Abuse Excuses

The media is heaving with news and opinion on the conviction of Eric Bikubi and Magalie Bamu, the three day torture and murder of Magalie’s brother, Kristy aged 15, and the torture of Kristy’s other siblings.

This case has been simmering away for a year but it was only after sentencing that pictures of the flat in which Kristy was murdered were allowed to be shown. I’m very unsentimental, detest sentimentality in others and fairly hardened to life, but I was aghast at what I saw on the news last night. Suffice it to say that the people whose duty it was to sit through details of this misery and pass verdict have been exempted from jury service for the rest of their lives.

Commentary is starting to focus on the socio-economic situation of the perpetrators – Bikubi and Bamu lived in a council flat in Peckham, an area of deprivation. The words ‘council flat’ in populist media are code for poverty and general shiftiness and also, to paraphrase a number of talk radio responses,  “We’re giving council flats to asylum seekers who bring their strange and dangerous foreign ways over here.”  Not only were they poor, they were African and therefore doubly troglodyte and unable to know the difference between right and wrong. Which misses the billions of poor people, African people and people in social housing who would not dream of being abusive.

The people who tortured Kristy to death were respectable members of their British communities. There’s the clue to what was really going on:

“People who knew 28-year-old Eric Bikubi have spoken of their shock to learn that the promising football coach . . . who showed no sign of the barbaric nature that was to emerge . . . killed a teenager.”

I’ve worked as a domestic violence counsellor for many years and the same issues arise there too. Perpetrators are very often respectable, charming people well liked by their co-workers and neighbours. In fact, the more charming and well liked perpetrators are the more likely it seems that they will kill, sometimes indulging in family anniahilation. Their motivations are power, control and a sense of entitlement.

When you meet with abusers it’s very easy to be drawn in by their charm. Abusers are almost by definition manipulative. It’s never a matter of ‘losing control’ because abusers are absolutely in control of themselves, they don’t attack their friends and neighbours or strangers who accidentally get in their way as strangers will from time to time. They choose to ‘lose control,’ that is, they choose to become abusive.

 They will say that they blacked out and have no memory of what happened; that the violence appeared out of the blue (“I’m not a violent person”); they deny their victims humanity (“A slut, a bitch,” “A Witch.”) Their entire perception of events is centred around themselves: if the victim hadn’t have done something to them they would not have had to defend themselves, or the police were called in order to punish them rather than to protect their victim – they’re classic narcissists. They have an enormous sense of entitlement and will want to talk about their victims’ behaviour and their own feelings.

Alcohol and stress are often used as excuses for violence. Yes, they can lower inhibitions but they’re also used ritualistically, as a precursor to violence. The scene is set, “I had a drink,” or “I’ve been under a lot of stress.” The abuser blames the victim for causing the stress or for not soothing stress.

Psychological instability is often used as an excuse, either a momentary insanity or because the perpetrator had an abusive childhood. In fact, the link between experiencing abuse as a child and perpetuating abuse as an adult is not clear and, again, discounts the vast majority of children who were abused who do not go on to become abusers.

I’ve no doubt that Bikubi and Bamu will use the ‘cultural belief' in witchcraft as an excuse for their behaviour. At least for a while, until they realise that the UK mental health system is inherently racist and will not tolerate any cultural expressions of distress at all. Whatever their eventual diagnosis part of Bikubi and Bamu's crucible of healing will be to acknowledge that they are child killers and child abusers: it has nothing to with witchcraft or kindoki style=, or any other 'cultural' practice.

Missed Sessions

From time to time patients don’t want to come to sessions. At first I used to worry about this and tended to take it personally – what had I done to cause someone not to want to see me? This question remains part of my reflection on missed sessions but I’ve learned that frankly, it’s not all about me!

I don’t subscribe to the theory that there is no such thing as a meaningless occurrence: sometimes a missed meeting is just a missed meeting. And sometimes there is a greater pattern to events. It can be a test, to see if the discussion of returning as much personal authority to a patient as possible has any real meaning; to test that boundary and the boundary of continued relationship. If I am rejected, how will I respond? This has implications too for modelling how rejection might be managed in other relationships.

The therapeutic literature offers different understandings of missed sessions. My own experience suggests that if a client is serious about addressing their distress they will make the effort not to miss sessions. For some clients, therapy is the equivalent for them of buying a new handbag or doing yoga, it’s primarily a statement about who they believe themselves to be and how they want to portray themselves, and when something more interesting than therapy turns up they’ll give up therapy. Some clients are told to go to therapy, very often to gain access to their children or to mime their desire to change, and these clients too are very unlikely to really engage in the relationship. Why should they? They haven’t chosen to, they’ve been ordered to.

When a person finds themselves in an institution where conformity is given high value and behavioural modalities are to the fore they - we, you, I - will seek ways of not conforming at the same time as not being punished for non-conformity. Many of the people I see do this by saying they’re Pagan, which is also a way of demonstrating that the institution cannot fulfil their individual rights. Instead, they manifest me. I’m not part of the medical team and I’m not a mainstream representative. I’m not an employee of the hospital and I don’t have any institutional power. The first question they ask me is if I will do a spell to change their situation. Who can blame them for wanting to know where my boundaries are? I make contractual safety boundaries clear from the beginning “I don’t hurt you, you don’t hurt me,” and very early on in our meetings we talk about the importance of relationship and the uses and abuses of power.

For me, missed sessions can be part of that discourse. One or two missed sessions now and again, well, that’s life. Any apparent pattern can be interesting. A missed session with no reason given is worth talking about, several missed sessions in a row are definitely worth talking about, particularly if this happens around the same time that a client told me something that might result in shame for them, or if they’re also pushing other people away.

Authenticity is central to being Pagan, central to being a properly functioning human being and entirely peripheral to life in an institution. Institutions demand Approved Behaviour rather than authenticity. Just the right amount of crying, but no self-pity; being positive but not manic; sufficient sorrow for past deeds, perhaps even a little panic, but don’t get stuck there. In some US institutions it’s wise to become a very practiced, repenting Christian. For people with anything like psychosis this is terrifically dangerous. Knowing that you will be rewarded if you just consistently appear one way rather than another is very unhealthy. (Which is exactly how we are all expected to behave.) For people who then become dangerous to the people they’ve charmed, this has implications. As a Chaplain I don’t get told and have a positive disinterest in a patients past, but I’d be foolish to ignore the implications of our setting.

There’s an institutional significance to the notion of missed sessions for Chaplains. If a patient doesn’t want to meet with a psychologist or doctor or nutritionist or any other professional it’s too bad, they have to get to the meeting or the meeting comes to them. This is reflected in their notes, a judgement about them and their behaviour is made, formally and informally. If a patient doesn’t want to see the Chaplain, he doesn’t have to, and he doesn’t have to give a reason. This offers religious freedom, protection from religious abuse and is useful in other ways too. But the difference in response between any other professional service and the Chaplaincy service reflects the importance that spirituality – all of them, not just Paganism - is afforded by institutions. That’s not the end of the world. “Professionalism” is the last refuge of many things.

The liminality around the role of chaplains and spirituality offers more space in which to practice, and that’s a double-edged sword. We have to be very clear about our boundaries and behaviours. Once more, I am thrown back on the importance of authenticity: I need to be aware of my own responses. Am I annoyed, interested, bored, upset, sad, glad to be getting off early when a patient doesn’t want to see me? What does that tell me about the relationship, about my role, about my way of being? Once I have that clear-ish, I can bring my authentic self to the relationship. What happens when I say, “I felt dismissed when you wouldn’t meet with me last week. And I still care for you”? Possibilities, sometimes in the form of terrifying chasms, can open up.

Chaplains can offer a model of relationship which is caring, boundaried, deals with power with a clarity and complexity that may never have been encountered before. That’s a heady responsibility and a wonderful opportunity.

pic by Terry Border "Bent Objects"

Power and Reality

First, read this

http://www.prisonexp.org/

This is the classic demonstration of how people – you and I – behave in groups. 15 ‘healthy, intelligent, middle-class males’ who had passed rigorous psychological tests turned into sadists and victims within a matter of hours. That last sentence is worth re-reading.

Further, relatives and friends who came for ‘visiting hours’ absolutely accepted their role and the treatment which their loved ones were experiencing. Yet further, the study staff – highly respectable Ivy League psychologists and professional university researchers – were swallowed up by their own scenario. So was an independent lawyer. And so was a prison chaplain brought in to give his opinion on the realism of the environment. Instead of which he simply recreated his own institutionalized personality.

Each one of the researchers, the lawyer and the chaplain would have considered themselves well versed in ethics, having passed extensive training in them.

Only one person involved in the experiment actually managed to be aware of reality:

Filled with outrage, she said, "It's terrible what you are doing to these boys!" Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality. Once she countered the power of the situation, however, it became clear that the study should be ended.

I would suggest that any discussion of power also requires the discussion of what reality is and is not and that this far from being simple and straightforward. The majority of the time it is so complex that most of us don’t bother thinking about it at all.