On the Margins

Stories & spritual reflections from meeting those on the margins of society.

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  • On London Bridge

    Much More Than Horror on London Bridge

    Thoughts on Religious Brothers Day

    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 as a Franciscan Brother 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 work as a forensic psychotherapist within the criminal justice system across the London prisons and probation service. 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 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 Franciscan themes of 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. Br. Stephen Morris is a consecrated member of the Franciscan Companions of the Cross and works for HM Prison & Probation Service in the UK)

  • Dying of Shame



    “Get your fucking arse in here NOW!” or to be more precise “What part of get your fucking arse in here NOW”, don’t you understand?” When you’ve tried everything in the book to prevent someone one from going into prison and they are still not getting it, this is the kind of desperate instruction that you resort to … well … it’s the level of desperation I’ve been known to resort to.

    As I bellowed my frustration into the telephone and not for the first-time fellow officers would look up from their desks and mouth “Are you Ok? With the passing of time eventually they would just mouth “Nick!” confident in the knowledge that it would be this particular young man who once again had pushed me to the limit.

    Nearly always, about an hour later, Nick would turn up for his appointment, off his face usually on GHB and often looking as battered as the bicycle he would have negotiated the Elephant & Castle roundabout with. Once I’d assessed the potential of him going unconscious, we would then go to a local greasy spoon. For an hour or more, Nick would talk, and I would listen. At the end I would always give him a hug and thank him for coming and for talking to me. I never breached him and Nick never went to prison.

    Seven years have passed since listening to Nick and the very early days of developing the criminal justice response to chemsex crime. In those early years the streets, gay bars, sexual health clinics, drug clinics, café’s other gay venues of Soho became my office. With only a handful of men convicted of crimes that had taken place in a chemsex context, it was possible to spend many hours with those men. Taking them to appointments and introducing them to services. Perfect opportunities to listen.

    Over two years I did very little else with that small cohort of men but listen. I listened. In doing so, I slowly became aware that I was hearing immense stories of personal tragedy and a depth of heart-breaking trauma I’d seldom heard before. People don’t need much to tell their story. They basically need a witness and I guess that’s what for those men I had become. All the stories I heard have stayed with me, they taught me much. Nick’s story and how he told me however, I will never forget.

    On a winter afternoon, I had agreed to meet Nick and go with him to his Dean Street clinic appointment. It had been, as usual, a long wait standing outside Boots on Piccadilly Circus. There had been the usual many calls to my mobile, ‘I’m on a bus’, ‘I don’t know where I am’, ‘I don’t know what direction its going in’ – “what can you see?’ ‘I can see that fucking big clock ‘ – ‘you can see Big Ben’ – ‘yes that’s it ‘ – is it in front of you or behind you?’ – ‘ I don’t know” ‘ How much G have you taken?’ ‘Fucking loads’ ….
    I don’t know how I did it, but I would always wait, and Nick would always turn up and usually dance his way towards me. People under the influence of G can look as if their dancing – they’re not! We would get something to eat, and slowly the effect of the G would diminish, Nick would start to talk, become more conscious, stop ‘dancing’ and then we would make our way to the clinic, or the Antidote drop in.

    I would wait outside to make sure he stayed and then I would see him home. We did this for weeks and eventually he was able to meet me sober. Each week he would talk and tell me, in graphic detail about the previous weeks chemsex activity, what his latest Grindr hook-ups had involved, what had happened at the last chillout and how he had not slept for 3 days. Reality and paranoid delusion all mixed in.

    Then, on one occasion, another wet cold afternoon in Soho, he said he wanted to show me something. He took me away from Dean Street, off Old Compton Street and down to the theatre that never closed in the war. He took me behind the theatre into a dark long ally one of the many that crisscross Soho and which the tourists never see.

    There were puddles and the suffocating smell told me they were puddles of piss both human and rat I imagine. Also, alongside much rubbish the discarded condoms stood out. It was all but silent. ‘Look’ he said ‘Look’. He checked to make sure I was looking then he looked at me and said, ‘Steve, this is where it all began’.

    By this time, I had learned enough about Nick’s life to know exactly what he was referring to. How old were you, Nick? When you first came here? I asked. ‘I was brought here’ he said, ‘when I was 12’. They brought me every day.

    Nick’s story was in fact all too familiar, over time I heard it again and again from different men and in slightly different versions, but all with the same ending. The same consequence. An experience of sex as abusive, exploitative, and as hideous as the setting of the piss-stained alleyways of Soho.

    Such a context of sexual experience is powerful in affect, in its secrecy and in its hiddenness. It gives messages about your sense of self, your identity and who you are at your core. It makes you other, less than, unworthy, a failure, an embarrassment, a disgrace. It tells you and teaches you a belief that what you do is shameful and that you are shame.

    This internal litany of self-denigration was writ large in Nicks thinking, it dictated how he was himself and how he thought about himself and how he believed others thought about him. When Nick said ‘this is where it all began’ he was revealing to me, explaining to me, letting me know in his way that that this is where his journey into shame and many other things that could not be spoken of began.

    Of course, it’s not only sexual exploitation that ends in shame. Any experience that makes you think and feel that you are ‘damaged goods’ has the same consequences and especially when it’s attached to not only what you do but to who you are. I’ve listened now to many hundreds of stories of shame and equally in number of the attempts, creative and destructive, to ameliorate such pain.

    It’s not unusual for me to be asked by other criminal justice professionals how do I get people to tell me their stories? It saddens be greatly that there is a need for them to ask. But in a public service culture where success is measured by a tick box way of thinking, more and more ask this question. Even more tragic is that many appear not to understand my answer. What have we become? is a much-needed question.

    In responding to the question, my answer is the same as the one given by Sr Elaine Roulette who founded a Jesuit outreach service for the poor. When asked, “How do you work with the poor?” She answered, “You don’t. You share your life with the poor.” It’s as basic as crying together. It’s about “casting your lot” before it ever becomes “changing their lot”. Whatever ‘the lot’ we are witnessing, poverty, shame or both then the task is to meet it with our very self. With the willingness to see the shared humanity in ‘the lot’ we all hold… albeit in different ways.

    When ‘the lot’ is shame, then Nick and the other men did not need me to tell them about my shame (and I’ve plenty). What they needed was me to witness it and crucially remained connected to them. Connection enabled me to aligned myself with them and did not affirm their shame by rejecting them or indeed minimising shames presence. The antidotes for poverty are many. The antidote for shame solely one thing. Connection. I would say even more clearly, unconditional connection.

    Connection requires very little. An authentic willingness to be present is what enables it. The ‘cop out’ I often hear from professionals is usually “I don’t have time” implying that connection can only be experienced after building a relationship. Not true. Connection is a communication of the human spirit and when allowed for, when given permission, is instant. It depends on our willingness to be human rather than hiding behind the mask or illusion of being ‘professional’, or only doing the things that enable us to tick the ‘success’ box.

    “I died of shame” people say. I’ve come to know that people do quite literally die of shame. Failing to connect, withholding connection because a tick box culture does not allow for it, does not value it and, it would seem does not teach it, has deadly, deadly, deadly consequences.

    Let’s be clear. In the case of the lasting effect of sexual predators and others who exploit in a myriad of ways, the tick box culture finishes off what they started. Since starting this work, a line from a Rosie Hardman song has constantly come into my mind, ‘It happens all the time – you see young men die.’ I know it to be a tragic truth.

    Equally, I know only too well that the roots of shame run deep. Indeed, for more than I would have ever imagined. Connection can come too late. I’ve learned painfully that even when you think that progress has been made shame can still hold the capacity to kill. Accidental, suspicious, and intentional death all feature highly within the cohort of men I work with. Each one of these deaths exposes, evidences, what a failure the success target driven ‘tick box’ culture is. How could it not be anything else. At its core it is deeply inhumane.

    I’m not beyond conducting welfare checks on those I worked with sometimes even years and years later. It gives a powerful message of valuing, and no tick box culture regulation will stop me from valuing. Last summer, having not seen or heard anything of Nick, my welfare check revealed that he had been found dead. Nick was 34.

    It was a sad realisation indeed to acknowledge that despite everything, Nick had always turned up for me. It was me that, had at the end of the day, arrived too late for him.

    Br Stephen Morris fcc.

  • The Killer Within

    At this time of year, the river that runs close to where I live often becomes a raging torrent. I love it and walk by the side it more often than in the summer when it is rather still and boring. A few days ago, I as I walked by its raging side, just in front of me a woman with a young child, no more than three years old, was doing the same. At some point she became distracted, reached into her bag, pulled out her phone, started talking to someone and at the same time started rummaging around in her bag. As I passed them, the child wandered off. The women seemingly oblivious. I wondered if the women would notice that the child had wandered and looked back just in time to see the child step into the violently turbulent river. The child immediately disappeared beneath its raging surface. Gone.

    The child had gone! I stood still and watched the mother as she put her phone away and started to look for the child but strangely without looking into the river. I turned and carried on my walk. I found myself wondering at what stage would the mother realise? Grinning, in fact laughing to myself, I decided not to tell her. I continued walking……

    It was my laughter that eventually woke me from this dream. As often so in the aftermath of a vivid dream, I found myself wondering and thinking as if the event had really occurred. For quite some time the images did not diminish from my mind. What would I have done in the hours, days, weeks, months, years knowing that I had not acted to warn the women? to rescue the child? and to not tell the mother the truth of what I had witnessed? How would have I lived with myself? was the question I was the overriding question I was left with.

    Our prisons are full of people who live, often across decades, asking themselves the very same question. They who have taken a life by murder. They who, in a moment of time, have killed, often with much less sadism than I in my dream. All face the challenge of needing to continue to live life and live with themselves. For them it’s not a dream.

    With exception to the few psychopathic personalities, most men and women who have murdered, as well as the need to talk about having to live with themselves, they are also eager to let me know that prior to their deadly act, they have held a view of themselves as someone not capable of murder. Indeed, so shocked and horrified by their own actions are they that many develop an authentic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

    The trauma of the murderer is seldom recognised. The traumatised killer is yet another paradox of the human condition. It is a paradox that confronts all of us who work with those deemed mad, bad, or sad. In real life, as well in the arts, these extremes of paradox do not sit in isolation. Fred West was described by many of his neighbours as a friendly soul willing to do anything for you. Beverley Allitt a dedicated caring nurse. Mary Bell blossomed into a successful loving mother. Paul Spector a popular bereavement counsellor. Steven Gallant, convicted of murder himself, wrestled another murderer to the ground on London Bridge, saving other lives. Each one reminding us again and again that no one is just their offence.

    Last week I visited the Southbank Centre to view the Koestler Arts Exhibition ‘Freedom’. As ever it declares though outstanding creativity its annual message of the same truth; no one is ever just their offence. Lining the walls of the exhibition for the last fifteen years have been literally hundreds of stunning works of art all created by those in our prisons. The paradoxes if you will of the human condition. Their artwork alone also revealing exactly that.

    But those isolated in prison do not in fact exist in isolation. As evidenced in my dream, we all exist with them. We may not be in prison, but we are in, part of, the same human condition. My dream is evidence of that. My unconscious ability to be callous, to turn away and to sadistically enjoy doing so, was not in consciousness acted out but those human abilities were as much part of my mind as those who at a specific moment in time have done just that.

    My dream caused me concern, caused me unrest, removed me from my comfort zone about myself. It was a powerful reminder that within me lies the capacity to be all I would rather not be. Life, professional and otherwise, has taught me not to believe so readily those who righteously claim that they could never kill. I’m not seduced by this denial of the primitive capacity we all innately hold. No, just like; Fred, Bev, Mary, Paul, Steven and the Stephen who dreams, we all, given the right conditions, can suddenly find we no longer have resource to our righteous mind or indeed any mind at all.

    For me as a clinician, I view the criminal act as a consequence of a state of mind, full of conscious and unconscious material, all holding meaning. The ‘thought crimes’ of Orwell, the New Testament ‘adultery of the heart’, the ‘secret thoughts of the heart’ referred to by Sir Edward Coke, may not have a place in law, but in the human condition they are all incredibly present without exception.

    The unexamined life is not only not worth living, but it is also highly dangerous. The invitation of the exhibition, like the invitation of my dream is for us all to have a mind. To hold in consciousness our own callous and murderous abilities. For if we, if I can do this, the killer within won’t need to kill!

    Br Stephen Morris fcc.

  • Another Week of Brokenness

    I’m a witness to brokenness most days of the week, we all are if we are willing to see. But seeing can be hard and occasionally deeply painful. It was exactly that earlier this week.

    A 22-year told man; Ricky (not his real name) attacked staff at his probation office. He, a few days earlier, whilst sectioned had attacked a nurse. The reason for his sectioning a few days before, he had attacked his mother and not for the first time. In his young life none of this was for the first time.

    Alongside his external attacking are also many repeated incidents of Ricky attacking himself. Consuming massive amounts of alcohol to the point of blackout. Making himself available to predatory men on Grindr who render him unconscious with GHB. Incidents of him being sexually assault, raped and the filming of him without consent. The repeated cycle of not eating, not sleeping, threats and attempts to kill himself.

    All the above was playing out over just three days this week. Alongside all of this was the exceptional compassion and skilled risk management of his probation officer and his specialist police officer. Over three days from morning and often throughout the night hours they worked ceaselessly to restore safety to protect Ricky and to protect the public. Despite their extraordinary efforts this week, it did not work.

    In their desperation they repeatedly approached community mental health services, who turned away. They repeatedly approached A&E departments, who turned away. They repeatedly approached the court, who turned away. They repeatedly approached the psychiatric hospital, who turned away. They repeatedly approached housing services, who turned away. No one would section Ricky. No one would admit him to hospital. No one would take him into custody and when a professionals meeting was convened with urgent instructions for all to attend, mental health providers did not turn up.

    At one point Ricky too was approaching A&E departments across London, begging his officers to get him into prison or to get him Sectioned. After three days a A&E Consultant admitted him but only for a short time. It was long enough however for a crisis housing worker to go to meet him and take him to emergency accommodation.

    The last contact I had at this point was to read the consultants account which described Ricky as wandering into A&E reception almost on the point of collapse, bleeding and having soiled himself.

    In all of this, and believe me it is not unfamiliar territory, what stayed with me was the fact that this immensely vulnerable and dangerous 22-year-old had shit himself. All the turning away, all the failure to contain, all the lack of willingness to recognise what was being communicated, all the failure to respond had resulted in such a stripping away of dignity, to the point where even Ricky’s shit could no longer be contained. The level of brokenness broke my heart and like Ricky’s own heart, I guess my heart is still breaking.

    Parallel to all of this, other parts of my life were continuing. At some point I received a message. The message was simple “I’ve just completed a home visit and noticed the child has a wound on his head”. Later my social work friend and I discussed this experience in depth, we needed to. Because like Ricky’s shit stayed in my mind, the wound of this child stayed in the mind of my social work friend. This is what witnessing brokenness does.

    I won’t bore you with all the professional ongoing responses that continue to unfold for both Ricky and the child. But in all of this, where are we to find hope? How can we hold onto hope? What is to become of hope?

    In the last meeting about Ricky, I raised that very question on behalf of him really. “What can we do” I asked, “to ensure that Ricky has something to hope for”. It seemed an impossible question, but we managed to answer it. The worker from the LGBT organisation, we had previously been trying to link Ricky with, agreed to give him a phone call. A call that would let Ricky know he was being thought about that he mattered, that he had not been forgotten. In this very complex broken place, it was the one simple glimmer of light, the one hope.

    The phone call, it was agreed, would not be a piece of work, it would not be an assessment. It would simply be a message of connection. Amidst all the inhumanity of rejection, all the repeated turning away. This simple phone call would offer a glimmer of light, I absolutely believe beyond any doubt that this act alone, provided a mirror for Ricky of his own essential goodness. It said to him that he is not defined by the worst of all he has done, or indeed by the worst that has been done to him.

    Ricky, like every person I’ve ever spoken with within criminal justice settings has experienced a tragedy at some pivotal moment in their life. Every one of them was denied love and affection from a mum, a dad, their grandparents, an uncle, or someone else who they should have been able to depend on. I’ve come to learn in my work, in the many Ricky experiences I have witnessed, that every human tragedy stems from a person being denied real love at some fundamental point in their life.

    Every person deserves to hear the words, “You matter; You are loved,” and to experience the this not only in words but in actions. We must not only witness the brokenness around us, but we must also act. Our actions must be about affirming the dignity of those who feel lost, forgotten, thrown out, and abandoned. Yes, on occasions this will also mean to clean up their shit and attend to their wounds. 

    Ricky’s brokenness started very early in his life. I know this because in his file there is a note written all those years ago by his social worker, “I’ve just completed a home visit and noticed the child has a wound on his head”.

    Br Stephen Morris fcc

  • When Life Puts us on the Floor

    Life sometimes puts us on the floor. Loss, grief and all that scares us does this to us and sometimes often. Such experiences run contrary to much of contemporary conditioning which implicitly and explicitly buys us into the delusion that life is only worth the living if it is lived on the heights of happiness and as far from the floor as humanly possible. Anything different must be banished. Not allowed. Christmas time it seems is when this delusion is at its most pronounced, when the need to comply is writ large in expectation of all kinds.

    The version of Christmas responsible for such delusion is no respecter of the realities of life. The being rendered to the floor experiences of life do not of course comply with any calendar and they certainly don’t wait until we’re ready. As we discover, usually over time, there are many life events that we can never be prepared for. Life is not always of our choosing.

    But the one-dimensional that would have us wedded to life as a constant mountain top experience need not be so total and can, if we allow, become more expansive, more whole. The indicators of this possibility are hard wired into this season, if only we would see. For Christmas does most certainly not take place solely on the mountain top. Christmas also occurs when darkness is almost total. When the deadliness of winter is at its midpoint. When the earth is at its most silent and its nighttime longer than the day. It is these aspects of Christmas and indeed of life that have had their value conditioned out of us. But valuable they are, especially so in preparing us for life’s encounters with the floor.

    When life puts us on the floor, our task is not in fact to immediately get up or expect to be able to when to do so is asking the impossible. No, our task is to allow whatever that experience is. To allow it to pass through us and for us to pass through it. Anything other than this, no matter how seemingly appealing, will hold an often-tragic high cost.

    The lowliness of Christmas is a reminder that life is not all mountain top experiences. Throughout our lives, as the seasons of darkness and winter come and go, they invite us to surrender our delusions and go to the places that so often scare us. They invite us to consider what we would rather not know but what so often must be.

    Thomas Merton writes beautifully about this when he says, ‘how great is our need for places of silence and solitude’. He says, ‘let there always be quiet, dark places in which people can take refuge.  Places where they can kneel in silence’.  Merton also spoke of the precious silence of nighttime. He said, ‘I live in the woods out of necessity.  I get out of bed in the middle of the night because it is imperative that I hear the silence of the night alone, and, with my face on the floor, say psalms, alone, in the silence of the night’.

    When, as a very young man, I first took the vows of Franciscan religious life, like all those Priests, Sisters, Brothers who had gone before, I prostrated myself with my whole body on a cold unwelcoming floor before the Blessed Sacrament.  What that meant to me then is very different to what it means to me now. Like Merton, I still rise in the night and press my face to floor. Not for any piety’s sake but because life, not vows, have taught me this is where I know, this is where I encounter all that is more than me. It is the place, the moment where I let go of delusion again and again and where I confront the realities of myself and our world I inhabit.  It does not free me of the pains of life but rather, relates me to them. Surrendering to the floor does not provide me answers to the cruel mysteries of life, but rather joins me with them. Surrendering to the floor even when like the psalmist, I’m not done with ranting and raving, then and only then do I experience something different, something that the world cannot give or take away …. Some would call it peace.

    Br Stephen Morris fcc

  • Children Who Kill …. who are they killing?

    I have again been reading about ‘Ghosts from the Nursery’. ‘Ghosts from the nursery’ is a powerful concept I was taught early in my forensic training. The theory has stayed with me, remained in my thinking and its reality has been witnessed by me in most people I have worked with almost every day since.

    ‘Ghosts from the nursery’ refers to the fact that we all carry within us the influence of at least three previous family generations. In the consulting room, prison cell, investigation room, secure ward and indeed in our own place in the world the crucial question to all is ‘What do you know about your Great Grandparents? Grandparent? Parents?’

    In forensic settings for those who have murdered the question has a particular poignancy. Often made more explicit when the follow-on question is asked; ‘Who were you killing?’ In the unconscious mind of the person who has killed, their victim is seldom the body in front of them.

    My first clinical supervisor prepared me well to ask these questions and to explore beyond the first answer. When discussing the latest assessment with someone who had murdered, she also always instructed me to remember ‘Ghosts from the nursery’. She would say, “Remember Stephen they were once a baby in a mother’s arms”. A strange thing to do when a 45-year-old is sitting opposite you. But as she predicted, over time the answers to my questions always came and the impact of knowing always worth waiting for. Such conversations have revealed to me, time and time again along with everyone else, the murderer also asks, why?

    The mind of the murderer, unless shaped by psychopathy and only very few of those who murder can be considered psychopathic, is no different to yours or mine. When confronted with parts of themselves they would rather not know, they too want to know why. There is something deeply human about that. To answer such a question they, we, I need to feel safe, be safe. The walls of the prison, secure hospital, secure unit may remain, but they keep those outside safe and offer to those inside a safety often never experienced before.  Ironically enabling immense freedom and enough so that over time many questions are asked and answered.

    ‘Why have I killed?’ is an even more poignant question when asked by the child who has murdered. The answer often however more readily available to their adult counterparts.

    All the children in the photographs attached to this post except for one, who so far in life has managed not to murder anyone, went on to murder more than one person and some murdered many. As the photographs indicate they did not come into this world as monsters. They have arrived in the same way as you and I. Later, when they arrive in my life, it is most certainly because they have behaved monstrously. Even then, they seldom reflect what has been enacted and captured in the graphic detail of the court bundle and subsequent documentation.

    Despite what many wish for and think, the reality remains, I have never met a monster, but I have met many ghosts. Fraiberg et al writing in 1975 explain such hauntings better than I;

    “In every nursery there are ghosts. They are the visitors from the unremembered past of the parents the uninvited guests at the christening. Under all favourable circumstances the unfriendly and unbidden spirits are banished from the nursery and return to their subterranean dwelling place. The baby makes his own imperative claim upon parental love and, in strict analogy with the fairy tales, the bonds of love protect the child and his parents against the intruders. the malevolent ghosts. This is not to say that ghosts cannot invent mischief from their burial places. Even among families where the love bonds arc stable and strong. the intruders from the parental past may break through the magic circle in an unguarded moment. and a parent and his child may find themselves re-enacting a moment or a scene from another time with another set of characters”.

    … and yes, for some, that unguarded moment of enactment is murder. When the associated ghosts manifest before me, they are often desperate to be exorcised. I guess that is also part of my job.

    No wonder we are so readily entertained by the ghost stories of others, watching our own ghosts at play may be far too scary.

    All this of course begs the question – Who actually is it that should be in prison?

    Please let me know if you can identify the one child pictured who has not murdered anyone… yet!

    Br Stephen Morris fcc

  • When even justice is corrupted

    Every abused kid knows what it means to be chosen. Every bullied child, every victim of crime, every silent sufferer has known the pinch of feeling noticed for all the wrong reasons. All the raped, the teased, the beaten, the harassed, they’ve all been chosen. And it sucks.

    There is a type of suffering that involves neglect, exclusion or marginalization, but it’s a particular kind of pain to suffer the special treatment of targeted hatred. Somehow you feel implicated, responsible, and at fault. Why me? How did they find me? There must be something about me. They chose me for a reason. Somehow I made this happen.

    Being chosen, being ‘picked-on’ or bullied, literally ruins you; it buries you in shame. When you’ve been chosen for abuse you don’t even want to bring the injustice to light; you just want to hide, to stay away from the attention. Even if the responsible powers do the right thing, catch the wrongdoers and seek to punish them, you are made uncomfortable by the outing of your testimony. In the confused moment of retribution, you feel somehow strangely responsible for their pain. Somehow even justice is corrupted.

    This is the ruin of right relationship. This is the perversion of abuse.

    I don’t mean the demonization of bullies (yelling “damn those perverts!”), but the perversion of responsibility and the corruption of kinship. We belong to each other, we are supposed to care for each other, and we abuse this responsibility when we misunderstand kin-ship for owner-ship. If we’re supposed to be a family then we shouldn’t choose each other like we choose an object, we should love each other like we love a gift.

    What then could it mean to say that God has chosen us? How are we to understand the preferential option for the poor and the oppressed? We claim, in faith, to be the “chosen people”; what does this mean for the abused, those chosen unto ruin of whom I speak?

    It might help, in the first place, to remember that God doesn’t choose us like a victimizer would, nor for the same reasons. We should never suggest that God’s plan is a “reason” for our suffering. And this because God doesn’t choose us in hate; we are not chosen for abuse. Instead it may be that God has chosen us in love because they did; chosen us for redemption.

    God’s intention is never humiliation. God’s plan is for salvation.

    I have been chosen in life by those who sought to do me harm. And I have chosen to hurt or selfishly ignore the well being of others, even those I’ve claimed to love. What a strange insight it was then, when I realized that in those sinful moments of choice I was also being chosen by God. I was being offered a hand up and out of that shameful place of ruin and welcomed back into the kinship of God.

    Redemption is real.

    I’ve witnessed it and I testify to it. When we choose to hurt or humiliate each other God chooses us, makes a claim on us. God reminds us to whom we belong, reminds us that we are family, chosen as sons and daughters. This is how, in the ruin of shame, God builds his kin-dom. God’s plan is for redemption. God’s choice is for love. We are no longer merely “chosen people” but we are the chosen people of God.

    We are chosen like Jacob, who wrestled through the darkness of night until the dawn of reconciliation with his brother Esau.

    We are chosen like Isaac, whose life was threatened by one who loved him, and yet was redeemed by a God who made Abraham’s sacrifice possible without compromising obedience or love.

    We are chosen like Mary, who in the humiliation of a scandalous pregnancy was full of grace, and given a special share in God’s universal plan of redemption.

    God sees to it that shame and humiliation will not drown in blood nor bury in ruin his precious and beloved sons and daughters. God’s choice is for redemption. As the chosen people of God we are returned from the ruin of shame and humiliation. In the act of redemption God embraces fully the humanity we reject when we choose to hate and humiliate others. And we who have been chosen in hate are redeemed, reclaimed, and chosen again in love.

    Fr Brendan Busse SJ