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Dr Adshead describes the risk factors for violence as being like numbers in a bicycle lock.

“Just as all the numbers have to line up for the bicycle lock to open, so multiple risk factors are usually in place before violence erupts.

“The more risk factors, the greater the risk of violence; one risk factor on its own is not enough to cause or explain violence.

“Another complexity is that the last number can reflect something that happens between the victim and the perpetrator, which the perpetrator misinterprets.”

Dr Adshead says people with severe mental illness account for only 5.3% of recorded violence.

“Interestingly, in prison it is not usually the homicide perpetrators who struggle most with mental disorder and distress.

“It is the non-violent majority of prisoners, typically young men and women on short sentences with addiction and family breakdown issues who struggle most and are at high risk of suicide.”

She adds that sometimes, the motives of violent perpetrators don’t make any sense, but that doesn’t mean that they are mentally ill.

“People with mental illness tend to have a motive that makes sense to them, but it’s driven by their psychotic beliefs.”

Dr Adshead believes that we all have the capacity to get into an ‘evil’ state of mind and are therefore capable of extreme violence.

She says these states of mind are dominated by ordinary emotions of hatred, envy, greed and anger.

“About half the murders in England and Wales each year are caused by a quarrel about something important that causes feelings to run high.

“But when traumatised people experience anger, fear or shame, that can then make them see other people as a threat, or even as people who deserve to die.”

Dr Adshead says she has never met a convicted killer who says they set out to be bad.

Instead, she says violence perpetrators usually have a story which both justifies and excuses their violence, known as a ‘neutralisation discourse.’

“A perpetrator can blame the victim, claim that they only did what others do, normalising, minimising the harm done to the victim, blaming their circumstances, “I was drunk.”

“In other words, they identify their own bicycle lock numbers. They normalise their own violence, try to make it understandable. They do not wish to be seen as monsters, but as people who felt they had no choice.”

Dr Adshead believes violent minds can change.

Dr Gwen Adshead Photo 漏 大象传媒/Richard Ansett

She says she has only met a few killers who remain incurious and remorseless after committing homicide.

She talks about the case of a man called Jacob Dunne, who killed another man with a single punch when he was 19.

By the time Jacob completed his prison sentence, he still justified his actions and said he saw violence as a way of maintaining his ‘honour’ as a young man.

However, a meeting with his victim’s parents changed everything.

“It was only afterwards when he listened and talked with them in depth about the killing and its impact, that it enabled him to re-evaluate who he was and the kind of person he wanted to be in the future.”

Jacob now works with groups of young men to try and help them find better ways to manage those emotions of loss, isolation and despair that make violence more likely.

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