Shooting in the Dark

that threw up the figures. And I know it, of course, because I am a psychologist and informed about such things. That I am a currently unemployed psychologist doesn’t alter the truth. I qualified and I have clinical and field experience.
    My ex-colleagues, of course, know that my employers felt it just to remove me from my post to avert a scandal. What is not generally known is that my research project was actually producing original and valuable data. And if I was so wrong in my treatment of the boys, why was I given such a huge sum of money to resign?
    Your question is this: will these sex offenders commit more crimes against the innocent? I don’t want to lie to you. The answer is that many of them will. Because although they have been convicted of sexual offences against children, and although many of them have served terms of imprisonment, they have not been cured.
    Which brings me, neatly, to one of my pet subjects: is there such a thing as ‘cure’ for offenders like these? And the answer is no, at least not in the conventional sense. There is though, even in my liberal profession, a growing consensus that these people can be ‘cured’ in a number of different ways. We are beginning to look again at a range of tertiary preventions, including selective incapacitation, the use of boot camps, and keeping high-rate serious and chronic offenders out of circulation altogether.
    Psychology is the art of observation, and observation is about watching people. All psychologists watch people, but not all psychologists see. Let me rephrase the last part of that sentence. Psychologists, like people in other professions, actually see what they expect to see.
    This is best illustrated by the experience of eye-witness testimony. Because eye-witnesses can be 100 per cent sure about what they have seen and at the same time 100 per cent wrong. There was an experiment carried out on television in the eighties where viewers were shown a film of a mugging, and then asked to pick the offender from an identity parade of six men. Remember that they had just seen the offender commit the crime in front of their eyes. A couple of thousand people responded, but only 14 per cent of them picked the right man. With six possibilities to choose from, a random guess would produce a correct result by 16.67 Per cent. So in this example eye-witness testimony produced a result which was worse than a random guess.
    There has been an enormous amount of research on eye-witness testimony, and it all tends to show that people remember faces poorly and that they don’t recall details from memory, but from stereotypes of what they think criminals look like.
    There is so much that should be obvious, but few people actually see it. Why do we insist that perception and memory are like data stored on a hard disk? Why do we think of them as akin to a copying process or a photographic image? Nothing could be further from the truth. Perception is a process which interprets an event in the outside world, and memory is always either deteriorating or reconstructing, attempting to fit images and interpretations into a scheme which feels right.
    Many of my colleagues did not understand this. They believe that crime can be controlled by means of education, or that it will respond to some form of psychotherapy or counselling. I fought them for all of my professional life.
     
    I would be a good eye-witness, because I have trained myself to be observant.
    I am the watchman.
     
    The woman fought like a tiger. When I got home I hardly recognized myself. My face was scratched and bleeding, the skin torn in vertical lines by her manicured nails. Her teeth had almost severed my right thumb; she had bitten down to the bone just above the knuckle and I had to swab it with iodine and wrap it in swathes of bandage to stop the flow of blood. A kick in the balls is never good news, but she had been particularly vicious and they had swollen up like tennis balls. I crept into bed, my head aching, and let myself drift into a numbing sleep.
    Miriam was not well pleased when she came home from work and discovered the state of me. What could I say? My injuries had obviously been inflicted by a woman.
    Her eyes flickered as she focused on the bandaged thumb then travelled back to my disfigured face. ‘What happened?’ she asked, her voice quietly controlled.
    ‘Accident,’ I said weakly, knowing I had no hope of getting away with it.
    Miriam said nothing. She turned away