Ideas - The Reith Lectures #1: Is violence normal?

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

This month, IDEAS features the 2024 BBC's Reith Lectures by forensic psychiatrist Gwen Adshead. Her four lectures address pertinent questions she has faced in her career. To start, she asks if violence is a normal part of human life — whether we are all capable and tempted by violence — or whether it is an aberration in just some people. *The Reith Lectures originally aired on BBC Radio 4.

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This is a CBC Podcast. You are statistically most likely to kill or be killed by the person you are currently sleeping with. So be nice when you go home tonight. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayad. But it's rare for these tragic events to happen at all and perhaps that is why it is not unusual for people to assume that only an abnormal monster could inflict such dreadful damage on another person. But I no longer think this. Gwen Adzhead is a forensic psychiatrist.

She has spent a career trying to understand killers. Whenever I hear of some new and dreadful homicide, She has spent a career trying to understand killers. Whenever I hear of some new and dreadful homicide, I think, will we see that man in our hospital? Will he come to one of our therapy groups for people who've killed? Adzed is a consultant with the UK's National Health Service. Working with prisons and psychiatric hospitals across the UK's National Health Service. Working with prisons and psychiatric hospitals across the UK, she studies violent criminals and how they justify and reckon with their actions. We all have a capacity for cruelty. Any of us can experience, even briefly,

the wish to hurt others who have enraged or frightened us. She is the author of the book The Devil You Know, Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion. She is also this year's BBC Wreath lecturer. The Wreaths are the BBC's flagship lecture series. In four lectures, one from within a prison, Adset examines criminal violence in society. In her first lecture, she asks, is violence normal? Is the urge to commit harm something within all of us, or an aberration. But the fact that something is natural does not mean it is normal. Even chimpanzees have rules

about when they use violence within their groups and without. Introducing the first lecture from London is the BBC's Anita Onand. Hello and welcome to the first of the 2024 Reith Lectures from Broadcasting House in Central London. Please, will you put your hands together and welcome Dr. Gwen Adshed. When we met, when it was a big secret that you were doing the wreaths, and we were chatting

about some of the work you've done, you refer to every offender that you had come across as either Mr. so-and-so or Mrs. so-and-so or Miss so-and-so. It was a formality that I'd expect if someone was in the room but you do it all the time. Why do you do that? Well I think the word formality is kind of key to your question because I think the work that we do, all forensic psychiatrists and psychotherapists, anyone who's meeting and assessing perpetrators of violence, the work is formal and it's serious and I think using people's titles is an important part of conveying something of the seriousness of what is happening, of the kind of conversations. And I also think that it is respectful and I think that that respect is important because the process of justice in which we're involved is a respectful

one and a respectable one. So that seems to me to be important. There are some people there who will say that those who perpetrate the most heinous acts of brutality and violence, the kind of cases that you see, forfeit their right to respect. Victims of crime for example say you know what about us? What about our respect? Well I feel very strongly that the rights of victims and the rights of perpetrators are not a kind of zero-sum game. That it is possible to be respectful of victims who have suffered, suffered terribly, and also to be respectful of the pain and experiences of perpetrators of violence. And I think it's a mistake to see them as either or.

perpetrators of violence and I think it's a mistake to see them as either or. Well, I think that is enough for me for now. I would very much like to welcome you now to deliver our asked to give the 2024 Wreath Lectures. I have to admit that when I received this invitation over a lovely lunch, I was grateful for my long experience in keeping my face neutral while hearing something you weren't expecting to hear. I found myself reminded of a patient in Broadmoor who spent one session telling me about his experience of having to

dispose of what he thought was a dead body. I remember nodding away as he detailed the struggle of trying to roll it up in a carpet and dragging it out of the room as if I too was entirely au fait with such problems. I also remember trying hard not to say hooray when the patient recounted how he had the fright of his life when his victims suddenly recovered consciousness and started to fight back I Intend no disrespect to the controller of radio for when I say that as he spoke I was reminded of that highly unusual conversation. I Might have appeared to have been politely nodding away, but

inside I was facing a new and unanticipated challenge. How to roll up all I've learned about human violence in nearly 40 years as a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and then both summarize it and make it come alive in four lectures for smart and serious people. However, my memory of that conversation and some others like it prompted a possible way forward. In general, when facing an unusual and daunting task, it's often a good idea to divide it into manageable parts. So I decided to focus these Reith lectures on the four questions that I've been most commonly asked about

when I discuss my work as a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Human violence is a subject that raises many questions about which most people have a view. Is violence the same as evil? Is violence caused by trauma? And what can we do about it anyway? These are the questions that I will explore in my lectures. But I want to begin with one of the most common questions, which is whether it is normal for

humans to be violent. Reported violence dominates our public media. So it is an understandable question and one that many different academic disciplines have studied from different perspectives. I can only speak from the perspective of the forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist who assesses and treats violence perpetrators in the criminal justice system, especially those who are thought to be mentally unwell. I therefore draw on my experience of studying violence in ordinary communities in peacetime.

I focus especially on family violence, abuse and homicide, not because other forms of violence are not important, but because most of my work, either as a therapist or court-appointed expert, has been with these kind of perpetrators. It's usual for lecturers about violence to offer a content warning. And I shall use a quote by one of our earliest psychologists, possibly better known as a playwright. This is from Hamlet. So shall you hear of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts, of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning

and forced cause. This quote from Hamlet articulates the first question, is human violence unnatural? Primate research with chimpanzees and baboons finds that these animals use violence against each other. Given that we share 98% of our DNA with these group animals it might seem safe to assume that violence is in our nature. But the fact that something is natural does not mean it is normal. Even chimpanzees have rules about when they use violence in their social relationships within their groups and without. And we should notice how a 2% difference in genetic makeup

makes for huge and significant differences in actions and relationships. As my dear father used to say, there are some similarities between a grizzly bear and a teddy bear but the differences are much much more important. I wonder if we tend to normalise violence because we know somewhere deep down that we all have a capacity for cruelty, any of us can experience, even briefly, the wish to hurt others who have enraged or frightened us. I'm sure you don't need any convincing. The fact that narratives of murder and cruelty have fascinated us for thousands of years and continue to do so

is evidence of our awareness of this capacity. Greek tragedies, true crime, the enduring appeal of crime fiction. As one of my patients in our homicide group observed, every night on TV you can watch a story of murder. Forensic psychiatrists are asked by courts to explore unusual acts of extreme violence and cruelty that seem to have no meaning or rational purpose to them and give an opinion as to whether mental illness could explain that violence. What I have learned is that it is illuminating to listen to what perpetrators say about such unusual actions.

The details of the bloody act are less interesting to me than its meaning and effects for victim, perpetrator, and those around them. I see my role as that of the naturalist, observing the unusual and the unknown, keeping my eyes, ears and above all my mind open. I hope that it is obvious that attempting to understand violence in this way is not the same as excusing violence. Rather, it is my firm belief that listening to what perpetrators say about what they have done may offer insights into potential interventions for violence reduction and prevention.

It is because violence can be bloody and dreadful that we must take it seriously and be willing to go deeper into the darkness of it to try and understand what is being communicated. One consequence of our fascination with violence is that we risk making assumptions about it, that it is all the same kind of behaviour and that it is committed by monsters with strange and alien purposes, wholly other than us, with minds that are preoccupied only and always with violence. Let's go back to the man who mistakenly thought he had killed someone. He faced a common problem for those who have committed a crime, how to get rid of the evidence. There is naturally

no manual for this and at that time there was no internet to consult. I suspect and hope that even now there is no handy video for body disposal, even on the dark web. He discovered that a human body is too heavy to move alone, and he told me how he had been forced to consider decapitation in order to make his task easier. He then considered how messy this might be and how it might cause further problems. You can see now the absurdity of my nodding along as he talked. My point here is that this man did not relish his task, nor did he have a dark and obscure motive for contemplating dismemberment.

obscure motive for contemplating dismemberment. He had a practical problem to solve, which reminded me of a reported interview with Dennis Nielsen, who killed several people and consigned their body parts to the drains. Mr. Nielsen commented that he was taken aback to find that the public seemed more shocked by what he had done to the bodies than the fact that he had killed in the first place. He was the son of a butcher and dismemberment of the body was a horrible but practical solution to a major problem. And I am also reminded of a man who had done something similar but found it hard to recall in therapy, saying to me, I can't imagine being the kind of person who would do such a thing.

Few of us can. Which takes me to my next point, that there is no such thing as a typical killer. Human violence takes different forms. Gang violence is different to domestic violence, and neither of these automatically lead to homicide. Homicide is different in different contexts, in its meaning and in its prevalence. It has a finality to it that changes the universe. As the Talmud puts it,

whoever takes one life takes the world entire. We are lucky to live in a country whose homicide rate is way below the global average and in the UK, homicide is a statistically rare event. In the year end for March 2023, there were 534 homicides in England and Wales and 52 in Scotland, the lowest numbers for some time, and consistent with the general decline in violence over the last 30 years. But of course, the rarity of some events is no indicator of how important they are. And each of those numbers represents a shattering catastrophe for a family. The apparently good news about falling homicide rates is no comfort to those bereaved by murder. As I write this, I am only too aware of news reports of deaths that will undoubtedly increase

this year's homicide statistics, and I fear there will be more to come. I am reminded to a four-dice Maxwell's piece he wrote at the time of the Dunblane massacre that homicide forces survivors to live in two worlds a world of apparently ordinary function and an inner world of pain and chaos that same torment can also be true of those bereaved by homicide who were also the perpetrators of that homicide. People who've killed parents, siblings and children while mentally ill. Their mental illness made them see their loved ones in a distorted light and when their vision clears They may be overwhelmed by grief and shock

Some even develop post-traumatic stress disorder in response to their own violence Some colleagues in the USA set up a therapy group for these people and we did something similar in the hospital where I work. What we have learned so far from running these groups is that each perpetrator's story is different and that the factors that can lead to a killing are multiple and complex. I'm reminded of another case I was consulted on involving a man who had killed in highly unusual circumstances. His loyal and loving wife was quoted as pleading for understanding, saying, He's not an ordinary killer.

But I am now doubtful that there is such a thing as an ordinary killing. It is true that the Home Office used to somewhat oversimplify homicides by categorising them as either normal or abnormal in terms of motive. Normal refers to those killings where the motive seems to make some kind of human sense, those familiar human emotions like greed for money, feelings of rejection and jealousy, the wish for revenge, or a substance-fuelled quarrel. The abnormal homicides are those where the motive is obscure to those investigating or judging.

In only a few cases will mental illness seem to explain the killing and this is unusual. It looks as though people with severe mental illness account for only 5.3% of recorded violence. It's also important to note that being found mentally ill at the time of a homicide does not automatically mean you will be found to be less responsible and even if you are thought to be less responsible you may still be sent to prison. Interestingly in prison it is not usually the homicide perpetrators who struggle most with mental disorder and distress.

It is the non-violent majority of prisoners, typically young men and women on short sentences with addiction and family breakdown issues, who struggle most and are at high risk of suicide. who struggle most and are at high risk of suicide. The rarity of homicide does not minimise its importance, but rather should make us more curious about it, not less. Even the apparently rational or normal motives only make sense at the most superficial level.

If you want to make money, homicide is a high risk, high cost strategy, which rarely works out well. In most socio-democratic countries like ours, homicides happen because of some kind of intense relational and personal disturbance. It is salutary to think that you are statistically most likely to kill or be killed by the person you are currently sleeping with. So be nice when you go home tonight.

But it's rare for these tragic events to happen at all. And perhaps that is why it is not unusual for people to assume that only an abnormal monster could inflict such dreadful damage on another person. But I no longer think this. Whenever I hear of some new and dreadful homicide I think, will we see that man in our hospital? Will he come to one of our therapy groups for people who've killed? What is there to know about the killing that may explain what he did and could help us try and reduce his future risk to others? One thing we know is that strong emotions, both positive and negative,

influence violence risk, especially in a relational context. Cast your mind back to the summer and the weeks before the finals of the Euros, when all sorts of emotions ran high. Hope, suspense, anxiety, frustration, alcohol use soars and apparently so do rates of domestic violence. A charity called Women's Aid cited evidence that men's violence to their wives and partners went up by 38% if their team loses, as if abusers expel their frustration and disappointment from their minds onto the bodies of others. But Women's Aid also claimed that men's violence increases

by 26% if their team wins. This data may just be a reminder that alcohol intoxication is one of the most potent risk factors for violence, but it also raises a question about the absence of the capacity for joy in the lives of men who hurt women, such that not even their team's success makes them feel better. What other risk factors for fatal violence do we need to think about? I first heard this question described in metaphorical terms of a numeric combination bicycle lock, where each number is a risk factor that may be present,

but is not sufficient alone to unlock the violence. Only when enough risk factors are present can the last factor click in to complete the combination and unleash the violence. Many of those risk factors are going to be social ones. Lack of job opportunity, rigid beliefs about gender role and family conflict. But that final number that unlocks the violence can be different for each person. It could be as random as an offhand comment, a smile, an action perceived as a threat, a paranoid state of mind, or even a football result. Whatever it is, what is unleashed is often a hock-sai wave of emotion

that overwhelms the perpetrator and distorts how they see everything and everyone, especially the victim. How we see other people in our mind's eye, as it were, can influence how we justify hurting other people. There's an odd pop-art picture, the artist of which I don't know, which has a magnified eye with a tear running out of it, and the text reads, We all want to be good people. This is absolutely true to my experience. I don't think I've ever met anyone who told me they set out to be bad. Rather, violence perpetrators usually have a story

which both justifies and excuses their violence, what has been called a neutralisation discourse. A perpetrator can blame the victim, he started it, claim that they only did what others do, normalising, minimising the harm done to the victim, blaming their circumstances. I was drunk. Sometimes they end up talking about their own victim experience. You don't know what I've been through.

In other words, they identify their own bicycle lock numbers. They normalise their own violence, try to make it understandable. They do not wish to be seen as monsters, but as people who felt they had no choice. This analysis is rarely true. Much of the work I do as a therapist is to help people come to see and accept that they did have a choice. This is a theme I will return to in a later lecture but at this point I am noting that violence perpetrators often

struggle to make sense of what they have done. I have met the odd person who says flatly, I killed them it's over so what? But even then, they will want to argue that they had their reasons and they are not monsters. In our homicide groups, people usually begin by discussing what I've come to think of as their cover story about why they killed, usually something that's been developed during their trial. Our group therapy process helps these men to revisit and dismantle that story, gradually going deeper into their accountability and their guilt for what

they have done. Eventually each man comes to describe how they came to kill, including the ways in which they convinced themselves that the killing was inevitable. By the time the people leave the group, they usually understand how normalizing killing as a solution made it more possible, and that they are now responsible for keeping themselves mentally well, and that they must in future try and see other people free of distorted narratives.

I'm thinking now of Jack who strangled his mother when he was mentally ill. He still seemed very unwell at the time he came to our Thursday group, and we guessed that being there was unsettling for him. But one day after another member had been talking about his regrets about the past, he said abruptly, I wish I could say sorry to my mum for what I did. I know I was mentally ill, but I wish I could say how sorry I was and that she could forgive me. I hope she understands how much I regret it."

What was remarkable about this reflection was Jack's awareness of his sense of responsibility, although at trial he had been deemed not fully responsible because of his mental illness. Not only did he feel responsible, he was also seriously sad. Notice too his use of the present tense in relation to his mother's mind, which suggests that he is not done grieving for her. It has been listening to men like Jack that made me realise that people who kill were not mindless monsters who'd been born to kill or who had murderousness running through their minds

like a black thread in a complex carpet. More often, they seemed to be people like myself, who struggle with shame and guilt and other normal human emotions. Yes, he had done something terrible which had changed his life, his identity and his family forever. But he had not been a violent person all his life and his fatal attack on his mother came out of the blue. He was an ordinary man who had done an extraordinary thing and many homicide perpetrators are like this.

That devoted wife I mentioned earlier was trying to make this exact point. Her husband was an ordinary loving man and his homicidal cruelty was not all he was. For both men, their violence was a dreadful and distorted communication from one human to another. 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.ideas.

Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayaad. 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. This year's Wreath lectures focus on violence and what drives people to cause harm to others. In this talk, Gwen Adzett, forensic psychiatrist with the NHS in the UK, asks the question, is violence normal? Is the urge to cause harm a quirk of some or a deeply buried part of all of us? From London, here's the second part of the talk,

followed by a Q&A with the BBC's Anita Anand. I'm coming to the close of this first talk. I've made two arguments. First, that violence is not normal for humans, especially fatal violence. And second, that by normal for humans, especially fatal violence, and second, that by normalising violence, we risk failing to understand the complexity of the motives and circumstances that make a person see violence as their only option.

I passionately believe that if we want to reduce or prevent violence, we need to understand all its causes and risk factors. What makes it start? What allows the risk to grow? And then by allowing people to tell their stories to understand the final numbers that can unlock that human capacity for cruelty and destructiveness. Denigrating, othering and calling perpetrators monsters does nothing to decrease risk and may even make the problem worse, either because it gives perpetrators a kind of awful status that may excite some people to further violence or because it dehumanizes perpetrators in ways that mirror what

they did to their victims. We ask our criminal courts to examine allegations of violence, determine guilt and also pass sentence on behalf of us all. The passing of that sentence represents our social condemnation of violence based on the social contract that when one of us is injured we are all injured. I'm here to argue that comprehending and interpreting violence is part of our daily lives as citizens, and it is our duty to take that seriously. But I think we won't be able to do this

if we oversimplify human violence and write off everyone who has killed or stalked or abused a child as a mindless monster stuck in the malignant aspect of social media forever as if no one ever changed their minds for the better. I understand, I think we all understand how monstering people is one way to deal with rage and fear. These are human emotions that victims and perpetrators of violence share. We say that perpetrators need to manage those emotions but so do we all have a responsibility not to get into a state of mind that might be called cruel and unusual. What kinds of minds these are is the question

for my next lecture. Thank you. I'd very much like to hear from anybody here in this audience if they have been the victim of crime. Hi, I'm Jo Early, I'm Chief Exec of SAM National Support After Murder and Manslaughter and I've very much come with my own experience of my son. You know, we have 5,000 homicide- bereaved people on our books that we support every year as members and about 28 to 30% of those cases are fatal domestic abuse cases where we see a history of violence and where families can make some sort of sense of what's happened because there is a history of violence there but it's those out of the blue cases where the bereaved families have a real hard time making sense of it. So I guess what I'm asking is,

how can bereaved families make sense of those out of the blue cases when there's no warning sign, no history of violence at all? Thank you very much. Well, what I'm going to say is not going to be of much comfort to you, which is that I'm not sure that you can make sense of them. I think that these kind of events are cosmic disasters. They are catastrophes and they change people's lives forever.

And I sometimes worry a little bit that the language of trauma work always wants to move people to something called closure. And I think that there are some kinds of life changing catastrophe that you get on with rather than get over. And I don't know that you can make sense of them, not least of all because the perpetrators of those kinds of homicide can barely make sense of them themselves.

And therefore we lack a kind of joint narrative to put words to the unspeakable. Can I just get your thoughts on that, the person who asked the question, do you recognise that characterisation of not getting over it? We don't say at SAM National, you never get over it,

you learn to live alongside it. Can I just say very, very sorry never get over it, you learn to live alongside it. Can I just say very very sorry for your loss and thank you very much for your question. Thank you. There's a microphone there, a gentleman at the back and then we're going to come to some of the questions at the forest of hands going up. Yes first we'll you sir. My name is Julian Hendy, I run the 100 families charity, we support families after mental health related homicides. My father was killed in 2007 by a man with severe schizophrenia who we'd never met before. Four days before he killed my dad his family were raising serious concerns about deterioration in his mental health which weren't attended to. We see lots of

families, often there are lots of warning signs beforehand and people are not getting the help they need. Families are crying out for assistance. Gwen said that she talks to perpetrators to try and get improvements or interventions. What we see is that people don't seem to be learning from these cases. Are people learning from these homicides? Thank you very? Because I don't think they are. I think it's difficult to overstate the degradation of mental health services in the last 10 years. The availability of services for people

who are acutely mentally unwell, the hoops that people have to jump through, and the ever more elaborate reasons that mental health teams seem to find for saying no to people but they're saying no because they don't have the resources and also because we've lost quite a lot of people who used to work on the front line in mental health there's a kind of pressure I think to turn people away.

Hi Gwen, I'm Joanna Davie. It's very clear that when you're in the room with somebody, you have incredible presence of mind, such grace and compassion. I'm interested to know what you draw on within yourself to have that grace, to have that space, to have that compassion. Thank you. What's most important to me is that understanding that we may be more alike than we are different and that if circumstances were different, I myself might find myself to be a violence perpetrator. I also feel very strongly that that potential for cruelty

is there, present in all of us. And that enables me I think it supports me to try and get alongside the people I work with. Doctors go where the pain is and that's an important motivator for me. Could you take a question here? Hello I'm David Munro I'm the chair of Why Me, which is a charity which campaigns for more restorative justice. Restorative justice, those who don't know,

is where the victim or the victim's family get together with the harmer to try and advance both sides on their journey of rehabilitation. And that's what we campaign for. In your professional experience, restorative justice, is that a good vital part of the armoury that you have at your disposal to make things better for the victim and the perpetrator? Yeah, absolutely. It's always been, where possible, a part of the work that we do

in the hospital that I work in, and it's certainly part in the prison where I work still and The evidence for the helpfulness of restorative justice is very clear We're speaking of restorative justice Jacob Dunn is in the audience. I can see you Jacob You were convicted of manslaughter after killing James Hodkinson after a night out With a single punch and you went to prison and you went through the restorative justice process. Can you tell us what that was like as somebody who had caused such pain and injury to the family? You know we've heard from some of the families here who've described what that's like. So as you've alluded to I threw a single punch an impulsive punch for no reason and

I've battled with Why I threw that punch for the last 14 years And But I Neutralized you taught in your lecture today about minimalizing, making excuses. It's difficult to think about the worst things we've done in our lives because it's shameful and we don't know how to deal with it because we don't create environments or cultures or relationships that allow people to talk about difficult things in a safe space.

And the way that we deal with people doing bad things is to treat them like they're bad people. But I was demonized forever. I could see no way out. And I made lots of excuses. Oh, I only threw one punch. How unlucky am I? My mate snitched on me. You know, there's all these different reasons that other people, my fellow prisoners, we all used to reinforce each of his justifications to not take responsibility. And prison by design strips you of all responsibility anyway. You don't make any choices for yourself. You get told when to eat, when to wake up, what to do. So I get out of prison worse, more normalized to violence. I'm exposed to violence every day I'm in prison.

And I'm more angry. I'm looking for other people to blame for how I feel because I haven't learned growing up the emotional literacy skills to express how I feel as a man. And then I hear from the victims of my offence, the mum offence to mum and dad David and Joan of James and they Found the courage and the curiosity which is something that's been touched on a little bit here to go who is Jacob Why did he do that? Yes, originally they wanted me to spend longer in prison They petitioned for longer in prison but what they realized is what their actual needs were was to express the harm that had been caused and to ask me questions that I was the only person that had answers to those questions.

And I took part in that process and I was able to deal with my shame through a two and a half year process and come out the other side when we now campaign together to raise awareness that one punch can kill, to raise awareness that restorative justice is a very good intervention to use to resolve conflict and we should be doing it at a much earlier stage. So my question is, is shaming people a useful way of reducing, in reducing violence? No. It's very straightforward. Making people feel bad about themselves doesn't improve their chances of rehabilitation. It actually decreases them.

And the irony is that we have some excellent work from the States that shows us very clearly that shame is a powerful driver for violence. So actually shaming people more is unwise and isn't going to help us. We were just hearing about prison, that it strips you of all responsibilities. The prisons minister here with us, I hope you don't mind me putting you on the spot. But do you recognise Lord Timpson, that characterisation of prisons, not helping at all? In too many cases, yes. I've been visiting prisons for over 20 years

and I've seen some incredible people who turn round their lives and lots of people who arrived broken and came out even more broken. So I think what we need to do is to help people overcome the problems that they came into prison with, the trauma that they have suffered in their lives, the problems with addiction, poverty. There are so many issues that we need to help these people with. And if you look at what's happening in prisons

at the moment, violence, prisoner on prisoner, is up. Prisoner on staff is up. So I have a long to-do list and I am very aware that we're dealing with the most complex people in the country in a system that is the most complex system. But these people need help because virtually all of them are going to come out on the streets one day and we want them to be normal law-abiding people who form loving relationships. Gwen you've got the prisons minister here, what should he be doing? We're all here for the night are we? Just checking. I'm very pleased to hear you talk about taking perpetrators

and their perpetrators of violence and crime seriously. It is only by taking them seriously that we are going to be able to work out what it is that we need to do. And there will be a different range of things for different people. It's not a one size fits all. Okay. Yeah, hi. My name's Shelton Thomas and I'm a consultant for Gangs Line Limited.

We're an organization that deals with organized criminal networks and street gangs. I was part of a leading gang. Nine of my friends were shot dead. The people that shot my friends dead had no dads. My friends had no dads. I had a dad but I didn't have a dad if that makes sense. One of the things I want to know is why are we afraid to address the elephant in the room? Because most violence that happens in the UK, in the Caribbean and in America is committed by men who grow up not understanding how to deal with emotions.

I haven't met a man in prison that has had a good relationship with their dad, so why is it we're afraid to address the elephant in the room? Well, you've brought the elephant, it's here, we're looking at it all together. Is that...? Am I the elephant? No, you're not. I absolutely agree with you. What I'm concerned about I guess is where we find these opportunities as I say to intervene. Children and young

people wait for interventions. It really is so different to how it used to be. Family guidance clinics that were around when I was training, none of those exist and therapists who are ready and able to work with angry boys, angry and sad boys, where are they? Steve Gallant is here. So you were convicted of murder and you received a life sentence for killing Barry Jackson in 2005. And people may be thinking, I know this name, I know the name Steve Steve Gallant that's because you were in the news again after the terror attack at Fishmongers Hall where you were one of the people who memorably grabbed a

narwhal tusk and fought off an attacker. Have you been rehabilitated? Well a lot of my work happened in the prison system. So I spent a long, long time analysing my violence and where it came from. And I would say that I was rehabilitated before London Bridge. And it's indeed why I was invited there in the first place. So I did a lot of work there in the prison system.

But I'd like to ask a question, actually, Gwen. Understanding my violence, it was clear that my environment and my upbringing was key to that. But my brother was also raised in the same environment. However, he wasn't violent like me. He wasn't using violence to resolve issues. So there were other factors at play. I did read later on that the structure of the brain, the resting heart rate, the things we eat can impact us. So, but I never saw any of that in the courses or in the understanding inside the present system. So I wonder, are we missing something? And if we are, what can we do about that? That's an excellent question. Thank you. And it's something that I'm going to talk about in my

third lecture. But I will just say briefly that I think that complexity of childhood development is really important to think about Because so many perpetrators of violence have experienced Chronic victimization in childhood and yet we know it's possible to suffer chronic victimization and not go down a violence route These are kind of complexities that are still completely open for exploration. We have run out of time. May I say there are so many hands still up who wanted to ask questions and I'm sorry we didn't get round to everybody.

Thank you to everyone who has asked a question. Next time we're going to be in Dundee for the second of Dr. Adzhead's series where Gwen is going to be asking is there any such thing as evil but for now thank you to our audience here in London a huge thank you though to our Reith lecturer Dr. Gwen Adzhead. 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 concept of evil and whether there is any rational explanation for actions of cruelty or violence. 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 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. 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 slash ideas, where of course you can always get our podcast. This series was adapted for ideas by Matthew Lason-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.