Being a victim does not make someone a safe person. Fact is that being a victim, can make someone very dangerous indeed. The wife of the sadistic predator John Smyth is no exception; she is indeed a chilling example.
The excellent documentary, ‘See No Evil’ makes very clear the manifest evil that was John Smyth an Anglican evangelical. His perversion of morality just as disturbing as his barbaric sadism, I actually found this case more disturbing than some of the satanic abuse cases I have worked on. I exaggerate not!
Smyths reign of terror created many young male victims over many years. Lives damaged forever. Smyth escaped justice for two reasons. One, the bastard had a heart attack and died before anything was done and two, those around his colluded with and covered up all his perverted criminal behaviour.
Collusion and cover up can sound slightly removed from the criminal act, making it crucial to remember that those engaging in such behaviours are in fact playing a very active part in the commission of offences. It is they who are enabling, giving permission and must thereby be considered totally complicit. In the case of Smyth, Mrs Smyth, in particular, stands out as an individual who did just that.
There appears not to have been a time when Mrs Smyth was not aware of the sadistic abuse occurring in her garden and in her home. Her role, cleaning up the boy’s blood as it seeped from the wounds inflicted by the beatings, some of which lasted for 12 hours. Mrs Smyth washed the cushions she put on the chairs to make sitting more comfortable for them. She also brought and gave them ointment. She did this, not once or twice but many hundreds of times. In addition, when Mr Smyth took groups of boys, for hours on end, to the garden shed, his torture chamber, she never once ventured there herself. No, what Mrs Smyth did was to never mention any of this to anyone. Mrs Smyth stayed silent. It takes some special kind of mind to know what she knew and not do anything to stop it. It’s a mind not unlike the mind of a sadist.
Towards the end of the documentary the focus shifts to Mrs Smyth. Her role in the crimes become frighteningly clear, including also the horrendous and equally sadistic treatment of her two children. We see them sitting by her struggling to make sense of her and then horrifically falling into the trap of once again becoming victims of their father and indeed victims of their mother. Like so many, they fail to see that as well as their mother being a victim, she is also an enabler of sadistic abuse. Her own victimisation does not absolve at all her responsibility for what she did by not doing.
Victims of a whole variety of abuses hurt others all the time. Not all victims, but many. Such repetition cannot be excused just because it is repetition. It can be understood as a causal factor, but it does not change the fact that someone who is hurt has also hurt another and in so doing is guilty of a crime and needs to face justice.
We in criminal justice do not always get things right, but what we do very well indeed is to work and think in a way that enables us to accept the fact that someone who has experienced danger can also be very dangerous indeed. That someone who has been hurt can also hurt others. That pain so often becomes violence. Just like Mrs Smyth. Is she deserving of punishment? Yes. Is she deserving of treatment and healing? Yes. For a true experience of justice, both are crucial. One or the other? NO! that is not justice.
At some point in the documentary one of the male victims describes how following a beating by Smyth, Smyth, naked, would lay over the boy across the bench on which the boy had been beaten and caress him in his arms and kiss him on the neck. Later, towards the end of the documentary, Mrs Smyth is asked if she would like to say anything to the victims? ‘Yes’, she says, ‘I would like to hold you tight in my arms and kiss you’…… In that instant a number of people came into my mind and further told me all I need to know about Mr and Mrs Smyth; …. Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, Fred and Rose West, Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr, Marc Dutroux and Michelle Martin, to name a few.
Br Stephen Morris FCC
