Some thoughts on sex offenders, addicts, spike island and language.

Last week I ended up going on RTE’s PrimeTime to talk about open drug use in the city centre. Think you can still watch it back on RTE Player. 

Since then, I have been watching a lot of Irish TV Programmes, and following the discussion on Twitter, Facebook, Broadsheet & TheJournal.ie 

I’ve felt a desire to connect with what the consciousness is like at the moment. To know what people outside of my group of friends think about the big issues of our time… 

I’ve just been prompted to write this response by this article on The Journal.ie about the RTE show #InsideProbation in which a sex offender client is featured.

I’m about to say something unpopular. Something that might enrage you. But I’d ask you to consider it, despite your rage. I implore you to read to the end. 

I believe in rehabilitation for sex offenders. Of all descriptions. Whatever they’ve done. However horrific the crime.

When I hear about sexual assaults and crimes I get very angry. I get upset and shocked. I don’t like reading about it in the papers. The #LindasRape storyline on Eastenders is also hugely challenging… I feel sick to my stomach watching it. I think sex offences are wrong. I think there is no excuse for it. I think they are dirty disgusting terrifying crimes. I wouldn’t wish an experience like that on my worst enemy. 

 I think rehabilitation is the answer. I think we need to explore that as a society. I think we have a responsibility to these people, and to their victims, and even more to their future victims. 

It’s difficult I imagine, for those, like the probation officer featured, to do their jobs when the reality is that most Irish citizens don’t support rehabiliation, and therefore most politicians would never champion that cause and therefore I can’t imagine they do well on Budget Day. Imagine the headlines: “Govt spend millions on state of the art sex offenders rehab complex… Guinness now up 5euro" 

Most sexual abusers, are also victims of sexual abuse. To abuse is a coping mechanism for dealing with the psychological trauma of being abused. That doesn’t justify it, but it points out that sexual violence is the result of a societal breakdown, a systemic failure. Every time we continue to preside over a society that allows this to happen - we are continuing this cycle for hundreds of years. I think that’s accepted actually as a truth we can all recognise. What makes people act this way? Oh well he wasn’t right - she was gone in the head - I always knew there was something funny about him - his father was the same, I think his father was the same with them… and so on.  How do we stop it? Is that the innocent question? Or the one we should all be asking ourselves. 

So, what I am saying is;

I support psychological research into this area

I support resources and jobs for people who work with sex offenders. 

I think more needs to be done to provide for Public Safety, I think the way that should be done is the rehab should be better. 

I think the Probation Service probably need more resources to monitor those at risk of re-offending, so they can catch it before it happens. 

This is a sad situation. These people are ’sick in the head’. And if they don’t have the proper resources, to heal and change, they will reoffend. And if they reoffend, us and the people we know will be the victims of sexual crime. And that cycle will continue…. and that is a crisis situation… because while sexual abuse itself is a consequence of sexual abuse it also has myriad other consequences… 

I think addiction is an illness, usually caused by the impact of a systemic failure the addict had no control over.

On last night’s #InsideProbation programme there was also a man called Peter. He talks about chronic alcoholism and drug addiction. I watched his story, one very familiar to me, play out. There was a moment I was waiting for, one very predictable piece of the puzzle was about to be revealed… Peter revealed that he was abused by the Christian Brothers. That the redress commission had paid him 135,000euros, but that he had spent it all on drink and drugs. 

I’ve been working with addicts since 2010. It’s always struck me how many of the people I meet disclose that they have been sexually abused. I’ve written about that before here and here. The connection between the amount of sexual abuse that has taken place in our country and the amount of addiction we suffer is very clear to me. Drink and Drugs are painkillers. Coping mechanisms. It makes sense that people would turn to those painkillers when there is very little else there to help them deal with the pain.

This is a country where you suffer in silence. Where if you say something has happened to you you are told that you are making it up. I would love to change the tense of that sentence to write ‘was’ instead of 'is’ but even after the Ryan Report and the Redress Board I don’t think we can yet.

I think we need to have First Holy Counselling replace First Holy Confession.

We don’t think about addiction like this though. I learned about that after I was on prime time last week. We live in a society that fundamentally judges people as good and bad and doesn’t think about the consequences. Can you imagine what the courts coverage would be like if we tried to interrogate why each defendant had offended? What were the causes in his life that led to where he is today? It would make for much more interesting, much less terrifying and much more useful reading. 

The Spike Island Mentality

For years we had a prison on an Island off the coast of Cork. It was called Spike Island and it housed young offenders.

The addicts only have themselves to blame. No one forced them to take drugs. If they don’t want to be treated badly, they should have thought of that before they took drugs, I have to look at them and they intimidate me and I am scared, so I want them out of my sight. I want them to be castrated. I don’t want them to be allowed to have social welfare. I don’t want clinics on my doorstep. They are going around like zombies and I am scared of them. I am worried for my kids. What about all the people who have hard lives who don’t take drugs? What about my rights? 

The above is only a fraction of the comments I’ve seen. 

We don’t want to deal with the problem. We want it to be removed from our eyeline. We are very slow to take responsibility, we don’t want to have to do anything about it.* We just want it to go away and we don’t want to analyse it. Yet, we really do want to talk about it. We’ll consume hours of media about it, as long as we don’t have to analyse it.  

Or maybe I have just been reading too many comments on the internet. 

I think there should be as many detox beds as there is drug using population, so there is never a waiting list if someone wants to get clean, because the will might not come again. (there are currently 30, the wait is over 5 months, and in the netherlands they don’t have a waiting list at all. It is a choice that we have it like this) 

I think we should make drug addiction a health issue and not a criminal one, like in Portugal. 

I think we should have medically supervised drug consumption rooms, they stop needles being left in the street for kids to pick up, and they direct people towards treatment by being in contact with services and coming to terms with their 'sickness’

And… the sex offenders should all be left to rot. If anyone did that to one of mine I would kill them.  But we don’t have the death penalty. So no one truly believes that do they? Really? Is it just easier to say that than to actually interrogate where you stand and what you feel? 

A few people tweeted me after being on PrimeTime, and they used the word J***** in their comments to describe drug users. I believe the term is the same as using the F word for gay people and the K word for Travelling people. Though, I was shocked by how many people thought it was okay to use that K word when discussing this weeks #LoveHate. I think this language is lazy and dehumanising. That dehumanisation is what allows us to exempt ourselves from thinking about what to do about the behaviour of other that challenges us. If they’re not human we don’t have to get involved. 

If the comments on the internet are true, if what I have been absorbing over the past week is true, than we live in a society that fundamentally doesn’t believe in the concept of recovery. Ironic considering the word recovery is dripping off every politicians tongue these days. But I am not talking about that kind of recovery. That farcical economic recovery that is only for the rich. I am talking about a whole sense of recovery, where is bad things has happened to a person they can recover from that, and if they have done horrific things as a result than they can recover from that too. If the comments are true then we live in a society that can’t believe in the best in people. That thinks that people are fundamentally good and bad. And then if that is true well then we should have the death penalty. It would make things a lot easier. 

We have a right to be angry about these things. We have a right to feel upset and vent. But we have to be responsible about that. We can’t let that be the only action we take. We have to try harder. 

I’m writing this blog, because I hope it’s not true. I hope we can believe and invest in recovery, and demand more complex solutions to the problems we are facing today. 

***(There are those who do want to do something, I’ve met them, and I will be blogging here in a few days a post dedicated to 10 things we can all do to ease the addiction crisis in our city)