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??

My understanding is that the terms of their licence does require disclosure of their identities in these circumstances

That was tomVivien

It was too thought out, too violent and too appalling to just be a dreadful mistake. These aren't simply the actions of two young boys, they are the actions of two people who must be seriously mentally disturbed. If they can commit such a crime as a child, goodness only knows what they would be capable of as an adult. One has committed child porn offences already, the other one may not have done anything so far (that we are aware of), but it certainly does not mean that he won't.

Elendon

When they carefully consider how to murder, further their plan murder and ultimately carry out the murder of a child barely more than a baby.

Those are not the actions of any “little boy” in the sentimental sense.

I sincerely hope that at least Thompson (Venables seems a lost cause) has been rehabilitated enough to fully understand and feel how utterly abhorrent and despicable his actions that day were. He hasn’t killed himself yet though so that seems unlikely.

Both boys were reported to suffer PTSD which suggests some level of awareness / horror of what they did

FYI - the adult sentence would have been 18 years. The judge discounted to 8 years given their extreme youth

Why are you advocating suicide? Alisvolatpropiis

Let me put this bluntly for some who may live in a fairly decent environment.
There are 10 year old children almost certainly within a 5 mile radius of wherever you are who believe it's ok to sleep with granddad, or for mother to be drunk 18 hours a day, or bring home a dozen men a day.
There are 10 year old children who see real guns in their home, drugs, hardcore pornography etc.

'My little Billy wouldn't have done that' is absolutely true, but 'my little Billy' lives in a world a million miles from some of the 10 year olds I mention above.

She's not advocating suicide eldon you must know that!

There is another chance for the neural pathways in a child's brain to develop in a more healthy way in adolescence so there is a chance T was rehabilitated with all the help he was given.

For a start, you're assuming that RT would have been caught if he committed an offence.

Rebecca, I have stated my opinion Thomspn won't re-offend. Of course no one can know that. When Venables was arrested, it was reported that he was angry that Venables had brought public attention back to the case. I think Thompson wants to draw as little attention to himself as possible. He has a job, he has a husband. He is also closely monitored so I do think we would know if he re-offends.

And then you go on and you use that same assumption that we can all rely on the absence of media stories as absolute proof that RT hasn't reoffended.

When did I say that it is 'absolute proof'? You have an annoying habit of attributing things to me that I have never said.

You don't want to believe that Thomson is rehabilitated. But to all intents and purposes, and until we hear differently, he is rehabilitated. And that is the aim of the justice system, to rehabilitate, not just punish.

The next step is for this to become justification for future releases (indeed see the PP about RT above). Like a negative can 100% prove a positive.

I don't know what you're talking about. Whose release?

What I find more disturbing than even the premeditation is that he begged and cried for his mummy and it didn't stop them. A crying baby, something that is absolutely designed by nature to inspire our protective instincts, and they had none.

Can any degre of rehabilitation actually restore that sort of basic human instinct/emotion?

PTSD does not suggest they were aware at the time, but afterwards.
Regardless, the interviews with both children demonstrated they were very aware at each stage - not that they had a masterplan from the start.
They could account for a great deal of what happened and demonstrated awareness, but it's the 'surreal' nature of their mindset that's complicated. At one point they expressed concern about James, and considered handing him to someone, but their thought processes were immature and they kept making the wrong choices.

Someone can know they are hurting someone, but not understand why that is wrong, or the consequences of it. That's the problem in the mind of a 10 year old. We can observe a 3 year old actively hit another child with no real comprehension of the hurt to the other child, or consequences for the other child, or themselves. They just hit.
In the same way, two troubled 10 year olds can have a similar lack of awareness, exacerbated by the presence of each other. Most 'normal' 10 year olds will have developed a better understanding that Thompson and Venables did.

We may not fully understand all the reasons why it happened, but there ARE reasons. 'Evil' is unlikely to be the reason (imo).

Oh, so now it's just your opinion that he won't reoffend? It's not cast in stone because the media haven't reported on it?

please do make up your mind!

Excellent points made by BrilliantMIstake, especially the bit about the boys not being able to see the obvious way out, i.e. take the child back.

I was an adult when all this happened, and in the heated discussions I though of something I did as child. I was about seven or eight and walking home from school along the canal, carrying my wellies. I was close to the edge and one dropped in. I couldn't get it back and was in a flurry as to what to do. So I threw in the other one. It seemed to be the only thing to do. I was still afford, but it seemed "logical".

I thought of this when the case broke, long before any details had emerged, that the boys could only see a child's way out, their actions evolved.

Please don't pile in and tell me a tiny boy is not a wellie, and the other boys were ten, it's the thinking of the child that's so different.

A person can know right from wrong without understanding it in the terms most of us do. They clearly knew it was wrong in the sense that they should not get caught doing it, that they were not supposed to be doing it, but it is quite possible not to understand different shades of right and wrong - it is not totally off the wall to suggest that they may have been unable to differentiate between something which is merely naughty (e.g. shoplifting) and something which is unspeakably awful. There is evidence of this in people (particularly children, but sometimes adults as well) who have suffered severe trauma or had extremely restricted upbringings - they cannot tell the difference between something which is disallowed and something which is morally abhorrent. Some posters in this thread have spoken about their experiences caring for children who have been disturbed and described similar things - it is unsettling to deal with because usually even quite young children can differentiate these things and it tends to stop them from knowingly doing anything really awful because they have a developed sense of morals, in addition to knowing what's right and wrong according to rules. When a person doesn't have this it means that their normal rulebreaking and experimentation can be extremely alarming because it doesn't follow the pattern we expect. Everybody expects children to get into trouble by drawing on walls or pushing over a peer in the playground - these are normal ordinary transgressions of childhood. When a child does something terrible to another living being or deliberately harms themselves, it is shocking because it is so out of the ordinary.

Rules are often arbitrary, meaning that they can be broken (usually when the person believes in something else more strongly than the rule, which can be their own enjoyment), whereas morals, while they differ from person to person, tend to be much stronger and seem to revolve around a core set of beliefs the vast majority of people share. Not harming people who are smaller and more vulnerable than yourself is one which is almost universal, as is not killing, although even the degree to with which these apply varies - some people believe in the death penalty, for example, while others consider even killing an insect to be wrong.

Mary Bell seems to demonstrate they can.
Robert Thompson also seems to suggest they can.

TheBrilliantMistake you are so right. I know that they are discredited because of their financial misdoings but Kids Company got some of the children in their care to make dioramas of their home lives and they were truly, genuinely heartbreaking. It's horrendous what some children grow up with, I remember one of the comments from one of the children, that no-one had ever cared if he was cold. Those models had guns,syringes, passed out strangers, general filth.

Oh, so now it's just your opinion that he won't reoffend? It's not cast in stone because the media haven't reported on it? confused

How can they media have reported that Thompson will re-offend? They don't have a crystal ball. 🙄

Why should the media report on Venables re-offending (including assault) but not in Thompson re-offending?

YY echt - that is also very true. Children don't think like adults, they don't problem solve like adults. Not that it excuses any of the awful things which were done.

And BrilliantMistake.

And thank you for the work you do with children. Just one person caring about a child in a situation like that must make the world of difference to them.

The more I read this thread, the more admiration I have for child psychologists who work tirelessly with child offenders to make sense of why they did unspeakable things and to try to rehabilitate them.

That's much more helpful to society than just saying 'throw them in jail and lock away the key.'

Well I am a well known Suicide Advocate on this forum Elendon!

Or perhaps you could read and think a bit more.

"Therefore I don't buy the 'only 10' and brain development excuses.
If they had been 4 or 5 then perhaps, never at 10 years old"

I recall reading somewhere (might have been in Blake Morrison's book) that the boys were assessed as being emotionally and mentally immature for their age and had low IQ. They were not like normal 10-year-olds. They were also physically small for their age.

One of the boys during interview clearly didn't understand what "being dead" means. He talked about making "the baby", i.e. James, "come alive again". He was thinking of death in a cartoon-like, fantasy sort of way and didn't seem able to grasp the enormity and finality of what he had done.

I think the crime against James was unspeakably horrible. But I also think that publishing the two boys' names, putting them on trial as if they were adults and then throwing them to the mob was utterly wrong.

Re Mary Bell, she didn’t become an author, the pp is thinking of Anne Perry, who writes Victorian crime stories. Her birth name was Juliet Hulme, she and another young girl, Pauline Parker killed the Parker’s mother in NZ in the 1950s. The film Heavenly Creatures is about the murder.
Interesting to note that the public don’t know the names in the recent case of a young girl and her boyfriend killing the girl’s mother and sister. Their identities haven’t been released to protect their families, which is what should have been done in the James Bulger case. We didn’t need to know those boys faces and names, what we need/ needed to know as a society, is that justice should and must be served, which it wasn’t in this case, or indeed in many others.

I did read though that a lady who had a son and was in a relationship was warned by social services to immediately stop contact and she was sure it was one of them.

Was it widely known at the time that one of them is gay? If so, she would have been able to work out exactly who she'd been seeing and it's to her credit that she hasn't revealed a lot more about him.