Some posters on this thread have been repeatedly being rude and saying I was lying. Even after I posted links they carried on doing it and claiming that some half remembered anecdote from 1998 was authoritative and the multiple respectable sources I posted were worthless.
This is part of the problem with the film. It is not seeking to explain or understand. He has not spoken to anybody involved, he has no insight. He is attempting to impose his own imagined narrative on events rather than seeking to shed new light on it.
This happened in another form after the trial when there was a bit of a moral panic about “video nasties” being to blame which they weren’t. Of course that was mainly in tabloids so I’m sure that the people who’ve defended this film would be aghast.
The film is no bloody different though. It’s just an attempt to impose a narrative on the case which makes people feel more comfortable but has very little relationship with reality, it’s just a scenario a certain type of person wants to be true.
The reality is that the people who actually surrounded the case admit the investigation and the trial only established the facts and never asked the question “Why?” which was, I think most of them would admit now, was probably a mistake, particularly because they massively underestimated JV’s capacity for manipulation.
Thompson did truly have an awful and horrendous childhood but the rush to wrap up the case without asking too many difficult questions meant RT’s childhood was blamed and JV’s actions were put down to him being dominated by RT and a mildly dysfunctional family.
And it was a mistake as far as Venables was concerned. Mary Berry, Robert Thompson, the two boys in Edlington. Those four children were brought up in appalling situations where the most horrific abuse was so completely normalised and frequent it would have been like other children view having their dinner.
All of them have been rehabilitated. By all accounts all four of them, once removed from an awful situation, were completely changed children and apparently flourished living blameless lives with some success.
Venables was just tacked into this narrative on the basis of very, very flimsy links and a lot of finger pointing at Thompson as the ringleader because anything else was just too uncomfortable.
He certainly wasn’t a child whose background was so awful that violence and abuse was routine and he did know right from wrong.
So it shouldn’t have been that much of a shock that removing him from his home situation didn’t make much difference to his behaviour because it wasn’t the cause.
Venables has just become a sacred cow of the left. He’s almost 40, he’s been caught twice looking at the worst grade of child sexual exploitation images which usually includes children being tortured, hurt or the involvement of animals. He’s had millions spent on him trying to help and rehabilitate him and it’s not worked.
It’s not worked because, in his case, the softly, softly, blame it all on his childhood trauma method hasn’t worked because it wasn’t the cause and nobody aside from Denise Fergus ever really challenged that. And she has repeatedly been proven right.
She thinks he won’t stop until he kills again. I’m inclined to agree with her.