Families Shamed

The Consequences of Crime for Relatives of Serious Offenders

Rachel Condry

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843925019
• eBook ISBN: 9781134013029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the experiences of relatives of those accused or convicted of serious crimes such as murder, manslaughter, rape and sex offences. A broader literature exists on prisoners' families, but few studies have looked specifically at those related to serious offenders, or considered their experience other than as prison visitors. Many of the difficulties faced by 'mundane' prisoners' families are magnified for the relatives of serious offenders, first by the length of sentence, and secondly by the seriousness and stigmatizing impact through association of the offence itself. Families Shamed draws upon intense qualitative research which combines long, searching interviews with the relatives of serious offenders with ethnographic fieldwork over a period of several years. The book focuses on how relatives made sense of their experiences, individually and collectively: how they described the difficulties they faced; whether they were blamed and shamed and in what manner; how they understood the offence and the circumstances which had brought it about; and how they dealt with the contradiction inherent in supporting someone and yet not condoning his or her actions. This is the first book to tell the story of serious offenders' families, the difficulties they face, and their attempts to overcome them. At the same time a focus on offenders' families also draws our attention to the ways in which women are affected by crime, illuminating the broader effects of crime and the criminal justice process on the proportionately greater number of women involved. It contributes also to wider debates about the social organization of the meanings of crime, and questions the tenability of some core policy assumptions about offenders and their families; the relationship between the state and the family, and its bearing especially on expectations about family responsibilities.

Chapter 1

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Discovering the offence

I suppose that at the end of the day it's not going to be as bad as the day you first hear that it's happened. You know, is anything going to be?

(Alice, son convicted of homicide)

Try to imagine as you are reading this that you receive news — from a telephone call or from someone knocking at your door — that a close relative has been arrested for a horrific offence. Imagine you were told that the person had sexually abused children, for example. How would you react? Disbelief? Shock? Horror? Panic? Your reaction might depend on a number of different factors — your relationship and history with the alleged offender, your opinion of the person conveying the news, or your own personal ability to deal with sudden distressing events. You are told of evidence for these allegations — do you believe it? Are you unsure? Does the news confirm suspicions you already had? As you read this you might be thinking ‘this would never happen to me’. Does that thought reflect a sense of security and belief that none of your close kin would commit a crime? Or a belief that events like this only happen to particular kinds of families?

Perhaps the most unusual or surprising reaction would be one of indifference. It is inconceivable to most people to imagine not caring about allegations made against a close family member, and even if they had suspected, to be formally confronted with the news might still be very distressing. As we will see, relatives in this study consistently described feelings of shock and distress at finding out about the offence, despite quite polarised accounts of life with the offender before this point. The day that they first found out about the serious offence was described by relatives in this study as a life-changing turning point. The day was etched with clarity in their minds and became a new centre of gravity, a new point around which all other events were constructed; a knock on the door, a telephone call, a letter, or a conversation brought catastrophic news and suddenly changed everything. They learnt of the offence from a number of different sources, but most frequently from the police, either through a telephone call, a visit to ask questions or to ask whether they knew the whereabouts of the offender, or suddenly having their house searched, as in the case of Beverly who was woken by police looking to arrest her grandson for a violent offence involving a firearm:

At about twelve o'clock, half-past eleven, twelve o'clock, I was in bed asleep with my boyfriend and my front door came off. And there was seven police standing over us with guns with lights on. My neighbours came out of the door and everybody was out there looking because they took us outside. And we had to stand up outside they handcuffed my boyfriend with plastic cuffs and they're searching all through the place and that. … And then total shock and disbelief you know, just couldn't believe that [my grandson] would get himself involved in anything like that, do you know what I mean?

(Beverly, grandson convicted of violent offence)

Other sources of this news included social workers, in the case of two relatives of sexual offenders, other relatives, or even the victims — one wife was sent a letter by her husband's victims which she handed over to social services. Police appeals for information often rely on someone from an offender's immediate circle coming forward and one mother in this study had recognised her relative's description in a newspaper report and notified police of her suspicions.

Gill discovered that her husband had been sexually abusing her nieces when her daughter Dawn was playing with her cousins. The cousins had told Dawn what her father had done and she ran to tell her mother:

When she said that, it's like somebody had come up and just picked up the biggest mallet and just smacked me here and smacked me there. So I shouted for my sister and she come running up and I knew then, I knew. And I couldn't believe it, see, and she said ‘do you believe them?’ And I said ‘of course’. First I'm going ‘no, no’ and then she said ‘do you believe them?’ and I said ‘of course I believe them’ and I put my arms around them and I saw [my daughter] Dawn and she was crying. Oh and all I remember, I just said to them ‘oh you're brave girls for telling me’ … and I went home and confronted [my husband].

(Gill, husband convicted of sex offence)

Hilda had lost contact with her son and was shocked to find out about his offence some months after it happened when it appeared on a television programme she happened to be watching:

R: How did you feel when you found out?

H: I felt sick. It was the biggest shock. I mean I've had some shocks, but I think that was the biggest. But in a way, I felt relief when [my partner] come in, because at least I could tell him as well, you know, let him have some of it.

(Hilda, son convicted of homicide)

The shock of discovery

Although they found out in different ways, relatives commonly described experiencing feelings of shock, disbelief, unreality, and feeling sick. One wife said that when the police arrived to search her house she felt as if she was in a television programme, as if the events were happening to someone else. Giddens has described feelings of disembodiment and unreality as characteristic features of disruptions to ‘ontological security’ — an attempt to transcend danger in extreme conditions, as Bettelheim described in Nazi concentration camps (Bettelheim 1970) — but also a temporary ‘splitting’ reaction to disruptions experienced in difficult situations in everyday life (Giddens 1991: 59). Relatives described feelings of shock at the offence itself and at its anticipated consequences:

You're in a situation where you've all had this terrific shock, you're having to deal with ultimately the sentences that they get, you're having to deal with actually what they've done, which is significant.

(George, son convicted of homicide)

For some relatives the shock manifested in physical symptoms:

I can actually remember physically what I felt like that day, half dead. It's like when you've got the worst dose of the flu but double-fold, it's like you just, your limbs have got no weight but they feel dead heavy, you know, I can feel how I felt but you couldn't describe how you felt. You weren't floating, they were heavy but there was nothing in them, you were just nothing, you were just hollow.

(Gill, husband convicted of sex offence)

One mother described how her reaction to the shock of the police arresting her son for rape was to immediately clean out all her kitchen cupboards because she felt so defiled. The immediate consequences were described by relatives as devastating and symptoms of shock persisted for some time:

I had sort of ten appalling days of you know, driving to prison and seeing solicitors and going to social services meetings and not being able to get there because I was snowed in, and oh blimey. I went back when I got home, I went home first to see [my husband] and [my son] and then I went over to see my Mum and I took to my bed nineteenth-century style and I went to bed and I couldn't get up, it was the most extraordinary sensation I've ever had, I was lying in bed and I couldn't move my arms and legs, they were so heavy, I stayed in bed for two days, I just couldn't move at all. I think exhaustion and shock and whatever.

(Monica, daughter convicted of violent offence)

Relatives said they could not imagine how they would ever come to terms with the news: life as they knew it had been shattered and smashed to pieces. One mother at an Aftermath seminar weekend described feeling numb, and like many of those I spoke to, compared the process to bereavement: ‘It's grief, a form of grieving, but you haven't got the respectability of them being dead’. This lack of respectability was important; relatives felt their grief was not legitimised because they were seen as somehow implicated and not free of blame.

What was it that relatives grieved for? There were a number of losses described: of their relationship with the offender or of free contact with him or her following imprisonment; of their hopes and dreams for the offender and what his or her life might hold — one father at an Aftermath meeting described how his hopes for his son to have a good job, a house of his own and to get married and have children were destroyed when his son was arrested for murder and subsequently given a life sentence; of other family members — in some families conflict emerged over whether to support the offender, for example, resulting in rifts and severed relationships; loss of the victim, if within the family or close circle — obvious in homicide cases, but also a result of children being moved into care or contact ceasing with grandchildren. Jane was grieving the loss of her grandson who had been removed to the care of social services and adopted with no further contact with his birth family:

J: Losing my grandson. That hurts, he's out there somewhere and I can't get to him…. I've got a room in the house, I know it sounds morbid [crying] but it's the only way I can cope with it, it's dedicated to Gareth. He's got clothes hanging in the wardrobe, he's got a cot, highchair, potty and toys on the floor and curtains up.

R: You think of that as his room?

J: That's Gareth's room.

(Jane, daughter convicted of violent offence)

Relationships with others might also be lost; there were many examples of relatives losing friends. There were consequential practical losses for some relatives of a job, finances, a home, and of time which was now devoted to the offender and his or her needs. One mother at an Aftermath meeting said she was unable to work because her son's conviction for murder was so devastating and as a consequence had to resign from her job and eventually lost her house.

Anne described her own experience of these losses and the experience of the numerous other families of serious offenders she had supported. Anne was also a counsellor for Cruse Bereavement Care, a national UK charity which supports the bereaved, and thought there were parallels between the two roles. She grieved for the loss of her son and for her relationship with him and for the loss of his future when he was convicted of rape:

R: Are there similarities between bereavement counselling with Cruse and counselling with Aftermath?

A: Very much so, I think it's, certainly for me it was a grieving process, even to the point that I could see a turning point after two years, which they say is the norm for grieving, you know, it takes two years. It was the same, it was two years before I started to sort of improve, because you've lost, I lost my son as I knew him, I lost my son, this is how I saw it at the time, life was never going to be the same between us again, I'd lost his future, I thought his future had gone, there was going to be no future, so very, very much the same, very much the same. Many, many times I felt that it would have been easier if he had died, because in my own mind he was dead, because everything had gone, and yet there was all the shame and the guilt and everything else that came with it, you know, so I couldn't get over it like I would if he died.

(Anne, son convicted of rape)

One Aftermath Chairperson described this as a ‘living death’: relatives would experience many of the emotions of bereavement, but with constant reminders of how their situation differed as they supported the offender through the criminal justice process, prison sentence and beyond.

One of the overwhelming losses described by relatives was the loss of security, of what they believed in, and a consequent loss of identity and their sense of self. Traumatic events involve a disruption of meaning, and of the framework we use to understand the world, which has been described as a ‘loss of the assumptive world’ (Parkes 1971; Parkes 1975). Janoff-Bulman describes the psychological impact of trauma and its aftermath as one of ‘shattered assumptions’ and has found similarities across different victim populations (Janoff-Bulman 1992). She argues that we all have a basic ‘cognitive conservatism’ and tend to discount anything that challenges how we see the world which stands us in good stead most of the time and helps us to understand the world and organise our experience. Normal change in our cognitive schema would be slow and gradual and not threaten its stability, but the change wrought by traumatic events is sudden and shattering: ‘the abrupt disintegration of one's inner world’ (ibid.: 63).

The relatives I met described the impact of finding out about the offence in similar ways. Again and again different relatives spoke of their world falling apart, of how life as they knew it had ended and how they felt their previous life experience had not prepared them for coping with something like this. The traumatic impact of finding out was partly to do with this anom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Discovering the offence
• 2 Life after discovery
• 3 Secondary stigma, shame and blame
• 4 Making sense of the offence
• 5 Relatives' own accounts
• 6 Self-help for families of serious offenders
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Notes on methodology
• Appendix 2 Interviewee characteristics
• Bibliography
• Index