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??

"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."

They wouldn't have been tried, if under 10 at all under any circumstances and between 10-14 only if it was thought their understanding was insufficient for criminal responsibility. They could not have been charged with a crime, they could not have been found guilty, and they would receive no help or supervision once 18 (unless they had committed further crimes over age 14).

There are different ages for different acts, in terms of when you are held responsible for your actions. That is down to consideration of whether the person would know right from wrong, not whether they understood what the length of possible sentence might mean for them. In such a high profile case, the consideration of whether these boys knew right from wrong would have been carefully considered.

That we hear nothing of V&T's families will be because of the siblings.

The psychopaths they were referring to, in order to be locked up, were obviously evil. You tend to get sectioned as criminally insane for committing a not so nice act as opposed to being particularly good st closing arguments.

Their point was these people cannot be rehabilitated. They cannot be helped in any way. To the point the kindest thing to do is hope they die as soon as possible. The alternative is a lifetime of being locked up and heavily medicated so others are safe. These people are born that way, they don’t turn 10 or 18 or 30 and become what they are.

My point is where does that leave us as a society if you have a 10yo psychopath who is a danger to others. You can’t rehabilitate them, not possible. What do you do? Try them as a child, give a childs sentence, let them out then wait until they commit another crime and are old enough to be tried as an adult to capture them in the net for good. How as a society do you deal with this?

Again, im not saying these two are true psychopaths, I have no idea whether that’s the case or not.

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

And we have a natural tendency to think there has to be something wrong with a person to commit particularly heinous crimes (I remember a lot of the commentary about the Yorkshire Ripper, and whether he would be sent to prison or secure hospital). It's because it is comforting to the population to 'other' the problem. A person must be 'mad' because no-one could be that 'bad' - the 'other' walk among us, but they're not like us. It's a normal protective thought pattern to put distance between us and what horrifies us.

"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."

It would not have been in public or in a crown court. It would have been in juvenile court.

They would have gone to the same places with the same sentence, assuming they were found guilty. If they had not been found competent they would not get a criminal record but would, again have gone to the same place, probably for the same period of time.

Their names would probably not have been released, but given public interest may have.

Sashh - a child with autism or ADHD may well lash out and cause serious injury ir death (in fact i mentioned this earlier) but they are unlikely to purposely kidnapped, torture and murder a toddler, it is an entirely different crime as it would be if an adult did the same. Lets not forget it was planned by the boys to cause the death of a baby as the attempted to kidnap another child the same day as they planned to push him in the path of a bus to make it look like an accident. They were charged for this also.

Wanna - there were nearly 40 witnesses that day, none of them stopped what happened. Some have been deeply affected by it of course, Denise has said she does not blame then, she blames the 2 boys who did it.

Angua Also very true. The majority of violent criminals are not psychopaths, but it's convenient to label them as such.

For example, Ted Bundy was the classic psychopath, but Charles Manson probably wasn't, but you'll routinely see people label him as such because it's the simplest and most convenient explanation for his actions.

They inflicted injuries so horrific the full details have never been released.........I think the fact neither of them ever served time in an adult prison is an absolute insult. All of my sympathy lies with that Poor, scared little boy who wanted his mummy and his parents.

"It would not have been in public or in a crown court. It would have been in juvenile court"

Homicide is always Crown Court, regardless of age of the accused. Ditto for certain other specified offences, or when the juvenile is tried alongside an adult for the same offence.

Sashh - a child with autism or ADHD may well lash out and cause serious injury ir death (in fact i mentioned this earlier) but they are unlikely to purposely kidnapped, torture and murder a toddler, it is an entirely different crime as it would be if an adult did the same.

I KNOW the crimes are different, but the law as it stands now means that ALL children are treated as competent adults. I'm not saying what they did was not evil, what I am saying is that the were used to change a law that puts all children in the same boat.

A child lashing out because they are having a meltdown and hits a another child is treated exactly the same as a neurotypical adult hitting a child for no reason.

Some people are just born evil

That's your opinion, it's not fact. There's no evidence for it.

It's so much easier to dehumanise people who do terrible things by calling them "monsters", "evil", "demons" than to examine what drove them to do it.

It is not about having sympathy for the murderers to want to look into the reasons why these boys may have acted as they did. It's about wanting to understand so that, God forbid, if another child ever has the same kind of tendencies, normal and decent people might have a chance of intervening before it is too late.

As I understand it is fairly common for seriously disturbed children to act in a similar way towards animals, something smaller and more vulnerable than themselves which most children have developed empathy for. Some children, through experience/abuse or simply a form of mental illness do not develop this normal sense of empathy and this is a dangerous combination. Children experiment, that's how they understand the world, and they don't process long term consequences like adults do. Empathy is usually what prevents children from experimenting in ways which cause hurt or distress, and most children by 10 understand death well enough to be horrified by it and afraid of causing it, much more so than younger children who have no sense of danger. It's quite likely these boys understood what their actions were causing in terms of distress and likely death - where was their horror, empathy and fear? It is as though through punishment we want to make them feel those things retrospectively, even if only in the sense of fear and horror for themselves, but I don't know if that's actually helpful in preventing future cases, because they almost certainly wouldn't have had the foresight to understand that their actions would result in prison for themselves.

It's difficult. They absolutely did need to be removed from the public sphere in order to protect other children. I can see a sense of retribution too, but in terms of preventing future incidents of this type I think the causes should have been identified further. Yes absolutely investigate the parents, and prosecute if they were found to have been at fault in terms of abuse or neglect. Not that parents are always responsible for their children's actions, but when abuse and negligence has caused a child to lack empathy in such an extreme way, that is horrendous, and the people responsible do need to be held to account.

It does seem very possible that Venables in particular may never be able to be rehabilitated. Whether that is down to early childhood experiences or a kind of personality disorder is not something any layperson can say.

It's my belief that the phenomenon of disturbed children hurting and killing animals does have strong parallels, just much less reported, and should be taken more seriously and looked at as a phenomenon. It is already known to be one of that he signs a child may grow up to become an adult who will murder, however, some children who torture animals do grow up and become 'normal' for want of a better world. I believe that to these two boys it might well have seemed no different or possibly obly one step higher to choose a young child instead of an animal for their entertainment :(

The boys had been living in children's institutions, with teaching facilities and access to psychologists. It was expensive too. (£300k per year).

Sending them from a children's institution to an adult jail at 18 would have undone 8 years of work.

I'm about the same age as Thompson and Venables. I remember being quite shaken by the case because it hadn't ever occurred to me that children could kill other children. I was pretty concerned for a while that I might be capable of murder.
I was made to study the case at university and I remember being one of the only people who felt the boys were treated unfairly. Someone said at the time "If you had kids you would feel diffetently" and I thought "it's thankfully very unlikely that your kids will either murder or be murdered but surely one is as likely as the other. So why should being a mother make a difference?" (I didn't actually say this!)
Now I am a mother, I do feel differently about a lot if things. Some things hit me much harder. But I still feel the same way about this. Perhaps because psychopathy does run in my family and my experiance of motherhood could very well consist of taking small boys to the police station and visiting adult men in prison. My Mum and me had very serious discussions about this when I was pregnant with my first.
Luckily there's no sign of this yet so perhaps I've dodged that particular genetic bullet but it was always a possibility.

I couldn't watch it. I remember this case so clearly from my childhood and it affects me even more now I have children of my own. It's just breaks my heart thinking about how scared that poor little boy must have been.

I find it interesting how it appears that one has been rehabilitated but the other not, perhaps a reflection on their personalities or something else. But I can't feel very sorry for them tbh.

Farahilda

Thanks for the correction.

I don't think the whole "imagine if it was your child who was killed" works in discussions like these anyway, the criminal justice system should not be about vengeance.

I still don't see what purpose it serves to go over the whole awful business again and again. Stupid people get to have an outrage-wank, or give themselves nightmares, but nothing positive comes out of it.

This.

Of course people are not born evil, it cannot be a coincidence that most serial killers have absolutely fucked up childhoods for instance.

Some people are definitely born evil. Cases this group of psychiatrists were relating was about young people who had good, kind, loving families and environments from birth. From the moment they could walk they started on torturing animals and smaller children. They carried on with this pattern when they went to school and were suspended, expelled from early ages. They were taken to psychologists and counsellors from the get-go with intervention from the parents and school system. They progressed to punishable crimes against people at an early age and had access to professional assistance via child detention centres. Nothing helped, they could not be helped, it was just inherent, some faulty wiring issue in the brain that no-one understands. Everyone could understand someone becoming a product of their tragic environment and upbringing, that’s easy but this was why they found it interesting/discussion worthy, because it was something that was a mystery that had no answers and they had all experienced it. In all cases society had to wait until the child could be tried and sentenced as an adult to lock them up and throw away the key. Meanwhile there was a string of tragedy in their wake. This posed the question of what should really be done with kids in this situation given the current system does not work to protect society, the rights are one sided.

When they turned 18, they should ave been transferred to an adult psychiatric facility for a long time. Heir childhoods, psychiatric problems provide an explanation to what they did, not an excuse. They still did what they did, and need to be punished adequately for it. Looks like Venables has not been rehabilitated at all, in fact he seems to be enjoying the notariety of it.

Yes, it was definately in the crown court. Thats why some people felt the trial was procedurally unfair. Because children (and particularly relatively young children) would not normally be expected to cope with the procedure of a crown court.

Hopping
People aren’t born evil. They develop different brain wiring resulting in diagnosable psychiatric conditions and/or mental illness. This is fundamentally different from what you are suggesting. A newborn does not have 666 on their head, which is what your comments suggest. Psychopathy isn’t even a diagnosable condition. It is a cluster of symptoms.

That 'awful business' won't ever go away though. Some crimes are never laid to rest much least when the vast majority feel justice hasn't been done.

I'm a mother, I love children. My instinctive reaction to a crying child is sadness and a wish to comfort them. Listening to those tapes just made me cold. I feel no sympathy towards them. But not anger either. Just numbness. Sometimes people commit crimes so appalling that we lose the ability to identify with them on any level. I don't think that's something that will ever change

This may be of interest:

www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-child-murdered-by-children-1616746.html

It’s a report about a near identical case in Stockport over 100 years before the Bulger case.
There was also a case where two brothers almost killed two boys in Doncaster a few years ago - nothing like the reaction seen in the Bulger case.
In all three cases, neglect and abuse was blamed for the children behaving as they did.
Although very rare, what seems to be unusual about the Bulger case is the reaction of adults not connected to the case and the fact that Venables has reoffended. The children are more usually successfully rehabilitated.

Thank you Bertie, chaos, baby, LeM, for articulating so well a more considered viewpoint.

They knew what they were doing was wrong. They just didn't care enough to stop before it was too late.

Herein lies the effects of the abuse Thompson/they suffered and why we as a society should never write them off.
And this may also be a clue to why Thompson seems to have been relatively well rehabilitated. If the reports are accurate the abuse he suffered was extreme and somewhat in excess of the abuse Venables suffered. This may have made it easier for Thompson to come to terms with what he did. Venables, according to an interview with his solicitor, actively seeks to be returned to jail. Perhaps he does have some form of psychopathy. I still can't bring myself to call a 10 year old boy evil though. The act he committed was evil.

As for why it's in our interests to be revisiting this tragedy 25 years later - we need to learn from it. Children like Thompson and Venables should not be growing up in a civilised society with such a disturbing lack of compassion that they can commit such crimes. But never again should two ten year olds be tried in the way these two boys were. Fortunately, their treatment once in their secure institutions seems to have been more humane and ultimately 50% successful if reports are true.