This activity gives young people the opportunity to reflect on how people ‘escalate’ during conflicts and to create a list of personal de-escalation methods
What to do
Firstly, invite the participants to sit in pairs and decide between them who will start. Each pair should be given a pile of at least 10 cards. Ask the first person to think individually about an action of another person that would make them angry. Then, they have 60 seconds to draw a fictional person doing this action towards an invisible other person (who should not be drawn yet). They should draw it on one card and lay it face-up on the ground or table so their partner can see it. The second person in the pair should not speak whilst the first is drawing.
Next, the second participant should think about how they themselves would realistically react to the action shown on the first card. They should pick up a new card and draw a second person who is reacting to the action of the first. They also have just 60 seconds to draw and put the card next to the first.
Continuing the same process, the first participant then draws a new reaction to the other’s reaction and puts this card on top of their first one (still only taking 60 seconds to draw). This reaction should be a bit stronger than the first reaction. This process is again repeated and the other draws once again. After ten rounds of drawing, stop the game. Ask the pairs to have a look at their chain reactions; they can spread out the piles of cards one after the other in a chain to see the full story of how the actions and reactions progressed.
Ask the pairs to decide together where the turning point in their chain is; where things escalated. Escalation means an increase in the intensity or seriousness of something. Comparing the very first card with the very last reaction they can also consider whether or not the last reaction would be a fair reaction to the first action.
Discussion Questions
Come back together and let the pairs explain what happens in their chain reaction stories.
Ask the group:
- How did you like the activity?
- Was it easy or difficult to come up with reactions to what the other person drew?
- Do you think what you have drawn is realistic?
- Have you ever encountered or experienced such a chain of reactions before?
- What influenced how you and the other person reacted? How did the situation end?
- Were all the reactions in the chains negative ones? Were there any reactions that you found surprising? Why?
- Can all the chains be considered conflicts? At what stage did a chain of reactions turn into a conflict?
- Did any of the chains of reactions which stayed negative turn violent? How quickly?
- How do you feel in such negative chain reactions?
- When you get very angry, how can you try to calm yourself down, to ‘de-escalate yourself’?
Take it Further
After collecting some ideas from the discussion questions, give everyone a copy of the piano keyboard. Ask participants to think about how they personally like to relax and get rid of strong negative emotions. They should write one way of doing so in every white key on the piano.
When everyone has filled their keyboard, ask them to put them on a wall so that they create one long keyboard all together. Give some time to read what others have written on the piano.
Debriefing 2
• What is your favourite way of calming yourself down?
• How can this help you when you have a conflict with someone else?
• How can you deal with the other person after calming down?
• Is there a calming down method that someone else wrote which you think would also be good for you? Which one?
Tips for facilitators
Instead of drawing, you could ask the pairs to simply tell each other the reactions and write them down in keywords.
If the participants are struggling to come up with an initial situation that would make them angry, ask them to think of specific examples that have happened to them in the past or you can give some examples to guide them, for example:
• Someone is using a toy which you want to use.
• Someone has borrowed something without asking.
• Someone walks into you without saying sorry.
• Someone breaks one of your possessions.
• Someone says something horrible about a member of your family.
• You get told off for something you didn’t do.
For older groups, you could explain the staircase model of escalation described in the introduction on page 11 and see if their chain reactions fit the model.