I didn’t realise at the time, but for me, the impact of Aberfan set in motion of what has been a lifelong affinity with trauma. I guess it was the first mass trauma that I was old enough to understand, the first I could identify with as I was the same age as those children killed and my school looked just like the one crushed under the mountain of coal waste. It was also the first time I could understand the injustices that soon came to light and that had caused it. The process of cover-up, denial and collusion all adding to the trauma. I did not know at that time I would spend decades of my working life as a clinician working with injustice and trauma – for me the two are seldom separate.

I have now, in the years that followed Aberfan, worked with many individuals caught up in trauma of different kinds from the glaringly obvious as; Kings Cross, 7/7, Admiral Duncan and also the slow. slow, slow drip by drip trauma such as the war in Ireland, the AIDS crisis and in more recent times the increasing trauma’s linked to chemsex. Although my involvement has been as a clinician, trauma involves me to the very core of my being, as indeed it does you.

Sadly the term ‘trauma’ has become normalised, the word is banded around with little meaning. One of the consequences for this is that an authentic experience of trauma is then minimised, it not recognised for the havoc it causes and it’s debilitating effects on daily life. Trauma is treatable and can be recovered from but one of the most difficult barriers to this is that because of its very nature, everyone else knows the traumatic experience is over but the person having experienced does not know this. A radical new approach is needed in how we recognise trauma and how we respond to it.

Trauma is not only an individual experience it is also a collective experience . Couples, families, groups and whole communities can share in collective trauma , even when they have not been directly involved.

The very nature of trauma is that it breaks through, it disrupts and invades all that we know to be protective and safe. In this process trauma has the capacity to disconnect, to separate and cause those suffering to feel and be regarded as other. From this disconnected place new vulnerabilities evolve as, often desperate attempts, are made to seek relief and reconnect.

Trauma cannot just be overcome and worked with in the consulting room. Healing and recovery from trauma needs to take place in the community, after all this is where it happens, this is where it is lived and this is where it can be addressed.

I knew, without reading any reminder, that today was the anniversary of Aberfan, I will also know, without reminder, the anniversaries of other trauma’s. Will I know so readily the anniversaries of individual traumas that sit in the hearts and lives of my friends? The tragedy is that I won’t and don’t. Until this can be achieved, much more is needed.

I will go so far as stating that in a connected community trauma is not possible . A sense of security, a secure experience of attachment and a knowing that we are not alone provides without doubt resilience. Resilience won’t stop traumatic events but it certainly enables us to be resilient in the face of them.

I am reminded of two people who were at the heart of the 7/7 bombings. Gill Hicks, who died several times and had both legs amputated and Aaron, a Police Officer who walked into a carriage and witnessed the vision of hell that he would never be able to remove form his memory.

Gill describes a childhood and experiences of community that were all we would associate with secure attachment, experiences of belonging and community.

Aaron’s childhood and life had sadly been the opposite. In response to their experiences Gill never developed or experienced symptoms of any trauma, quite the opposite, she worked to achieve and created even more experiences of safe community. Aaron, withdrew and community withdrew from him, in his isolation and loneliness he developed a full blown traumatic response. His pain and suffering hidden for a long time took much recovery.

The experience of the inspirational Gill and Aaron, the experience of those in Aberfan and indeed may be your own experiences, are powerful reminders of the importance of connection and community and the role we all play in that and need to play in that.

Br Stephen Morris fcc

The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse highlighted many times the horrific incidents of abuse within religious institutions.

The Inquiry also made clear how a considerable number of faith leaders collude, cover-up and deny the experience of victims. In particular, the report mentions a series of religious groups including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptists, Methodists, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and non-conformist Christian denominations. Other reports have covered both Anglican and Catholic institutions. All are implicated in their moral failure.

This report however brings something new to our attention; the fact that some seemingly integrated faiths, operate using abuses of control and power more readily associated with extreme sects.

I have long been aware that within State accepted religious organisations, individual leaders can create and use the dynamics of a sect for their own ends. The indicators can be frighteningly obvious, but in religious cultures that often thrive within the guise of ‘chronic niceness’, they seldom get recognised for what they are. Even when suspicions are raised or evidenced all too often the wall of silence and the collusion with chronic niceness results in victims being ignored and their abusers remaining in power.

In the context of religious organisational abuse, not all abuse is sexual; domestic, physical, psychological, emotional, financial and spiritual abuses all feature. Sects exist within mainstream religion of all faiths with the knowledge and often the blessing of their hierarchy.

The report from the Inquiry usefully made clear indicators of high control sect like dynamics that, if present , should be recognised as a serious cause for concern, including:

Victim blaming

Not openly discussing matters of sexuality

Abuse of power by religious leaders

Men dominating leadership

Lack of accountability

Mistrust of non-religious agencies

Misusing the concept of “forgiveness”

Dealing with reported concerns in isolation

Poor understanding and non- application of safeguarding procedures

Exclusivity, favouritism of individuals or cliques

The Inquiry also found that in some faith communities “the relationship between ideas of sexual ‘purity’ and social and familial standing are likely to make abuse markedly harder to report.

The imperative not to speak is bound up with notions of honour, with consequences for an individual’s ability to marry, for their family and for the ‘honour’ of their community. In extreme cases, being seen as dishonourable can lead to violence against that individual or their family.

It is this cycle of abuse I see played out on a regular basis with young gay men forced to deny their sexuality in order to please mum and dad. It never ends well. Secret lives are led, conflicted sexuality manifests in violence and murders take place. These factors are reflected daily in my work with those who also become involved in chemsex related crime. These men have often created many victims but they too are indeed victims.

In all of this, silence is the most defining, dangerous and permission giving factor. Silence, I’ve concluded in this context is indeed a sin and is in need of an Inquiry report all of its own. In my career spanning over forty years, the one consistent message I have been required to give is the need for those who know of abuse, to speak out and to speak out even if uncertain. Inquiry reports speak out, but will remain limited in effect if others closer to home remain silent.

Those who abuse, who collude and cover up are of course never silent …. leaving victims to persist alone.

Br. Stephen Morris FCC

Throw away the key’ is a term applied by some, to most if not all, of the men and women I have worked with in prison, probation and policing. It’s a term informed by hatred of a person rather than an informed understanding of how that person behaved at a particular moment in time. The term holds an implied wish to impart suffering rather than a restorative, redemptive justice.

It’s an appalling indictment on the UK Government that, on an almost daily basis I am reminded how such a revengeful wish can also inform the thinking of politicians and government ministers.

It never takes very long for statements made by desperate prime ministers to make claims about how they will reap revenge on those who do wrong. In a barely disguised wish to shame and humiliate, it’s not that long ago the UK government announced a plan to make people sentenced to community service wear hi viz jackets identifying them as such. Such thinking can only be recognised as abusive and deeply inhumane.

Such public labelling repeats the very experiences of what often informs the early lives of many who offend. What we in criminal justice attempt to achieve is to address the unhealed trauma of the past by facilitating the growth of self-esteem, self-worth, self-respect and, crucially important, the instillation of hope. It is these aspects of the human condition that prevent re-offending. Since when did public humiliation ever serve to redeem and make whole again? Never. It cannot.

Acts of revenge, naming and shaming are dangerous., They are also especially damaging when done to the powerless by those in power. Shaming and humiliation are never useful experiences, they are weapons of abuse. Having commissioned an offence people, starting out on a journey of reparation, require every encouragement to change and to be different. The most powerful motivating factor is for them to grow and discover hope.

Labelling someone as bad at that point, at any point, removes the essential essence required to change, live and remain living. That essential essence being hope.

No one therefore has such a right to ‘throw away any key’ in whatever way they choose to do it or imply it. As a forensic clinician, I learned early on, no matter what psychological torment or anguish I was being asked to address, my main task was the instillation of hope. For without hope little else is possible. Without hope, what are we?

During my year of specialising in the treatment of trauma at the Tavistock Clinic. I was privileged to be tutored by Caroline Garland. It was Caroline who introduced me to the term ‘the instillation of hope’ She described hope as like a mineral, it grows and diminishes according to its environment and treatment. In the lives of the many I have worked with I have now seen this process repeated many times.

There are two environments that have taught me most about the instillation of hope. I know both environments well; the prison and the monastery. Without a doubt they are both most certainly places where the human experiences of hope and expectation manifest in their fullest. On arrival in both settings much has usually occurred in the external world to have diminished hope to the point where there is often little if any left. In the solitude and separation provided by both settings, and contrary to often naïve public understanding, both prison and monastery provide the ideal conditions for hope to grow and be lived again.

Both Prison and monastery, if allowed and resourced, to fulfil their task will make clear the potential of a future, a vision and a way forward.

Hope is not to be found in complex interventions, formation programmes or expensive schemes. It is found and manifest in human connection, in human valuing one to another where the harms of the past are not repeated. Human connection can be as simple as a smile. On a prison landing a smile and a authentic greeting can be immensely powerful. Many prisoners over the years have taken time to thank me just simply for that.

Across the world, in prisons and monasteries, there are awesome examples of manifest hope and transformation arising from environments where a sense of connection and being in the mess of life together has been allowed and nurtured.

In a humane society we can all share in the responsibility of holding hope for others and indeed playing an active part in hopes installation. The main resource we can offer is ourselves. We know that it is the relationship we establish with those who have offended that can provide often longed for experiences of safe connection. Our relationships can offer the experience of a secure attachment. Such relationships founded in hope affords respect and dignity. When founded in authenticity, hope is installed and lives are changed.

To identify someone who has offended by dressing them up in a labelled hi viz jacket comes from a sadistic mindset. It is vile and beyond the sacredness of humanity. In the redemption of the world, we are all called to be so much more than that.

Br Stephen Morris FCC

“I looked at the picture of one of the bombers expecting to see a monster but, I didn’t see a monster. What I saw was a young man” – Gill Hicks. Survivor of 7/7 …

Today many will be remembering the lives lost and rearranged on the morning of 7 July 2005. I have.

The events of that day confronted us with many things. Horrific events like that do, and repeatedly.

The reminders of that time will, for many, occur in the context of anniversary remembrance, news footage which with the passing of years get shorter and shorter. For those who lives were rearranged on that day the concept of an annual anniversary is often meaningless. Each day, and for some, each moment holds a myriad of anniversaries. Traumatic loss in its many forms tends to have that effect.

Collective traumatic events, as indeed 7/7 was, one way or another insert themselves into our memories and remain. Whether the anniversary effect is moment by moment, daily or annually we will be remembering. ‘Who we will be remembering’? however, is an important question, so obvious, so assumed in fact, it seldom gets asked and in the not asking misses the point that memory is highly selective.

Selective memory is often defined by acceptable memory. Some memories we allow and are allowed, whilst other memories are banished, not allowed, not deemed accepted or wanted. The memories of 7/7 are one such example of acceptable and unacceptable memory.

The acceptable memories of the day are literally set in iron in the southeast corner of Hyde Park. Here 52 people have been named, memorialised into cast iron pillars. It’s a powerful setting and a powerful statement. But it is partial, it is incomplete, it does not tell or symbolise the full story and does not give permission for the full story to be remembered. In the later sense it is an edifice to banished knowledge.

The invitation of the memorial to remember extends only to 52 who died and not to the whole figure of 56. The names of Habib, Germaine, Mohammad and Shehzad are missing. The message is clear there are those we are allowed to think about and those we are not, must not. We must not think about the four young men who birthed 7/7 and the way it rearranged life. Equally, we may say defiantly ‘but I don’t want to think about them’ .

The exclusion of the four young men from the symbolic memorial is symbolic in itself. I get the varied reasons for this exclusion, but the meaning causes me difficulty to say the least.

When thinking about something or someone is not allowed, if we ourselves make this choice, it marks the beginning of exclusion, a splitting off, a fragmentation. When applied to a person, to people, it creates ‘other’. Truth is, in the context of Habib, Germaine, Mohammad and Shehzad, it was the creation of ‘other’ that birthed 7/7 into reality.

The process of making ‘other’ is a process of creating ‘less than’. It’s the process of objectification. The reduction of person into object. If we want to understand why and how 7/7 happened in first place, in those six words, there we have it.

Crimes of all sorts are commissioned because in the mind of the perpetrator they have consciously or unconsciously engaged in a process of division and of reduction. The ‘other’ quickly becoming ‘less than’ making anything possible. It’s not a question of ‘who’ is being killed? but ‘what ‘is being killed? In the mind of the one who’s doing the killing they are killing ‘something’, seldom is it a ‘someone’.

This is not a process unique to those who go on to enact such a process of objectification individually. Governments, organisations, communities, rulers etc do it all the time. Approve it all the time. The creation and use of the very term ‘terrorist’ a prime example how the State operates on the dynamics of objectification, findings ways to legitimise the treatment of others as less than and enshrining laws that make it ok for them to objectify but not for others. This process can be referred to, understood and witnessed time and time again in world over the dynamics of oppression.

If the process we follow is one that results in objectification, then, State, Religion, Politics or indeed our own mind then the consequences are likely to be the same. We are all in peril.

So, what to do?

Let’s be clear, the process of all that unfolded on 7/7 began in the mind and it is to the mind where we must go if any different process is to be given a chance. We need to be able to invite our minds to start to comprehend its understanding of the very antidote to the process of objectification, that antidote being the process of wholeness. Easier said than done. More so because our understanding of wholeness is often deeply flawed.

If 7/7 made anything clear it was that we live in a culture of dividedness and fragmentation of the self. The very opposite to wholeness. When we contemplate what it takes to live a peaceful life, we extol wholeheartedness and a version of wholeness that is only constituted of all the perceive to be good. But being wholehearted, being whole, is only sufficient if your heart is your whole self; being whole is only sufficient if your mind is all you are. We are, of course, so much more expansive than our hearts and our minds or whatever fragment we choose to fixate on. But we compartmentalize our experience in this way, divide it into fragments, as if to divide and conquer it. We banish ‘bad’ and delude ourselves that only ‘good’ has a place if we are to be whole. We could not be more wrong.

By its very nature wholeness is the coming together of all that we banish in the name of ‘badness’ with all that we embrace in the name of ‘goodness’. It is the unification and acceptance of this paradox which takes us unto wholeness and prevents process of ‘othering’, splitting, making less than, objectification and all that follows in its wake. The 7/7’s of our world.

On this day of remembering there are of course those who knew Hasib, Germaine, Mohammed and Shehzad. They knew them before they became victims of the process of objectification. They knew them with fuller lives that were not reduced to a piece of media print, and some, if not many would have known them with the human capacity for love as well as hate. They may not have a column of steel erected in their memory but as members of the human condition they were not immune from attachments and all that lasts from such a sacred fact of life.

Banished thinking and banished knowledge may make us feel comfortable with ourselves. Being selective with the lives we choose to remember may make us feel right and just. But unless we start to recognise what it is that gets repeated in this then the cycle of 7/7 we will surely need to repeat. Remembering what less than wholeness looks like, will only serve us well if we can bare to remember what wholeness actually is.

Br Stephen Morris fcc

I don’t like inconsistency, it achieves nothing! Endurance is however a different matter.

To be involved in struggle requires endurance. Staying with a situation political or personal to enable transformation or liberation cannot be dependant on feeling good. Screaming and shouting about one cause one week and another the next is often a characteristic witnessed among ‘political’ groups who, over time, move from one cause to the next. Hardly surprising that those who shout the loudest but don’t stay seldom achieve change. Endurance is often dull and thankless. It’s like training for a marathon. It is the exercise regime of the heart, the measure of the soul.

Without endurance, without the willingness to keep on keeping on, nothing of change would ever happen. What is endured and won in one century must be so often be won again in another. Just as we think the struggle has been won somewhere, somehow it emerges all over again. Endurance involves being eternally vigilant.

In recent times, many commented on historic slavery and were shocked to learn, when I reminded them, about current sex slavery and economic slavery. We must never assume that equality has been accomplished as long as the pursuit of power exists.

Justice does not come without daily effort. Injustice must be addressed but may not be achieved for eons. The struggle to fight to free the Guildford Four took every moment of fourteen long years. The freedom for the Birmingham Six even longer. Their families, Sr Sarah and myself did not jump on the bandwagon years down the road but endured from day one and resolved to stay even if our mantra had to become “If not for us, then because of us”.

Endurance also requires us to stay with what we know to be right or unjust and not to be wavered by what may be popular or what may keep us in favour with one and not another. Endurance requires consistency. When someone dresses up exploitation to look acceptable or respectable, it is still exploitation. We cannot suddenly say ‘oh well that’s alright then’. I am often left aghast at the contradictory stance of some. To not notice is to be deceived. I always notice!

In circumstances both personal and public, it is the awareness of the power of patience and the energy that comes with endurance that makes the difference in both the substance and quality of our lives.

Endurance is the cement of human development. The ability to say no to myself, to the oppression of others, is the one assurance we have that we are teachable and capable of becoming fully human. We can change and we can be saved from ourselves. I admire those that turn up to my consulting room week after week and sometimes year after year. They have the patience to bear hard things and to work through their pains to their goal of becoming fully human. They have not been seduced by the fallacy of a ‘quick fix’. They are willing to save themselves from their own limitations and follies, from lack of maturity and experience. They have the humility to receive the wisdom of life and in return become wiser as they go.

Enduring for ourselves enables us to endure for others. Being consistent in our thinking and in our being, even when it’s not pleasurable, is what brings change yes, for ourselves and for others.

Br. Stephen Morris fcc

To be resilient in the fight for justice is crucial, but not easily achieved. Such is written large in the lined faces of the now many I know who, in one way or another, have been required to overcome immense injustices life that has visited upon them. Those whose resilience has needed to endure across years and decades defined by a struggle for what is right. Whose hope during that time could not afford to give way to despair. Each one of those men and women of dignity and spirit offered much to me as I attempted to journey with them. They still offer much to us, if we dare to witness and participate in any fight against the injustices of life.

Rebecca Solnit writes in her work ‘Hope in the Dark’, “despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and, in a sad way, it’s safer.” If you don’t want to despair, then look to lives who, from their own struggle ,offer inspiration. Look to find out how they are composing meaningful lives in the face of injustice, delayed justice and the hurts that life has brought to their door.

There are many disappointments in the life of a dedicated activist.-So many lost children, killed ideas, thwarted plans. But the energy is not wasted if it is channeled in pursuit of what is good, right and just.

I’ve come to know that in fights against injustice, the system may not be permanently changed, but it can be made a bit kinder or more dignified, even if for a moment.

Suffering may not have ceased, but someone will have truly witnessed another’s suffering, and that mutual recognition, I know for certain, is healing in itself.

All is not equal, but a light has been shone on inequality and made people who perpetuate it take notice.

A child has learned how to ask for help. A former prisoner has eaten a home-cooked meal. A person’s consciousness has been altered by seeing a provocative film. The world has not been “saved,” but it has been made a little more just or beautiful.

The way we understand success and failure is critical, not just because it leads to achievable goals, but because it can ensure a grateful and resilient spirit, the only kind truly capable of investing in a better world for the long haul. What could be more radical in the end than refusing to be defeated or deflated by failure?

To reclaim failure as a mark of a visionary and impossible dream worth having, to root our confidence in the smallest of human interactions, to feel buoyed by one productive day, one humanising conversation, one healed wound. We need to feel that we have contributed to the world that we want to create, that we have talked with people that we disagreed with, in a way that we can be proud of, and that we have made our communities more dignified, beautiful, and peaceful through our own resilient nature.

Br Stephen Morris fcc

My experience of ‘the sacred’ in life has not been found in the cathedrals, monasteries, friaries or parishes of the institutional church but most vividly, tangibly, in places more readily associated with darkness, mess, brokenness, pain and horror. Let me say this more directly; the prison landings, police and court cells in which much of my work takes place are the places where I often witness more compassion, concern and humanity than I ever have in the chronically nice religious institutions that also feature in my life.

On Religious Brothers Day, I and my fellow brothers working in sites of suffering across the world celebrate the paradox of our place in the world and in so doing I recall an incident, a horror, that unfolded on London Bridge some years ago now.

Time and time again life, if we live it fully (for me living life as a religious Brother enables me to do just that) takes us into the uncomfortable territory of paradox. The point in the human condition where opposites come together and demand of us that we think outside of our comfort zones and with new perspectives. No matter how many times we are called into this process it never seems to become any easier. For more than three decades now, my daily work has provided me with this challenge.

I trained in forensic psychotherapist and work as Operational Lead for Project Sagamore for HMPPS and the Metropolitan Police. At the heart of forensic psychotherapy is the belief that all offences are a symbolic communication of something that cannot be said and that no one is ever just their offence. It is these tenets that I embrace when advising courts, parole boards and police investigations on risk, dangerousness and suitability for treatment.

In the context of my work, I have met many hundreds of men and women each presenting me with their own unique version of the paradox and in particular the paradox that sits at the heart of that which we would consider ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘evil’ or ‘mad’. I am forever grateful to the men and women who consume my daily thinking and in so doing constantly challenge me to go beyond myself. Repeatedly, it is they who take me into the heart of the experience of the passion of Christ and at the end of the day the only certainty I come away with is that it is never clear cut. It is always paradox.

Paradox in the criminal justice setting is always hidden from public view. My work takes place in a separated, secret world. That fact alone acts as a constant reminder that I am connected to much that many do not want to think about. It is the stuff of life considered only on partial terms by a polarised media or distorted beyond recognition by the latest Netflix crime drama. It is also a world where there is much history of the crucifixions of life. Where contemporary versions of the passion are repeated and often with little evidence of any resurrection.

I could cite many examples that would enable me to share my work but none quite like that which occurred in the winter of 2019. A major incident on London Bridge propelled not only the paradoxes of criminal justice into the wider public’s thinking but also, and with little recognition of course, the very themes of the passion of Christ; forgiveness, wholeness and redemption.

The incident I refer to unfolded at a conference on rehabilitation. A radicalised young man launched a knife attack on two of those attending and killed them. As the violence continued it spilled out onto the bridge and others from the conference became involved.

In the media coverage that followed, two men were brought to our attention, both are deserving of our continued reflection. One is a man previously convicted of murder who, caught up in a new drama acts to save and preserve life. The other, a man who has committed his young life to helping change and rehabilitate similar offenders and who then loses his life at the hands of one he may well have sought to serve.

In the days that followed, the media found many words to express a response in relation to the later. But their struggle to find the language that could comprehend that someone serving a life sentence for murder could also be equally involved in the preservation and saving of lives was only too apparent.

In this example, it seems that extreme events are never really as extreme as we need them to be. We prefer ‘extreme’ to mystery. We know what to do with ‘extreme’. We make it ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and our small, limited mind can then cope. What our thinking struggles most with is the reality and fact of wholeness.

The fact that someone, that we, are forever a sacred mix of all that we easily label ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and that the resultant manifest wholeness is for the most not extreme at all. My understanding as a clinician of faith tells me that wholeness is not one or the other, it is always both. It is always a paradox.

The events on London Bridge made public the reality of the paradox within the human condition. For once, the very private world that I inhabit was revealed. Something more occurred, something more got played out for all to see and that something seriously is demanding more than our conditioned view of our world and each other. It is demanding we think beyond the initial superficial reaction and not be so afraid of ourselves and the mystery of what wholeness really looks like. Because wholeness is much more than we care to think about.

Wholeness also requires us to think about the third man who featured on the bridge that day. For it is he that brings into sharp focus the reality that none of us are ever a reduced to one dimension. We are all that incredible mystery of immense light, immense dark and many dimensions. At that moment in time, it is the third man who manifests the part of him capable of ultimate destructive behaviour. But, like it or not, that destructive moment is exactly just that, a moment. It is not the full picture and is certainly not the full reality or extent of who he is. The third man was once a babe in arms, just the same as the other two men. He will have also travelled through life being attached to and loved by others. Being seen and known for many things worthy of praise and respect and nothing like the part of him now witnessed by the world. He too, just like the rest of us, was a manifest paradox in much need of a manifest passion.

Br Stephen Morris fcc

(This article was first published in ‘Passio’ Lent 2021)

Virginia’s Roberts Giuffre’s tragic death by suicide does not sit in isolation. It’s what can happen to victims of sexual abuse when justice is not denied and when there is a constant denial of reality by those around you. Professionally, I’ve witnessed many times this toxic impact of repeated denial. It renders people insane and to a point where they just want it to stop. So they stop it.

When abusers of all kinds do not face justice, when they are not held to account and when they fail to take responsibility, the outcome for their victim(s) can be the same. Healing cannot take place when denial remains.

Today, as every day, there will be other men, women and children who have been abused who in the absence of justice will die by suicide. This horrendous fact is one reason why I will never tire of speaking out about abuse and how we all have a responsibility to know about those who abuse, to understand how abusers operate and crucially to speak out about it, as indeed Virginia courageously did.

As a forensic clinician with over forty years specialist experience of treating perpetrators of sexual crime, it was not difficult for me to recognise many indicators of guilt in the now well known interview with one of Virginia’s abusers.I wrote about it at the time and in honour of Virginia I share it again … I called it ‘Think Like Andrew’ …..

Once upon a time there was a Prince called Andrew. Some very horrible things were said about this Prince. In response, the mother of the Prince, the Queen, commanded him to go on national television. The Prince and his mother made a long list of all the things he needed to say to defend his reputation. This was not difficult as his mother had needed to do this before when other men in her family, including the prince’s uncle, had found themselves in similar situations.

The prince however remained worried and started to cry; “Oh Mummy, the lady saying the horrible things about me has also got a photograph of me looking guilty as fuck and sweating like a real sex offender”. The Queen responded immediately by telling her son not to worry and just to tell the people that, as a Prince, he was unlike anyone else in the world as he could not sweat. On hearing this the Prince was so excited he started to say out loud all things he had secretly told himself over many years. For the Prince had always known that what the lady had said about him were in fact true. But now it did not matter at all. The Queen had spoken and just like magic he was above the law.

Indeed, the stuff of fairy tales. That is exactly as it seems when hearing or reading the first statements made by someone guilty of committing a sexual crime. The story and stories they tell themselves are often beyond belief. To make any sense of it, to see through it, to expose the truth that hides behind it, to bring about justice, then the task is to enter the world of the fairy tale and to think, for a time, like the storyteller. It was this process I had in mind when I heard the sweating Prince telling his story and the public debate that followed. It prompted me at the time to invite others to ‘think like Andrew”.

Thankfully, we have become familiar with being able to think as victims or about victims. As crucial as this awareness is it plays only a small role in preventing incidents of sexual abuse and bringing those guilty of sexual crimes to justice.

To prevent, recognise and respond to sexual crimes we need to be able to think like the predator, abuser and paedophile. No wonder we shy away from this uncomfortable task. Despite my clinical training those who I have learned the most from are the men and women who have commissioned sexual crimes. Assessing their risk, listening to their stories and reasons over many years I now know what to expect, their agenda does not change or develop much, although I must remain ever vigilant to still hear the unthinkable and even after decades, I do.

So rather than debating Andrew, why don’t you do you own assessment of his story. Watch it again. Just using his public statement how many of the following thinking traits can you identify. You may also do this same assessment on those you know or associates who appear to collude with others whose behaviour has been supportive of any kind of abuse; domestic violence, emotional, psychological abuse and sexual abuser – often we are too good at making excuses for those we should be holding to account.

This obviously not a full assessment but it illustrates the self-talk, justifications and denials of those who need to be cause for concern. Each is followed by a typical statement I have heard literally thousands of times.

EXCUSES “I couldn’t see what I was doing”

BLAMING “She / He gave me the come on” “my partner

wouldn’t have sex with me”

PITY “I was having a bad time, I needed cheering up”

JUSTIFYING “It’s always happening to me, when people do it to

me, I don’t mind”

REDENFINING “It’s not abuse, its flirting”

LYING “I did not do it”, “I was not there”, “I don’t do things

like that”

UNIQUENESS “It’s a gay thing, it’s part of the scene, we behave

like that to each other”

ASSUMING “She was in a nightclub so therefore she wants it”

MINIMISING “It’s a laugh, a joke, its friendly fun, much worse

could happen”

VAGUENESS “I just brushed by her – I wasn’t thinking”

GRANDIOSITY “The law is mad and out of date, I can do what I

want, I’m not oppressed”

VICTIM BLAMING “She / he made me do it”

VICTIM STATUS “This whole thing is ruining my life”

SPLITTING “I’m a good person and would never harm anyone”

“I haven’t got a bad bone in my body”

PUZZLEMENT “I just don’t understand this consent thing”

HELPLESS “I didn’t know what I was doing, I was

very overwhelmed”

MY WAY “I Joke all the time, it was a joke, it’s how I am”

AVOIDANCE “The alcohol / drugs / chems made me do it”

DISTORTION “I was being honourable, loyal to my friend” “I was helping him / her” “I was educating him / her”

There are of course always new versions, new justifications, new distortions, new lies. “I cannot sweat” was a new one on me ….

Br. Stephen Morris fcc

‘No Faith in the System’ is the title of a book by Sister Sarah Clarke which documents her work with the Irish prisoners of war serving sentences in British goals and their families. Across three decades, it was a work we shared together and wisely only together. For much of the time it was a sensitive and dangerous work, it certainly was not a poplar work. It was a work that, placed us both in that immensely challenging place of paradox – the very point where opposites come together. Here I’m referring to ourselves and to ‘the system’ of which neither of us had faith.

As then, I am often asked by many, how do I manage to work in a system when at the same time clearly, think different to it, behave differently to it and often oppose it? Indeed, there was a time when both church and state attempted to stop our work. Thankfully they did not succeed. Sr. Sarah worked up until her death in February 2002 and I of course have continued I(beyond retirement), albeit in a clinical and not political role. Working in ‘the system’ being part of ‘the system’ and remaining different to it is a strange, often uncomfortable place to be; it is a place of true paradox. How I achieve that from day to day? to be honest I have not thought too much about it, I’ve been too busy being me and I guess therein is the answer.

Paradox exists because of difference and never once have I ever compromised on my difference from ‘the system’. Over time I have in fact made it my selling point. ‘The system’ is very predictable, it is not creative, is rigid, often unthinking, not connected, remote and often without humility. Being true to myself, my true self and all I encompass, is and has always been the opposite of all of that. What allows me to work from this place of difference is a willingness to be responsive and not predictable, to creatively think and act outside of the box, to be flexible, to have a mind which is curious and questioning, to be available for connection and attachment, to be present and not remote, to forever be willing not to know and remain open to the humility of learning. As long as I’m being and doing those things, as long as I am faithful to my difference, I can absolutely have no faith in the system but be very much part of it.

Of course, it is not just me, I am not alone in ‘the system’. Surrounding me is a formidable range of inspiring, committed, creative and deeply human people who are also being faithful to their difference. ‘The system’ may well try to cover them up, silence them and challenge them, but crucially I have learned that they are there. It is they who make the paradox bearable. Last year, I and others hosted a bringing together of criminal justice agencies and sexual health providers to celebrate some of the early developments of creating a compassionate criminal justice response to chemsex related crime. One of my senior officers was asked how was it possible to be compassionate with people who had caused great harms? Her response explained how even when working within ‘the system’ it was still possible for her to work to get the best sentence for that person. The best sentence being a just response for the victim and a rehabilitative process of change for the criminal justice client. Again; wonderful and inspiring evidence of paradox in action.

To remain true to your individual difference in the context of ‘the system’ is not easy, is not comfortable and often does not allow you to be popular. But since when was anything achieved by being popular. Being popular may well stroke the ego, but the end results often fail and usually do so by means of collusion. No, being faithful to difference often means a fight, often voicing and questioning the unthinkable – that is not the path to popularity or fame. Just last week an unthinking, uncreative, non-responsive, disconnected and arrogant meeting process decided to cast an individual away from their local responsibility and indeed if they had their way to cast the person concerned into a process of repeated mistrust, shame and vulnerability. It was not comfortable to stand up to that powerful group, to voice an alternative and to speak for his vulnerability and powerlessness. It was not easy to get my voice heard when it was saying something very different and opposite to what people wanted to hear, this too is paradox in action.

In the 40 or so years of working in the place of paradox one most powerful thing I have learned is not to be silent. In the early days of fighting for the release of the Maguire family, those convicted of the Guildford and Birmingham bombings, Judith Ward, Gussepie Conlon and others, no one believed us. This was long before the likes of MP’s, journalists and noble Dukes got involved. Cardinal Hume himself, told us to ‘go away’ and not to have anything to do with ‘thugs and murderers’. So often we would return to the convent from the rich and powerful, from the courts or from the prison gates and wonder if we should carry on. At such times Sarah would remind me that if we did nothing else at all, we should make sure that no one could ever turn around and say they ‘did not know’ those words of wisdom, all these years later, echo in my ears and my soul several times most days. I may struggle with the place of paradox but I remain committed to the task of never being silent.

By my desk is a print made by Sr Sarah. It is a crucified figure bowed down holding its own crown of thorns. Printed over this powerful image are her words ‘A spirit thus outraged will ever turn and come again demanding justice’ It invites me every day to remain outraged.

Br Stephen Morris fcc

“Cunts Corner”

‘Cunts Corner’ was the name, given by the women in HMP Holloway, to an area of the visiting hall where women would sit if their visitor did not turn up. The term communicates powerfully how it must have felt sitting there. The expectation and significance of a visitor when serving a prison sentence is immense. When that visitor does not turn up and your surrounded by another 100 women whose visitors have tuned up imagine for a few moments how that would feel ……. ‘Cunts Corner’.

But such feelings of difference, being made ‘other’, outcaste, unwanted, alone, being made ‘less than’, rejected, devalued and judged are not confined to the women who once sat alone in HMP Holloway. Political, Governmental, social, religious, family, professions, work places, educational establishments, schools, indeed all institutions can hold well established ‘Cunts Corners’. They can be recognised, discerned, detected by the kind of statements they make, policies they endorse and laws they ignore. Just a few weeks ago and not for the first time, it was the Anglican church that thought it totally acceptable to make statements affirming the oppression and the devaluing of large sections of society. ‘Cunts Corners’ clearly exist in all areas of life.

‘Cunts Corners’ also exist within the LGBT community and especially within the commercial gay scene. If you look ‘right’, sound ‘right’, wear the ‘right’ clothes’, have the ‘right’ body shape, are the ‘right’ colour, are the ‘right’ age, are the ‘right’ HIV status, go to the ‘right’ places and have the ‘right’ size cock then don’t worry you will never see ‘Cunts Corner’. Fail on any one of these and your heading right there!

‘Cunts Corners’ exist every time a ‘less than’ culture is allowed or ‘less than’ statement is made. Such statements can be made and heard far from home and very close to home. Nobel bishops and dukes may make them, but sometimes it is our friends that make them, our partners and those we loved and respected. It does not matter who makes them for the consequences are the same.

Let me be clear, as I think many fail to realise the full impact of such statements. Every time such statements are made new waves of hatred flood towards people of difference. New waves of bigotry are given permission and new waves of hate crime encouraged. Whoever it is that thinks it possible to make ‘less than’ statements, such arrogant and self-righteous statements banish beautiful, loving, creative souls to the hell of a ‘Cunts Corner’. This in 2025 is happening and it is the shameful reality.

Let me continue to be clear. If you have remained silent in the face of such statements and manifest hatred, then you too have played your part in the creation of such places and the denigration of another.

I was five years working in HMP Holloway. Throughout that time, I witnessed immense compassion for those women who were made to feel ‘less than’. I often witnessed a caring and sharing that I seldom see in many other settings and rarely see in the gay scene. As long any individual is made to be ‘less than’, as long as any individual is relegated to a ‘Cunts Corner’ then it is a reminder there is much to do and much not to be silent about. The next time you witness a ‘Cunts Corner’ in operation, call it out! speak it out! Enough is enough!

Speaking out needs only to be a small effort. But small efforts, as Dorothy Day reminds us can have a massive impact “People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do”.

Br. Stephen Morris fcc