“Get your fucking arse in here NOW!” or to be more precise “What part of get your fucking arse in here NOW”, don’t you understand?” When you’ve tried everything in the book to prevent someone one from going into prison and they are still not getting it, this is the kind of desperate instruction that you resort to … well … it’s the level of desperation I’ve been known to resort to.
As I bellowed my frustration into the telephone and not for the first-time fellow officers would look up from their desks and mouth “Are you Ok? With the passing of time eventually they would just mouth “Nick!” confident in the knowledge that it would be this particular young man who once again had pushed me to the limit.
Nearly always, about an hour later, Nick would turn up for his appointment, off his face usually on GHB and often looking as battered as the bicycle he would have negotiated the Elephant & Castle roundabout with. Once I’d assessed the potential of him going unconscious, we would then go to a local greasy spoon. For an hour or more, Nick would talk, and I would listen. At the end I would always give him a hug and thank him for coming and for talking to me. I never breached him and Nick never went to prison.
Seven years have passed since listening to Nick and the very early days of developing the criminal justice response to chemsex crime. In those early years the streets, gay bars, sexual health clinics, drug clinics, café’s other gay venues of Soho became my office. With only a handful of men convicted of crimes that had taken place in a chemsex context, it was possible to spend many hours with those men. Taking them to appointments and introducing them to services. Perfect opportunities to listen.
Over two years I did very little else with that small cohort of men but listen. I listened. In doing so, I slowly became aware that I was hearing immense stories of personal tragedy and a depth of heart-breaking trauma I’d seldom heard before. People don’t need much to tell their story. They basically need a witness and I guess that’s what for those men I had become. All the stories I heard have stayed with me, they taught me much. Nick’s story and how he told me however, I will never forget.
On a winter afternoon, I had agreed to meet Nick and go with him to his Dean Street clinic appointment. It had been, as usual, a long wait standing outside Boots on Piccadilly Circus. There had been the usual many calls to my mobile, ‘I’m on a bus’, ‘I don’t know where I am’, ‘I don’t know what direction its going in’ – “what can you see?’ ‘I can see that fucking big clock ‘ – ‘you can see Big Ben’ – ‘yes that’s it ‘ – is it in front of you or behind you?’ – ‘ I don’t know” ‘ How much G have you taken?’ ‘Fucking loads’ ….
I don’t know how I did it, but I would always wait, and Nick would always turn up and usually dance his way towards me. People under the influence of G can look as if their dancing – they’re not! We would get something to eat, and slowly the effect of the G would diminish, Nick would start to talk, become more conscious, stop ‘dancing’ and then we would make our way to the clinic, or the Antidote drop in.
I would wait outside to make sure he stayed and then I would see him home. We did this for weeks and eventually he was able to meet me sober. Each week he would talk and tell me, in graphic detail about the previous weeks chemsex activity, what his latest Grindr hook-ups had involved, what had happened at the last chillout and how he had not slept for 3 days. Reality and paranoid delusion all mixed in.
Then, on one occasion, another wet cold afternoon in Soho, he said he wanted to show me something. He took me away from Dean Street, off Old Compton Street and down to the theatre that never closed in the war. He took me behind the theatre into a dark long ally one of the many that crisscross Soho and which the tourists never see.
There were puddles and the suffocating smell told me they were puddles of piss both human and rat I imagine. Also, alongside much rubbish the discarded condoms stood out. It was all but silent. ‘Look’ he said ‘Look’. He checked to make sure I was looking then he looked at me and said, ‘Steve, this is where it all began’.
By this time, I had learned enough about Nick’s life to know exactly what he was referring to. How old were you, Nick? When you first came here? I asked. ‘I was brought here’ he said, ‘when I was 12’. They brought me every day.
Nick’s story was in fact all too familiar, over time I heard it again and again from different men and in slightly different versions, but all with the same ending. The same consequence. An experience of sex as abusive, exploitative, and as hideous as the setting of the piss-stained alleyways of Soho.
Such a context of sexual experience is powerful in affect, in its secrecy and in its hiddenness. It gives messages about your sense of self, your identity and who you are at your core. It makes you other, less than, unworthy, a failure, an embarrassment, a disgrace. It tells you and teaches you a belief that what you do is shameful and that you are shame.
This internal litany of self-denigration was writ large in Nicks thinking, it dictated how he was himself and how he thought about himself and how he believed others thought about him. When Nick said ‘this is where it all began’ he was revealing to me, explaining to me, letting me know in his way that that this is where his journey into shame and many other things that could not be spoken of began.
Of course, it’s not only sexual exploitation that ends in shame. Any experience that makes you think and feel that you are ‘damaged goods’ has the same consequences and especially when it’s attached to not only what you do but to who you are. I’ve listened now to many hundreds of stories of shame and equally in number of the attempts, creative and destructive, to ameliorate such pain.
It’s not unusual for me to be asked by other criminal justice professionals how do I get people to tell me their stories? It saddens be greatly that there is a need for them to ask. But in a public service culture where success is measured by a tick box way of thinking, more and more ask this question. Even more tragic is that many appear not to understand my answer. What have we become? is a much-needed question.
In responding to the question, my answer is the same as the one given by Sr Elaine Roulette who founded a Jesuit outreach service for the poor. When asked, “How do you work with the poor?” She answered, “You don’t. You share your life with the poor.” It’s as basic as crying together. It’s about “casting your lot” before it ever becomes “changing their lot”. Whatever ‘the lot’ we are witnessing, poverty, shame or both then the task is to meet it with our very self. With the willingness to see the shared humanity in ‘the lot’ we all hold… albeit in different ways.
When ‘the lot’ is shame, then Nick and the other men did not need me to tell them about my shame (and I’ve plenty). What they needed was me to witness it and crucially remained connected to them. Connection enabled me to aligned myself with them and did not affirm their shame by rejecting them or indeed minimising shames presence. The antidotes for poverty are many. The antidote for shame solely one thing. Connection. I would say even more clearly, unconditional connection.
Connection requires very little. An authentic willingness to be present is what enables it. The ‘cop out’ I often hear from professionals is usually “I don’t have time” implying that connection can only be experienced after building a relationship. Not true. Connection is a communication of the human spirit and when allowed for, when given permission, is instant. It depends on our willingness to be human rather than hiding behind the mask or illusion of being ‘professional’, or only doing the things that enable us to tick the ‘success’ box.
“I died of shame” people say. I’ve come to know that people do quite literally die of shame. Failing to connect, withholding connection because a tick box culture does not allow for it, does not value it and, it would seem does not teach it, has deadly, deadly, deadly consequences.
Let’s be clear. In the case of the lasting effect of sexual predators and others who exploit in a myriad of ways, the tick box culture finishes off what they started. Since starting this work, a line from a Rosie Hardman song has constantly come into my mind, ‘It happens all the time – you see young men die.’ I know it to be a tragic truth.
Equally, I know only too well that the roots of shame run deep. Indeed, for more than I would have ever imagined. Connection can come too late. I’ve learned painfully that even when you think that progress has been made shame can still hold the capacity to kill. Accidental, suspicious, and intentional death all feature highly within the cohort of men I work with. Each one of these deaths exposes, evidences, what a failure the success target driven ‘tick box’ culture is. How could it not be anything else. At its core it is deeply inhumane.
I’m not beyond conducting welfare checks on those I worked with sometimes even years and years later. It gives a powerful message of valuing, and no tick box culture regulation will stop me from valuing. Last summer, having not seen or heard anything of Nick, my welfare check revealed that he had been found dead. Nick was 34.
It was a sad realisation indeed to acknowledge that despite everything, Nick had always turned up for me. It was me that, had at the end of the day, arrived too late for him.
Br Stephen Morris fcc.
