A lesson in understanding serial killers and child molesters

True crime is having a moment: every day there’s a new documentary, book, podcast, or blockbuster film announced, detailing the grisliest, most depraved actions imaginable. Once only the domain of fanatics, true crime is now mainstream. At its best, it’s fascinating, shining a light on human behaviour, but at its worst, it can be voyeuristic and dehumanising. So I approached The Devil You Know, Dr Gwen Adshead’s memoir of forensic psychotherapy charting her encounters with serial killers, murderers and paedophiles with a little trepidation.

The book is divided into 11 chapters, each telling the story of an (anonymised) patient of Adshead. They come from her time spent working in prisons, secure hospitals such as Broadmoor and private practice. Between them they are responsible for serious arson, serial killings, parental murder and child sexual abuse, including of their own children. They are a broad sweep of those individuals whom society tends to consider irredeemable.

It’s easy to dismiss people who commit acts of evil — to view them as outside our own experience, incapable of thinking, feeling or loving in the way we do. We allow ourselves to think that we could never behave like them and it suits us to file them away as fundamentally different. The ‘othering’ of these offenders is natural, but it’s also unhelpful. It leads us to believe that they are unable to change in any meaningful way, and it ignores the harm that we are all capable of in the wrong circumstances.

This is Adshead’s starting point: that evil is ‘really a term, much like beauty, which says more about the viewer than the object’, and that we are wrong to dismiss the treatment and therapy of violent offenders as a waste of time; that listening and compassion can make a difference.