10. Opening a Space for Hope in a Landscape of Despair

The concept of hope is not often evident in public or professional discourses on child sexual offenders—the language of pathology, evil, or risk management more often to the fore. If you consider the lives of the “residents” of Coalinga Mental Hospital in California,¹ you gain a sense of how little real hope darkens the door of this and other regimes of containment and treatment for men who have perpetrated child sexual offenses. Explanatory theories of child sexual offending offer the personality of the perpetrator or gendered relations of power and control as the main protagonists; medico-legal paradigms or the feminist alternative provide the relevant evidence for such perspectives. Within medico-legal perspectives, the identity of the perpetrator is recast as a new species of pedophilic being, while the gender alternative offers all men as possible suspects.² Within such a context, the search for meaning seems almost as futile as hope is the domain of the “naïve.” But within this context, my work in relation to trauma and violence, love and abuse takes place.

It is impossible to discuss men who have sexually offended without referring to the children and young people whom they have abused; however, the primary focus of this chapter is my work with men who have perpetrated such offenses. That work is influenced by and, in turn, influences my therapeutic work with individuals who have experienced sexual violence and sexual abuse in childhood. In some cases, the man who has perpetrated the abuse has also experienced trauma and abuse at another time in his life.

This chapter illuminates the varying influences on my trauma and violence work with men who have perpetrated sexual abuse against minors—an area of professional activity that is conducted under the gaze of an ever-vigilant and concerned public and professional community. An ethic of social justice informs this work. I also point to a number of ways in which a social constructionist perspective enhances my practice. The first part of the chapter focuses on the theoretical underpinnings, philosophical influences, and personal inspirations on my work; the second part illuminates some of the practice ideas.

My mother was a central character in my life. Formally uneducated but with an insight into the human condition that none could teach, I, the first of her five children, was to be the benefactor of a depth of wisdom that flowed effortlessly as she and my father coached their five children from childhood to adulthood in an Ireland that was undergoing great social change. Here, the lessons that I now see as resonating with social constructionist thought began: Rules are manmade and meant to be questioned; never judge a book by its cover; never underestimate the power of the human spirit; trust your instinct, but always remember that your “view” is not the only one; do not fear those in authority, such as doctors and clergy, and never take as “gospel” what they tell you; doing what you think is right often involves risks (of rebuttal or rejection); tread gently for life is difficult. Within the parameters of this humble working-class enclave, I learned “to avoid isolation” and “refuse indifference” (Weingarten, 2007: 15) and that by doing so lives and worlds can change. In these early years, I also learned the importance of having allies in life, people who were interested in standing with me in solidarity as I navigate the journey that is my life.

I am currently employed as an academic at the School of Applied Social Science, University College Dublin. While most of my teaching involves masters students of social work, I also teach modules to undergraduate students on a range of perspectives relating to crime and the “justice” system. In moving into academia from practice as a systemic and forensic psychotherapist and formerly as a social worker, I committed myself to responding to former clients and their families, should they ever need to consult me in the future. This work, alongside some organizational consultations, keeps the practice side of my professional life strong but not overwhelming. My research and practice also involves Roman Catholic clerical men who have perpetrated sexual abuse against minors,³ and this work has brought me into dialogue with many Catholic clergy and Church leaders and into witnessing some of the practices that are involved in the institution that is the Roman Catholic Church. In 1996, I was one of three people who set up a community-based program in Dublin for individuals who experienced sexual abuse in childhood and for those men⁴ who had committed such offenses (and both sets of families). In recent years, influenced by the failure of current practices that divide individuals into victims/offenders, good/bad, and innocent/guilty, and the socially sanctioned marginalization and oppression that results from such dichotomies, I have turned my attention to attempts to find other more useful ways forward in the area of sexual trauma and violence work, partly influenced by ideas of justice (Sandel, 2009) and based on restorative and redemptive principles.

My primary training as a social scientist, later as a social worker, and later still as a systemic and forensic psychotherapist, equipped me with the intellectual skills to undertake my professional life and to evolve and expand my intellectual horizons over what is now a period of more than thirty years. The myriad clients whose lives intertwined with mine gave shape to that learning, teaching me the small but important lessons in what it means to be a compassionate and courageous worker. In translating compassion and courage into activities that fight against isolation and indifference and work on behalf of inclusion and concern, I learned to welcome folks, to be hospitable, to avoid labels, to be humble but not self-effacing, to lead and be led, to listen carefully to what people said, to honor silence, to be skeptical of certainty, and to take risks⁵ (Foucault, 2001: 11–24). The more I learned about clients’ lives the more the distinctions between “us” and “them” became increasingly untenable. “They” were “us” and “we” were “them”—connected by more than what divided us. This became increasingly clear when both worker and client managed to “show up”⁶ and particularly when the dialogue moved to the sphere of hopes, dreams, values, and intentions for life.

Speaking and writing about these reflections in relation to my work with men who have committed sexual offenses, and in suggesting that the distinctions between “us” and “them” are far thinner than many would care to accept, has indeed drawn its own caste of critics and skeptics. Beyond the accusation of my “naivety” or the suggestion of their “manipulation”—marking me out as another of their victims—I am invited by the literature and the academy to take certain stances that will help me become a “good” and “effective” social worker and psychotherapist.

I am invited to listen for difference rather than similarity, especially with men whose behavior is universally abhorred and whose personhood is recast as embodied evil. I am invited to pit the innocence of childhood against the guilt of adulthood and to render invisible the adult-child as though the abusive adult never had childhood. I am invited to privilege “behavior” and ignore “intention,” and if intention must be noticed, one melody must apply—“bad action always speaks to bad intention.” I am invited to punctuate my conversations with men who have perpetrated violence and abuse with invitations to responsibility, but I am to ignore the manner in which violence and abuse get replicated by the very social processes and therapeutic practices designed to prevent and treat them in the first instance, such as when individual identities are reduced to descriptions of “abuse perpetrator” or when men who were once abusive are run out of their homes or their country [as happens in Ireland] without so much as a peep from the political caste, religious elite, human rights defenders, or the psy-professionals, all of whose silences serve to condone such practices. Ultimately, I am invited to correct, discipline, and punish through socially sanctioned “corrective” and “therapeutic” measures, by keeping the gaze on this therapeutic “other.” By means of community management of such subjects who become objects, I am invited to believe that I am behaving ethically. In navigating such terrain, social constructionism has been an ally.

As I reflect back on my introduction to social constructionism proper, three important forces came together in the early 1980s and one in more recent times to sway my life and work in that direction: my work as a probation and welfare officer⁷ in a Dublin prison, my training as a systemic therapist in the first family therapy program in Ireland, and my introduction to the narrative work of Michael White. The more recent influence has come through my meetings with Art Fisher who runs a program in Nova Scotia for responding to love, hurt, and violence in families.⁸

While the work in the prison offered humbling evidence of embodied resilience and marginalized despair in the men whose lives had taken them into confinement, my systemic training offered a questioning site of much new learning. Foucault’s (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which combined both, had a profound and lasting effect— taking its place alongside Goffman’s (1961) Asylums, C. Wright Mills’s (2000 [1959]) The Sociological Imagination, and Virginia Axline’s (1990[1947]) Dibs in Search of Self. These texts would be returned to again and again. Run by Imelda McCarthy, Nollaig Byrne, and Philip Kearney of the Fifth Province Associates,⁹ the systemic family therapy training program also provided support and challenge as my exposure to the philosophy of social constructionism took hold. Imelda and Nollaig, who were to become lifelong friends and mentors, were also unknowingly to become the guardians of my new social constructionist and systemic home, as I learned to witness and meet with imprisoned men and those who loved them. The work of Michael White led me to consider the multiple meanings of “imprisonment” and the “life sentences” imposed by Western psychiatric practices. Having worked in adolescent and adult psychiatry, I developed skepticism towards the promises offered by psychiatric practices, for example as pathways to liberation from emotional pain, which contrasted with the stigmatized identities and side-effects of medication that often came instead. I learned that diagnostic classification systems are instruments of power that mask the power relations involved in their very construction (Foucault, 1991, 2004). I concluded that diagnostic classification systems served interests other than those of the so diagnosed.

All of these experiences compelled a professional coming-of-age and a wake-up call from which there was no return. Going forward, all taken-for-granted ideas and truths, particularly in the human sciences, became “truth in parentheses” and just one version. No longer could truth claims in the social sciences be accepted as outside of the context of their creation (Foucault, 1991, 2004), which included the sphere of influence of vested interests, ideology, and power relations. Going forth, all taken-for-granted truths in the “soft” sciences would have to be deconstructed and challenged, in the name of ethical practice, and any suggestion that certainty or truth could be arrived at through “scientific” methods, “objective” instruments, and “objective” researchers was no longer acceptable. Grand theory would have to be “held lightly” (McCarthy, 2002). In its place came my interest in the omnipresence of power, ideology, and emotion and the influence of this trio on the creation of knowledge and on how human beings live. I also became interested in the power of language and in the stories that get told and that people tell about themselves and their lives. It was also during this time that I committed myself anew to working with the people who sought my help rather than on them. I decided that the only way forward was to offer with-ness work (Shotter, 2005), with those imprisoned men whose life met with mine, rather than aboutness-work or on-ness work that engaged the men as object-subjects. I also committed myself to joining with the individuals who consulted me in the search for meaning. My belief and subsequent experience was that in the creation of such conversational and human meetings that lives and worlds can change.

Acknowledging that no one life represents a linear event and that the complexity of the inspirational factors on one’s life cannot easily be narrated in a simple linguistic representation, my understanding of the period described above and the confluence of factors that came together during this time is that they were to determine and influence the course of my professional life and have continued to do so until today.

Since my introduction to social constructionism, several of its core ideas are always close at hand to disturb complacency in my work and in my life, acting as propellers against indifference. That is the thing about social constructionism—used as critique it disturbs everything! It moves the “subscriber” from the security of foundational knowledge of human phenomena, to the uncertainty of a multiplicity of truths; it questions essentialist notions of interior self (with all its ramifications for emotion, gender, race, and ability), in its place giving birth to a narrative self, created through dialogue; it exposes traditional visible power practices based on intentional oppression, top-down violence, and social control over people as only one expression, and instead construes modern power practices as invisible and omnipresent, manifest in the social control that is exercised through normative practices and normative surveillance. Following Foucault (1991, 2004), social constructionism establishes a link between power and the creation of knowledge, destabilizing the hegemony of certainty in the social and human sciences and rendering somewhat inane those scientific discourses that proclaim objectivity in methods and interpretations.

In this context, social scientific disciplines, unhappy with the current “soft” status, see the production of empirical “data” on individuals, preferably achieved by means of the gold standard, randomized, controlled trials, as evidence of their worthiness for membership of the elusive “pure” science club (Seto, 2005; Seto et al., 2008). The language of evidence-based is used in this aspiring new “science.”

Measuring and categorizing individuals and subjects in a manner that reduces them to objects or numbers renders invisible the power relations that are at play in these consensus-building exercises that emerge in the name of science. Measured and judged as pathological objects, the social impact of this new “science” and its “findings” on the individuals so evaluated is rarely the subject of “empirical” or reflective evaluation. The aspiring “new” scientists who call for evidence-based answers to the problems of living and for outcome studies as the only reasonable measure of worthiness for all that we do, are rarely seen to debate and evaluate the social and political “effects” of their work and pronouncements on the individuals and groups who are caught in their web of influence. The men in Coalinga again come to mind. While I am not arguing against the importance of empirical and large-scale research into sexual abuse and violence, including that which is grounded in positivist thought, I am arguing for reflexivity and critical approaches to all that we do in our practices in the social sciences. It is here that the philosophy that is social constructionism offers sanctity and respite, giving a critical edge to research and therapeutic practice by providing distance from essentialist notions, totalizing descriptions and the lure of “objectivity” by instead putting “reality” in parentheses, inviting attention to power relations, ideology, and emotion and to the processes by which modern consensus is achieved.

My understanding of social work and psychotherapy is that they stand as activities of hope that center on the possibility of change within a social justice commitment. However, the focus of the change largely depends on how the problem and the problem’s nature are formulated. The construction of the problem against a background of what is regarded as normal sets the stage for all social intervention. Understanding the politics of problem construction and of social research is, therefore, one of the contributions of a social constructionist perspective in the social sciences.

Positivism and notions of scientific certainty generally influence much of the psychological literature on men who have perpetrated sexual offenses against children. The primary focus of much of this research is an individual one, with a strong emphasis on understanding the psychological and personality factors that might lead an individual down a sexually abusive path (Hudson, Ward, and McCormack, 1999). The psychiatric literature is equally framed by truth-claims and notions of scientific certainty, and the aim of the psychiatric perspective is to measure and quantify and identify the predictive personality variables that are seen as playing a causative role in creating the phenomenon (Berlin and Krout, 1986; American Psychiatric Association, 2000, DSM-IV-TR). Individual biological and psychological factors are generally privileged in accounting for sexual crime in much of this research. In effect, the predominant focus of the psychiatric and psychological literature is one of individual limitation and personal failure, giving rise to professional discourses based largely on ideas of deviance, deficit, and individual pathology.

Within such a perspective, the child sexual offender is classified as a pedophile (Berlin and Krout, 1986; American Psychiatric Association, 2000, DSM-IV-TR) or conceptualized as suffering from a host of psychological dysfunctions, such as “cognitive distortions” (Abel et al., 1984, 1987; Mann and Beech, 2003), “deviant sexual attraction” (Hanson and Bussière, 1998), or “poor emotional regulation” (Keenan and Ward, 2000). At any rate, he is conceptualized as different from “normal” men; belonging to a different “class” or “type”; a member of a class apart. This construction of the sexual offender has been challenged by some scholars within the psychological discipline (Marshall, 1996; Marshall et al., 2000; Freeman-Longo and Blanchard, 1998). However, despite this challenge, the power that these professional disciplines exercise in the creation of knowledge appears to be rarely questioned. Instead the “scientific” journals are filled with disputes about which findings are more “scientific” and whose version can claim to be closer to the truth. In all of these deliberations, the “gold standard” of randomized controlled trials is proposed as the only valid way of speaking with authority. Those researchers who are interested in more “local” narrative, including the voices of clients who are living through the situations under investigation, are marginalized along with their “findings” as merely “qualitative.” If allowed at all, qualitative work can be used to support the “real,” “scientific” authorities.

Given the power of “scientific” research findings to influence how one version of a problem is played out and given truth-status in the public and professional sphere, my concerns center on a number of issues: (1) The results of such theorizing can serve to marginalize and stigmatize; (2) within a context in which much psychological and psychiatric research is created and portrayed as objective and unbiased truth, the risk for oppressive and discriminatory practices is omnipresent; and (3) the findings of such research, which are subsequently reinterpreted by the popular press, have implications for shaping the public discourse in which child sexual abuse is narrated. By framing the problem as one of individual deviancy and pathology and neglecting the social context in which the problem comes to be, men who have abused are seen in singular terms and viewed as “other.” Their identities are totalized as “sexual predator.” Such a focus sets men who have abused apart, and it totalizes the identity of people who have experienced this trauma as “victim,”¹⁰ thereby setting up binary constructions that do justice to none of the participants in this unhappy sphere of human activity. Totalized identity descriptions are hard to find release from. The social and personal consequences for the marginalized and alienated cannot be underestimated. This is not to say that psychological discourses of pathology create this marginalizing situation, but rather that they unintentionally contribute to it.

Social constructionism as critique raises different issues from those addressed in the psychological or psychiatric literature. Rather than privileging individual personality features in understanding sexual crime, the complex relationship between the individual and the social, and the language used in bringing forth certain phenomenon, is under review. The social constructionist perspective brings together the individual and the contextual dimensions of the problem in a web of interacting dynamics and relationships that are brought forth in understanding, through particular forms of language. Social constructionists want to understand the context and circumstances in which sexual offenses occur, and they also want to understand how some actions become defined as deviant (Foucault, 1991; Hacking, 1999: 27; Jenkins, 1998: 7; Best, 1995a: 2; Berger & Luckmann, 1966: 39; Kincaid, 1998: 5; Johnson, 1995: 22). The political and cultural context in which the abuse takes place and the professional discourses which give form to the subjects that emerge from these scenarios are kept in view (Mercer and Simmonds, 2001; Haug, 2001; Cowburn and Dominelli, 2001). The social constructionist focus questions the role that knowledge plays in the creation of a problem’s definition and in what core features will become taken-for-granted as central to the problem’s depiction (Hacking, 1999: 27; Jenkins, 1998: 7; Best, 1995a: 2; Berger & Luckmann, 1966: 39; Kincaid, 1998: 5). This is especially so when one is confronted with abuse that goes to the heart of what most adults appear to abhor.

Social constructionism raises questions about the positioning an author, researcher, or worker will take, either inside or outside of the realm of the crime that has been committed. Where will a worker position him- or herself in relation to the other, especially when the other is socially reviled? Related to this question is the possibility of creating a “them and us” distinction. The social constructionist critique raises questions about whose truth is important and whose truth can claim to be final? Should the perpetrator have a say in telling his story or should he only be listened to through a lens of assessment, judgment, and objectification? Do such “subjugated knowledges” (Foucault, 2004: 44) have a place in contextualizing the abuse and in helping towards explanatory understanding? These questions are important in the context of working towards avoiding isolation and refusing indifference within a social justice ethic. While social constructionism does not offer prescriptive maps regarding how to work with men who have perpetrated sexual abuse and violence towards children, its offerings, which I experience in the shape of invitational questions and cautions for the worker, are no less powerful in their effect.

Jenkins (1998: 9) argues that none of the words or concepts that are often used in relation to child sexual abuse represents universally accepted objective realities. Rather, many of the words used in relation to this problems definition, such as sexual abuse, victim, survivor, pervert, pedophile, and molester, are rooted in the attitudes of a particular time and each carries its ideological baggage. It seems impossible to write on the topic of child sexual abuse without using language that appears to accept the ideological interpretations of a particular time. In so doing, it forecloses the exploration of other avenues of interpretation. This is particularly challenging for social constructionist practitioners, many of whose practices are influenced by social constructionism, except for when it comes to sexual violence. It often appears to me that even those workers who consider themselves as influenced by social constructionist thought return to normative and uncritical ideas and to traditional views of visible power in relation to sexual abuse and violence. Power as domination is the only version of power considered. Dominant discourses of sexual violence, particularly against children, invite workers to define the person who has abused as the problem, respond by educating him about the effects of the violence on the other, take a position towards him that is influenced by ideas of management and risk, and do all of this in the name of community values of safety, child protection, or professional care (Fisher, 2008; 2009). Where is social constructionism in this formulation?

Adopting a social constructionist perspective for trauma and violence works invites critical exploration of the web of conditions that might favor what we are calling child abuse. Kincaid (1998:9) argues that Western culture has “enthusiastically sexualised the child while denying just as enthusiastically that it was doing any such thing.” Child pageants and the sexualizing of children in the realm of the pop music industry and in the advertising of certain goods provide the evidence for this thesis. For Kincaid, a society that regards children as erotic, but also regards an erotic response to them as criminally unimaginable, has a problem on its hands. In his opinion, the extent of the abuse of children is still denied because the complexities involved in the interplay of childhood, sexuality, and adulthood are also denied, while attention is focused on the “monster” (Kincaid, 1998: 20). The logical conclusion is that a change in the discourse is necessary if a society wants to work towards a safer society for children and all adults—including men. The discourse must change to one in which the problem of child sexual abuse is located within the general adult population and not with a few individuals who are identified as monsters. Ultimately, a better understanding of the complexities of adult and child sexuality is required.¹¹

Foucault’s (1998) analysis of power and sexuality helps the social scientist to refocus his or her view from deviant individual to particular institutions—such as the family, the fate of the body, and how it relates to desire when thinking about child abuse and violence. Foucault’s work also helps the social scientist to be cautious when it comes to accepting pathologizing or totalized descriptions of individuals. This is not to say that individuals are not accountable for their actions. Rather, the social scientist is invited to move cautiously around normative discussions of child sexual abuse; always mindful of the fact that at best we only ever have a partial perspective of the complexities involved. The dichotomous thinking that abounds this subject may ultimately not serve children or adults well. “Them” and “us” distinctions may serve only to alienate and marginalize, rather than embrace the problems of living within the shared human community. In Kincaid’s (1998: 6) view, many children suffer in the current situation: those children who are sexually abused and those who are denied a nurturing relationship with adult men. Men who have ever abused a child suffer, too, when they are sentenced to live their lives as “evil monsters” by an unforgiving adult public.

As well as providing a mentoring environment for my introduction to social constructionist thought, the Fifth Province Associates, mentioned earlier, also enormously influenced my approach to therapy with men who had sexually abused minors. As well as forming a team to provide family therapy training in Ireland, they focused their clinical work and research in the areas of incest disclosures, poverty, and gender inequality (Byrne and McCarthy, 2007, 1999, 1998, 1995, 1994, 1988; Colgan, 1991; Hydén and McCarthy, 1994; Kearney, Byrne, and McCarthy, 1989; McCarthy, 2002, 1994, 1990; McCarthy and Byrne, 1988). They developed this work in a department of child psychiatry in a large general University Hospital in Dublin¹² and they were influenced in these processes by the work of four Milanese psychiatrists, known as the Milan Team (Prata et al., 1988). An ancient Irish allegory was adopted by the Fifth Province Associates as the guiding allegory for their work and it is a story that must be told in order for the power of the allegory and its importance for my practice to be appreciated.

During the 1970s and 1980s in Ireland, two Irish philosophers, Mark P. Hederman and Richard Kearney, co-edited a biannual journal, The Crane Bag, in which they attempted to create a forum for the expression of diverse and sometimes divisive points of view on a large range of topics in Irish thought: economics, the arts, history and politics (Hederman and Kearney, 1977: 10, 11; McCarthy and Byrne, 1988: 181). In the creation of the forum, Hederman and Kearney (1997: 10) invoked the allegory of the Fifth Province from ancient Celtic mythology, because they felt it symbolized what their forum was all about—“a neutral ground where things can detach themselves from all partisan and prejudiced connections and show themselves for what they really are.” According to Hederman and Kearney, the Fifth Province was a province of imagination, an archetypal imaginary meeting place where even the most ordinary things could be seen in an unusual light. The Fifth Province represented “a place where a new understanding and a new unity might emerge . . . [a place] where all oppositions were resolved . . . where unrelated things coincided. . . . This province, this place, this centre” was not “a political or geographical position” but it was “more like a dis-position” (Hederman and Kearney, 1977: 10, 11; McCarthy and Byrne, 1988: 181). Within the Fifth Province, apparently varying competitive and disqualifying views could be held and honored, allowing new connections and understandings to emerge. “The metaphor is a remembrance of duality transcended and of pragmatic concerns transformed” (McCarthy, 2002: 10).

While for Hederman and Kearney (1977:10-11) the Fifth Province represented a province of imagination, for others it was believed to have been an actual geographical location in the very center of Ireland (Woods, 1907: 242; Colgan 1991:125). Ireland is known to be divided geographically into four provinces (Ulster, Munster, Leinster, and Connacht) and the ancient myth of the Fifth Province tells a story of how it was created. According to the ancient Celtic myth, during the first century, one of the ancient Irish High Kings, King Tuathal Teachtmar, erected a palace in the center of Ireland, at the Hill of Uishneach, in County Westmeath. Around the hill he cut off tracks of land from each of the existing four provinces, thereby creating the geographical site for the new province—the Fifth (Woods, 1907: 242; McCarthy and Byrne, 1988: 181). The legend suggests that the leaders of the four provinces came to this Fifth Province to sort out grievances and to receive counsel (Woods 1907: 242; Colgan, 1991: 125). The Fifth Province was not part of the existing four provinces, but it was not an unrelated domain either. It incorporated the four provinces and transcended them at the same time (Colgan, 1991:125; Hederman and Kearney, 1977: 10, 11; McCarthy and Byrne, 1988: 181). Inspired by this ancient Irish story the Fifth Province Associates adopted this allegory for their systemic consultations with families and agencies involved with families disclosing incest. Inspired by the work of Fifth Province Associates, I adopted this allegory also as guiding the allegory for my work with men who had sexually abused minors, albeit in a different way in the direct clinical situation.

In my work with men who had sexually abused minors, the allegory of the Fifth Province allows for the existence of an expansive speaking site, one that is not constrained by policing the form of talk that men utter. Rather, the men are facilitated in speaking their truth [as one of a multiplicity of truths] and their intentions and preferences for life, and through these lenses come to understand their actions and evaluate their consequences. This conversational space incorporates the dominant discourses and transcends them at the same time, bringing forth multiple perspectives on sexuality, power, violence, childhood, adulthood, and justice, in the project of creating a safer world for children, women, and men. By drawing on the allegory of the Fifth Province as the metaphorical site for my work, the conversations that take place are not restricted to the public or professional normative prescriptions of what “should” be discussed in relation to the problem that is defined as child sexual abuse and sexual violence. However, it is not a disconnected domain either, cut off from normative ideologies or the “real” world. Crucially within this conversational space child sexual abuse is seen as material reality yet prejudiced by the dichotomous binaries that constrain and limit its true exploration as expressions of living, with all the consequences of trauma, pain, and harm. Child sexual abuse is seen as both real and socially constructed. My experience is that sometimes the full exploration of how it comes to be that some men [and women] engage in these practices is often constrained by discourses that delineate what is permitted to be spoken and what is proscribed—even within the therapeutic conversational context.

Dialogue in relation to the “wrongness” of sexual contact with children is often encouraged in much therapeutic practice with men who have abused minors, when the men’s words are monitored for evidence of “distorted thinking,” which are in turn challenged or “corrected” by the worker. I often notice how some men in therapy for sexual violence are interested in letting me know about the wrongness of these activities and how these activities represent an aberrance. However, I am of the view that unless I am willing to enter into the man’s understanding of how sexual contact with children “fitted” in his life at the time of his abusing and may in some senses have even made “sense” [no matter how inappropriate this may now appear], that a whole area of useful and meaningful exploration is ignored. I also believe that most human beings do what “fits” for them in a particular context at a particular time, and I am more interested in exploring this with the men with whom I work. By exploring the man’s understanding of how the abuse fitted for him at the time of his offending [often a conversation that workers and clients can find difficult, for the truth-telling that it involves] and simultaneously exploring the high possibilities that these activities were intrusive for the child who was abused [who cannot give consent by definition], my experience is that a process unlocks, creating with it new visions for responding to life in respectful and non-abusive ways. It is important that the events of the abusing are explored not in a manner of excuse-making or justification, but as a means of meaning-making in the context of the socially available structures of life.

By locating the therapeutic conversations in the imaginary site of the Fifth Province, a space is created in which it is possible to speak about this highly complex and emotionally charged subject in a manner in which all points of view get expressed, and the integrity of no one is challenged. The language of “denial” does not even enter the room. Through such conversational meetings, the male participants get to speak about their lives and times, actions and inactions, hopes and dreams, intentions and motivations, achievements and failings. They also get to discuss the relational networks they inhabit and the children and adults whom they hurt by their violence. All experiences of suffering and cruelty can co-exist in this conversational space, one neither serving as explanation for another (such as, your experience of A caused you to commit B) nor disqualifying another (such as, by committing B your right to acknowledgement of your experience of A is disqualified). The need for a type of clarity that reduces one “reality” to make room for another is not part of the project. Rather, the multiple and complex realities of the human condition can be explored and shared and new pathways for living forged.

Much research has demonstrated the futility of “confronting” men who perpetrate abuse into ways of being better citizens (Marshall, 2005; Marshall and Serran, 2004). Shaming strategies have also shown themselves to do more harm than good (McAlinden, 2007). Instinctively, some of the “responsibility” work in this area (Jenkins, 1990) leaves me uncomfortable for reasons to do with the limited construction of responsibility that is often in play. In “responsibility” work with men who have abused, I am more interested in discerning and unpacking the dichotomies shaping the plots of responsibility/irresponsibility and what it means to be individually and socially accountable. My aim is that within the imaginary site of the Fifth Province that multilayered rich descriptions of storied lives are given time to be told and retold, and in the reshaping of life stories, men’s values and commitments have time to emerge (White and Epston, 1990).

Within this conversational space, there is time to attend to the complications of children’s experiences of trauma, violence, and silencing; women’s experiences of trauma, violence, and silencing; men’s experiences of trauma, violence, and silencing; and adults’ violence towards the less powerful (Fisher, 2008). There is also time to attend to experiences of re-traumatization that occur, sometimes in intervention and therapeutic practices. There is an honoring of and support for the men’s desires for directions in their lives that do not include inflicting violence on others. No premature punctuations in the evolving stories are marked with professional “diagnoses” or “assessments,” and nothing needs to be pinned down. The therapeutic space becomes a conversational milieu that allows for the complexity and messiness of life to emerge and expression given to all conflictual and contradictory thought.

My experience is that the witnessing and meaning-making that emerges in such situations can be transformative for all participants, including the workers. However, the challenges are immense—primarily the call of the “shoulds” and “oughts” and the relentless invitations for the worker to interrupt the clients’ narratives with his or her “better” knowledge of life and his or her “expert” knowledge in what it means to be a non-abusive individual or live a non-abusive life. Despite the moral weight that bears down on workers to adopt such a professional stance, this invitation might better be resisted, as its “shoulds” or psycho-educational features rarely come without shame for our clients, no matter how mild a dosage or how well camouflaged, often foreclosing opportunities for real therapeutic engagement. Instead, a therapeutic space in which clarity and un-clarity can co-exist is important so that explanations and meaning-making can emerge and the emotional, relational, and social conditions that give rise to what we call child sexual abuse can be explored.

The allegory of the Fifth Province inspires a spiritual or mystical sense for complex human work and it also inspires a political space in which all voices, utterances, and perspectives in a divided political landscape can be held and honored (Byrne and McCarthy, 2006). It offers a metaphorical or imaginary site from which to work to avoid dualities in conversations with individuals, while at the same time to embrace all normative and “provisional divisions and disputes” (McCarthy and Byrne, 1988: 189). The Fifth Province offers a way of being both apart from and a part of all voices involved in complex human problems (Colgan, 1991: 10). By its attachment in imagination to all voices and domains, it creates a space where new connections and encounters between apparently disparate understandings, explanations, and experiences can become possible (10). At the same time, it facilitates possibilities for going beyond the constraints of one’s starting position and point of view (10).

My learning from this kind of work is that men who have come to perpetrate sexual abuse and acts of violence against children do not need psycho-educational lessons in how to take responsibility for the wrongs they have done, or in how to stop offending. Rather these commitments come through conversational activities that allow the complexities of the men’s histories and stories and preferences and values for life to be rendered visible. Paradoxical as though it may seem to individuals who think of men who have perpetrated sexual violence in terms of absolute dichotomies, such as bad not good, or abusive not loving, many of these men value safety for children and value respect, justice, and love in life. However, the complexities of these values and the context of their expression in the men’s lives and in the social structures available to them often need unpacking. The accounts of these experiences are told and received in micro-detail, bringing to the fore what the men themselves already know about responding to love and abuse, trauma and violence (Fisher, 2008). In some therapeutic practice, many of these skills and knowledges are drowned out by dominant story lines of abuse perpetration.

Men who come to therapy for sexual offending are often experts in shame and personal failure, and finding a place to stand, other than in shame and personal failure, is key to their “able-ity” to do the work (Fisher, 2008). If shame is the only available site from which to speak (Byrne and McCarthy, 2006) and shame becomes the medium through which they must be engaged, it is likely that they will exit prematurely from the therapy process, in spirit if not in body. Men in therapy for sexual offending know the difference between being defined and being heard. They also know the difference between being judged and being received. They know what it is like to be defined by others, and they often have developed skills in protecting themselves in order to make things safe. Disengaging is often an option. No matter how otherwise well-intentioned, if workers enter the therapeutic relationship with a partially closed heart and a closed mind, clients who have experienced shame and trauma will be highly skilled at noticing any ambivalences towards them, no matter how well-camouflaged. They will also have skills at noticing workers’ absences of transparency and mystifications of power, saying one thing while believing another (Fisher, 2008). As one of Fisher’s clients observed to him, “You seem nicer than most but you’re still clever.”

Having a space to stand (Fisher, 2008), or a site from which to speak (Byrne and McCarthy, 2006), other than shame or personal failure, allows participants in therapy for sexual offending to achieve a little distance from the immediacy of the problems and an opportunity to see the problems in a new light. For this reason, my group-work with men who have perpetrated abuse and violence always begins with life-story work, including intentions, hopes, and dreams—and not with offense-specific work, as is preferred by workers who are not of the same persuasion (Wyre, 1996). Some therapists do what they call self-esteem work, before engaging men in therapy for sexual offending, as another way of helping them find an alternative site to shame and personal failure from which to do the work (Marshall et al., 1997; Marshall et al., 2000). In my context, the allegory of the Fifth Province allows for such possibilities by creating a welcoming safe space, a space beyond dualities and a space of possibilities (Colgan, 1991). The “doing” of hope through with-nessing in dialogue and silence becomes part of the therapeutic imperative.

Within some professional discourses the self is theorised as an essential or interior self, capable of being thought about as a separate entity. In these discourses the self is seen as something to be discovered; something that is fixed and autonomous and something that is internal to the individual (Burr, 1995). Social constructionism theorizes the self in rather different terms; here the self is conceptualized as relational, as a self-in-action, always fluid, always being created and re-created in relationship with others. Such a way of conceptualizing self gives rise to the concept of a narrative self, a self that may have a core, a physical and emotional embodiment, but which is primarily storied and constructed in language and in relationship with others (Flaskas, 2002: 87; Gergen, 1992; Ward and Marshall, 2007: 2; White, 2004a).

According to White (2004a: 121), individuals living out of a negative self-identity are more likely than those who live out of positive identity descriptions to live unfulfilling lives. Abusive behavior is more likely to occur in individuals who hold negative identity conclusions (Marshall et al., 2000: 48–50). It is therefore important to consider the impact of labels, stigma, and social rejection on the narrative identity of individual men who come to commit child sexual offenses and to take a stance against such practices in the work. In most cases, the actual offending behavior of men who abuse minors occupies a very small portion of their lives. Based on the analyses of the very detailed diaries of a predatory child-sexual offender, who had abused over four hundred boys, over a twenty-year period, Marshall (1996: 318) estimated that this man spent 8 percent of his time offending (including planning and arranging). For many child sexual offenders, the time spent offending is much less than 8 percent. However, when sinister motives are attributed to all of a man’s actions and his actions are seen as evidence of a pathological or deviant identity, the effects may be disintegrative in nature, in that there is little or no effort made to affirm the basic goodness of his character or to reinforce his membership in the community of law-abiding citizens, long after he has served prison terms and fulfilled community sanctions (Garfinkel, 1956). The primary relevance of stigmatization is that it shuns the offender, keeping him as outcast—a situation some scholars hypothesize can lead to further offending (Karp, 1998: 283; Maxwell and Morris, 1999; Soothill and Francis, 1998: 288, 289). Many men who have abused minors often end up with “sexual offender identities” in which no other identity descriptions are permitted (Hudson, 2005:1, O’Malley, 1998:1). The extent to which such sexual offending identities influence any further offending is the subject of ongoing research.

As a social constructionist-informed practitioner I am aware of the potential cul-de-sac that is encountered when we lend support for explanations that are based on “naturalistic” accounts of individual identities and of certain social problems (White, 2000: 51). Naturalistic accounts, which are premised on an understanding of the individual’s “nature” and on “the nature” of things, dominate many contemporary understandings of individuals’ identities and of certain events (White, 2000: 51). The dominance of such naturalistic accounts renders it difficult to think outside of them. By contrast, the refusal to accept naturalistic accounts, or at least to subject them to critique and question, opens the door for endless possibilities and curiosities about how things came to be the way that they are and to the complexities of the skills and knowledges, hopes and intentions that human lives comprise. In effect, “too much is obscured by explanations that defer to the rules of human nature” (White, 2000:49).

The practices involved in the work that I am describing are very different from responses to the problem of violence and sexual abuse that are based on predefined socially available definitions of “the problem”¹³ and the person who acts, and it is in line with the work being carried out by Fisher (2008, 2009) and his colleagues in Nova Scotia. This approach differs from those which focus on the problem-only stories of a man’s life—such as “distorted thinking,” “inability to regulate emotion,” or “deviant sexual interests,” which then become the focus of the treatment. This approach instead keeps open a space for consideration of the points of ambivalence and contradiction that exist in the area of love and violence, care and abuse, which are rendered invisible by descriptions of love and abuse as dialectically opposed, with all the social ramifications that follow. The complexities involved in paradigms of justice (Sandel, 2009) are also honored in this conversational milieu.

Fisher (2008) observes in his work with men who have perpetrated violence that workers must always be conscious of the positions they are invited into by dominant discourses, particularly in relation to their clients. He suggests that it is no longer acceptable to maintain the questioning gaze on the client’s life but rather that all therapeutic practice must also be subjected to the same critical optics; the absence of which can lead to therapeutic abuses. In addition it must be recognized that power relations in the room shape the politics of “possibilities” (Colgan, 1991; Fisher, 2008).

For Fisher (2008), this reflexive work is given form by means of a number of reflexive questions, which cover more than individual or group conversations and extend far beyond the interview room, to the way that people’s lives are documented in case files and in reports. The reflexive questions broadly take the following form: What socially available forms of problem definition am I invited to find compelling, promising, or productive? What socially available ideas about “effects” of the problem am I being asked to privilege? What socially available forms of judgment am I invited to impose? What socially available identity conclusions am I being invited to come to? Unless the worker turns the reflexive lens onto his own practices and professional discourses then the possibility exists for unreflexive and potentially oppressive work to be carried out by workers (even those who may label themselves as social constructionists), which is presumably not something that they intend.

Fisher (2008) also cautions workers against complacency and against adopting a belief that their practice offers the best or only right way forward. Violence and trauma work that are inspired by social constructionism must sit alongside many other practices as just one way. There is little room in the area of sexual trauma and violence work for contentment or certainty than any one group of workers or individual perspectives will provide all the answers. In effect, either/or thinking might usually be replaced by both/and perspectives.

The use of shaming mechanisms is not new, nor is the use of public humiliation and social disgrace in order to exact punishment for an offense. Such strategies can be state-led, as well as popular responses to sexual offending; both have the same disintegrative or stigmatizing effects. These strategies, designed to shame offenders into greater respect for the law and to create a powerful deterrent to reoffending (Karp, 1998), can also be seen as strategies of social or institutional violence—a violence that we have not begun to address in the Western world. While some of the state-led examples of social violence in the United States, England, and Ireland can include registration and notification schemes, which are a response to populist calls for punitive responses to sexual crime (Bottoms, 1995), other schemes are much more violent in their impact. In the United States, mandatory self-identification, which mandates the offender to personally inform his neighbors that he is a convicted sexual offender, or community notification schemes, which give the police the power to release details of convicted sexual offenders via the Internet or on posters, are in effect strategies of public exposure and humiliation, although the intent may be to protect the public (Karp, 1998: 281). There are numerous examples of shaming strategies imposed in the Western world, which are all designed to bring the crime to the attention of the public so that they may respond with shaming. While part of the intent is to warn potential victims of the potential dangers that an offender may pose, the risk of stigmatization attached to such penalties is very high (Kelley, 1989: 775).

At a more community-based level, public humiliation and shaming strategies are also in evidence, often with the help of the media. The 2000 News of the World “name and shame” campaign in England, which also spilled over to Ireland, centered on the “outing” of suspected and known men who had sexually abused minors, by printing their photographs, names and addresses, and details of their offending histories in the public press. The aim of this campaign was to name and shame all the child sexual offenders in Britain and to pressure government into adopting an equivalent of Megan’s Law from the United States, in Great Britain, which would provide for a greater degree of community notification than had previously been in existence. The media campaign provoked widespread hysteria and vigilante activity, culminating in demonstrations outside of people’s homes, forcing several families to flee, one man to disappear, and two alleged child sexual offenders to commit suicide (Ashenden, 2002: 208). Its effects in Ireland were that some men lost their employment, some were run out of their homes, and some out of their country.

Far from protecting the community and adding to greater community safety, such strategies of social violence only serve to label and stigmatize individual offenders and isolate them from their communities (Winick, 1998: 539). Such strategies work against the rehabilitative ideal and ultimately may drive many sexual offenders underground (Soothill and Francis, 1998: 288, 289). While the aim ought to be to invite sexual offenders or potential sexual offenders to come forth and to seek help, in effect such strategies may have the exact opposite result. Social violence renders crucial stories about abuse perpetrators’ lives invisible, their motivations and intentions bad, their personalities damaged, and their good works suspect. Within the modern day technologies of power, nobody is accountable for inflicting such social violence and social trauma. The challenges involved in working against such oppressive practices are ever mounting as the new punitiveness and the culture of control (Garland, 2001) continue to gain their foothold in what is becoming regarded as the Atlantic Alliance—the United States, England, and Ireland—at least in how it attends to sexual crime.

A short story tells of the complexities of the conversations that take place when one is working with individuals for whom trauma and violence, love, and abuse and their intricacies form part of the life histories. My client, Tom¹⁴—a man who had abused a number of adolescent boys in the context of his work as a teacher—was taking part, prior to sentencing, in group therapy in a community-based program of which I was the co-facilitator. He recounted many stories of his life, including numerous accounts of how he was sexually abusive to adolescent boys. One such young boy, Alan,¹⁵ who had experienced abuse by Tom, and who had discovered that Tom was in treatment in my program, requested a meeting with me. Having secured the necessary permissions and considered that this was something meaningful for Alan, I agreed to the meeting. Alan wanted to know if Tom had remembered him. Did Tom remember exactly what he had done? Did Tom show remorse? Did Tom have any sense of how his actions had impacted Alan’s life?

One of the difficult aspects of this scenario was that Tom had no memory of Alan, but because he had abused a number of boys he would plead guilty to this offense, too, believing that Alan must be telling the truth. Alan’s description of the abuses that had occurred fitted largely with the pattern told of Tom’s abuse by other boys, now men, and by Tom himself. However, Tom’s plea of guilt was insufficient consolation for Alan, and he needed a more personal kind of acknowledgement of the events that had occurred and of their impact on him.

Over the course of two and a half hours, Alan and I spoke of these and other matters. I was deeply sorry for Alan that Tom found it hard to remember him. We wondered about injustice on top of injustice—and Tom’s lack of memory of Alan was located in the realm of adding insult to injury. We considered ways of helping [or forcing] Tom to remember—and we considered how this could be best done. In the end, we had exhausted so many options that seemed to offer such little promise (much had already been tried with Tom), that we came to wonder why we should be so concerned with Tom’s remembering—as maybe it was Alan’s life and remembering (White, 2000, 2004a, 2004b) that should matter most for Alan now.

We moved to consider power and agency and the small but powerful child strategies that Alan used to fight against the abuse that was occurring and the options and strategies available to individuals who have suffered abuse at taking back power. We evaluated the responses that Alan had made in his life to the events that had occurred and how he had worked to turn his tragedy into something that made him an even greater human being in the world. We made a long list of the skills and knowledge that had come to Alan in life through his tragedy. And we discussed his future hopes and dreams. Overall, I found this to be a most moving, sad, and precious conversational space.

As we moved towards the end of our meeting I offered to help Alan in any way I could in the future, if he had any ideas of how that might take shape, especially given my ongoing contact with Tom. Alan, who was having therapy with another worker, who knew he was seeing me on this occasion, said he would let me know if anything arose. We got up to leave together and I walked with him to the door. As we said our goodbyes and were just about to part company, Alan paused and said that he had just one more question. Looking at me straight in the eye, Alan asked: “Whose side are you on?”

In all my time of doing trauma and abuse work in all its complexity with men and women, I had never been asked this question before, although it often hung unlanguaged in the room. Being systemically trained in the tradition of the Milan School¹⁶ and being utterly familiar with the debates concerning the concepts of neutrality in therapeutic positioning (not moral neutrality) which the Milan School reauthored as “curiosity,” because of the inflamed debate that the concept evoked in the literature, I immediately thought of the systemic calling to neutrality. However, I declined this as inadequate. Instead my reply was to be indelibly printed on my mind and heart forever. “Fifty-one, forty-nine,” I answered. “Fifty-one percent on your side—you are innocent, you were the child. Forty-nine on Tom’s side, and this is so because I have come to know him well and know about his life. I feel I have glimpsed his soul. I know that he is working never to hurt a child again and I know that he is truly sorry for what he has done.” Silence followed for a few moments. Alan thanked me. He appeared happy with this reply, and so was I, and we left the room together.

Back in the therapy group on the following week I reported to Tom the account of my meeting with Alan (as agreed with Alan), and I included in my account Alan’s final question to me: “Whose side are you on?” I also recounted the answer that I had given to Alan, articulating the logic propelling my reply. Tom said he understood, and my impression was that he was grateful to be “a forty-nine.” Other men listened intently, and nobody commented. And so we carried on with the work. Alan never did call me. I assumed he didn’t have a need.

One year later, Tom was still in the therapy group and was active in his participation, deconstructing his life and its stories and considering all aspects of the abuse that he had perpetrated. Although he had mentioned some time along the way that he had experienced abuse in adolescence by a number of school teachers, on this particular day that I will never forget, his narrating of the story caught my attention and that of the other participants in a way that it had not done before. This time, the small details of the story were overwhelmingly sad, such as the first abuse that he suffered occurring at the age of eleven years, on the week of his return to school following the sudden death of his father. The detail of the story had the whole room spellbound, including myself.

When Tom finished speaking and had received support from the other men and the other worker, I asked for permission to say what had occurred for me during his telling of his story. This included my account of the beam of light which carried the message that merely said “fifty-one, forty-nine.” The group participants and Tom afforded me such a luxury. I now wanted to articulate the following to Tom (and later to Alan) in that spontaneous occurrence. “Last year when I met with Alan and he asked me “Whose side are you on?”, if you remember I responded by saying “fifty-one, forty-nine.” At the time, I explained to you the logic of my reply. Now I want to say something else, and I hope this is okay with you.” I told Tom about the beam that shone light on my consciousness when he was talking, and I went on to say the following. “I want to tell you that for me today “fifty-one, forty-nine” feels really inadequate, and I want to change my answer to that question.” I paused for a moment to keep pace and breath with the heaviness of the heart that was beating and then I continued: “I want now to let you know that I am on the side of all human beings who are trying to live their lives, in the only and best way that they can, a life that is often difficult and messy and complex. I am against abuses and violence of all kinds, in all their dirty and rotten manifestations and in the multitude of ways they get expressed in the world. I also want to tell you that I am on the side of people who are trying to live their lives with the resources that they have in the only and best ways that they can and I am against oppression and injustice in all its nasty manifestations. I feel I need to tell you that just now.” Nobody spoke. My utterance had come from deep within my being, visible to all by the voice that gave it expression.

Tom began to cry inconsolably. Apart from Tom’s tears, no sound could be heard. Individuals gave witness in silence. These were Tom’s first tears to be shed in twenty months of group conversations, and a river of tears was cried on that afternoon. Lumps filled eight other men’s throats, and a lump filled one woman’s throat on that day, too. The silence lasted for a long time, broken only by Tom’s voice: “When you said fifty-one, forty-nine on that day following your meeting with Alan, and I was forty-nine, I accepted that fully, because what could I expect? I was the guilty one, and I knew that. I was grateful not to be much lower on the scale, and I knew what you were saying. But now I can tell you that on that day I was also very sad and in a way a little part of me died, too. You see it was a secret hope. You see I have always wished that someone could really love me and that someone could really know me, and you were as close as anyone had come to knowing me ever. When you said forty-nine that day, I came to the realization that I could never be loved, that it was never going to happen, and that, that was my lot.” Tom cried again, crying that was held in the silent witness of me and the other men. His voice then uttered the following words: “Now when you have said what you have just said, I am just overwhelmed. Thank you.”

During the course of Tom’s sentence hearing I was asked to give to the court an account of Tom’s therapy and my witnessing to that. Alan gave the court an account of his life before and since the abuses that he had suffered. Here Alan and I met again in a small but bright courtroom, with eight people listening and witnessing to the sadness and heroics of the lives that were being shared. Tom accepted his culpability and was sentenced to a number of years’ imprisonment. He was taken away to the holding cell by the officers of the court, following brief moments of goodbye. I promised to visit and to keep in touch.

At the back of the courtroom, Alan and I shook hands. I asked him if he was okay. He said it was hard. I agreed. We spoke briefly about this and that and I asked him if he remembered our conversation of one year ago. He said that he did. I asked if he remembered my saying something about fifty-one, forty-nine and about taking sides in these issues. He said that he did. I said to him that I have come to another realization about that since the time of our last meeting and I offered to share my thoughts with Alan if he wanted. He said that he did. As I had done with Tom in the group therapy program, I described in similar language the realizations that had come to me (as described previously) in response to the question “Whose side are you on?” I also added that “I will continue to work against violence and abuse.”

Having listened in these halls of lawful justice, Alan looked at me intently and said that he had come to realize that there are no winners in these situations, but that maybe we are not losers either. He concluded that all we have got is what we have got, and we all have to live—only one life. He expressed a hope that this day, when the man who had abused him as a child was met with the rigors of the law and held accountable for the abuses that he had perpetrated, would mark another milestone in that which was Alan’s life. I added that I hoped this day would bring whatever it was that Alan desired and required.

We chatted some more before we left the courtroom, and I wished him well. I have not had further contact with Alan. I still have contact with Tom, who survived prison and is retired. He contacts me from time to time. To my knowledge he has not abused a child in over twenty years. It is thirteen years since we first worked together. I will leave it to the reader to speculate about the personal learning that may have emerged for me from this work in relation to the forms of problem definition that I relied upon, what I privileged, the judgments I made, and the identity conclusions that resulted. I will simply say that these men helped me realize more fully than I had previously that there is another part to the current problem of sexual abuse by children; one that is beyond the obvious and to which we are all recruited. It is the unhelpful idea that sides must be taken for or against individuals in situations of sexual abuse, and in the process compassion must be rationed or even withheld from certain individuals. I refuse this invitation to ration compassion.

A life without hope is no life at all. Life without meaning is a life not worth living. So what must it be like to be exiled in a meaningless, hopeless place of existence in which no one wants to understand and few appear to care? Experiences of loneliness and abandonment are common features of the stories of many men and women who have experienced trauma and abuse. The men who are in effect warehoused in such institutions as Coalinga Mental Hospital in California after serving their prison sentences again come to mind in this regard. They are not alone. This homeless place of no-man’s land is what many men in Ireland who have perpetrated abuse and violence also describe in the wake of the disclosures of their sexual offending, when some are run out of their homes and some out of their country (Keenan, 2007). The absence of hope and the prevalence of despair contribute in no small way towards the webs of human misery and suffering that surround this very topic.

Western ideas of hope view it as a feeling—an achievement of the individual alone. From this perspective, responsibility for its achievement rests with the individual (Weingarten, 2007: 14). However, such a perspective does not always bring the desired effect. Expecting people to achieve hope when they are marginalized and low of spirit seems not only foolish but may also be downright irresponsible (14). Despair is a likely outcome, based on the isolation of the position and failure in achieving the goal. An alternative perspective of hope, conceptualized by Weingarten (2007: 14), is predicated on the idea that hope is something we “do” with other people, and far from being the responsibility of individuals, “doing” hope is the responsibility of the community. Within this perspective there are hope tasks for the hopeless and tasks for those who witness their despair. Individuals who feel hopeless must resist isolation and those who witness despair must “refuse indifference” (15). The moral imperative is to stand in witness to those people whose lives are blighted by trauma and violence and to build communities of support for their preferred ways of living.

Living in a global village, injustice and oppression are much in evidence. In cultures predicated on fear, anger, and hatred, hope is in short supply (Weingarten, 2007: 15). Yet it is necessary. Standing together to resist hate represents a way of doing hope together (20). The imperative is for groups of individuals to work together to diminish fear and resist the powerful pull of hate. In this all human beings stand to win.

This is not to suggest that we blindly ignore the re-offense potential of men who have abused minors, or that we do not work to protect children. It is, however, to suggest that we move the lens through which we view the problem; we need to move it from individual to community, from fear and hatred to hope, and we need to seek solutions that will provide good and meaningful lives for all. Central to this activity is an understanding of the problem in all its complexity, based on deep introspection, honest dialogue, and the concept of justice for all. Michael Sandel, the Harvard-based political philosopher, enticed his academic audience over the last few months with an entire lecture course about “Justice,” subtitled “What’s the right thing to do?” (Sandel, 2009). Sandel raises questions about what exactly constitutes a good life. He asks what exactly its purpose is, and he reminds us of the role that values, purpose, and meaning have in life. He encourages us to think about what our purpose is as a society, what holds it together and why we should care. We are not just a loose assembly of individuals in which everything is mediated through or determined by market forces. Sandel’s argument forces us to think about the common values that we are striving for, even as we dispute some finer aspects of how we should live. He shows that deliberation about the ends is important in itself since a preoccupation with means can lose sight of our purposes.

I recognize that social workers and psychotherapists cannot work outside of a normative structure, by definition, as the very act of intervening with men who have perpetrated sexual offenses can be conceptualized as a normative move in itself. However, at the same time, the power of normative and dichotomous structures to replicate the very violence and abuses which they purport to work against must not be underestimated. As societies go on alert in their desire to stamp out abuse of children and the populace becomes increasingly sensitized to the possibilities of abuse, we develop categories that reduce the complexities of life to simple binaries, such as abusers and victims, which in turn become the means by which we index many other aspects of social life (McNamee and Gergen, 1999: 50). In effect, we develop a dichotomous structure in which we look for and see abuse everywhere. Events that require more elaboration, unpacking, and deconstruction are reduced to simplistic descriptions and explanations. As McNamee and Gergen (1999:50) observe, “our indignation creates the very conditions for constructing a world in terms of abusers and victims.” The work that I have described in this article represents an attempt to problematize such dichotomous structures in therapeutic practice and to replace them with a linguistically ambiguous¹⁷ space that leaves room for exploration of the complexity and messiness of life that includes love and violence, trauma, and abuse.

I propose a way of thinking about the problem of trauma and violence that offers a futures framework for the work that is not dominated by a preoccupation with the past alone. This does not imply that the offenders’ past offenses are not considered, but rather that the methodology involves a constant movement back and forth between past, present, and future, in which past, present, and future are constantly interwoven between people, through conversation and through their imagining, envisioning, and anticipating (McAdam and Hannah, 1991: 224; Lang, 2003). Rather than focusing on trying to prevent bad things from occurring, a futures focus emphasizes future possibilities (Lang and McAdam, 1997; Lang, 2003; Ward and Stewart, 2003). The movement is from positive action to positive outcome. The futures orientation of this approach is supported by research in the psychotherapy literature, which confirms the importance of hope, expectation, and a belief in possibilities for bringing about positive therapeutic outcome (Hubble, Duncan, and Miller, 2005: 419; Snyder, Michael, and Cheavens, 2005: 181).

As Kathe Weingarten (2007: 22) tells us, “[h]ope is a resource. We hoard it at our peril. . . . It is a human rights issue. Just as food, water, and security must be equitably distributed, so too, must hope. Whether we offer or receive, co-create or imagine, we can all participate in doing hope.” Mandela had it right when he advised that a nation should not be judged by how it treats it highest citizens, but by how it treats those who are seen as its lowest. In current times in the English-speaking world, there are few who are seen as lower than men who have sexually abused minors.

1. Coalinga State Hospital is owned and operated by the State of California. The institution houses more than 500 convicted sex offenders, most of whom have already served prison sentences for their crimes but are deemed too dangerous to release back into the community. Since Jessica’s Law was passed in the United States of America in 2005, men who have sexually abused children and who have come to the end of their prison sentences can be deemed mentally ill and put up in Coalinga indefinitely. Although the official aim of the hospital is to rehabilitate offenders, up to 70 percent of the inmates or “patients” refuse therapy, in some cases as a means of protest. Of the hundreds of individuals treated at Coalinga, up until April 2009 only 13 men had been approved for release into the community, with a few more being released with the help of their lawyers. Commenting on his documentary “A Place for Paedophiles” shown on BBC2 in the United Kingdom on April 19, 2009, Louis Theoreux remarked, “If therapy was really being embraced by a lot of the patients it would seem workable, but there wasn’t a lot of therapy going on as far as I could see. Because so many of them refuse to engage, it means Coalinga is basically a very expensive, luxury warehouse to keep these people off the streets for the rest of their lives.” (Singh, A., The Telegraph, April, 20 2009.) Most of the men are sent to Coalinga as compulsory patients, where they can either participate in the therapeutic programs that the hospital offers or resign themselves to an indefinite stay. But the majority know they’re going to be there a very long time indeed. According to the director’s message on the hospital’s Web site, this facility is a critical part of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s goal to protect Californians from sexual predators. When the facility is fully operational, it will be the largest employer in the Coalinga area with an annual operating budget of $152 million and more than 2,000 staff. (http://www.dmh.ca.gov/services and programs/state_hospitals/coalinga/default.asp)

2. Whilst feminist theory has made a huge contribution to contemporary understanding of sexual violence, the limitations of the feminist argument come from its conceptualization of power as only one form—power as domination and control—and its under-theorizing of other forms and exercises of power, such as in the creation of consensus discourses (see Lukes, 2005).

3. In August 2011, my book, Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power Organizational Culture, will be released by Oxford University Press.

4. Of course, women also sexually abuse minors.

5. I like Foucault’s work on risk which he elaborates in Foucault (2001), Fearless Speech, 11–24.

6. Showing up means more than the body showing up. Rather it means that the person, with their skills, knowledge, intentions, pain, and vulnerabilities, show up and allow themselves to be seen and heard in dialogue with others (Fisher, 2008).

7. Probation and welfare officers in the Irish jurisdiction are generally social workers who have therapeutic functions over and above statutory and monitoring responsibilities ascribed in legislation.

8. Art Fisher is director of Alternatives, a program in Nova Scotia working with trauma and violence. For further information the reader is directed to http://www.alternativesinstitute.com.

9. The Fifth Province associates were comprised of Dr. Nollaig Byrne, a child psychiatrist, Dr. Imelda McCarthy, a social worker and university lecturer at University College Dublin, and Philip Kearney, a social worker. They formed a team for their clinical work and research with families disclosing incest and they also developed the first family therapy program in Ireland.

10. In circumstances where an individual wishes to identify him or herself as a victim, that is perfectly acceptable and the prerogative of the individual concerned. However, I have concerns that in the context of sexual violence some individual identities are constructed in which people who have experienced sexual violence are totalized as victims, which marginalizes other aspects of the individual’s identity, including his or her resistance to the violence that was perpetrated.

13. I am here interested in Fisher’s work (2008, 2009) on trying to unpack socially available definitions of “the problem” and his thinking on the complexity of what gets called “violence.” In essence, Fisher is thinking of violence as a practice that signifies many complexities of intention, knowledge, skill, agency, and positioning within the socially available structures that are available to individuals. The “problem” may have many aspects for the individual who acts in this way—and to fail to unpack these complexities by merely describing the behaviors as “the problem” is to miss something of significance in context. Fisher invites the worker to see the complexity of intentions, knowledge, skills, and agency in what gets called “the problem.”

16. The Milan School of Systemic Therapy was interested in the concept of neutrality to describe the positioning of workers in the therapeutic conversation. The concept of neutrality was not intended to imply a moral neutrality on the part of the worker but rather a positioning towards each of the participants in the dialogue that privileged no-one (Prata et al., 1978). However, following critique in the literature and the accusation that the concept of neutrality was gender and power blind, the Milan team reconfigured their concept of neutrality and adopted instead the idea of curiosity as that to guide the positioning of the worker.