“In essence, X has been a victim of child physical and sexual abuse, but had very little knowledge of how to process that information or be aware of how unhealthy and inappropriate it was throughout his/her childhood. As such, he/she is a prototypical example of what can occur from such an unhealthy childhood development and which has now contributed to a plethora of psychiatric presentations which are integral to his/her personality and have contributed to his/her ongoing offending behaviour for many years.”
This is an extract from a report I wrote about a young offender I assessed. It encapsulates a childhood marked by a lack of love and care: an inability to process information correctly and the presence of one or more psychological or psychiatric disorders as a result. This is the consequence of poor parenting and an unpredictable home life, a childhood scenario that very often ends up in my office on the back of a crime committed as an adult.
It would be misleading to describe a “typical offender” because each crime and perpetrator is unique. But it is fair to say that there are typical background circumstances that constitute a criminogenic environment. While it is true that the majority of offenders I interview are in the low socioeconomic status bracket, usually living in disadvantaged areas, I have learned that it is not the area they are from that predisposes them to crime so much as the parenting they receive and their family circumstances.
These factors are absolutely crucial to brain and psychological development. For a baby born into a chaotic and inconsistent household, it will prove very difficult to grow into a productive, caring, empathetic, hardworking adult. That may sound like a controversial statement, but after 18 years of interviewing offenders of all types, I am certain that environment, or nurture, is the single biggest determining factor in their lives.
There is a “nature” element, of course, but it can be ameliorated or worsened by environment. For example, mental health challenges such as depression, alcoholism, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, with features such as poor anger management and melancholy, all appear to have a preponderance genetically.
We don’t yet know exactly what genes they are or which are turned on to cause this, but they do seem to have a family history. Any one of us can be born with these genes and will have to deal with those genetic inheritances during the course of our lives.
However, if we are born into a stable, loving environment, to parents who exhibit warmth, healthy physical contact, high levels of care, problem-solving ability and ethical behaviour, we are far more likely to develop the mental tools we need to understand and mind our psychological and physical health. If we are born to parents who exhibit challenging or aggressive behaviour, the development of those mental tools is hampered, with often far-reaching consequences.
I have mentioned before how the backgrounds of the offenders I interview can be depressingly similar, and this is true. The templates I’ve developed for my reports are based on the key things experience has taught me about the criminogenic environment.
Who we are by 10
The first 10 years of a person’s life are crucial to their psychological development. This is when who we are is laid down, layer upon layer. If a child experiences adverse conditions, that is layered into their psychological make-up. As it becomes part of the foundations of the person, it makes it harder to tackle and undo in adulthood.
From a psychologist’s point of view, up to the age of 10 (and beyond, of course) children require strong leadership, strong attachment and firm boundaries with clear expectations regarding behaviour. The presence of these elements leads the child to develop an emotional vocabulary and empathy for others.
They should absolutely not witness volatile or violent behaviour, or physical, emotional or sexual violence. The key concept here is “witnessing”. What you see as a child, what is role-modelled for you, has a huge effect on your thinking and behaviour.
It is the “monkey see, monkey do” dilemma: if children witness something that they are unable to process properly, they will accept it as the norm and quickly become resigned to it as the way life is lived. This is why victims of child abuse so often don’t report what is happening to them, or even accept their abuser’s explanation that what is happening is “normal”. It is this resignation that is likely to lead to self-deprecating behaviour and mental health challenges, with comorbidities such as behavioural challenges.
When I worked in Australia at the start of my career, my first assignment – the very first interview I conducted, in fact – was with a man I shall call Alastair. When laid out from A to Z, his story was a chain of events that was always heading in one direction, illustrating the disordered thinking that arises from childhood neglect, abuse and "witnessing".
Alistair’s family life was chronically disordered. His mother was an alcoholic, unavailable to her children emotionally because of her addiction. His father came and went from the family home at unpredictable intervals, but when he was there he was very violent, meting out daily beatings to his wife and his six children. All the males in the family had a forensic history, with law-breaking seen as a normal way of life. Alistair left school at 13 and was periodically employed as a labourer. He smoked cannabis and drifted, detached from everyone and everything.
During the interview, it struck me how all of Alistair’s past was written on his body – his constantly shifting eyes that refused ever to meet mine; his lean, rangy, tense body; the scars on his face and arms; the sense that he was there but not there, disconnected from his physical surroundings, unable to engage with me and not sensing his place in the world as valid or important or even present.
The crime he was going to be tried for was rape and murder. When I asked him about what had happened, he spoke freely, describing the incident in detail.
This is one of the interesting things I have noted about offenders over the years – they want to tell their story in full and, even though I advise them that anything they specify can be left out of the report, they never ask me to omit anything from the official record. It’s as if, once they begin to talk the truth, they have to get it all out and have it detailed properly. Alistair was no different.
It happened at a bar, where Alistair was drinking to excess. He noticed a woman, approached her, was rebuffed. He brooded sullenly, then decided to approach her again. This time, she made it clear she wasn’t interested, and her friend laughed. Alistair felt humiliated by this “bitch” who wanted to make him look stupid in front of the others in the bar. He decided to “show her who was boss”. He hid outside the bar.
The woman came out, alone. He jumped out, surprising her, and they fought as he tried to drag her away. He was stronger and extremely determined, so he succeeded in dragging her to a secluded spot. There, he raped her multiple times, strangled her and, while she was still breathing, stabbed her repeatedly.
He described the act of raping her so matter of factly, it prompted me to ask him if he had done that before. He shrugged and said he had raped a number of women, although this was the first one he had knowingly killed. He admitted he was usually “shit-faced” when he carried out rapes, so his memory was completely unreliable.
In his answers and his thinking, Alistair exhibited a plethora of psychological disorders: attachment disorder, conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder manifesting as aggression against women and misogyny. All of this could be traced back to his childhood and the things he had been forced to witness and try to process. He had resigned himself to being beaten and that violence was the norm, which meant that perpetrating violence was second nature to him.
It transpired that the whole evening – the drinking, the anger – had been preceded by an argument with his mother. He had felt slighted and unfairly treated by his mother, and he then took out those negative feelings on a substitute woman. He did what he had seen his father do so often, and then pushed it right into murder.
Alistair displayed no remorse or guilt, no empathy for his victim or her family, only a cursory understanding that what he had done was wrong. His thinking had become so disordered through the effects of his chaotic upbringing, it made him capable of coldblooded murder.
Alistair occupies an extreme end of the spectrum, but the consequences of early experiences are very often apparent in the stories offenders tell me about themselves and their crimes. The key to intervening in this unhealthy psychological development is to catch it early, which is why teachers and social workers are trained to look for the signs that a child has been a witness to violent incidents.
There are many possible symptoms, but they include difficulty sleeping; physical complaints, such as headaches, that seem to have no physical basis (somatic maladies); withdrawal from friends and social engagement; aggressive behaviour; acting out/reconstructing violent scenes during play; hypervigilance – constantly worrying and fearful; separation anxiety; regression to baby talk or babyish behaviour; indifference; and concentration problems, which inevitably affect schoolwork.
My own work is protected by the fact that I haven’t seen the crime being committed, which insulates me against heightened emotional reactions to the offenders I meet. But for a young child who is forced to witness violence of any kind, there is no buffer. At a sensitive and susceptible stage in their development, they must contend with the visceral reality of violence and its aftermath and try to put some sense on what they have seen.
It is impossible for the growing brain and mind to do this in such a way as to protect the child from it. They are too young, too inexperienced, too raw to be able to keep themselves safe, either physically or mentally. As a result, negative behaviour and emotions become integrated with the child’s development, perhaps even their DNA.
Capable of love
In our early lives, good parenting fulfils our primary needs – food, love and sleep – and consistently supports us, allowing for calm and insight to develop. As a result, we become sure of ourselves, assertive, confident and equipped with emotional resilience and resolve. We have strong coping mechanisms and are capable of loving others and moving forwards in our lives.
Poor parenting, by contrast, makes a child afraid of their own ability, leads to a lack of belief in their assertions and fails to promote education, which affects the child’s future life and prospects. In this situation, the parents don’t provide the all-important buffer between the child and the world.
A good parent allows their child to develop and mature at their own pace, hiding from them the nastiness in the world until they are ready to learn of it. A poor parent puts their child in the position of having to confront the nastiness alone and without any perspective to help make sense of it. This affects the child’s identity formation, which in turn affects their understanding of the differences between what is possible or plausible, acceptable or defiant and thoughtful or narcissistic. The lack of learning can have many different repercussions.
The result of poor parenting and a chaotic, unreliable home environment is a lack of attachment. Anyone who remembers the news footage of the babies and toddlers in the cots in Romanian orphanages, exposed to the world after the fall of the Ceaucescu regime in 1989, knows what a heart-breaking sight it was: rows of children, many of them clearly distressed, often banging their heads against the cot bars. Most of them looked vacant, as if their souls and minds had retreated from the awful reality of their half-existence.
These unfortunate children had received no love, no warm physical contact, no stimulation; they were neglected to an extreme extent. They quickly received help once their plight made headlines around the world.
One of the outcomes was that a psychological research team began to investigate the effects of their treatment on their brains. That work has shown conclusively that brain development is affected by care and environment. This means that the brain responds positively to careful nurturing, but is hampered in its growth by adverse conditions.
Enhanced brain activity
In the case of the abandoned orphans, their early experiences shrank the volume of grey and white matter in their brains and also caused lower quality brain activity, according to electroencephalography (EEG) measurements, which assess the distribution of neuron activity across the brain. The researchers concluded that children "who develop a secure attachment actually show enhanced brain activity at age eight"(Nathan Fox, University of Maryland).
Brain growth is, therefore, stimulated by love and attachment. The case of the Romanian children underlines the huge importance of attachment, or bonding, to babies and children. Attachment is developed from initial skin-to-skin contact between baby and mother. As the frequency and proximity increases, oxytocin and other chemicals are secreted in the mother’s and the child’s bodies, which facilitate a positive relationship as well as compassionate attachment.
Over time, the attachment becomes strong and assertive – the child knows they are loved and the mother knows that she loves the child. This attachment teaches the child that their love will always be reciprocated, that it is constant, and that they can turn to their mother for any need, be it physical or emotional.
As the child grows, this primary attachment, and those they foster with other family members, gives them emotional resilience, insight and intelligence. The care bond is the emotional spine of the child’s psychological development.
This is the beauty of the attachment mechanism that nature bestows on us. When that becomes interrupted, warped or broken, it leads to ambivalent or avoidant attachment, which is the basis of attachment disorder. Where the attachment to the mother is uncertain, intermittent or absent, the child will avoid seeking help or compassion from others or from its mother, and often won’t feel anything for the mother or primary caregiver at all.
This leads to emotional disorders, personality disorders and, more often than not, a vulnerability and sense of isolation in that person, which in turn leads them to experience a degree of solitude throughout their life. Their relationships invariably become destructive because they don’t have any confidence in their ability to talk and communicate with others.
Attachment disorder affects the child’s ability to reach developmental milestones, which has negative effects on personal and psychological maturity. Attachment is the primary disorder, but it can give rise to many other types of disorder as the child/adolescent/adult struggles to deal with the consequences, including depression, distorted identity and understanding of the interactive world around them. It can even contribute to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and anorexia.
From my own work, I think that attachment disorder more often leads to difficulties in coping with emotional stimuli and environmental stimuli later in life, which then manifest as psychological disorders.
The reason why so many offenders present with attachment disorder is because that lack of attachment led to disordered thinking and psychological difficulties, which in turn led to negative coping mechanisms, such as addiction or aggressive behaviour. That led them to cross the line into criminality due to their desperation for a substance, a feeling or a sense of self.
What I have found is that the majority of criminals had a mother who was a single parent who struggled financially, often working a number of jobs to keep the family afloat. The worst cases are those where the mother was entirely absent or, through substance abuse, consistently rejected the offender.
The very worst cases are those where there is ambiguous or ambivalent attachment, whereby the mother shows some love, then withdraws it, goes missing and comes back again, or acts erratically and with volatile behaviour.
This last type of mothering seems to me to cause the most damage.
An offender who always springs to my mind when considering attachment disorder is a young man called James. He was unusual among my clients because he came from a middle-class family, where both parents worked and provided a stable, reliable home environment. That alone made James stand out, and I was curious to hear how he had come to be facing, and pleading guilty to, a charge of assault and false imprisonment.
James’s legal team faced an uphill battle because of the violent nature of his offence and because it was not his first offence – the first was child sexual abuse. A custodial sentence was inevitable in his case, but they felt that he was unforthcoming about his past and that it might prove to hold mitigating, or at least explanatory, factors. It was in this hope that they asked me to interview him and prepare a report for the court.
I met James in a high-security prison. He was in his 40s and seemed indifferent to my presence and to the suggestion that my report could help his case. He told me he was one of four siblings, one of whom, his younger brother, had died at the age of six. I asked about his relationship with his parents, and his face clouded over and he told me that he hated them. He said this in a tone of angry resentment and it was clear the feeling ran deep.
I asked about his brother and he told me that he was two years younger than him, so James was just eight when he died, and that he had died of rare form of cancer. His short life was punctuated by hospital visits, tests, medicine, which ate up all of the time, resources and emotions of their parents. After he succumbed to his illness, James’s parents were distraught with grief. They were religious people, but religion seemed to give them no comfort.
In this atmosphere of choking emotions, James, the remaining son, became the focus of his mother’s grief. She had been a good caregiver up until now, but after her son’s death she began to call James “useless” and told him that God should have left her younger son and taken James instead. As James put it, “she wished I was dead”. His parents began to discipline him more and more severely, taking to locking him alone in the garage as a punishment, often for days at a time and without food.
James began drinking alcohol at the age of 10. He progressed to drugs, then from the age of 14 became sexually promiscuous – usually with women in their 30s and 40s who could buy him alcohol. Between the ages of 15-17, his parents twice committed him to a psychiatric hospital in an effort to address his addiction. After school he did some vocational training, was married at 24 and became a father to four children.
Ten years into the marriage, James raped his daughter. He explained this act as the fault of alcohol, insisting that he wouldn’t have done such a thing otherwise. He had served 10 years in prison for child abuse. He no longer had any contact with his ex-wife or children, nor did he see his parents or siblings.
James had become disconnected from everyone who had once mattered. Just like Alistair, he seemed incapable of feeling remorse or understanding fully the consequences of his actions. He was resigned to living as he did, detached from any emotions about his life and how it was affecting others.
The story so far already pointed clearly to attachment disorder, process disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. The abuse James had suffered at the hands of his parents – physical, mental and emotional – had created a well of anger inside him that could overwhelm him at any time. Given the abuse of his daughter and other incidents, it seemed he often served this anger through violent sexual acts against females.
James’s emotional language was poor (this is something we learn from our parents, but he had not), with a very limited understanding of the perspective and emotions of others. When I asked him what he thought the effect of the abuse would be on his daughter’s life, he shrugged and muttered he supposed it would be bad.
It was a striking underestimation of the consequences of his actions. I felt he was emotionally numbed, which was consistent with dissociative process disorder, which is marked by dissociated thinking, an uncaring, narcissistic disregard for the effects of one’s actions on others, on the environment or on oneself, and a self-serving, parasitic nature devoid of feelings of responsibility – the hallmarks of a psychopath.
His alcohol and drug consumption was an effort at self-medication, but allied with his impulsivity and poor anger management, it was a dangerous cocktail. True to the criteria of attachment disorder, he showed signs of compromised cognitive processing and lack of attainment of developmental milestones.
Drifting sexual relationship
At this point, divorced from his past and drifting, James had met a woman and struck up an intermittent sexual relationship. On the night of the current offence for which I was assessing him, the two were drinking heavily. They left the pub and he drove them to her house, where she realised she couldn’t find her keys. They argued bitterly about her forgetfulness, then climbed back into the car, had sex, which he claimed was consensual, and fell asleep.
Sometime later the woman awoke and, realising they were half-dressed in a car in a now-bright street, she shook him awake. As she did so, she said, “Come on, X, wake up.” The name she used was not James, but the name of her former boyfriend. This slip enraged James and he started to strangle her because, he said, “I had to let her know how angry I was”. The woman struggled to get free, finally breaking his grip on her. At this point he began to calm down, so she asked him to drive her to the home of a friend and he did so.
At the house she showered while James waited in the sitting room, now feeling remorseful. When she was ready, he drove her to the police station, where she made a complaint against him, backed up by the distinct bruising on her neck. James was arrested, then released on bail pending sentencing.
I asked why he was now in jail if he had been granted bail and he looked very uncomfortable. He admitted he had committed another offence in the meantime but refused to say anything about the latest crime
The script James was now living out had been written in his childhood, when he was powerless to change it. The revoking of attachment by his mother, the verbal abuse and then the physical abuse and confinement without food had all combined to wreck his well-being and his psychological health. Unable to cope and with no one to turn to, he had taken refuge in substance abuse, which had compounded all of his problems. By now, in his 40s, he was a serial offender who exhibited psychopathic disorder with features such as disinhibition, impulsivity, narcissism and ego-centrism, all of which were warping his ability to process information and emotions.
The case has stayed with me because it shows the very far-reaching consequences of ambivalent or avoidant attachment – the ability of parents to write a destructive narrative for their children that leads them to cross the line, in James’s case again and again.
Power of care orders
When cases of potential child neglect or abuse come to the attention of the authorities, the State provides a powerful intervention tool in the form of care orders. If granted, these allow a child to be taken out of the care of their parents and placed in foster or residential care.
In my work, I participate in many parental capacity cases, called in to assess by HSE social workers working with the Child and Family Agency (CFA). These are generally intricate cases that require a great deal of investigation and reflection on my part because there can be serious consequences to my decision.
It has taken seven years to prepare the parental capacity template I now use because I have continually updated it according to new research and to what I have learned over years in court, discovering what exactly the courts need from me. The template is now comprehensive and tailored for purpose, supported by various psychological scales to assess particular facets of the person’s psychology.
It is a very intricate assessment, weighing the cost of remaining in an unhealthy environment, which may create attachment disorder, versus a stable “care” environment without biological ties to the primary care-givers.
This is, essentially, a hedging game, but if you use the majority of the scientific and developmental facts at your disposal, the hedge becomes smaller. There is always a risk I may be wrong in my assessment, but generally these are not mysterious cases and therefore quite easy to solve.
Parents’ capacity to be consistent caregivers can be adversely affected by substance use and abuse, anger management, immaturity, lack of educationand assertiveness, poor confidence, difficulty in understanding the role of a parent, and lack of family or community support. A parent who is mired in their own psychological problems, especially if accompanied by substance abuse, is obviously not ready to be a committed parent.
There are levels of capacity, but usually those who are incapable stand out clearly in their behaviour and actions. A forensic history, for example, where the parent/s have prior convictions is a big warning sign for future asocial behaviour and must be taken very seriously in parental capacity cases. Often, though, I find parents who want to be good parents but simply lack the skills and know-how to carry out this wish.
Upon investigation, this will commonly relate back to how they were brought up – likely in a less-than-optimum environment that failed to teach them how to be good caregivers. But if they have the will to learn, they can change this state of affairs and become good parents and raise their children themselves. It’s a question of identifying the right supports for them.
When I have to recommend a care order be implemented, I don’t necessarily feel good about “saving” that child. The problem is that I rarely come across cases where the parents are completely indifferent. Instead, I am usually dealing with people who really do want to have their children and be good parents, but there are factors working against their ability to do that. However, the desire to parent is there – that is why I’m called in, because they are requesting care of their child.
So to then go to court to argue against them and convince the court they cannot care adequately for their child does not feel good, even when the accurate assessment states that to be the logical finding. It’s very complicated.
Reach them young
In terms of intervention and working to protect children in dysfunctional families, I think it is important to reach out to them at a young age. There are key developmental milestones between the ages of four and 10, which is therefore a crucial window of opportunity to prevent or undo the damage of attachment disorder. I have found that once the child reaches teenagehood, it is very difficult to reverse the mental and behavioural crystallisation of family dynamics and the entrenched behaviour.
This is a controversial point of view, I am aware, but my experience has convinced me that intervention must take place between the ages of four and 10 to be properly effective. This poses a challenge to the State to put in place the agencies and supports necessary to facilitate early intervention in this manner.
The Irish care system has often been criticised, sometimes for very serious failings, but thankfully it’s not the case that every child who goes through that system finds it to be a bad experience. Yes, there have been cases where children have been failed by the system, but equally there are plenty of children who are very grateful for the intervention and care they have received. I have seen both sides of this over the years.
The psychological world of the person who crosses the line into criminality is one of disordered thinking and challenging behaviour. When we are victims of crime, we see the behaviour, which is the manifestation of the inner turmoil. That emotional distress is what I normally get to see, demonstrated during my communication with the offenders. The sad fact is that this turmoil has often been forced upon them by the people who were meant to love them and protect them.
When parents fail their children, they fail the whole of society by creating an individual who isn’t equipped to live a fulfilled life, which could contribute to their healthy development in society. This is not to excuse criminal behaviour – there has to be personal agency and responsibility – but it is important for us, as a social community, to understand this and to seek to put in place supports and interventions to protect children.
The role of the family and parents cannot be underestimated with regard to psychological well-being and successful living. It is an important message to get out there, so that people don’t shy away from speaking the truth about it. Often a collective sigh is heaved when someone like me says anything remotely like “it’s the parents’ fault”. People bristle, feel resentful and often seek to find an alternative reason. But my years of experience have shown me, categorically, that the source of much of the pain in the world – inner and then outer – is poor parenting and poor family circumstances, leading to developmental, educational and emotional malnourishment.
We have to learn to deal with that, to solve the problems and to place children squarely at the front of community care in order to cultivate positive and progressive psychology.
Ian Gargan is a consultant and forensic psychologist. This is an edited extract from The Line, published by Gill, €18.99
