Ideas - Reith Lectures #2: Is there such a thing as evil?

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

In a career spanning over 30 years, Dr. Adshead has heard many of her patients ask: "I have done evil things, but does that mean I am evil? In her second BBC Reith Lecture, Adshead asks if there is such a thing as evil. She argues we all have capacity for 'evil' and says we need to find ways to cultivate societal and individual 'goodness.' *The Reith Lectures originally aired on BBC Radio 4.

I distinctly remember hearing someone yell, stop that van. From CBC Podcast, an investigation into how young men are being recruited and radicalized on the internet. And she asked me if I was friends with a guy named Alec Manassian. By a new supercharged form of hate. On Facebook, police say he wrote the incel rebellion has already begun. A dark online subculture that's spilling over into the real world. Boys Like Me, available now on CBC Listen and everywhere you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast.

I sometimes think of the people I work with as the human version of a natural disaster. As one of our patients said recently, I was like a tornado in the path of my victim. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. What I'm always struck by when I meet someone who has done a horrible thing is initially their ordinariness. Gwen Adzett is a forensic psychiatrist working with the UK's National Health Service. She studies violence, speaking with and learning from violent criminals. Statistics of sentencing for homicides show that only a minority of people are found to be mentally unwell at the time of the killing, and that most perpetrators are seen as ordinary

people who killed for an ordinarily unpleasant reason. She is the author of the book, The Devil You Know, Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion. And she is delivering this year's Wreath Lectures. The subject of her second talk, Evil. Even the most ordinary person can bring themselves to carry out terrible cruelty while telling themselves that they are doing good.

But we need to think about how evil starts and grows mentally and where and how it seems likely to flourish. The Wreaths are an annual lecture series from the BBC. Across four lectures, one from within a psychiatric prison, ADCET asks four questions that get to the heart of the human capacity for violence. In this lecture, does evil exist? There are seven psychological elements that make up the evil state of mind. Introducing the second lecture from Dundee in Scotland

is the BBC's Anita Anand. Welcome to the second of this year's Wreath Lectures with Forensic Psychiatrist, Dr Gwen Adzhead. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. evil? I have heard this question many times from the patients I work with as a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Typically, I begin my

answer by telling them that evil is a complex idea and that saints, sociologists, theologians and neuroscientists all have had something to say about it. But then I say to them, as I intend to say to you today, that the capacity for evil is present in all of us. As William Blake said, cruelty has a human heart. Just as I say to my patients, I am going to say in this lecture that we therefore must attend to that capacity in ourselves and study its components closely, because it is possible for each and every one of us to get into a state of mind that could be called evil. I will also suggest that we need to manage our own capacity for evil by cultivating and practicing our capacity for goodness, which is both protective against evil and healthy

in its own right. I've had to think about this issue in my work because historically there has been some confusion about mental illness and evil, and an implication that they are somehow connected. For example, hospitals like Broadmoor use routinely to be described as places that house evil people. This false association extends even to the buildings, as we saw in the early summer of this year when some of the old 19th century buildings that used to be Broadmoor Hospital caught

on fire. The immediate reportage was all about the violent men who used to live there, most of whom are long dead. No mention of the firefighters or local householders who might be at risk, or of the many men and women who successfully engaged in treatment in those buildings and who were enabled to either return to prison to pay their debt to society or to be rehabilitated safely in the community. As I said in my first lecture, what I'm always struck by when I meet someone

who has done a horrible thing is initially their ordinariness. And then as they tell their story, the sense of a terrible intersection of chance and choices that led up to the offence, such that I usually feel that there, but for the grace of God, go I. Often the only major difference between us

is their long experience of severe mental illness, which sometimes results in people feeling possessed or compelled by an inner network of chaotic and disorganized thoughts and feelings. Such emotions and thoughts are aggravated by alcohol and drug intoxication, and also intense levels of fear and distress which distort people's sense of reality. I guess we could think of the men and women I've seen in my work as people who were driven into evil states of mind by a fatal combination of mental illness, addiction, and different kinds of stress.

Whatever the combination of risk factors, the violence committed by the people in our secure psychiatric hospitals and prisons seems far from ordinary, especially when we consider that the vast majority of people with mental illness, even severe mental illness, pose no risk of harm to anyone else. I sometimes think of the people I work with as the human version of a natural disaster. As one of our patients said recently, I was like a tornado in the path of my victim.

Poetry, drama and history tell us that ordinary men and women can get into evil states of mind. The poet W. H. Auden describes evil as unspectacular and always human and the historian Christopher Browning called his study of the German soldiers who killed thousands of innocent civilians ordinary men Browning's work is a must-read for anyone who is interested in the evil state of mind and One of his most interesting findings is that not all these men felt the same about their murderous orders Only about a third of the soldiers seemed to relish their task.

About a third saw themselves as under military obedience, leaving about a third who resisted by seeking transfer away from this detail. It has been suggested that the emotional impact of this type of killing on military morale was reported to the Nazi High Command, and was one factor that led to the development of the technology of mass murder and the death camps. The statistics of sentencing for homicides show that only a minority of people are found to be mentally unwell at the time of the killing, and that most perpetrators are seen as ordinary people who killed for an ordinarily unpleasant reason.

That does not mean that ordinary homicide perpetrators are all unfeeling and cold. Many perpetrators experience painful and disturbing emotions, and the killing provides some sense of release. But then afterwards, the same people who have killed also suffer remorse and distress, especially those who kill family members, and they are known to be at increased risk of suicide. Parents who kill their children are at especially high risk of suicide later, a risk that persists for years. I shall never forget the young mother who killed her children while suffering from a postnatal mental illness.

She was sent to hospital for treatment, but recovery brought intolerable insight and distress. We knew she was at high risk of suicide, even as we planned for her return to the community and sure enough she took her own life on her release some ten years after her offence. I am also thinking of all those young men who are killed by other young men. For the year ending February 2024, 71% of homicide victims in England and Wales were male, and the same percentage as seen in Scotland. But in England and Wales, it is the youngest men whose risk of being a victim is higher than the national average, especially those aged 16 to 24, they kill and they die in an aroused and intoxicated state of mind

that goes looking for a fight, a state of mind that is both dreadful and ordinary. It is a state of mind which is generally quite unlike the state of mind we call evil. So what are the factors that make up the evil state of mind? I think there are seven psychological elements which are distinct but related to each other. It is rare for all these factors to be present all at once,

but a certain number of them are probably essential for more extreme cruelty to take place. The first factor are what are called cognitive distortions, that is, the disturbance of the ordinary capacity for flexible and nuanced thinking, especially in a social context, a key aspect of cognitive distortion is rigidity of thinking about others and absolute certainty about their beliefs about the world.

I am thinking here of those men who believe that they can tell what a woman is thinking, or those who believe that the world is divided into winners and losers. In such a state of mind, there is no capacity to tolerate uncertainty or ambiguity, to say I don't know what's going on here. Such distortions are further aggravated by how information is weighed and the discounting of any information that contradicts one's thinking. Psychological rigidity and exclusion of uncertainty contribute to the development of the second factor of an evil state of mind, which is hyper individualism and egocentricity.

This is a mental perspective in which other people's minds are neither real nor morally significant. This certainty and egocentricity then fuel the third factor, which is the entitlement to control and power over others, which is absolute. I read recently about the trial of a man in his early 20s who attacked a much older woman who he met on his way home from the pub. She pleaded with him to let her alone and he replied, I'm the boss now. You have to do what I say. He apparently sobbed in the dock as he was sentenced for rape and GBH. He was a previously ordinary young man with a long-term

girlfriend expecting their child, who he will probably never know. We have no details about his insight or what he felt about his victim, but my point here is only that he was ordinary in terms of having a capacity for making relationships and working, quite unlike the offenders who get admitted to places like Broadmoor, who rarely have relationships with anyone. This man's offence is an example of how an evil state of mind need not be enduring or be a persistent quality of a person, and may even co-exist with a capacity for goodness towards others. The fourth component of an evil state of mind is setting up of one's own personal moral rule book, an assumption of a god-like omnipotence which again

ignores social traditions and denigrates the idea of the common good. Primo Levi tells a story of his time in Auschwitz when he witnessed a guard brutally hitting a prisoner for no reason. The prisoner protested, why did you do that? Seeking a rational, social understanding of what had happened, not least so he could avoid it again in future. But the guard replied, there is no why here. Communicating that both he and the prisoner were now in a world

with a completely different and idiosyncratic moral framework and values. Levy's example is naturally connected with the fifth component of an evil state of mind, namely denigration of victims and their vulnerability and the causing of suffering. This denigration is the essence of the cruelty that we fear most about evil and rightly so. Evil states of mind need a target, someone to denigrate and despoil, and whose suffering proves to the perpetrator that they are all-powerful and that they cannot be gainsaid.

In this state of mind, the perpetrator sees the victim's vulnerability as evidence that the victim is disgusting or dishonourable, which justifies their cruelty and may even enhance their status. Justified cruelty is often legitimised by pre-existing narratives about victims, both rigidly held and regularly elaborated. The development of such narratives happens at the level of the personal and the social,

especially long-held and re-rehearsed stories of past humiliation and dishonour which must be rebalanced. National and international experts on violence have commented on the danger to societies when such revenge narratives are woven into gender role expectations of what it is to be a man. The sixth component also involves the creation of narratives, but ones that dehumanise victims and make them seem non-human. But this process is not as simple nor binary as it sounds. It used to be thought that dehumanising people was essential to cruelty because it allowed the perpetrator some moral numbing or distance from being judged negatively.

But it is clear from studies of everyday atrocities that people in an evil state of mind may seek to preserve the humanity of victims in their minds as part of the infliction of suffering. I am thinking here of the man who killed his child in front of his wife to punish her for leaving him. In that moment he needed her to be human in order that she fully experience the suffering he planned for her. The final component of the evil state of mind involves self-deception and rejection of the idea that there is something called truth which, as John Locke put it, is worth the seeking. All the components of the evil state of mind are interconnected,

but arguably this last component enables the others and augments them. Disinformation and self-deception are not new, but there are parallels at the level of both the political and the individual. Two different scenarios come to mind here, both of which I know only by report. Many years ago, a businessman was jailed for fraud, which on the face of it is a non-violent crime, and perhaps not obviously evidence of an evil state of mind. His crime was to make and sell items which he claimed were landmine detectors, although he knew they were nothing of the sort.

It is not known how many people died because of his idea of a successful business and he seems not to have cared to know. More recently we have all heard reports of people who use their social media accounts to spread false information about alleged perpetrators of heinous crimes. Again, on the face of it, this does not fit with commonplace notions of evil and I suspect that these people have nothing in common with those people I see in prisons or secure psychiatric care. Yet naming a person or persons as a possible killer of children or animals without any

evidence is an act of cruelty, if only because it shows an absence of concern about what might happen because of that naming or even a wish they should be harmed. We cannot know for sure, but I suspect those who did this told themselves that they were good people, doing a good thing, and either blinded themselves to the consequences, or they felt entitled to harm others they did not like, which is grandiosity, and so did not care. Such people who lack care or concern for others they don't know probably pose no immediate danger to citizens they do know. But could that change? Would you like such a person to care for your children or to be your doctor? This was a question raised in the 1940s by a psychiatrist called Hervey Kleckley,

who came across patients in his hospital who did not seem to care about the distress they caused others and were similarly grandiose when challenged. Kleckley said this state of mind was an example of psychopathy, and he called it a kind of agnosia or inability to see others as people. Kletley was puzzled by the fact that many of his psychopaths had what he called a mask of sanity. They appeared generally to be ordinary, even privileged

folk who yet continued to lie, con and exploit others. It is important to note that Cleckley's work did not identify psychopaths as either evil or necessarily violent, but Cleckley's work was later used by Professor Robert Hare to create a checklist of psychopathy which he applied to men serving time in prison for violent offences. Hare hoped his work would improve risk assessment and there is no doubt that his work has been extremely influential. But I think what is most noteworthy is that not all the violence perpetrators satisfied Professor Hare's criteria for psychopathy, which means that psychopathy

doesn't explain all violence or even all wrongdoing. So far I've argued that evil states of mind differ from the states of mind we see in those people with mental illnesses who are violent and I have also argued that ordinary men and women can get into those states of mind. So the question is what can drive people into such states of mind? One approach from the perspective of individual emotions was first described in pre-classical thought but is probably better known in its Christian elaboration as the seven deadly sins. Pride is arguably the deadliest sin as it is an emotion which leads naturally to grandiosity and denigration of others.

Both gluttony and lust describe dysregulated emotions as well as appetites. Greed and envy are emotions that link directly to public discourses about whether there is enough to go round, and the extremes of inequality that can be a driver of violence. Sloth is probably better understood as a kind of ultimate in not caring and a withdrawal from the world. And it may be a driver for despair, which is a risk factor for suicide and potentially for homicide also. Anger is a complex emotion, not least because it can be both healthy, if properly managed, and also pathological. Anger is also a response to pain and threat. Pets bite or hiss if they are in pain.

And many theorists have argued that the anger that causes violence is a reaction to fear. But anger is also a potent respecter for violence because it can take a pathological form that leads to hatred and that emotion creates destructive bonds between potential perpetrators and their victims. We all have to live with and learn to manage such emotions, which is partly the basis for my assertion that the capacity for evil is there to be found in all of us. It is, as St. Thomas

Aquinas suggested, a disposition in humans that may never be enacted but could be in the right circumstances. But those right circumstances may not always be down solely to our individual personalities and beliefs. We are social animals who are influenced by how others think and feel, and as we have seen, by the stories we hear and listen to, media of different sorts affect the way we think and feel about our place in society, our bonds to others and who we may legitimately dislike or even despise. The reason that Nazi Germany is so often cited in the context of evil is that it is an example of what happens when the majority of a social community

including those with leadership roles inhabit an evil state of mind and legitimize it at a national and cultural level. Such social structures and beliefs may resonate and work to amplify those aspects of the individual personality that can be activated to make evil states of mind seem reasonable and satisfying. You're listening to the Wreath Lectures, the annual flagship lecture series from the BBC. Gwen Adset is a forensic psychiatrist with the UK's National Health Service and author of the book The Devil You Know, Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion. cruelty and compassion. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca.

Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayad. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's gonna get personal.

I don't know who sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This year's wreath lectures focus on violence and what drives people to cause harm to others. Across four lectures, AdSed asks four questions that get to the heart of the human capacity for violence. In this lecture, does evil exist? From Dundee, Scotland, here is the second part of the talk, followed by a Q&A hosted by the BBC's Anita Anand. I want to return to my initial argument that the evil state of mind is one that all of us can get into.

Even the most ordinary person can bring themselves to carry out terrible cruelty while telling themselves that they are doing good. But we need to think about how evil starts and grows mentally, and where and how it seems likely to flourish, and where and how it can be discouraged. For example, spending time ruminating on greed, lust, anger, envy and pride, whether on your own or on social media, is the kind of activity which could edge you towards an evil state of mind. It might seem far away right now, but if other traumatic and stressful things happen to you, which they can in the happiest of lives, you might find yourself developing a state of mind

where cruelty to others doesn't seem so bad. We can then, in fact, begin to mirror the evil that we denigrate, fear and despise in others. I like organic rather than mechanical metaphors for the human mind. So let me suggest that individual and social minds are like gardens that need close tending or the boundaries will be lost and the weeds choke the desired growth to death. I want to close by continuing this metaphor in relation to the importance of the cultivation

of goodness in the individual mind and in communities. If evil is the absence of good, which I can attest to, we need to grow goodness using organic and dynamic qualities in our lives as humans. Practising compassionate and grateful states of mind can lead to the growth of virtues which act as a protection against evil states of mind. We have good reason to think that people like plants flourish in rich soil that is full of nutrients and water and which forms part of a complex biosystem which involves other plants, insects and birds. Neglect of the complexity of both individual and social minds alike can lead to the social garden being overtaken by ideologies

that are like knotweed, damaging and hard to root out. To grow a capacity for goodness paradoxically involves paying attention to our most painful and afflictive emotions like anger, envy, vengefulness, grief and fear. If we are able to recognize such emotions within ourselves and then take the time to look at them and name them for what they are, we may be better able to consider them compassionately and carefully. When we do this, it gives us mental space to think about these emotions and see them as events in the mind and not identities to inhabit.

We then have more ways to manage painful emotions without harming ourselves or others. We can get what mindfulness practitioners call more skillful. So I am concluding that defending against evil states of mind means developing a capacity to take horrible emotions like rage and hatred seriously. We especially need to recognise in ourselves the kind of anger that leads to a wish to hurt others, so that we have more agency to protect ourselves. This may be essential when social minds and movements around us appear to be drifting into a wilderness of cruelty and grandiosity.

The problem of the wish to hurt others is especially important for those who have suffered trauma, for whom anger may be a constant struggle to manage. And it is the connection between experiencing trauma and later violence that I discuss in my next lecture. Thank you very much. Gwen thank you so much. One thing struck me is you talk about an evil state of mind and you're very careful to say it is not a binary thing

good and evil and yet a lot of the imagery you used in your talk is biblical and And I see such clarity in scripture, and that can be whatever faith you come from, which says there is such a tangible thing as evil. And you're a religious person. How do you reconcile the fact that scripture is often very clear about it. And the fact that you're saying there is a multiplicity of avenues that take you there and therefore can bring you back. The subject of evil is a huge concept which has been discussed by saints such as Thomas Aquinas. And what I found helpful is the understanding that if we think about evil as an adjective rather

than a noun, that allows us, all of us, to engage with it rather than seeing evil as something other or out there and to decide that everything would be fine if only these evil people weren't around. Let me just ask a question of the audience here. Who here believes that actually it's not just evil acts, but there are evil people? Okay, hands shooting up everywhere. Can we get a microphone to the lady here at the front?

My name's Linda MacDonald and in 2017 the Scottish Prison Service let out an evil killer on home leave who attacked me while I was walking my dog. His name I cannot mention obviously, but I was not known to this person, he was not known to me. And it was really interesting about your talk because you talked about people who enjoy the evil acts. And even when you're begging and you're pleading and you're humanizing yourself, all the things I done and yet if it hadn't been for my screams and being

interrupted I wouldn't be here. So I believe that day I saw evil. I saw evil. Well thank you for that incredibly generous opening up, that it was generous of you to share that and courageous too. And for me, it really nicely ties in with what I've been trying to say, which is you met someone in an evil state of mind, and there's no doubt that he was in that state of mind, no question that he was in that state of mind. And of course, what is particularly appalling, not just that you were attacked in this way, but also the fact that he came out of prison, which makes me think that nothing that happened in prison had done anything to ameliorate that man's evil state of mind and his kind

of inhabiting of that state of mind. And it's really because I think that if we could try and understand what gets people into those states of mind we might be able to do something about it. I'm not arguing that the evil state of mind doesn't exist, far from it, and I've seen that face too, believe me me but it's about saying if we understand is the state of mind that people can get into then we could perhaps do something about it rather than simply saying those people over there are evil okay and the lady wants to come back and just on that issue if

you know if you can get into that state of mind do you believe and I know this is hugely personal to you but the person who attacked you could get out of that state of mind. Is there, I mean your husband's shaking his head, but is there a pathway out of that? He spent 15 years in prison for attacking a young lady for no reason, brutally stabbed, and 27 times letting her throw a stamp on her face, 15 years of prison for to be on a home leave and all that was in his head in the middle of the day, in a beautiful sunny day was to kill. No alcohol, no night out, no drug and fuelled, which is interesting because I do believe that people could be rehabilitated, but there are the critical few. We have to be mindful that public safety comes first.

Thank you very much. I'll take another question from the gentleman over here. Thank you. My name is Simon Maclean. I'm a former police officer. I worked in the Serious Crime Squad and Murder Squad in Glasgow and throughout Scotland. As a young detective, obviously a few years ago now, we were at police college and we had a lecture from a criminal psychiatrist, forensic psychiatrist, who actually irritated us all. We felt that he was able to justify just about any act of evil with neurological miswiring, the chemical processes of the brain, or traumatic dysfunctional family history. He seemed to feel that these things somehow mitigated the criminal and usually very violent and often evil acts that these characters had committed. Do you not accept, Doctor, that in some cases, people are just bad,

they continually demonstrate that there are danger to us all, and that no amount of compassion, rehabilitation, or opportunities can change that evil core? I'm not suggesting that what people have been through makes them less responsible in any way or excuses them in any way. In fact, quite the reverse. What I want to do is to try and understand all the factors that got somebody into a state of mind that allowed them to do something horrible.

And that we need to understand what that is, including a wish to harm. I'm not suggesting for a moment a wish to harm doesn't exist. In fact, I actually think the wish to harm others is an emotion that everybody can get into. And that's why we need to study it carefully. We actually need to know much more about who we can help and who we can't because we have some good evidence to suggest that we can rehabilitate some people but clearly there are people that we can't.

Can we go back to our police officer who's sort of reacting so visibly with his face, but it's his radio so we need to hear what's going through your mind as you hear this. I didn't realize I was that transparent. I would play poker with you any day of the week. Go on. I get asked this question all the time. We have a podcast that we do, a crime podcast, and people ask police officers all the time,

why did someone do that, murder a child or whatever the horrific act might be? And we always say that that why is the question that plagues us all. But as police officers, we never try to delve into what you're trying to delve into, the why. And the FBI, who wrote the rule book on catching serial killers and criminal investigations of that nature, insist that the main thing that people possess when they commit these violent crimes is choice. And that's, as police officers, that's where we always came from. Let's take another question. There's a gentleman over there on that side.

And then I see a former Reith lecturer in our audience and we will come to Darren McGovern in a moment. Yeah. Hello. My name is Jimmy Paul and I head up the violence reduction unit in Scotland. And for nearly two decades, we've taken a public health approach to the issue of violence, namely treating violence as a disease and tackling its root causes. So my question is this,

whether in a custody suite or elsewhere, what are the specific things you would like to see more of in addressing those holistic needs of these people so that we can cultivate that metaphorical garden you also spoke of? Well we're going to need a pretty broad brush approach aren't we? Because I think we need to be thinking about the environments that people grow up in but we also need to think about the environments that people grow up in, but we also need to think about the communities in which people live. We need to think about poverty, housing, opportunities for work. But I also think we need to think about the things

that actually accentuate evil states of mind. We have very, very good data that says that alcohol and various kinds of drugs, intoxication, can make violence more likely. I'm familiar with the model of a disease model of violence and I think the only thing that I think it sometimes leaves out is the kind of individual aspect of choice and that sense of actually coming to the moment and what takes a man or a woman to doing this terrible thing and knowing that they've done that terrible thing. Thank you, Darren McAvey, our former Reith lecturer.

Hello, hi. I was just wondering the role that self-justification plays because we all, particularly those of us who have any experience of trauma and who have recovered from that or addiction perhaps, there are points where we're in the grip of that when we have a very intoxicating narrative about why we are in the state that we are in, whose fault it is, and who needs to be held accountable for that. And I wonder if some of the perpetrators that you have dealt with are examples of people who have just ran amok with their interpretation of what's actually going on,

the justification that they've cited to explain their explosive, shocking act of violence. And if I can just tack a second thing onto this. Are forms of violence that you have seen on a kind of trajectory where almost a tolerance develops, much like an addiction, where you seek out a more extreme form in order to just hit your baseline.

I know that's two questions. I'm sorry, it's a bit cheeky. You're absolutely right. Self-justification, I think, is a very important part of getting into a state of mind where you convince yourself that it's reasonable to do what you're doing. I very rarely come across somebody who says, I set out to do an evil thing.

And what they say to themselves is, it doesn't matter anymore, or this person doesn't matter, or I don't matter anymore, or nobody will care if I do this. And there's some kind of self-justificatory narrative that kind of makes a terrible sense in the moment, it then disappears. But I think your point about becoming addicted to violence is a very interesting one, which again deserves much more study.

Certainly in the hospital where I work, the thing that we notice and look for are the people whose pattern of violence begins to change, where they shift from being from criminal damage, burglaries, nicking stuff, to actually then laying hands on people and using weapons and that shift is a bad sign. And one of the problems we have in mental health services is that mental health services are not always very sensitive to that shift. And in my experience it quite often begins with violence in the family, which doesn't get taken seriously.

Lots of hands going up. Let's take one from this side of the room. Pam Gosall, member of the Scottish Parliament. I'm looking at a prevention of domestic abuse private members bill, and one of the areas in there is about education. So do you believe doctor that education could prevent people from becoming evil and violent whether it's in domestic abuse situations or any other situation and if we were to capture those children at a young age and it was mandatory to put any anti-violence courses in the school

do you think that would help? Well, I certainly think that if schools are not about emotional education, that I'm not quite sure what they're for. But the emotional education has to include learning how to manage horrible emotions and learning how to manage relational conflict. One of the things that I think is really problematic is that because we place a lot of emphasis

on people being kind and nice and compassionate and that's just as it should be, but what that means is that somehow we expect relationships to be like that all the time and we don't talk about the conflicts, the ordinary conflicts that arise in friendships, in relationships with partners, how you can get, you can really hate somebody that you also are very fond of. And those complexities and how you manage those emotions skillfully, I think has got to be part of education. And in terms of childhood, of course, children are changing. So what you tell a nine-year-old is not what you tell a 13-year-old and not what you tell

an 18-year-old and not what you tell an 18-year-old. I'm MacNorth and I'd like to sort of carry on with the discussion of the use of the term evil person. In 1996, my five-year-old daughter was one of the 16 child victims at Dunblane Primary School. The perpetrator was immediately labeled by the media, particularly the tabloid press, as evil, an evil monster. Since then I've often been asked, did I agree? And I have to say I haven't. It was a gut reaction initially, but it feels like a cop-out, that it's a term that's being used to explain everything, but it actually explains nothing. To me, he was a disgusting man, but I didn't see him as evil. I saw him as a man with a grudge. I saw him as a man with a grudge.

I saw him as a man with a grudge who could get a gun. And in some ways, that was the more important thing to me. How could this be prevented? You couldn't prevent it by somehow sorting out what or wasn't evil. You could sort it out by stopping people getting guns. I'd be quite interested to hear your thoughts on how the media and particularly the tabloid press very easily put the label of evil on anyone

who perpetrates a serious crime. of evil on anyone who perpetrates a serious crime. Thank you so, so much for sharing that with us. And I completely agree with you. That is very much my view, that the sense of, well, he's just an evil monster, allows people to kind of close the book and not look closer at what might have been done in order to try and stop it.

Now I accept that what he did was a kind of unicorn cosmic event which hardly ever happens and so anticipating those kind of dreadful diabolical rare events is very hard but he was a man full of grudge and a man full of cruelty and ruminated on that cruelty and that grudge and you just kind of wonder what might have happened if somebody had picked up on the grudge and the grievance as well as making sure he didn't have access to a weapon. Thank you very much for that. I'm Nadia Alnackla, I'm a local councilwoman and a psychotherapist. Maybe circling back to when Anita mentioned religion, that religion gives a lot of

context around the boundaries in terms of goodness and evil. What is your experience in the use of religion in terms of rehabilitation from the evil mindset? What's your experience as religion being used as a resource or a tool as part of people's journey? Well, I've been very fortunate to work with wonderful chaplaincies, both in the hospital where I work at Broadmoor, but also in the prisons that I visited. I go to a women's prison once a month and we have a wonderful chaplaincy there. I think the chaplaincy is a really important part of offender rehabilitation precisely because of the jealousy of the issue that you raise, precisely because it can be a way of copping out again of saying, it's all over for me, I'm in hell, which of course many people are in hell after they've done something terrible,

but not a future hell or a theological hell, but the hell of now to have been something who did something terrible is a kind of hell. And I don't say that in order to invite compassion necessarily, but to invite thinking about what's going on for those people. But also for other people who are, for living with long sentences their faith from whatever faith background they come from can sometimes be a very important part of how they cope with that and a very important part of their rehabilitation we should be proud of our chaplaincy's in the prison service. Do we have a prison chaplain here? Hello. What is your

experience when people come to you? Thank you Anne Stewart. I've been a prison chaplain for 17 years. My point of view is at one level very simplistic but I think absolutely true and I think Gwen hopefully may agree with it but I think it's as simple as from a theological point of view every last one of us is capable of great good. The Christian way of looking at it is we're made in God's image. Equally, everybody is capable of evil. The Christian way of looking at it is we're all sinners.

So every last one of us is a mixture of good and bad. And I would never agree with somebody that they were evil full stop, that that was all there was to them them because we're all a mixture of good and bad. Thank you. Gwen, thank you so much. We're going to have to leave the questions there. Next time we're going to be at Grendan Prison in England. This is the first time we have recorded a wreath lecture from inside a prison. But for now, a huge thank you to our hosts and our audience here at Dundee's V&A, and of course, to our Reith lecturer 2024, Dr. Gwen Adzard. (*audience applauding*) (*upbeat music*)

You were listening to ideas and to the annual Wreath lectures from the BBC featuring Gwen Adzhead, forensic psychiatrist and author of the book The Devil You Know, Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion. Her next talk focuses on the relationship between trauma and violence. Kevin and I did not dwell on the grim details of what he had done. We did talk, however, about his abusive and traumatic childhood and wondered together whether there was some link between the cruel intrusions perpetrated on his body and the similar intrusions he inflicted on the body of a complete stranger.

I remember Kevin turning this idea over in his mind and then saying, but I don't see how that would explain what I did. Most people who are abused as children don't go on to do what I did. Could being a victim of violence in some circumstances make you more likely to become a perpetrator of violence? Was W. H. Auden right when he wrote in 1939, those to whom evil is done do evil in return? evil is done, do evil in return. Gwen Adset is this year's BBC Reith lecturer. Look for her next talk in the days ahead on CBC's ideas. If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard in this episode or in any other, you

can do that on our website, cbc.ca.ideas where of course you can always get our podcast. This series was adapted for Ideas by Matthew Lazen Rider. Special thanks to Laura Lawrence and the BBC World Service. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Senior producer Nikola Lukcic. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayed.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.