TREATING THE UNSPEAKABLE

Optimistic psychologist

’’They’re remarkably ordinary people who do things that are wrong and they try and meet their basic needs in ways that are problematic and unacceptable, but you can still see the person and what they were trying to do.’’ Tony Ward on sex offenders

The hostility of dinner party rants puzzled him. Throw away the key, they demanded angrily. He learned to shut up, or say he used to work with eating disorder patients instead – that was far more socially acceptable.

These days Tony Ward no longer works to rehabilitate child sex offenders, so the dinner party reactions aren’t as rabid. Now, he tends to call himself a psychology professor, clinical psychologist or – if he’s feeling provocative – forensic clinical psychologist.

Made a Royal Society fellow in 2017 for his ‘‘strikingly original theoretical contributions’’, Ward is known here primarily as a researcher. But internationally he’s recognised for the Good Lives treatment model he devised.

The 63-year-old Victoria University professor’s quest for a better rehabilitation model began with Ward’s appointment as the inaugural director of the Kia Marama treatment programme for child sex offenders at Christchurch’s Rolleston Prison. At the time – 1989 – the programme was revolutionary, hence the vehement dinner party reactions.

Growing up, Ward was a restless soul. He mucked around at school in Christchurch then Nelson, married and had kids young, cleaned, laboured and connected phone lines before following his speech therapist mother into a psychology degree (with philosophy).

Before going to Kia Marama he published a volume of pessimistic poetry, undertook a master’s in clinical psychology, and worked as a psychiatric nurse in Christchurch’s Sunnyside mental hospital, a Salvation Army alcohol counsellor and as a psychologist treating young women suffering from severe eating disorders.

But there’s a thread that binds all his experiences – a sensitivity for wasted potential. At Sunnyside, some patients had been there 30 or 40 years.

‘‘I was just struck by the tragedy – the waste of these people’s lives. There was one guy who had been there since he was 13 or 14. He was put there because of excessive masturbation. He never got out.’’

When Ward told dinner party guests he worked with child sex offenders, the most common retort was, ‘‘These people don’t merit help and what about the victims’’. Both reasonable concerns, but that’s really not the point, Ward argues. It’s a constant tension in forensic psychology – walking the line between punishment and rehabilitation, helping without minimising the person’s offence. Ward argues punishment is only meaningful if it’s finite and proportional. Once you’ve squared the moral ledger, there must be a way back into society.

‘‘These guys will get out sooner or later, and isn’t it better to try and help them find other ways to live, so they’re going to be less likely to harm others.’’

Kia Marama also taught Ward that people – both offenders and psychologists – aren’t like textbook caricatures. They react to you and you react to them. Something of an anti-authoritarian, Ward’s first reaction to circumscribed prison life, and its cargo of society’s most hated was ‘‘God, get me out of here’’.

The assessments were the most challenging – three weeks of hearing the graphic detail of offences. It was hard not to slip into the mindset of ‘‘these are just really awful people’’. But hearing their stories made him realise sex offenders weren’t some homogenous evil that all had the same motivations, the same modus operandi, the same risks. Some had lengthy offending histories, others had offended just once. Some were sexually attracted to children; others sought intimacy.

‘‘They’re kind of caricatured as these deviance machines – these faulty mechanisms that are deeply flawed. Actually, most of them are not at all. They’re remarkably ordinary people who do things that are wrong and they try and meet their basic needs in ways that are problematic and unacceptable, but you can still see the person and what they were trying to do. So that changed me, it changed the way I thought about people who commit offences.’’

These days Ward is a theorist, hemmed in by shelves of obscurely named textbooks, rather than prison bars. Since Kia Marama he has published extensively on sexual offending, and he’s never lost sight of that vision of offenders as ordinary people with normal motivations expressed in unacceptable ways.

It turns out he is far more optimistic than his angsty young man poetry suggested. He believes anyone can change, but only under three conditions – they need to want to, they need the skills to do it, and they need an environment that allows it – jobs, social groups, support. But he argues our rehab programmes have the focus all wrong. They’re all about stopping the problem behaviour, be it drug use or boy racer hooning or violence, without providing a compelling alternative.

‘‘People who commit offences really want the opportunity to live fulfilling and better lives, not really the promise of less harmful ones. Just being told, Ok, you’re going to go through this programme, you’re going to open up, you’re going to expose your fears, you’re going to be confronted, and what we can promise you at the end of that very difficult journey – you’re not likely to hurt anyone else. How motivating is that?

‘‘Whereas if I say to you, ‘What we’re going to do is take the things that matter most to you and find a way to help you realise them, that’s socially OK and likely to be beneficial to you, how does that sound?’ That’s really the Good Lives Model.’’

Forensic psychology is a blend of art and science – it’s based on evidence, but without relationships it’s meaningless. Ward worries that our fixation with measuring risk is eroding that balance.

‘‘We’ve forgotten about the humanity and it’s all about the numbers, it’s all about the data. It’s all about prediction and I think that’s a major problem.’’

While it makes sense to try to predict those more likely to reoffend, correctional psychologists are treating risk factors not as symptoms but as causes, and using them to design treatment, Ward says.

‘‘Basing our treatment programmes on risk factors is a dead end, on its own. It’s part of the picture but it’s not enough.’’

When he’s not working, Ward is probably discussing (arguing) with his neuropsychologist partner Carolyn. Or walking his ball-of-fluff samoyed dog Skylar, or watching films with his four grown-up kids. He watches sport, but avoids those crime analysis TV programmes – they just make him angry with their sweeping characterisations of offenders as ‘‘inherently this or inherently that’’.

If you meet Ward at a dinner party, do ask him what he does. And don’t worry, he doesn’t believe in that Freudian rubbish, so he won’t be secretly psychoanalysing your every move.