Into the Darklands (4 page)

‘Why me?’ Tom whispered in my ear, cueing me with what to say.

The first time I said those words Robert came completely undone. In truth he howled. It was one of the most painful sounds I think I’ve ever heard. He collapsed to his knees sobbing, gasping ‘no’ over and over. Inside, the dam had broken, and now the shit storm had come. And it took him away for a while.

When he came back he was no longer ‘handling it’, and despite
all the words I know, I cannot think of one to adequately describe the look in his eyes. How does one describe how it must feel for him to finally face the things he’d done to that little girl? That task is beyond me.

For my part I felt as if I’d been gutted. Not figuratively, but literally. It felt as if I’d been slit open and had my insides pulled out. Sitting back in my chair I felt disconnected from the world, and it took several minutes to pull myself back into my own head. Looking over at Robert I wasn’t quite so clear any more. Inside I felt a swirling mixture of pity, anger, sadness and disgust. It would be days before I’d be able to get enough distance from the weekend to start to sort through some of those feelings. I do remember the urge to slam him was gone.

There was nothing I could do that would equal the pain he was now feeling. It’s always ourselves we should fear most.

We did that for the next 13 hours, from midday Saturday till 1 a.m. on Sunday morning. I was an auxiliary in every drama and by the end of it I felt absolutely
fucked.
Exhausted would be the polite way to say it, but
fucked
is far closer to the truth.

I played the role of victims, offenders, battered children, parents of their victims, the offender’s family, everything you could imagine.

Swimming in a sea of shit, that’s the game we played, swimming in a sea of shit all the way from a bright sunny afternoon into the deepest depths of the night. When we finally finished in the small hours of Sunday morning all I wanted was to go home. The thing about those weekends though is you don’t get to leave till the ride is finished.

So instead of leaving I drank some more wine with Tom and Andy and wished I was safe home in my own bed, safe in my own life where bad things only happened on television.

We did some more things on Sunday morning, mostly talking about the weekly groups they’d be going on to next, which would focus on relapse prevention, and then we went home.

Just like that. Except there was never going to be any ‘just like that’ for me. Some places stay with you, they
change
you.

This was no longer just about getting my master’s thesis finished, it was now about the
work.
The things I’d experienced were too big to walk away from. I could no more go back to my old life than I could go back in time.

I’d spent three days in the Darklands and there was never any going back. Within two months I was working as a therapist on the programme.

I’ve never really left.

BARRY SAYS IT IN the way guys like him always say it: with a whiny, poor-me tone of voice. He’s not really looking for an answer, at least not the real one anyway. Barry just wants to arse on about how awful it all is and how he can’t understand how he could have done such a terrible thing. If he does that long enough then he won’t have to really think about what he did to his victim.

I sigh. Despite Barry’s game playing, the question has some validity. A lot of people ask me why people do bad things. Usually I reply: ‘Because they can.’ I suspect, however, that this probably isn’t a very satisfactory answer.

Our fascination with the ‘criminal mind’ undoubtedly goes back as far as the caves. Some Neanderthal probably killed some other Neanderthal and the rest of the tribe wondered: ‘Now why would Bob go and do a thing like that?’ We’ve continued to want to know what makes people do bad things. Earlier explanations revolved around spiritual dimensions, good and evil, God and Satan. Interestingly, for some the debate hasn’t moved much past there.

‘Satan made me do it,’ a man told me when I asked him why he’d raped his nine-year-old stepson.

‘Wow,’ was my somewhat facetious reply, ‘I saw that movie.’

‘What movie?’

‘The Exorcist.
That was some pretty scary shit. Can you make your head spin right round? I’d
really
like to see that.’

He frowned. ‘No.’

‘You’re not going to vomit green bile all over me, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Do you want me to get a priest?’

‘No.’ By now he’s sounding halfway between amused and pissed off.

‘Can you do the scary voice?’

‘No. What’s your point?’

‘My point is that I think you had a lot more to do with it than the devil.’

‘Oh.’

(Whilst not being a big biblical scholar, I’m pretty sure that—demonic possession aside—the whole free-will thing pretty much screws that argument. The devil might have whispered in your ear, but he didn’t unzip your fly.) I get tired of guys who rape or kill somebody, then find God and are instantly forgiven and shown the right path. Usually these people are backed up by well-meaning, naive and dangerous supporters who think they’ve saved the bad guy and who are only too happy to come along to a session and tell you how helpful God has been about the whole thing. I’m sure even God must get sick of these people.

One of the first ‘scientific’ attempts to explain criminality was published by an Italian Professor, Cesare Lombroso, in 1876, in his book
L’Uomo Dilenquente (Criminal Man).
Essentially Lombroso tried to isolate the distinctive physical characteristics of criminals.
He came up with an interesting list of criteria: prominent jaws and cheekbones, eye defects, funny noses, unusual ears (the more they look like monkey ears the worse you are), big lips, long arms, and funny-shaped heads. His thesis was that these were the physical giveaways that someone was a born criminal. Essentially, the more you looked like a monkey, the worse kind of criminal you were.

Now, while I’ve seen a number of offenders who were distinctly monkey-like in appearance, I’ve also had a few that looked pretty normal. I think it’s safe to say Lombroso doesn’t have a large school of followers these days, although he’s always good for a laugh in conference presentations.

That said, we still look for physical signs of criminality. Recent examples are the work that’s been done on XYY chromosome males, and the onwards search for ‘criminal’ genes. It’s a nice thought—that it might one day be as simple as a gene test—but I doubt it. There might be some nature, but there’s always going to be a significant nurture component as well.

Sociological explanations of criminology have also been a significant player and continue to be advanced in some quarters as the reason why people do bad stuff. Essentially this is the old Monty Python line: ‘It’s a fair cop, Your Honour, but society’s to blame.’ The sociological argument is that wider social factors such as poverty, lack of education and discrimination are the causes of crime. As such the way to stop people committing crimes is to provide employment, education and help us all to love each other more. The scientists hate this one. They’ll tell you it’s a load of fluffy nonsense.

Social-learning theory is currently one of the most popular flavours in the forensic ice-cream shop. Basically this is a case of monkey see, monkey do. People who commit criminal acts do so because it’s learned behaviour. Clinicians guided by this framework
would look at things like antisocial attitudes and beliefs, antisocial behaviour, antisocial personality factors, and whether or not you have antisocial peers. All these things have been shown to be predictive of the likelihood of future criminal behaviour.

I’d have to say that I spend most of my time in the social-learning camp. There are a lot of people who are poor, uneducated and unloved, and they don’t all go out and commit crimes. Some do, but a lot don’t. Problems are
not
excuses. There are just as many people from deprived backgrounds who go on to live decent, law-abiding lives. This is counter to the whole everyone’s-a-victim-of-something, no-responsibility culture that has been evolving over recent years. There always seems to be an excuse. Once I heard a defence lawyer claim that his client was suffering from a heart condition and the lack of blood flow to his brain may have been a contributing factor as to why he shot and killed three people. That, of course, is why the murder rate in cardiac wards is so high. We all hear stories every day of heart surgeons shot dead in operating theatres by deranged angina patients, right? Give me a break.

So if you’re assessing a guy who brutally raped a woman, you’re probably better off looking at what he’s done before, what he was thinking and whether or not he has criminal mates, than how he was victimised by an uncaring world.

But is that to say issues of social justice have no relevance? Hell, no—and this is something I sometimes think some of my more ‘scientifically minded’ colleagues don’t seem to get, or if they do, then only grudgingly. Mainstream forensic thinking has no quarrel with the fact that antisocial attitudes contribute to criminal offending. If your motto is ‘Fuck the world’, then you’re more likely to go out and try and to do just that than someone whose motto is ‘Give peace a chance’. What doesn’t seem to follow is any concern with where that antisocial thinking came from.

I was once told by an organisation that will remain nameless, that they wouldn’t pay me to work with a high-risk offender on his own victimisation issues because that wasn’t relevant. His antisocial attitudes were relevant, just not his own history of severe childhood physical abuse.

Now, this is where things get all screwed up, because we take a good and useful concept and adhere to it so rigidly that it no longer reflects the real world. In essence we stick our collective heads so far up our bureaucratic bottoms that we can’t see what’s right in front of us. If it doesn’t fit in the box, we throw it away.

This guy was angry. He hated everybody for just about everything. He’d been horribly beaten throughout his childhood, and was a deeply emotionally scarred man. His head was almost constantly filled with intense ‘flashbacks’ to scenes of this early abuse. The brain stores traumatic memories and can spontaneously reproduce them in incredibly vivid detail. These old painful memories can come sweeping back in a second. His whole life had been spent being battered by these memories. When they happened they were so intense it was as if he was experiencing them all over again.

For him it was a nonsense to look at changing his antisocial attitudes and beliefs until he had achieved some relief from his almost constant flashbacks. It’s a little hard to believe nice things about the world when all the time you’re having vivid flashbacks to the time when you were seven years old and being beaten with a piece of barbed wire.

Unfortunately I never managed to convince the bean-counter of this and so wasn’t able to work with the man. He was ‘referred out’, which means he fell off the back of some desk. And if that guy ever kills someone I’m more likely to be questioned over the thoroughness of my paperwork than the bean-counter will be about why I wasn’t allowed to do what I believe needed to be done.

The problem with our large institutions is that the people making the big decisions are often not the ones on the front line. For some reason people who sit in nice chairs in big buildings way up in the sky think they know more about how to do the work on the ground than those of us who get our hands dirty. There have been many times over the course of my career when I’ve been told by a bureaucrat that what I wanted to do either wasn’t a good idea, or simply ‘isn’t what we do here’.

Box logic.

Even though I believe the monkey-see-monkey-do argument is a good one, we always have to remember monkeys live in trees, not boxes. You have to consider the monkey’s whole context when trying to understand why he steals a banana. The problem with psychologists is that we want to put monkeys in boxes and measure them. We want to record the frequency of each little monkey action and extrapolate out from that one action to the real world. We
yearn
for scientific legitimacy.

Because of that many of us think the only way to really understand why monkeys steal bananas is to stick them in a box and measure the number of times they push a lever. In the
real
world monkeys live in trees.

‘I just want to know
why
I did it,’ Barry whined again. He’d been convicted for sodomising his nephew so badly the boy had needed reconstructive bowel surgery.

‘How will that help you?’ I asked.

‘I just need to know, because then I can understand it,’ Barry said, with eyes that drooped like a pathetic beagle. He was using the ‘why’ question as a way to avoid working. He kept telling himself he couldn’t go forward until he knew
why.

‘You really want to know?’

‘Yes, I really do.’

I sighed. ‘Well, I could tell you all kinds of reasons why. I could tell you that you did it because you feel too inadequate to approach someone your own age. I could tell you it was about repressed homosexuality. I could tell you that you did it because it was a way to express the power and control you feel is your right as a man. I could tell you that you did it because you felt depressed and the sex was a distraction from those negative feelings. I could tell you that you did it because you wanted emotional intimacy but had no way to get it in an appropriate way because your parents didn’t teach you how. I could tell you that you did it because you hated the boy’s mother for making you feel stupid. I could tell you that you did it because the boy represented yourself at that age and it was an act of self-punishment. I could tell you that you did it because you wet the bed when you were ten, or the way your mother potty-trained you, or that your father was emotionally unavailable. I could tell you it was because the planets were aligned in a particular way, or solar flares from the sun disrupted your brain functioning.’ I paused.

‘But the majority of that would be psychological bollocks. In the end you did it because you were selfish and you wanted to. You did it because you wanted sex. You did it because you were only interested in yourself and you didn’t give a
shit
about that poor little boy. In the end, the only thing I can tell you with any degree of certainty, is that you did it simply because you wanted to
come.’
And again I pause.

He’s so still he isn’t even blinking.

‘Now, Barry, we can spend a bunch of time talking about all that
why
bullshit until we come up with something that makes you feel better, or we can focus on
how
you did it and
how
you can make sure you don’t do it again. What do you want to do?’

He looked at me for a few moments. ‘The second one,’ he said at last.

I smiled. ‘Good choice.’

In the end, people do bad things because they can.

I have bugger all interest in all the academic blah-de-blah about
why
people do bad things. You can make up any number of stories about
why
a person does something and in the end they’re only stories. I’m pretty much only ever interested in
how
they can make sure they don’t do it again. If I’m sitting in a room with some bad guy, I can’t change the world, I can’t address any political or social injustices that may have contributed to him doing what he did. I’ll leave that to other people. My concern is more immediate. My concern is
him,
and the things I need to do to help him change.