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Guilt and narcissism
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SOHAM: A STORY OF OUR TIMES
By Nicci Gerrard
SHORT BOOKS ISDN 1904095925 £9.99
Why do some crimes attract public attention and some not? The author explains this by referring to other cases and concludes: “Don’t be a boy, don’t be black, don’t be working class. As for persistent runaways, children in care or teenagers with drug problems … forget it
Ian Huntley is behind bars and if all is still not all right with the world his incarceration has partly mended it. Or so we would believe. We sought his conviction to assure ourselves that we were safe and that a kind of justice was done. What we do not try and do is to discover why some people do terrible things to others (often children) and whether we can do anything about it.
Nicci Gerrard asks whether we “Can we find boys who are going to turn into Ian Huntley or Ian Brady or Peter Sutcliffe?” Certainly there is much in Huntley’s childhood and personality into which we can now read his later actions: insecure yet cocky, he came from a fractured family with a violent father. By 20 he had attempted suicide three times. We now know that he might have been stopped much earlier with his taste for rape and sex with young girls but that is not to say definitely whether any of those experiences and traits of youth indicate what he turned out to be. Yet if we could predict, Gerrard does discuss the practical implications of what we might do about it.
She suggests that Huntley can never face his guilt. “Anything else”, she writes, “would have destroyed any sense he had of himself. His internal structure would have collapsed, leaving only the rubble of hellish despair.” But experience and example, too, tell us that this can be so for some people, even those like war criminals, accused of even more appalling crimes than Huntley. Gerrard finds Rose West a “rare” case of accepting her guilt and not seeking parole. One might point also to Myra Hindley, who both accepted her guilt but did seek parole.
Why do some crimes attract public attention and some not? The author explains this by referring to other cases and concludes: “Don’t be a boy, don’t be black, don’t be working class. As for persistent runaways, children in care or teenagers with drug problems … forget it.” However, she might usefully have looked at the role of news editors whose decisions to a large extent determine (or manipulate) public attention.
Gerrard also wants to know why we were transfixed by the Soham girls’ disappearance and the public outpouring of grief that accompanied the finding of their bodies. “The therapy culture”, she says, is part of a post-secular, post-enlightened age. It turns inward, not outward and pathologises ordinary human experiences of death and loss. It promotes what Frank Furedi calls “the diminished self”. It is, says Gerrard, “subjective, self-centred and self-absorbing” and gives way to boredom, discontent, inner emptiness and narcissism.
One need not go all the way with Gerrard’s arguments and perhaps a less polemical book might have considered opposing views. However, there are many questions that Gerrard asks that we are sometimes too busy empathising and emoting to answer.
Terry Philpot is a writer and journalist and editorial consultant to YoungMinds
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