Into the Darklands (10 page)

Other times the humour is black as can be. One night during a sex-offender treatment group one of the men was describing the first time he’d sexually offended against his 11-year-old niece.

‘I was sitting with her in the spa pool,’ he said, ‘when I just started to notice the light shining on the water.’

‘What about the light?’ I ask.

‘It was all swirly and sparkling, and it just seemed to put me into a kind of trance, like I was hypnotised or something. And that’s when I did it.’

‘Did what?’

‘That’s when I offended against my niece, when I was in the trance,’ he said, with this completely earnest tone.

I tried to speak, but the urge to laugh was too strong. I laughed so hard it hurt. When I’d finally recovered some composure I turned
to him. ‘That is the most impressive piece of bullshit I’ve heard in the last six years. I thought I’d heard every excuse known to man and then you come in here with hypnotic trances. Well done,’ I said. ‘As a prize you can go home early. That was a good one.’

He didn’t leave. He just sat there looking embarrassed. He also didn’t speak about hypnotic trances again.

Or there was the man who exposed himself to schoolgirls because he said he was upset about apartheid in South Africa.

Or the man who got caught for armed robbery because his mate dropped their address book in the bank.

This is serious shit, all right. Far too serious to take seriously. If I did I’d never have been able to survive this long.

PICTURE A HOT SUMMER afternoon in the depths of an equally hot and bad-tempered city. The country’s in the grip of a heatwave, and people queue in department stores for an hour to buy electric fans that are suddenly as scarce as dental floss for hen’s teeth. No one can sleep at night, except for the few lucky bastards who managed to get fans. The rest of us toss and turn thinking of nothing but cool breezes and the selfish bastards hogging all the fans. Then we get up in the morning feeling tired and fed up with everything and everyone.

So you’re sitting in this small room with no ventilation other than a window which opens a smidgen wider than a crack. This is the building where they send the bad guys after they get out of jail. The idea is that people like you are supposed to keep them from doing some other shitty thing.

Across from you, on the only other chair in the room, is your third appointment for the day. We’ll call him Henry. Henry has just got out of jail. He was sentenced to four years for sexually abusing a six-year-old boy. It was bad. This is his second time in prison; next
time he gets preventative detention, which means he gets a real long time to sit and think about where he went wrong. Although by then it won’t matter, because he’ll have added more children to his long list of names.

Henry didn’t make the best use of his time inside. He completed a sex-offender treatment programme in jail, nine months’ worth in fact. Only thing is, the people running it don’t feel anywhere near as good as he does about how he went. The report that came with him states that his risk of reoffending is ‘very high’. Apparently he didn’t really display much ability to understand the pain his offending had caused. He also refused to discuss some pretty important issues, most notably his sexuality.

He did disclose offending against a total of 27 boys in his career to date. You do the maths and figure that probably means the number is closer to 60. At least.

On top of all that he even
looks
like a paedophile. He’s dressed in a blue shirt, grey walk shorts, white socks and brown sandals. He’s a rather rotund gentleman, in a Billy Bunter kind of way, and his face has a rosy red sheen. When he smiles at you there’s an unpleasant simpering quality to it that makes you want to lean out and slap him a couple of times. You don’t, of course, but you sure as hell feel like it.

He lives by himself in a dingy little flat. He has no friends to speak of, no job and no interests. He has no real qualifications and no reason to feel anything but depressed about his life. On top of all this you look at your watch and realise you only have 40 minutes left with him before he leaves and goes back out there into the world. Out there with all those kids.

The phrase ‘very high risk of reoffending’ plays over and over in your head like a needle stuck in a groove as you realise you’re sitting with a ticking bomb. The question isn’t will he do it again,
the real question is how many times will he do it again before he gets caught? Thirty-nine minutes left. What are you going to do?

Welcome to my world.

I’m the first to admit it’s a strange thing that I do—I sit in rooms with people like Henry and talk about all kinds of terrible stuff. As I said at the start, I have no intention of writing a how-to book about working with bad guys, but it is relevant to talk a little about the nature of the work.

The politics of psychology is something I’ve largely placed myself apart from, mostly because politics of any kind makes me want to get up from wherever I am and leave. Politics is the organisational fluff that gathers in our collective navels. It feels important, but in the end it’s just lint and dead skin.

The official line is that psychologists are scientist-practitioners, the theory being that research guides our clinical practice. Science is the way forward, we’re told, science will unravel the mysteries of human behaviour and show us how best to correct the aberrant parts we don’t like. If we are careful with our controlled studies, all will be revealed.

Bollocks.

Obviously there are far cleverer people than me who have mounted pretty valid challenges to the dogma of Western Empiricism. If you’re interested in all that stuff I suggest you go and read the pile. Maybe start with Thomas Kuhn’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
and work your way forward from there. Most of all though, you should read some of Mr Lateral Thinking himself, Edward de Bono. He’s one of the few people I’ve read who actually said something that was helpful to me in the real world.

You can read every scientific study in every journal, but eventually you still have to sit in the room with the bad guy, and I have never read an academic paper that told me much about how to do that.

Why is it we can build space shuttles and particle accelerators, but we can’t stop kids from killing themselves? Why is it we can bask in the technological triumph that is ‘home theatre’, yet we don’t know how to accurately predict who is going to kill a child?

Perhaps, as people like Edward de Bono assert, it’s because science is the wrong logic to understand why people do the things they do. Perhaps the logic of human experience is different to the logic of mathematics and science. No one actually believes that human beings are rational and logical, but we persist in using the rational and logical methodology of scientific enquiry as the only valid way to try to understand why we do the things we do.

I’ll say it one more time just in case you missed it before: bollocks.

When I was in seventh form I did a correspondence paper in art history. I’d like to think it was because I was particularly cultured as an adolescent, but really I think it was just another way to say ‘Screw you’ to the rugby boys at Waitaki Boys’ High School. I did it for a few weeks but then gave up on the assignments and focused on reading Stephen King novels instead. They were a lot more fun.

Despite that I did learn a thing or two about art history. What surprised me the most was how technical it all was. I’d always assumed they just got some paint, a blank space and did their thing. What I learnt was that there was considerable time and effort put into developing the quality of the paints and the surfaces on which they were applied. There was a science behind the art, which all makes perfect sense when you think about it, given that there’s not much point painting a nice fresco on the roof of some church if it all flakes off next year. So if you want to be a good artist, as well as all the X-factor stuff, you have to know what makes the paint stick. You have to know how to make colours that won’t fade.

Being a shrink is just the same. You gotta know what makes the
paint stick. There’s no point sitting down to talk with a bad guy if you don’t know some of the technical aspects of how to mix the paint and prepare the surface. We do know some things about which general approaches work better with particular problems. There has been a lot of good research telling us how to mix paints and prepare surfaces.

If all you do with a sexual offender is talk about his relationship with his father, or whether he used to wet the bed, or the shitty things that happened to him in his life, you’re worse than useless, you’re dangerous. There are some quite specific things you should do to best reduce the risk of reoffending. If you don’t know what those things are, then you shouldn’t be sitting in that room with that guy.

The worrying thing is that there are plenty of people out there doing this work who don’t know the first thing about making the paint stick. Once I read a court report from a psychologist working in private practice who said that it was appropriate for this particular offender to have sexual images of children because he was immature and therefore could only relate to children. In his learned opinion this meant the pictures were ‘developmentally appropriate’. Like I said, if you don’t know the technical stuff then you’re worse than useless, you’re dangerous. My advice to the probation officer who showed me the report for a second opinion was that he should lay a complaint with the Psychologists’ Board.

So don’t get me wrong, I believe people working with bad guys should have a good technical grasp of the mechanical stuff. But having said that, a technical understanding alone will not produce a work of art. If you use a paint-by-numbers approach you might end up with a perfectly functional picture of a horse, but no one’s ever going to want to hang it on their wall.

At the same time as we need to study up on the technical
aspects of painting, we have to be careful that we don’t take the soul out of the work. There is a tendency at present amongst various quarters in the forensic field to try and reduce offender treatment to what essentially amounts to a series of tick boxes. There is a lot of bureaucratic talk overflowing with acronyms, but hardly anyone talks about the ‘c’-word:
compassion.

There has always been a lot of talk about ‘ethical practice’ and ‘professional practice’, but I haven’t heard much about
compassionate practice.
Never, in all my years working with the major players in this area, have I seen a memo or document stressing the importance of establishing a
relationship
with bad guys.

Why is that? I guess it’s easier to sit behind the ‘scientist-practitioner’ facade than it is to climb down into the shit and get your hands dirty. It’s easier to make some polite pretence at ‘rapport’ while remaining emotionally detached. After all, who in their right mind would want to enter into some kind of emotional exchange with a man convicted of raping children?

No, better that we sit back behind our clipboards and make our assessments of their criminogenic needs and their predicted responsivity to treatment. Best not get too close.

Except, of course, that doesn’t work. You can dress all this stuff up in as much jargon as you like, but in the end it boils down to us asking the bad guy—granted in a relatively sophisticated way—to please stop doing bad things to other people.

The real art is in the building of a relationship between you and him so that he actually
listens.
He’s never going to do that unless he feels like he’s bumping up against something real. He won’t stop because you threaten him, or scare him, or reason with him, or present him with a logical argument. If logic and reason worked we wouldn’t have any crime, so why do we persist in approaching the treatment of criminals with ‘logical’ and ‘reasoned’ approaches?

It is
compassion
that builds the
connection
that makes the magic work.

Let me be clear—I’m not arguing for some kind of nauseatingly touchy-feely, all-you-need-is-love approach, because even the best relationship with your client isn’t going to get you anywhere just by itself. But I
am
saying that establishing a relationship is a necessary precondition to change. I’m not saying you have to hug the guy, or take him out on a date, but you have to at least bring yourself into the room. If you don’t do that, why would he bother to listen?

Some people would argue that logic and reason provide our best hope of systematically refining treatment approaches. They would no doubt say that without science there can be no real development. I would say this is partly true—science is useful at one level. It can help us to see patterns that we might not have otherwise seen. Here’s an interesting statistic: serial rapists tend to commit their first burglary at age 15 and their first rape at age 25, a statistic that holds pretty well across several different countries. Knowing this is important, since it suggests some of the questions I should be asking a 25-year-old up on his first rape charge. Here’s another: a UK study found that close to 90 percent of serial rapists lived within a circle defined by their two furthest apart offences. That’s another useful one to know if the bad guy is still on the loose. Choose the two furthest apart offences and draw a circle using those points as the diameter. Chances are you now know the area in which he lives.

Now, while there’s still a lot of debate about these kinds of statistics in the international research literature, and debate about how this stuff applies in our part of the world, it’s still pretty damn useful science to know about.

Actually, it seems our rapists are far more transient than those in the US and UK. Our guys tend to move around a lot and also
have their own transport, so that makes the geographic profiling a lot harder. Our most promising lines of finding an unknown offender would seem to be from combining both the geographical data about the location of the rapes with data about the offender’s likely criminal history (for example, people with convictions for burglary, violence offences etc). Combining those two factors results in a greater degree of accuracy in finding the identity of the rapist.

The problem is that all too often we make the mistake of thinking that just because
some
of this is useful, this means science can tell us
everything.
Worse still, we discount everything outside the scientific approach because there aren’t numbers to show it has any worth.

While I believe science has a valuable contribution to make (remember: there are patterns in the Darklands), if science is our best hope of ever having an impact on human behaviour then I for one will be retreating to a secluded concrete bunker well stocked with canned goods and firearms. Maps are good and useful things, and they can help us find our way out, but the map will never be the terrain. It will never tell us where to put our feet, or where the snakes might be hiding. If science is all we’ve got to help us solve these problems, then we’re in big trouble.

Detached ‘psychological assessments’ and ‘psychological interventions’ are the equivalent of that paint-by-numbers picture of a horse. You can tell it’s a horse—the picture has all the right component parts—but it will never stir the heart or mind.

My profession
yearns
for scientific legitimacy. We say that’s what makes us different from the rest of the counselling field. Psychology has struggled from an inferiority complex right from the start, so we say that our research-informed practice is what makes us better. Maybe it makes us different, but it doesn’t automatically make us
any better. When we sit down with people and embark on a journey of therapeutic change, we are artists, not scientists. At least if we’re any good.