The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry

by Gwen Adshead

Considerable study of the connection between watching porn online and “contact offenses” has been made in recent years, suggesting those who do move from the virtual to the actual are more likely—but not exclusively—to be those who have exhibited prior criminal or antisocial behavior.

W. H. Auden’s lines, written on the eve of the Second World War, that “Evil is unspectacular and always human, / and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”

“normal” is self-defining, and they were “like me.”

Experience of what might be considered a kind of “benign neglect,” when found in combination with other risk factors, can also be predictive of violence or self-harm, or both.

Perhaps doing this made him regain a sense of power when those disturbing dreams rendered him weak with fear.

I wondered if he saw his offending self through this lens: if he was never “there,” simply because he wasn’t actually in a room doing terrible things to a drugged or restrained child, he might have persuaded himself for a long time that he was free to persist with his “hobby.”

Hope is not fanciful or naive; it is a mature defense against sadness and loss.