Ideas - Reith Lectures #3: Does trauma cause violence?

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

With very rare access, forensic psychiatrist Gwen Adshead gives her third Reith Lecture inside Grendon prison, in England, where she talks to a small number of prisoners and staff, and asks the question: Does trauma cause violence? Does being a victim of violence, in some circumstances, make you more likely to become a perpetrator of violence? *The Reith Lectures originally aired on BBC Radio 4.

I am going to tell you a story that a powerful state doesn't want you to know about tens of thousands who have disappeared. Once they get into the hands of the military, they will be tortured brutally. It's a story so dangerous to tell that for some it's meant ending up on a kill list. She was seen as a dangerous political actor and a threat to Pakistan security, but she was a local hero. The Kill List, a six-part investigative podcast, available now. and respect to Pakistan's security, but she was a local hero. is a CBC podcast. I'm thinking now of a sad case in which a young man attacked an older man in the street. Welcome to Ideas.

I'm Nala Ayed. The older man had reprimanded him for something minor, and a young man, a teenager, really, flew into a rage and beat the older man to death. Gwen Adzad is a forensic psychiatrist in the UK. She speaks with and learns from people who kill. Something in the victim's voice and language activated intense feelings of shame and rage which this young man could not manage or make sense of. He could only embody that emotion and then evacuate it into another body with fatal and tragic results. She is also this year's BBC Reith lecturer.

In her third talk of the series, she examines the connection between violence and trauma. Could things have been different if as a little boy that young man had learned how to articulate painful emotions. It is a capacity that may be damaged by exposure to abuse and shame. ADCED works in psychiatric prisons and hospitals across the UK. This lecture comes from within Grendan Prison, where around 200 men are incarcerated, many serving life sentences for violent crimes. All of them have accepted responsibility for their actions and are taking part in therapy. We're challenging our behaviours, we're challenging our offences, we've done some

terrible things, you know, and it's hard. Basically, I committed crimes most of my life from being in and out of prison and to be honest I never learnt nothing in the other prisons I was in. I came a broken man. I came here to fix myself, but also the little boy that was abused, like many of us. From Grendan Prison, here is the third Wreath Lecture, introduced by the BBC's Anita Arnand. With us today we have prisoners in the audience, all of whom have been convicted of serious acts of violence or sexual violence. They are part of a small audience here, including members of prison leadership, psychiatrists, prison officers and other people working within the system. And we'll find out a lot more about how things work in Grendon

a little bit later. But first, the forensic psychiatrist Dr Gwen Adsaid is going to look at the relationship between childhood trauma and violence. Why do some of those from abusive and violent homes go on to commit violence, but others do not? Please welcome the BBC Reith lecturer, Dr Gwen Adsaid. In this lecture, I want to explore the question of whether trauma leads to violence. Trauma is a word that means many things in everyday speech, but my definition of trauma is that it's the kind of suffering that pierces your defenses and gets under your psychological skin. I'm going to begin my exploration by asking you to cast your minds back to the year 1994

and to an American case where two brothers, Lyle, aged 21, and Eric, 19, were tried for the murder of their parents by shooting them at close range in their home in California. The background to this case has been the subject of a recent TV series, and I'm grateful to Netflix for their assistance. The Menendez brothers didn't deny that they killed their parents, but they claimed that they had done so because after years of different kinds of abuse by their parents, they were in fear of their lives and had to defend themselves. Eric, the younger brother's allegation that he was sexually abused by his father, was especially emphasized. This was probably the first trial in which the phrase

the abuse excuse was used to describe a potential link between being a victim of violence with being a perpetrator. The brothers claimed that at the time of the killing they were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, as a result of the trauma they experienced. And their defense team instructed a psychiatrist who gave expert testimony that supported their claim. Inevitably, the prosecution had a psychiatrist whose expert testimony vigorously rebutted the idea that having PTSD might explain the killing,

but also mitigate criminal responsibility for it. Even if the brothers had PTSD, that could not prove that they had been abused by their parents, and I suspect the expert also pointed out that most victims of violence with PTSD are never violent to anyone. The jury found the prosecution evidence more convincing, and both brothers were found guilty of murder and convicted to life without parole. I believe that sentence is now under review. sentence is now under review. But the question remains open about how and whether the experience of being a victim of violence explains later violence or increases the risk of becoming a perpetrator. That question was certainly on my mind some years later when I was working with a patient

in therapy. Let's call him Kevin. Many years before we met, Kevin had killed and raped an elderly woman. He was then 19. He was deemed to be mentally unwell at the time of the offence and was sent to hospital for treatment. This included having therapy with me as a way of trying to understand how he had come to do this dreadful thing. Kevin and I did not dwell on the grim details of what he had done, although we acknowledged them and referred to them as necessary. 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. Both the Menendez case and Kevin's question articulate the theme of this lecture. 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? And if so, how does that transformational process work? To start, I think it's important to distinguish my theme of how trauma increases violence risk is distinct from the idea of getting revenge. The philosopher Francis

Bacon described revenge as a kind of wild justice, and it is noteworthy that the Menendez brothers did not argue revenge at their trial. The state of being vengeful is seen as normal and cannot be an excuse for violence. Instead, they sought to suggest that they had developed PTSD as a response to repeated abuse and that PTSD diagnosis made them pathologically sensitive to perceived threat and more likely to overreact in an impulsive and violent way. The question of how and whether childhood experience affects who you are as an adult is an old one. But it is only in the 20th century that we have had the research tools to try and answer it.

Ironically, it was around the time of the Menendez trial that a large-scale study was begun to explore one aspect of this question, namely, does being exposed to childhood adversity and trauma affect your physical health in adulthood? The researchers devised a list of adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, such as being neglected, growing up with quarrelling parents, living with parents with addiction issues, all parents who had gone to prison, as well as more direct experiences of childhood trauma, such as verbal, physical and sexual abuse. It is noteworthy that you can be exposed to high levels of childhood trauma without anyone laying a finger on you. The researchers then gave 17,000

people a tick box list and asked them to tick off which kind of traumas they'd experienced, if any. They then looked at how often these same people used health care services and what medical problems they had. The results were published in 1999 and they were interesting. About 10% of the population had experienced four or more kinds of childhood trauma. And these people were much more likely to suffer poor physical health in the form of heart disease, respiratory disease and liver disease. This group were also more likely to be heavy smokers and drinkers and to be users of drugs, both prescribed and non-prescribed.

In contrast, about 30% of the population had experienced no childhood adversity at all and they had much better physical health. Both the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control in the USA now encourage research into ACEs in order to improve public health. A recent Welsh study reviewed what is known about levels of ACEs in different countries. They found that in Wales, 14% of the population have experienced four or more kinds of childhood trauma, but in England only 9% have had that level, and in Sweden only 1%.

The research also included a survey of European teenagers aged 16 to 25, which found that 6% reported very high levels of childhood trauma, most commonly the early death of a parent, physical abuse from a carer, and exposure to family violence. These studies suggest that a small minority of people experience high levels of childhood trauma, and there is a general consensus that there is some link between that exposure to trauma, especially maltreatment by adults, and a range of problems in adulthood. These include not just poor mental and physical health, but also a range of social problems, including criminal rule-breaking, including violence, interpersonal problems, substance misuse, and addiction.

But there is considerable debate about what the nature of the connection is between childhood adversity and adult problems. How could repeated and persistent experiences of fear, pain, rage, and terror cause so many problems in adulthood? The kind of problems that one study memorably describes as downstream wreckage. There are a number of theories but no definitive answers, chiefly because good quality research on these questions involves studying multiple factors in large groups of children over time, which is both expensive and tricky. Children's minds and brains develop and change

at different rates, at different ages, in response to stresses within themselves, their families, and their environments. Social stresses like poverty and discrimination and prejudice of any kind can also interact with individual trauma to affect development. Adolescence is an especially complex time, as young people's brain development is influenced by massive changes in hormone level during puberty, alongside the psychosocial task

of developing the basis of an adult identity outside the family. It is really no surprise that the majority of mental health problems begin in adolescence. One theory is that a child who is traumatized experiences high levels of stress, fear, and rage, which then become a chronic stress response, which can itself be physically damaging to the developing

brain. Persistently high levels of adrenaline and cortisol may impair the normal developmental trajectory of how brain connections form. Harmful levels of stress may also impair the normal function of the immune response in the child, leading to widespread inflammatory processes across the developing parasympathetic nervous system and distorting the development of the vagus nerve, which is important for the development of facial muscles that underpin social communication as well as affecting heart and lung activity. Another theory involves epigenetics, the way that external events, like feeling fear, may alter how genes are expressed, which can have an impact on how brain cells develop and connect. For example, we know that if

pregnant women are exposed to high levels of stress, that causes high levels of circulating stress hormones in their blood. But their blood is then shared with their unborn babies through the umbilical cord. And those high levels of stress hormones affect the genetic expression of the baby's stress hormones. So the babies are born with a lower threshold for stress sensitivity or even accelerated aging mechanisms of the newborn baby cells. So far we have been talking about the impact of trauma on the child's brain and body. We now need to discuss the psychological impact of trauma on the developing mind, and especially children's sense of themselves and their relationships with others.

During the first five years of life, the baby's mind changes from that of a hard-to-read infant who has to learn how to communicate with their carers and how to make sense of their own bodies to that of a small person with a definite sense of a physical and mental experience and a story to tell of who they are and who is important to them. Babies have to grow a relational mind, work out who they are as a person and who others are and especially who they can trust to get close to when they feel scared. Learning to manage painful emotions by getting close to someone and sharing your feelings as words

is one of the most important tasks of early and late childhood. But to do that, children need secure attachments to adults they can trust and don't fear. We can study the importance of attachment security by looking at what happens if you disrupt attachment security both in animals and humans. If you disrupt attachments in group animals like monkeys by raising them in social isolation, which is highly stressful, they show big behaviour problems which make them very unpopular when they interact with other monkeys

later as adults. Similarly, children who are regularly frightened or living with a frightening person develop disorganised attachment systems so the child does not know how to trust or make sense of how they can seek help from others when vulnerable, especially they lack the skills to read other people or accurately gauge what's going on in a social situation. We have good quality studies that help us understand the nuance of how exposure to chronic trauma of different kinds has a bad effect on how children's minds

develop. One early study found that abused children were more likely to react to their own image in a mirror with hostility and fear compared to children who had not been abused. These were also children who lacked language for painful emotions. Children who are maltreated are more likely to have cognitive deficits, problems with self-recognition and self-esteem, problems with reality testing and how they appraise social situations. You could sum up their problems as impairments in mentalizing, that is, the capacity to think about your own mind and intentions, and the minds of intentions of others. The reason that the capacity to mentalize is important is that

failure to consider or read other people's intentions skillfully may be one factor that makes people more prone to use violence. I am thinking now of a sad case in which a young man attacked an older man in the street. The older man had reprimanded him for something minor and the young man, a teenager really, flew into a rage and beat the older man to death. As his victim lay dying the perpetrator was heard to shout, what you saying now? What you saying now? As if he was carrying on some kind of argument in his head with his victim. Something in the victim's voice and language activated intense feelings of shame and rage which this young man could not manage or make

sense of. He could only embody that emotion and then evacuate it into another body with fatal and tragic results. Could things have been different if as a little boy that young man had learned how to articulate painful emotions and to bear them without action? This is a capacity that we generally learn from being cared for and cherished, and it is a capacity that may be damaged by exposure to abuse and shame. We know that some violence perpetrators are prone to misreading threat in other people's faces and reacting to socially ambiguous situations as threats. Children who are exposed to multiple kinds of trauma may grow up to

become teenagers who dislike themselves and who fear others. They will be teenagers and young adults who struggle to articulate painful emotions like shame, sadness, and hate, instead drowning them in alcohol or numbing them with drugs. They may turn to self-harm and have an increased risk of suicide. The Welsh study I mentioned earlier reported that exposure to high levels of childhood trauma and adversity substantially increases the risk of later suicide. That report also stated unequivocally that exposure to childhood trauma

increases the risk for being both a victim and a perpetrator of violence, and argues that the two states might be connected. Some similar research into traumatic stress in teenagers in Finland also found evidence that experiencing childhood trauma led to a three-fold increase in the risk of committing violence in both sexes, although the effect is stronger for boys. Parental education was a noteworthy protective factor. Families

where parents had less education were more likely to be families where there was trauma. An American study from last year also found that both boys and girls who had experienced multi-victimization were at increased risk of violent actions when they got older, including intentional physical harm, causing injury that needed medical attention, and perpetrating intimate partner violence. Yet another American study found that in one US state, people with high levels of childhood adversity were nearly twice as likely as people with low levels of childhood adversity to keep a gun in the house. The results of all this research look pretty compelling, but there are caveats that are

important to consider. Research into childhood trauma and later violence often involves meta-analyses of smaller studies that might be subject to publication bias. That is, studies that do show an association between trauma and violence are more likely to get published. And although the data look intriguing, they do not definitively prove that experiencing childhood trauma will inevitably cause violence perpetration later. Nor does exposure to childhood trauma predict violence risk. It is still the case that not everyone who is maltreated and abused as a child goes on

to be delinquent or a perpetrator. The cycle of violence is not a perfect circle. Of all teenagers who get into trouble, it is a small subgroup only who go on to be chronic, severe violent offenders. And the proportion of risk due to childhood trauma may interact with risks that might arise from living in social environments that are also known to be risk factors for criminality, usually communities which are subject to stresses like high unemployment, lack of social supports, income inequality, and a lack of access to education, especially literacy skills.

But even in these communities, it is a minority of socially and psychologically disadvantaged people who are at increased risk of criminal rule-breaking generally, which in turn increases the risk of criminal rule breaking generally, which in turn increases the risk of criminal violence. Most people with poor mentalizing skills, low self-esteem and mental illness, will never be violent to anyone except themselves. And although substance misuse, addiction and antisocial attitudes are known risk factors for violence, most antisocial addicts will not become violent. As my patient understood all those years before, childhood trauma is not a complete explanation for violence.

Nor do any of these studies seek to excuse violence. The question of whether childhood trauma mitigates responsibility and culpability is a question for juries and courts, not therapists and researchers. 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. Ideas as a podcast and a broadcast, heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada,

on U.S. Public Radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.cbc.ca.cbc.cbc.cbc.cbc.cbc.cbc.cbc.cbc.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c. I'm Nala Ayaad. you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. This year's Wreath Lectures focus on violence and what drives people to cause harm to others.

In this talk, Gwen Adsaid, forensic psychiatrist with the NHS in the UK, examines the connection between trauma and violence. The lecture comes from within Grendan Prison, a facility holding men who've committed violent crimes, many serving life sentences. Here is the second part of the talk, followed by a Q&A with the staff and prisoners of Grendan, hosted by the BBC's Anita Anand. In this talk, I have explored the question of whether trauma causes violence. I think there is compelling evidence that suffering childhood trauma can be one risk factor for violence in some people. But questions remain about who is especially vulnerable

and what protective factors might be operating in those abused and traumatized people who do not go on to become violent. For example, we might be especially interested in how promoting social cohesion and a sense of community acts as a protective factor for some young people, especially in the years of emerging adulthood, and access to work and employment opportunities. There are so many other questions we could discuss. I want to close by raising two that I find especially puzzling. First, why do males outnumber females by nine to one as violence perpetrators?

Large scale studies suggest that boys and girls experience similar levels of abuse, and many argue that girls experience more abuse and suffer more because of it. But only a fraction of abused boys and girls will go on to be violent, and only a highly unusual minority of traumatized women will become violence perpetrators. It seems that although women are often traumatised in childhood and adulthood, they are able, in the main, to protect themselves from becoming perpetrators. Could there be a connection with the experience of abuse and toxic gender role expectations for both men and women. What is it that happens to boys when they are traumatised that makes them more likely

to develop internal toxic narratives of both masculinity and femininity? Are men uniquely vulnerable or women especially strong? My last question is about that minority, estimated about 30%, of people who have apparently never experienced any childhood adversity. They are clearly a fortunate group, but we do not know much about them, and it could be useful to not know much about them and it could be useful to find out more about them and what makes them so fortunate. But could that lack of experience mean that they lack understanding about childhood trauma and its effects? And could that lack of understanding be a liability in

some circumstances? I am thinking that at the level of policy making, we might need new assumptions about what is normal for societies. It looks as though having an adversity-free childhood is far from being the norm, which might suggest that we need a new approach to seeing traumatic experiences as a common chapter in people's life stories, and which people survive and articulate in different ways. These and other questions are for other, smarter people to answer. We will need their answers if we are to get serious about violence reduction

and how we help people who have been violent change their minds for the better. That is the theme of my next and final lecture. Thank you very much. Just before I take the questions, I think a quick reminder of where we are to remind you who is in the room with us here at Grendan Prison. So we have among the audience men who have been very violent, some of whom have killed. We're not going to be asking names, we're not going to be asking, we can talk in generality about offences but we're not going to get into any specific details and that is to minimise any chance of distress to their victims.

So we're going to take some questions, we're going to try and understand a bit more about the work that goes on here and to that end I'd really like to speak victims. So we're going to take some questions, we're going to try and understand a bit more about the work that goes on here and to that end I'd really like to speak to Olivia Phelps who is the Governor at Grendan Prison and also next to her Richard Shooker who's Head of Clinical Services here. So first of all if you were to describe Grendan, what is its role? Its role is to provide a distinctive approach towards working with people who have committed violent offences and understand some of the links between and address some of the links

between psychological difficulties and later patterns of behaviour. So what's really different about Grendan is that you have to apply to come here. So once you apply to come here, you then go through a period of assessment. So we assess all prisoners prior to them coming to Grendan. They come from across the whole country. They can be serving all types of sentences, different sentence lengths, which is why we're very different. Okay, I just want to come back to Gwen because there are people who are going to be listening to this saying why are you giving airtime to those who have visited such pain and anguish on people like us listening?

What would you say to that? Why is it important to hear the voices that we will hear? Well it's precisely because of the pain and distress and anguish that is caused by violence perpetrators that I think we need to understand more of how that violence comes about. I think it is helpful to hear from the people who have perpetrated violence to fully understand how that comes about and especially what might be done to reduce it. And I think it's really important that we understand that the interests of supporting victims and the interest of exploring perpetrators violence are not alternatives but in fact must coexist if we are to get

violence reduction right. Let's take a question from somebody who is here, a prisoner. We're only going to identify your wing, we're not going to say anything more than that but a question from D-Wing. Can I just start by asking what brings you to Grendan, how do you find yourself here? I come to Grendan for positive, progressive, personal self-change. I knew that I needed to look at myself and the behaviours that I've learnt as an adolescent and as an adult and all the trauma that I've been exposed to

and created as well, I've had to come and unravel all of that. Right, and you have a question for Quan. Okay, the question was, would seeing parents in acts of violence towards each other have a lasting impact forever after? We have good quality research that suggests that children who witness

domestic violence between their parents are at increased risk of becoming perpetrators of domestic violence later on themselves. But I think we also have to remember that we're not talking usually about witnessing one experience of parents fighting. We're talking about growing up in an environment where there's a climate of fear, where everyone is frightened, including sometimes the perpetrators of the violence. And so the violence is taking place all day, every day, and small children's brains are affected by high levels of fear. So the evidence is pretty strong that it does have an effect. I mean, what do you think about that answer?

And how long are you here for? Yeah, I've been here seven years and it's tough. It's tough though, you know. What's the toughest bit? Well, we're all challenging each other all the time and we're challenging our behaviors, we're challenging our offenses. It's tough, it's tough because like we're seeing each other in ourselves and each other.

There's reflections all around us and we've done some terrible things, you know, and it's hard. It's hard work. Thank you. Richard, if I come back to you, I mean, some may say, well, getting in touch with your childhood traumas or, you know, your feelings or the therapy side of it, it's an easy option. I think one of the aims of the work here is that people do need to confront what they have done and explore what they have done but also to actually face some of the harm they have caused. Now that isn't an easy process. People also have to be able to confront some very disturbing parts of their life which is also particularly distressing. One of the

things we ask people to do here is to be very accountable for your behaviour and that involves having your behaviour explored sometimes in microscopic detail. Is it group therapy every day? Is it one-on-one therapy? I mean I think people would be really interested to know how you get that accountability. People take part in group therapy three days a week. You are asked to talk about your offence in sometimes quite precise details and that in itself can be I think quite a difficult and very demanding process. And you were saying something between 20 and 30% of people can find it too hard. Yeah they do. The attrition rate is round about a quarter. It is not an easy option. There are other prisons where you could do your sentence and do your time,

but to have to actually face up to what you have done on a day-to-day basis is what a lot of our prisoners describe as some of the hardest work they've ever done. So I think the temptation is to probably go away to avoid confronting what you have done. Okay, I just want to come back to Gwen, because when you're sitting in that therapeutic setting, what do you find is the most difficult thing for the people who are working with you is actually to admit the thing that they did

or the impact that the thing had on the victim of that crime? Both, I think. And I also think it's important to make clear that this is a process, it's not an event. The process of acknowledging what you've done is painful and shameful, but also the process of acknowledging what's been done to you and how that may be mirrored in what you did to someone else. It's much easier to avoid it. Right, okay. Let's take another question. Let's take a B-wing question.

Can I ask you all, and I will ask you all, how did you end up at Grendan? Okay, I come to Grendan because I had problems with managing my emotions and poor conflict problem-solving skills and coping. And my question is, I grew up with three younger siblings, they're girls, in a hostile, traumatic environment, and they've gone on to be

law abiding citizens, but I've gone on to offend. I just want to know your opinion on that. That's a really excellent question and a really difficult one. We often talk about parenting as though it's one experience, but your parents were not the same when they parented child two, three, and four as they were when they parented you. And it's often first time parents who really struggle with providing safe and anxiety-free environments. That's not to blame parents particularly,

but just to say that being a parent is hard. The question you were raising perhaps into exactly what I was wondering about is whether there's something about femininity or womanhood or the connections that women can make in adolescence and early adulthood that acts as a protector, whereas boys, particularly once they get into trouble, are then kind of excluded and cut off from other people and left with strong feelings of shame. Can I come back to you? What do you think? Me personally, I don't think trauma led me to a fend but I think

it did play a part in deliverable violence when I did a fend. Could we do with a bit of feminising of society to maybe make things easier for everyone? Has anyone got a thought on that? I would just like to recognise that you know putting yourself wholeheartedly into your therapeutic journey does make you a softer person. We do get soft, it does soften us. Thank you very much. Yeah, I mean the feminising of society, is that something we should all be striving for?

I mean, is softer automatically feminine? Well, I was very struck by the use of that word soft. And it made me think about vulnerability and whether girls and boys are kind of socialized differently around being vulnerable, about the language of vulnerability, about managing feeling needy and vulnerable and feeling scared. And I just think that it's really interesting the use of the word soft

because it also makes me think about hardness. Let's take a question from D-Wing. Hello, Gwen. I'd like to ask, are there forms of trauma that appear more often in prisoners? And if so, what are they? The studies of adverse childhood experiences in prisoners, of which there are several, including one in Wales from a couple of years ago, which suggested that 50%, five zero, 50% of prisoners in our prisons have experienced four or more kinds of childhood trauma, so which is massive, much more than the general community.

The kinds of trauma that are commonest are actually often to do with parental environments. So growing up in a home where people, with parents who are addicted, growing up with parents who are violent to each other. But the direct kinds of abuse that really seem to be associated with violence is physical abuse. Physical abuse has really a strong relationship

with becoming a perpetrator later, but the other one is neglect. And that's a really tricky one because neglect is not something that people remember. When you take a history from people, they often don't remember being neglected because the essence of neglect is that people are not interacting with you. The reason that that is dangerous is because if you are emotionally neglected, and I'm talking about emotional neglect, often these people can have shoes on feet and food on table, but if you're not interacted with,

if you're emotionally neglected, then it becomes very difficult to grow a strong sense of self. And if you don't feel real to yourself, other people don't seem terribly real to you either. And that allows violence to then happen much more easily because people will say, well, it didn't feel real. I was hitting him with this hammer and it just didn't seem real. It was like it was in a movie. How many people have I met who said it felt like I was in a movie. How many people have I met who've said it felt like I was in a movie? I think we've got a question here from G-Wing.

Yeah, my question was, can trauma also, does it depend on what kind of abuse you were subject to and can it also lead to positive things that you do in life? What an excellent question, thank you very much indeed. And the simple answer is yes. And this is why this whole area is so complicated, because there are many, many accounts of people who have experienced childhood adversity who have actually somehow been able to transform that into something positive. And that word transformation is really important, because I think we know that if we don't

transform our suffering, we will surely transmit it to somebody else. And the question is, is how some people are able to transform that pain into something creative? And there are lots of ideas about that. Sometimes people are lucky enough to find one person to attach to. Sometimes people are lucky enough to find one person to attach to. Sometimes people are lucky enough to find a group of people to attach to.

I saw some people who were in children's homes in Ireland where there was a lot of abuse and neglect by the staff in those homes. And some of those children survived well into adulthood because they formed a little group together to support each other even though they were only kids. Thank you very much. Let's take a question from the front now and again a G-Wing question and I'll start by asking what I'm asking everybody is why are you here? How did you come to be here? Well I came because I've basically committed crimes most of my life and been in and out

of prison. And to be honest, I never learned nothing in the other prisons I was in. I've been here three and a half months and it's the toughest three and a half months. I didn't think it was going to be this hard, but it's very hard. What's the hardest thing? You're in a group, 40 people or things you can relate to. You're rolling for the similar offenses. So hearing their traumas and their emotions and their ways of living, and I can relate to them, and them finding questions of me,

and I'm finding it difficult to answer some questions, because they are hard, and it's, you know, when the truth hurts, you say your truth hurts. So when something hits me that's truthful to me, it resonates with me me and it's hard to answer it. I've been asking you questions but you have a question for Gwen. What's the lasting damages of trauma and can you ever get over it?

The first half of your question, what are the lasting damages, I think we still don't know exactly what they are. There's lots of theories, as I was saying. We also don't know whether, if you've got early changes, are they changeable later on? I mean, I'm inclined to be optimistic about this, that probably more people are able to change than not. I think the capacity for changing your mind is pretty big. But as you were saying, it's a question of what it costs and whether people have the strength to do what it costs. But as you've been saying so eloquently, the truth really hurts.

The process can be really painful. That transformational process is hard. And that's why I believe so passionately in places like Grendan and that we need more and more places like Grendan for violence perpetrators because we need to help guys and women change their minds for the better. They're going to need more support not less. I don't often do this but I will because I happen to be chatting to a very interesting man who has been at Grendan for some time and is

poised to leave Grendan, who has stayed and who's done the work. Do you mind if I put you on the spot? Just tell us a little bit about, first of all, why are you here and when are you going and what do you leave with? I've been in Grendan six and a half years now. I came a broken man. I was traumatised. But not only was I broke inside, I came here to fix myself but also the little boy that was abused like many of us. Grendan gives you a platform to explore as much as you want but you can't do it on your own. I done it because I trusted the group of eight people, all for different, different offenses,

but I needed those people to change. I put my traumas out there and they work with me and vice versa, I work with them. So I had to go to some real dark places. And for me, the turning point for me was when I'd done a art therapy and that's where my journey really started. And what happens next? My next step is I'm going to a pipe unit.

It's a bit more relaxed there. It's my next step. Thank you very much. I'd like to come back to both of you, Olivia and Richard. So many people have said how much this matters. Why aren't there more Grendons? I think the reason there aren't more Grendons is because prisons have different purposes for different cohorts of prisoners. It's a very intensive program. Lots of people in prison wouldn't be ready for this type of intensive work. So you couldn't just make every prisoner Grendan because that wouldn't work either. So I think it's important that prisons should do the bit that they're

meant to do. Our job is this therapy and that's what we try and do as best we can. I was going to add actually that, yes, there are some really important outcomes of being in a place like Rendon. As a prison, people who previously behaved very violently in prisons behave in a very responsible way here. People change their views and outlook, but we have the luxury of being a relatively small and well-resourced establishment. Being able to replicate something like this health on a wider base is difficult for those reasons but as an outcome, the outcomes here I think are self evident. Yeah and Gwen just final word with you. For those who go through two, three, five, however

many years in this kind of intense introspection at a place like Grendan, is the rest of sometimes a five, seven, ten plus year sentence going to be easier or harder? I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer this, but my sense is that it may well make life easier because if you spent time here understanding yourself better, I think that an understanding what goes on in the minds of other people who are in a similar situation, I suspect that may equip you with some strengths for avoiding difficulties when you go back to a more one of the more chaotic prisons. And so you know how to make use of the strengths that you've learned here. So I actually think that even if you've got quite a bit of time still to do, you might be able to use it better. That is all that we have time for. It's been an absolutely riveting hour. Next week for the final

lecture of this series, we're going to be in Norway, a country which has a long and distinctive approach when thinking about criminal justice and in particular how it manages violent offenders. For now though a huge thank you for everybody who made it possible to come here and record this lecture at Grendan Prison. We really are very grateful and of course to our wreath lecturer Dr. Gwen Adzad. 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 and final talk of the series focuses on rehabilitation and whether violent minds can change. violent minds can change. Changing your mind means being ready to be uncertain about what you believe and know, and to take a chance on having a new thought, which may also be painful. Prisoners know that changing for the good means taking responsibility for what goes on in your mind as well as what you have done and how you might have deluded yourself. As one prisoner said to me recently, when you're in here you have to look at the truth about yourself and the truth hurts. I'm thinking now of Luke, a man who killed when he was high on drugs. He was probably mentally ill

at the time as well. He found participating in group therapy for people who had killed excruciating, to start with, saying, I felt so exposed. He ran away after the first session and told me he wouldn't consider going back, but a year or so later he has found the courage to rejoin. Over the four years I have known him, I have seen his mind change in the way he relates to others. From the silent, paranoid man who glowered at anyone who passed him, to becoming a warm man who supports others and who values the trust he feels able to place in them. Articulating how bitterly he regrets his offense has expanded his awareness of his human connections, his

victim and the family of his victim. family of his victim. Gwen Adzett is this year's BBC Reith lecturer. Look for her next talk in the days ahead on 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 slash ideas, where of course you can always get our podcast. The series was adapted for ideasas 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. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayd. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.