Content warning: Discussions of abuse and vicarious trauma
You feel it descend as the kids run off through the aisles in the supermarket. As soon as they’re out of sight you are alert and tense. Occasionally it happens while you’re distracted, so when you look up and realise they’re gone you don’t know exactly how long or which way they went, and when that happens you go straight to third gear. Short breaths, quickening movements. Whatever you were holding flung in the general direction of the shelves as you spin away into the search.
There’s a thing you do — walking as fast as you can, rushing, hyperalert, checking along and under and at the same time throwing glances towards the exit for any sign of a kid being hustled or carried out past the bag checkers — all the while trying not to look like a deranged helicopter parent. Must not helicopter.
You’re thinking about He Who Walks Behind The Rows. When as a teenager you read about Stephen King’s supernatural demon, the source of evil in a story about a cult of children killing adults, the words had a heft of their own that sunk in and stayed with you. Like a line from a song or a poem that pops up from time to time in response to the right stimuli. Decades later, you used it to name another chilling character you encountered, but he who walks among the aisles wasn’t squashed safely between the pages of a paperback. He was a real person from a real case who, with help from a single accomplice, took a child straight out of a shop past dozens of people and security guards. Although your left-brain knows you’ll never meet him he’s there with you in every supermarket, toy or department store moving along quietly out of sight; watching, waiting.
In court his breathing was loud and deep, Vader in a cardigan. He looked annoyed, his lawyer was pressing his rights and you ground your teeth but you were, as always, polite and professional. It’s not as if you’ve never had to press an argument that left ash on your tongue.
Just as you start to hyperventilate you find them three aisles away, pottering and smiling. You know they’ve done nothing wrong but you admonish them gently and, just for a second, hug them a little too tightly.
At the fringes of the legal system, there are areas of work you probably won’t read about in law school career guides. Many of these deal in trauma or poverty. They are substantial, but they aren’t celebrated or pursued by the mainstream of the profession. They generally attract neither money nor prestige, and in many cases the ‘market’ fails to provide paid jobs of any sort, irrespective of need. Social security law — incredibly complex, full of rich intellectual challenge and compelling human stories — sustains almost no dedicated lawyers aside from a handful in community legal centres and their moderately more comfortable counterparts in Centrelink. Whereas its pin-striped reflection, tax law, sustains thousands of comfortable jobs, many of which come with seven figure incomes.
'To do this work is to accept its scars. This is true for the social workers, psychologists, community advocates, magistrates, youth workers and others in this space. Lawyers are not special; I write what I know.'
Child protection is the underpaid, scruffily-dressed cousin of family law. It attracts small clusters of lawyers around state children’s courts, a mix of the truly dedicated and those who simply landed there and never moved on. Beyond child protection there are a smattering of other lawyers grinding through an eclectic collection of trauma jurisdictions. Historic (and occasionally recent) child abuse claims, periodic inquiries and royal commissions, family violence and intervention orders, and a growing area of law in the complex management of very violent individuals, especially sex offenders, outside gaol.
To do this work is to accept its scars. This is true for the social workers, psychologists, community advocates, magistrates, youth workers and others in this space. Lawyers are not special; I write what I know. I can concede there are more traumatic or challenging jobs while also wondering if the particular requirements of the law may have their own unique way of opening a person to damage. You descend into the story, absorb much of its detail, then turn the furious intensity of your legal skills to the task of furthering another’s advantage. Telling their story with conviction. When your conscience aligns with your work, you risk becoming overwhelmed and obsessed with the outcome as you sink deeply into the needs of your client. When there is less alignment you may — assuming you have a strong conscience — feel your sense of self undermined by cognitive dissonance.
With perverse irony, the lawyers whose actions render the greatest damage usually work at some remove from the outcomes. Collins Street’s ‘best and brightest’ don’t visit the undeveloped sites of foregone public schools or hospitals, nor meet the dying victims of toxic torts or the suicidally depressed debris scattered by a mass ‘employee offboarding’. Sometimes even government lawyers are deliberately buffered, with a degree of structural separation, from those they act against. I was once told by a lawyer from a hard-nosed unit based in Canberra, a unit that seemed to love litigation like I love the fatty bits of bacon, that they were kept away from direct exposure to the poor and disabled people on the receiving end lest, it was implied, they lost their steely resolve.
The law of trauma and abuse doesn’t offer such genteel opportunities to pontificate on section this or subparagraph that while whistling cheerfully. The damage opens up in front of you — a haemorrhaging patient in thoracic surgery — and you need to steel yourself and go on in because that’s your job. The files alone will put hooks in you, even if all you do is read and summarise, read and summarise. When you realise just how much abuse has been absorbed by thousands of children, women, the vulnerable, how predatory and misanthropic people can be, how indifferent and irresponsible so many others — charged with protecting or educating those children — can also be, that shapes you forever.
There are many tripwires. One woman I worked with couldn’t watch Law and Order; a show that was merely edge-of-seat can become a door into a liminal space where fiction feels interchangeable with real files. I get that one too, but I also find the prompts can be far more random — a shop, a suburb. There is a street in Melbourne where a girl was brutally assaulted and killed decades ago, and I spent some time reading about how the perpetrator was caught, many years later, through an incredibly dedicated cold case investigation. I sometimes walk past the street and her story always comes back to me. I don’t know where exactly it happened, so each house, in my mind, potentially holds this coiled history, the inexplicable horror with its long, dark tail that would have destroyed the lives of those closest to her and would still be alive in her wider family’s consciousness.
Sometimes my worst reactions are responses to perceived institutional failures. For example, the way so much has been uncovered and learned but so many people still seem, to my no-doubt-jaded eyes, to be providing performative lip service when it’s easy while failing to truly ask for a society where we consistently strive to protect children from harm. We can scream and march if we find out a former offender lives in our community, and we can usually muster bipartisan support to condemn the well-documented institutional sexual abuse of the past.
Yet we can also deem some children unworthy of the most elemental protections by labelling them outsiders and slapping them behind razor wire. And we still seem to fret about whether child-on-child abuse, of the non-sexual kind, is really that bad or some sort of rite of passage that prepares kids for ‘the real world’. Never mind the evidence it can lead to the same long-term trauma and developmental harm as the abuse we more readily acknowledge. Never mind that we shape the so-called real world ourselves, through our decisions and the norms we allow to be embedded into each new generation as it passes through the education system.
In my mind there remains a direct intercommunicative link between these types of failures and the better acknowledged ways we failed children in the past. I hear about them and immediately feel some of the anger I felt reading files about abusers being moved around or police laughing off children’s stories and delivering them back into the hands of their perpetrators.
'There is a particular way this can unsettle your sense of self if you are a man who has spent time in this type of work.'
Whatever the prompts may be, they are ever-present for many people who’ve worked in these spaces. Turn the wrong corner or page and it arrives.
Images blur and join between memories. Priests circling like dementors, ready to steal childhoods and leave traumatised shells that wake in the night thirty years later. Juvenile gaols where guards locked themselves away in safety every night rather than deal with the gang beatings and rapes. Men sitting behind steering wheels, watching lights going out in bedrooms or waiting in quiet carparks.
There is a particular way this can unsettle your sense of self if you are a man who has spent time in this type of work. You will understand, both impressionistically and factually, that some of the most disturbing, least understood pathologies are overwhelmingly problems of men. You will see an old friend furiously reposting obfuscatory nonsense dredged up out of rabbit holes deep in the manweb and you will be angry and frustrated. You know they wouldn’t so much as humour let alone propagate that garbage if they’d worked a month in the Children’s Court.
Of course it’s not all men and yet, even as your friend loudly wades into some discussion insisting on their own impeccable credentials, you recall encounters with loud, black-shirted men’s rights activists making the same arguments in court. Every single one of them indignant and unfairly put upon. Every single one a violent, abusive and unbalanced individual individual with an exasperating inability to see themselves from the outside, recognise the lines they’d well and truly crossed and accept boundaries and help. Every single one of them there because their actions had harmed those they purported to love and, in the process (as they were likely to tell you without any admission of culpability), destroyed what may have been the best thing they had.
The vast majority of really serious family violence cases you handled or saw involved men abusing women. ‘Really serious’ are the ones where implacably angry perpetrators hold court orders in open contempt, or crawl along in cars following victims from home to shops to school, or beat them to within an inch of their lives. The cases where at every moment you worry, really worry, that they might become another headline. The gender skew is even less debatable when it comes to sexual assault, whether of women or children. It isn’t even controversial to observe that sexual assault is — overwhelmingly — a problem of men.
Even if you dear male reader, or I, or any one of my male colleagues from the times I worked in these fields are not a risk in this regard, not prone to powerful abusive impulses let alone ‘unable' (or unwilling, or unwilling to do the work to be able) to control them, you may find it hard to avoid wondering what fuels this darkness. Wondering in a way that ever-so-slightly twists the wires that hold you together.
'That they are not dissuaded by the lack of material rewards or professional recognition is not to the point. It is to their credit, but not that of a system that grinds on treating the most valuable work, whether in law or across society generally, as if it is the most expendable.'
Despite the inevitable damage, every day people turn up and do this work. Police interview victims, social workers try to help people who’ve hurt their loved ones, trauma counsellors listen and empathise and give something of themselves to guide people away from the edge of an abyss. And lawyers turn up in places like the Children’s Court, acting for frightened, confused or angry children and parents, or for social workers, doing their best with what they have, who sometimes feel the same emotions as those they work with.
Measured by the standards of their own profession, the work is thankless — not only at the bottom of the pay scale but almost never accorded recognition for its value or difficulty. Not one of the good, even great lawyers I’ve known who worked in that court made silk. Every year, the self-perpetuating system of legal honours awards its highest quality mark to people whose lives have been dedicated to defending power and privilege, many of whom would fall apart like Bloomberg’s presidential campaign if they spent a week running emergency contests about where an abused child will sleep that night. A few good Children’s Court lawyers manage to become magistrates, many reach a point where they have to move on, for their sanity or the mortgage, but others build an entire life taking on those cases and the load that comes with them. That they are not dissuaded by the lack of material rewards or professional recognition is not to the point. It is to their credit, but not that of a system that grinds on treating the most valuable work, whether in law or across society generally, as if it is the most expendable.
No doubt it gets easier as time goes on (as it did for me, over several excursions into different aspects of this law) but even for the lifers ‘it’ must always be there. Even real, substantive fears like running into the wrong person in the wrong place. Like the existential horror that paralysed one of my former managers when, out walking with her small child, she realised she was standing close to someone violent she’d encountered in court. She walked away, unrecognised, but not without sustaining a small tear in the fragile barrier between her work and private lives.
The personal impact of this work is now getting attention. There’s an invitation in my inbox to a professional development lecture about managing vicarious trauma, and recently a former prosecutor was awarded substantial damages for posttraumatic stress disorder from prolonged exposure to sexual abuse files. The result may be an increased focus on ameliorating the direct impact of the trauma exposure — perhaps by creating a more balanced mix of work, where possible, or by offering counselling.
What may prove difficult to quantify is the impact that would come from better funding and recognition.
The lawyers I know who do this work rarely complain about their marginal status within their profession (many hold its worst pretentions and conceits in contempt). But humans are social animals, and nobody revels in third tier status (or pay, for that matter). When it comes to building resilience, it can’t be helpful that we tell these people, through the signifiers that have value in our society, that what they do is not important.
Martin Pike is a lawyer and writer who lives in Melbourne
Main image: Illustration Chris Johnston