Revenge: Harm done to someone as a punishment for harm that they have done to someone else (Cambridge Dictionary).
There are many thousands of people who have been harmed by foster carers and/or staff running church and state institutions, many thousands who were removed from families via the actions of social workers, lawyers, psychologists, judges and who ended up in far worse situations.
Imagine if as adults
they’d all enacted revenge on those who’d caused them harm, which is the
premise of Michael Robotham’s first crime novel, The Suspect.
An 8-year-old boy, who adores his father, is no longer able to see him because an array of professionals decide—incorrectly—that the father has been sexually abusing his son. The father’s life is ruined, and he kills himself.
When he becomes an adult, the boy is determined that those who caused this situation should pay for what happened. If he can’t get to the person directly, he’ll do so indirectly via loved ones.
I wrote previously that Robotham was inspired to write this book by a story Margaret Humphreys told him when he was working with her on Empty Cradles. She wondered if she was doing the ‘right thing’ by removing a newborn from his mother at birth.
In The Suspect the professionals are sure they’d done the ‘right thing’—but they hadn’t.
There’s another character in the story whose baby is taken from her at birth and adopted out after which “something broke inside her that no medical doctor could ever fix” (109). The woman develops agoraphobia and dies in a house fire, having refused to leave the home she’d not left in decades.
One character affected by 'the system' quietly suffers, the other seeks revenge.
Robotham’s novel gave me pause for thought.
I’m not aware of anyone who has been in Out of Home Care who has subsequently avenged themselves. Ditto the many victims of forced adoption.
If they had, I’m sure they’d be written off as ‘damaged and perverted’ (as Paula Hawkins has a character say about people who have been care in Into the Water) and the system would chug along continuing to do harm.
Instead, survivors seem to quietly get on with their lives, despite their suffering. They might eventually give testimony to a public inquiry (since the 1990s there have been many inquiries with a focus on listening to testimonies from survivors, see here for a summary of Australian ones). Sometimes there might be some sort of financial compensation…
But vigilantes?
No.
In fiction, however, we could add the new category of Vigilante to the others formulated by Laura Peters and to which I’ve already added Orphan as Healing Agent and Seekers after Justice.
For the category of Vigilante, there’s The Suspect, plus later stories such as M.W. Craven’s The Puppet Show and the excellent Danish television series, The Chestnut Man based on the eponymous book by Soren Sveistrup (which I’ve not read).
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I’ve become a fan of Robotham’s since starting out with When She Was Good. He’s funny, astute, tolerant of human messiness, and compassionate. By the latter I mean that he attempts, through the psychologist characters of Joe McLoughlin and Cyrus Haven, to understand why people do what they do rather than peremptorily condemn them.
Plus, there is a diversity in the ‘outcomes’ of his Care Experienced characters.
Take The Other Wife, published 14 years after The Suspect and in which there are 2 Care Experienced characters.
First, there’s the woman who shows up when Joe O’Loughlin’s father is in hospital, claiming to be his wife. Turns out the respectable doctor, William O’Loughlin, has 2 families: the one Joe is a member of and a secret one with Olivia. Olivia has lived in England since she was 13 (she’s from Romania) and her tennis coach cum guardian raped her repeatedly.
Apart from the ruckus around her marriage with the paedophile tennis coach, Olivia’s adult life has been a mostly quiet one.
Olivia is in contrast to 23-year-old Micah Beauchamp, who was raised in kinship care, sexually abused by a neighbour for 7 years and then at age 13 set that neighbour’s house on fire (another vigilante!) for which, of course, he was punished by 3 months in detention. The paedophile lost fingers in the fire but there’s no indication he was state sanctioned for the abuse.
Micah is out of control but then so is his best mate, Ewan, Olivia’s son from her marriage to the paedophile who was raised by Olivia and the good doctor.
The above are suspects in the attempted murder of William O’Loughlin but it took some fine upstanding non-Care Experienced citizens to carry that out.
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