Dr Billy Conn was born, educated and trained as a psychologist in Ireland before moving to the British mainland to practice. There he worked as a psychologist specialising in cases of severe abuse and neglect of children, routinely providing assessments and expert testimony to the courts.
For some 40 years he worked with the children, their families and the abusers. The nature of the abuse he dealt with ranged from isolated incidents to more organised and systematic paedophile rings, sometimes involving people in positions of influence and power. This subterranean world both intrigued and appalled him. He quickly learned that where there is an appetite, however perverted, people and systems will emerge to meet it.
Coming to the conclusion that a case by case approach or writing in arcane journals was unlikely to have the impact needed to help the wider public understand what is going on, Dr Conn came to feel a need to expose the full horror of the world of so many victims, to the widest possible scrutiny. Thus he decided to share his experiences in the form of this trilogy which seeks to present an account from the different perspectives of police, parents, schools, lawyers, social workers, the perpetrators and crucially the child victims.
The overarching title of the Trilogy is ‘Sleepers of the Cave”. Volume one is entitled ‘To Kill One’, volume 2, ‘By the Waters of Tasnim’ and volume 3, ‘The Zaqqum Tree’.
Email the writer here:
