Poverty Safari, page 3
‘You’ve got really neat handwriting.’
The second you say something positive, whatever it may be, the participant will instinctively deflect it, reinforcing a more familiar negative:
‘Me? Neat handwriting? Aye right. I’m stupid. I can’t write.’
But if you pay attention, you’ll notice that they light up and become bashful at having received a compliment the second they think you aren’t looking. On a good day, they may even ponder the compliment in more depth later, and dare to grapple with the possibility that it might be true. These are the tiny interactions that help you and the participants get under one another’s skin, creating the chemistry necessary to instil trust and self-confidence within the group.
Participants who face barriers to education such as poor literacy or low self-esteem usually – though not always – come from backgrounds where their abilities are not acknowledged or nurtured, making it harder for them to take risks. For this group, simply reading out loud or expressing an opinion can be daunting and even intimidating, which means you have to remain intuitive to a person’s needs if you want to encourage them beyond their comfort zone. For the ones who end up in prison it’s often worse; their talents are suppressed, ridiculed or actively discouraged and become a source of embarrassment or shame. This can evolve into a tendency to conceal aspects of self that reveal vulnerability as well as reinforcing a belief that they are stupid. If things seem to drag at the start of a lesson then people disengage, assuming the fault is with them and their lack of intelligence – even if it’s really down to an ill-prepared facilitator like me. This core belief that they aren’t smart enough often manifests as a disruptive, confrontational or aggressive attitude. The challenging behaviour is used to deflect any interaction that might reveal their fear, sense of inadequacy or vulnerability.
For workshops like this, I usually perform a song as an ice-breaker. One of the tracks I do is called ‘Jump’. The first line is: ‘Growing up, I never knew who to trust, looking at the world though the window of a school bus, gob-stopper in my mouth, I didn’t mind school, it got me out the house.’
The lyrics are autobiographical and detail my school years and the sudden death of my mother. But the song is also deliberately laden with the imagery and language of lower class communities, with references to alcohol products like MD 20/20 and Buckfast, and rap artists like Tupac Shakur. Themes of family breakdown, abandonment, alcoholism and bereavement, as well as playful jibes at the middle class and law enforcement, not only reflect their own experiences back at them but, crucially, recognise the validity of those experiences. The song, like much of the culture they engage with, regarded as coarse, offensive or lacking sophistication, appeals to them because it reveals the richness of their own experience; the poetry in what is often regarded by wider society as the dereliction and vulgarity of their lives.
Administering punishment is the role of the state. My job is to help these people express their humanity in an environment where it can get them killed.
Participants, whether in a prison setting or any other populated by people from deprived backgrounds, will often scan me while I talk, looking for signs that I can be trusted, that I am ‘sound’. They will observe how I speak, which words I use and the dialect in which those words are couched. They will instinctively attempt to ascertain the distance between who I really am and who I say I am. In this environment, authenticity is the yardstick by which all people are measured. That is why you rarely find high status people, speaking in high status language, operating in communities like this – unless they are surrounded by security or imbued with some sort of legal authority. When people come here to work, they often adopt personas that they think will appeal to the participants, forgetting the prison population is filled with some of the most emotionally intuitive and manipulative people you are likely to find.
Although people end up in prison for all sorts of reasons, one common theme for most people behind bars is that they have experienced emotional, psychological, physical or sexual abuse of some sort which – almost always – precedes their criminality. Maltreatment or neglect at the hands of a care-giver appears to play a significant role in triggering the germinal factors that lead to offending behaviour: low self-esteem, poor educational attainment, substance misuse and social exclusion.
Towards the end of the workshop, one woman, who has been quiet until now, casually mentions that both of her parents and her sister recently died after purchasing fake street Valium. Even so, she continues to use the drug in prison. She’s here because she took the blame for something her boyfriend did. Despite this, he ended up in here anyway having started using heroin shortly after the murder of his best friend, which he witnessed in his own flat. The dispute was about drugs. She will retell the story of her dead family several times throughout the course of my work with her, almost as if she’s forgotten the previous times. On the fourth week, she will shed a tear. She will tell me that this is the first tear she has shed in front of other people in prison. This is her way of letting me know that she trusts me. When she begins to sob, the other women console her with all the care and tenderness of a nurturing and supportive family, something many of them have never known.
Many of the people in this prison are repeat offenders. Many deserve to be here for what they have done. Many have committed crimes against innocent, law-abiding citizens that warrant punishment. When you work in this environment it’s easy to forget about the victims of crime. But while it’s crucial to recognise this, it’s also true to say that much of the destructive and socially harmful behaviour we see from offenders has a definite starting point. If you take almost anyone in this prison, excluding psychopaths and the criminally insane, and dial back their lives to a time before they were criminals, what you are likely to find is that, as children, they were the victims of some form of violence.
2
A History of Violence
BY THE AGE of ten I was well adjusted to the threat of violence. In some ways, violence itself was preferable to the threat of violence. When you are being hit – or chased – part of you switches off. You become physically numb as the violent act is carried out. A disassociation occurs. You become detached from the violent act as it is being perpetrated against you. The disassociation can make you physically numb as well as emotionally unresponsive. Your body goes into self-preservation mode until the threat is over. Thankfully, angry people tire easily. Therefore, the key to enduring a violent episode at the hands of someone you can’t evade or fight back against, is usually to submit and hope that you don’t sustain a serious injury.
Acts of violence are terrifying, but a sustained threat of violence is sometimes much worse. If the violence occurs in the home, then it’s something you feel in the air. You adapt to the threat by becoming hypervigilant. This heightened state of awareness is effective in short, sharp doses but when the fear of violence is constant, hypervigilance becomes your default emotional setting, making it very hard to relax or be in the present moment.
In a home where violence, or the threat of violence, is regular, you learn how to negotiate it from a young age. You become adept at reading facial expressions and body language as well as scanning the tone of people’s voices to detect and deter possible threats. You become a skilful emotional manipulator; able to keep an abuser’s anger at bay by remaining intuitive to their needs and triggers and adjusting your behaviour accordingly. These survival strategies, cobbled together through trial and error, eventually become instinctive. For many people, they remain, integrated fully into their personality, long after the threat of violence is gone. However, these strategies only work for so long before they inevitably fail. In addition, by seeking to contort yourself around the needs of the person you’re afraid of, you simply prolong the dread that feeds the hypervigilance. Dread, in this context, being a sense of anxious expectation that precedes a violent incident. It’s a catch-22. On one hand, you don’t want the violence to happen. On the other, you know it is inevitable and would rather just get it out of the way.
One such event occurred when I was about five years old. We had not long moved to the other side of Pollok, where I grew up. Pollok is a so-called deprived area on the southside of Glasgow and in the early ’90s it scored high in the tables for social deprivation across Europe. Our new home was a three-bedroom, semi-detached house with a front and back garden. This night, I recall being upstairs in bed but finding it hard to sleep because of noise coming from the living room. My mum had people over and they were downstairs drinking, laughing and listening to music. My next memory is standing at the living room door, before a group of guests. I had my hopes pinned on my mum letting me stay up because she was drunk. I preferred her when she’d had a few drinks. She was much more relaxed, fun and affectionate. But tonight she was having none of it and told me to go back to bed. There was a bit of back-and-forth between us. I suspect I was showing off in front of her guests, probably winding her up or trying to outwit her in some way. Then her tone and posture shifted as she gave me a final warning to go back upstairs. I defied her.
She held my gaze for a moment, before leaping out of her seat and charging into the kitchen. She pulled the cutlery drawer open, reached in and pulled out a long, serrated bread knife. Then she turned round and began pursuing me. I already knew she could be unpredictable but this was like nothing I had witnessed before. I ran out of the room and naively made for the stairs as she emerged from the living room into the hall only seconds behind me. I scrambled up the stairs as fast as I could but she was closing the distance between us. With nowhere to hide I ran into my room, slamming the door behind me, but it just seemed to bounce off her as she came charging through, clutching the knife, like a monster in a nightmare.
If only I had had the sense to run out of the front door instead. Seconds before, she had appeared to be having so much fun that it had felt safe to wind her up in front of people. Now I was trapped in my room, pinned against the wall, with a knife to my throat. I don’t remember what she said to me but I do remember the hate in her eyes. I remember thinking that I was about to be cut open and that I would probably die. Just as she lifted the knife to my face, she was pulled from behind and thrown to the other side of the room by my dad, who then restrained her while one of the guests picked me up and bundled me into the back of a car.
I don’t remember my mother, or anyone else, ever talking about that night again. Truth be told, I forgot about it myself until many years later, when it came back to me in the form of a flashback.
It’s hard to quantify what an experience like that does to a person and harder to measure the long term impact as life unfolds. All I can say is that events like these, while seeming strangely normal at the time, later found expression in my beliefs about the world and all of the people in it. For if you are not safe in your own home, under the care of your own mother, then where else could you possibly drop your guard?
After explosive incidents like this, whether they involve physical violence or non-physical aggression, there is always the faint hope that the perpetrator’s remorse will propel them towards better behaviour. Even when there’s no sense of that happening, there remains a perverse allure in their empty promises. In these moments, there is a vulnerability, tenderness and honesty, seen so rarely, that is so affecting that you struggle to resist the twisted logic of your abuser. All you want is for them to love you and this need persists at the expense of your own sanity and safety.
Violence wasn’t an everyday thing in our house, but my mother’s unpredictability created a chronic sense of dread in me. Sometimes, simply the crime of being upset or scared could get you trouble. She once threw my bike in the river because I wouldn’t stop crying. But while puzzling for me as her son, in the broader context of our community, her drunken, aggressive and violent impulses were not difficult to understand.
In Pollok violence was a part of daily life. Even just a simple trip to the shop around the corner was a risk to your safety – and pride. There were varying degrees of violent threat to consider, from scuffles to proper fighting, and different qualities of violence to fear, such as fist fights or stabbings. What didn’t change was the constant awareness of aggression and the potential for it to escalate.
In a community like this, the threat of violence is so pervasive that even when there is no reason to be afraid, the state of hypervigilance keeps you on alert regardless, making daily life considerably stressful. Outside the home, in the school, violence was more like a public exhibition. People staved off the threat of violence by stoking it up for someone else, whipping the playground into a frenzy until the first blow was struck. Whether at home or in the street, faced with the threat of violence, you will experience the worst possible type of fear. Physically fighting is a horrible, terrifying and dangerous thing to do. I learned early in my life that violence was inevitable and that I had no choice in the matter. So I picked my fights wisely if given the opportunity, earning my stripes in primary school with a boy I fought so many times that eventually people stopped coming to watch.
His house was closer to the school than mine, so I always had to walk past it, which made avoiding him impossible. One day I remember being so exhausted and scared from fighting that I was physically sick. When I did get home, I made the mistake of telling my mum about what had happened. Rather than console me, her response was to grab me by the sleeve of my jacket and march me back down to his house where she would confront his mother and I might be expected to fight again – to prove I wasn’t scared. I remember her reacting this way on a few other occasions, sometimes with people who were older than me. One time she marched right into a classroom to threaten a teacher for making me own up to something I didn’t do. The trigger that set her off seemed to be me appearing to be frightened by someone. Admitting you were afraid was almost shameful. I like to think, perhaps naively, that her love for me meant the thought of me being frightened or helpless was so upsetting to her that it caused her to overreact. But whatever the cause of her outbursts, it was eclipsed by her desire for retribution. Her solution to the problem of violence was always more violence.
The only reason I ever overcame my fear of the bullies was because it was dwarfed by my fear of my mother. Once she left, the threat of violence remained as I entered my teens and started attending a secondary school where it was present in many forms. Even a couple of the teachers were aggressive and prone to violence. So much of your thought and energy is given to pretending that you aren’t scared of anything whilst simultaneously assessing your safety in relation to a vast array of potential threats throughout the day.
There’s no point in fighting someone at the location they stipulate beforehand. They usually choose that location because it gives them a tactical advantage. My biggest worry, when faced with an unavoidable fight, would be that I might gain an early advantage, which could raise the stakes and potentially provoke an extreme act, biting or head kicking. I went into every fight with something to lose. Most of the people I had to fight were not burdened by that anxiety and this gave them a distinct advantage. Their anxiety was like my mother’s. Their biggest fear was losing face in front of other people in the community and this gave them an edge. If people were honest, they’d admit that fighting is extremely unpleasant. Sadly, backing down from a confrontation or admitting that you don’t want to fight can leave you vulnerable to humiliation as well as more aggression. It’s this fear of being ridiculed, cast out or attacked that subtly directs your thinking and behaviour in violent communities.
3
The Call of the Wild
IN THE MIDST of so many potential threats, it’s not easy to express yourself – unless you are being aggressive. Most other forms of emotional expression are kept in check, either by mockery or the threat of violence. This makes growing up in a so-called deprived community an oppressive experience. This sense that you are being repressed extends to nearly every means that you have to express your individuality. Which is why nearly everybody dressed and spoke the same. If you didn’t conform to the prevailing norm of the day then life became a daily run of the gauntlet.
Just as you’d attract attention for having the gall to wear a pair of trousers with more than two pockets, it became very apparent to other people if you started dropping fancy words into conversation. I recall a summer afternoon, stewing on the school bus as rowdy classmates were being dragged aboard by teachers for the weekly trip to the football pitches. Two minutes on the bus and it was clear the boys were in no mood to behave unpredictably; snarling through their nostrils and homoerotically play-fighting while using the word ‘gay’ as an adjective for anything that fell outside their frame of reference. By these measures, I was already well out of the closet and that day I made a passing comment about one of the girls in our class, who was sporting an attractive new hairstyle.
‘Here, did you see Nicola’s new hair? It’s fuckin beautiful.’
That sentence might seem uncontroversial, but in this environment, there is a preferred way of speaking. When you are bold enough to speak up amongst a potentially aggressive peer group, it’s wise to screen your impending statement in your head beforehand, or you risk inviting a confrontation. Luckily, my sense of what I should and shouldn’t say was, by this point, instinctive and I could think on my feet depending on the demands of the situation. If I found myself in a staff room, in the presence of adults with authority, it was natural to take things up a notch and perhaps drop in a reference to politics or current affairs – if there weren’t any boys around. For some reason, it always felt natural to alter the way I spoke when conversing with teachers. It was important to me that they knew I was smart. In a school like this, where the threat of mockery and violence hangs in the air, intelligence is an attribute you learn to conceal for reasons of personal safety. Therefore, if the opportunity to flex my intellectual muscle did present itself, it was difficult to pass up.
