Into the Darklands (6 page)

STANDING THERE, a half-chewed barbecued chicken leg in one hand and a stubbie in the other, I can’t help but sigh.

Welcome to my own personal Groundhog day—a conversation I’m forced to play out every so often. This time it’s with a bloke I’ve just met, Geoff. He’s a bit pissed, but I don’t mind because I’m a bit pissed myself at that point.

‘Who knows,’ I say, smiling and shrugging my shoulders. ‘I wanted to be a hangman but I failed the knot test. I can only do bows, so the buggers kept falling out. A shrink seemed the logical second choice.’

‘No mate, seriously,’ continued Geoff, and I realised he wasn’t as pissed as I’d first thought. ‘How can you do it?’

Men often ask the question in a slightly aggressive way, like they’re pumping up for a fight. Women more often come in a little easier, more interested than angry. Whatever the case, everybody has that little glint in their eye, that give-me-a-peek look. Geoff looked like he was itching for a lynching.

‘Beats working for a living, I guess.’

‘Did you see that guy in the paper?’ Geoff asked. ‘The one who molested his daughter for years, and did all kinds of sick shit to her?’

I nodded. ‘Yup.’ Actually I’d spent a little bit of time chatting with the man in the paper, but I didn’t think it would help things much to point that out to Geoff.

‘So what would you do with him?’

‘Well, I’d like to hang him, but like I said, I’m no good with knots.’

Geoff wasn’t going to play. He wanted a serious discussion. I looked around desperately for a familiar face, but in the last few minutes the party seemed to have been gatecrashed by a busload of strangers. I was on my own.

‘How the hell is a bit of
counselling
going to stop someone like that?’

He said the word counselling like he was talking about something the cat had just sicked up on the rug. I didn’t mind the fact that he was having a go at counselling—God knows I do enough of that myself. The thing that really got me was the fact he was having a go at
me.
Geoff wasn’t just passing judgement on the field, he was passing judgement on
me.
He was calling me a tree-hugger.
That
was what really pissed me off.

I don’t mind a debate; in fact I think talking about this stuff is incredibly important, but I don’t like being disrespected simply because I choose to work in an area most people don’t understand. My job, at the end of the day, is to protect people like Geoff and his kids. My job is to sit at the edge of the flock and try to convince the wolf not to eat the lambs. Which is fine, but when someone like Geoff says
I’m
the problem, it makes me a little cross.

‘Well, what would
you
do?’ I ask him.

‘Put a bullet in his brain.’

‘Fair enough. How?’

‘What do you mean? I’d just shoot him.’

‘I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Geoff, but we aren’t allowed to shoot people in this country.’

‘Well, we should be,’ he said.

‘That may be, but we aren’t, so what are you going to do?’

‘Put him in jail forever then.’

‘For the rest of his life?’

‘Yeah. Problem solved.’ Geoff looked well pleased with himself. Clearly this man was a resource the Minister of Corrections had overlooked.

I shrugged. ‘That’s not going to work either, Geoff. Do you know how much it costs to keep a guy in jail for a year?’

‘No.’

‘Just over $50,000. It costs about $73,000 in maximum security.’

‘So?’

‘So, do you know how many people there are who commit sexual offences in this country every year?’

‘No.’

‘Shitloads.’ I’ve never had a good memory for statistics but have found that ‘shitloads’ will suffice most times. ‘So it’s going to mean big tax increases if you want to keep all those people in jail for the rest of their lives. You want to pay more taxes?’

‘If it kept those bastards off the street, I would.’

I didn’t believe him, but I let that one go. ‘OK, so how are you going to convince the politicians to raise taxes to pay for keeping these people in prison forever? Because they have to sell it to us voters and we don’t even want to pay more tax for a better health and education system. Why would we want to pay more for sex offenders?’

‘Well, why did the country all vote for tougher sentencing then?’ Geoff asked, with a got-you-this-time smile.

‘They didn’t.’

He screwed up his face. ‘Yes they did.’

‘No they didn’t.’ I took a sip of beer and smiled.

‘Ninety-something percent of the country voted for tougher sentences. What are you, stupid?’

‘They voted for a solution, they didn’t vote for tougher sentencing.’

‘The referendum was
about
tougher sentencing.’

‘No it wasn’t.’

Geoff looked at me like he wasn’t sure if he should thump me or laugh. Actually I think he was leaning more towards thumping me, but I was gambling that this was a fairly civilised do, so thumping me wouldn’t really be an option. ‘So what was it about then?’ he asked.

‘It was about fear, about wanting to stop bad people from doing bad things.’

‘Yeah,’ Geoff laboured, like he was talking to a retarded person. ‘Through tougher sentencing.’

‘No it wasn’t. People were saying they’re scared of the violence and they want it to stop. If making criminals dress as chickens stopped offending they would have voted for that.’

‘But tougher sentencing
will
work. If they know they’re going to go to jail for life, then they won’t do it.’

I sighed. ‘How many murderers have you met, Geoff?’

‘None.’

‘OK, how many sex offenders have you met?’

‘None.’

‘Armed robbers?’

‘None.’

‘Well I’ve talked to shitloads,’ I said, reverting once again to my hard statistical argument, ‘and believe me, tougher sentencing won’t stop bad guys from hurting people. At best it’ll keep the ones we’ve caught from doing it again, but it won’t stop others from doing it. And there are plenty of wannabes waiting in the wings.’

‘Are you saying that if you
knew
that if you killed someone you’d go to jail for life, that wouldn’t stop you from doing it?’

‘Of course it would.’

‘But you just said…’

‘I’m saying it would stop
me.
It wouldn’t stop the kind of people who really do go out and kill people. Murderers fall into three piles: sad bastards, bad bastards and mad bastards. None of them pay much attention to the legal-schmegal stuff in my experience. Threats will never stop them.’

‘You see,’ said Geoff, obviously taking offence at what I was saying, ‘that’s the whole problem. People are too soft on them. Jesus, guys in prison eat better than I do.’

‘Have you ever been in Mount Eden Prison?’

‘No.’

‘Well I have. It’s cold and it smells like a urinal.’

‘Good job,’ Geoff said. ‘Maybe they’ll think harder before they break the law next time.’

‘The only problem with that, Geoff, is they don’t.’

‘What, so we should just keep giving them colour televisions and pizza? Will that stop them?’

I sighed. ‘No, it won’t. As far as I know pizza has no inherent rehabilitative value.’

‘Then what?’

‘I think we have to be nice to them.’

Geoff shook his head, just as I knew he would. ‘That’s the problem with the whole system. We’re too nice to them already.’

Now, I could have used a different word instead of
nice,
something less likely to ruffle poor old Geoff’s feathers, but my beer was gone and the night was wearing on. There was no way he was going to understand what I was saying. It was time to bring this conversation to a close.

‘You want to know why I really help these guys, Geoff? I’ll tell you. I help them because that’s the only choice I have. That’s all I’ve got. I don’t have the luxury of standing on the sidelines bitching about what everyone else is doing wrong. So if I have to be nice to some sex offender to stop him raping kids, then I’m happy to do that.’

One of the research papers I quote in every training workshop I run was published by an American psychologist, Michael Lambert, in 1992. Lambert reviewed a large number of studies on treatment outcome to see which factors contributed the most to therapeutic change. His findings were both simple and profoundly important:

What this means is that the
relationship
between you and your client is the strongest thing you have going for you. It’s not as simple as the fact that a good relationship
alone
will produce the desired change, but rather that the relationship is the vehicle that drives home whatever messages you’re trying to give. In essence it’s the quality of the relationship that determines how much the person you’re working with actually listens to what you are saying.

Geoff just looked at me blankly. We were never going to get anywhere. He didn’t really want to know my views, he just wanted
to vent his spleen. That wasn’t really Geoff’s fault. For him this was all just stuff he’d seen on the telly. It was no more real to him than
The Sopranos
or
The Simpsons.

Time to go,
I thought to myself.

‘You want to know what the
real
answer is Geoff? Hug a sex offender. That’s the way forward, a big manly hug.’

He frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh come on, come to work with me on Monday and I’ll let you hug a couple. You never know, you might even develop a taste for it.’

‘Yeah, right.’

I shrugged. ‘I gotta get another beer, catch you later,’ I said and made my way to the kitchen. Sometimes you just have to run.

As I was opening the fridge to get another stubbie, a friendly-looking bloke introduced himself as Tim. He said he was in marketing and asked what I did.

‘Chartered accountant,’ I replied without missing a beat.

MY NICE AND YOUR NICE are probably not the same thing. My nice comes with sharp edges and jagged little hooks. My nice hurts more often than not.

John had served 20 months for sexually violating his 11-year-old stepdaughter over a two-year period. He’d been released quite some time ago and, because of staff shortages, was only just being seen, shortly before his parole period was to end. He’d served his time and been no trouble, and he hadn’t been in any further trouble in the time he’d been out, but he’d never admitted to having abused the girl, despite pleading guilty at his trial. This is one of the great farces of our legal system—bad guys plead guilty to get a lighter sentence, and straight after the trial they go back to saying they didn’t do it but instead selflessly pleaded guilty to spare their young accuser a trial. Such self-sacrifice is truly heart-warming.

John had taken that line, and added in a whole new slippery twist of his own.

When I went out to meet him my first impression was that he seemed like a nice enough guy. This might seem like an odd thing
to say about a man who’d sexually violated an 11-year-old, but it’s important to understand that otherwise nice people can do the most appalling things. John had no previous criminal convictions. This was the first time he’d been charged with anything. Before he went to jail he’d had a job and, apart from the fact he was raping his stepdaughter most nights, he’d lived a pretty normal life.

First impressions count with me. I’ll adjust my thinking as I’m going along, but mostly I find my initial judgements are pretty much on the money. If I think a guy is creepy at the beginning, I’ll probably still think that at the end. If my first gut feeling as I walk out to meet him is that he’s weird, he usually ends up being weird. Maybe I just filter other stuff out, but really I think that if you do this stuff for long enough, if you talk to enough people, you can recognise the signs very quickly. I have rooms full of filing cabinets in my head jammed with mental notes from interviews of all kinds of offenders, and so I think the sorting process happens very quickly, and mostly unconsciously. The result simply gets spat out the end as ‘Oh, he’s one of
those
…’

When I walked out to the waiting room to meet John it quickly became apparent who I was dealing with. As I said, he was a nice enough man: quiet, polite and eager to cooperate. He was very respectful but at the same time visibly anxious. I knew what he was scared of, and it wasn’t me.

We did the usual introductory bits and chatted for a few minutes. I kept this fairly light and warm because I wanted to establish with him right from the start that I wasn’t attacking him, it was just two guys talking. This was important given where I wanted to take him. Actually it was quite pleasant talking with John, because he was a genuinely likeable guy. But he was also a child rapist.

Most of all, I knew that John was scared of John.

‘So,’ I finally say, getting down to business, ‘it says here you saw
a psychologist inside.’

He nods. ‘Yeah, he was really helpful.’

‘How so?’

‘He helped me with a lot of stuff.’

‘What did you work out about your offending?’

He looked down. ‘Well, that one was hard because I don’t remember doing it.’

‘You don’t remember?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘And why is that?’

‘I was asleep.’

‘Excuse me?’

He nods. ‘I was asleep when it happened.’

‘You were asleep? So it was some kind of sexual-offending version of sleepwalking?’

‘I guess.’

At this point, I’m thinking a bunch of things. Part of me is pleasantly surprised. It’s always nice to come across an excuse you’ve never heard before. Sex offenders are like the people who make toothbrushes; just when you think they’ve come up with every feature they could possibly put on a toothbrush, they come up with something new. Whether it’s angled heads, different lengths of bristles, antibacterial bristles or flexible handles, they always have some new marketing spin. Two days ago I saw an ad for a toothbrush that whitens your teeth. The humble toothbrush is a testament to our lateral-thinking abilities.

Sex offenders are exactly the same. Just when you think you’ve heard it all someone comes up with a new one.

‘What did your psychologist in prison say about that?’

‘He said maybe I could have some kind of sleep disorder or something.’

‘Uh huh.’

I never believe what the bad guy tells me about another professional. It’s possible that happened, but I’m not going to assume it did unless I can check it out myself. Besides, it’s irrelevant to where I’m going.

‘Look, John,’ I say, putting my paper and pen down on the desk, ‘there’s two ways we can do this. I can play the polite shrink and ask you all these polite little shrink questions, or I can tell you what I really think. If we go the polite way it’ll be easier on you, but it won’t help you. If you want me to be really honest it’ll be a lot harder, because I’m not going to be gentle, but you might actually get something out of it.’

Now, there are two main reasons I’m doing this. Firstly, I want to signal to him that we’re going to have a different conversation than he might have had with his last shrink. Whatever they talked about, John is still very distorted in his thinking, and thus still very dangerous. If I simply repeat what was probably a very polite and ‘professional’ conversation, we won’t get anywhere either. Secondly, I want John to bring himself into the conversation by choice. He’ll listen more if he’s
asked
me to be honest. As the saying goes, it ain’t the sausage, it’s the sizzle.

‘I want you to be honest,’ he says without hesitation.

‘Are you sure, because it ain’t gonna be pretty.’

He nodded. ‘I’m sure.’

‘OK then.’ I sit forward in my chair, just ever so slightly. ‘John, has anyone ever told you they think you’re lying?’

‘No.’

‘I see.’ I pause again. ‘John?’

‘Yeah?’

‘You’re lying.’ I don’t say it in an aggressive way, just quiet and matter of fact.

He blinks and sits back. ‘Oh.’

I shrug. ‘Yup.’

‘Is that what you really think?’

I nod. ‘Yup. And the psychologist in jail probably thought exactly the same thing too. He just didn’t tell you because he was too polite.’

‘Oh.’

We sit there in silence for a few moments. ‘Why do you think that?’ he asks, and he isn’t defensive or upset, he really wants to know. His reactions are confirming my initial impressions.

‘Because you’re not a bad man.’

He frowns. ‘You think I’m lying because I’m not a bad guy?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘I’ve been doing this a long time, John, and I’ve talked to lots of people who’ve hurt children like you have. There are basically two kinds: the bad ones who do bad things and don’t give a damn, and the good ones who do bad things and it eats them up inside. None of us like to face the bad things we do. None of us. I think this thing is eating you up inside.’

‘I still don’t get it,’ he says, and he’s sweating big time. John is scared because he knows he’s about to go somewhere he doesn’t want to go.

‘Shall I tell you what happens inside your head?’ I ask.

He swallows, and to his credit, he says, ‘OK’.

‘When you think about it, when you
really
think about what you did, it makes you sick. You wonder how you could have done such a thing. It confuses you, because you know that isn’t who you are, not who you
really
are. Except the thing you can never escape is that it is. That
is
who you really are, because you did those things to that poor little girl.

‘And you stood up and pleaded guilty in court because your lawyer told you that was the smart thing to do, that you’d get a lesser sentence. But then when that was all done you couldn’t bring yourself to admit it, not out loud. You couldn’t bring yourself to say the words because that would make it true, and you don’t want it to be true, so you came up with this stupid story. And you repeated it. And you told yourself it was true even though you knew it was a lie.’

He’s sitting there, dead still, listening to every word.

‘But it hasn’t helped, because you feel worse now than before. You’ve done your time but inside you still feel like shit because you’ve never owned up. You pleaded guilty in court but you’ve never said it to yourself. And it’s even worse than that because there are still times when you think about what you did with her and it turns you on. You remember what
it felt
like when you were raping her. And that’s the thing that makes you feel the sickest of all, that’s the thing that makes you feel like such a shit. The fact that it still happens in your head. Just like all those times afterwards, when you’d lie in bed feeling sick with guilt and fear, telling yourself you’d never do it again, and at the same time knowing you would.’

I pause, and the silence feels huge.

‘I can’t help you if you won’t take the first step, John. I can’t do anything if you won’t face up to this thing. I can’t, but the truth is that even if I could, I wouldn’t. You don’t get to come here for free, stuff that. This shit costs. You have to give something up if you want to see me.’

He swallows again. ‘What?’

If I’d asked him for money at that moment he would have happily written out a cheque. But of course I don’t want his money—I want something much more than that.

‘Give up this dirty lie, John.’

‘I…’ he starts to say, but I cut in.

‘Have a care, John. Think carefully about what you say next because this is a one-time-only offer. You’re about to choose who you want to be from here on, you’re about to make the most important decision of your life. These are big stakes so whatever you do, have a care.’

He pauses for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is more measured, but there are tears in his eyes. ‘What do I do?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Tell me about the first time.’

And this is the point; this is where I hold my breath and hope. After the longest time he drops his head and starts to speak. ‘It was in my bedroom,’ he says. ‘Her mum was out…’

‘John?’ I cut in.

He looks up.

‘Don’t look down, that shit is for liars. What you’re doing now is hard, and it’s some pretty awful stuff we need to talk about, but don’t look down. The truth is something men do face to face.’

He nods, sighing. It is a very sad sound. ‘OK.’

‘Start again,’ I say.

And he does.

I only got to see John that one time because his parole period ended a couple of weeks later. He wanted to come back and see me, and tried to pressure the system into letting him come back but it didn’t work. Once you’re out, you’re out. The last time I spoke to him he said he was thinking about writing a letter to his MP.

I’m sure there will be some who think my calling him a liar wasn’t very nice. They will probably say it was disrespectful. Perhaps not surprisingly, I disagree. I think that it would be more disrespectful to think that and
not
say it, or to say it in such a convoluted and ‘polite’ way that he wouldn’t have heard. John was trapped in his
lie, and he needed a way out. He’d had months of counselling and nothing had shifted. Not a thing.

All I did was tell him the truth. I respected him enough to tell him what I really thought. I don’t fake nice. I say it as I see it. My guys will
always
know where they stand with me. If I want John to be honest with me, I figure I owe him the same in return. Down here that’s the only kind of respect that counts.

And, as far as I could tell, he seemed to value that. If he didn’t, I can’t imagine why he would have pushed so hard to come back.

Like I said, my nice and your nice are probably not the same thing.