The most dangerous people I met were not monsters. They were broken children wearing adult faces.
Pamela Nathan, clinical and forensic psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, uncovers the inner worlds of society’s most dangerous and broken-whether behind bars or hidden in plain sight.
In Pain Bleeds Crime, she shares 23 gripping true stories from decades of experience working in maximum-security prisons, courts, forensic hospitals and public mental health. The crimes are shocking-murder, rape, paedophilia, assault, fetishism and bestiality and more-but what lies beneath is even more confronting. Each offender, reveals a hidden world shaped by trauma, pain, and silence.
Pamela enters the inner worlds to feel and then to reveal, the internal crime scenes, exploring what made them break-mentally, emotionally, morally. These aren’t justifications. They’re revelations into the fractured minds behind unthinkable acts.
You’ll come face to face with people whose crimes horrified the public-people who might say “I am not violent” or “that it just happened.” With unflinching honesty and rare insight, Pamela shows how the past never really stays buried-and how behind every crime, there’s an untold story waiting to be told. Brutally honest, deeply unsettling, and impossible to forget, Pain Bleeds Crime is at its most raw and revealing.
As a forensic psychologist, I’ve looked into the eyes of those who’ve done the unthinkable. And I came to a hard truth: They weren’t born monsters. If I had lived their life - or something like it could I have done what they did? Every time I walked through the prison gates, I whispered to myself: “There go I, by the grace of God.” If pain is the root, crime is the symptom.
This book invites you to look beneath the symptom - into the wound that bleeds. Because behind every crime, there’s a story. And when we dare to understand - not just the violence, but the pain underneath - something begins to shift. That shift doesn’t just change how we see others. Sometimes, it changes how we see ourselves - and how we shape justice, and the system itself.
So I invite you: Read Pain Bleeds Crime. Not just to learn what happened - but to understand why it matters.
Non-fiction, Crime, Forensic, Trauma, Inner Crime Scenes, Psychoanalytic
About The Author
Pamela Nathan is a clinical and forensic psychologist and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with more than 40 years of experience working across prisons, courts, forensic services, public health, and private practice.
She has lived and worked in central Australia and continues to consult with Aboriginal communities through CASSE – Creating A Safe and Supportive Environment – a psychoanalytically informed not-for-profit organisation based in Alice Springs. Pamela has authored three previous books – A Home Away from Home, Health Business, and Settle Down Country (with accompanying film) – and published over 30 papers in forensic and clinical psychology, sociology, Aboriginal health, trauma, and psychotherapy.
She is committed to amplifying the voices of her clients—whether they be inmates, patients, or Aboriginal people—and making psychological insight accessible and deeply human. A founding board member of both the Australian Forensic Psychotherapy Association and CASSE, she is also a member of VAPP, PPAA, and APS.
Throughout her career, Pamela has shared her work at numerous conferences and in publications, always with the goal of telling untold stories and revealing the human truths beneath crime and suffering.
