Wenche’s behaviour towards Anders could change rapidly. One minute she would be pleasant and kind, only to start shouting aggressively at him the next. Her rejections could be brutal. The staff at the centre heard her yell at her son: ‘I wish you were dead!’
Anders’s mother was soon a topic of conversation among the staff.
‘Even in a clinical setting, she spoke uncritically about her aggressively sexual fantasies and fears, and her attitude to the male staff was very ambivalent,’ wrote the psychologist Arild Gjertsen. At times she was very flirtatious. But he also noted that she became more composed as her time at the centre went on.
The families being evaluated were usually discharged after the four-week observation period, and were then supported by the child welfare and child psychiatry services in their own locality. The Breivik family’s sessions at the centre led the specialists to conclude that family life was harming the children, particularly Anders, so it was recommended that social services look into the possibility of fostering.
‘The whole family is affected by the mother’s poor psychological functioning. The greatest impact is on her relationship with Anders. There is a duality to this relationship, in that on the one hand she ties him to her symbiotically, while on the other she rejects him aggressively. Anders is the victim of his mother’s projections of paranoid aggressive and sexual fear of men generally. Elisabeth escapes some of this, not least because she is a girl. For her part, Elisabeth goes too far in the precocious maternal role she adopts towards Anders.’
The conclusion was that ‘Anders needs to be taken out of the family and into a better care setting because his mother is continually provoked by the boy and is locked in an ambivalent position, making it impossible for him to develop on his own terms.’
Mother and daughter were probably better able to live together, the centre thought. But Elisabeth’s progress, too, should be carefully monitored, as there were some danger signals, such as the fact that she had few friends and tended to get very wrapped up in her own fantasies.
The Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reported in a letter to the local child welfare office: ‘The profoundly pathological relationship between Anders and his mother means early intervention is vital to prevent seriously abnormality in the boy’s development. Ideally he should be transferred to a stable foster home. The mother is however strongly opposed to this, and it is hard to predict the consequences of enforced intervention.’
As Anders’s mother had requested respite care in the form of a weekend home, the centre suggested an initial effort to build on this, with foster parents who understood that the arrangement might become permanent.
The Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry emphasised to the local child welfare office that this was a matter of importance, and that work should start at once on finding a suitable weekend home. The centre offered its assistance in evaluating foster homes, mediating between the family and the respite home and remaining involved to ensure things were moving in the right direction.
* * *
Then something happened that botched the plan. Jens Breivik, who was now stationed in Paris, received the report from the Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Through his lawyer, he demanded immediate transfer of Anders’s care to him. The diplomat wanted an interim injunction that would give him emergency custody of the boy straight away, while he explored permanent custody through the courts. Wenche, who had welcomed the prospect of weekend respite care, now refused point-blank to accept any help at all. It might give her ex-husband an advantage in court. Wenche again hired the lawyer who had helped her with the divorce and dividing the assets. He wrote that ‘respite in the form of a foster home for Anders is a solution that my client finds utterly objectionable. Furthermore, the need for respite ceased to apply a long time ago.’
At that point the Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the child welfare office stood back and awaited the outcome of the case at Oslo City Court. In October 1983 the court ruled that Anders’s situation did not require urgent action and that the boy could live with his mother until the main court case started.
As Jens Breivik understood it, the court had concluded there was no serious negligence on Wenche’s part and he therefore had little prospect of winning custody of his son. In the early 1980s it was in any case unusual for a court to find in a father’s favour in child custody cases. The mother generally took priority.
Jens Breivik had not seen his son for three years. Now he gave up his demand to take charge of Anders’s care and the case was never brought before the court. His lawyer wrote to the Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry that Jens Breivik and his current wife had begun to have their doubts after they learned about the preliminary meeting at Oslo City Court. Initially, ‘their impression had been that Anders was in a critical state, and they had not hesitated to open their home to him. Now, however, they feel they will have to fight to get Anders. This is a new development and they feel they have been thrust into a situation in which they had no intention of becoming embroiled.’
* * *
But the young psychologist at the Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry did not want to give up on Anders. Just a month after the City Court ruling, Arild Gjertsen asked the child welfare authorities in Oslo to instigate standard proceedings to have Anders taken into care, that is, to separate him from his mother by force. Gjertsen emphasised that ‘We stand by our original conclusion that Anders’s care situation is so precarious that he is at risk of developing more serious psychopathology and we hereby restate our assessment that an alternative care situation is necessary for Anders, which we consider to be our duty under The Children’s Act § 12, cf. § 16a. Since the father has withdrawn his civil action, child welfare authority should take up the case on its own grounds.’
In November of the same year, Wenche’s lawyer accused the psychologist of ‘monomanic victimisation’.
‘Admittedly I am not a psychologist, but in my thirty years of practice I have acquired something young Gjertsen may be presumed to lack, namely a wide-ranging and detailed knowledge of human behaviour. On this basis I can express my firm conviction that if Wenche Behring is not qualified to look after Anders without the intervention of child protection agencies, then there are in fact very few, if any, mothers in this country qualified to raise their children independently,’ he wrote to the child welfare authorities.
There was no more the specialists at the centre could do. They were not authorised to take any formal steps; only the child welfare department could take such action.
The serious concerns of the Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry now had to be weighed against a new assessment from the Vigeland Park nursery, which referred to Anders as a ‘cheerful, happy boy’. Jens Breivik complained that the assessment had come from the pen of a nursery employee who was a friend of Wenche’s.
When the Child Welfare Board held its hearing to consider whether Anders should be taken into care, Wenche arrived well prepared at the Vika social services office, along with her lawyer. He stressed that Anders’s mother had now recovered from the short-lived crisis that had resulted from her difficult divorce. The officer originally handling the case had left, and the young replacement had scarcely any experience of child welfare issues and had never been called before the board before. When she attended the meeting she had not worked on the case beyond reading the papers. It proved an uncomfortable experience for the young welfare officer, who felt she had been thrown to the wolves.
It was only on specific and very serious grounds such as battery, abuse or obvious neglect that legal authority could be granted under the Child Welfare Act for the enforced placement of a child in a foster home. Social services suggested a compromise. The family would be monitored for the time being.
Three checks were carried out, one with notice and two unannounced, in the winter of 1984. The social welfare office report of these visits to Silkestrå ran as follows: ‘The mothe
r appeared organised, tidy and in control, easy to talk to, calm and unruffled regardless of the subject under discussion. The girl was calm, well behaved and watchful. Anders was a pleasant, relaxed boy with a warm smile that immediately makes one like him. During conversations in the home he sat up at the table, busy with games, plasticine or Playmobil toys.’ The report also said that not a single cross word was exchanged between the family members. Anders was never whiny or obstructive. ‘The mother never changes her expression and does not get upset if difficult situations arise with Anders. She speaks calmly and Anders accepts her instructions and does as she says.’ The only reservation expressed by the home visitor from social services was that the children’s mother had sent them out for pizza, although they were ‘possibly a bit young to run that sort of errand, and one might add that pizza can scarcely be called a nutritious meal’.
At the very end, the home visitor did say there could be grounds for concern about how the mother might cope with potential crises in the future, but this in itself was not considered sufficient to warrant removing the boy from his mother’s care.
Around midsummer 1984, when Anders was five, the child welfare board in Oslo reached its unanimous verdict:
‘The necessary conditions for taking the child into care have not been met. Case dismissed.’
Peeing on the Stairs
What a little brat, thought a young mother from one of the neighbouring staircases, who had tried yet again to get a hello out of Anders. He never responded, just looked away or turned aside.
Oh well, she thought, and went on her way.
Anyone watching the children at play would notice the boy who was nearly always by himself. He would observe from the sidelines, never get involved in anything. But the busy parents had enough to do keeping track of their own kids. The gardens and pathways round the blocks of flats at Silkestrå were teeming with children.
Then, something new happened on the estate. A number of the unsold flats were bought up by Oslo City Council and allocated to refugee families. Asylum seekers from Iran, Eritrea, Chile and Somalia moved into the flats round the blue, green and red gardens, and gradually the scent of garlic, turmeric, allspice and saffron drifted out through open balcony doors.
Until the early 1980s, Oslo’s Skøyen was a district of dazzling whiteness. Few foreigners found their way to Norway. At the start of the preceding decade, Norway had fewer than a thousand non-Western immigrants: 1971 saw the first influx of foreign workers as the Norwegian state tackled a labour shortage by issuing an invitation to Pakistan. Six hundred single men came over to work that year, taking jobs that most Norwegians did not want. But the foreign workers did not move into Skøyen. They lived in cramped and miserable conditions in run-down parts of the city.
In 1980, the first asylum seekers arrived. Refugees presented themselves at Norway’s borders, asking for protection. This had never happened before. In 1983, the first year the Breivik family lived at Silkestrå, 150 asylum seekers came to Norway. The year after that, three hundred. Three years later, the number was almost nine thousand.
A Chilean family moved in on the floor below the Breiviks. They had fled Augusto Pinochet’s persecution, and after almost a year at the asylum seeker reception centre in Oslo they were given a flat at Silkestrå. Wenche was the first person to turn up on their doorstep, with a warm ‘Welcome’ and a child in each hand.
Anders took a liking to the youngest daughter of the family, a little tot with curly hair, two years younger than he was.
Eva gradually started to tag along with the boy from the second floor wherever he went. For his part, he thawed out with the new girl, grew more talkative and taught her new Norwegian words every day. With the Latin American family, he felt secure.
Eva got a place at his nursery in Vigeland Park, and when Anders moved on while she still had two years left at nursery he waited for her every afternoon after school.
Smestad was a school for conditioned children who had fathers with freshly ironed shirts, posh middle names and villas with big gardens. King Harald went to school there after the war, and was later followed by his own children, Prince Haakon Magnus and Princess Märtha Louise. The Prince was six years older than Anders and finished his last year at primary just as Anders was starting.
This school district is a dark blue belt in Oslo and it helped deliver the right wing’s election victory in 1981. A wave of privatisations and deregulation of property prices followed. The value of housing-cooperative flats soon soared.
In the spring of 1986, the year Anders Breivik started school, the Labour Party returned to power. The Conservative Prime Minister Kåre Willoch had faced a vote of confidence after proposing to raise petrol prices and failed to win the support of the right-wing Progress Party.
Suddenly, Gro Harlem Brundtland was Prime Minister again. This time she was better prepared. She became the first head of government in the world to form a Cabinet with as many female ministers as male ones: eight out of seventeen Cabinet posts, plus herself at the top.
This was a new Labour Party, which tapped into the spirit of the age and carried forward many of the economic changes brought in by Kåre Willoch’s Conservative government.
At the same time, Brundtland’s policies gave women a set of rights that no other country could match. Pragmatic as she was, Gro set out to make life more practical for women, and for men. Her government extended maternity leave, built nurseries and gave more rights to single parents, and there was a focus on improving children’s and women’s health. In the wake of these reforms came a stream of new, confident women who wanted to play their part in society.
Not everyone was happy. State feminism was the insult hurled by some. A matriarchy, complained others. The term ‘vagina state’ was later coined. But it was still Gro Harlem Brundtland who put her stamp on Norway more than any other politician in Anders’s school years.
Anders himself was growing up in a female world consisting of his mother, his sister and Eva. It was fun playing with Anders, Eva thought, at least for a while. Because Anders was always the one who decided on the game. It was only when they were at her flat that she had a say. They built a den in the living room, played with her dolls or just hung around in the kitchen with her parents. When they were upstairs at Anders’s place they never played where his mother was. Round there, they were never allowed to stay in the living room, which was always kept pristine, nor in the kitchen. They were only allowed to be in his room and they had to keep the door closed. That was where Anders had his toys and games, all arranged in neat rows on the shelves. Wenche really preferred them to play outside. Because Anders’s mother liked peace and quiet.
Whenever Eva tried to play with other children Anders pulled her away; he wanted to keep her to himself. He liked it best when there were just the two of them.
But sometimes the group took over. There were so many youngsters at Silkestrå it was difficult to keep the others at bay. In the basement there was a room where some parent had installed a table-tennis table. The children would take their cassette players down there and dance to Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna, and later to rap music. Anders found his own spot. He always sat on the ventilation pipes in the corner and did not join in the dancing or the table tennis. From there he could see everything, and was left in peace. There was a smell of urine in that corner. Whenever the smell spread through the basement, Anders got the blame. ‘It stinks of pee, it must be Anders!’ the others laughed.
* * *
The ants in the wall had a permanent path from the grass, across the tarmac, along the edge of the footpath, across a grating and up the steps. Anders would sit there waiting.
‘You’re going to die!’
‘Got you!’
He picked them up one by one and squashed them. Sometimes with his thumb, sometimes his index finger. ‘You and you and you and you!’ he decided, there on the steps, master of life and death.
The little girls found him disgusting. He was so
intense, and he was cruel to animals. For a while he had some rats in a cage and would poke them with pens and pencils. Eva said she thought he was hurting them, but he took no notice. Anders caught bumblebees, dropped them in water and then brought them up to the surface in a sieve so he could watch them drown. Pet owners at Silkestrå made it clear to their children that Anders was not to come anywhere near their cats or dogs. Anders was often the only one not invited to come and stroke other children’s new puppies or kittens.
Little by little, Eva started to get a feeling that something was wrong. But she dared not tell her parents that she did not want to play with Anders any more, because her mother and Wenche were by now good friends. Wenche was teaching them how to adapt to life in Norway, and she passed on clothes that no longer fitted Anders and Elisabeth.
Eva never told her parents that it was Anders who broke the heads off the neighbours’ roses, leaving just the stalks; who threw stones through open windows and ran away; or that he teased and bullied kids who were smaller than him, ideally the new arrivals who had not acquired the language to defend themselves.
One of his victims was a skinny little boy from Eritrea. On one occasion, Anders found an old rug, rolled him up in it and jumped up and down on him. ‘Don’t do that, you’re hurting him!’ cried Eva. But she stood on the sidelines, watching.
There was only one thing Anders could not abide. Being told off. Then, he would melt away while the other kids were left there to take a scolding for scrumping apples or ringing on doorbells and running away. Anders would creep out again when things had calmed down.
Once, he could not get away in time and was caught by Mrs Broch. To get his revenge after her rebuke, he peed on her doormat. He peed on her newspaper. He peed in her letterbox. Later, he went and peed in her storeroom. It was from then on that he got the blame for the stale urine smell in the basement.