Victims

The cast of my latest novel, 'Believing in Butterfly' could all be classed as victims. I guess we are all victims at some point in our lives. The recent TV series,'The Victim' shone a light on a whole new point of view on the subject and certainly made me think about how we judge things. We are all judgemental to some extent but, if we knew the whole story of why people behave the way they do, perhaps we'd be more understanding.

No one starts their day thinking 'Today, I'm going to do something wrong'. We justify our decisions, believing we are doing the right thing or, we react spontaneously to an outside influence. There is a third trigger to our actions in that we are shaped by what has happened to us in the past and, if something fires up memories of traumatic experiences - or even small incidents that affected us more deeply than we realised - I believe we can become motivated to act quite differently from our usual reasonable behaviours.

The BBC dramatisation of 'The Victim' focused on all of that and, more so, on how destructive it can be for those who believe they are a victim of someone else's crime. We often hear how important it is to 'let go' and how forgiveness benefits the forgiver much more then the forgiven. And although it is purely a choice, forgiveness is the hardest thing to do. No wonder it is called 'a divine act'. The consequences of choosing revenge over forgiveness can, as this wonderful production showed, be devastating The series was stunning in both the writing and performance, and finished with a quotation from the poet, Rumi.

'Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.'

Quite the most beautiful thing I've ever read.