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??

It would be so good to hear more from people like TheBrilliantMistake, Needsasickamnesty and HarveyKietelrabbit who have experience of working with troubled kids.

I am really shocked at some of the sympathy that the two boys are getting on here, to the point where the shocking acts that have been done to him, are being downplayed and put to the side.

Aeroflotgirl, where are you getting this from? I haven't seen sympathy for them on here. Yes, several people disagree with the facile assumption that they were, for instance, born evil, and refer to the abuse and neglect they suffered as an obvious reason for what they did, but that doesn't amount to sympathy in relation to the dreadful acts they committed.

I'd also strongly disagree with the suggestion that 8 years in custody is nothing for a 10 year old child. For a child of that age, it's as long as their conscious life up to that point. Bear in mind also that, as Venables has discovered, a life sentence really does mean life - they can be called back to prison at any time to serve more of their sentence in custody, for even the most minor offence.

The issue of doli incapax was raised by the defence at trial and the prosecution were able to call expert evidence to prove they knew right from wrong, and that they knew it was wrong to take a boy from his mother and seriously harm him. Surely the evidence of experts who actually assessed the boys in question has to trump generalisations made by people who never met the lads in question based on their personal experiences of dealing with abused children....

It depends.

I had a paediatrician tell me just last week that my DD was unlikely to be affected by attachment disorder because she was removed from her birth family at 2. That is utter, utter rubbish and has been debunked by a number of different trauma specialists.

Further, Thompson and Venables would have been able to say it was wrong, I have no doubt. Seems Dr Muller agrees

So, what you are actually saying here is that you would be capable of being a child killer given a specific set of circumstances.
You just didn't like the circumstances of two 10 year olds, but yours would be OK, despite being an adult?

In a way, it continues the cycle of the big person picking on the smaller person. Would these people saying they would have killed V&T say the same about killing a big strong man in revenge?

'Particular children can be less resilient to troubled backgrounds'

Of course, I totally agree with this.

It's not too hard for me to imagine two boys left to their own devices for hours, minds already warped by the environment, to end up doing something awful.

Still, whatever the initial cause, Jon Venables clearly isn't capable of a rehabilitation.

I find it hard to believe that anybody so evil can be rehabilitated.
But we already know that some can. We just can't identify which until we've tried.
Mary Bell struggled at first then managed to live as normal a life as possible.
Thompson so far has done OK too.
So is it lack of possible rehabilitation or a need for retribution that underpins your view?
If the former, it seems flawed. If the latter, you don't seem to be calling for child executions, so what retribution would bee fitting?

I do not work with troubled kids. I do however know of them.

We don't really know if Mary Bell and Robert Thompson have been rehabilitated because we don't know anything about them.

As far as we know they haven't been in anymore trouble, but we don't actually know anything for a fact.

If they were actually neglected and abused then why apparently were no siblings on either side removed?

We wouldn't be told that (unless the children themselves chose to publicise it as adults), as the names of children in care cases are always anonymised.

@AHungryMum this question has been asked on here repeatedly and yet no-one has actually answered it. Where on this thread has anyone suggested that the boys didn’t know right from wrong? The fact is that no-one has suggested or said anything of the sort. People have repeatedly stated that the boys needed to be held accountable for their crimes at the time but that to suggest that ten year old children needed to be treated as adults, locked up for the rest of their lives and given punishments that even adults would not have served in this instance did not take account of the fact that although they committed an unspeakably awful crime, they were still ten year old children and could not possibly have known the long term implications of a life sentence for instance.

We don’t allow children to do certain things until they are adults because we consider that they do not have the capacity to understand the consequences of what they’re doing. And yet here we had a case of ten year olds being expected to be treated as adults because the act they had committed shocked the public and the public believed they should be treated as adults.

What I really don't understand is, how certain posters have said that they'd have "done time" for murdering Thompson and Venables due to extreme circumstances, but can't grasp that two 10 year old children will have an entirely different idea of what constitutes extreme circumstances to them, and likely led to them lacking empathy to the point they committed murder in the first place.

Judge's sentencing remarks - explains the 3 years, but TRIGGER WARNING it does describe some of the images

The last paragraph

This makes a total term of 40 months. At the half way point of this sentence you will be released from this sentence. Whether you will actually be released from prison at that point depends on what action is taken in relation to your life sentence.

www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/r-v-jon-venables.pdf

Even normal law abiding citizens don’t get police protection.

But then normal law abiding citizens don't have the tabloids regularly stirring up the population into baying for their blood.

they were still ten year old children and could not possibly have known the long term implications of a life sentence for instance.

What the fuck has that got to do with it? The problem isn't that they didn't consider what their punishment might be, the problem is that they CHOSE to torture a toddler. It should be humanity that stops them doing that, not fear of punishment. The fact that they enjoyed harming a tiny innocent child is why they are not safe to be in society.

And it doesn't matter what dreadful things led them to that point, they reached it and as such it was too late for those two (though we can learn to prevent it happening again). I mean, there's lots of abusive men out there and we would advise women to leave them, doesn't matter about the man's own abused past/reasons behind it, because there's a point where you have to keep yourself safe. Same with these two - deosn't matter how much we know about their pasts, how dreadful it is they were so messed up, we still have to keep people safe from them.

What I can't get my head round now is knowing that Jon Venables has been found with indecent images of children, twice, yet has been given a short sentence so will be back on the streets again soon.

Highly unlikely. His life sentence has been reactivated, so it'll be up to the Parole Board to consider whether it is safe to release him. Given his history of reoffending, they will be extremely cautious about this.

We don't really know if Mary Bell and Robert Thompson have been rehabilitated because we don't know anything about them. but if they had reoffended then we would know.

By that argument you don’t know anything about anyone do you? And anyone you come into contact with might be a criminal of any kind. Just because you don’t know that they are doesn’t mean that they aren’t.

But the media do know where Mary Bell is, hence how they were able to hound her several years ago

No I don't know everything about everyone.

Someone said that Mary Bell and Robert Thompson are proof that rehabilitation has worked.

I'm just saying that we don't really know that do we?

Rehabilitation is ALWAYS possible in children and juveniles. Not guaranteed but always possible.

I don't want a system like in the USA where 13 year olds can be given life without possibility of parole because they're too young to be given the death penalty. Otherwise the state would execute them quite happily. Writing off an entire life in almost exclusively damaged and abused children and adolescents.

Many don't talk about what they've suffered until much, much later and their families don't either because it would usually mean criminal convictions for them. So you seem to have a dangerous child or adolescent who didn't have the best start in life but certainly wasn't considered to have it that bad. Till many months or years later when you hear about the rapes by family members or the paedophiles who bought them booze and games and were their 'mates'. Wandering the streets all day and often all night. Hearing Mum being raped and/or beaten by her latest boyfriend or punter or even forced to watch.Trying to climb out of the window at primary school age because there's no food in the house and no electric and parents are in a drug induced stupor or just fucked off for the night. Watching Dad kill your much loved pet because you've wet the bed again because you're terrified all the time.

Terrified of going to school because Mum cut herself again last night and says she'll hang herself today. Not being allowed to go to school because Dad has locked you all in a room because he thinks someone is going to come and kill you because he's psychotic.

That's the memories they have. There's also pre-language trauma that you couldn't express and can't consciously remember. Being left in a cot with a few bottles and a dirty nappy for days on end. Being in the house with your dead Mothers body for a couple of days before the Police break the door down.

These are the kind of backgrounds a lot of these 'evil' children and young people have.

I've seen children and young adults do abhorrent things (which are very, very rarely publicised btw) and go on to commit no other offences. Some do. It's not always easy to predict who will and who won't.

I don't excuse what they've done but I certainly sympathise and understand how it has happened.

There was a man recently, Theodore Johnson. He killed 3 women, he was let out of prison after the first two deemed to be safe.

I don't believe in the death penalty, I don't believe in an eye for an eye or any of that, but I also don't just blindly trust the British justice system to get it right.

But were issues like attachment disorder affecting factors like remorse and empathy well known at the time? Members of my family adopted in the early 90s and as far as I know were not taught about attachment disorders, certainly not to the extent that posters on mumsnet appear to be informed about it today. It might be, of course, that MNers who have adopted have done much more research than my relatives happened to do, and this information has not come directly from social workers etc. But it's my understanding that the process of adoption and foster care changed quite a lot (life stories, safer caring rules, daily logs for foster carers, for example) during the 00s in particular, and whether that is down to better modern understanding of child psychology, I don't know - but perhaps it is? Attitudes towards children being hit, for example, at home - and I mean more than smacking - have changed irrecognisably since the 80s and 90s and I wonder if a turbulent childhood or certain aspects of parenting might have been seen as a less important factor than is recognised today.

Elendon you accused another poster of spreading lies and its been pointed out to you that they werent lying. Perhaps you could apologise instead of ranting now.

Not quite. The poster in question said that both boys had received compensation of around £30K. The facts demonstrate that neither received anything like that sum, not least as the overall figures include costs which, for a Human Rights claim, would have accounted for virtually all of the awards given.

sashh
That is chilling. Intellectually I know that such people and images exist. Understanding the depths of depravity and reading the content of the material available is something else. 😢 I’m speechless. And humbled by what the children suffer. I actually had no idea what category A abuse images actually are.

I hope they never let him out now.

Sorry, that was in response to a comment which suggested that as the boys were assessed by psychologists at the time of the trial, they couldn't possibly have issues as alluded to by many on this thread.

(Just in case it wasn't clear.)

We don't really know if Mary Bell and Robert Thompson have been rehabilitated because we don't know anything about them

Actually we do know rather a lot about Mary Bell, not least as a result of Gitta Sereny's book about her.

NeedsAsockamnesty, I do wonder what happened to Venables in those secure units. The Sydney Morning Herald published this a few years ago, 'Venables has proved more problematic [than Thompson]. At 17, while still inside the Red Bank secure children's unit, he'd been accused of having sex with a female care worker'.

That's not a normal rehabilitative regime.