The Devil You Know

by Gwen Adshead

  All the activism in relation to, and condemnation of, CSOs suggests we know our enemy, but it is not as straightforward as it might seem. For starters, the Greek word paedophile (denoting someone with a love for children) is wrongly used as interchangeable with someone who causes sexual harm to children. Instead, it denotes a primary sexual attraction for children, and not all those who have this desire act on it; in fact, many define themselves as actively ‘anti-contact’.2 To complicate matters further, the majority of people who are convicted as CSOs are not simply paedophiles; many are married or partnered and have an ordinary sexual interest in adults, even as they abuse their sons or daughters. Although it has been with us since ancient times, up until the last century sexual offending against children was barely recognised or spoken of, and until the civil rights activism and social revolution of the 1960s, there were minimal protections for CSOs’ victims under the law, in any jurisdiction. Today, protective laws in most countries define victims of child sexual abuse as anyone under eighteen.

  But this protective stance doesn’t allow for another societal development on a worldwide scale, which is that so many ‘children’ under the age of eighteen are engaged in sexual relationships, with diminished legal protections where the age of consent (sixteen in the UK and much of the US) is lower than eighteen. And where there is sex, there may be cases of sexual assault; we know that the overwhelming majority of all sexual assaults occur within the context of relationships. Although identifying accurate data is difficult, mainly due to under-reporting by victims who may be afraid or unwilling, there are some statistics that stand out. Research into the scale and nature of child sexual abuse in London in 2017 and 2018 noted that girls between the ages of fifteen and seventeen reported the highest incidence of sexual assault.3 According to a survey in 2015 by the Scottish charity Break the Silence, one in three teenage girls in a relationship suffer an unwanted sexual act.4

  A recent study by a leading American researcher in this field, the sociologist David Finkelhor, showed that in the fourteen- to seventeen-year-old age bracket, ‘most offences are at the hands of other juveniles (76.7 per cent for males and 70.1 per cent for females), primarily acquaintances’, and of that number, girls are four times more likely to be the victim than boys.5 It appears that while media and public interest is intently focused on the idea of the ‘typical’ CSO as a creepy adult stranger targeting a pre-pubertal victim,6 the most common victim of child sexual assault is a teenage girl, her assailant a teenage boy.

  There is also the question of what desire entails. Traditional bioscientific accounts of sexual desire tend to emphasise the importance of looking and seeing, as a basis of lust, and wanting it more if you can’t have it. But my experience of assessing sex offenders suggests this is simplistic. Not all of them describe a visual focus for their sexual desire, and other motives, such as anger or jealousy, may drive a heterosexual married man to abuse his sons. I have found it helpful to break down the concept of desire into three different domains: the carnal, the sensual and the erotic. All three may coexist in one person at different points, but they communicate different things.

  The erotic is easy: it is the use of sex to express intimacy and attachment, and primarily it is playful and profound, messaging, ‘I want you as you, and you and me as we.’ The sensual is shallower and may involve little mutuality or connection, but it can be comforting, if only because touch expresses a message of ‘I’m with you’. Many heterosexual prisoners will talk about this when describing their same-sex relationships in prison. Carnal desire is not playful, and it is uninterested in co-operation or exchange; it is about appetite. The object of desire is something to be had, and the message might simply be ‘Fuck you’ or ‘I own you.’ Child sex offending (like all other sexual offending) is violence, and it is carnal. Victims of CSOs do not have an erotic or sensual experience, and most describe feeling used, controlled and consumed. I doubted whether Ian would have been able to explain any of this to himself, let alone to his son, if they were to meet again.7,8

  Some years into his prison sentence, Ian had agreed to join a sexual offenders treatment programme (SOTP). These have been developed in the UK over the last two decades to help sex offenders reduce their risk by attending to the harm done and building self-awareness. In the US, the Federal Bureau of Prisons provides similar programmes for convicted sex offenders, although they are not widespread and vary state by state; as in the UK, the primary focus there is on risk management rather than rehabilitation and therapy. In contrast, the European Parliament passed a directive in 2011 addressing the reduction of child sex abuse which emphasised the value of prevention and intervention programmes for CSOs. Colleagues in Scandinavia and Germany have been active in trying to reach out to help potential CSOs before they offend. Their attention is focused on adolescents, to try and halt a pattern of offending before it can become compulsive, especially if the person has other risk factors for crime, like substance misuse and social isolation.

  SOTPs in British prisons may involve adult sexual abuse survivors who are prepared to come and speak about their past experiences. Such talks can help offenders to take seriously the harm they have done. I gathered that Ian had been deeply moved after hearing a young man talk about being abused by a relative. He told his offender manager in prison that he had gained a new understanding of what his sons had been through and fully accepted responsibility for his assaults. He subsequently fell into a prolonged depression and had been suicidal at times, which can happen when people wake up to the reality of what they have done. Ian told me at our first meeting that he was happy to continue taking the antidepressants that had been prescribed to him at that time, because he knew they helped him, and I took that as a good sign. Investment in self-care can be the first step to caring for others.

  I would see him for six sessions, with the specific and limited task of advising on risk and helping probation think through the pressing issue of possible contact with his son. Quite apart from the question of how it might look if reported in the press, enabling such a meeting had ethical and practical considerations, which we discussed in the team meeting. What if Hamish wanted to exact vengeance, someone asked, or what if Ian tried to ‘groom’ his son again? I dislike that word, because it is often overused and ignores the complexity of the ways in which offenders get their victims to comply. The idea of grooming also fails to convey the victim’s dilemma about their relationship with their abuser, and how hard it can be to refuse someone you trust and love. I suggested that I thought it unlikely Ian would attempt anything of the sort with his adult son and was doubtful at this point that he would even agree to see him. Ian’s senior probation officer, Peter, proposed to have a preliminary meeting with Hamish as a next step and suggested that I might come along and observe. I wouldn’t talk about Ian specifically, and I wouldn’t be acting as any kind of therapist to Hamish, but I could be on hand to answer some general questions about CSOs and their treatment. It is not the norm for me to meet the victims of my patients, but it is not unheard of in my community work, and I was willing to do so if it was helpful to everyone involved. In the interests of transparency, I would let Ian know beforehand.

  At our next session, I broached this with him, and he bristled at the idea. Was I going along to warn Hamish about him or something? ‘Tell him stuff I’ve said to you?’ I assured him I would not be sharing anything he told me with his son. His tone changed, softening. ‘And are you there to see if he’s … like … strong enough?’ No, I said, I was not there to be Hamish’s therapist. My priority was Ian. I added that it sounded to me like he might have some curiosity about his son and what he was like now, as a young adult. Was that so? Ian dropped his head into his hands, his response muffled. ‘I don’t know … I don’t know anything.’ I sensed his despair and feelings of loss, and his sadness seemed to fill the space between us.

  I am aware as I write this that the reader might be experiencing powerful negative feelings imagining this encounter.
It is understandable and human that a kind of righteous anger arises when faced with a person who has hurt a child, who has exploited an innocent’s trust. How dare a paedophile present himself as sad or vulnerable? How could I possibly have compassion for such a man and offer to listen to and understand him, especially when victims of sexual abuse so often fail to get such support? And what good will it do anyway? I am asked such questions regularly, and part of my response is that depriving people like Ian will not improve services for victims. In fact, it might make things worse for future victims if offenders are not supported in their efforts to rehabilitate nor offered a chance to make good. And as a doctor, I know what I’m getting into when I sit down to work with CSOs, just as surely as a lung specialist walking into a respiratory unit knows his patients will cough.

  People also ask me how I, ‘as a mother’, could ever get involved in this work. I explain that my initial experience with CSOs was in the mid-1990s, before I was married or had children. At that time, I was a senior trainee and trying to gain experience as a psychotherapist. Therapy groups for sex offenders were being tested by the probation service, and an opportunity arose for me to take part in a group treating male CSOs. For some participants, it was a condition of staying out of prison, while for others it was a condition of their licence on release, having already served a sentence. Group work was becoming more prevalent in the forensic field and was indicated for offenders because it promoted pro-social behaviour by requiring them to work with others, listen with respect and speak in turn. It was also effective because many people with a history of offending were averse to being alone with an authority figure or a person in a caregiver role and needed to be in a group to feel safe. For CSOs, there was a specific value because they had to manage feelings of shame and guilt, emotions of self-assessment that imagine an audience’s response.

  In this group we saw a recurring script emerge, a ‘neutralisation discourse’, as it is called by criminologists. This entails using language that reduces agency, as all of us do when we feel defensive, from an early age – phrases like ‘It wasn’t my fault’ or ‘They started it’ are familiar examples. The careful constructs I heard in the group also framed the abuse as somehow consensual, with lines like ‘She flirted with me,’ or ‘She never said no,’ or even ‘I loved her … This was how we showed our love for each other.’ There were also overlapping descriptions of how they leveraged affectional bonds (‘Don’t you love your daddy?’) or offered veiled threats (‘Mummy will be angry with us’).

  In almost every case, their victims were children they knew and cared for as fathers, grandfathers, stepfathers, cousins, teachers and family friends. Data prove beyond a doubt that this is typical of the overwhelming majority of CSOs, whose crime happens in the context of an existing relationship.9 As we’ve seen with other forms of violent offending, the media focuses on the exceptions to the rule. The forcible abduction of young people by strangers is newsworthy, of course, but the way it is handled can be misleading, as if shocking cases like the kidnap and abuse of Jaycee Dugard in the US or Natascha Kampusch in Austria were some kind of awful norm. Tragically, that kind of stranger abuse does happen, but it is the offending equivalent of a plane crash. It wrongly persuades us to think of some omnipresent threat that is ‘out there’, as if danger comes from some evil and unknown bogeyman. This idea probably persists because it is too terrible to contemplate such a threat being close to home.

  Contrary to the grotesques of tabloid fantasy, the men in the CSO group were not generally cold or psychopathic, and in many cases, they seemed quite empathic. Each of them was asked to write an account of their offence, before taking the ‘hot seat’ and reading it out to the others, which was not easy. The other men would point out their distortions of reality, which they recognised easily because ‘it takes one to know one’. If this process is managed properly, it is truly remarkable. I learned so much at that time, especially about the need for delicacy and precision when leading a group. With qualified and sensitive facilitation, CSOs in group therapy can be helped to walk a tightrope of honest self-revelation without dying of shame.

  After I started at Broadmoor, I had few opportunities to work with CSOs because there was only a small number of them held there, and unlike the men in the probation group, they had nearly all killed their victims – which is statistically exceptional. I came to work with CSOs again within the probation service decades later, and by then I was a much more experienced psychotherapist. I’d had a chance to study with some remarkable colleagues in the meantime, including Professor Derek Perkins, who had done groundbreaking work on the treatment of sex offenders, and Dr Estela Welldon, a pioneer in running therapy groups that put perpetrators and victims together, enabling them to learn something from and about each other on their path to recovery.10

  By this time, I did have growing children of my own, and I found it made the work both harder and easier for me. I could better appreciate how it was possible to see your offspring as an extension of yourself, almost as an object you control, which were themes I’d heard often in the ‘scripts’ of the therapy group. It was as hard as ever to imagine a child in distress, but I don’t think this was more acute for me now than it had been before I had children, or indeed when I think about any victim of violence. I may have had increased empathy for the wives of CSOs who abused their children, thinking of their shock and fear when they found out what was happening, and the shame and sense of failure they may have experienced because of the cultural expectation that mothers will protect their young.

  *

  Soon after my initial sessions with Ian, I sat in a meeting room in a typically drab public office building in town, waiting for Hamish with Peter, an old-style probation officer who could remember when making a positive and therapeutic alliance was the mainstay of the job, as opposed to the basic risk management which was now offered. He was a big man with a soft West Country accent and a gentle manner. I found his air of calm reassuring, and I imagined his clients would too. Offenders tell me that they often find it easier to work with older probation officers than younger ones, who can sometimes present as more rigid and controlling. I sympathise with that when I remember my younger self sometimes covering up a lack of confidence with a bossy attitude. In hindsight, I can see that a lack of experience in caring roles, such as looking after a parent or children or even a pet, is a real disadvantage when dealing with people who are dependent and sometimes demanding. Handling power differentials is an acquired skill which takes years of practice.

  I had taken a seat at the end of a rectangular table, where I would be able to see both men without swivelling my head from side to side, tennis-match style. I was conscious of feeling nervous, even if I couldn’t say why. I reminded myself I was just there to observe. Hamish was ushered in, looking younger than his nineteen years, with a clean-shaven round face, fair hair and a slim build. He apologised for being late, when he really wasn’t, and made good eye contact with me, shaking my hand firmly, just as his father had when we’d met. After brief introductions, Peter thanked him for coming and kicked off by saying that we’d like to understand a bit more about what Hamish’s request to see his father was about. The young man sighed. ‘Nobody wants this.’ Another unconscious echo of his father, I thought.

  ‘I just feel I need answers,’ Hamish was saying. ‘My mum and my brother … they don’t think I should see him. Mum says it’s best to put the past behind us, and after all, we’ve been fine without him for so long … And it’s true – we have.’ He looked from me to Peter, his gaze level. ‘Anyway, Andy had it worse than me. And we had therapy about this, right after … I mean, not for long, Mum couldn’t afford it. But I remember the therapist said that I might want to get closure, later on, about what happened.’ ‘Closure?’ Peter raised an eyebrow. ‘Thing is, I have memories of him from before, some good ones too, you know – football, holidays, stuff like that. I mean, he was just my dad, and then it all happened and, whoosh, he was gone overni
ght and … I know that he’s not … like, he’s not Dad any more, but who is he now? And what’s meant to happen now that I know that he’s out? I could bump into him in the street or something.’

  I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Are you frightened of your father?’ Peter shot me a look, and Hamish frowned as if the question was absurd. ‘Not at all … I’m not sure I have any feelings about him. I just want to see … I don’t know, this bogeyman we haven’t been allowed to talk about for ten years. I’m still related to him, aren’t I?’ I sensed some anger simmering not far below the surface. As if he could read my mind, Hamish quickly assured us that he had no wish for revenge, and I began to feel a reluctant admiration for a young man who was taking his courage in both hands to do something so difficult. Neither Peter nor I were responding immediately with a plan for contact, and Hamish’s tone turned appealing, almost desperate. ‘Isn’t there a kind of process that I could get here? I’ve read about this, where a victim and the person who hurt them get in a room together … That’s all I want, just one meeting where I could just ask …’

  He was talking about restorative justice, a reconciliation practice that first originated in Canada in the 1970s, in experimental programmes involving the making of verbal amends by offenders to the victims of their petty theft or vandalism. Ultimately, they contributed to the development in the 1990s of formal victim– offender mediation, and its adoption and promotion by the UN, the Council of Europe and other organisations, including the American Bar Association. By the time I was working with Ian and the probation service, the practice was increasingly making its way into the public consciousness in the UK. But I knew that no victim was entitled to this kind of relief, despite what they had suffered; the perpetrator always had the right to decline, for whatever reason.