Rethinking rehab?

With Jon Venables back behind bars, child psychologist Linda Blair explains how children who commit evil can turn good

In my opinion, nobody is born evil (although nobody knows for sure) Everyone is born human, and human nature contains both aggressive urges and altruistic urges. We have a deep need to affiliate, to be around people, and no creature spends as much of its life depending on others as we do. Emotion and reason are the twin engines of motivation for children and adults; and emotion is ten times more powerful. Children are fuelled by emotion and learn to be reasonable, whereas adults try to be reasonable and are flooded with emotion.

If no child is born evil, we must account for terrible acts of aggression by a combination of factors: personality, which includes genetics; environmental circumstances, particularly the role models a child had between birth and the age of 7 or 8, which is a crucial time, and whether a child has been harmed or hurt by others; and whatever the opposite of luck is. The fact is, you can have the environmental cocktails but you need an opportunity too.

The most pertinent question, in a case like that of Venables, is what about rehabilitation? I think it’s possible to rehabilitate someone to live a life in which there is always the possibility of seeking help, although I know that costs money. We can’t rehabilitate children by putting them in institutions with negative role models, as we do now. That denies them the opportunity to learn better ways of behaving. That’s why I’m not in favour of prisons as they are now, although I do know that prison must serve to protect the public.

I think we need to redefine what we mean by rehabilitation. What does it mean for someone who has had this terrible cocktail of genetic and environmental factors, who has had bad things happen to them and who might have committed a terrible act? We’re not Etch-a-Sketch people; we can’t erase what went before in our lives, but we can learn to defuse the stress, anger and pain it causes. There are ways to decouple the emotions from a memory, and that can offer new ways of coping with a situation.

When we’re stressed, we tend to behave as we did when we were younger. We repeat early behavioural patterns, before we’ve had a chance to think about things logically. This is why, for me, rehabilitation must be an ongoing process, not something that is done once and that’s it.

Remember, when someone leaves prison, he is leaving a structured environment. He is turned out into a world in which he must build his own structure. He has to get through that transition period. He’ll need a helpline — someone to turn to when he has trouble coping.

This helpline should be available at all times. It could come in the shape of a therapist, or could be someone who has worked extensively in prisons. Either way, someone should check up on a vulnerable patient and make sure he or she knows how to get hold of them at all times, as in the NHS.

The therapist need to do regular check ups on whether the patient is keeping their daily structure in order — is he/she getting up at a regular time, performing their job as normal, carrying out their daily tasks. This is what helps to keep the stress down, and when things start going wrong, there are some telltale signs that a professional should pick up on immediately — a change of emotion, breathing quickly, a sense of restlessness. All these things should be acted upon. Rehab has to be seen as something that doesn’t have an ending.

A predictable, unstressful life is best, with structured hours, and not moving around too much. In these circumstances, it is possible to lead a life that is not exceptional but is safe. Even those of us with gentle backgrounds sometimes need to rework ourselves, to move forward. The human psyche is so resilient. I’m no Pollyanna but even among traumatised patients, I’ve seen people recover and live their dreams.

There are other questions that need to be looked into also. What are the genetic characteristics that make a person act in an antisocial way? The most important is what’s called the impulsive-reflective dimension of personality. We all lie somewhere along this spectrum but people at the impulsive end spend all their time apologising because they’ve acted without thinking things through. If you are impulsive, then you’re very prone to behaving before thinking things through rationally. Your reason is flooded by your emotions. You make lots of mistakes and end up saying sorry a lot, perhaps for shouting at people. An impulsive person runs into a road after a dog, without checking the road is clear first.

Importantly, kids with behavioural problems tend to be impulsive, and they need to be taught strategies to slow them down before they act. It can be something as simple as getting them to count backwards from ten, or to think in terms of red, yellow and green traffic lights. Even teaching them to breathe properly, through their nose, helps, because when you breathe through the mouth you get jittery and the adrenalin is pumping. Kids can learn these things themselves.

There is, however, no best or worst along this spectrum, just different. If you’re too reflective, you can lose out on opportunities because the other kids have grabbed all the goodies.

There is another important dimension here which we usually call intelligence — I prefer to call it savvy, because it’s not really about IQ. This is the ability to weigh up several courses of action and decide on their relative merits. If you haven’t got the ability to think of alternative ways of behaving, you’re always going to be vulnerable to the mindset that says: “I want it so I’ll grab it.” There are probably genetic and environmental contributions to this type of “intelligence”: we don’t yet know whether it is learnt or whether it’s inborn.

Environmentally, the most important factor is role models. Here, we are talking about a child’s caretakers, the people a child depends on. It doesn’t matter whether they are biological parents or not. What matters is how those people behave. If a child, especially a preschooler, is surrounded by people who just grab what they want, disregard others and even harm others, then the child will behave like that. Interestingly, you can’t rectify this by showing children videos of people behaving properly; they practise the behaviour they learn first-hand.

And, finally, your have to ask whether anything has happened to sear fear into a child’s psyche that they need to defend themselves against? It’s often written that traumatised children are more likely to go on and commit aggressive acts, but do we really know that? Many children are abused and don’t do aggressive things. Professor Sir Michael Rutter, at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, looked at women who were brought up in care homes and found that some made brilliant mothers. That’s why I think that the role models early in life are crucial rather than critical: you can go through all those bad things and still turn out okay.

Linda Blair is the author of The Happy Child

Linda Blair, The Times 09-03-2010

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Linda Blair

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