An appalling case from recent British history should teach us sobering lessons about the nature of predation
Medomsley Detention Centre was meant to give its young inmates a “short, sharp shock”. It certainly did. Young men “perceived to lack discipline and structure” were supposed to be shaped into law-abiding and productive members of society. Instead, violence and sexual abuse left them traumatised.
How Medomsley was meant to influence its young detainees remains mysterious. “I have found no evidence that clear direction was supplied [to staff],” writes Adrian Usher, Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, “Or that detailed thought had been given to what the regime being delivered should look like in order to achieve those aims … Also absent was a staff training programme to suitably equip them to deliver the regime.”
No direction. No training. Nor was there a significant level of oversight. “Visits from the Board of Visitors or the regional director,” Usher comments, “Appear to have been more social occasions than accompanied by any degree of scrutiny.”
In practice, then, Medomsley became a totalitarian state in miniature.
A lot of the abuse involved arbitrary violence. Christopher Onslow, jailed in 2019, was an especially vicious bully who would commit heinous assaults for no particular reason. For example, one inmate endured a “ferocious beating” with a football boot for not cleaning it properly. Another young man broke his back after falling from a cargo net when Onslow threw rocks at him.
The most evil member of the Medomsley staff, though, was Neville Husband. Husband, according to Usher, may have been “the most prolific sex offender in British history”. Of the 549 sexual abuse allegations that have been made regarding young men’s time in Medomsley, 388 allegations were made against Husband. He was convicted in 2001 for sexual offences against six victims, and then in 2004 for four further offences, but Usher’s report has exposed the full scale of his criminality.
To the public, Husband was a married father who volunteered for churches and a local drama group. (He was awarded the Imperial Service Medal in 1990.) In the kitchens of Medomsley, though, he groomed and raped young men. Allegedly, Husband even trafficked his victims to others.
The vicious nature of the crimes at Medomsley should not obscure the less sensational, but still appalling, daily indignities. For example, the detainees could be forced to strip, whereupon officials would mock and insult them. “They pointed and joked at my penis and told me I was a pathetic excuse for a boy,” one man remembered. Some Medomsley employees looked down on the inmates for being dysfunctional teenagers while behaving like the worst school bullies in the world. Instead of being shown a better way, the boys were led down a path of fear and humiliation.
How could the inmates report abuse? Staff, medical workers and police officers did not take them seriously. There was little oversight. Once victims of rape and abuse were released, shame and embarrassment often silenced them. Of course, decades afterwards, the trauma lives on. “What does closure look like?” Simon Hattenstone reports one victim saying to him in an excellent Guardian piece, “It looks like a coffin closing.”
This appalling case also reminds us that anyone can be a predator
As in the cases of the grooming gangs, in more recent times, the abusers depended on the knowledge that their victims were considered to be so disreputable that no one would care about them or take them seriously. We should be very mindful of how predators can stalk the margins of society — and, with reference to the Medomsley case, those of us who believe that the wellbeing of collective life depends on separating some people from society should be careful not to forget their own wellbeing. To be stripped of rights should not mean being stripped of all rights.
This appalling case also reminds us that anyone can be a predator. The grooming gangs scandal inspired a lot of necessary discourse about the existence and nature of disproportionate representation among criminals. Quite right too. But it is also the case that someone being an unlikely criminal does not mean that they are not in fact a criminal. A husband and father who volunteers at his local church and drama group can be a prolific rapist. Lest we forget, in the period when Neville Husband was committing his crimes, British kids were also being preyed upon by a beloved television personality and a respected liberal politician.
“It would be easy for this report to be viewed through a historical lens,” Usher writes, “To say that it all happened a long time ago, and that safeguarding has since moved on. That would be a mistake.” Very true. From young offenders institutes, to churches, to shisha bars, to Hollywood studios, any kind of institution can be the rotten apple in which the worm in human nature thrives. We should never forget it.
