by Nigel Latta
Now, while there’s still a lot of debate about these kinds of statistics in the international research literature, and debate about how this stuff applies in our part of the world, it’s still pretty damn useful science to know about.
Actually, it seems our rapists are far more transient than those in the US and UK. Our guys tend to move around a lot and also have their own transport, so that makes the geographic profiling a lot harder. Our most promising lines of finding an unknown offender would seem to be from combining both the geographical data about the location of the rapes with data about the offender’s likely criminal history (for example, people with convictions for burglary, violence offences etc). Combining those two factors results in a greater degree of accuracy in finding the identity of the rapist.
The problem is that all too often we make the mistake of thinking that just because some of this is useful, this means science can tell us everything. Worse still, we discount everything outside the scientific approach because there aren’t numbers to show it has any worth.
While I believe science has a valuable contribution to make (remember: there are patterns in the Darklands), if science is our best hope of ever having an impact on human behaviour then I for one will be retreating to a secluded concrete bunker well stocked with canned goods and firearms. Maps are good and useful things, and they can help us find our way out, but the map will never be the terrain. It will never tell us where to put our feet, or where the snakes might be hiding. If science is all we’ve got to help us solve these problems, then we’re in big trouble.
Detached ‘psychological assessments’ and ‘psychological interventions’ are the equivalent of that paint-by-numbers picture of a horse. You can tell it’s a horse—the picture has all the right component parts—but it will never stir the heart or mind.
My profession yearns for scientific legitimacy. We say that’s what makes us different from the rest of the counselling field. Psychology has struggled from an inferiority complex right from the start, so we say that our research-informed practice is what makes us better. Maybe it makes us different, but it doesn’t automatically make us any better. When we sit down with people and embark on a journey of therapeutic change, we are artists, not scientists. At least if we’re any good.
I’m sure many of my colleagues will shriek when they read this heresy. So just for them, let me say it again: if we want to be anything other than a bureaucrat with a clipboard we must accept that we’re artists first and foremost. We work with paints and brushes, but we create the intangible, the unmeasurable. It is not sufficient simply to make paint stick to the canvas—you have to produce something that moves people.
Stephen King once said of writing that you must not come lightly to the blank page. You can come to the act of writing any way you like, says old Mr King, just don’t come lightly. Good advice for writers. Good advice for shrinks too. In my game, if you want to have any chance of being effective, you have to believe that every day you hold souls in your hands. Come with passion, with anger, with sorrow, with humour, with hope, even with despair, but you must never come lightly to the work.
Which brings us all the way back to Henry and that hot uncomfortable afternoon, a man who’s done a specialist sex-offender treatment programme and is still considered to present a ‘very high risk’ of further offending. Mostly that seems to be because Henry refused to look at some important issues in his life, most notably his sexuality. He has only ever offended against boys but he refuses to talk about his sexual orientation. That, according to the notes, he considers ‘too personal’.
Fortunately I’m not hamstrung by the necessity for politeness and so don’t feel the need to take his refusal all that seriously. If the bad guy tells me anything is out of bounds, that’s where I want to go first.
So there’s Henry, sitting in his chair looking like a chubby, red-faced, 40-year old boy scout in walk shorts and sandals. All the while the clock’s doing what clocks do best: ticking. Nine months of treatment and he made bugger all progress. All we’ve got left today is about 24 minutes. After that he walks out the door into a world full of children. Henry knows where to find them too, the lost and broken children, the ones no one cares about, the kids who have no one to tell. For men like him, the professional hunters, there is a veritable feast to be had on the streets and playgrounds of the not-so-civilised world.
Make no mistake about it, when you play this game, you’re playing for the highest stakes there are.
So whatever happens in the next twenty-something minutes has to be very different to the usual stuff he’s had from shrinks before, because it washes off this man’s back like water from the proverbial duck.
Now, at this point—where other people might be inclined to knock politely on the door and ask if they can come in—I’m more likely to just stroll right in as if I own the place.
I sigh. ‘You know what?’ I ask.
‘What?’ he replies, that slight smile on his lips, like a schoolboy who knows he’s been naughty.
‘I look at you and I think about your life, and it makes me feel very sad. Your whole life is a lie. All you’ve ever done is hurt people, and even worse, you’ve hurt children. You’ve spent years trying to fill the big empty hole inside you with other people’s pain so you don’t have to think about who and what you really are. I think you’re a very, very lonely, empty man, and that makes me feel sad as hell.’
He keeps that little smile for a few seconds before what I’ve just said filters through, then it starts to falter. This is not within his realm of experience. This is not how it’s supposed to go.
I let him sit with all that emptiness, letting it soak in and drag him down further. ‘But,’ I finally say when the silence has become so heavy it threatens to block out the light, ‘it doesn’t have to be this way.’
And he looks up again.
‘You don’t have to be this sad, empty man living on the edge of the world, hurting kids. You don’t have to live your lonely pathetic life. You don’t have to be that way if you don’t want to. If you want to come back into the world with the rest of us, you can. It’s not even that hard. All you need to do is choose it. Choose life, Henry. It’s there if you want it. I can help you to find your way back in, that’s what I do. I’ll do everything I can to get you there, but first you have to decide.’
He’s still looking at me and his eyes are glistening. He’s feeling it, the bite of his pathetic life. At the moment all he feels is self-pity; he doesn’t feel anything for the kids he hurt, but I’ll take what I can get at this point.
‘What do I do?’ he asks.
‘Talk to me. Listen to the things I say. Do the things I tell you to do. I’m offering you a chance to come in from the cold. It may be the last chance you have.’ My voice is very quiet and very serious now because I want him to really hear what I’m saying. ‘Don’t piss this away.’
He shakes his head. ‘I won’t.’
And in that moment, I believe he means it, which is good, because that means we’re on the road.
Sometimes, as a last resort, you have to tell people what you’re really thinking. You have to tell them the truth. Most professionals form all kinds of theories about their clients but they never come right out and say them. I tend to do the opposite, because I think it’s better for people to know what I’m thinking. If you’ve done a bad thing to someone else, then some of those theories are going to be less than complimentary. Some of those theories will inevitably make you feel uncomfortable, or upset, or angry. In truth I would hope they do, because people who are comfortable talking about the bad things they’ve done worry me most of all.
People in my game are, as a rule, dreadfully concerned about being sensitive. We—and here I include psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, social workers and the lot—don’t like to offend people in any way, but of all the sacred cows, culture, gender and sexuality rule supreme.
If there was a ‘helping professionals’ prayer it might go
something like this:
God (and by this we mean whatever form you might choose to represent a higher power)
Grant me the sensitivity to be tolerant of all people.
Let me not cause offence, Lord, to anyone, for any reason.
Help me always to remember that issues of culture, gender and sexuality transcend all other things—even common sense.
Especially common sense.
And if I become so open-minded, Lord, that my brain falleth out, all
I ask is that it not hit anyone on the way down.
Especially the vegetarians.
I hate the suffocating grasp of political correctness. It is a noxious weed choking the soul out of the world. It is the antithesis of everything I believe, and of everything I try to instil in the people I work with. It is bullshit dressed up as divinity and I hate it to the very core of my being. Political correctness is the modern-day Emperor’s new clothes. We all ‘oohh’ and ‘aaah’ but really all any of us see is a butt-ugly naked guy.
I recently heard on the radio that a complaint of discrimination had been made against a retail shop in Britain after they advertised for a salesperson with a ‘cheerful disposition’. The complaint was upheld on the grounds that the advertisement discriminated against non-cheerful people.
If it were possible to include sound effects in books, then you would hear a long exasperated sigh at this point. Surely, if anyone deserves to be discriminated against, it’s the grumpy people? Separate seats on buses for grumpy people? Absolutely. I don’t want to sit next to one of them. Separate neighbourhoods for the bad-tempered? You bet, I don’t want one living next door to me. I don’t want their grumpy kids playing with my children. Higher taxes for grumpy people? Sure, make the bastards pay, I say. Hell, I’d even support laws banning grumpy people from marrying, because if they marry they’ll just breed. Then we’ll have whole new grumpy families and the intergenerational cycle of grumpiness will roll on unchecked.
My point in all this is that I think we’ve become so open-minded that our brains really have fallen out. Surely being offensive can’t be all bad? What’s the alternative—a totally bland, totally inoffensive world with no colour except grey?
Human beings are, I believe, offensive by nature. It’s in our bones. In private we make all manner of offensive noises and smells. Some brave souls even make them in public. We also do lots of really crazy weird stuff when we’re alone. It’s just when we’re together that the rot sets in. We all pretend to be normal. We play the game that this really is a decent and civilised world populated by enlightened, sane, caring people. And just in case we ever falter in our blind repetition of the mantra, the PC-police are there to reinforce the point.
Nowhere does political correctness have as much sway as it does in my game. In one of the agencies I worked in we had mornings where the men and women would ‘caucus’. Now, I don’t know what the women did in their caucus, but us men talked a tremendous amount of shit in ours. There was one bloke who valiantly kept trying to have serious discussions about gender issues, but the rest of us just took the piss.
It seemed utterly ridiculous to me that, in an agency where we were supposed to be the experts in facilitating honest communication between people, we were unable to directly talk to each other without the assistance of these caucuses. Whenever I hear the word ‘caucus’ now I just want to throw up.
Good intentions have got totally out of hand. Laffer curves, that’s what we’re really talking about here. The Laffer curve was named after an economist who proposed that after a certain point increasing taxation will actually decrease revenue. This is because after a certain point companies will start to put more effort into tax avoidance than production. Edward de Bono puts it in slightly clearer terms: just because a little salt is good, it doesn’t mean that more salt will be better. Democracy is good, but is a lot of democracy better? I don’t think so. A lot of democracy can be paralysing because no one can ever get anything done.
If being sensitive to issues of culture and gender is good (and let me be absolutely clear that I believe it is good) does this mean that being hypersensitive is better? I think not. When we become hypersensitive to ‘issues’; the fear of offending someone results in our becoming immobilised and ineffective. We tolerate incompetence and bullying in a raft of public and private ‘helping’ agencies for just these reasons.
In the helping professions there is a curious habit of tolerating the most outrageous and unethical behaviour from our colleagues because the person doing them is from some ‘marginalised’ group or other. The ‘minority’ card is the big get-out-of-jail-free ticket if you work in this business, maybe not for offenders, but it certainly is for those who work on my side of the desk.
The bad guys play the culture card all the time as well. If I had a buck for every time I’ve heard a sex offender say:’You don’t understand me, you’re not Maori/Samoan/Moroccan/whatever,’ I’d be able to buy a pretty tidy little second-hand car. We all belong to multiple cultures, and many of them are completely contradictory. I once did an assessment of a boy, half-Maori, living with a Pakeha father fascinated by the Third Reich. The father’s house was filled with Nazi posters, swastikas, books on Hitler and videotaped documentaries. Sitting there with them both, surrounded by Nazi memorabilia, a large red swastika tacked up on the wall, I asked the father if he saw any contradiction between his open admiration of the Nazis’ exploits and the fact that his son was half-Maori.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked, with a look of genuine puzzlement.
Now, there might be many things about someone from another race that I don’t understand, but then there are a shitload of things I don’t understand about people who are the same race as me.
Why do we prioritise some cultures (for example, race, gender, sexual orientation) as being of more importance than others? Does this mean the Nazi dad had the right to ask for a Nazi psychologist? Surely only another Nazi would be able to understand his unique view of the world? As far as I know, clinical-psychology training programmes are not doing anything to meet the particular cultural needs of Nazis by actively encouraging Nazis into the profession. Does this make them bigoted?
Logically I think you’d have to say it does since this reflects a bias against the Nazi culture. Still, are you going to lose sleep over the fact we discriminate against Nazis? I know I won’t. I’d even be happy to pay more taxes to set up a special department whose express function would be to discriminate against them.
Once at the beginning of an assessment a sexual offender told me that he didn’t want to speak to me because he was a Muslim and therefore only another Muslim could truly understand him. At this point sensitivity and political correctness decreed that I should acquiesce to his demand and try to get him a Muslim psychologist. Instead I told him that if he could show me where in the Koran it said it was OK to have sex with children I would happily oblige; if not, then I wasn’t really interested in whether he was Muslim, Hindu, Christian or worshipped aliens for that matter. We were here to talk about his sexual offending, not his religious practices.
Someone out there is going to read this and say I showed no respect for that man’s religious beliefs, which is not the case at all, but that’s still what they’ll think. That person will have missed the message because they’re operating from the dark side of a Laffer curve. That person will keep on shovelling spoonfuls of salt into their mouth and telling everyone it tastes just fine. I can tell you one more thing too, I’ll guarantee that person’s butt is so well puckered they probably haven’t had a decent fart in a decade.
Too much sensitivity paralyses us. My Muslim sex offender was playing a game. He didn’t want to talk about his sexual offending so he played the culture card. Usually that would result in the other person backing down. He was just unlucky (or lucky if you really think it through) that he got me, because I don’t back down no matter what card you play. If you come to see me because you’ve done something bad, then you w
ill talk about it.
In my experience it doesn’t matter that much what you say to people, what really matters is what’s in your heart. It isn’t the words; it’s what drives them. Even the stupidest people know when they’re being shat on. You can talk as politely as you like, using all the ‘right’ words, but if you don’t have respect for people, they’ll know it. You don’t have to like them, but you have to respect them.
Sometimes the reason people might disagree with you may not be because of your culture, gender or sexual orientation; sometimes it might just be that you’re wrong. It’s so much easier though to say you’re not being treated fairly because the world is racist, sexist or homophobic. The irony is that what began as a genuine attempt to address valid issues of abuse of power has become an abuse of power in itself.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the world isn’t racist, sexist and homophobic. Generally I think it’s well overstocked in all those things. There may be a lot of love out there, but there’s a lot of hate as well. You only have to look at what happened after September 11 to see that. Muslims were being threatened and spat on even in our own sleepy little country. Even the Hindu temple in Auckland was paint-bombed. The latter was particularly revealing with regards to the intelligence of your average bigot. Most of us are pretty aware of the fact that historically Hindus and Muslims are hardly the best of friends.