Today as a part of writers fortnight I listened to two different speakers who shared their experiences and stories of important parts in their lives. The first speaker, was a criminal psychologist, Christian Perrin, who spoke about his experiences whilst interviewing different criminals and the typical things to look for when speaking with them. I found this talk very captivating as I have never visited a prison or spoke with the people he had interviewed, and learned that the stereotypical criminal with big tattoos and a mean looking face is almost never the case. One of the more troubling example of the people he interviewed was a man in his 20s who was put in prison for the possession of child pornography, this affected both us and Mr Perrin as he was the type of person that you would “go out to dinner with” and have a nice time with. This example really opened my eyes as criminals can be hidden in plain sight and could be people whom you least expect them to be. Mr Perrin stated that his job was primarily made up of 3 main components: to help assign rehabilitation processes to murderers and sex offenders, to help teach criminology to others and to research into different rehabilitation techniques. If I were to interview Mr Perrin I would be eager to hear about more stories and interviews he had done with criminals as this is (to me) a fascinating part of his job that few people ever experience in their lifetimes.
The second speaker that I went to was Mr Sanjay, he spoke about his experience with racism as a person with Indian ethnicity in England. The talk was about one significant event that had happened in his life, which occurred when he was 19 at a bar in London. A white man at the bar decided he didn’t like Mr Sanjay just because of the color of his skin and wanted to “fight him outside of the bar”, Mr Sanjay was a boxer himself, but he belonged to the light flyweight category whilst this man that challenged him was much bigger and stronger than him. However, he was at this bar to celebrate with his boxing team who were all boxers of different weights such as heavyweight (which would require them to be much larger and heavier), so he was full of himself and knew that he would be backed up if this verbal conflict were to shift to physical conflict. Despite all this, Mr sanjay explained that he used humor to get himself out of this situation, which I sometimes do to. He explained that although this man was rude and racist (and he experienced many situations which could have led to conflict), that fighting is something that you should never try to engage yourself in even if you would defiantly win. I would love to have the opportunity to find out about more of his stories with others and how he got out of those. I was really surprised to how he always kept his cool and always apologised even though he was in the right and he and sometimes others may have gotten hurt, honestly if I were in his position I also wouldn’t endure violence but I would make it known to the people who are in the wrong about their wrongdoing.
