What part did the eminent woman psychologist who says sex attackers aren’t all monsters play in his release?
Worboys will be on the streets in a month His case is typical of ‘soft justice’ culture
Dr Jackie craissati is due to give a lecture at the University of London’s Goldsmiths campus next week, an event that has been widely publicised and eagerly anticipated.
Dr craissati is lauded as one of the country’s most eminent forensic psychologists. With three books and more than 40 publications under her belt in a career spanning 30 years, she was awarded the MBe for services to mental health in 2013.
This is not the reason, though, why the Goldsmiths auditorium is likely to be packed; it surely has more to do with the controversial subject matter of Dr craissati’s talk, provocatively entitled: ‘Ten Myths about Sex Offenders.’
We do not have a transcript of what she is planning to say. But, judging by her well-documented views in this field, it’s not hard to predict what at least one of those so-called ‘myths’ might be.
it is this: that sex offenders are too often labelled ‘monstrous’ individuals which, Dr craissati argues, is ‘overly simplistic’.
Sex offenders like John Worboys, for example, the black cab rapist who was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting 12 women in the back of his taxi, but who police suspect was responsible for many more attacks on scores of young female passengers in London.
Does she not believe that he is a ‘monstrous individual’?
Dr craissati is certain to face such a question from the audience at Goldsmiths — because this week she was named as the author of a report that contributed to his imminent release.
She is understood to have submitted expert opinion on Worboys to the Parole Board, which heard his successful application to be freed after less than a decade behind bars.
The decision has been roundly condemned by politicians from all parties as well as by Worboys’ victims, who were not informed his parole had been approved.
Worboys, 60, among Britain’s most prolific and notorious sexual predators, was given an indeterminate sentence with a minimum term of eight years in 2009.
Nevertheless, he will be back on the streets at the end of the month after the Government announced yesterday that it will not challenge the decision in a judicial review.
Dr craissati, 57, was not, of course, solely responsible for the recommendation to free Worboys.
The three-strong Parole Board panel heard evidence from nine ‘live’ witnesses (including fellow psychologists and prison and probation staff) and deny accusations that they were ‘overly influenced by one individual’s evidence’.
The identity of these witnesses, and their testimonies, is protected by strict Parole Board procedures.
Dr craissati’s alleged role in this process is believed to have been leaked by prison sources opposed to Worboys’s release.
The revelation has fuelled the controversy. Dr craissati’s body of work — blaming, for example, the ‘excessive emphasis’ on ‘punitive controls’ on sex offenders for ‘increasing an offender’s emotional instability’ — has left her open to accusations that she, and others in the traditionally liberal world of psychology and psychiatry, too often favour leniency for sex offenders, something she denies.
The Worboys case, say critics, epitomises the ‘soft justice’ culture for such individuals.
The question many would ask members of the Parole Board, however, is this: would they be happy for their wives or daughters to get into a car with Worboys when he leaves jail?
Dr craissati is an official adviser to the Parole Board and sits on its review committee, which examines cases where former prisoners have committed serious further offences within three years of release.
She has extensive experience of working with high-risk sex offenders and runs a (not-for-profit) company — Psychological approaches — ‘offering consultancy and training to those working with complex mental health and offending behaviour’.
‘key achievements’ are listed in her profile on the company website. These include chairing a consortium of four mental health trusts to ‘deliver innovative personality disorder services across London . . . in partnership with the prison and probation service’.
‘Jackie is very experienced and highly rated by other psychologists,’ said a colleague.
even so, there is one entry on Dr craissati’s impressive CV that has escaped scrutiny in the wake of the Worboys furore. it is her involvement in the Nicola edgington scandal.
edgington’s name may have faded from the public’s memory but not the brutal nature of her crimes.
edgington was detained indefinitely (like Worboys) under the Mental Health act for stabbing her mother nine times at her home in east Grinstead, West Sussex, in 2005. She was placed at the Bracton centre in
Dartford, Kent, a ‘medium secure’ unit run by Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust. Edgington was deemed fit for discharge after three years and released in 2009.
In 2011, Edgington, armed with a stolen butcher’s cleaver, virtually decapitated Sally Hodkin, 58, an innocent grandmother on her way to work in Bexleyheath, in South-East London.
Sally was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Last year, a damning report into Mrs Hodkin’s death, commissioned by NHS England, found that staff at the Bracton Centre were too willing to accept Edgington’s version of events and failed to take seriously warnings made by Edgington’s own brother and sister that she was still unwell and potentially dangerous.
Documents sent to the Ministry of Justice did not detail concerns about her behaviour. Mrs Hodkin’s family accepted an out-of-court settlement from the Oxleas NHS trust. What has any of this to do with Dr Craissati?
Dr Craissati has worked at the Bracton Centre since 1988, according to the minutes of a board meeting of the Oxleas NHS Trust, and was clinical director between 2010 and 2016 before leaving to set up her Psychological Approaches company.
When contacted this week, Dr Craissati stressed she ‘was in no way involved in the assessment of risk of the particular individual (Nicola Edgington), nor was I involved in the decision to release her’ [in 2009]. She said she was not clinical director at the time.
But she was implicated in the controversy, nonetheless. Dr Craissati was named, we have learned, in a highly critical 2012 report into the murder of Mrs Hodkin — for which Edgington received a life sentence — by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). Edgington, having been judged well enough to leave the Bracton Centre, was moved to a house run by a councilfunded charity in Greenwich, South-East London, under the supervision of a mental health team. She was being prepared to live unsupported in the community when she attacked Mrs Hodkin.
Police in Greenwich, however, were not notified of this fact as they should have been.
The staff member at Bracton who should have passed on the information was Dr Craissati. She was then head of psychology at the Bracton Centre, according to the minutes of the same board meeting of the Oxleas NHS Trust mentioned earlier.
Dr Craissati was interviewed by investigators from the IPCC. She said ‘she should have notified’ Greenwich police, but it was ‘possible that she omitted to forward this information’.
But the report goes on to say that ‘the evidence also shows that Nicola Edgington’s forensic social worker did email an electronic referral form to Dr Craissati which should have been forwarded to Greenwich police. She has accepted that she believes she omitted to send the form.’
Her apparent failure to do so did not affect her stellar career. As already stated, Dr Craissati was subsequently appointed clinical director of the Bracton Centre and was later made an MBE.
But her link to the Nicola Edgington scandal — in fairness, a string of other professionals involved in Edgington’s treatment received stinging criticism, too — will do little to assuage the anger of Worboys’s victims.
Dr Craissati’s beliefs, shared by many of her peers, will doubtless have already confirmed a growing suspicion among the wider public that the rights of perpetrators increasingly come before the rights of their victims.
Much of Dr Craissati’s work has focused on paedophiles. Her book, Child Sex Abusers, A Community Treatment Approach, was written in the late Nineties when she was based at the Bracton Centre.
Dismissing established theories in this field as ‘illogical and inaccurate rhetoric,’ she writes:
It’s feared that victims’ rights are ignored
‘It’d take an awful lot to convince me he should be released’
‘Emotive responses to biased assumptions can only increase the daunting task of assessing and managing the sexual offenders known within our system, and identifying those individuals who do indeed pose an enormous risk to children.
‘The message that “there is no cure” is disheartening — and probably untrue. It would seem that — despite under-reporting — a number of convicted sex offenders do not reoffend.’
Dr Craissati maintains treatment programmes have even allowed ‘some [abusive] fathers and children to reestablish a warm, close relationship’.
She says studies suggest the police should only be ‘worried about’ 25 to 33 per cent of people who access child pornography.
Jim Gamble, a former head of Ceop, the child exploitation and online protection command of the National Crime Agency, says the figure who pose a risk could be as high as 85 per cent.
Another controversial subject is tackled in an academic paper by Dr Craissati with the title: ‘Should We Worry About Sex Offenders Who Deny Their Offences?’
It is a rhetorical question. ‘There is no evidence to link denial to increased sexual recidivism [reoffending],’ she wrote. ‘Indeed, the converse is true insofar as a number of studies link denial to reduced reoffending, particularly in higher-risk sex offenders.’
This is crucial and may help us understand the reasons why Dr Craissati is said to have supported Worboys’s application for parole.
Worboys has shown little remorse for his attacks down the years.
In 2010, he reportedly lost his appeal against conviction. Three Appeal Court judges branded him a chancer who wasted court time. In 2013, he also asked the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to examine his case. Two years later, he withdrew his submission with no explanation.
Parole cannot be refused solely on the basis of a prisoner’s denial or lack of remorse, but they are important factors when an application is considered.
There have been reports that Worboys ‘found God’ and converted to Christianity before coming before the Parole Board at Wakefield prison, where he will remain until his release.
His victims have questioned why Worboys was denied a move to an open prison in 2015, but granted parole just over two years later.
They said he had not undergone a ‘test’ period in a more open environment, usually considered vital for sex offenders before release.
Worboys will be subject to 14 restrictions when he comes out of Wakefield.
Prison sources say he will have to live for at least six months in a bail hostel with a night-time curfew, which will be little consolation to the women he targeted.
His modus operandi was to tell them he’d come into money and invite them to join him in a bottle of champagne to celebrate. It was laced with sedatives.
‘He is a calculating, devious individual and it would take an awful lot to convince me it is safe to have him outside,’ was the verdict of the former detective chief inspector who led the original investigation into Worboys.
Is there anyone apart, it seems, from Dr Jackie Craissati and her fellow witnesses who gave evidence to the Parole Board, who would disagree with him?