KAREN Matthews was branded �pure evil� by Detective Superintendent Andy Brennan after she was found guilty last week with Michael Donovan of kidnapping her daughter Shannon. It was the same powerful phrase used by a former wife of handyman Peter Tobin after he was convicted last week of murdering Vicky Hamilton. But what does �evil� really mean? Dr Ian Stephen, the psychologist who was the inspiration for TV�s Cracker, believes it is the wrong word to describe Matthews as he explains what drove her to commit the shocking crime
Society tends to go to extremes in the way it describes things nowadays. Simple things that were once either good or bad are now described in quite horrific terms. People who are speaking to the mass media now use words such as "evil" when in fact it is something bad. It doesn't provide a proper perspective about what the difference is between something being bad, malicious, wicked and evil.
There is a spectrum of "badness", which is used to describe people like Karen Matthews. It starts from being "naughty", like a "child", to "bad" when the behaviour gets worse. Then you have "malicious", when harm is done to somebody; "wicked" where there is an intent; and "evil" which covers people such as Peter Tobin.
When Shannon's mother is described as evil, it is not diminishing the essential "badness" of her actions. "Evil" gives you a different perspective on what this woman has done. She is basically someone of low intellect, who has seen the potential for a scam based on the Madeleine McCann case, in which she saw the large rewards on offer from the newspapers and saw the potential to make money.
Shannon was still alive, and Karen was aware of where she was, which doesn't make what she did evil. The rest of her extended family didn't know where she was, but Shannon was obviously in a place of safety compared to where she was before in the family home. The harm that was done to her was not as extreme as being tortured, raped and killed. People need to keep it in some perspective.
The lack of all logic behind the kidnap scheme caused it to unwind in the first place. Matthews thought "here is a way to get reward money" without thinking whether the police and social services would ask questions after Shannon returned.
It is like telling everyone I have lost my dog and someone else putting up a reward, when, in fact, the dog isn't lost and on his return I try to claim the reward, not expecting people to ask questions. The logic behind Matthews ploy was simplistic and not as successful as she thought it would be. This was because Shannon's disappearance caused national uproar. The escapade cost the police millions of pounds and Matthews got deeper and deeper into trouble. It was out of her control by the time a neighbour reported to police that she could hear a child in Michael Donovan's home and Shannon was found in the base of a bed.
Although there were similarities with Madeleine McCann's disappearance from the outset, the difference was that the McCann's were a middle-class family who had good PR agents working to help find her. Karen Matthews was an extremely deprived individual who wasn't very bright and saw this as an opportunity to make some money.
There was so much publicity around the McCann case that it became infectious, especially among impressionable people who failed to see the issues surrounding it. It was a case of Matthews thinking "maybe we can make some money out of this?"
However, she is not evil. If Matthews had been a more intelligent person who could have foreseen the outcome of the scam, she would have had a very clear intent, which would have been malicious. It raises the whole subcultural issue of what children mean to some families. Are they just a way of raising money?
I thought the emotional search for Shannon was overdone, with phone numbers on T-shirts appealing for her return. This was something that united the whole community in their search for Shannon, and shifted their focus away from everyday pettiness and the struggle of life. This issue brought them together, almost in a war-time scenario, to fight the injustice of what happened. Part of the cruelty of what Matthews did was that all these people who had strived to find Shannon felt dreadfully let down when they discovered the whole thing had been a rip-off.
Matthews is different to Tobin, who is "pure evil". He was someone who over the years had committed a number of violent crimes, including rape, torture and murder. There is more evil intent because you can see an entire pattern throughout his life. You can see the evil in a person such as Tobin, whereas Matthews was more wicked in the way she arranged the kidnap of Shannon. It's a subtle difference.
You can compare Matthews to children, who are not capable of standing trial for cases because they are too young. You have to look at this woman and ask if she is capable of being "pure evil". Or is she someone who has done something wrong and got into a terrible mess?
Wickedness is where somebody is focused on their behaviour and its consequences. Evil is something that permeates the individual as a whole and affects an entire part of his or her life. People, such as the detective who described Karen Matthews as "pure evil", tend to use extreme language and it reflects on society as a whole when people can't answer a question with a simple "yes". People are nowadays using far more dramatic language to create an impact, without providing a proper analysis of what drives people who commit these crimes.
When you describe someone as pure evil, it sounds more dramatic and the people using the word sound more emotionally involved. People need to pay attention to what they are saying. I don't think Matthews set out to deliberately kill or attack her daughter, but it comes across like that in the media after the comments of the detective last week.
Ian Stephen's work was the inspiration for the TV series Cracker. He is a former director of psychological services at the state hospital at Carstairs and worked with the Scottish Prison Service as a specialist in violent offending
