Into the Darklands

by Nigel Latta

So let me be clear: I believe absolutely that discrimination occurs every day against all manner of people for no other reason than their gender, the colour of their skin or their sexual orientation. Please don’t confuse what I’m saying here with an attempt to minimise the stupidity and cruelty that lies behind each and every act of discrimination. The thing is though, that just because there is some, or even a lot of, discrimination, doesn’t mean everything is about discrimination.

  Only a Muslim psychologist can understand a sex offender who also happens to be a Muslim? Give me a break. Catholics are a bit of a mystery to me as well. Does that mean I can’t talk to them either? And while I’m at it, what about proctologists? Or line dancers? The world is overflowing with cultures that are a complete mystery to me, and why is that a bad thing? I once had a sex offender who was an Elvis impersonator. What should I have done if he’d said that only another Elvis impersonator could really understand his needs? Sadly, I don’t own a single pair of blue suede shoes.

  Why is it that just because I’m not the same as you, that automatically means I have nothing to offer you? Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t, but it would be nice if we could sit down together and talk for a while to figure that out. If political correctness had its way we’d never even get to meet.

  All of this is why I spend so much time trying not to sound like a psychologist. That painfully respectful, stuffy professionalism doesn’t get you far down here. Being ‘polite’ and ‘cordial’ has nothing to do with establishing a working relationship. I can be polite and cordial with people I absolutely detest. The problem is that too many people in my game don’t understand this point; instead they equate being ‘polite’ with being ‘respectful’. In my view respect is not about the content of the words, but the motivation behind those words. People know when they are being disrespected and it has nothing to do with the words being used. From my own experience some of the most disrespectful comments ever made to me personally were from other professionals who were being arse-clenchingly polite at the time. Not a single ‘fuck you’ escaped their lips, but that was what they were saying nonetheless.

  If I’ve learnt anything in this job it’s that it doesn’t matter what comes out of your mouth, it’s what you hold in your heart that counts. That sounds sappy, I know, but just because it’s sappy doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Compassion is not something you say, it’s something you do. And if you do what I do, then you have to believe that each day you hold souls in your hands, and all souls deserve respect, even those that are less than perfect.

  Which brings us back to Henry once again, who’s about as imperfect a soul as you could ever hope to meet. This man has hurt many children, all of their lives damaged to greater or lesser degrees.

  Right now he’s sitting looking shocked and slightly deflated. He feels that way because I’ve just told him the truth. I’ve told him what most of his other shrinks probably would have thought, and may have alluded to indirectly, but no one has ever actually said. I’ve told him his life to date has been a desolate and depressing thing. He has nothing in his life except a need to hurt children to try to compensate for the nothingness that eats away at him.

  I do this not to be cruel, although I’m sure for all the reasons I’ve outlined above, some people will think exactly that. I do this because he deserves to have someone tell him the truth. Sometimes the truth can be a painful thing. I don’t believe I would have been doing Henry any favours by sugar-coating that or making it sound better than it is. Sometimes we are most helped by being told how things are, very directly and honestly. Making someone feel better doesn’t always make them feel better. Sometimes we have to make them feel worse to feel better.

  Henry looks upset, which is a good thing, because if anyone could have done the things he’s done and not feel upset they’d have to be some kind of nut.

  ‘When did you first realise you were gay?’ I ask him.

  ‘But I’m not,’ he says.

  I hold up my hand, silencing him. ‘Henry, you’ve only ever sexually abused boys. You’ve consistently refused to talk about your sexuality in treatment. You keep saying you’re not gay, but your actions prove the opposite. The reason you’re alone out there is because you’re a coward. You don’t have the guts to stand up and face a homophobic world so instead you prey on little boys. Rather than taking the risk of facing who and what you are you hide away in the dark and make children pay the burden of your fear.’ I don’t break my rhythm when I’m talking to him, because we’re on the road, so we have to keep moving. ‘I wish I could say that the world will be kind to you, Henry, but it probably won’t. There are plenty of small-minded bigots out there who will try and hurt you for no other reason than your choice of sexual partner. They will look down their nose at you, they will say mean things, they will discriminate against you every chance they get, and some might even try and physically harm you.’

  Henry swallows.

  ‘But that’s no reason to make little kids pay. No matter how much intolerance there is in the world that’s no reason to do the things you’ve done. You, Henry, are gay. You’re so gay it defies belief. You’re the only one in the whole world who doesn’t think you’re gay and it’s time to stop creeping around that. It’s time to be who you really are. It’s time to be a man. That’s how you come back in with the rest of us, Henry. Honesty is your way back in.’

  When he speaks, his voice is very small, timid as a mouse. ‘What do I do?’

  ‘Have you ever actually had sex with a guy? With an adult?’

  He looks down, shaking his head. ‘No.’

  ‘I’m going to give you a task. Whether or not you do it is up to you, but that’s the only way I know for you to come back inside the world.’

  He looks up again. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I want you to go to a sauna, a gay sauna. I want you to find a guy you’re attracted to, someone your own age or older, and who fancies you as well, and I want you to have sex with him.’

  His eyes widen like he just sat on a drawing pin.

  ‘You can have sex more than once if you want, that’s up to you, but you have to have sex at least once. And you have to use a condom.’

  Henry sits there, looking somewhere between stunned and bemused. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I want you to go have sex with a man. Safe sex, but sex just the same. I want you to find some guy you like and screw him like a bunny rabbit.’

  He giggles. ‘I don’t know if I can,’ he says, but I can see the idea intrigues him. Years of pent-up desire and suppression have just been swept away by the simple act of giving permission.

  ‘Go forth and fornicate, Henry,’ I say. ‘Then come back and see me next week.’

  We end the session in a flurry of blushing and handshaking.

  Now, this is not the most psychological of interventions, and it’s not very PC, but as it turned out, it worked. In fact it worked miracles.

  Henry did go off and have sex; in fact he had sex twice. He was like a different man the next session. The dimensions of his world had changed. He’d finally done this terrible thing he’d spent his whole life running from, and discovered that actually it was kind of fun. The earth may have moved, but the sky didn’t fall on his head. After that he became a regular visitor to the saunas. He didn’t become especially promiscuous, but he did have a few different partners. Eventually he entered into a relationship with a man he liked. It was the first intimate relationship of his life. He joined some gay social clubs and got involved in a gay church. For the first time in his life, he had real friends. Given that one of his identified high-risk situations was social isolation, I thought that was a pretty good outcome. The purpose of the intervention wasn’t about sex, it was about honesty. Simply having more sex doesn’t stop a guy from sexually offending, it just keeps him busy.

  As far as I know, Henry is still doing very well. He has a job, a relationship, friends and a full social life. He even dresses more like a normal person. He has come back into the wo
rld, and it’s hard not to feel some sense of admiration for the changes he’s managed to accomplish. I told him so in our last meeting.

  The irony in all this is that I was probably the least polite psychologist he’d ever talked to, but he listened to the things I said and he didn’t feel disrespected or put down. People know the difference between someone who is acting from a sense of genuine compassion and someone who just wants to shit on them. And it has nothing to do with how many times you say the ‘F’ word.

  Like I said, it wasn’t a very PC conversation, or a very PC intervention, but to be honest I don’t really give a rat’s arse. Henry now has a life, and I think he’s got a good chance of making it work. For the first time in his life he’s actually happy. Just as importantly there are a whole bunch of kids out there that hopefully never have to deal with the trauma of a visit from the old Henry.

  Stacked up next to that, political correctness doesn’t even rate a sideways glance.

  CLEARING THE MESSAGES

  I GET HOME JUST after six having battled through the traffic for the better part of an hour. I’ve just come from working with a family with a history of gang involvement who, surprise, surprise, are having big trouble with their kid. He’s only nine and already he’s been expelled (or ‘excluded’ or whatever it is they call it now) from two schools. When he gets angry he beats the living crap out of anyone who gets in his way. This little guy doesn’t just thump other kids, he pounds them into the ground. His mother is coping with his behaviour, but only just.

  Before that I spent two hours with a man who violently sexually violated his niece, pleaded guilty in court, and is now saying he didn’t do it. He’s Samoan and says he didn’t understand what he was pleading guilty to. Funnily enough though, he could understand all my questions before we started talking about his offending. Then as soon as I ask him about what he actually did to that wee girl, all of a sudden he starts shaking his head and smiling blankly like he doesn’t understand me. It’s a familiar card he’s playing: sorry, but I don’t understand your Palagi ways. He’s playing the culture card.

  Before that I went to a meeting at a school for a boy whose life has been a rolling series of abuse and neglect almost from the moment he hit the ground. The story of what that little boy has been through would make any decent person feel like weeping. We were trying to come up with a scheme to get enough money to fund a way to transport him to school.

  A taxi driver once told me that a prominent politician had spent $65,000 in one year on taxis. Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but maybe we could ask a few politicians to catch a shuttle and we could use that money to send this boy to school?

  In any case it’s late and I’ve had enough for one day. Stupidly I decide to call my office to clear the phone messages.

  ‘You have…seven…new messages,’ the little electronic eunuch who lives in my answering machine tells me.

  The first is from a social worker politely inquiring where a report is. That one isn’t too late, hence the politeness. The second message is from another social worker, where the report is very late, who isn’t so polite. The third message is a mum wanting help for her teenage daughter who’s recently started cutting herself with razors. Even over the hiss of the line you can hear the desperation in her voice.

  The fourth is from a lawyer who has a client currently on trial for assault. Apparently the young man played a lot of video games and the lawyer wants a psychologist to give expert evidence as to the desensitising effect of violence in the media. Bollocks to that. I don’t do that stuff. I have to come home and sleep at nights, and if I stood up and said the reason that guy beat someone up was because of a violent video game, I don’t think I’d sleep all that well.

  The next message is from a current client, a flasher, who wants me to write a letter for the court saying he won’t offend again. Oh, and by the way, could he have it by tomorrow afternoon? This is the same man who not five weeks ago assured me at the beginning of our working together that his seeing me had nothing to do with his court case. ‘I just want help,’ he’d said. Again, bollocks.

  The second-to-last message is from another social worker letting me know that one of the kids I’ve been working with for several years has once again absconded. The police have been notified but we both know he’ll be gone anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Sometimes this boy’s feet start to itch, and running is the only way he can make the feeling go away. I look outside, at the darkness, and say a silent prayer for this kid. I pray that in his travels he doesn’t fall under the gaze of the Bad Man. I know he has to run, that’s simply what he does, but I whisper a silent prayer just the same.

  The final message is from a guy who gives his name as ‘Bob’. His lawyer suggested he called me for some help about a ‘sexual matter’ that he was currently ‘in a bit of bother for’. Bob asks me, in a slightly weaselly tone, to call him urgently to arrange an appointment. Then he hangs up without leaving his number. Sure, Bob, no worries. Doofus.

  What’s the moral of this story, you may ask?

  Simple: never check your messages, because just when you think you’ve had enough, you’ll find there’s always more to be had.

  PIZZA AND CHANGE

  I WOKE UP ON THE morning of 12 September 2001 to find that the whole world had changed.

  ‘The World Trade Centre’s collapsed,’ my wife said as I walked into the living room just before 7 a.m. ‘Look.’

  I turned to the television. The scene was incredible. I watched smoke pour from the tower for a few moments, and at first I thought she meant a piece of the tower had collapsed, but then the whole thing slid down into that huge dust cloud. I’d been to New York a couple of times and seen the World Trade Centre. It was a big hunk of steel.

  It was an unreal moment. For the next few days I watched the drama being played out on CNN. It didn’t matter how many times they replayed the shots of those planes crashing, of the towers falling, it just didn’t seem real. Even then I knew the world was going to change forever as a result. It felt like a 21st-century Pearl Harbour.

  During the blur of those first few days I have a vague memory of a small piece on the news the next day about the death of a pizza-delivery man in South Auckland, but that’s all. Just like the rest of the world, my eyes were on New York. The death of Michael Choy, or ‘the pizza man’ as he became known during the trial, couldn’t compete with the global spectacle of the destruction of the World Trade Centre.

  It was only later that the case started to attract media attention. Once the dust in New York settled, it was always going to be a headline grabber, because Michael Choy was killed by a bunch of kids, the youngest of whom, Bailey ‘BJ’ Kurariki, was aged only 12 at the time. Six co-offenders were charged with the aggravated robbery and murder of Michael Choy: BJ aged 12, a 14-year-old boy, two 15-year-old boys, a 16-year-old boy, and a young woman who turned 17 on the day of the crime.

  It wasn’t until June 2002 that the case entered my world. I was contacted by the lawyer for a 14-year-old who had been charged with the other six defendants for the attempted aggravated robbery of a Kentucky Fried Chicken delivery driver three nights before Michael Choy was attacked. His client was allegedly part of this group but didn’t participate in the subsequent attack on Michael Choy. The trials for the two separate incidents would be conducted simultaneously. I have to confess that my first reaction on learning he was a defence lawyer was a guarded caution. Some lawyers push hard to get you to present their client in the most favourable light. For some, it’s all about winning the game.

  In this case though, the lawyer was very engaging. He was straight up and didn’t waste time with bullshit. A lot of lawyers, like a lot of psychologists, speak with an odd stuffy formality when you first meet them. But not this guy. I liked him pretty much from the beginning. More importantly I believed he didn’t want a hire-a-shrink.

  And he was interested in an important question. Essentially he explained that under the UN Co
nvention regarding the Rights of the Child (1989), New Zealand had an obligation to ensure young people received a fair trial. In this case, given the age of the defendants, he wanted to know if they would be able to adequately participate in their own defence, given that the trial would be held in the High Court and not the Youth Court.

  The lawyer had raised the question after reading a judgement from the European Court of Human Rights against the United Kingdom after the trial of the two 10-year-olds who murdered two-year-old Jamie Bulger in Liverpool in 1994. The pair had taken the toddler from a shopping mall, battered him to death and left him on a railway track to be run over. Essentially the European Court found the two young accused had not received a fair trial because they were not able to adequately participate in their defence. The UK court was criticised for various aspects of the way the trial was conducted, including the fact that the boys were subjected to heckling from a large and angry crowd when being transported to and from court, they were seated in a raised dock and thus were ‘on display’ to both the court and the public gallery, and they were generally traumatised by the trial and were thus unable to comprehend what was happening to them.

  The relevance of this to the present case was that New Zealand was a signatory to the same UN conventions, which guaranteed the young person certain rights. Specifically Article 3 s 1 of the UN Convention states:

  In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative, authoritative, or legislative bodies, the best interest of the child shall be a primary consideration.

  In addition Article 40 provides:

  State parties recognise the right of every child alleged as, accused of, or recognised as having infringed the penal law to be treated in a manner…which takes account of the child’s age and the desirability of promoting the child’s reintegration and the child’s assuming a constructive role in society.