Into the Darklands

by Nigel Latta

  To make it easier to follow I’m just going to recount the dialogue here without the repetition of each role reversal. Imagine that each person is Robert speaking in the particular role. The dialogue and physical reactions are all his own as he steps physically and emotionally backwards and forwards into the other person’s shoes, becoming at various times his father, his victim, himself.

  ‘Say what you say to your dad,’ Tom directed Robert.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ Robert said self-consciously.

  ‘Reverse roles,’ said Tom, and Robert dutifully stepped into the role of his father. I saw a stony man looking back at his son with something like disgust.

  ‘You’ve got nothing to say to your son?’ Tom asked him.

  The old man shook his head, so staunch you could almost hear stone grinding over stone as he moved. ‘No.’

  ‘Is this what he’s like?’ Tom asks Robert. ‘Has he always been this way?’

  Robert nods, and his eyes are red. ‘He’s a hard old bastard. Always has been.’

  ‘Tell him that,’ said Tom.

  Robert is silent for a moment, as if saying this to his father would be too much. ‘You’re a hard bastard,’ he finally says, so quiet it’s almost a whisper.

  ‘Louder,’ said Tom.

  ‘You’re a hard bastard.’

  ‘Louder.’

  ‘You’re a hard bastard.’

  In the quiet of the room the noise is deafening. Robert’s eyes were glazed over now, he was somewhere else, not here. He was in some other place where sons go to face down their long-dead fathers. Surplus reality, the psychodramatists call it. The Darklands by any other name.

  ‘This man treated you cruelly, didn’t he?’ Tom asked, his voice very quiet.

  Robert nodded, not breaking eye contact with his father.

  ‘Tell him what he did to you.’

  Again the pause but this time it didn’t feel like fear. This time it felt like a great angry wave gathering speed and size as it sweeps towards land.

  ‘You beat me,’ Robert hissed. ‘You beat me for fucking years.’

  ‘Reply to your son,’ Tom instructed the father.

  The old man spoke like each word was a little piece of iron spit. ‘He deserved it.’

  ‘Did you?’ Tom asked Robert.

  Robert shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Tell him.’

  ‘I didn’t deserve what you did to me. I was just a kid, for fuck’s sake.’

  His father scoffed. ‘You were a little shit. I was just teaching you right from wrong.’

  ‘When I was nine you beat me with a piece of hose so bad I couldn’t walk for three days. The neighbours heard my screaming and called the cops and you put me in the bath to wash off the blood.’

  Robert’s voice was shaking now, fat wet tears squeezed from his eyes. He blinked as if trying to stop them, but there was no holding this back. No way.

  ‘I was just a fucking kid,’ Robert screamed. ‘Why did you do that to me? Why?’

  His father looked back at him impassively. ‘I had no choice.’

  ‘Choose someone to be you when you were nine,’ said Tom.

  Robert didn’t even pause, picking one of the group and placing him beside his father. Robert at nine cowered, unable to look up.

  ‘What was that like?’ Tom asked the boy, his voice suddenly gentle as he spoke to this poor little kid. ‘What was it like for you being treated that way?’

  For the longest time there was nothing. Little Robert simply stood there shaking, tears dripping down his face.

  ‘Tell him what it was like,’ Tom gently prompted. ‘He needs to hear this.’

  ‘I was so scared,’ little Robert moaned, his voice twisted in pain. ‘I was so scared. I didn’t know what I’d done. Why me? Why did you hurt me? Why?’

  Robert stood there, shaking, watching the terrified little boy.

  ‘Choose someone to be your victim,’ Tom said, quietly, but there was an edge in his voice, an urgency. Endgame.

  Robert looked around the room. His eyes seemed to have trouble focusing, as if he’d been looking at some faraway place the whole time. ‘Nigel,’ he finally said, pointing at me.

  My stomach dropped.

  I knelt down before him on the floor, assuming the role of his victim.

  ‘Tell her what you did to her,’ Tom said.

  Robert took a long shaking breath. ‘I raped you. I came into your room night after night and…and I raped you.’ He shuddered and tried to look away. ‘I can’t…’ he started to say. ‘I can’t do this…’

  ‘Yes you can,’ said Tom, compassionate but firm. ‘This is your work, no one else’s. Ask her how she felt.’

  ‘How…how did you feel?’

  Then we reversed roles and I repeated back what he’d just said as if I was him. I tried to sound as cruel as I could. It wasn’t hard.

  Tom knelt down. ‘What was that like?’ he asked Robert in the role of the little girl. ‘Tell him. Tell him what it was like being raped by your stepfather, having him hurt you night after night after night.’

  Robert, kneeling in the role of his victim, rocked slowly back and forward, making small mewling sounds. Not words, just tiny awful noises.

  Then Tom got him to reverse roles again so that Robert was standing as himself looking down at me in the role of his victim. ‘Pick up the role,’ Tom whispered in my ear.

  I closed my eyes and imagined I was that girl, that I was 12 years old and he’d done these terrible things to me. It felt too important to do anything else. You couldn’t fake this stuff; even back then I knew that.

  ‘Stop it,’ I whispered. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it…’

  Over and over, letting it tumble out of me. As I was kneeling down I’d told myself to be careful, that this wasn’t me, that this wasn’t my life, it was just a game. Look after yourself, I chided. But that went out the window as soon as I knelt down and started to speak. I wasn’t important any more. All that mattered was that poor little girl, and I tried to lose myself in her.

  ‘Why me?’ Tom whispered in my ear, cueing me with what to say.

  The first time I said those words Robert came completely undone. In truth he howled. It was one of the most painful sounds I think I’ve ever heard. He collapsed to his knees sobbing, gasping ‘no’ over and over. Inside, the dam had broken, and now the shit storm had come. And it took him away for a while.

  When he came back he was no longer ‘handling it’, and despite all the words I know, I cannot think of one to adequately describe the look in his eyes. How does one describe how it must feel for him to finally face the things he’d done to that little girl? That task is beyond me.

  For my part I felt as if I’d been gutted. Not figuratively, but literally. It felt as if I’d been slit open and had my insides pulled out. Sitting back in my chair I felt disconnected from the world, and it took several minutes to pull myself back into my own head. Looking over at Robert I wasn’t quite so clear any more. Inside I felt a swirling mixture of pity, anger, sadness and disgust. It would be days before I’d be able to get enough distance from the weekend to start to sort through some of those feelings. I do remember the urge to slam him was gone.

  There was nothing I could do that would equal the pain he was now feeling. It’s always ourselves we should fear most.

  We did that for the next 13 hours, from midday Saturday till 1 a.m. on Sunday morning. I was an auxiliary in every drama and by the end of it I felt absolutely fucked. Exhausted would be the polite way to say it, but fucked is far closer to the truth.

  I played the role of victims, offenders, battered children, parents of their victims, the offender’s family, everything you could imagine.

  Swimming in a sea of shit, that’s the game we played, swimming in a sea of shit all the way from a bright sunny afternoon into the deepest depths of the night. When we finally finished in the small hours of Sunday morning all I wanted was to go home. The thing about those weekends though is you don’t
get to leave till the ride is finished.

  So instead of leaving I drank some more wine with Tom and Andy and wished I was safe home in my own bed, safe in my own life where bad things only happened on television.

  We did some more things on Sunday morning, mostly talking about the weekly groups they’d be going on to next, which would focus on relapse prevention, and then we went home.

  Just like that. Except there was never going to be any ‘just like that’ for me. Some places stay with you, they change you.

  This was no longer just about getting my master’s thesis finished, it was now about the work. The things I’d experienced were too big to walk away from. I could no more go back to my old life than I could go back in time.

  I’d spent three days in the Darklands and there was never any going back. Within two months I was working as a therapist on the programme.

  I’ve never really left.

  I JUST NEED TO KNOW WHY I DID IT

  BARRY SAYS IT IN the way guys like him always say it: with a whiny, poor-me tone of voice. He’s not really looking for an answer, at least not the real one anyway. Barry just wants to arse on about how awful it all is and how he can’t understand how he could have done such a terrible thing. If he does that long enough then he won’t have to really think about what he did to his victim.

  I sigh. Despite Barry’s game playing, the question has some validity. A lot of people ask me why people do bad things. Usually I reply: ‘Because they can.’ I suspect, however, that this probably isn’t a very satisfactory answer.

  Our fascination with the ‘criminal mind’ undoubtedly goes back as far as the caves. Some Neanderthal probably killed some other Neanderthal and the rest of the tribe wondered: ‘Now why would Bob go and do a thing like that?’ We’ve continued to want to know what makes people do bad things. Earlier explanations revolved around spiritual dimensions, good and evil, God and Satan. Interestingly, for some the debate hasn’t moved much past there.

  ‘Satan made me do it,’ a man told me when I asked him why he’d raped his nine-year-old stepson.

  ‘Wow,’ was my somewhat facetious reply, ‘I saw that movie.’

  ‘What movie?’

  ‘The Exorcist. That was some pretty scary shit. Can you make your head spin right round? I’d really like to see that.’

  He frowned. ‘No.’

  ‘You’re not going to vomit green bile all over me, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Do you want me to get a priest?’

  ‘No.’ By now he’s sounding halfway between amused and pissed off.

  ‘Can you do the scary voice?’

  ‘No. What’s your point?’

  ‘My point is that I think you had a lot more to do with it than the devil.’

  ‘Oh.’

  (Whilst not being a big biblical scholar, I’m pretty sure that—demonic possession aside—the whole free-will thing pretty much screws that argument. The devil might have whispered in your ear, but he didn’t unzip your fly.) I get tired of guys who rape or kill somebody, then find God and are instantly forgiven and shown the right path. Usually these people are backed up by well-meaning, naive and dangerous supporters who think they’ve saved the bad guy and who are only too happy to come along to a session and tell you how helpful God has been about the whole thing. I’m sure even God must get sick of these people.

  One of the first ‘scientific’ attempts to explain criminality was published by an Italian Professor, Cesare Lombroso, in 1876, in his book L’Uomo Dilenquente (Criminal Man). Essentially Lombroso tried to isolate the distinctive physical characteristics of criminals. He came up with an interesting list of criteria: prominent jaws and cheekbones, eye defects, funny noses, unusual ears (the more they look like monkey ears the worse you are), big lips, long arms, and funny-shaped heads. His thesis was that these were the physical giveaways that someone was a born criminal. Essentially, the more you looked like a monkey, the worse kind of criminal you were.

  Now, while I’ve seen a number of offenders who were distinctly monkey-like in appearance, I’ve also had a few that looked pretty normal. I think it’s safe to say Lombroso doesn’t have a large school of followers these days, although he’s always good for a laugh in conference presentations.

  That said, we still look for physical signs of criminality. Recent examples are the work that’s been done on XYY chromosome males, and the onwards search for ‘criminal’ genes. It’s a nice thought—that it might one day be as simple as a gene test—but I doubt it. There might be some nature, but there’s always going to be a significant nurture component as well.

  Sociological explanations of criminology have also been a significant player and continue to be advanced in some quarters as the reason why people do bad stuff. Essentially this is the old Monty Python line: ‘It’s a fair cop, Your Honour, but society’s to blame.’ The sociological argument is that wider social factors such as poverty, lack of education and discrimination are the causes of crime. As such the way to stop people committing crimes is to provide employment, education and help us all to love each other more. The scientists hate this one. They’ll tell you it’s a load of fluffy nonsense.

  Social-learning theory is currently one of the most popular flavours in the forensic ice-cream shop. Basically this is a case of monkey see, monkey do. People who commit criminal acts do so because it’s learned behaviour. Clinicians guided by this framework would look at things like antisocial attitudes and beliefs, antisocial behaviour, antisocial personality factors, and whether or not you have antisocial peers. All these things have been shown to be predictive of the likelihood of future criminal behaviour.

  I’d have to say that I spend most of my time in the social-learning camp. There are a lot of people who are poor, uneducated and unloved, and they don’t all go out and commit crimes. Some do, but a lot don’t. Problems are not excuses. There are just as many people from deprived backgrounds who go on to live decent, law-abiding lives. This is counter to the whole everyone’s-a-victim-of-something, no-responsibility culture that has been evolving over recent years. There always seems to be an excuse. Once I heard a defence lawyer claim that his client was suffering from a heart condition and the lack of blood flow to his brain may have been a contributing factor as to why he shot and killed three people. That, of course, is why the murder rate in cardiac wards is so high. We all hear stories every day of heart surgeons shot dead in operating theatres by deranged angina patients, right? Give me a break.

  So if you’re assessing a guy who brutally raped a woman, you’re probably better off looking at what he’s done before, what he was thinking and whether or not he has criminal mates, than how he was victimised by an uncaring world.

  But is that to say issues of social justice have no relevance? Hell, no—and this is something I sometimes think some of my more ‘scientifically minded’ colleagues don’t seem to get, or if they do, then only grudgingly. Mainstream forensic thinking has no quarrel with the fact that antisocial attitudes contribute to criminal offending. If your motto is ‘Fuck the world’, then you’re more likely to go out and try and to do just that than someone whose motto is ‘Give peace a chance’. What doesn’t seem to follow is any concern with where that antisocial thinking came from.

  I was once told by an organisation that will remain nameless, that they wouldn’t pay me to work with a high-risk offender on his own victimisation issues because that wasn’t relevant. His antisocial attitudes were relevant, just not his own history of severe childhood physical abuse.

  Now, this is where things get all screwed up, because we take a good and useful concept and adhere to it so rigidly that it no longer reflects the real world. In essence we stick our collective heads so far up our bureaucratic bottoms that we can’t see what’s right in front of us. If it doesn’t fit in the box, we throw it away.

  This guy was angry. He hated everybody for just about everything. He’d been horribly beaten throughout his childhood, and was a deeply
emotionally scarred man. His head was almost constantly filled with intense ‘flashbacks’ to scenes of this early abuse. The brain stores traumatic memories and can spontaneously reproduce them in incredibly vivid detail. These old painful memories can come sweeping back in a second. His whole life had been spent being battered by these memories. When they happened they were so intense it was as if he was experiencing them all over again.

  For him it was a nonsense to look at changing his antisocial attitudes and beliefs until he had achieved some relief from his almost constant flashbacks. It’s a little hard to believe nice things about the world when all the time you’re having vivid flashbacks to the time when you were seven years old and being beaten with a piece of barbed wire.

  Unfortunately I never managed to convince the bean-counter of this and so wasn’t able to work with the man. He was ‘referred out’, which means he fell off the back of some desk. And if that guy ever kills someone I’m more likely to be questioned over the thoroughness of my paperwork than the bean-counter will be about why I wasn’t allowed to do what I believe needed to be done.

  The problem with our large institutions is that the people making the big decisions are often not the ones on the front line. For some reason people who sit in nice chairs in big buildings way up in the sky think they know more about how to do the work on the ground than those of us who get our hands dirty. There have been many times over the course of my career when I’ve been told by a bureaucrat that what I wanted to do either wasn’t a good idea, or simply ‘isn’t what we do here’.

  Box logic.

  Even though I believe the monkey-see-monkey-do argument is a good one, we always have to remember monkeys live in trees, not boxes. You have to consider the monkey’s whole context when trying to understand why he steals a banana. The problem with psychologists is that we want to put monkeys in boxes and measure them. We want to record the frequency of each little monkey action and extrapolate out from that one action to the real world. We yearn for scientific legitimacy.