Into the Darklands

by Nigel Latta

  Which brings us to Moe.

  Moe doesn’t have a motto, just a guiding principle that he doesn’t really understand, he just follows: everything’s shit. That’s pretty much where it begins and ends for the Moes of this world. Technically speaking we call that a disorganised—attachment style.

  I knew Moe on and off for about six years and watched him grow up from a boy who was more animal than human to a painfully awkward young man. It was five years before he was even able to say hello to me.

  Moe’s family was the worst kind. Both parents had sexually abused him and his siblings. Both were in jail. He’d been neglected, beaten and abused until social workers took him away and put him in a series of foster homes. He had sexually abused a large number of children over the years, and is probably one of the most prolific adolescent sex offenders I have ever worked with. There was no finesse, no grooming. He didn’t try and trick kids or bribe them; instead, he’d just find a vulnerable kid and rape him or her. It was as brutal and simple as that.

  Moe lived in a shattered, traumatised world filled with memories that no child should have to endure. The building blocks of his personality had been every kind of abuse and depravity. He had lived the first part of his life as deep in the Darklands as a person can go and not die. He would not make eye contact and talked in little more than grunts. It was like sitting with a wild beast.

  Over the years a lot of very skilled clinicians put a great deal of work into Moe. I was involved in only a couple of group sessions with him. My colleagues did the real work with this boy. At first it seemed hopeless. Year after year Moe was involved in individual and group therapy, and it is a great testament to the therapists involved that they hung in there with very little sign of change. The ability to retain hope for hopeless cases is a rare and valuable gift down here. Then, almost at the eleventh hour, Moe began to open up. Slowly he began to come back from the darkness.

  One day, as I was walking into the building Moe walked up and said ‘Hi, Nigel.’ I stopped and looked at him, stunned. I didn’t even know he knew my name. He’d never done anything more than grunt at me in all the time I’d known him. For the first time in all those years I actually saw his eyes. Over the next few months I made a point of stopping and chatting with him, wanting to do my little bit to encourage his efforts to reach out to the world. It was a wondrous thing to watch after all those years of experiencing him as a fractured, broken, un-person.

  It was also very sad. For the first time I saw a glimpse of the boy Moe could have been if he hadn’t had the arsehole parents he ended up with. Surprisingly he had a wonderful smile, and an engaging but very fragile sense of humour. Born into the right home, I believe Moe could have been a really lovely kid.

  Unfortunately there probably won’t be any happy endings for Moe. I hope so, but experience tells me otherwise. A lot of work was done to set up supports for Moe before he finished the treatment programme, and for a while at least, he’s done OK as far as we know. I hope that continues for him, I hope Moe finds a peaceful place somewhere in the world, but I suspect not. He was so damaged I’m not sure he can ever fully come back. One day the demons that still rage somewhere inside him will sweep him off again to that dark empty place where there is only hunger and the need to fill it.

  I hope I’m wrong. But I very much doubt it. Just like Humpty Dumpty, I don’t think all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can put this particular boy back together again.

  Larry, Curly and Moe are three very different kids, with very different backgrounds. They all ended up committing the same type of crime, but there were very different histories that moved them. What I hope you do see is that the experiences we have growing up have implications that reverberate down the whole course of our lives. This is true for all of us, but it’s doubly true for the people down here.

  Remember James, the man from the prologue? James, who wanted to kill kids because they were ‘too fucking noisy’? James, who told me about crushing a dog’s chest when he was little, who did everything he could to make me recoil from him? I wonder if you can start to make a few guesses about his childhood? Can you start to build up a picture of what his mental map might be? Can you imagine the lessons he might have learned about other people when he was little?

  We know that early experiences of chronic trauma and neglect change the physical structure of the brain. Trauma is not a fluffy counselling metaphor; trauma exists as a physical entity. Trauma puts physical limitations on how children are able to experience the world. We also know that the maps our parents give us for navigating relationships stay with us all through our lives.

  If a prison could have nightmares, they would be the collected pool of memories of the people living within its walls. These places are filled to overflowing with men and women with histories of chronic abuse and neglect. Trauma is as much a part of their lives as breathing.

  Still, after having said all of this it is still important to remember a simple truth: just because you’ve had a shitty life that doesn’t make it OK to do shitty things to other people. I know I’ve said this before but I need to keep saying it because then maybe people will listen.

  We all know the difference between right and wrong. The only people who don’t are those with some kind of organic brain damage or some form of psychiatric illness. And, by the by, it’s also important to know that people with psychiatric illnesses commit criminal offences at the same rate as the rest of us. Being ‘mad’ doesn’t make you ‘bad’.

  I have worked with a great many people who have experienced horrendous childhoods but who’ve never done anything bad to anyone else. Being abused does not make you an abuser. If that were true then the great majority of sexual offenders would be women, since they comprise the great majority of the victims of sexual abuse. Doing something bad isn’t an after-effect; it’s a choice.

  If you do some shitty thing to someone else, then that’s solely down to you. Don’t put it on your mum because she beat you, or your uncle because he used to molest you. If you do a bad thing then that’s down to you and you alone.

  If you come to see me and tell me that the reason you raped a 10-year-old was that your junkie mum’s boyfriend used to do the same to you, you’ll not get much sympathy. If you’ve got some shit to deal with because of stuff people did to you when you were little, then deal with it. I’ll even help you to deal with it if that’s what needs to be done. But don’t use it as an excuse for raping a 10-year-old, because that just doesn’t fly.

  It’s a fine line that has to be walked down here. It is important to understand how people view the world, to understand their histories, but you cannot allow yourself to be pulled in too far.

  His world, and more importantly the way he interprets it, is why he did what he did in the first place. That is where it begins for him, so that is where you have to start. You have to walk around in his world and see things as he sees them, but you cannot ever allow yourself to become a citizen of his world. You must understand the nature of those beliefs, but understanding is where it stops.

  You must always keep one eye on the door.

  DEAD GREEK PHILOSOPHERS

  IF I WAS GOING to blame anyone for all the trouble we’re having, it would be dead Greek philosophers. Those bastards have a lot to answer for. Socrates and his chums may have come up with some pretty good ideas, but we’ve taken a good thing too far. That’s why we haven’t really made much progress in human affairs.

  When you write a book like this there’s a certain expectation that you’ll come up with some ideas, some solutions of your own. Oddly, this has proved to be the hardest part of the whole trip. It’s not that I don’t have ideas; I do, lots of them, I just don’t think anyone will listen. That might seem a little defeatist, but you have to understand that it’s an attitude born from nearly 13 years of knocking up against various systems that for the most part haven’t listened.

  At times I have nearly broken myself trying to make a difference in thos
e places. I love the work, but God how I hate the systems within which the work is done.

  Five years ago I finally gave up and went into private practice. If I’d had to go to one more meeting I think I would have come to the same end as a disgruntled US postal worker. Now I’m only a visitor to those places. I go in, do my work and leave. Every so often I get caught up in some system or other, and every time I do it just reconfirms why I ran away in the first place.

  So when I sat down to write this part of the book my first thought was what’s the point? I’d rather just tell a few more war stories and let people do their own thinking. Except I knew people were going to ask me anyway.

  For three days I tried over and over to get this one down, but every time I started it trailed off into something that sounded slightly whiny.

  We need more social workers, more probation officers, more cops…

  Better placements for kids at risk…

  More teachers in classrooms…

  More skilled clinicians…

  Change the culture of prisons…

  No matter how I tried to write it, it always came out sounding like the same old same old. So instead I sat down at the keyboard, put Coldplay on the headphones—loud—and decided to tell you what I really think.

  We have to fart more.

  That’s pretty much it.

  This may not seem like much of a finale, but it’s born from a long and often painful observation of how we go about the business of trying to fix screwed-up kids and screwed-up adults.

  If there’s ever been a time for farting, it’s now.

  So much of this stuff is about people protecting their own little patch, be it intellectual prowess, financial resources or professional standing. It happens all the way down from the bureaucrats to people like me. While the bureaucrats are the worst without doubt, psychologists are just as guilty of this as everyone else. I’ve sat in meetings with shrinks who seem to think that just after God got through with Moses, He handed down a whole bunch of special wisdom just to us.

  To be honest, I find some people’s belief in the power of psychology absolutely frightening. The scientific base we set ourselves on is a pretty shaky house of cards at the best of times. It is fraught with all kinds of philosophical and methodological issues at the highest levels, and essentially irrelevant at the individual level. What good does it do me to know that 98 percent of college students from Minnesota blink their left eye when they lie if I’m working with a guy from Auckland, Woollongong or Liverpool who blinks with his right eye every time he says he didn’t do it?

  Is he telling the truth, or is he one of the two percent who lie and don’t blink? Out of 100 people, 98 will lie and blink, and two won’t. How do I tell which one he is? Or is it just that college students from Minnesota are somehow different to the rest of us?

  At the individual level, which is where the work actually happens, the statistics are both interesting and meaningless. I can quote research in meetings or in reports to sound clever, but it means nothing when I’m sitting in a room with someone. I still have to figure out what is going on with him. I still have to figure out a way to convince him not to rape any more children.

  After all the years I’ve spent talking with all kinds of people about all kinds of things, I have come to the conclusion that none of this is a logical process. None of it. We are not logical creatures, at least not the logic that dominates our present thinking.

  And this is where that bastard Socrates comes in. During the last Renaissance the ancient Greeks were ‘rediscovered’, dusted off and set to work. People saw the tools of logic, reason and argument as a way to overturn the dominant theological and dogmatic thinking of the time. Through the use of argument, reason and logic, we would devise the fundamental nature of all things, ourselves included. Through argument would come truth. Through the process of opposition and critical thinking, we would find reality.

  All would be well in Eden.

  Except of course, it isn’t. The great promise of critical thinking hasn’t worked out quite the way it was supposed to. We have used these tools to build rockets, but we still use the rockets to blow each other up. Things are still pretty crazy in the world, and there are many areas of human behaviour that we haven’t really got the first clue about.

  This thinking did allow us to make boxes to put things in, which reduced some of the clutter, but after the initial tidy-up the limitations soon started to show. The problem is that there isn’t a lot of room in this box logic for grey. There also isn’t a lot of room in box logic for things that aren’t logical, which is why it doesn’t work when you apply it to people, because people are both illogical and grey. It’s easier to apply box logic to physical things. There is some sense in saying that a piece of furniture either is a chair or is not a chair. That works for me just fine. But what about people?

  It doesn’t work to say that a person is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, since most people are degrees of both. I’ve talked a lot about the ‘Bad Man’, but I know it isn’t as simple as that. Human beings are flawed and imperfect creatures. We can do both great good and great bad all in the same lifetime.

  Over the years I have been fortunate to meet some amazing people doing amazing work with young people. Some of these people had histories that were pretty grim. They’d done some very bad things in their life, but then something had happened, and they had changed. Often it was as simple as a decision. One day they just stopped, and said no more. So are these people good or bad?

  Whenever I work with someone I put dead Greek philosophers out of my mind, because if I think in that way, it won’t work. I draw my lines in the sand, and I know some things about making paint stick, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t get stuck on assigning him to a box. I simply set out to discover who he is, why he is and where we should go next.

  There are too many boxes in the world, and that’s why it all comes unstuck so often. We cling to our box-logic thinking. If something doesn’t fit, rather than changing the box, we simply throw the ill-fitting thing away. How often do we hear that someone ‘fell through the cracks’? If we didn’t have separate boxes, there would be no cracks to fall through.

  The way we use the resources we have is deeply flawed. We’ve built our current systems over time in an additive fashion, one step on top of the next. We build on what has come before us, rather than periodically sweeping it all off the side and starting again. I’m not suggesting the monotonous more-of-the-same reshuffles that happen every so often in most systems, but a fundamental rethink of the whole thing. Sometimes you have to redesign the whole thing to escape the grasp of the box logic employed by those who have gone before us.

  Something like 85 percent of those released from jail reoffend. Maybe it’s time to completely rethink how we do prisons? But it’s more than just the way that we allocate resources and which buildings we put things in; the real problem is the boxes inside our heads. Box logic blinds us. It prevents us from stepping outside the lines to look for different solutions. We cannot look sideways because we should only look straight ahead in the approved fashion. There are far too many ‘shoulds’.

  Recently I attended a meeting with social workers and a family to help decide what should happen with their 12-year-old son who had been sexually abusing his siblings. The family was very defensive and suspicious of professionals. It was like sitting in a room full of ticking bombs. As a result I spent all my time trying to disarm them. I did what I do best, I made jokes, mocked myself, mocked them a little, and generally nudged and cajoled the whole thing along till we finally agreed on a plan. I felt pretty good about the job I’d done, but discovered later that the person facilitating the meeting felt I wasn’t acting particularly ‘professionally’.

  We often lose sight of the real work because everyone is so busy trying not to fart. We keep doing things a particular way, even when it isn’t working very well, simply because that’s the way it ‘should’ be done. We act ‘professionally’ bec
ause that’s how professionals ‘should’ act. My response is always the same: bollocks.

  One of the things I’m asked to do a lot is work with ‘delinquent’ kids in foster care. Typically these kids have been removed from home because it wasn’t safe for them to be there, either because of what they were doing or what someone else was doing. So we take them out and put them in a foster home because that’s how we ‘should’ manage risk. Some of these kids’ homes are so completely messed up that we decide they can never go home, or they pass through the foster-home revolving door and go in and out of care over several years because nothing changes at home, and nothing changes inside them.

  Although that’s not quite true. The resentment continues to grow, and the rage. They might stay in care till they’re 17 and their case is discharged, then they usually go straight back home anyway. They might have had years of counselling in some shrink’s office once a week, but they’re still angry as hell about having to grow up in a foster home. Typically these kids don’t respond to therapy because they simply don’t give a shit. They don’t want to learn anger management, they just want to go home. They hate the system, authority figures and the world in general.

  Can you imagine what might happen when this angry, resentful 17-year-old walks out the door of the foster home and into the front door of their parents’ house? Or what might happen when he’s sitting around on the street without an education, without a job, without hope, and looking at all of our nice things? Does that sound very ‘safe’ to you?

  In truth most of the time the system gets stuck having to make decisions which are really about covering its own arse in case something goes wrong. None of us want to end up on the evening news. At least if you recommend Johnny stay in care till he’s 17, your butt will be covered.

  And don’t blame social workers or psychologists for that either, because you force them to do it. Your elected representatives are the ones baying for blood every time something goes wrong.