by Nigel Latta
Ben had been to lots of counsellors in his short life, and he never stayed for longer than about 10 minutes. He hated counsellors.
First time I met him he walked into the middle of another session and sat down in a spare chair. I was talking to a nice middle-class couple and he just walked in and sat down like he owned the place. For a few moments I thought he was their son. Then Ben’s caregiver came into the room. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘He’s losing it a bit today.’
‘Oh,’ I said, turning to the couple. ‘He’s not with you?’
They smiled. ‘No.’
Ben stomped out again. Already I liked him. With an entrance like that, how could I not? This kid had some kind of gazumph.
After I finished with the couple I got the caregiver to bring Ben back in. He paced about the room like a caged animal, occasionally lightly punching the wall. This was going to be interesting.
‘He was throwing stones at cars,’ said the caregiver, ‘so don’t let him go outside.’
Ben kept pacing, looking like he was about to explode. Clearly there was a need to establish a little control. He was a scrawny little bugger, but if I didn’t establish a no-fly zone this was going to be over before it even started.
I stepped in front of him and raised my voice just enough to set a little bit of a don’t-fuck-with-me tone. ‘Are you going to be a dick or are you going to settle down? Because if you’re going to be a dick you may as well go home now.’
This threw him a little. I imagine most other people tiptoed around him, trying to convince him to stay in the session, but I wasn’t going to be held to ransom by a 13-year-old hooligan.
He flopped down in the chair, muttering.
‘We’ll be fine,’ I said to the caregiver. ‘So did you really throw stones down onto the cars?’ I asked him once she’d left.
He smiled, slyly.
‘Waste of time. If you’re going to throw something down on the cars you should throw old people.’
He smiles, then quickly wipes it away. ‘What?’
‘You should throw old people. Imagine if this old person splatters all over your windscreen. They’d be turning on the windscreen wipers trying to clean off all the old-people shit. You know, all the guts and false teeth.’
He laughs, and this time he doesn’t squash it away.
‘And the wigs,’ I say. ‘Those wigs are a bitch. You get one of those suckers caught in your windscreen wipers you’ll be picking out cat hair for weeks.’
‘Huh?’
‘All old people wear wigs. Everybody knows that. You wait, when you get to sixty all your hair falls out and you have to shave your cat so you got some shit to wear on your head. Why you think dogs bark at old people so much?’ I pause, but he clearly doesn’t know. ‘They can smell the cat wigs,’ I continue. ‘Hell, the dogs probably think old people are cats wearing people suits that haven’t been ironed.’
He’s looking at me now like he’s not sure who should be in therapy, which is good. I have many interesting theories about the world that you need a captive audience to share. Call it a perk.
‘While we’re on the subject of shit falling out of the sky,’ I continue, ‘let me ask you this: what’s the stupidest way to get rid of a dead whale?’
He’s still giving me the what-are-you-on-man look.
‘This is not a joke, it’s a serious question.’
‘I dunno.’
I sit back in my chair. ‘Blowing it up.’
‘What?’
‘It’s true. The stupidest way to get rid of a dead whale is to blow it up. Serious, this really happened in America in the sixties. This whale died on a beach and they had to get rid of it. They had some big meeting and talked about all the different things they could do. In the middle of it all some bright spark comes up with this great idea that they could blow the whale up. Brilliant, everybody thinks, we’ll blow it up and then the seagulls can clean up all the little pieces. So they pack all this dynamite underneath the whale and then the whole town turns up to see the big event.’ I shake my head. ‘The beach was full of people all wanting to watch this whale get nuked, which is kind of weird but it’s America. So they all stand back a couple of hundred metres and they push the plunger. Boom! Of course they filmed all this, and all you see at first is a big pink cloud, which you think is kind of gross, but it gets worse.’
He smirks. ‘How?’
‘Turns out the dynamite guy wanted to make sure he really disintegrated the whale, so he used a lot of explosive. Only problem is the whale didn’t disintegrate. It just broke up into lots of pretty big chunks. All this slowly dawns on the people standing on the beach as these big pieces start coming down out of the sky. Next thing you know all these people are running and screaming as these large chunks of rotting whale meat start raining down. One piece was so big it totalled a car.’ I smile. ‘Nobody got hurt, which was a miracle, but a lot of people got covered in rotting whale. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.’
‘That’s fucked up,’ says Ben, and at last we agree on something.
He stayed for the whole session, and (just for all you worry-warts) he never chucked any old people off motorway overpasses or blew up any dead whales. It’s all in the way you tell it.
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.
THE ‘C’ WORD
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 ha
ve 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 e
motional 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.
