C4 now - the James Bulger case **Trigger Warning - Contains Info about the case** (Title edited by MNHQ)

[Hairgician]

Sat watching this now.

I do not accept the view that those 2 boys were treated unfairly. They murdered that poor little boy and they knew what they were doing and that it was wrong.

They should be rotting in jail. Aibu to say justice not served??

By giving them capacity for criminal acts and calling them evil we absolve ourselves from any responsibility to either try and help prevent children from doing such things or rehabilitate them after.

Nope. We can say that they're evil but still want to know how they ended up evil, and try to prevent it happening to other children in future. You seem to see being evil as some innate thing, as either or. They did something so terrible I dont see how they can ever be decent human beings, but it doesn't mean it HAD to be that way if we (as a society) had intervened before it got so bad.

LeM

The 10 yo boys who murdered James Bulger were not locked away forever. Did you not actually watch the programme?

They were treated with considerable respect and consideration.

Capacity to consent to sex is completely different. Even murder - or I suppose it would be manslaughter - could be different depending on how it came about (eg. they didn't understand a prank would end in death). But they actually tortured a toddler, they actually knew they were hurting a tiny child and continued. That isn't some complicated thing with later consequences that may not be immediately apparent, the wrongness of what they were doing would have been obvious. They chose to inflict pain in the cruellest way. You cant rehabilitate that.

The age of "criminal responsiblity" is a red herring. A 10 year old who steal from a shop may well not have the understanding of an adult, should be treated differently etc. But choosing to tortue a vulnerable being is totally different - it doesn't need complex understanding, it should be innate not to be so cruel. And if its not, theres not much hope. They shouldnt be allowed out ever, men like this ruin the whole world. Fuck them.

Missmoney I agree with you. I really don't see evil like that it isn't some innate thing, it is more a convenient label for some. I agree we need to see how they a child could end up 'evil,' and how we could prevent it. Children aren't born evil.

Erm. I think you’ve totally misunderstood MissMiney’s point LeM!

Sorry if this is a silly question but what would the other trial, being tried as children, have been like? What would have been done differently? Genuine question.

I was only a year older than the two boys myself when they murdered James Bulger, I was aware of the case at the time from the news and remember the media frenzy of blaming films like Halloween and violent video games for corrupting them. I never knew the full details of what happened til I was older.

There was obviously neglect and severe sibling violence in Thompson's family that is without doubt, it seems less clear in Venables's case from what I've read. If they were so mentally disturbed by their upbringings that they had no real concept of what they were doing, would this not have been taken into account though? Wouldnt they have been classed as unfit for trial? I have read so many articles with different reports on their backgrounds that I just don't know what to believe.

*Missmoney

Royal, didn't see the programme, not in the UK. I do know they weren't locked away for ever, and I believe they were treated well. I am saying there are many people who would have liked them to have been locked away forever, and if the UK had the death penalty it follows that some would have agreed with that. Both of which I think are entirely wrong for two 10 year olds.

I may very well have misunderstood, its very late!

I really don’t understand what the confusion is.

Two 10year old boys tortured and murdered a 2 year old.

They were taken away from society for a number of years to be rehabilitated and were released as young adults when they were deemed harmless to themselves and others.

One of them reoffended and was put into rehabilitation again.

The other didn’t reoffend and is living a relatively normal life.

What is there to not understand or object to?

How terrible their backgrounds were has a bearing on trying to prevent other children becoming so messed up.

It doesn't have any bearing on whether they should be let out. Not for punishment, as such, but to protect others from them.

They CHOSE to sadistically torture and murder a tiny child. They went past the point of no return. Whatever pushed them to that point, when they reached it it was too late to turn them into normal decent human beings.

The other didn’t reoffend and is living a relatively normal life.

He's an utter cunt and it terrifies me that someone so evil is allowed to walk free amongst us. Gd knows why people like him get so much help from the system when people abused by these evil men get nothing.

Spot on MissMoneyPlant. Should've known the bleeding hearts would come out batting for the murderers on good old MN.

I'm amazed that so many posters are showing sympathy for those two demons and saying we should show them compassion and understanding, FUCK THAT!!

I don't care care how deprived their childhoods were it doesn't ever excuse or explain why they murdered and tortured that baby boy. I think the fact they were 10 makes them even more sick and deprived. Come on all of us who have encountered 10 year olds in our life, can you imagine them ever contemplating doing this? I think its disgusting that one of them is supposedly leading a normal life now, well fucking bully for him!! Little James never will and neither will his poor parents.

Monsters like this should never have been let out, there are some crimes which are just too evil to ever give them another chance, and I don't care if my view is in the minority here.

Their childhood may have been such that developmentally, they struggled to know right from wrong.

However, it's hard to see how Thompson and Venables could have thought Jamie was ok about what was happening to him.

He would have been in pain and expressing a wish for them to stop. They would have recognised this, and ignored it. Ignored it until the end.

I'm less inclined to think the issue was a troubled background (I'm not saying this wasn't the case) but that the ability to see someone in desperate pain and not be moved by it suggests some degree of sociopathy or psychopathy.

And is this innate? I don't know enough about it. Can it be 'cured'? Does therapy help? Can a psychopath, who inherently doesn't have any empathy, be changed?

I must admit, because I personally think the action of Thompson and Venables was as much (if not far more) down to nature as nurture, I don't feel any sympathy for them. Absolutely none.

Just as they didn't have any sympathy for their victim.

Those children were put on trial for the mob to see. No other reason.

They pleaded not guilty, but they had no defence, their counsel should have advised them to plead guilty, I don't know if they received that instruction.

They were in secure children's homes from the time they were arrested, the ONLY sentence they could receive was, 'Her Majesty's pleasure' and the only place they could be sent was a secure children's home.

If they had not gone to court they would have been in secure accommodation until they were deemed no longer a threat to society. If they had been a couple of months younger this is what would have happened.

If they had pleaded guilty then the details would not have been read in open court, they would have gone to a secure children's home at her Majesty's pleasure until deemed no longer a threat.

The court case only did one thing and that was let the public in to gawp and the press to write the details.

My heart says they should have locked them up and thrown away the key, my head says they were not fairly treated by being tried as adults.

And one thing that should concern every parent on here was what that trial did for YOUR children. Before this trial, although the legal age of responsibility was 10, there was a 'safety valve' of doli incapax, this meant that 10 - 13 year olds would have their mental and physical status taken in to account.

So now a 10 year old is treated as mentally and physically an adult when it comes to crime.

You may say, "oh but my child would never kill" and you are probably right, most people don't. However you might feel differently if your child has ADHD or is on the Autistic spectrum and one day lashes out.

If they are 10 or over that can leave them with a conviction on their record for life. That can stop them working as a teacher or in health care, it can stop them getting on a uni course.

On reading this thread, I searched and found this article on Robert Thompson theukdatabase.com/2012/04/03/profile-of-a-child-killer-robert-thompson/. It is reported here how he was abused by his brothers and in turn ended up having a strange relationship with his younger brother, with whom he had a symbiotic relationship and parallely abused him. His alcoholic mother was beaten first by RT’s father then by her alcoholic new partner. In turn, she beat her children.

Perhaps RT didn’t have the tools to be a normal 10yo boy. He had very little control over his life and acted out in alarming ways and had little concern for his personal safety. RT and all his siblings definitely learnt from their mother/parents how to act. Ie you pick on someone more vulnerable than you to act out your pain and suffering. One of his siblings managed to get taken into care. Others have tried to commit suicide. There would appear to be nothing normal about this family. So why are we expecting the 10 yo to act like a normal 10 yo?

I suffered abuse including from my sibling and used to have fantasies of exacting revenge. I knew/thought there was something wrong with me until I had extensive therapy quite recently. As a child and even an adult, I didn’t know how to make proper friendships. I was controlling of others even as a child because I had no control over my life. I don’t think I would have done what the boys did. But what if my abuse had been that extreme?

It seems to me that the mass hatred of these boys was in some way to illustrate how advanced our society is and how we would never do something like this. But ahem many societies do and have - Germany less than 100 years ago is a prime example. Mass murder is still happening right now.

People poured hatred onto these boys thus eclipsing the problems in society, which allowed this situation to happen in the first place. The hatred also served to hide people’s fantasies and inadequacies. In what way is it normal for a mob of adults to bay for the blood of 10 year olds? These were adults, who wanted to hurt or kill children. In a terrible irony, these adults were illustrating just how easy it is to work together as a group to hurt or kill a more vulnerable person. In exactly the same way as Jon Venables and Robert Thompson did both by choosing a vulnerable victim and by working together as a group.

I agree with Chaos. 10 year olds generally know the difference between right and wrong, but not between wrong and more wrong. Doing something wrong and then panicking and doing something worse to cover it up is practically the definition of a ten year old! I thought that at the time when I was about 13 and still think it now with a 10yo of my own. Look at books for boys of that age - full of wrongdoing which escalates. Just most kids have sufficient empathy to realise within a moment that kidnapping a toddler isn't funny and stop right there.

I don't understand the sympathy for these 2.
Saying they had a lack of control?! Really...
Imo they way they took & what they did to that baby showed complete control & planning.
They have had cushty new lives while poor james parents & siblings will never have that. Poor denise must be on edge if her kids want to leave to even play with friends.
I don't care about their history. There are lots of people that have abusive childhoods (myself included) that would never even contemplate that type of act.
I don't know how they could have even thought it up.

He's an utter cunt and it terrifies me that someone so evil is allowed to walk free amongst us. Gd knows why people like him get so much help from the system when people abused by these evil men get nothing

Totally agree.

Some people are just born evil. Psychopaths. All nature and nothing to do with nurture. Some psychopaths come from decent loving families, they were just born that way, no failings on the part of the family or society. They can’t be helped/changed. That was the consensus among a group of psychiatrists informally discussing the matter at a dinner I attended. No idea if that’s right or wrong but they believed it. All agreed true psychopaths were scary as all fuck and the best way to deal with them is lock them up, throw away the key and hope to god they die of something quickly. Obviously hard to implement in a ‘civilised society’.

So some kids are born evil no matter what. Don’t know if it’s the case with these two or not.

In my head as a grown adult I feel I should be able to see this from a different angle but I just can't. I cannot muster any sympathy.

They didn't lash out. They brutally tortured. Huge difference.

The extremity of their crime is such that it makes any comparisons pretty fruitless. I would hate to have been making those decisions on where to place these boys and I don't envy those that had the responsibility for a second.

If they were mentally ill and lacking in the capacity to understand what they were doing wouldn't they still be deemed a risk now? Or if they aren't mentally ill and fully understood what they were doing was the sentence proportionate to the absolute horror they inflicted on that baby? Can you ever really rehabilitate that severity of behaviour particularly when it presents at such a young age? We already know one of them still poses a risk to children and the other is out there under the radar.

I don't know what to do with them or if they should have been detained for longer. I'm not one of these people baying for their blood. I just can't get into the headspace of 'oh they had a hard childhood' 'they were only children' etc etc I just can't. What they did was too evil, prolonged and planned for me to ever have anything resembling sympathy towards them.

They are synonymous with evil in the same way The West's, Moors Murderers are and will remain that way until they die. I don't think public opinion will ever change on that.

Hopping

That's making the assumption that all psychopaths are evil, which is fundamentally incorrect. There is a disproportionately high number of psychopaths in professions such as law, finance and medicine (surgery), because they are able to detach emotionally from their work in a way that most aren't. For this reason, many psychopaths will be incredibly successful, and many will never go on to commit any crimes.

Not all psychopaths are evil. We just tend to hear about the ones that are.

In her recent interview with the Guardian, Denise Bulger talks about how she doesn't have the energy for anger anymore, even though she can (very understandably) never forgive them.

If she can let go of her anger, I think we should do the same.