Charles Manson’s Unheard ‘No’
Why society must begin to collectively take responsibility for the trauma it causes.
A society incapable of acknowledging and taking responsibility for the harm being caused by the way in which it is structured and run, locates mental illness in people instead of in itself.
On a hot summer’s night in 1969 cult leader Charles Manson ordered members of the Manson Family to drive to a house in Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills and to kill everyone inside.
The murder of film director Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant at the time, and her friends, went on to become one of the 20th century’s most infamous crimes.
Looking into Charles Manson’s unsettling eyes, which have come to symbolise those of a ‘crazed killer’, and which were described by one commentator as ‘soulless pits of evil’, it’s hard to imagine how his story began. Yet imagine his story we must if, as a society, we’re serious about grappling with the immutable fact that nearly all criminals are themselves, first and foremost, victims.
It’s a reality eloquently expressed by Professor Baz Dreisinger, a world renowned specialist on prisons and the Executive Director of the Incarceration Nations Networks. “The binary that we’ve created is imaginary,” she…
