‘Hidden Worlds’ Chemsex Crime and the Wish Not to Know
This paper was presented to the chemsex crime conference held in London in 2022 by Br Stephen Morris fcc. Operational Lead for Chemsex Crime – HM Prison & Probation Service and Operational Co-Lead London Metropolitan Police (Sagamore) It contains material which some may find distressing.
“Hidden Worlds’, as a title, was not plucked from the air. The two words describe perfectly where chemsex crime takes us. In criminal justice we are of course familiar with a range of the hidden worlds where crime takes place. We know that to manage the risk and dangerousness that hidden worlds pose we need to fully understand and appreciate, why they exist, how they have come into being, the needs they meet and how they function – without this awareness we cannot have a hope of protecting the public or changing the lives of the people under our management and in our care. This is especially so when a ‘hidden world’ is unique.
In relation to chemsex crime I want to address two issues; (a) what it is that makes chemsex behaviour and its hidden world unique (b) the risks this hidden world presents to criminal justice professionals. A lot has been written to address the risks it poses to those involved but we seldom recognise or think of the risks is poses to others who come into contact with this hidden world.
It is crucial that our understanding of chemsex behaviour is informed by a clear recognition of the relevance of diversity to chemsex. Chemsex behaviour is defined by and occurs in the context of experiences of diversity. It is this defining fact that makes chemsex unique and what makes the context of the associated crimes requiring of unique consideration. About chemsex behaviour must be understood through the lens of diversity and specifically diversity as experienced by gay / bi-sexual men, MSM and some within the trans community.
The term chemsex is often misused by the media and can be misunderstood by some academics who, misleadingly use the term to describe heterosexual sexualised drug use. This is a distortion. It lacks respect for the specific community in which chemsex emerged and dismisses the defining factors that make it unique to the precise sexualities involved.
Misuse if the term chemsex implies some inaccurate assumptions by asserting, it is only the drugs that define chemsex or their use in the sexual context, the drugs used in the main have histories that pre-date the emergence of the chemsex scene and there are indications that non-gay male populations use them. No, what defines chemsex are the actual uniqueness’s of gay sex and gay culture. It is how gay sex ‘homosex’, is responded to by wider culture / society. It is these responses often manifest as attitudes that impact powerfully, not just on how gay / bi / msm and trans people see and think of themselves.
For men who identify as gay, bi, msm and trans, societal attitudes impact powerfully on the capacity, ability, enjoyment and pleasure of gay sex. The responses having such powerful impact involve:
- Societies attitudes on homosexuality and particularly those associated with disgust
- Cultural and religious attitudes – particularly those that label gay sex as sinful, perverted, disordered, less than
- The remaining, often unaddressed, trauma and stigma of the AIDS crisis – gay sex = death
- The impact on the contemporary a gay scene of the dynamics of objectification, the marketing of ‘self’ via use of hook-up apps and the associated consequences of community displacement resulting in isolation, loneliness and distortion of connection, intimacy, love and relationships
- The emergence of a gay specific rejection culture – enabling shaming because of age, shape, race, looks, wealth, status – all the hallmarks of internalised homophobia.
- The experience of pre-existing and vulnerabilities resulting from early developmental experience involving – bullying, rejection, homophobia, hate crimes
- The impact and the often life distorting experience of growing up, developing in an invalidating environment.
Collectively and overtime the impact of such experiences make, at a deeply psychic level, disinhibited sexual pleasure and sexual enjoyment almost impossible. They impact negatively on sense of identity and particularly on the processes of relational intimacy and connection These experiences lock people into toxic shame about who they are sexually, what they do sexually and indeed who they are in the world and additionally influence a toxic perception of how the world experiences them.
Such shame is massive in its effect and implications. It is an influence that seldom gets mentioned, but it is rampant. The most significant consequence of shame is that is makes connection and intimacy almost impossible. Hardly surprising then that research finds again and again that the motivating factor behind immersion into the chemsex world is the desire, longing, and search for toxic free connection. Although of course consciously it seldom looks like that.
On the surface it appears that we are not back in the 1950’s. Liberations have been hard fought and won, but not all. Do not be seduced by the rainbow flag flying from almost every building for one week each year. No, Toxic shaming, toxic pathologizing and toxic hate still define the formative experiences for many.
There is another side to the rainbow and its dark indeed. It is evidenced in the hideously tragic rates of suicide, self-harm, depression, anxiety, mental health diagnosis and addictions. I personally know of 5 gay men who have taken their own lives in recent times. But this other side of the rainbow again is seldom talked about.
When such formative experiences and their consequences are not talked about, are not recognised, the real and full picture is denied. In such conditions the attractiveness of an alternative hidden world becomes very attractive indeed. The hidden world of chemsex is difficult to resist. It is for many a very attractive option. Those of you who have spent time listening to the experiences of those engaged with chemsex will know how quickly, immediately in fact chems reverse this experience. One slam, smoke, snort of crystal methamphetamine and the disinhibition, euphoria and pleasure is immense – totally immersive. In a nanosecond such self-medication makes everything internally and externally appear to be alright. This hidden world is experienced as an amazing alternative to the toxicity of the wider world or indeed of a shaming, rejecting gay scene. In the chemsex world all appears well … for a time ….
But like all experiences of denial our most favoured defences tend to take us back to the very thing we wish to avoid. The often-extreme harms and crimes have been evidence in my work for over seven years. My work makes clear exactly what it is that happens when the chemsex bubble bursts. A powerful reminder that denial, psychological avoidance is a dangerous thing.
The self-medication of denial does not stand still, it is dynamic in its function and changes overtime, to preserve and maintain its function. So, we should not be surprised to hear that the chemsex world has changed, has evolved over time. What it was ten years ago is not what it is in 2025 and the lives that it hides, the lives it consumes are not ending well.
Two years ago, I was asked to review an investigation and viewed some evidence that enabled me to recognise with confidence that what was emerging was indicating all the dynamics and consequences of sub-culture. The evidence was a live recording made by a young gay man who regularly hosted chemsex parties at his home. In the days following the recorded party, this young man recognised that he was becoming unwell. He was also aware that on occasions he would become unconscious at his parties due to use of GHB. Given his symptoms he wondered if something had happened to him whilst under the effects of this powerful drug. The recording did indeed show him unconscious. He was laying on his living room floor with his hands tied and was being anally raped by four other men. To see this was of course horrifying but what I found most disturbing was the fact that in the same room were several other men, none of whom were responding appropriately too the crime that was unfolding before them. The men were looking at their mobile phones and commenting to each other. As I processed this I was struck by an apparent level of well-established desensitisation. It was clear evidence that the chemsex sub-culture enables the normalisation and further denial of an immense range of harms. Indeed, the level of apparent callousness and paradoxically vulnerability surpasses anything I have ever come across in over four decades of working within criminal justice.
The behaviour described in the incident of chemsex rape does not stand in isolation. Neither does its normalisation. A whole lexicon has emerged harnessing a permission giving language to a whole range of harms, many criminal. A language aimed at making it ‘ok’ to do and to experience.
In London alone, I was overseeing x600 cases of men convicted of crimes commissioned in the chemsex context. I would be hard pushed to find a handful of those that did not involve extreme harms and extremes of behaviour. All were rightly assessed as high risk or very high risk of harm.
Such a high-risk cohort, needs to sound a warning to all because inherent in identifying and confronting extremes of human behaviour and that which involves abuses, is the wish not to know. Criminal justice professionals are not removed from human responses to the pain and horrors of the human condition. Our willingness and capacity to know is tested again and again, by that which we are called to investigate and manage. We too can be at risk of denial and our own wish to be seduced into not knowing. We too can be at risk from seeking a comfort zone, by avoiding instead of challenging, accepting instead of questioning, by not looking beyond what is obvious and by not having essential courageous conversations – by ‘backing off’.
We know only too well the tragedy that can unfold when criminal justice professionals choose not to know. Those seeking to offend know that even better than we. It is they who have taught me over the years, of the importance of professionals to resist the dangers of being drawn into the dynamics of secrecy and the silence of collusion. Hidden worlds of harm, abuse, the hidden world of chemsex crime depend highly on fear, secrecy, and collusion. If we are not aware of our own resistance and what causes it there is a real risk, we can replicate all of that in a myriad of different ways.
We know how victims in the chemsex context are so often silenced and controlled by immense fear. The high price of fear usually manifests as secrecy and a conspiracy of silence. Professionals are not immune from this. We need to be acutely aware if the dynamics within ourselves that can result in us not speaking out. What use are we to anyone but the perpetrator when that happens.
Professional silence, if not overcome, can make the chemsex context of crime more dangerous than it already is. If we meet any part of it with minimisation, silence, or our own wish not to know then we too become victim of the power of sub-culture and all its harms.
The first two years of speaking about and revealing the truth about chemsex crime, was a lonely experience. In some sections of the LGBT community, I was not popular. But that was just the start. When it became clear that child sexual abuse was significant in the range of crimes being committed in the chemsex context, I became even less popular. This was response is familiar territory for me. Throughout the 80’s and across the decades that followed, I and a very few informed colleagues worked closely with the aftermath of Cleveland. We travelled the country training other professionals how to recognise the signs and symptoms of the sexual abuse of children. Our invitation at the time – ‘think the unthinkable’. We did the same in the early 90’s speaking out about the abuse of adults with learning difficulties within institutions and by the mid 90’s my work caused even more disturbance when I and very few other clinicians at the time spoke out about the realities satanist abuse.
So, when in 2022 I speak out about the sexual abuse of children within the chemsex context, I do not do so naively. I know only too well what is means to go into families, institutions, and specific communities and expose the abuse that is occurring within them. I know what it means for me, for those communities and for the victims within them.
The chemsex context of crime is full of invitations to remain silent, to tread on eggshells to not know. But to do so risks repeating the horrors that have occurred before and indeed recently.
The recent enquiry findings into the failure of Government agencies to appropriately respond to child sexual abuse occurring within a specific identified community in Derbyshire is a chilling example of the consequences when police, social services, probation council officials and others start to tread on eggshells and follow a ‘we must not upset – remain silent’ agenda, the maintaining a comfort zone. The avoidance of action in Derbyshire by those responsible for the protection of children to remain in favour with a specific community all enabled networks of sexual predators to continue to abuse a thousand plus child victims over time.
It is not unusual for me to notice similar dynamics of avoidance with those working to address the chemsex context. Officers can be nervous, frightened even of causing offence, of being accused of being homophobic. Such lack of confidence with the issues of diversity does not serve any community well. In trying to protect them from offence the risk is we increase their vulnerability and at worse we are complicit. The message that professional silence gives to victims in such situations is chilling for is it in fact no different from the message of the predator.
Child sexual abuse is taking place in the chemsex context. I am often asked for the number of those convicted. But I am unable to recall ever being asked about the number of victims of those convicted. Behind such a question is the wish not to know, as somehow a number will give permission for the issue to be minimised, for it to be avoided, denied even, to be met with silence. For me, x1 perpetrator of CSA is x1 too many, but of course it is many more and to give an indication of the number of victims, in a recent case x1 24 year old perpetrator was found to be in possession and sharing over x14000 images of children ranging from babies to post pubescent.
My call to all professionals within criminal justice, within sexual health, within drug services and for all those with a pastoral responsibility for the GBT and MSM community is a call to arms. It is a call for the establishment of a specialist unit, national governance, development of specific risk assessment tools, but mostly from my perspective it must be a call to renewed confidence, a call to awareness and excellence in diversity practice. It most certainly is a call to knowing what we would rather not know and tragically it needs to once more be a call to think the unthinkable. It is a call to meet chemsex vulnerabilities with compassion and it is a call to meet chemsex harms and dangerousness with our ability to protect the public and enable justice.
I conclude with words from Donald Winnicott Paediatrician and child psychotherapist. From the childhood game of ‘hide n seek,’ to responding to cases of child sexual abuse, Donald knew all about hidden worlds their attraction, risks and their dangers. He said, “It is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found”. Those words of Winnicott make our task abundantly clear.
