Rehabilitation (teenagers' murder conviction) *Harrowing subject*

[lougle]

I started a post and lost it all. I'm struggling to marry my usual stance on rehabilitation (Christian concept of redemption, Grace, etc.) with the news reports of the two young girls who have just been convicted of Murder (I won't link to the news stories as they are horrific).

Given that these girls could be released from detention before they are 30 (starting sentence is 12 years), do you think that our justice system can rehabilitate these girls so they are safe to live in society? I'm not sure I do, which is so unlike me. I even manage to feel sorry for Hitler and have compassion for the boy he was before he turned into a murderous man.

I wonder if it's because the woman they murdered was vulnerable (alcoholism) and I know that my DD1 is going to be a vulnerable adult (SN brain condition)? Perhaps I am projecting my fears onto the situation. I just can't comprehend the nature of this murder and can't understand how these girls got to this point.

I think, what I struggle with, is whether this is simply another example of how the authorities can't (or don't?) save everyone.

I mean, the older girl was with her mum until she was 11. Then she at a care home, she had several foster homes, a special education facility, she had a full mental health facility, and anger management that she seemed to engage with. She wasn't forgotten by the system.

Now there's a big call that she should have been taken into care far earlier than she was - 11 is too late. But as I said earlier, I've been there, and SS will give the family every chance to change first.

She'll be in prison for a minimum of 15 years and she's on suicide watch, with a mental health team, and she'll get some deep psychotherapy. But if she's fundamentally broken inside, I'm not sure what good that will do.

The flipside of course is that there is fury when parent's children are taken before something horrendous happens, and nobody wants a state that essentially vets parents and takes away children if they think that they've done a bad job. I'm sure if I have kids, I'll sympathise with this more - at the moment, having been a child in that situation, I'd rather that we'd been taken into care.

It seems a very thin line, and realistically, I don't know what the answer will be. It seems this won't spark a change because nobody knows what the change has to be. It's just; "They had sad lives." and lock them up. We'll give them a shot at coming out, if they seem to be rehabilitated, and hope for the best. Any kids like them currently having a sad life will still be forgotten.

I grew up sure that by the time I was an adult, SS would be better, they'd start moving children from bad parents before their lives were screwed up. Now the kids are getting worse and other people are dying, and we're still no closer to a solution that suits.

What happened to the lady was unbelievable in the context of violence. I can't escape the feeling that all three are victims though. Nor the feeling that if the girls were in SS care, it wasn't very effective care if they were able to spend hours with an alcoholic "stranger" (no offence intended) who provided them with drinks and cigarettes. What were the people who should have been responsible fir these girls doing.

Raises huge concerns about the expectations and competence of those involved with SS.

How long had the older girl been on SS' radar before she was taken into care?

IMO there are so many factors which don't necessarily always point to a system being at fault, but that being said there must have been signs that something was amiss before it got this far, whoever was responsible for noticing clearly didn't.

It's interesting what you say anchor about thinking the system would have changed before you got to adulthood. My DP says exactly the same now. And I do wonder about how young a child needs to be removed to avoid future issues, or could any neglect/abuse play a part? Also, not all foster placements are positive experiences, so if a placement breaks down and a child has to be moved to a different one this too could cause issues.

My DP was permanently removed when he was seven. However he became disabled when he was a baby, and subsequent to that the parents went on to have more children. Afaik SS were involved with the family but clearly whatever involvement they had was ineffectual. Two of the subsequent children were also placed in care, and a further child was removed at birth and placed for adoption. But my DP was lucky, he had a positive fostering experience and stayed in permanent care with the same family. One of his siblings doesn't talk positively about his experience though and has far more issues. Not criminal afaik but certainly esteem issues. The other siblings are pretty much out of the loop.

DP's mum however went on to have three more children who she was able to keep because they weren't with the same father. Even though she herself was complicit in the abuse of her other children.

Personally I do think that we should be allowed to sterilise someone who has had children removed because of severe abuse. How anyone can argue that it is far more preferable to have child after child removed at birth to be put through the system and all that entails, knowing the issues which surround adopted children rather than one individual be held accountable and disallowed from having any more children through one procedure is beyond me.

Do people really think that it's ok to damage child after child after child in the name of human rights?

Nor the feeling that if the girls were in SS care, it wasn't very effective care if they were able to spend hours with an alcoholic "stranger" (no offence intended) who provided them with drinks and cigarettes. What were the people who should have been responsible fir these girls doing

But what you are proposing is locking up children, in case they get up to no good.

If even loving, caring and adequate parents fail to prevent their teens from going to places where they are at risk, drinking, taking drugs, why should teens in care be subject to tighter control?

You can't take away their liberty; only a court of law can do that. Can you imagine the outcry from society if children's homes were subject to the same security as offenders institutions? Or if foster Carers locked their charges in a secure cell at night?

I have a 15 year old DD. I trust her. But I am very aware that if she chose to break that trust, and began to defy the boundaries I have in place, there is very little I could do about it.

Hi all,

Can we please ask you to avoid speculation, please - or we'll have to pull the thread.

But Joffrey, that means nothing. I also suffered very signficant neglect and all sorts of other trauma and no, I've never done anything and never will... but the balance is tipped by things like receiving no love and affection and seeing a lot of cruelty before the age of 3, not having any good adult available in childhood and the magnitude of what's witnessed in line with underlying biological/genetic vulnerabilities. Many of us had shitty childhoods - very shitty childhoods. Thankfully it's much rarer for the whole toxic combination that leads to outright failure of someone's humanity to come to bear. However none of us who were LUCKY enough to have some experiences that enabled our resilience should harden our hearts entirely to what happens when there is just no good in a child's life.

fusion I know you're right. But I'm finding it hard to feel much understanding, TBH andthe fact remains for me that every time something like this happens, it's chalked up to 'neglect', bad parenting, failure of the care system etc which is a damned insult to that vast majority of damaged, neglected kids, who didn't go on murder sprees. Nature, nurture - the two aren't mutually exclusive. I guess a % of the population - whatever their upbringing - will be 'evil' (for want of a better word) and a % of the population will be sheep in awe of a more charismatic character and when the two get together, you will get the folie a deux phenomenon.

I am a believe in rehabilitation - what would be the point, otherwise? But these kind of cases probably are people who can't be rehabilitated - Thompson and Mary and Norma Bell notwithstanding. And there remains no mechanism by which to deal with the failed parents and failed social workers, who may have played a part in this. By 'deal with' I mean address the causes.

I'm not proposing dc are locked up at all. I am proposing that adults responsible for 13 year olds should know where they are, who they are with and what they are doing.

At 13 my DD went to school, phoned me when she git home at 4pm, chilled a bit, did a bit of homework and had guides on Monday, Drama on Tuesday and choir on Friday. Collected from all by me. That's pretty normal.

beau and if your DD had decided not to come home at 4pm? Then what? How do you know she'd been to school in the first place? What if you had been called by the school and asked where she was?

Knowing where they are and what they are doing relies on them being honest. If they choose not to be - what sanctions do you propose?

Being a foster carer can be a thankless task - reporting your Foster child to the police as missing 8 or 9 times a week still doesn't prevent them from hanging out with the people they choose to.

I haven't read the whole thread but I just want to say that every time I see posts about child criminals they're always given the excuse of they had a crap childhood and it pisses me off.
That's no excuse, stop trying to excuse them. They have their own brains, they know what it right and wrong and they still chose to kill this poor woman. They took pictures of themselves with her. They took a break and then went back! They're evil and should be locked up for life.
I had a shit childhood. My mother beat the crap out of us on a daily basis. She smashed our heads against the walls while on the phone to my dad so he could hear it. She threw us down stairs. She burnt us with cigarettes. She slept with random men and took us on dates with her. She made us chose "teams" and fight with our siblings. When my dad finally left and took us we were homeless for 2 years. (7 children) and stayed in hostels. We saw our dad being beaten up and threatened with guns because we couldn't afford the rent. We saw people taking drugs. We were beaten up by random teenagers from one week to the next we didn't know what we were going to eat.
Our childhood was shit. Pure shit.
Not one of us 7 children have done anything remotely illegal. We haven't had therapy or anything, we just know right from wrong and decided to do the right thing.
These girls decided to do the wrong thing and should be locked up for life.

Sorry, rant over.

I'd have collected her from school oretty. These girls were 13 at the time not 15.

Whilst I agree with the concept, that Norway case keeps coming up, and it's not comparable at all. Those children were six years old, they were tiny. The crime was horrid but nowhere near as horrendous as thIs.

Does Norway treat older child killers the same way?

I think it'd be a really small percentage of people who wanted to kill these two girls, and even less if they were just six.

Howlong your post makes no sense. A sample of seven abused children who do not go on to commit crime does not been that many damaged children will.

You aren't ranking murder victims but the fact that a vulnerable person was chosen goes to the heart of the nature of the crime. It was in no way a crime avenging abuse by a stronger person against the girls. They chose someone weak, used her and then abused her and then murdered her in a sustained and brutal attack. It doesn't make her death more or less important than another victim but it makes the crime all the worse.

What makes this crime particularly awful is the 3 hour break in the middle of it, before they went back to carry on their abuse. That is especially awful.

Also, I would like to see all of the friends these girls contacted during the attack, who knew about it and did nothing to stop it, punished in some way. They have behaved appallingly too.

Ubiquity If your comment about ranking was aimed at me (I'm not sure?), I wasn't doing that at all. I was just saying the cases are not at all similar.

In Norway, two six year old boys are playing with a five-year-old girl, something happens (most people seem to believe a tantrum), and they beat her up. They seemingly had little intent to kill her, they thought she was sleeping. They were looked after in a way anyone would expect them to be - lots of help from school, the authorities, the parents.

Our nearest comparable case in the Bulger case. They were 10, though, and they planned to abduct and kill a child. They kidnapped him in a shopping centre, and tortured him. That's not comparable, at all.

Then in this case, there's two 12 year olds - double the age. The elder one seemed to genuinely believe that beatings wouldn't kill, but the younger one almost certainly did understand. They chose someone who was vulnerable but whom they knew, who had helped them to get alcohol and given them somewhere to hang out away from their families. They beat her horrendously, and then left for a break, and then came back and carried on. And through the entire attack, they documented it on Facebook and Snapchat.

If you compare the killers - two six year olds to two ten year olds, or two twelve years olds, there's a big difference.

If you compare the crimes, the difference is huge. Norway had a case of an almost accidental murder, they didn't name the children and helped rehabilitate them. The UK might have done the same.

To be honest, it's only the big, graphic and surprising cases that tend to make the news. There may well be cases where six-year-old children in the UK have killed someone, and they weren't subject to the legal system...

And that leads us to the age of criminal responsibility, which is roughly 10 in the UK, but between 7 and 13, can be argued either way - if you can show that you didn't understand the consequences, that's a defence. Likewise, if the prosecution can show you did.

Context is everything, even when victims are "ranked" the same. At the end of the day, you're always going to have at least one person dead, at least one person who killed them, and the how/why/when is the context that says whether the sentence is better or worse. If you strip the context away, it'd probably have to be "kill someone = life imprisonment", which would be unfair in some cases, and brilliant in others.

I'm talking about the nature of the crime from the view of the perpetrator. So in your example of the kick boxer, his life is no less worthy, but the psychological decision do choosing to attack someone stronger than you rather than someone weaker could tell you things about the person who committed the crime.

You've gone to the victim again. Killing is very very rarely right and justified. No murder is worse, all lives have value, hence my anti death penalty stance. But not all criminals and crimes are equal. Some pull forward different emotions and the reasons crimes are committed and the nature of the victim compared to the criminal is relevant b

beau I find your criticism of foster Carers quite offensive tbh - it's easy for those of us with compliant, well behaved teens to say "oh, I'd have made sure I knew where they were" but the reality is very different.

13 year olds (and younger) who bunk off school, stay out all night, climb out of bedroom windows to 'escape', steal cash from their foster families for bus fare and booze, go missing for days at a time with no regard for their own safety - it's hardly as simple a solution as "collecting them from school".

The described behaviour of these girls is, unfortunately, all too similar to many of the fostered teens I'm familiar with. And the implication that somehow, their foster Carers ( or the staff in the residential facility) should have done more, is doing those Carers a great disservice.

PrettyBrightFireflies
You speak like a social worker, and that's the problem; you are so concerned with the children's "rights" that you forget about their main "right" - the right to have a carer who is willing to move Heaven and Earth to protect and care for them. A parent doesn't shrug their shoulders and say "I can't deprive my 13 year old of Liberty, and so I can't stop her going out to an alcoholic's house to get very drunk, take drugs and smoke." Liberty to put yourself in danger at 13 and younger, is not the primary right which trumps all other rights. The right to the care and protection due to a child is the primary right. This was going on well before 13 also. Social Services are "in loco parentis". They should start acting as though they were, instead of taking the essentially non-caring route of saying "ooh, we can't be Baddies and keep them off the streets."
Many foster carers have struggled with troubled youngsters to then have them re-admitted to Care - and lo and behold, the CareHome just let them walk straight out and do much worse behaviours than the foster carers were trying to guide them away from!
The SJW naive attitudes of many in the SSsystem is totally unfit for purpose. I have ceased to be shocked at the daftness I have heard espoused by SW's during my working life.
Children in Care are being massively failed by people and a system which is neglecting to operate in the caring, protective ways in which real parents would. These children are not receiving "care"; they are, rather, being allowed to avail of bed and lodging as and when they deem to take it.

No, I'm not a social worker.

Children in Care are being massively failed by people and a system which is neglecting to operate in the caring, protective ways in which real parents would.

Real parents, who post on MN, battle with all the same behaviours as foster parents.

Teens who abscond. Teens who hang out with older kids, drinking, smoking and taking drugs. Teens who ignore boundaries, steal to replace confiscated technology and are oblivious to the risk they place themselves in.

What do you suggest parents, or foster parent do when their teen doesn't come home from school? Doesn't answer phone? And when they are returned by the police, walk straight out of the door again?

Tbh (and I promise I'm not being flippant) I wonder about this with non fostered teens. I have small children but once they're teens how would I physically stop them walking out of the door?
That said I was a teen myself decades not so long ago (with a normal upbringing and very caring parents) and I was immature and thought I knew it all. But I didn't walk out and I can't put my finger on what stopped me. I assume no matter how dull and boring being at home and having to do my homework was (in my fourteen year old mind) I had enough sense.