True Crime – Podcast »Crime Analyst«: The missing word

This text is about domestic violence and violence in the partnership. Further information on the topic can be found on the Internet at helpetone.de. The help telephone for those affected can be reached at any time under 116 016.

For example David Challen. David Challen is a guest in episode No. 261 at Laura Richards, in her podcast “Crime Analyst”, this time there is even a hall audience, so David Challen tells in front of paying spectators why his mother killed his father, with over twenty hammer blows on the skull.

When violence comes up, it has often been too late for a long time. One of their perfidious characteristics is that they are silent around them, creates a speechlessness, look away, think away and want to not know. Bullying in your company? Oh, that’s all just fun. Scream in the apartment on the first floor? Oh, they calm down again. So far they have always calmed down. When violence is finally discussed, it has often grown into monstrosity, sometimes it reaches us in the form of newspaper headlines.

So it is important to bring up the meanness to bring violence as early as possible. That nasty: Often the language is often not even invented. Violence in the shade can often thrive because society does not even have a word for it: what has never been named cannot be charged. As a guest in Laura Richards’ Podcast, David Challen explains: The violence in which he grew up was largely not physical violence. As a child, he had a vague idea that something was wrong between his parents, but he lacked the language for the word “abuse”, that is, abuse, would not have occurred to him. Yes, there was physical violence. But maybe even more crucial that his mother has been isolated, narrowed and humiliated for decades by much thousands of restrictions and humiliation. Sally Challen himself, the mother, had also tried not to verbalize it, had tried to give her sons the feeling of normality.

Where does violence begin? Leave blows deeper scars than evil words? Can’t the mental incorporation and suffocation of a person not be as devastating for years as the threat of the knife? Violence often goes silent ways. And before you can think about what a society tolerates and what it has to punish – she needs a language for violence at all.

Laura Richards’ Podcast “Crime Analyst” (crime-analyst.com) should actually be the worst podcast in the world. Because Laura Richards has a mission. And if we know one about journalism and if we know one thing about good entertainment: missionaries are usually the end for both. Laura Richards is an expert in relationship power, and the podcast is just one of the means with which she promotes her concern. For many years she worked as a analyst and department head at Scotland Yard and successfully worked to improve the prevention of violent crimes. During this time she not only got to know the dark sides of society, in the police authority she also became well known to the machismo, which does not want or cannot admit many forms of violence.

Now she is fighting her fight as an activist: as a guest she shines on many YouTube channels, as a host she captivates her with a rare mix of empathy and analytical power. She can talk about True Crime with the greatest competence because she has worked on thousands of cases herself. Richards grabs her audience on the sensationalism and uses the awakened interest to make people smarter and more sensitive. She also works on the fact that the misfortune becomes discussed and language.

A turning point in her life was the case of Clare Bernal, a stalking victim that was looking for help from the police and did not find. In the police perception, stalking was a cavalier offense (“He loves it!”), Even when Bernal found the brakes of her car one day and reported it to the police, there was no alarm automatic. Days later, Clare Bernal was dead, shot by her stalker. Laura Richards, at that time still at Scotland Yard, realized from her numbers that stalking is a significant risk factor for murders, a fact that had not been observed until then.

Finally, she explained the horror-private life of the music producer Sean Combs alias Diddy-and it is perhaps no coincidence that Combs is always in the ear with his copy of “Every Breath You Take”, a song that is written from the perspective of a stalker (and is often considered to be an unknow to the ultimate love song). The Causa Combs makes a term that Laura Richards wants to anchor in the world’s consciousness: “Coercive Control”, translated in German as “forced control”. This form of violence is often overlooked as such: a person completely brings another person under his control, usually in the context of a love affair. It starts with charm, romanticism and hot love laces, and this lovebombing phase is already used to find out all the weak points of the victim. Then follow, gradually, social isolation, dependent, more and more regular humiliations and devaluations, gaslighting. Until the victim loses the feeling for his self -esteem and partly for reality and is defenseless to the perpetrator.

It does not need a pop superstar to practice Coercive Control. The dangerous narcissists and the good faith victims populate our world. David Challen’s mother was one of them, his father a charismatic and unscrupulous man. Sally was still a young girl when she got involved with him, she was an open, accessible person, and Richard Challen isolated her from her social contexts, and made small and smaller, humiliated, cheated, raped for decades. One day she tried to clear herself from the perpetrator. He brought her back under his control. Then he had contracts signed: that they no longer smoke. No longer drink. That she no longer contradict him. Sally Challen was in the trap. A short time later she reached the hammer.

“Abuse,” says David Challen, in the past he would never have come to call the relationship between his parents. Activists like Laura Richards have made speaking possible for him and many others. After long years of lobbying, England and Wales introduced the missing word in their legislation in 2014: “Coercive Control” has been punishable as a form of domestic violence since then. David Challen has now written a book in which he processed the history of his parents and his own. Now he is sitting in front of an audience with Laura Richards and talks about his mother’s martyrdom and his own suffering. It is just an episode of a super exciting podcast. Experts have their say here, affected, survivors. It seems that they like to be there because they know that they are heard and understood at Laura Richards. There are over 260 episodes of “Crime Analyst”, they touch better and inform deeper than any thriller.

263 episodes are available on crime-analyst.com and wherever there are podcasts.