To wonder how many people actually understand

[TheLadyEvenstar]

How it feels for the Victim and victims family when a criminal is released or escapes and then reoffends?

I have one hell of a lot of sympathy for James Bulgers family and to some extent understand how she is feeling right now.

1993 little James was murdered, that was also the year i was sexually and violently assaulted, no the 2 were not connected. But one thing that does connect them is Jack Straw made a bad decision on both cases.

He made the final decision on releasing the Bulger killers and also the final decision on moving my attacker from Rampton to Prestwich hospital - the result in both has been awful.

For Denise and her family they had to be notified when these 2 were released, and now that Venables is back inside after commiting another crime - level 4 child pornography - just one less than beastiality and violent pornography/acts.

For myself I was contacted in 2006 to tell me the criminal who attacked me had escaped and was on the loose. Took from November 2006 - March 2007 for him to be caught and then only because he reoffended did that happen.

I know the dread i felt daily and the pain it caused me and my family. Imagine being glad your Dad, in my case, was no longer alive to know he had escaped and that the man who had hurt me was on the loose to do the same to another woman.

Its easy to say, they were children/too young/difunctional family etc but at the end of the day the sympathy should not be with the criminals but the forgotten victims - THE FAMILIES OF THE VICTIMS. Because they will never forget what their child/parent/sibling went through.

But we also owe it to our children to keep them safe.

There are some crimes for which rehabilitation does not work - that is my opinion. Paedophilia is one of them, as the people guilty of committing these crimes form little communities and actually campaign to be recognised. They feel that they are being persecuted as homosexuals once were and that one day they will be accepted.

You cannot rehabilitate someone who refuses to admit they did wrong.

What about the 2 boys from Doncaster? Who again refuse to accept any wrongdoing on their part, who refuse to show remorse at all? Do you think their parents should also be prosecuted?

And then what do we do with those children? They have grown up in the most appauling circumstances, without love, surrounded by cruelty and violence. Some children manage to break out of that cycle, others go on to perpetrate it further. At some point that is a choice that is made by that child. So when a child chooses to perpetrate the violence, what then? That is all they have known and they are not going to discover love in prison are they? So can you really guarantee the public's safety if they are released? How can they lead a normal life when they've never known normality? Are we asking too much of them?

I agree Rhubarb.

How far can we repair the damage inflicted upon children that renders them violent and psychopathic? Its a valid question. but not one that means we do not try.

If we take the three examples of child killers of children, we know that Mary Bell has never reoffended. We have no idea about Robert Thompson, but for the moment we must assume he is functioning and not reoffending. which leaves JV. A 66% per success rate must count towards considering rehabiliation as desirable and to be pursued.

Sadly the truth is that our children are most at risk from their own parents or other family members, not from strangers.

The abberation that is child killers of children attracts such notice because it IS so rare. And perhaps we can say find some comfort in the fact that we do live in a society where these instances occur so very very infrequently. Unlike say some countries where children are given guns and told to kill people.

But I firmly believe that unless we are the actual parents and family of a child killed, we must be aware that the feelings these situations bring up in us are our own feelings of rage and violence, which do not have an accepted expression in day to day life, but in these instances we can allow ourselves to feel them because we feel we can attach a moral righteousness to them.

and in doing so, we give these deep rooted urges a voice normally denied in society. And there is a release for all of us in that.

I would just say we need to be aware of our feelings, and where they come from.

and also, the way we treat criminals is also a dialogue with ourselves about how we believe society should operate. IT reinforces our shared values of both punishment and compassion. We need that ongoing dialogue to be able to bind society together.

We believe as a society that murder is wrong. But that is simply a consensus arrived at after many centuries. So in order to maintain that consensus, the murder as wrong concept must be validated again and again, by the actions of the justice system, and by our willingness to abide by those rules.

So to step outside those rules for individual cases, hurts society, weakens the consensus, weakens our right to protection from violence.

I happen to think that remorse has a lot to do with it.

Mary Bell was fully remorseful. She collaborated with a book on her crimes that she got a lot of stick her, but apparently she did it to try and come to terms with her crimes herself and to try to heal. In the book she is fully apologetic, although how that sits with her victims family I don't know.

The 2 boys from Doncaster told police they were not sorry for what they did and would do it again.

Venables and Thompson as far as I am aware have never shown remorse either. They were aware of what they had done in police interviews, they knew it was wrong to kill another human being. Interestingly Thompson blamed Venables and was the more composed of the two, whilst Venables cried through most of the trial.

Perhaps Thompson is fully rehabilitated and living a normal life, or perhaps, being the cleverest of the two he has just avoided being caught. We don't know. But what disturbs me are the innocent people who will be caught up this - their future girlfriends.

Less children are murdered every year than at any point since records began. We are doing better at keeping children safe than we ever have been. Of course, you can always do better.

That's not true Rhubarb. Venables showed immense remorse according to an interview I heard with his lawyer the other day. And not all paedophiles are campaigning to have their predilictions accepted - a lot of them are horribly ashamed of their feelings.

"The number of killings of under-15s has ?collapsed? since the 1970s, according to Colin Pritchard of Bournemouth University. Professor Pritchard calculates that in 1974 Britain was the third-biggest killer of children in the rich world. By his reckoning it is now 17th, following a 70% drop in child homicides. To be on the safe side, he did the analysis again, including cases where the cause of death was undetermined; even then the number of cases had halved. He credits closer co-operation between police and social services, which kicked off in a big way in 1979."

www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15452867

remorse is indeed important. And we of course do not know whether they have since shown remorse. We can only speculate. Though I did read that one of them did ask for the police to tell JB's mother he was sorry.

To feel remorse one must have a set of emotional skills that perhaps were absent in those boys. Can they develop them? To develop awareness of others, to empathise....often extreme damage means that people cannot even feel their own feelings, cannot recognise, feel scared of their own emotions, have disassociated from them utterly. And if they cannot empathise with themselves, can they empathise with others? And to inflict such cruelty on another is a way of channelling the brutality inflicted on them...acting it out, placing it elsewhere.

Therapy will often focus on emotional disassociation that people who have suffered extreme trauma experience. They literally cannot allow themselves to feel. Because feeling might spell pyschic disaster. I would hope that part of their rehabilitation would be to work through those seemingly inpenetrable barriers to bring them safely to a place where their feelings are integrated with their intellects.

That would be the aim, anyway.

LadyBiscuit - I said it was my opinion. I did criminology and there are groups of paedos who believe their condition should be recognised. Of those who regret their actions, they still accept they pose a danger because "they cannot help it".

And yes Venables lawyer is bound to say that isn't he? But on reading police interview transcripts, that's not how he was at first.

The boys who committed this awful crime were 10 years old. That's 10. I've lost count of the number of threads on here discussing what 10 year olds should be allowed to do - many people think their 10 year olds are too young to be left at home alone for 20 minutes or to go to the shop alone of go to the men's loo. Yet here are two damaged 10 year olds who are expected to be able to take full criminal responsibility, and to be tried and sanctioned like adults....

Why is he 'bound' to say anything? He was a duty solicitor and someone who didn't want anything to do with the case. I can't think he has anything to gain by saying that he felt sorry for Venables. I haven't read all the transcripts though.

You said that you didn't believe paedophiles could be rehabilitated and actually I agree with you.

Yes. the pyscho-sexual pathologies of adult paedophiles are virtually impossible to remedy. Their sexuality and social pathologies are hardwired into them by the time they are adults.

LadyBiscuit, I thought you were talking about Venables' solicitor, not the duty solicitor. Apologies there.

So if paedophilia is 'hard wired' into adults, what about murder? Is it too late to rehabilitate two 10yo boys who planned and carried out a most horrendous murder of a baby?

Would you say that, based on your knowledge of the Doncaster boys, they could ever be rehabilitated? In your opinion?

Is murder hardwired?

Rhubarb, that's silly; murder is an act, not a psychological state.

So is paedophilia an act. It is also a psychological state like psychoticism.

Anyway I shall have to bow out of this thread as piglets considerate posting of the details has upset me more than I care to admit. I wasn't personally involved in the case and can only have huge admiration for those who were and have managed to deal with it.

I've just had a cry and will really have to steer clear from these threads in future.

i think murder is a completely different kettle of fish to paedophilia.

sexual drives and violent drives are surely different? I know I could kill if someone threatened my ds...I don't think I could sexually abuse a child in those circumstances...

A paedophile needs to abuse again and again to satisfy their desires.

I might be wrong in thinking that most murders are one off events, the result of certain external circumstances. (serial killers excepted, perhaps their pathology is as extreme as paedophiles) And violence is much more normalised in our society. Violence and murder are portrayed throughout our media and our stories. Paedophilia is not.

Murder is the extreme end of violence against others, which is around us all the time. Paedophilia is not. It is the extreme result of abuse and/or other factors, but there is no normalising of it in society (except for perhaps the rise of the internet, which seems to normalise and validate these people because they are no longer so isolated).

But I don't believe they are the same drives. No.

which is not to say the pleasure and satisfaction from committing violent acts cannot become hardwired also. The prevalence of DV points to the fact that abusers do get a physical and emotional thrill out of hurting others. But they can contain it, otherwise they would soon be arrested for assaulting other people whenever they got pissed off.

Children are not innocent. You don't need to show a child how to misbehave, you need to SHOW them how to obey/do the right thing. Equally children are often incapable of self control (which can over ride the do the right thing principle), and of merging real with fiction. I remember thinking (i was a teenager when it happened), that even tho I knew right from wrong at that age, I knew people who still did wrong then, but learnt to toe the line. The point is, they did something hugely wrong and only THEY know how they felt when they did it, after they did it etc. Chances are they didn't really think about the child being dead, or even think of him as a human being at all... It depends on what you learn. I was blessed with an over active conscience, so wouldn't even consider dropping litter (because it was naughty), but even then did/said things without thinking of what the end result might be.

They have been re-taught, and one has committed another crime, as an adult. I don't think the fact that they did it as a child makes them more evil. How can it? Children can be pretty cruel at times, and are by nature selfishly inclined. Teenagers often ask "why does everyone hate me", in a hormone driven self obsessed angnsty way... Their psychology is entirely different, and in the case of those two boys it was important to try to correct it. The fact that it doesn't happen very often is a good thing. It doesn't prove evilness.

I do feel for victims, but have some sympathy for those bys.