Ok let’s be honest here. The reason why people might not forget the James Bulger murder (and actually, it was over a generation ago now so actually, plenty of people are not going to know the details anyway,) wasn’t because the murder itself was so horrific, it was because the murder was committed by two ten year olds and the law was changed specifically to allow society the ability to demonise them.
There have been worse murders since, committed by Harold shipman for instance, Fred West, Ian Huntley but we conveniently forget about those because they weren’t children, even though in some cases their victims were.
It’s very easy to demonise two children instead of having to ask the questions which so many in society don’t want to have to ask, ie. how it happened that two ten year olds reached a point of murdering a child one day.
Because regardless of whether they had bad home lives, the reality is that you don’t just wake up one morning and think “oh I know, I think I’ll go out and abduct and murder a child,”. There will have been signs that something was very, very wrong in these children’s behaviour long before it got to the point of those children murdering that two year old. In the same way society asks how a baby such as baby P can slip through having been noticed as being neglected before it got to the point he was killed, so society should also be asking how it happened that the behaviour of two children slipped through being noticed before they killed another child.
But it was far easier to turn a blind eye and to change the law to allow society to demonise them instead of to ask the questions as to where society had gone wrong.
These were children who were two young to vote, too young to have sex, too young to drink, drive, get married, even buy a lottery ticket,and yet they suddenly became adults because they committed a crime? Why is that? Because they suddenly grew up? No it was because trying them as children and admitting that others will have had a part to play in them ending up where they did would mean asking difficult questions. So better to turn them into monsters than to face the reality that they’d been failed by society to the extent that although they were responsible for the crime they committed, others were responsible for the fact that their behaviour had reached the level where they were able to commit that crime unchecked.