved. Write a letter to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which you can download from the site, expressing your concern. Alert your parents and families to be watchful. Get involved in this important effort.

Please see Public Safety Announcement: http://www.theideabank.com/psa/NoveltyLighters.html

Things you can do:
http://www.theideabank.com/psa/PDF/Three_Ways_to_Help.pdf

Sample Letter to Congress:
http://www.theideabank.com/psa/PDF/Congressional_Representative.pdf

Sample Letter to Consumer Product Safety Commission:

http://www.theideabank.com/psa/PDF/CPSC.pdf

SOS Fires: New Article

2007-01-16T09:12:00.000-05:00

A new article has been added to the "What's New" page of the SOS FIRES web site (www.sosfires.com). This is a dissertation on the motivations for 8-17 year olds who set fire in their schools. It takes an interesting look at these kids through direct interviews with them. It also compares a nd contrasts past studies to see how they stand up to today's youth firesetting behaviors and philosophies. Some compelling recommendations can also be found, especially for schools. Check it out along with the other articles and research posted on the SOS FIRES web site.

sHoRtCuT

2007-01-10T13:57:00.000-05:00

To easily check on this blog:
1. Go to this link: http://brandononfire.blogspot.com
2."right click" anywhere on the page
3. select "create shortcut"
4. read and comment with ease

Posting is a little trickier... feel free to email post to rporter@brandonschool.org & I will gladly post for you.

Link to: Interesting Article on Adolescent Firesetting

2007-01-10T13:42:00.000-05:00

"Enuresis, Firesetting, and Cruelty to Animals: Does the Ego Triad Show Predictive Validity?"
Michael Slavkin, Ph.D.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2248/is_143_36/ai_82535318

Firesetting: This Orphan Needs a Home !

2007-01-08T16:24:00.000-05:00

For decades firesetting and arson among juveniles has been an orphan behavior, known by everyone but belonging to no one. Everyone agrees that one of the most important factors to addressing our youth firesetting problem is “multi-disciplinary” cooperation between fire service, juvenile law enforcement, mental health, social service, burn care, and education. Have I left anyone out? There are some excellent examples across the country of local programs and individuals who have been able to establish effective intervention programs based upon the notion that we all need to be working together if we want to reduce firesetting in our communities.

However, we are sorely lacking a national leader. There is a real need for one of our credible and recognized national organizations to step up and take and active leadership role and begin to coordinate and drive our efforts from a national level. Someone needs to own this problem, get committed, and develop a comprehensive national strategy for research, training, and intervention. Whether this is FEMA and the USFA or the National Association of State Fire Marshals, or the American Psychological Association, or the National Association for Social Workers, or the American Burn Association is not the real issue. Just that someone steps up. As a psychologist it is hard for me to understand how, during the APA’s “Decade of Behavior”, we have not even sniffed at firesetting. Disappointing.

Robert Stadolnik, Ed.D

Cinderella’s Revenge

2006-11-30T14:27:00.000-05:00

There has been almost universal agreement during the past twenty years that approximately 10-15% of juveniles involved in firesetting are females. When we tell our stories to each other it is more frequently the young girls who we have come in contact with that scare us the most.

Their fires are described as:

more planned

more sophisticated

more personal

and more targeted.

Yet, young woman have received less than 1% of our research attention and as a result we know very little about these girls and whether, or how, they might differ from the boys with whom we work. In fact we can count the studies on one hand.

Girls, especially adolescent girls, have been described by some as the looming “third wave” of delinquency and recent statistics bear this out. Crime rates, including rates for more violent crimes, among these girls has risen dramatically during the past decade. These girls are described as coming from even more disturbed, abusive, and violent homes than their male counterparts and their prognosis into adulthood is especially poor with many of them facing domestic violence, homelessness, substance abuse, and incarceration. For many of these abused, neglected, and damaged girls their delinquent behaviors are an effort to act out against a world, or a person, that has treated them so harshly and neglectfully.

During the past year I have become more aware that more often than not the girls who we are asked to evaluate for firesetting fit this pattern. They become involved in firesetting as young adolescents after having been largely free of violent or acting out behaviors through their elementary school years. They frequently have set very few fires, as compared to our boys, but their fires are seen as being more meaningful, frightening, and/or confusing to the adults working with them. Rarely so they set a fire in a vacant building, woods, or dumpster and almost exclusively set fires in their homes or school. Their social skills are more distorted than they are under developed and they have highly conflicted relationships with their parent(s). These girls are often very sad and tragic characters who have little in the way of opportunity or hopefulness.

Those of us in the firesetting world have a challenge ahead of us. How do we respond to what will be a likely increase in the numbers of girls being referred to our programs? So do we just provide them what we have provided to the boys? or do we really take a look at the different deficits these girls have so we can tailor our interventions to their needs as opposed to tailoring these girls to our program needs?

The Myth of Pyromania

2006-11-20T09:53:00.000-05:00

Several mental health terms seem to have found there way into our everyday language in ways that appear on the surface to be accurate, but are anything but. How many of you have heard phrases like, "He's so schizophrenic," or, "I'm sure she's got OCD," in circumstances where the person clearly isn't or doesn't. Add "pyromania" to that list. It's amazing to me how frequently I either hear that term, or see it written in reports, being applied to kids whose firesetting behavior clearly isn't the result of their meeting the diagnostic criteria for pyromania-or coming anywhere close.

Pyromania is a term that was introduced into the legal community in Europe in the mid 1800's by a French defense attorney who was mounting an insanity defense for the son of a wealthy nobleman who had burned several homes. Its first appearance in anything resembling mental health literature was in the late 1920's and early 1930's when psychoanalytic writing by Freud and some of his contemporaries as part of their development of a psychosexual developmental model. In Freud's work, Origins of Power Over Fire (1931), he described man's attraction to fire as being fueled (no pun intended) by a latent homosexual desire to extinguish it with his urine as a means of resolving an internal sexual conflict. This established what is a continued association, in many peoples' minds, between firesetting and sexuality, urination, and deviancy.

Several researchers (David Kolko and Jeffrey Geller) have made the credible argument that pyromania, as it is currently written in DSM IV, either doesn't exist or exists at such a rare occurrence that it doesn't deserve the recognition it receives. I would agree. Having worked with over 1000 kids in the past 10+ years who've exhibited firesetting behaviors I can count on one hand the number of times I've even considered it as a possible explanation for the behavior. In each occasion the child never met the criteria for the diagnosis.

Why, despite the evidence against its use, does pyromania have the kind of staying power it has?
First, it's a lack of training and credible information available in education programs.
Second, it's an easy label to put onto a child whose firesetting behavior, which we probably haven't really examined, doesn't make sense to us.
Third, it smacks of deviancy and pathology, which some of us are attracted to. I'd encourage you to make every effort to eliminate the term "pyromania" from your working vocabulary or at the very least be especially certain that you use it in the most responsible manner. Read up on the subject if you still have questions.

Contributed by: Rob Stadolnik, Ed.D
President, FirePsych, Inc.
Consultant, Brandon

Face the Facts

2006-11-15T13:27:00.000-05:00

We have a tremendous firesetting/arson problem in our country and have so for decades. A major portion of this problem is the result of the actions of children and adolescents. It’s difficult to understand how we have largely ignored what has been termed by some as a “behavioral epidemic”.

Fact: Ever year intentionally set fires are responsible for over $1 billion dollars in residential and commercial property loss, hundreds of fire service and civilian lives lost, and thousands of burn injuries to children (mostly) and adults.

Fact: We also lose over $200 million dollars a year in school property-mostly middle schools and high schools-to fires that occur during the school day, most of which start in a lavatory.

Fact: 75% of all brush fires start between 3-6pm and 75% of all school fires occur while school is in session.

Fact: Juveniles represent more than 50% of all arrests or arson in our country and 66% of these juveniles are under the age of 15. Arson is the only violent crime tracked by the FBI where juveniles make up the majority of arrests.

Fact: A significant percentage (30-50%) of children admitted for pediatric burn care were burned in a fire that either they set or that was set by another child. Children under the age of 6, especially young Afro-American and American Indian boys, remain at highest risk for injury or death due to fire.

These facts point to the reality that child and juvenile firesetting is a problem that is much greater in scope than most people realize. We have become a largely fire ignorant culture and there are numerous examples of inappropriate adult modeling and media influences which our children are exposed to on a daily basis.

Firesetting among juveniles is a problem that impacts the fire service, the juvenile justice system, the burn care system, the mental health and child welfare system, and the insurance industry. Not to mention the impact on families and the children themselves.

We must face the fact that only through the collective and cooperative efforts of all those involved will we have the chance to stem the tide of what truly is a behavioral epidemic.

Contributed by: Rob Stadolnik, Ed.D
President, FirePsych, Inc.
Consultant, Brandon

Brandon on Fire

2006-11-06T18:16:00.000-05:00

Brandon on Fire is a unique, online resource dedicated to providing the most current and pertinent information on Child & Adolescent Firesetting. Brandon on Fire is moderated by The Brandon School & Residential Treatment Center, Inc. , leader in the assessment and treatment of problem firesetting in boys.