THE TRUTH ABOUT BRIAN PEAD- PART FOUR

5

Having been enthused by the weekend course at CPPD on 2 and 3 February 2008, Brian Pead reported back his findings to the team at Sub19, a sister charity to Off Centre.

Sub19 formed part of the London Drug and Alcohol network. It was a statutory service which provided assistance to young people under 19 (hence its name) who had concerns around drugs or alcohol or both.

It was based at 11E, Florfield Passage, Hackney, E8 1DX. It was managed by Matthew ‘Matt’ Doocey, a counsellor from New Zealand. Other members of the team were Liam Shannon, Catherine Bedford, Marcia Asante, Delores McPherson, Hania MacLagan and secretary Ashirifianai Tete, more commonly known as ‘Ash’.

When he had applied for the post as a counsellor with Off Centre, Brian had been told that a requirement of the post was that he would have to become part of the Sub19 team, as well as the Off Centre team and that he would occasionally have to counsel young people under the age of 19. He explained at his interview that his counselling diploma was not a specific ‘child counselling’ diploma and that his particular approach to counselling (being based mainly on an amalgam of Existential and Gestalt approaches) was not particularly suited to children. Nevertheless, despite informing his interviewers of his shortcomings around counselling those under 18, he was given the post.

Each Tuesday morning, Brian Pead would report for work at Off Centre and then walk round to the Sub19 offices in Florfield Passage, a matter of a two-minute walk around the corner.

The energy of the Sub19 team was significantly different from that of the Off Centre team and Brian Pead enjoyed his Tuesday mornings there. He contributed greatly to staff meetings and on the morning of 5 February 2008, he gave a short presentation to the team about the weekend course at CPPD.

Although Sub19 (and, indeed, many other drug and alcohol services throughout the country) focus on issues of drugs and alcohol, the issues are rarely confined to just those substances. Clients often had other issues associated with substance misuse. Brian Pead, and others on the Sub19 team, had noted that several clients had underlying issues of sexual abuse in one form or another.

In a document entitled Sub19 Service Objectives created by Matt Doocey in January 2007, the New Zealander made reference to the fact that the Sub19 service was not ensuring that Tier 1 young people’s services receive specialist training and advice on working with young people with substance misuse problems. (He awarded the service only 3 out of a possible 10 marks for this area of the team’s effectiveness.)

When Brian joined the team a year later in January 2008, he immediately saw that this was a serious weakness in the team’s overall effectiveness. He formed the view that the Sub19 team was made up of a collection of hard-working, caring, intelligent individuals who were trying to make a difference but that they were basing their work on out-dated practices and with little reference to research.

During the clinical meetings, in which Brian made detailed notes, it became obvious to him that whoever presented a new client to the team, underlying issues of sexual abuse or inappropriate sexual activity in whatever guise were mentioned all too briefly and virtually dismissed.

Brian felt that this was a serious oversight, since he knew that it is possible to work with a client on his or her drug issues or alcohol problems and provide a ‘sticking plaster’ to the work between the counsellor and client, but that if the underlying issues of abuse were not addressed, the work was essentially flawed, lacking in integrity and basically not relevant to the client’s real needs. He often used the phrase ‘pissing in the wind’ to describe the quality of the work if the underlying issues were not addressed.

On 5 February, he gave a brief report to the team about the weekend and made mention that several clients had been discussed in the clinical team meetings who had underlying issues of sexual abuse and that in his humble opinion, the Sub19 service was letting down its clients by not addressing these fundamental issues in their clients’ lives. Considering that he had only joined the team a month before, this was a brave move on his part. He knew that his comments might alienate some of the team against him, but that is another of his character traits – he is not afraid to be outspoken if he feels a needs has to be addressed and he is prepared to become unpopular if necessary ‘for the greater good’.

He had seen a similar problem in clinical meetings with the Off Centre team, but, in his judgment, the team members there were more firmly entrenched in outdated beliefs and he believed that it would take far longer to make the changes that he felt were necessary. He thus focused on the Sub19 team.

Having given some feedback on the Working with Survivors of Abuse weekend, his comments were met with approval from the team and Matt Doocey asked him whether he would be prepared to provide a fuller and more detailed account of the weekend to the entire Sub19 and Off Centre teams as part of Staff Training. Brian Pead accepted the offer with relish. A date was eventually set for the 28 March 2008.

Brian Pead is not a man who would be asked to undertake staff training and not thoroughly prepare for the task. As an author and former teacher, he set about conducting further research into child sexual abuse at home and at work. He saved his research on to his workstation in the Off Centre office that he shared with Maya Walker, a Slovenian, and Mark Elmer. The three counsellors would often discuss therapeutic approaches. Mark Elmer was keen on the work of Lacan, and Brian Pead was a devotee of the work of Irvin Yalom, an existentialist. It became obvious to Brian that, although Maya Walker had been qualified for some five years, she had not continued on a programme of continuous professional development by conducting research, since she rarely contributed to these discussions, but would sit back and absorb the information from Elmer and Pead.

Nonetheless, there was a chemistry between Brian Pead and Maya Walker and they became lovers. She was drawn to his ‘vast knowledge of many subjects’ and he admired that she had come to England from Slovenia and mastered not only the English language but also the language of emotions that underpins counselling.

Brian worked tirelessly to create an agenda for the staff training. He based a good deal of his presentation on the work of Derek Jehu who had written an article entitled ‘Personality problems among adults molested as children’, which appeared in the journal Sexual and Marital Therapy (volume 7, number 3, 1992).

Brian felt that he wanted his audience to focus not only on the ‘here and now’ issues that the clients presented, but that the work they did with clients could have much longer-term benefits if the underlying issues were addressed. He knew that these teenagers and young adults would grow into older adults with spouses and children and that, if the underlying issues could be addressed as successfully as possible, then society would benefit in the longer term. He saw this as something like a ‘ten-year plan’, but he also knew that he would have to limit his aspirations in order to get the team ‘on board’ since too much information or too much change can frighten people off or create resistance.

He was also interested in the work of researchers such as Anna Salter (in America) and Christiane Sanderson (in the UK). Both women had written extensively on the subject of child sexual abuse and offenders.

A good friend of Brian’s – John Callow – attended several lectures by Christiane Sanderson on the topic of child sexual abuse at Birkbeck University. Brian told Maya Walker of this link and she, too, attended such lectures.

Moving in such circles, it is evident that Brian Pead’s mind-set at this period in his life was full of his own experiences of sexual abuse in the children’s home, the abuse experienced by his clients at Off Centre, research and his experiences on the Faceparty website. This was a considerable weight to carry on his shoulders, but he wanted to educate his colleagues and lighten his load whilst simultaneously making things better for clients. He knew he could not fight this alone.