On the Margins

‘The Sixth Commandment’ is an exceptionally written drama, matched in its excellence by the skilful portrayal of its main characters, particularly by Ann Reid and Timothy Spall. I’m in awe. As the episodes unfold, we are taken into the world of a real-life crime story. A murder committed by Benjamin Field. The acted persona of Benjamin is accurate to perfection. Eanna Hardwicke manages to, look, sound, and move just like the real Mr Field. Again, I am in awe.

As crime drama goes this is not your highly charged gruesome sensationalist indulgence. It’s. not ‘Line of Duty’. It is calculated, measured, dignified, chilling, understated even. Just like in fact the real-life Benjamin. He most certainly was all those things. But that is where my awe ceases. Because we’re not getting the full story, the full picture, that I understand is intentional. The writers have made very clear statements that they didn’t want the focus on the drama to be on Benjamin. The reason for this; respect for the victims and their families. I get that and it disappoints me.

No victim of murder stands in isolation. Much like there is no such thing as ‘just a baby’, there is always a baby and a mother. There is also never ‘just a victim’ there is always a victim and a murderer. Whilst the human condition can get its head around mother and baby, it struggles to hold both victim and murderer in mind. This separation, this splitting, may enable a kind of comfort, but it is never helpful and is particularly unhelpful for the understanding of murder, what we need to do to prevent it and how best to respond to those who do.

A life’s work with those who have murdered and on occasions the victims’ relatives, has never failed to keep me curious. My asking ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ has never ceased. What must be now hundreds of cases, have all provided, eventually, their own unique answers to these questions and in so doing I’ve been able to make meaningful contributions to the management of risk and the task of public protection. Key learning in this process has been recognition of the fact that focusing on the victims’ experiences tells us very little that we do not already know. It is to the behaviour and into the mind of the creator of victims that we must go. This task of course is much less attractive and is without the reward of making us feel good about ourselves.

For the last six years leading on the criminal justice response to chemsex crime for London, it has meant a lot of murder has come my way. 16 victims created by 12 perpetrators. The 4 victims of Steven Port will come easily to mind. But what about the others? No, most will struggle to name any of the other victims of chemsex context murder and certainly not those who murdered them. When it comes to murder, we are in fact very selective in who and what is remembered, this despite the assertion that it matters terribly. This selective remembering, this selective knowing, this selective recall, and as reflected in the decision of those responsible for ‘The Sixth Commandment’ to only focus on the victim’s story does us no favours.

For the armchair detective, there is an excellent documentary on the investigation into Benjamin. ‘Catching a Killer ‘– Ep 5 ‘Diary from Beyond the Grave’ (Channel 4). It’s an inspiring example of highly professional and compassionate policing. But like ‘The Sixth Commandment’ it only provides part of the picture. There are however some teasing glimpses that hint at the fuller story of Benjamin. His exquisitely polite behaviour in the custody suit. His stretching exercises on being remanded and his request to the custody Sergeant for reading material delivered in the manner of requesting a copy of something by Socrates from his local library. ‘You’re in a Police Station sweetheart’ I think I said to my television screen. ‘You’ll be lucky if they can conjure up a stained aging copy of the Sun’, I continued amusing myself. His request however is met with equal exquisite politeness and that starts to reveal to us something of the bigger picture. It’s a great, example of offence paralleling behaviour, and it worked.

Fact is, if our fascination is to be more than indulgence, is to be more than ‘concern’. If our fascination can be harnessed to play a role in the prevention of crime, in the management of risk and in public protection then Benjamin deserves a drama all of his own.

The real-life drama of Benjamin would have started at least three generations before he was born. That’s the number of generational influences we all hold within our unconscious processes. From his birth there then would be a range of biological, environmental, and psychological factors that combined to enable the development of a problematic personality structure or structures. It is these that played out and communicated themselves not just in his murderous behaviour but in all the ways he went about it and indeed in all the ways of his lived young life.

Since sentencing, Benjamin has not stopped being Benjamin. Within our custodial estate he continues to be exquisitely polite, highly intelligent, charming, helpful to others and he will continue to be all of this and more on his release. Therein lies his dangerousness and the vulnerability of many.

It is the ‘how?’ and ‘why?’, on release, that becomes crucially important for the management of risk and public protection. ‘Risk is Everyone’s Business’ is the title of ongoing training in this important task for officers within HMPPS. My conviction is however that ‘Everyone’ also needs to include the wider public including you. Benjamin committed murder in plain sight, as most people do in fact. It is that fact that needs to inform our awareness and thinking.

Benjamin is on my radar in the context of my current specialism, chemsex context crime, I and others have assessed him as ticking enough indicator boxes to be considered what we refer to a ‘chemsex nominal’. Suffice to say, from thinking about the whole picture of Benjamin the chemsex context could be very appealing to him on release and for all the reasons of power, risk, and vulnerability it encompasses. We need to be prepared and we need to think.

Holding someone in mind who has murdered, thinking about them is the only way anyone can come to an understanding of the ‘why?’ and ‘how?’. It is thinking about them that repetition can be managed, and the influence of causal factors minimised. I’ve often wondered if the Benjamin’s of the world have any comprehension just how much thought is invested in them and of the sort that goes way beyond news headlines, documentaries, and television dramas, no matter how good. Problem is that this thinking tends to happen after the event. Benjamin’s now known behaviour started long before he committed his crime and he’s not so unique. There will be other Benjamin’s building up to the commission of a similar offence right now. Only by us all having a mind for all of this will there be any chance of them being stopped or in the case of the Benjamin we know, being prevented from doing it all again.

As for, ‘Thou shall not kill’, not always as, as well as easy as perhaps we would care to think, but I guess we, as well as Benjamin all have a responsibility.

Br Stephen Morris fcc

Dear Lucy

I’m writing to say how sorry I am that we won’t get to meet. Some years ago, we would have perhaps met in HMP Holloway. The Lifer Unit there was very well resourced with pets and everything! sadly it’s now no more. Demolished. Although no longer in HMP Holloway, I’m still working with people who have killed in a similar way to you by weaponizing drugs, surprisingly they are exclusively men and within the context chemsex, not nursing or hospitals I’m afraid. Anyway, I thought I would write, just to let you know the sort of things we could have talked about.

It’s a shame we won’t get to chat as I also some questions that I think you may have found refreshing. Unlike it seems the world and its mother, I would not need to ask, ‘How could you murder those babies?’ The act of murder is, I’ve come to understand, really very simple. I get it. Your own method in fact, easy as pie. No, my main question would be, why so many?

I’m also wondering if you got as bored as I did with people being so shocked about the fact that a nurse could murder? and that you didn’t look like someone who could murder? Gosh people are so predictable. Yawn.  

O Lucy!  you have made an awful lot of people so very angry indeed. But here’s the thing, they don’t appear to be angry about the fact that you have murdered many, but rather than you don’t look or sound like someone who would. One journalist. Judith Moritz, I think it was, wrote columns about you and clearly could just not get her head around the fact that at no point have you fulfilled whatever image it is that she holds in her mind of what a murderer looks like. Her lengthy piece for BBC News ended in despair. “I just don’t understand” she says. Bless. But seriously though, it’s about time that Judith Moritz, her other journalist friends, and the many despairing others stood in front of a mirror and realise what they see reflected back is what someone who murders looks like.

Lucy, the fact that you were a nurse and chose your nursing context and environment in which to kill comes as no surprise to me. I would go as far as saying, if one wishes to commit murder, it’s a perfect role and hospitals are the perfect setting I’m more shocked in fact about you getting found out, caught. Mind you, it took them quite a few years.

Despite all the interest in crime fiction, thrillers, real life crime genre and the like it does seem that the collective response of disbelief, in relation to yourself, reveals very little imagination.  Think nurses. Think doctors. Think hospitals. These roles and institutions clearly sit in our minds in a very particular way. A way in which we are heavily invested and need to maintain. There are reasons for that investment. It offers the illusion of comfort. We need nurses, doctors, and the places we go to when vulnerable with sickness to be safe, kind, caring, empathic, often to a level that is superhuman. So much so, we end up referring to the personnel as ‘angels and the buildings as sanctuaries of healing.  My guess Lucy is that you knew this fact very well indeed. Which makes me want to ask another question if I may; At what point did you decide to use your context, your ‘angel’ identity to transfer your own imaginations into reality?

Yes, you and I Lucy appear to have a shared knowledge about the idealisation of those involved in health care and how such idealisation is born from the primitive fears and anxieties of our own vulnerability. In vulnerable situations, we need to make nurses ‘Angels’ and doctors ‘Saviours’. Anything less is just too risky. For those on the receiving end of such powerful projections that is a lot to live up to. It’s not just murder that challenges this delusion. Just look at how quickly adulation changes to denigration when nurses and doctors dare to go on strike.

Lucy, I want to go back a bit if your able to; Can you recall for me the very first moment you put on your nurse’s uniform. Tell me what did it feel like? How did other people respond to you? What did their reactions make you feel about yourself? Does power have a role to play here? Narcissism perhaps? Definitely even.

My guess is Lucy, what you are likely to have described in response to my curiosity , would be very similar to what other nurses have told me.  What you and they recognise is the associated unconscious dynamics that until now have been a powerful part of your working life. This is especially so in relation to your very particular setting of the Special Care Baby Unit. Here, even more dynamic influencing factors would have been at play. Infant vulnerability confronts us with our very own. Not surprising then that such a unit and all those that work on it again need to be seen and thought of as deeply caring, dedicated, able to banish pain, suffering and able to achieve survival. Tell me how aware of those beliefs of others were you?  what did that make you feel? And what did you think of those who had those expectations of you? Sorry, a lot of questions I know. 

Lucy, what I’m going to say now is related to what we have just recognised and again, I think this is something that you have known and understood for a very long time. Please correct me if I’m wrong.  But with all those parents and others so deeply invested in seeing only positive things about the unit and its staff, then the other part of the until and its staff does not get recognised or even thought about. I’m talking about the not so benign aspects of the unit and of hospitals in general I suppose. Because also present, perhaps even more so, are the realities of pain, risk, suffering, disappointment, not knowing, loss, sadism even, death even. Gosh that is heavy, and one can start to understand, just a little as to why the delusional belief of ‘angels’ becomes so important.

Look Lucy, to be honest, I thought it was quite unfair that some media and some people who looked at you in court then went on to describe you as cold, unfeeling, disconnected. There was no recognition that for you, your fellow nurses, doctors, and managers there is a massive need to remain distant, not to show feelings, to even cut feelings off. It’s something you would have learned to do very early in your career. It’s how you and clinicians manage to survive the full reality of working in a hospital. Had I been in court or if I’d written your report, I would have pointed out that outside of stressful situations away from the unit and indeed away from the court room you would and clearly had the capacity to feel fully, connect with friends, show emotion and to engage well with others. There was loads of evidence of such fact. But your career required you for long periods of time not to think and not to feel. For you, like many other health care professionals it had become a default way of being.

I think it would be helpful to both of us if you gave some time to thinking about the process I have just described and then write it all down. When did you start to be able to control your feelings by numbing them, but not feeling? Did this start at work or had you achieved the ability to do this before, maybe a long time before? Then describe for me the occasions when you did allow yourself to feel, when you connected, when you expressed ranges of emotion. Then please, if you would, describe for me the range of feelings you experienced when bringing about the deaths of the babies in your care. I know that won’t be easy, so perhaps do that starting with the first one and then work your way right up until the last. In that way we might start to see how the feelings you were experiencing changed over time. Usually, I would very much want to be with someone when they did this task and I’m sorry I’m asking you to do this alone. Maybe I’m being over concerned for you. Revisiting the moments of the babies deaths need not be horrific for you, those moments in particular may have been moments of extreme pleasure, immense powerfulness, omnipotence.

I hope by doing the exercise I suggest above that it will help us to think about you more wholly. I’ll be direct. I know some have labelled you as having a psychopathic personality structure. I’m not convinced. I think there may be other issues at play. You gave me a clue when you made the arresting officer adjust the seat in the police car because of recent knee surgery. Such was your concern, it made me think of your narcissistic needs. We all have them, but to varying degrees and yours, in that moment, seemed quite acute. I’m cheeky to say that without even doing a full assessment – apologies. Oh yes! There was one other thing that made me think the same. Your hair. You’ve changed its colour but not its style. You still wear it as you did in your school photograph. I’d love to ask you about that.

In closing, I just want to indicate where ongoing discussions would go if we were to work together. Childhood. Yes, that old chestnut, or more precisely, parents. Both your own and those of the babies you killed. Yours were present in court for the whole trial, this is highly unusual. Was this out of their love and concern of you? Was it that they hoped to learn something about you? or about themselves? or was there presence a sign of knowing? A knowing about you and themselves and the three of you together. How did you experience their presence? Was it Supportive? Oppressive? Controlling? Accusing? Shaming? Or all these things? and what about their presence throughout your life, how was that? How will it be now? You also formed attachments with the parents of the babies you killed, and it does seem that you went out of the way to do this, to include them in some way. Simply Lucy, was it about the babies or about the parents? If I’ll be bold and again correct me if I’m wrong. I think it was about the parents, yes?

Finally, I just want to recognise that your sentence is the loss of liberty, that, and nothing else is the punishment. The lifer progression process is not and should not be a punishment. I think you will come to know that. Although life will be very different for you, you will have a life and you’ll need to live it as fully as you can. You’ve created enough loss. Enough is enough.  I say that to all the lifers I work with.

Your sentence is also about protecting the public. But truth is, that responsibility sits with the rest of us and I’m convinced it starts with us surrendering our immensely dangerous need for angels.

Br Stephen Morris fcc

Mother’s Day’ for many, is not a happy time and is for more than we would like to think, a deeply traumatising time. Perversely, I would love to turn the front of Estella’s book ( see image below) into a Mother’s Day Card. It would not sell. Such a card would challenge the massive investment which goes into maintaining the saintly Madonna archetype of ‘mother’. Try challenging this and you soon discover just how heavily defended the associated beliefs are. For those who have endured and traumatised by a monstrous mother, society seldom offers a reference point.

There are those on ‘Mother’s Day’ that cannot take resource in denial. There are those each ‘Mother’s Day’ who know from witnessed or actual experience that mothers do sexually and physically abuse, that mothers do torture and murder their children and that mothers can inflict over many years sadistic emotional and psychological abuse. The number of mothers convicted of such crimes is not as insignificant as is often argued, but since when did minimal numbers lessen the lived experience of even just one victim.

Denial for the victims of a mother’s crimes is always a double trauma with its own particular symptoms and destructive impact on life. For mothers who have committed crimes against their children, then the denial that surrounds their existence is nearly always a triple trauma; the unhealed trauma that has informed their own harming behaviour, the trauma of what they have done and the trauma of themselves not having a reference point. During the years I worked in HMP Holloway, I met many mothers caught in this immensely painful trinity.

Remaining wedded to the saintly image of motherhood, even on ‘Mother’s Day’ serves no one well.

Br Stephen Morris fcc

Following a violent criminal attack at Westminster, the media were so lost in their sensationalist reporting, they failed to invite any useful analysis or reflection. Rather than relying on the BBC to stimulate my thinking, I turned to my own experience of crime and my training in forensic psychotherapy. Whatever type of offence I am confronted with my starting point is always the same, ‘What is the meaning of this?’

The real meaning of a crime, all crime, can be identified by the one aspect of it that characterises its manifestation and its consequences. Knowing the real meaning of a crime is absolutely crucial is being able to respond effectively to manage the associated risks and particularly in our response to prevent further crime.

The real meaning of a crime is often not the one we would prefer to acknowledge. Often the real meaning is one that connects us with discomfort or truths that are hard to acknowledge. This applies to both the perpetrator and to victims. To discover the real meaning and purpose of a crime we need to ask what is it that the crime in question is communicating? More importantly, what is its unconscious communication? If we can answer this question, then we have an opportunity to address causal factors and reduce further risk to victims. In some instances, further repetition of the crime can be stopped completely.

The crime of terrorism is a good example. The unconscious meaning of terrorism is not so readily available for assessment. But if we look at the various components of a terrorist act, it does not take long before it is possible to identify the one characteristic of it that gets repeated again and again by all involved. That defining characteristic is the experience of vulnerability. Terrorism, for its perpetrators, supporters and victims is all about vulnerability and not in fact about terror.

The motivating factor for a terrorist act is vulnerability. The motivated terrorist has perceived that something they hold dear or indeed that they themselves are under threat, under attack, that they are vulnerable. It is the perception or the actual realisation of this that informs the defensive response of a, bombing, shooting, stabbing, kidnap or other atrocity. The causal factor is vulnerability, the immediate impact is vulnerability, and the ongoing consequence is vulnerability.

It is discouraging therefore, to recognise that the ‘solution’ being pursued by the state appears to be missing this point altogether. The states in their response has decided to focus on radicalisation. Radicalisation is not the cause of terrorism, it’s a symptom. Much emphasis is being placed on the radicalisation of young people rather than the vulnerability that they wish to escape from.

In our developmental year’s we are acutely aware of our vulnerability. It is during these years we learn to do everything possible to deny, avoid and banish our experiences of vulnerability and in so doing we search for, find and employ anything that will keep it at bay. Drink, drugs, sex, religion all present radical alternatives to vulnerability and enable us to experience comfort, omnipotence or both.

In denying our vulnerability we do ourselves a massive disservice, we stop the growth of resilience. Consequently, we are then forever at the mercy of our defences rather than discovering the strengths of our resilience. It is a sobering truth that all defences give the impression of working for us, but sure enough they always end up repeating the very experience we sought to avoid in the first place.

As long as the response to terrorism continues to focus on radicalisation the real cause will go unaddressed. The young men and women attracted into ‘radical Islam’ are no different to any young person attracted into any cult. The emphasis of the response needs to be on enabling young people to tolerate their vulnerability, to value their vulnerability and to discover a healthy resilience to the vulnerabilities of life.

The current emphasis on radicalism is further misses the point in its lexicon. Even the term ‘radical’ is unhelpful, in my youth anything described as radical appeared attractive indeed, it implied the opposite of vulnerability and therefore was worth investment. Again, so often when the truth within the unconscious is not recognised repetition occurs.

In my work with people who have committed crime contrary to popular belief, I see massive change. but only when they can start to be honest and real about their vulnerability. Does that happen when I talk about their crime? No. Does that happen when I talk about their faults and failing? No. Does that happen when I try to judge them or punish them? No. It happens when I start to talk about love and fear and hopes and needs and compassion. Those are the occasions murderers, rapists, bank robbers and yes, terrorists, break down and cry and allow their vulnerability to be seen and heard. Yes, they make sure they stop before stepping out onto the prison wing, but it’s a start and once that process is started it seldom fails them and certainly does not fail society. Because from that place of embracing vulnerability flows empathy. Initially yes, it is for themselves then it soon becomes for others. Evidence for me that focusing on the cause and not the symptom brings change. Now, that is radical!

Br Stephen Morris fcc