all
proceeds from sales of this book will go to the James Nayler Foundation
The Foundation is very
pleased to print these transcripts of the talks given at its Inaugural Conference
on Saturday 24th April 1999, held in Friends House, Euston Road, London.
Over 500 people attended
the Conference. There was a palpable sense of excitement and optimism as we
listened to our eminent speakers outline positive ways forward from their
different professional perspectives.
There was a rare and
uplifting unity of understanding that the problems of violence and destructive
social behaviours can be successfully analysed and overcome.
The Foundation is
committed to building on and developing these understandings for the benefit of
individuals and society.
We are profoundly
grateful to all who participated in the Inaugural Conference which helped so
much to continue the positive development of the Foundation.
all
proceeds from sales of this book will go to
the
James Nayler Foundation
March
2000
Bob & Sue Johnson
introduction................................................................................
2
contents.....................................................................................
3
Dr Bob
Johnson..........................................................................
4
Is Humanity Born Lovable, Sociable, and
Non-Violent?.......... 4
Kate
Cairns...............................................................................
20
Violence and the Victims of Child Abuse.............................
20
Maria
Noble...............................................................................
30
Zero Tolerance of violence in School.................................
30
Edward
Fitzgerald QC.............................................................. 40
Legal aspects of untreatability.............................................
40
Paul
Whitehouse.......................................................................
46
Violence, the Police View....................................................
46
Andrew
Coyle..........................................................................
51
Prison in the 21st Century...................................................
51
Dr James
Gilligan......................................................................
58
Violence prevention an agenda for
the coming century.... 58
The James Nayler
Foundation.................................................. 70
Dr Bob
Johnson is a Co-founder of the James Nayler Foundation. He is a Consultant
psychiatrist, who specialises in the treatment of Severe Personality Disorders.
He worked for five years in Parkhurst Prison. His book Emotional Fitness is due
to be published by Metro Publishing, in October 2000.
Welcome. I came into the
hall yesterday and for all my efforts I couldnt do what you have now done
fill it. What I want you to do is to look at each other. We have filled
this hall. Why are we here? We are here because we intend, every one of us, to
start building a violence free society. I have got an agenda here which I hope
to stick to, to some degree. The first item on it is my scientific discovery
about Ignorance. I know a lot about that. And then I want to move on to intent,
and I want to welcome you.
We have
some very distinguished speakers and I am looking forward to hearing from them.
I want to welcome too my parents who have come at some considerable toil, down
to hear us today. I welcome their support. I had hoped that my daughter would
be here, but I havent managed to catch her yet. Oh, there she is, she is
waving. I have to say that I went to a conference earlier this year, spoken to
by David Utting. And he opened it along similar lines. He said my parents are
in the front row and if you ask any member of the sociology department what is
the cause of crime? they will invariably say parents. Dont ask Kate about that,
will you? Thank you.
Violence is always
irrational. Violence is an infantile response. Violence is a disease and it is a
learned disease. It is curable disease. Punishment is also irrational, it is
also infantile and I hope to expand on that. Before I wax too philosophical I
want to tell you in 30 seconds my recipe for curing violence.
Two years ago following
my 14 minutes of fame, following the Panorama programme I was invited to
conduct a workshop in Portsmouth. The title of the workshop was Curing Violence
and the Chairman introduced it along with other points in the programme, and as
he came to mine he said Curing Violence well at least trying to
ameliorate it. I said No. Sorry. It sounds outrageous, but that is what I mean
– Curing Violence.
So after the workshop I
was sitting somewhat as I am now, and there was a distinguished Police Officer
there who lent across to me and said, Prove it. What do you mean curing
violence? So I said, Well, Im not going to tell you anything you dont know. If
there were two people hitting each other over in the corner, as an experienced
policeman you would go over and establish a personal relationship with the two
of them. You will also know that they are hitting each other because of a
figment. Something else is there, some element from the past. I aim to remove
the figment. The figment comes from what they have been taught. They have been
taught that violence is a normal activity. Violence is always pathological.
So trying to stick to my
script to some degree, I want to move on to my scientific discovery. As I say
it relates to Ignorance, of which I know a great deal. I hope to increase your
Ignorance a bit before I finish. A hundred years ago Einstein was wrestling
with the problem of the speed of light. The speed of light was not behaving
like any other moving object and it was puzzling the Newtonian physicists of
the time. Einstein solved the problem of the speed of light, but at the cost of
abolishing all absolutes. The speed of light and all other events are dependent
on the characteristics of the observer. Absolutes have gone. About 75 years ago
a similar disturbing event happened in Subatomic physics where the Uncertainty
Principle was invented to cope with the problems in observing the electron. You
can either tell where the electron is or where it is going.
It is called the
Uncertainty Principle. You can imagine the railway conductor saying We are
travelling through Crewe at an enormous speed in a direction. Or we are now
travelling at 350,000 miles per hour due south somewhere. You know one
thing – you dont know the other. I have extended this as we get close to
the Millennium, to the Unknowability Principle. In every context in which
humans are involved there is an element of Indelible Ignorance. There are
elements in every situation that you cannot possibly know. I am going to say
something now, and you have absolutely no way of telling what it is. Toasted
cheese. There is no way you could know that and this is actually a very
significant factor.
You might say something
like when is he going to get onto the question on the bottom of the page ?. I
have no way of predicting that. It is very critical, because the answer to it
or the way we get round it is to communicate our intent. Intent has aspects of
unknowability so the scientific community finds it difficult to deal
with. Academic psychiatrists ignore it. Over the last four or five years since
my experience in Parkhurst and the expertise I developed there, I have appeared
in a number of court cases. You go into a court of law and one of the
principles they cling to with some tenacity is the notion of intent. If you
read through the last 10 years of the British Journal of Psychiatry you will
not find this term. Scientists, Academic Scientists dont believe it. They
ignore it because they do not know it. And as I say, you need something like
the principle of Indelible Ignorance to begin to understand it.
The notion of Ignorance
is very important. It is analogous to the concept of zero. If you look back to
the beginnings of this millennium, you will find the year 1 AD. You may even
find the year 1 BC. You will not find the year zero, because the 6th
Century monks who gave us the present time structure, used Roman numerals. And
they hadnt been enlightened by the Arabs, or informed by the Indians, so they
did not have a zero. Sounds a bit odd having no number. You number something
and there is a no, a zero, a nought. Now the same applies to human knowledge.
It doesnt mean you give up, it means you try harder. So here we go
intent. Intent is the next.
I now intend to
demonstrate that the concept of intent is important, it exists and if we cant
say anything other about it than that it exists, then we have to accept it.
Suppose on the floor here there was a wasp. We look at the wasp and we wonder
first is it alive ? How do you tell ? The wasp is moving about. Well it is a
draughty old hall, maybe it is being blown about. No, it seems to be moving
about on its own.
Very inconvenient if you
live in a Deterministic Universe. Nevertheless, that is what it seems to be
doing. What is this wasp doing now ? It is flying. I intend to fill this room
with the most eminent physicists and scientists in the universe and have a
wasp. It is called a Wasp Test. The wasp is setting out. What is the wasp going
to do? What is the wasps intent? It doesnt have one, or does it ? And if
you are going to be stung, if you get its intent wrong, you might change your
mind.
Intent. I have no idea
what it is. I know it exists. In fact, if you study intent you find that every
living organism has some part of this intent( except of course, academic
scientists and others on religious grounds). It depends how you view the world.
I view the world as if it is inhabited by people with intention. Let me just
say another word about other living processes. Not being the Prince of Wales I
cannot ask the plants what their intention is, but I am quite sure they have
got one. Every living process has an intent. If they can communicate it to you,
you may begin to understand it, if they cant it doesnt mean they have not got
one.
One of the advantages of
working in Parkhurst is that I increased my skills in recognising non-verbal
behaviour. You are shut in a small cell with somebody who has murdered three
people, you learn to study their face and the passing emotions and thoughts,
even though they are not verbalised. So the intentions may be there, but they
may not be able to articulate them.
So what is the answer?
Here I have described an Unknowability. We cannot know absolutely, so what is
the remedy? The remedy is for me to explain to you and vice versa as clearly,
as truthfully and trustworthily as we can. Words are slippery. Words let you
down, they can be misinterpreted, but there is a remedy. It is not a 100%
remedy. Human beings are fallible, but they can be trustworthy, they can tell
the truth and they can operate by consent. Consent is related to intent. It
means that the person has said I intend to go along with what you have said.
The words Slobodan
Milosovich appear on my page. Slobodan is not an evil man, he is a man with
evil intents. If you dont believe in intent, you cant make the distinction. But
if you do, and I hope in due course more people will, you say, what is the
problem? The problem is not to smash the infrastructure of Yugoslavia and Serbia
it is to change Slobodans evil intent. Not easy, but do-able. And it is
only do-able with consent. There is much in this current world which operates
with the reverse of these. Deceit, deterrence and coercion. I speak as a
Clinician, I speak as a Pragmatist. Deceit, deterrence and coercion are
unreliable – they do not work.
During my time in
Parkhurst the number of violent incidents disappeared. This is a graph showing
incidents against time. I have grouped them in groups of two years. In the first
two years there were 24 incidents of violence. In the first 7 years there were
42, roughly one every 2 months and some of these were very grievous. In the
last 2½ years there was one episode of violence, because one of the less
confident prisoners passed a schizophrenic who was muttering and he hit him,
before he hit him, if you see what I mean. The intent was not clear. But during
the last 2½ years, the intention of these most dangerous, most violent,
untreatable psychopaths – the intent was to be sociable. Which, as you
will recall, is one of the 3 elements at the bottom of the page –
sociable. The Chief Inspector of Prisons came round and had a look at the unit.
They said to him that they were very proud of the fact that no alarm bells have
been rung for 2 years. Now why would they do this? These are human beings and
their intent underneath it all and despite their training and despite their
detriment by the Criminal Justice System and others, their intent was to be
sociable. Their intent was to be non-violent and they were proud of the fact
that the alarm bells had not been rung.
Later, I checked,
because it was a sort of research unit. All the events were carefully recorded and
I found that there were 20 alarm bells per annum in that particular unit, there
were 40 in a normal unit, but this was a special wing. And it fell to 0. So
over a 10 year period, before the unit was closed on ideological grounds, there
should have been 200 alarm bells, but there were only 150. 50 alarm bells were
missing. (In some ways, I sometimes think we live in a feudal society in which
the barons at the top make the decisions, and surfs like me and you, go about
our business. )
If I was director of a
prison service and I was concerned that there were too many incidents of
violence I would be interested in a situation where violence seemed to be going
down. It would be of interest to me. I would check the figures. I would
independently count the number of violent incidents recorded. I would find out
why the response of this prison service under the previous administration
system, I say tactfully enough, was to issue a press release saying it is quite
wrong of Dr Johnson to say that he did any good. I think there is something
going wrong there, but we havent time for that now.
What I want to do now it
says here, is to give you some insight into my view as to why murderers murder.
Around 3,500 people have already seen the video clips I am about to show. They
show an important fact that the figments that I advised that I try to
remove, invariably come from infancy.
One of the advantages of
my 14 minutes of fame was that I reviewed a book called Violence Our Deadly
Epidemic, and its causes. I thought well that will be a load of old cobblers,
it will take ½ hour to review, so I took it on holiday, bottom of the
case. But when I got there, I picked it up and couldnt put it down. This book
was written by Jim Gilligan who is going to address you this afternoon. I could
have written it. It explains how every dangerous individual that Jim came
across had had an even more dangerous child hood. We compartmentalise too many
things. Childhood from adulthood. Violent boys become violent men. Why is that astonishing?
It is astonishing because we compartmentalise, we specialise, we have adult
psychiatrists, adult teachers, we have infant teachers, infant psychiatrists.
Well it is time the two met.
I want to show you now a
video clip. Let me just give you a clue what to look for. This is a video clip
taken in September 1991, taken of a prisoner called Lenny. Now Lenny was
sentenced in 1980 for a crime that no one could account for so he was
persuaded to plead diminish responsibility, to say he was guilty by virtue of
being insane. The Trial Judge suggested he have a tariff, a term of 7 years.
This man is still there – his chances of being released are receding. 19
years, 20 years, there is something distinctly wrong. How would you describe, I
say to him, to someone who doesnt know anything about it, what questions I am
asking you and what you are doing? Well, says Lenny, it is about my mother. How
she used to batter me when I was a kid. Further down, what I want you to look
for is that I invite him to imagine his mother sitting in the room. I ask what
would he say to her. I should point out this is the fifth session. I had only
been in the prison since the 1st of July. This is the 11th September. It took
me a while and them a while to build up confidence, as I say build up trust for
me to videotape, ask if they would agree and for them to say yes. So here we go
. . .
Video Interview with a Prisoner on 'C' Wing Parkhurst
11th September 1991
B: How would you describe to someone who
doesn't know anything about it what questions I am asking you and what we are
doing.
L: Well it's about my Mother, how she
used to batter me when was a kid.
B: What affect did this have on you?
L: Well it made me frightened.
B: Did it?
L: Yes.
B: What's happened to the fear?
L: It's embedded.
B: It's still there is it?
L: Yes.
B: It doesn't help you does it?
L: No.
B: What effect does this embedded fear
have?
L: It's made me violent.
B: Did it?
L: Yes.
B: How does that work?
L: I don't know.
B: Why does embedded fear make you
violent?
L: Well she used violence on me all the
time and I grew up to violence didn't I? Do you know what I mean?
B: But you're a big lad and you're an adult
so why are you still frightened of your Mother? It's still there isn't it?
L: It's still there, yes.
B: So why hasn't it changed. Why is it
still there, do you think?
L: Well, it's all part of growing up
isn't it?
B: Part of you hasn't has it?
L: Yes.
B: Part of you is still there, isn't it?
L: Yes.
B: Because we talked about that this
morning didn't we?
L: Yes.
B: Being an adult. Can you tell her
you're an adult?
L: Yes, I could try.
B: Do you find it difficult?
L: Yes.
B: You would, wouldn't you?
L: Yes.
B: Do you find that surprising, that you
find it difficult to tell your mother you're an adult?
L: Yes. Very surprising.
B: It is isn't it. So what will stop you?
Say your mother was sitting over there, what would you say to her?
L: I'd say "Mother you can't hit me
any more. I am an adult".
B: And you believe that?
L: Yes, partly.
B: You partly believe it and partly
don't?
L: Yes. I don't know whether I could say
it to her or not.
B: What would stop you?
L: Fear.
B: Fear of what? What is she going to do?
L: Well she might get up and clout me.
B: Might she?
L: Well she might.
B: How old is she?
L: 85.
B: And she is going to do you an injury
is she?
L: Oh she's still lively.
B: 85. How big is she?
L: 5 feet 2 inches.
B: And how big are you?
L: 6 feet 3½ inches.
B: It doesn't sound much of a match does
it?
L: No, but you can't hit a woman can you?
B: You can't disagree with your Mother,
let alone hit her can you?
L: No.
B: Do you need to be able to disagree
with her?
L: It would be nice to, wouldn't it?
B: Would it? What advantage to you is
disagreeing with your Mother?
L: Well, I could get on with my own life.
B: Could you?
L: Yes.
B: What would you tell her?
L: I'd say leave me alone.
[continued]
That is the first bit
and you see if you listen very carefully to my question what am I doing? I
always ask people that, I like to find out what I am doing. He said you are
giving meƒ and I say, moral support. Power, and that is right. I am empowering
him. It is called democracy, you empower the individual. I am doing that,
empowering him to look at todays reality.
I want to show you
another minute, 2 months later, but I want to describe to you now the process
which I believe, is going on and which I see in every psychiatric consultation
I do. It is particularly useful when helping people who are cutting themselves
or cutting other people or burning themselves or in other ways being violent,
outwards or inwards.
The child is growing up.
The child is exploring the world. The child is learning the language of the
adults and the carers around. The human species has to look after its infants.
They are 100% dependent. Whatever the infant thinks, ( before it can speak,) it
cannot tell you but the infant feels. The infant knows that if it is left on
the mountainside it is dead. Life and death issues. The child is growing up,
hopefully it grows up smoothly. In some cases something terrible happens. In
Lennys case, Lennys mother took to battering him,(not severely I dont think, )
but battering him.
So what the child does,
because the child is rather smaller, as Lenny still thought he was with respect
to his mother, smaller than the adults mother or father, so the child shuts the
lid on the box. Inside the box is terror and a big notice on the box. IF YOU
WANT TO LIVE DONT OPEN THIS BOX.
My life was threatened 3
times in Parkhurst. In one case, in a very detailed way. The reason why, was
because he thought I was pressing too soon to open the box. A matter of life
and death. But it is an infantile box, the box was valid in infancy. Dont upset
mum, dont upset dad or you are dead. In some cases, in infancy this true. It is
never true in adult life. You open the box and there is nothing in it. I know
that. I also know now that the most important thing about the person in front
of me is something they dont want to talk about. So if we could have the next 2
minutes . . .
(Video is continued)
11 November 1991 extract
–
L : You can't hit
your own mother. Whenever she battered me, I'd never dream of lifting a hand to
hit her. Even when I was 21, she slapped me across the face. And me Dad came
in. And I ran out of the house. And slammed the door, and then just went and
got pissed.
B : And bottled it
up
L: Yes
B: But now you
would stop her, if she came to hit you ?
L : There's no way
she would hit me now
B : What would you
say ?
L: I wouldn't have
to say anything -- if she went to slap me, I'd just hold her hand. [both
laugh]
B: well you didn't
have the confidence to do that before
L : If this had've
happened years ago, where a doctor had taken an interest say when I was in my
twenties
and said what you'd
said and we'd conquered it, and then I went to the house. And say I came in
late, and she said blah blah blah and she went to hit me, I'd say mother you
can't hit me love -- I'm a grown up. You can't do it. You can kick me out of
the house
B : Because it's
your house
L: But you can't
hit me -- don't try and hit me
B: But you've never
said that up until the last month or two
L: Yes. I've never
had the confidence to say it
B : That's right.
L: You're brain washed into
fear. . . . . . . [continued]
There are another 700
hours of videotape I dont know how long you have got. So why do
murderers murder? Going back to my original little recipe, they are murdering a
figment in their heads usually a parental figment or some figment from early
life. I dont now much about Slobodan, I know quite a lot about Adolph Hitler,
quite a lot about Joseph Stalin and the childhoods in these individuals cases
was disastrous.
We need a body of people
whose intent is to say we need to change. There is sufficient evidence that
human beings wish to be lovable, we wish to be sociable. They are not naturally
violent. I think this differs a bit from our immediate primate relatives, the
chimpanzees. In fact one anthropologist said if Manhattan was inhabited by
chimpanzees, we would have mayhem. Human beings are bipedal, they are not
quadrupeds, they stand about, as you have noticed, but they are also
co-operate. They cant run as fast on 2 legs as they can on 4. This is an
evolutionary disadvantage, but it allows the hands to develop into much better
manipulative organs. But it has a price and the price is we must be
sociable.
I was thinking about
this. Normally, I think about this about 5 am and think about what Im going to
say and I thought who does not want to be lovable ? Show me any individual in
the entire universe who does not want to be lovable. As it happens in order to
be lovable you have to have people who are sociable, you have to have people
who have learned how to be sociable.
Truth, Trust and Consent
may sound idealistic, but it is the only thing that works. If you travel 2
miles south of this spot you come to the City of London. My word is my bond. It
would not function if it wasnt. If you could not trust the trader you just sold
10,000 tonnes of pork bellies, the system collapses. This isnt airy-fairy. This
is hard practical politics, you could say, certainly hard practical human
relations.
There is a myth that
violence is genetic. This gruesome picture is a picture proving otherwise. This
is a monkey. The caption says it was raised in isolation. This is one of
Harlows monkeys. So many of his monkey mums werent very good, so he thought he
would dispense with them, and bring up monkeys without mums, and hope we have a
better success.
He was rather surprised.
This monkey bites itself at the approach of the photographer. Powerful
individuals are dangerous individuals is what this monkey has learned. And if
you look at the dangerous people in this world that is what they have learned
too.
We know precisely why
this monkey is biting itself and attacks its fellow monkeys. It hasnt been
taught anything better. The notion that you can coerce somebody into being
lovable, sociable and non-violent is nonsense. The concept of consent is
crucial to social cohesion. It relates to intent. The two are married together.
Intent relates to consent as well to meaning. We mean what did you
intend ? It relates to purpose, what did you purpose in doing that? What was
your intention in coming here today? Your intention co-mingles with mine and
that is a very powerful phenomenon. When we are sitting together like this,
thinking along the same lines, it is what I describe as an existential moment,
we are relating to each other. We are up-holding each other, we are intending
to be benign. We are hoping to learn something, we are hoping to move forward,
we are being sociable.
This is not because we
are of any particular religion, any particular size, or any particular shape.
It is because we are human beings. Human beings are born lovable, sociable and
non-violent. But they are trained the wrong way. They are trained that if they
fight they will get more success. I just want to show you briefly a chart,
which is probably not very clear from where you are, so trust me and I will
tell you what it says.
This is a chart of
television ownership in South Africa. For several years South Africa refused to
have a television service, because it might show that the black people were
rather similar human beings to the white people and that was not suitable to
the barons in charge of that particular feudal society. However, eventually
commercial pressure introduced a television service and here is the graph
rising a nice steep curve. Television ownership. Here is the graph of homicides
and it parallels the graph of television ownership, without a peradventure. If
you are taught that violence is a normal manly thing to do, that is what you
will do. The recent horrific shooting in Denver followed a demonstration of how
to shoot teachers and fellow pupils in a film. You can argue, as the Hollywood
Moguls do that there is no connection between the two, but it is not sensible.
I would say that just as when I used to be a medical student and the Radiology
Lecturer said they keep telling me that that smoking 2 ounces of tobacco a week
is no good, but I continue to do it, there is no evidence against. He couldnt
say that today the dangers of smoking are too well and too widely known.
In the United States they
have now banned cigarette advertising. We havent got that far in this country.
Perhaps the tobacco lobby is too powerful, but nevertheless cigarette smoking
is no longer socially approved. 5, 10, 15 years time violence will no longer be
approved. To show films of men and women supposedly pulling human bodies apart
will be considered not the right thing to do and then we will find, as the
Scandinavians found when they banned all cigarette advertising, that violence
will go down, just as smoking went down.
I started by talking
about intent. Intent exists. I dont know what it is, but it is important that
we intend to move. When this body was being set up, I cast around for a
suitable name and I came across a quote from one of my favourite early Quakers.
James Nayler. He died in 1660, so here am I in great personal trouble finding
out what makes murderers tick, and then I read this. It has already been
well-established 300 years ago and before. He says there is an a spirit which I
feel that delights to do no evil nor to revenge any wrong. Its hope is to
outlive all wrath and contention and to weary out all exultation and cruelty.
Look at that phrase weary out. You weary your opponents out, you dont batter
them.
Our present baron Tony
Blair shows consummate skill in wearying out the IRA. The contentions in
Northern Ireland he devotes vast amounts of prime ministerial time to with
endless patience. What is he doing ? He is trying to get the consents of these
destructive individuals. The contrast with the Balkans could scarcely be
starker. James Nayler concludes it takes its kingdom with entreaty and
not with contention. We need to seek consent, we need to try and change intent.
It is not a risk free option. My psychiatric career has suffered very badly because
I have approached problems in the way that I have described, but if you and we
are going to build a violence free society, I see no other way. Thank you.
“
–
ã
–
Kate Cairns
is a Child Care Consultant and Trainer Consultant at the British Agencies for
Adoption and Fostering (BAAF). She is the author of Surviving Paedophilia , a book
on the traumatic stress suffered by victims of paedophilia (pub Trentham
Books).
Thank you very much. I
am very proud to be associated with the inaugural conference of the James Nayler
Foundation. I have been aware of Bob Johnsons work, as many of you will have
been for a considerable time. I have been fascinated by the links between the
work which Bob was doing with severely dangerous adults and the work that many
in my line do with young people, children and adolescents, and it is that
continuity which Bob spoke of which I would like to address.
We are beginning, I
believe, this group of people, to develop an understanding of Personality
Disorder, of its origins and of how it can be treated. Bob can prove
treatability in the area of working with severely damaged hurt men
adults. We can demonstrate the application of this to looking after children.
Children who may have been described as suffering from conduct disorders, behavioural
problems, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, it really depends what
practitioner they have managed to get to see.
The foster carers that I
work with arent so troubled by the labels unless the labels get them service.
They are living with the behaviour; they are living with the child. Sometimes I
am asked, as a result of the work that I do, to talk to community groups, clubs
whatever, pensioners groups, about the teenagers that I work with. I am never
quite sure what these groups want from me when I am asked to do that talk. They
will be using words like difficult, disordered, disturbed, challenging,
dangerous, whatever the word is that comes to mind. What I try to do with them,
is to get more words from them, to get more clarity about what it is they
really want to know from me about these children. So we say what are the words
that apply to teenagers.
What comes into your
mind when you are thinking of the sort of dangers you are talking about ? We
build a picture. We build a picture here where we are. And the words come.
Loud, that is a common one. Aggressive, difficult, disordered unpredictably
destructive and violent. And then we get on to more specific issues. Drug
using, car stealing, glue sniffing, violence. Violence comes, always violence.
Is this image clear for
you? Or shall I take a short walk out on the city streets and find one and
bring them in, because I havent to go very far. We walk past the children who
come to my attention all the time. You walk past them as you come out of the
tube; you walk past them as you come out of the stations. As the picture grows
the underlying sense in us of fear and rejection also grows.
I would like to clarify
that. It is not foolish to be frightened of people who are dangerous, but we
need to know that we are frightened. These young people, the ones we are
talking about do engage in random violence and senseless acts of destruction.
They can be very dangerous to themselves and others. Dangerousness naturally
leads to fear and rejection. We all know that violence breeds fear.
Then I ask that we leave
that teenager there. Weve got them. There they are, male or female. There they
are. And I say let us go to a different point on the life cycle.
[walks across to the other
side of the stage]
Here we have a baby.
Which of you will say to me this baby, newly in the world all potential, all
future? Which of you will say this baby is not lovable? And what are the words
that come to mind. Babies are not easy people. They are demanding, they are
difficult, they are not easy people to be with, but most of us feel protective
towards babies. They engage our protectiveness and many people feel tender. The
baby engages us. Yet these are just two points on the life cycle. This baby and
this teenager are the same person. We have to ask how did that happen. What
happened? How did that baby become this teenager? So mad and bad and dangerous
to know.
In the James Nayler
Foundation we think the answer lies with unhealed trauma. My work has been in
field of Paedophilia among other things, but I am dealing today with all sorts
of childhood abuse. We could look further back, we could go beyond the point
where the child has even been abused. And look at problems with some children who
develop attachment difficulties right at the beginning. And I think as research
goes on and we look further, we may come to a view that attachment difficulties
are linked to very early trauma. We shall see. But we are sure that it is the
trauma that causes the problem. Traumatic stress is so toxic it changes us
forever. A massive overwhelming stress reaction provides the maximum chance of
survival. At this level of stress the physiological response is toxic to our
normal functioning. It is provided for a survival situation, it is toxic to our
normal functioning. We are in effect poisoned by our own survival response.
Now the cause may be
simple, but the affects are complex. We are changed usually for the time being,
but we are changed. Physically our brains and nervous systems function
differently. Psychologically our capacity to think and reason and relate things
together changes. We are changed emotionally feelings are a luxury at
the point of extreme threat and all sensitivity to ordinary feelings is
diminished. And we are changed socially. Social interaction, as Bob said, as
John Shotter developed, social interaction requires intentionality. The
intention of the person who is suffering traumatic stress is to survive. All
other intentionalities are superseded. In childhood, that is true for all of
us, traumatic stress cuts across the developing personality of that child like
a surgeons knife across living flesh. It is particularly difficult for the
still forming person to contain the fragmentation of the self, which is no
less, the toxicity is so great that the self fragments. And the young child,
the undeveloped self cannot contain that fragmentation, it is very difficult
for them to do so.
However, most people
subject to traumatic stress recover, spontaneously. Well Hallelujah, just as
well, because trauma is not exceptional. It is a part of the human condition.
If we look around the world we cannot doubt that many people are subject to
traumatic stress. Children suffer the same exposure to trauma as adults.
Natural and technological disasters, wars, conflicts, rape, torture,
exploitation and being made to witness the violation of others. Children
experience all these things, but if the trauma ends and if they find themselves
then in a safe place, under certain conditions they can recover.
What are the
conditions?
They need to be safely
held in a secure social network with well established and well formed
attachment relationships. You see trauma is a social phenomena, it is not just
individual, it doesnt just happen to me. It happens to me as the person in my
social network, it effects everyone around me, it happens in that social
setting, and I need the social setting to recover. We need the social setting
to recover. We have to be sociable beings, otherwise we are wiped out by
trauma. In that situation if the child is fortunate enough to find themselves
in that secure social setting, with those well formed relationships, with that
safety, they will then play out the traumatic events and they will safely be
able to endure the physiological re-enactment. Bit by bit, the overwhelming
experience is broken up into bits that do not overwhelm, but can be assimilated
and they become absorbed as part of the developing persons history. They
recover. What happened then, becomes something that is in the past, but
unpleasant. The child will either remember it or if they dont remember it, they
are not further injured by it, because it has been healed. It has been integrated.
Victims of child abuse
have a less hopeful outcome. In just the same way after abuse, the whole self,
that complex mind-body interaction, with the environment, which is the person
in the social network, is distorted by the toxicity of the survival response,
which will not switch off just like that. The effects of that distortion are
visible, as powerful physical, behavioural and social indicators, but only if
we can open ourselves to recognise the pain being acted out in front of us and
among us.
The changes brought
about by the traumatic stress of abuse do not disappear because we move the
child out of danger. This is something that my profession has had to learn and
is learning. We can stop the process of being injured, by placing the child in
a safe place, but we do not thereby heal the wounds. And children who have been
victims of childhood abuse usually have lacked the conditions for spontaneous
recovery. They have lacked the secure social connectedness in which trauma can
be safely re-experienced and integrated. They have often lacked the early
attachment relationships, crucial in building resilience. If we are not able to
recover from trauma, then traumatic stress is likely to lead on to one of a
range of post-traumatic disorders. Those are self perpetuating conditions
unless they are treated.
Not all children who are
abused will go on to be violent. There is no cycle of violence in that sense.
What we have rather is an injury, a trauma, a traumatic stress that will affect
people differently, as all injuries do. All injuries are differential in their
effect. Once the trauma victim becomes the victim of post-traumatic stress
disorder, the trauma they suffered is entrenched. It is physiologically etched
into the brain and nervous system so deeply that it becomes the central
organising principle of the personality. Now we are moving towards what will
become recognised to some people as Personality Disorder. The frozen terror at
the heart of the personality, this is what Bob was talking about, frozen
terror, can then be triggered by vast and unpredictable ranges of neutral
stimuli. Even the child or growing adolescent and adults own memories and
flashbacks will trigger a response. A proportion of any population subject to
traumatic stress will go on to develop post traumatic stress disorder. That
proportion is high, we dont know how high, but it is high in the case of
children who have suffered abuse.
So what happens to
these children?
There are many signs and
indicators of the distress and the terror, which is at the heart of their
personality. They are subject to random attacks of wordless terror, symptoms of
extreme disorder of feelings and behaviour. Those symptoms can be very varied
and are often apparently unrelated to the original trauma, which itself may be
buried in some long forgotten corner of the childs past. These varied and
apparently unrelated symptoms bring the child to the notice of a whole range of
agencies and professional workers. Each agency has its own way of describing
and labelling the part of the problem, which relates to their discipline and
thus we contribute to the fragmentation of the self. For we do not provide a
unified service for what ails the child.
What sort of signs
and indicators?
The child will be living
in a permanent state of hyper-vigilance and hyper-arousal. The stress hormone
levels are high the whole time. This is extraordinarily painful, only the child
doesnt know it, because it doesnt know anything else. They are not able to
establish or re-establish normal daily rhythms, sleeping and eating patterns
are affected. Children will have nightmares, night terrors. They may wake
early, they may fail to sleep, they may sleep too much. This is how varied it
can be. Disorders of eating I am not talking necessarily about labelled
disorders although those exist as well, but oddities of appetite. Overeating,
undereating, eating strange things. These are common.
Perceptual fields. Our
perceptual fields are altered by this level of hyper-vigilance. Instead of
being able to focus or concentrate, this vision is enhanced, because it is
scanning for threat. That becomes the dominant brain activity. We are scanning
for threat all the time under the influence of this hyper-arousal and then the
child cant see properly when it tries to focus. It becomes very difficult to
read, if you cant see the page properly, for any length of time. There is a
loss of concentration, not surprisingly. Parts of the brain relating to
language, speech and memory may be switched off. Actually starved of oxygen.
Language development may be then affected. There are likely to be learning
difficulties. Self harm is common. Suicide attempts. Self medication, drugs,
alcohol. Mind altering substances of one sort and another, anything chemical,
anything.
Regression is also a
normal childhood response to trauma and when traumatic stress is perpetual so
is the regression, wetting, soiling, reverting to infantile patterns of
dependency, baby talk, infantile play, dissociation, where the person splits,
at the point of trauma this is a life saver. It enables the overwhelming
event to be split up into manageable bits. Where the point of trauma becomes
every point, it hurts. And it hurts to live with, because the child finds it
intensely difficult to identify any fixed personal sense of self. Instead they
exist in different ego states, in different settings, in different ways and
they cannot take accountability or responsibility seriously, for they cannot
remember what they did.
The numbness of shock at
the point of trauma again is disabling when it pervades every waking moment,
for the victims life holds no joy. Social interactions become meaningless when
life is drained of delight and responsiveness. Curiosity and playfulness are
lost. Aesthetics and empathy are equally meaningless. In place of the depth and
texture of feelings for those of us who are not victims, the sufferer is left
with a bleak numbing of emotional responsiveness. But this goes along, we can
ask Bob, this goes along with intense emotional reactiveness, because of the
physiological hyper-arousal.
Any stress however
trivial is likely to produce an extreme reaction. Any of you carers, you will
know what I am talking about. That reaction is not complex, because we are
talking very infantile reactions here. The reaction is one of terror, or rage,
or both. Panic or violence and the violence can be as extreme as the terror. So
what happens to these children. Sometimes they stay at home. Sometimes the
abuse is not recognised. The child is assessed or diagnosed or labelled as
having a problem. They are likely to be producing this range of unconnected
behaviours and responses and they are likely to come to the attention of an
equally varied range of professionals. They will struggle at school and they
might be excluded or moved into special education. They might receive medical
attention for symptoms of physical or mental ill health. Sooner or later they
may likely, not inevitably, but they may come to the attention of the Criminal
Justice System, as this extreme reactiveness or lack of social connectedness
leads to crime. They may receive treatment for their addictions to drugs or
alcohol, but these agencies are unlikely to be talking to one another.
Other children do have
the abuse recognised and they may then be moved into public care. In some
respects they may be thought of as more fortunate. It depends whether you have
read the reports or not. But the outlook is somewhat brighter and some of those
children do very well, but simply placing the child in the safe environment
does not heal the wounds. The post-traumatic stress disorder moves into the
care situation with the child. The experience of overwhelming terror, the vast
and varied range of symptoms travel with the child. It is as though the abusive
system in which the child was nurtured has moved into the carers home.
The child cannot escape
from being perpetually harmed by past events and experiences and neither can
the carers. It is common for carers to become symptomatic in their turn,
haunted by shadows of a past which is not their own. Carers and their families
thus may become secondary victims of the traumatic stress which has caused such
devastation in the lives of the children they care for. They may also become
victims of violence themselves. Children who have been victims of violence,
live lives haunted and dominated by frozen terror. As a direct result they may
become perpetrators in their turn.
At present as a
community, we are not merely allowing this victimisation of people who provide
a service for our most needy children, we are actually causing it. Children who
are victims of post traumatic stress disorder need safety, stabilisation,
therapy, secure social attachments and the possibility of joy. Many children in
public care receive none of these. Very few receive all of them. Yet this isnt
a list from which options may be selected, for the child to recover all of
those elements must be present: stability, appropriate therapy, lasting social
connectedness, restitutive emotional experience. The whole healing process must
be based on effective treatment of post-traumatic disorders, which devastate
the lives of the child.
Secondary victimisation
is preventable. We could prevent it. Primary victimisation is treatable. If we
apply the principles of Bobs work, the disorder can be healed. The severe pain
and distress of the distortions of feeling and behaviour, which are the result
of unresolved traumatic stress can be cured. As we have seen the cause of the
disorder is simple, but the effects are complex. They generate devastation in
every area of the victims life. Such a global disorder requires a holistic
response. The entire person in a social network, which is the location of the
disorder, needs to be healed. To do this we will need a radical reform of the
services we provide for children who have suffered abuse. To do less than this
is unacceptable. Thank you.
“
–
ã
–
Maria Noble
was an Advisor for Equal Opportunities for Manchester City Council. She helped
pioneer innovative anti-violence policy and practice throughout the city. She
is currently School Improvement Officer (Equal opportunities,/ race/gender)
Good morning. You are my
first adult audience this week. The last group I worked with were a Year 2
group. The group that I had worked with before that were a group of nursery
children and I had made the mistake of going into the book corner. I dont know
if any of you work in education, but that meant that all the nursery kids
promptly came in and sat down because they thought I was going to read a story.
They took the
opportunity to have a look at me and one of them said Excuse me Miss, but are
you a man or a women? I dont wear much ornamentation, at that stage children
havent got fixed in their mind what gender is about necessarily. They were
trying to make sense of it. That brings me to what we are doing on our domestic
violence work. One of the first things that we learnt very quickly was that it
helps children to be less isolated and to make sense of their experience to
teach about this. One of the first things that people said to us was why do you
want to introduce children to such an unpleasant topic when they should be having
their childhood. But very quickly we saw that a lot of children could tell us a
lot more about violence than we could tell them. It is a very sad tale.
I am an adviser for
Equal Opportunities, with particular responsibility for race and gender issues.
Happily I am the Co-ordinator of a multi-agency group working on domestic
violence, initially. But now we work more extensively with abuse. These are a
very good group of people, very committed which has been an important element
in moving this work forward. We are quite clear that our perspective is about
the abuse of power and control, in relation to children. You will see that
cycle all over the place. The 2 speakers who proceeded me identified the fact
that so many damaged children are seen in the education system. They are over
represented in terms of poor attainment, truancy, bad attendance, emotional
behavioural difficulties, movement into areas of criminality exclusion a
whole range of difficulties – they have in their background a cycle of neglect
or abuse, very, very often major abuse.
When I go to conferences
I tend to want to know why the speakers are doing what they are doing; what it
is they are doing, what possibly might happen next, and what they have learnt
from their experiences. And I hope I am going to be able to lay that out for
you today. I will start with the history of this work within the city.
In Manchester we started
off with a domestic violence forum. This involved members, City Council members
and officers, which meant that we had the political will to do this work within
the City. We also found that there were other agencies not controlled by the
City Council. Thinking of these issues there was a moment, the moment
was right. There were a lot of people coming up against very similar issues in
terms of young people and there was a desire to do work.
The first thing the
domestic violence forum asked us to do was to produce some curriculum
materials. Quite often the first response in education is to produce a pack about
it, so off we went. One of my colleagues got some money from Safer Cities
locally to pay for the cost of those materials and I pulled together a group of
teachers who might be able to actually write them. We had a variety of packs
across key areas and I brought one to show you. We found other people doing
work in this area, pulled it all together and created a pack that we thought we
would be able to use effectively within schools.
We sent it out to all schools,
appropriate to all ages, from early years right through to secondary. It went
down like a lead brick. Disappeared without a trace, onto the shelf of the Head
Teacher. We thought what is this about, and started doing some consultations.
We trialled the material with the teachers who had been involved in producing
it. Some of the Head Teachers were saying yes we would love to do this work
but we have concerns about it. We fear that if we do this work we open a
can of worms and we dont know what to do with it next. We are going to have
children starting to disclose their experiences of violence. What do we do in
these situations ?
So we started running a
series of training events to try and work with these concerns. They were for
people volunteering for it for Governors, for Teachers, for Head
Teachers. We looked at strategies they were using already, some of which were
very good indeed. We were then able to share that experience, that good
practice across the City. At the same time we set up a mini partnership with
other agencies apart from the City Council who were interested in this area.
Schools, Youth Service and Probation were very keen to do some work. They were
already working with perpetrators, those youths that we have already talked about,
that you might see on the streets, who were being sentenced in relation to
violence. As a part of their sentence they were having to work on why they were
violent and looking at ways of altering that behaviour.
On the local domestic
violence help-line there was a multi-agency worker appointed who came to work
with us. Since then that group has expanded to health, Police and Social
Services. So we started doing the work with the young people, with the groups
of teachers who had taken it on board. Worryingly we found that there was a
level of acceptance of violence, particularly amongst young women who were
given the odd smack. They felt that a bit of jealousy showed that their partner
cared about them. As adults we threw up our hands in horror and thought what a
horrible thought. We have learnt a lot since then, Ill talk about that maybe a
little later.
Domestic violence is
very common indeed. The Youth Service commissioned a play by G W Theatre called
To Have and To Hold which looked at the themes of violence in relationships. It
looked at a non-violent man, a violent partner and how women got drawn into a
cycle of violence. How they started to be isolated from their family, how they
lost confidence in themselves and how they ultimately ( a happy ending ) got
out of that situation.
It is not always a happy
ending, given that women experiencing violence quite often have an average of 7
contacts with agencies, before they get any effective help. Funding allowed us
to tour the play in High Schools as a year 10 play. At the same time we had
Zero Tolerance. Zero Tolerance is a publicity campaign which has been touring
the country. It started off in Scotland, which gives a very high profile to
non-tolerance of domestic violence, as not acceptable in our society. How
successful it is I am not too sure, it certainly raises debate about the issue.
Whether we are talking about male perpetrators only or whether we are talking
about female perpetrators, that seemed the major thing that came out of that.
Head Teachers are saying
what do I do when I am confronted with this violent aggressive screaming
female? the first thing you do is think about why that female is aggressive and
screaming. What experience is she having that brings her to your door like that.
We need to look at it, because otherwise we will leave children unprotected if
we assume that women dont abuse.
One of the first things
that we learnt from the pilot tour of the play was that it was very helpful to
involve workers from other agencies. We had school liaison Police Officers and
Youth Workers. In some schools they worked with a team of people in trying to
deliver the curriculum work and that seemed to be quite effective. We extended,
therefore, the training to Education Welfare Officers, Education Psychologists,
Youth Workers, Governors, Magistrates, anybody who wanted to come along,
basically, and who we felt would be supportive.
The evaluation of the
first pilot showed we had started to embed some work in the curriculum.
Teachers felt more confident in doing some work, and were more willing to raise
it as Personal Social Health Education issue. Then we evaluated pupils
attitudes. It seemed to be making some impact on the level of acceptance of
violence, and on the feeling that it was something that should be kept private
in the family. Having done that, we got feedback from young people suggesting
that the support they were getting from professional agencies wasnt of the
nature that they would like to have. So this year we have been conducting a
small survey in our schools of the experience of violence that young people
have and where they go for support and what sort of responses they expect and
actually receive.
Our survey involved a
total of 220 young people, 250 young people when we take on board the young
people who were interviewed in depth. What is violence ? was our first question
and our 3 top answers were punching someone, slapping someone, forcing someone
to do something they dont want to do. For young women it was punching someone,
slapping someone, shaking someone hard
Under 20% actually
talked about other things like picking on someone, and calling someone names.
Verbal abuse was less high profile at that stage. We asked if anybody had ever
been violent towards that young person, young men 90%, 85% of young women said
the same. Who has been violent? For the young men: a stranger, a father, their
friend. For young women, someone at school, a friend or a brother. A lot of
violence coming from men there.
In terms of tackling
this issue, taking it on board, presenting it to our colleagues, we looked
first at recorded violence. I know there has been a lot of debate recently
about how violent women are, but in terms of recorded instances it is largely
men that we are talking about. What was the violence towards you? Punched,
kicked, beaten up. Punched, kicked, slapped. Have you seen or heard domestic
violence happening in your family. 75% of young men and 63% of young women had
had direct experience of violence in the family. Who would you then go to? Who
would you talk to in this situation? For young men: their friends, Childline or
family.
One of the concerns
about Childline was being able to get through and being able to get a response,
but 55% of young men said they wouldnt talk to anybody. We know there is an
issue about communicating feelings, communicating hurt for young men. Obviously
one of our priorities is to look at how we can pick that up. If you were
worried about violence that has happened to you, looking at personal
relationships and other forms of violence, would you talk to anybody about it?
Yes, in this case. 26% of young men said they would and they would choose a
family member, friends or a Teacher in this context. 87% of young women would
speak to a family member or friends or a Teacher, so we know that people in
schools and in our single agency have an immediate responsibility in terms of
their pastoral role for doing this work.
Anything else
what other comments were there? Why do people bully me? How do I stop these
things happening? How can people do these things when they love someone? This
idea of love. We have looked at the perpetrators of violence and we have tried
to make our teaching pack non-gendered in terms of that response, so that
anybody effectively can be violent and we are looking at what that means in
terms of young peoples experience. We have also tried to provide help.
Each time we have had
this play, now in our third year, we have produced a little help card, a pocket
sized information card, which has just got a logo that we use in the teaching
pack. How tight is he gong to squeeze you tonight? is the logo. Where to get
help and we have listed a range of things there, the domestic violence
Helpline, our local Safe in the City project. Lesbian and Gay centre, because
we are conscious about young people being assaulted around homophobia in the
family. Stress and anxiety, the 42nd Street, Childline and the Youth
Service have been our connection points there.
I find there are links
between the work that I do in the city, together with a variety of multi-agency
work on racial harassment and homophobic bullying. This is linked to the sense
of identity that young people, particularly young men, have. I dont know how
many of you have picked up research recently on the very narrow forms of
identity that are permitted for young men. In forming that identity, the last
thing that you want to be called if you are a young man is a girl. So anything
which has a feminine trait towards it, is unacceptable, which tells you
something about the way that young men are perceiving women and young girls.
The other thing you dont
want to be called is a feminine in any way, in the sense of being gay. Targeting
somebody with that label, whether they are gay or not, is a way of pulling them
back into line, in terms of the identity that is appropriate for men and boys.
So that means we are doing work on gender stereotyping and work on
discrimination more broadly. This is not a stand alone strategy. There has been
a lot of work done and a lot more work to be done. I hope you will take the
opportunity to ask questions about that.
What comes next? One of
the things that can be picked up at school is improved child protection
procedures. Indeed for any agency working with young people, the question is
how quickly can we respond to young people, and how effectively can we respond?
One of the concerns in the focus interviews in our research with young people is
that by approaching an adult for advice, for in approaching the adult, the
professional, in that situation there is a massive concern about the
process going out of control. I dont want social services involvement, I dont
want police involvement, what I want is for violence to stop, I want that to
change. It doesnt mean I want my family to be dismantled within that process.
So there is a major concern there about the appropriateness of response.
Within the last 2 weeks
I have read in the Times Education Supplement about the success of an internet
contact line, which is largely used by boys, 70% of the take up is by boys. It
seems that the reason it is used is that it gives a very fast response and it
is anonymous. So you dont have to say anything. You dont have to engage in
conversations with people. You dont have to show your vulnerability in any way,
you just have to send an anonymous message and get something back, very neatly
very quickly. So is there a route there to be expanded. There are concerns
about that, in terms of professionalism and so on. But from us, what can we do
to improve our child protection procedures. Safety and security in schools so
that we do not give information about a child to somebody who probably
immediately looks like they have care and control rights. We check that that is
the case. The easiest way to track a family who have been abused is for the
perpetrator to track the child through school. They find out which school the
child attends and they turn up at the school gates and they want to take the
kids out and usually that is about controlling the other parent.
Empowering young people.
We found that a play or a video works extremely well. It is an immediate focus
for young people to talk about. Curriculum work needs to happen as well, Youth
Centre work needs to happen, Church Group work needs to happen, but to have a
stimulus that allows that discussion to be generated is extremely useful. The
way in which young people use it most effectively seems to be if they work in
small groups, with a friend that they trust. One of the schools that we have
worked in has managed a very effective model of bringing in all those people we
have trained. In particular they involved the Youth Worker, the School Nurse,
the Governor, the Teacher, and the other parents who may be interested in work
and has worked with groups of pupils and this has meant that dialogue has
happened.
We were also thinking of
how to make our support services most effective. Part of that is to make sure,
as we do with the card, that people have the information of where to go next.
This is an inter-agency project. It is largely field workers working with what
they think is possible. There are mega-scale issues that we cant deal with as
individual workers. Some of our role, therefore, is to inform the work that
happens through the domestic violence forum.
Work with Primary
Schools is part of our next programme and it is again through feedback from
children that we are getting an idea of what that might be. The children are
not necessarily concerned about what might happen to them in adult life, they
are concerned with what is going to happen to them when they come into their
teens. So we are working on a pairing system between older youth, expert in
some of those issues and children still at the primary stage. So they get a
role model, which is possibly about non-violent choices, rather than
replicating the adult roles.
There has been heavy
criticism of adults in the research, that they are unwilling to talk about some
of these issues. Children feel that they are much more willing if they are
facilitated in a fairly structured way, to talk about issues to open them up,
to deal with them than adults are. They feel that adults want to put the lid
on. When I started with adults, they were thinking what do I do with this? Im
really concerned that I cant cope with it, therefore I wont deal with it. That
shuts off the routes. Similarly, I think the National Childrens Home did
research with women who had been abused and their families, and their children.
They found that a lot of those women tried to shield their children from the
experience of abuse in the home. The effect of that was to cut off any
opportunity for dialogue about what was happening, so the child was left
isolated from that experience. Bringing it out in curriculum work, as I say
helps to counter that isolation.
The thought that I am
left with is that given that abuse in relationships in the home has such
significance in all sorts of areas, it seems to be a national scandal. I dont
know why this issue is not much further out in the open than it is. My
colleague trying to run the forum on violence and children, is working to
network people like yourselves and agencies who are concerned about abuse and
the effects on children, to raise it onto the national profile. So I hope you
all nab Janet during the break and say give me a copy of your publication,
which is a self audit for schools around violence and what you can do to deal
with it, but also to support that sort of campaign so that it stays high
profile. Thank you very much.
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Edward
Fitzgerald QC is a practising barrister and is a leading Expert in
International Human Rights. He was the Winner of the Times/Justice Human Rights
Award in 1998.
One of the problems, which is arising at
present, is the question of whether the law is at fault in its provisions for
those people who are held to be untreatable psychopaths – people
suffering from personality disorder – that is to say are there
deficiencies of the law which expose society to unnecessary risk. And could the
proposed changes in the law – particularly those recently put forward by
Jack Straw – could these be the answer ?
As I understand it, the suggestion is that
there are a group of untreatable people with personality disorders who are not
detained in prison because they have either not committed offences or they have
completed their sentences, but are yet felt to be dangerous. These are not
treatable in hospital, because they are untreatable, and therefore they could
not be detained under the Mental Health Act. Therefore the suggestion is, that
a new form of detention should be introduced, which is a form of Preventative
Detention for those found to suffer from severe personality disorders but to be
untreatable. They will not be detained in prison, they will not be detained as
a result of the commission of an offence. They will not be detained in mental
hospitals, but they will be detained in some form of preventative detention.
Do we need that form of
detention ? Will it be just ? And will it be in accordance with basic Human
Rights ? I think the answer to these questions is no.
Firstly, we dont need
it, because one of the problems is not the law, but how the law is applied
particularly by Mental Health Professionals sheltering behind what they
claim is the treatability test. This is, in fact, a very wide test, but it is
being presented as meaning you can only take somebody on, if you can guarantee
to cure them, or have a reasonable prospect of curing them.
Secondly there are, in
any event, existing provisions. For example, Section 2 (2) (b) of the Criminal
Justice Act 1991, which actually requires, once it has someone before them who
has been convicted of a serious, violent, or sexual offence, that part of the
sentence be preventative detention for such a period as necessary to protect
the public. This can go way beyond the period that they actually get for the
commission of their offence.
So already we have, I
would suggest, perfectly adequate resources in the law to provide for the
detention of those who are perceived to be so dangerous that some form of
indefinite preventative detention is required. So it is not necessary to
introduce this further additional provision.
Just looking at the
history, the treatability criteria is often put forward as the reason why
people cant be treated in hospital. And why they have to be turned away at the
gates. indeed, it is said that that is the reason why many people, particularly
those described recently, have fallen through the net.
The history of making
treatability a precondition of compulsory admission of psychopaths is
longstanding. Its there in the 1959 Mental Health Act which made it necessary
as a precondition for classification as a psychopath, that the condition required
or was susceptible to treatment. So there had to be some form by which the
Doctor had to say it required or is susceptible to treatment. After that, came
the 1983 Mental Health Act, and the requirement that if you were being detained
on the grounds of personality disorder, or some psychopathic disorder, or of
mental impairment, the Doctor had to certify that the treatment, the medical
treatment, was necessary to alleviate, or prevent the deterioration of the
condition.
Now to take a look at
two aspects of that test. Firstly, it was clearly intended to provide some
protection against inappropriate detention, where it could serve no useful
purpose, and where there was absolutely nothing that could be offered. However,
it is an extremely wide test in that the test isn't Can we cure this person ?
But Is there something that we, as Doctors at the hospital with a whole
range of types of treatment that are available can offer this person to
alleviate or prevent a deterioration of the condition ?
Indeed it has recently
been held by the House of Lords in a Scottish case (Hutchinson Reed) that that
is a very wide test. So, although many psychiatrists and other Mental Health
Professionals justify inactivity, by saying that this person wouldnt satisfy the
treatability test, (i.e. I dont think I can cure them) that is not the
test.
Secondly, when detention
is inevitable the test becomes a negative test. That is to say it
becomes a reason for saying to someone – who every body is agreed is mentally
disordered to the point of suffering from a serious personality disorder, and
to that extent not fully responsible for their behaviour (very often due to
early childhood experiences of abuse and violence suffered by that person as
touched on this morning) – well they have to go to prison because nobody
is prepared to say that they are treatable.
But they are not
operating the legal test. They are operating as it were an informal test they
have devised Do we think that this person is treatable ? can often come
down to – Do I think I want to treat this person within my hospital ?
This is not the formal application of the statutory test.
So the first point I
make is one has to examine what the treatability test is. And one has to
do this before saying it is all the fault of the treatability test, and
therefore we should introduce a new power to lock up the untreatable. The
treatability test is a wide one – Can one alleviate or prevent
deterioration in the condition ?. This can include treatment geared towards the
manifestations of behaviour, such as behavioural therapy, group therapy,
counselling, all those, provided it is in someway going to alleviate –
make less bad – or prevent a deterioration of the condition. And of
course treatment is very widely defined, to include nursing, habilitation and
rehabilitation under medical supervision.
The injustices that can
occur when an unduly strict approach is taken (Can I say, or do I want
to say this person will be cured by my treatment ?) – is that people
suffering from mental disorder are sent to prison for preventative detention
because people either say I cannot cure or I cannot guarantee that I will cure
them.
I would suggest that
this does raise serious problems. People shouldnt be in prison, if they are not
responsible for their actions in the wider sense. This approach, the very
exacting application of the treatability test, means that people are denied the
right treatment that they should have in the widest sense, rather than being sent
to prisons, and often getting discretionary life sentences, or extended
sentences for preventative purposes under Section 2 (2) (b).
Clearly there are
injustices in the therapeutic nihilism approach, the approach of There is
nothing we can do for them, they are not treatable, they must go to prison.
The second question
Does the law as operated at present, expose society to dangerous people
? There have been a number of cases where non-intervention has said to be
justified by reference to the treatability criteria. The Sharon Campbell
enquiry focused on one aspect of that. There have also been many other
enquiries and cases exposed by the press, where it has been said well we
couldnt do anything about the person because they didnt satisfy the treatability
test.
I would suggest that the
present law does not expose society unnecessarily to
dangerous people if it is properly applied. That is to say there is provision
for people suffering from personality disorder whose condition can in some
sense be alleviated or deterioration prevented and that provides for a very
wide variety of interventions including detention under the Mental Health Act.
There is also Provision for preventative detention for those who have actually
been convicted of an offence, on the basis of the courts assessment that on
their past form and the psychiatric evidence they are likely to be dangerous in
the future.
So just looking at that
question, Do we need this proposed non-medical alternative of detention for
people who will be labelled untreatable ? I suggest it is very questionable
whether there are people who in the wide sense are untreatable altogether.
Secondly, we dont need it. Thirdly, it violates fundamental concepts of Human
Rights.
In terms of the European
Convention on Human Rights and indeed those aspects of English Law that reflect
it, it is already recognised that people who are convicted of crime may,
because of their dangerousness, particularly as proved by past offences, need
to be detained for longer than the period that is justified to punish their
most recent offence. Indeed we have in Section 2 (2) (b) of the 1991 Act, that
it is a duty of every court dealing with violent sexual offenders, to consider
whether preventative detention is necessary for the protection of the public.
If there is a fault, it is that Judges are not applying it properly.
So there is no need for
further legislation. People who have actually been convicted of an offence who
are thought to pose a serious threat in the future which cannot just be met by
the limited finite term as punishment, are already catered for in existing
legislation.
While the suggestion
that people who havent been convicted of an offence should be locked up because
of what some psychiatrist thinks they might do in the future not in a
mental hospital for treatment but in some third type of detention, neither
prison nor mental hospital but preventative detention. This, I would suggest,
is contrary to basic principles of fairness and justice. It is also contrary to
the European Convention.
The European Convention
recognises that you can detain someone who has been convicted of an offence for
longer than they deserve, on the basis of future dangerousness. It recognises
also that in the case of someone who has not been convicted of an offence,
their mental disorder may be such that they require detention until it is safe
to release them. But that has to be detention in a mental hospital for
treatment for a mental condition. And I would suggest a wide definition of that
medical treatment.
The idea of this third
type of detention, where it is not based on conviction for an offence, it is
not based on a finding of mental disorder and a finding that the person
requires treatment in a mental hospital, but simply on the basis of
preventative detention without any treatment or medical supervision at all
this is unnecessary and unjust.
Untreatability will
simply become, in itself, a dangerously wide label for consigning people to
detention, which is so far unprecedented in English Law.
These are just some of
the issues that arise around treatability and untreatability that I wished to
comment upon. Thank you.
“
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Paul Whitehouse is the Chief Constable of Sussex. He is well known
for his pioneering policing initiatives in the Community.
I am here because I want
to reduce victimisation. It is not that I wish to deal with people who have got
personality disorders and who create problems, for their own sake. I actually
want to do it in order to prevent them having an effect on others. It is the
end we achieve if we are successful in dealing with such people. So what I want
to talk about is how we can deal with problems from the long-term perspective,
rather than the traditional short-term approach, which bedevils so many of the
things that we do. In that sense I dont know how many of you heard Radio 4 this
morning, but John Humphreys was particularly good with an American whose
identity I didn't catch, because I came in the middle of it. He was making an
extremely forceful point about the shootings in Denver, and asked how can the
President of the United States deplore the use of violence in any
circumstances, given what he is engaged in ?
I think I must make my own
position clear on that point. I was suspended last month, because I had, very
forcibly at the beginning of 1998, supported my Officers, when one of them shot
a man dead. So I am not someone who says that there is never a need for
violence. There are certain circumstances which I will not go into this
afternoon, when I believe that violence may have to be necessary, and I have
addressed other Quaker gatherings on that. The point that I am making is that
unless we are aware of the consequences of our actions, we should not embark
upon them. It seems to me that there are too many people about in all parts of
society who are doing one thing, but say other things. We all know that we
behave as we see our mentors behave and not as we hear them tell us.
Let me speak then from
the position of someone who wants to alter the way that we do things, in order
to reduce the amount of crime, whether it be violent crime or in any other
area. I come at this from the moral position that we dont wish people to be
hurt and we wish for less violence. I dont suppose there is anybody in this
room that would dissent from that. However, when it comes to persuading people
that we should do things differently, in order to achieve our aims, it is
probably more effective to go for the pragmatic arguments. People will hear and
understand pragmatic arguments and perhaps be persuaded by them, even though
they are not convinced of the moral position. That is where we need to be much
more effective in selling our point of view, if we are determined to effect
change. An interesting point, because it is relevant in this building and
because it is Friends who were one of, if not the prime movers in the abolition
of slavery. The abolition of slavery was necessary for economic wellbeing in the
Southern United States. If you study economic history you can justify that.
That is an example of how you can put two things together, and you can actually
demonstrate that what is morally right is also pragmatic and beneficial.
I believe, and it was
illustrated for us this morning by speakers who were talking about child abuse
and other things like that, that it is essential to go back to the beginning.
We have a saying in my Police Force solve your problems at source. The
illustration we use in this connection is the comparison between the excitement
of what Police Officers are generally supposed to do most of the time and what
we should be doing. I illustrate it like this.
If you are standing on
the bank of a wide fast flowing river and past you are floating from time to
time, people who are crying for help, because it is obvious they cant swim and
they are drowning. It is very exciting indeed to jump in and swim vigorously to
their rescue. You wont always succeed, but every now and again you will drag
one of them to the side and you will render first aid and artificial
respiration. And people will count you a hero. But you wont rescue all of them,
because there is only one of you standing on the bank and there are lots of
these people drifting down the stream.
It is much more
effective if you put on your size 10 boots and your walking gear and plodge
through the mud up stream and find the person that is throwing them in and stop
him. It is very difficult, you dont get any plaudits for it. There is a long
period during which you are plodding up stream when you are achieving nothing
and people are still floating past you shouting for help. But in the end it
will be better than initially. Of course, its much less exciting. We all like
exciting jobs, and all like to be told we are doing well, so trying to make
that change is important.
So let us think about
violence for a moment and let us not forget, thank goodness, that violence is a
very small proportion of the total crime in this country. That is very
significant, because people are frightened by crime, they are frightened by
violent crime, but they need not be as frightened as they are. And in
particular, of course, they need not be as frightened, because the vast
majority of violent crime is committed against a group of people who are not
nearly so frightened about it as others, and thats young men between the ages
of 17 and 24. The other very significant point, which I am sure most people
here know, is that you are much more likely to be a victim at the hand of
someone you know, than someone you dont. If we could only get that over to
people, it would make them feel much better, much happier. But then we have got
to think about it if, in fact the significant preponderance of violence
is by people we know in familiar situations, in relationships – why is
that?
Well I dont pretend to
have any blinding glimpse of the obvious here, or any special insight. But it
must be due to the way they were originally brought up and given a chance to learn
their socialisation. If you were brought up in a house where violence is the
norm between your parents, or by either one of your parents towards the other,
or by someone else towards one of your parents is it at all surprising
that you would go on to behave life that in later life. And isnt it therefore
more helpful in the long-term, going back to my trudging up stream to put more
effort into identifying those children who are in homes where they are not
being given an opportunity to socialise and get them into a place where they
may at least learn some sense of socialisation at the earliest possible
opportunity. If you took them away from their parents, it may mean more and
better nursery education at a lower age, with specific classes for children,
where those sorts of problems can be identified.
Similarly, with domestic
violence. There is a very good pragmatic argument inside my service, and inside
other services that have to do with the outcomes of domestic violence, for
being very firm and swift in dealing with domestic violence when it occurs.
This is for the simple reason that when you first come to know of violence by
one partner towards another and you are firm in your actions, making an arrest,
if you are a Police Officer it doesnt hold that that needs to lead to
incarceration, but it does mean that you have to bring in other agencies. You
are likely to reduce, in fact you are almost certain to reduce the chances of
eventually that violence getting worse to the point where someone nearly dies
or is killed. In pragmatic terms, the way to sell that inside the service, is
to point out that the costs of investigating a murder – forget the human
cost, and just talk about the financial costs – show people who arent
always seized of the moral imperative, that the financial costs are
substantial, whereas the actual costs of dealing with people at an early stage,
when they have only committed comparatively minor acts of violence are much
cheaper.
In the much wider
context of policing, it is very much more important that we should do what I
have been talking about in general. We have to cope with the vast increase in
telephone penetration I dont know how many mobile phones there are in
this room. There are bound to be at least a dozen. There may be 100. When you
think that 20 years ago there werent any at all, it shows you how things have
moved. This means we are getting an enormous increase in calls, people will
tell us about things that no-one would have bothered about in the past, and
expect us to doing something about it – because everyones expectations
are, of course, much greater these days. If we are to break the increasing
cycle of calls, because we have no more people to deal with them – like
the Health Service, the Police Service has infinite demand and finite resource.
We have got somehow to break that cycle, so as in domestic violence, as in
child abuse, as in anywhere else, if we can see a solution to sorting out a
problem, by attacking it at source, then we can make life easier for those who
are responding to calls, and give us more time to deal with those calls, which
will continue to come in. We have reduced demands on our services but it will
never go down to zero. People always persist in bringing their problems to us.
What then have we got to
do? We have got to look at the long-term benefits and realise that we must have
our eyes fixed firmly on the future rather than on the present, and be prepared
to suffer the pain, if necessary, to get to that long-term solution. We have got,
as at least one speaker said this morning, to work jointly, with which ever
service, which ever profession we come from, to recognise that everyone else
has got something to offer and none of us can be successful unless we work
together. Particularly in child abuse the earliest intervention is the most
effective and also the cheapest. If we all take that long term view, all of us,
in which ever field we work, I am convinced that we can succeed.
“
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Andrew Coyle is the Director of the International
Centre for Prison Studies, Kings College London. He is a former Prison Governor
and is the author of The Prisons we Deserve (pub Harper Collins)
I would like to share with you this afternoon
some thoughts which I have, following the conference which the International
Centre for Prison Studies organised last week, on penal reform in the next
Millennium. We brought together 120 people from 50 countries. It really was an
amazing event. It was very exhilarating to hear the Minister of Justice from Armenia
arguing with someone from Canada, and someone from Khazakstan sharing views on
problems with someone from Bolivia.
One of the complex things, I suppose, for those
of us from the so-called developed world was that much of the new and radical
thinking came from the so-called developing world, particularly on the subject
of penal reform and prison reform. That really should not have been very
surprising because prison is basically a Western concept. A concept which grew
up in the North Eastern United States and Western Europe and which subsequently
spread throughout the world, through the expansion of colonies. In many
countries, for example in Africa or South Asia, the notion of imprisoning large
numbers, particularly of young men, is actually quite alien to the culture and
seems a very odd idea based on the whole notion of exclusion rather than
solving problems by inclusion.
The Conference was all about finding solutions,
but inevitably we had to spend some time on reminding ourselves what the problems
were, in terms of dealing with reform. The reality is that all over the world
criminal justice systems, and penal systems are in need of reform. They are in
a word, in crisis.
We now know, for example from some work that we
have been doing at the Centre, that there are over 8 million people, men, women
and children in prison all over the world. Interestingly enough almost 2
million of them, almost 25% are in one country, the United States. In many
countries the majority of people who are in prison, (around 75-80%) are people
who are awaiting trial, in other words not yet convicted of any offence,
perhaps not likely to be convicted of any offence.
We discussed the fact that prisons are of small
benefit to society and are very expensive. They disrupt the families of
prisoners who inevitably become victims. Prisons give very little
satisfaction to the victims. The criminal justice system which ends in
imprisonment does not meet the needs of the victims. Prisons throughout the
world are institutions which are isolated from society and easily forgotten.
In many countries there are frequent human
rights abuses in prisons, including overcrowding at a level which almost
beggars belief. I was in Russia recently and saw a room of 80 square metres,
which the authorities said should have held 20 prisoners. There were 34 beds
and 84 prisoners. The prisoners slept in 3 shifts. Including all the furniture,
they therefore had less than 1 square metre per person. They were in that room
for at least 23 hours a day. The strongest, the most able slept at night, the
weakest slept during the day and therefore, were not able to have their one
hour in the fresh air, which was the only time they were allowed out of cell.
In situations like that disease is rife. In some countries of the former Soviet
Union 25% of the prisoners have Tuberculosis and that is an illness which comes
back out into the community, once people are released.
In almost all countries, there are
disproportionate numbers of racial, ethnic and other minorities in prison and
an over-representation of the poor and the marginalised. The needs of
vulnerable groups, such as women, children, juveniles, mentally and even
terminally ill do not receive the attention which they should.
Of course, in recent years the total number of
people in prisons has been dramatically inflated by the use of imprisonment as
an attempt to deal with the problems of drugs in society. In some societies
more than 50% of people who are in prison, are detained for non-violent
drug-related offences and the list goes on and on and on.
That was the starting point of the conference.
We agreed what the problems were, but we quickly moved to discuss possible
solutions and to draw up what we call a new agenda for penal reform.
We began from a recognition that the criminal
justice system has a very narrow role, a well defined, but very narrow role to
play in any democratic society. The criminal justice system should not be used
to resolve problems which are not relevant to it. Society should not look to
the criminal justice system to solve its problems. There has been a tendency to
do that in this country in recent years. If we have a problem then we will pass
a law about it, and if we pass a new law about it then somehow we think we are
actually dealing with the problem. There should be a recognition that
imprisonment should be an instrument of last resort, rather than of first
instance particularly in respect of pre-trial detention.
There was a very strong feeling among the group
that there was a need in many countries for a criminal justice system, which
would be non-elitist, and which would treat all people equally. A criminal
justice system which would include women, ethnic and minority groups at all
levels in its operation. So, these were the principles which we ended up with.
The question was then how to develop that agenda in detail.
We started from the basis that we needed to
develop strategies which would allow many issues which are currently dealt with
within the criminal justice system, to be dealt with in other formal or
informal procedures.
We moved to take quite a number of issues out
of the criminal justice system. We moved on from that to a recognition that a
greater number of offenders who are at present detained in custody could be
more effectively and efficiently dealt, with in the community, that in turn
should lead to a reduction in prison populations. This would give prison staff,
prison administrators and others the opportunity to assist prisoners to use
their time in prison more positively and to prepare for release.
We identified 9 strategies which we thought
would help this agenda to develop. The first one was the whole issue of
restorative justice. We stood
the whole system on its head and we started from the basis of saying Let us get
many of these issues out of the criminal justice system. Those which are in the
criminal justice system let us depenalise them. Many of those which are dealt
with in prison can be dealt with in the community. And only at the end of the
spectrum do you reach the issue of imprisonment and what imprisonment should be
like.
So, the first of those issues was restorative
justice which, of course, was pushed more strongly by the people at the
conference from places like New Zealand, (where it is very well developed,)
Canada and in this country by the Thames Valley Police. Restorative justice
involves a recognition that formal criminal justice systems have marginalised
victims of crime, and have failed to oblige offenders to face up to the damage
and harm which their actions have caused. The basic principle of Restorative
Justice is the determination to restore the balance between the victim, the
offender and the community.
We then moved on to the strategy of what is
called Alternative Dispute Resolution, that was pushed principally by people from South Asia, particularly
Pakistan and Bangladesh, where there is a real movement to provide options
which take disputes out of the penal justice arena and help the parties
involved to resolve the dispute, whatever it may be, with the assistance of a
neutral person, such as a mediator. Running through all of this is the notion
of inclusion, rather than exclusion.
We moved on from that to the whole area of what
eventually we called Informal Justice, which is sometimes known as Customary Justice, or Community Based
Justice. The performance of that model came from Africa, where there is a
tradition of using informal methods of justice to contribute to improving
access to justice for all, in a manner which is reconciliatory, inexpensive,
intelligible, participatory and uses language which is value sensitive, and
which can be understood by local communities. This is something which is pushed
very much in countries where there is no indigenous tradition of imprisonment.
Moving along that spectrum, we came to the next
strategy, which was the use of alternatives to custody many of which we already have in our own
tradition in this country. Those initiatives were pushed particularly by people
from East Africa and countries, such as Zimbabwe where the judiciary are
leading very closely the whole notion of community alternatives. These involve
a recognition that traditional alternatives to custody which help the community
and which help the victim are also more likely to have influence on the future
behaviour of the offender, and to have the added benefit of reducing
inappropriate use of imprisonment, which has lead to widespread prison
overcrowding.
Leading on from that, but separate from it, was
the whole issue of finding alternative methods of dealing with juveniles, which was touched on earlier. The international
human rights instruments relating to this issue, particularly the Convention on
the Rights of the Child, defines a child as anyone under the age of 18 years.
Our government and our country has signed up to that convention we
GB'>define a child as anyone under the age of 18 years. and it should be of
particular relevance that custody of whatever form for children should only be
used as a last resort and that alternative strategies need to be developed.
All the time the focus of the discussion was
narrowing. We then came to a recognition that violent crime would remain in
some form or other, and to a recognition that violence-prevention was crucial
for society, and that special strategies needed to be developed to deal with
it. I wont go into these at the moment, as it seems to me that this is very
much what the James Nayler Foundation is about.
As we get to the end of the spectrum we almost
inevitably find that we have reduced the prison population. But, at the same
time, we have to have strategies for making sure that this reduction continues.
All the international human rights instruments expect minimum use of
imprisonment, but specific
steps need to be taken to reduce the inappropriate use of imprisonment.
Then, and penultimately, that brings us on to
the notion of the proper management of prisons. One is then left with a number of people who
need to be in prison and we can then begin to look very positively about how
these establishments should be run and what they can be expected to achieve.
Finally, the conference underlined the need for
all of civil society to be involved in Penal Reform. Prisons dont exist in
isolation, they are part of our society, just as much as a hospital or the
school is. We may feel uncomfortable about that, but it is a reality. Prisons
exist because we want them to exist and therefore we have a responsibility to
be in involved.
These, as I have described them to you very
quickly, were the 9 strategies which we discussed ( those of us from 50
countries around the world,) relating to how prison reform might be developed
in the next decade. That is the new agenda which we have set out, which I would
be very happy to make available to anyone who was interested. It seems to me
that what the James Nayler Foundation is proposing to do sits very firmly in
the middle of this new agenda.
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Dr James
Gilligan is a former Director of the Massachusetts Prison Mental Health
Services. He is Director for the Centre for the Study of violence, Harvard
Medical School. Author of Violence reflections on a National Epidemic
(pub Vintage Books).
It really is an honour
to have been invited here today and be on the same platform as such
distinguished speakers who have added an enormous amount to our knowledge.
The discrepancy in the
level of violence between the United States and the United Kingdom is so
staggering, that I think that it is appropriate to comment that one reason that
you have so much less criminal violence than we do, is precisely because of
people like you. It is the fact that there is an audience like you, that will
come together to talk about this issue, to take a day out of your busy lives to
think seriously about this problem. That explains precisely why you have less
violence than we do if we had more people like you in the States we
would have less violence.
I do want to mention
that in coming here to speak to you on the subject of preventing violence, I
feel a little like the figure of Madeline Albright the US Secretary of the
States. In a cartoon in the newspaper recently she was depicted as coming to
meet the Chinese Premiere. She was being introduced by his deputy, who said
Your Excellency, the representative from the country with the largest
imprisonment rate in the world is here to lecture us on civil liberties.
If I were to update that
cartoon, I would have to have her visiting Slobodan Milosovic saying that the
country that has practised ethnic cleansing more thoroughly than any other
country in human history, is here to lecture you about ethnic cleansing. I say
it as someone who opposes ethnic cleansing, but I just want to say I cant think
about the issue in any sort of self-righteous way. We have certainly got little
ground on which to make moral judgements on the issue.
I want to talk today
about the subject of violence. And having mentioned the fact that I come from
the such a violent society, certainly the most violent of the economically
developed or industrialised nations, then this brings certain advantages, if
one wants to study violence there is just so much of it. People used to
ask me why I worked in such terrible places as prisons. And I used to quote a
famous bank robber in the 1930s, called Willie Sutton, who when he was asked
why he robbing banks he said because thats where the money is. I worked in the
prisons because thats where the violence is.
I used prisons not only
as a place to try to bring treatment where there simply had not been treatment
before. But also as a kind of clinical laboratory for the study of the causes
and prevention of violence. I mean, laboratory in the sense of a working space
where we can see if it would be possible to learn something about what we could
do to decrease the frequency of that.
The first question I
want to mention is that I think it is possible to show that violence can be
prevented. The reason that I say this is because I have had the experience of
finding out that it could be, just as Dr Bob Johnson was mentioning this
morning, through his work at Parkhurst Prison. When you actually work with a
population of violent people and you give them some time and attention, you
discover what is possible. The reason I had the opportunity to work as Director
Of Mental Health programmes for the prisons system in Massachusetts was because
those prisons were basically like a war zone during the entire decade of the
1970s. In one maximum security prison alone which housed little over 600
inmates there was a murder a month and there was a suicide every 6 weeks. That
was roughly 20 deaths a year, throughout that entire decade.
Finally as this
proceeded, some inmates with the help of activist lawyers, brought a class
action suit against the State through the Federal Courts, which had
jurisdiction over the State to recognise that a great deal of this violence was
resulting from undiagnosed and untreated mental illness, some of which was
spontaneous and some caused by the absolutely inhuman living conditions within
the prisons themselves.
But as a result of this
suit, the Federal Courts ordered the Department of Correction in the State
Prison System, to allow a team of mental health professionals into the system to
provide services. And the State chose a teaching hospital Harvard Medical
School that I was affiliated with, so I was able to direct this programme.
Altogether I worked a total of about 15 years.
What we found was that
it is indeed possible to prevent violence. By the first 5 years we wound up
with 3 homicides and about 2 suicides during that 5 year period. There were 2
serious hostage taking incidents. Before that there had been riots and hostage
taking incidents, officers had been killed, visitors had been killed, fires had
been set, and so on.
There were actually no
riots once we got this prison health programme going. We had 2 serious hostage
incidents, fortunately nobody was killed in them. By the second 5 years, there
was literally one homicide within the entire State Prison System and zero
suicides in those we were responsible for, plus no riots, no hostage taking.
In other words you can
go from one extreme to the other, by simply paying attention, giving people
attention.
I am currently doing a
study of a similar programme, even more intensive, in the San Francisco jails,
where there is one experimental unit. In this unit they had 38 violent
incidents in the 12 months preceding the programme - stabbings rapes
quite serious – things that were written up and were legally significant,
and a similar number in a corresponding other unit in the prison. We now have
for comparison a unit that is still following the old system, plus this new
system. During the first 13 months of this programme the new unit, which is
about 64 men – same size as the old one – had one violent incident
in the first month and none in the following 12 months, whereas the
corresponding control unit, has continued to have violence at the same level as
in the past.
I think it is clear that
we know that violence can be prevented if we want to. In this Unit in San
Francisco the inmates are in a very intensive programme. They are doing things
12 hours a day, 6 days a week. A lot of it is, you might say, a deconstruction
of the male sex role. A deconstruction of patriarchal attitudes and assumptions
that lead men to feel that in order to be men they must be violent. And that
they have certain rights to beat up their wives, or girlfriends or their
children and so on, if they are not doing what they want. This is just
intensively being what it means to them to be a man.
There are other
programmes that involve psycho-drama, psycho-therapy, regular education, and so
on. People are spending their entire 12 hours a day, six days a week, working
on these issues.
Violence can be
prevented. We are studying recidivism in the community to find out whether we
can also show that these programmes can reduce recidivism. We did do a
recidivism study in Massachusetts and we found that the one programme we could
find that had been 100% effective in preventing re-offending was getting a
college degree while in prison. We had a programme going on for 25 years in
which professors from Boston University and other local institutions would
volunteer their time to give college credit courses to prisoners. Out of the
first 200 inmates who took this over that 25 year period not one had been
returned to prison as at the time we followed this up.
Then I discovered that
the State of Indiana got the same results as well. Also a State prison in
California had got the same results as well and so on. Across the country
studies have shown that education is the most demonstrably effective single
programme in enabling people to move out of a life of crime and violence, and
the more education the better. This is very statistically significantly more
effective than anything we were doing before.
What is so astonishing,
is that when I announced the results of this study at a public lecture near
Boston, our new Governor of Massachusetts who hadnt realised there was a
programme of free college education in the prisons – went on television
to give a Press Conference to say that we have got to stop this programme of
giving free college education to prison inmates. Otherwise people who are too
poor to go to college will start committing crimes so they could get a free
college education.
Least you think that was
simply one demagogue pandering to the worst instincts of the voters, the last
United States Congress, the same group that is still in power, abolished a
programme which provided payments for college tuition and text books for
prisoners throughout the country. So this is not just a local issue.
In other words, in the
name of being tough on crime, we have been systematically dismantling the very
programmes that have been shown to be most effective in preventing crime.
We were talking earlier
about this dichotomy between prevention and punishment, and which do we want to
give priority in our society. It is clear that the priority here is
forget about prevention, forget about crime control. All we are interested in
is punishment and revenge for its own sake, even if it elevates the crime rate.
This is so far removed
from common sense that I think we have to say something else is going on here.
It is not that we dont know what to do, it is not that we dont know what works,
we do know what works. The question is do we want to do it? Or are we more
interested in shooting ourselves in the foot so to speak ? By punishing people
even though we know that only stimulates more violence and crime.
Now that is why when I
ask the question How can we prevent violence ?, it seems to me that what we are
talking about here is more than just changing a few details. We are talking
about a gigantic paradigm shift, as some of earlier speakers were suggesting. I
think this is a paradigm shift that is necessary for us to make, both within
the health care professions and within the legal and criminal justice system.
I think that both
systems are already in fact beginning to rethink the basic assumptions that
underlie them. In the mental health professions I was so pleased to see that the
James Nayler Foundation and Bob Johnson and the rest of you, are putting this
together, and beginning to focus now on Personality Disorders. Because when I
was in my training in psychiatry, back in the late sixties, early seventies, I
was basically taught that most of the character disorders were untreatable.
Especially the ones that
were called Anti Social Personality Disorders, Sociopathic and Psychopathic
Personality Disorder I was told were untreatable – you might as
well forget about them. All you could do for these people, is call for the
police, get them sent to prison, get them out of circulation. The psychiatrists
shouldnt waste their time trying to treat the untreatable, they were
unmotivated, they were unreliable, they wouldnt tell you the truth, etc.
Well, when I actually
went into the prisons, I discovered everything that I thought I knew and that I
had been taught up to that point was simply wrong, or at best a half truth,
with the most important half left out. I began to realise that my own
profession needed to make a paradigm shift. Indeed to say No, our business is
not just the classically identified major mental illnesses, the psychotic
conditions, schizophrenia and so forth, but also conditions that up to now we
have not been treating at all, we have only been punishing, even though they
manifestly involve abnormal psychology and severe psychic damage.
I think the legal
system, also, is undergoing a change. We have been hearing a lot today about
the concept of restorative justice, for example and reparative justice,
alternative sentencing. In the US now, we are more and more having drug courts
where instead of sending drug offenders to prisons, we have them go into
treatment. We are finding it less expensive, and more effective.
The State of Arizona
recently found that sending non-violent drug offenders into treatment cost only
half as much as what they were doing before when they put them in jail, but it
was also vastly more effective in getting people off drugs and away from the
crimes that their drug habit would put them at a higher risk of committing.
When the Rand Corporation studied this they concluded that, dollar for dollar,
treatment for substance abuse rather than putting people in prison was 7 times
more effective than imprisonment. That was in terms of getting people off drugs
and out of crime and future criminal charges.
So I think that in all
of these areas, both medicine and law, and all the professions affiliated with
them, we are already beginning a rethink. One way I have thought about this, is
to look at the whole issue of human violence as we approach the end of this
millennium. We have already been talking about thinking forward to the next
century and the next millennium. If we think on that scale, it becomes apparent
that for the last 3,000 or 4,000 years the whole human species has been engaged
in a great social experiment. Namely to test the hypothesis that we could
control violence, prevent it and render it harmless, by condemning it morally and
legally and prohibiting it. And then when people become violent anyway, despite
all that, punishing them with more violence of our own.
Now 3,000 years is long
enough to test any hypothesis. And I think that as experiments go, this one has
really come in with very clear results. They are all around us. We can see that
far from being a form of preventing violence, that this approach, which goes
back to Hammurabi and Moses and Dracon and Solon and Plato and Socrates and
Aristotle and Justinian this approach which has been around for so many
centuries and millennia, has not worked.
Violence has been
constantly increasing until this century through which we have just
lived, has been the most violent century in all of human history, to the point
where for the first time in all of evolutionary history, we have become the
first species ever to create through a deliberate effort, the means of bringing
about its own extinction. Which we will do – unless we can succeed, more
effectively at preventing violence and getting the human propensity to commit
acts of violence, under better control. I say propensity in the sense of
potential, not instinct, not inevitability. There is certainly potential for
that, that we all share, if the conditions are right (maybe we should say
wrong).
The new paradigm that I
want to suggest, which I think is emerging, at least within the mental health
professions, is to recognise that thinking about violence as a moral and legal
problem really means that the only question we can ask is how evil or wicked
was this particular crime, and how much punishment does the perpetrator
deserve.
But instead of asking
that, we need to ask a different set of questions, because asking those
questions does not help us in the least to understand what we really need to
understand which is – what are the causes of violence, and what
can we do to prevent it ?
When you start thinking
about violence in these terms, you are thinking all of a sudden, in terms of
public health and preventive medicine, including social and preventive
psychiatry, psychology and social sciences and so on. The advantage in thinking
in this way is that you can come up with empirical data, you can investigate it
through research.
I am going to just quickly
try to summarise what I thought I had learned from 25 years of working in the
prison system and also running the Prison Mental Hospital in Massachusetts,
about the causes of violence, because I think that directly relates to what we
need to do to prevent it. I will begin with what I thought I learned about what
causes people to become violent, by quoting what I heard over and over again,
virtually every time I asked a violent prisoner why he had assaulted someone,
or even killed them. The answer which would come back to me with stunning
regularity, was because he disrespected me. In fact that term was used so often
that it was abbreviated into the slang term he dissed me.
Now any time a word gets
used so often that people abbreviate it, it tells you something about how
central it is in the moral and emotional vocabulary of the person using it. I
used to think that armed robbers committed their crimes and murder in order to
earn money and, of course that is one reason, and it is what they would like
you to believe. It sounds very rational and relatively more adult. But when you
actually start sitting down and talking with these people, what I started
hearing over and over again was one variation or another of the statement, I
never got so much respect before, as I did when I had a gun pointed at some
dudes face.
I remember talking with
one prison inmate who was just totally recalcitrant, repeatedly violent, to the
point where he was in this endlessly repeated vicious circle with the Prison
Officers where the more violent he became, the more they punished him. And the
more severely they punished him, the more violent he became. Finally there was
nothing more they could do. He was in solitary confinement, they had taken away
his bedding, his clothes, no visits, no phone calls. There was nothing more
they could do. So finally they asked me to see him to see if I could
figure out what was going on. I invited him into my office. I had known this
man for a couple of years and he was in for violent crimes, muggings, armed
robberies and was continually violent within the prison.
This guy was usually so
inarticulate and incoherent you could hardly get a clear answer to any
question. I asked him what is it you want so badly that you would be willing to
sacrifice everything else in order to get it. Because that struck me that that
was exactly what he was doing. He was sacrificing everything for the sake of
something. This man who was usually so incoherent he wouldnt even answer
questions, totally astonished me by standing up tall, looking me in the eye and
saying with simple eloquence Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem. Then he went on more
in the usual way he talked, and I shall paraphrase it so it is not quite as
obscene. He said And I will kill every mother-f**r, if I have to, in order to
get it.
He went on to describe
how he was systematically taunted, teased, rejected, ridiculed, called names,
and was subjected to shame and humiliation in every possible way, by his fellow
inmates, by the Officers. And then this became a vicious circle, where one
would lead to the other, and they would keep provoking each other.
He went on to say he had
nothing left but his self-respect, and that was the one thing they couldnt take
away from him. But for him, maintaining his self-respect meant not submitting
It meant keeping up the fight, continuing to rebel, not bowing down to them.
I began to think that
when I heard these stories over and over again that maybe I had discovered
something new, something original. And then I happened to be re-reading the
Bible, a story I had read thirty or forty, fifty or sixty times before, and had
never gotten the point. That was the story of the first recorded murder in
western history the story of Cain and Abel. The Bible tells us why Cain
killed Abel in this paradigmatic murder. It is really telling us why people
commit murder. It says very clearly that God had respect unto Abel and his
offering, but unto Cain and his offering, God had no respect.
It had never struck me
what that meant until I started talking to murderers, heard what they were
saying and put it in context. Again my dreams of glory at having discovered
something new disappeared when I was reading Aristotles Rhetoric. He said the
reason people become angry and violent and start to commit assaults was he
said, because they feel slighted and he went on to describe what he
meant by being slighted – exactly what I am talking about. Being
insulted, being ridiculed, being treated as unimportant. Thomas Aquinas repeated
the same conclusion. Modern experimental psychologists have found when they are
trying to induce people to become violent or to create an artificial equivalent
of violence in an experimental study – that the one thing that is both
necessary and effective is exposing people to insult. Nothing else works as
well, or is as foolproof.
It is not just
frustration alone there used to be the frustration- aggression
hypothesis, people become aggressive because they were frustrated. But
aggression is not the same thing as violence – it is when the frustration
occurs in the context of being insulted that people become violent.
Psychoanalysts say that
the deepest roots which psychoanalysis can penetrate in seeking the roots of
violence is to a Narcissistic injury or wound, that is so severe that it
threatens to overwhelm the cohesion and viability of the self. The person feels
in danger of being overwhelmed by what I am calling shame and humiliation and
psychoanalysis calls Narcissistic wounding or injury. The psychology of shame
is the psychology of Narcissism.
One thing this tells us
is that once we understand this, we can begin to realise that both the personal
and social conditions that expose people to shame and humiliation and to
feelings of inferiority and being treated as second class citizens these
can be demonstrated to be the very conditions, that cause violence. And if we
can change those conditions – then we can prevent violence.
++++++
After
the central part of his talk relating to his clinical observations, James went
on to discuss, with audience participation, the relative importance of a range
of sociological factors illustrating this with reference to research
data, graphs and statistics, which because of limitations in our resources we
are unfortunately unable to include here.
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