Children Assaulted/Critical but stable condition

[Claire2009]

Two boys aged 10 & 11 being questioned about this. Don't know how to do links but this might work

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/7984392.stm

mamadiva good point, sadly I think it is all the no blame culture that means kids keep acting like this.

I would imagine they were in care because of neglectful parenting - which resulted in bad behaviour.

Mamadiva i agree that they need to face up to what they have done and need to understand how wrong it is and learn how to behave like decent humans.

but if the parents couldn't cope with their behaviour whose fault is that?

Mamadiva no-one said they shouldn't be punished. Although it is worth mentioning at this point that these two children haven't actually been charged with a crime yet, let alone tried and convicted, so we don't actually know whether they did anything.

However, if these two boys are guilty of harming the other two children, while they of course need to be held accountable, I think that questions do need to be asked as to how children became so violent in the first place. And how violence like this might have gone unnoticed. Because a child doesn't suddenly turn from a placid, well behaved child into a violent thug capable of attempted murder. There must have been signs that all was not well with these children's behavior, and if that was the case then it's not unreasonable to suggest that someone should have been involved in trying to manage that behavior before it reached such a critical point.

"They were in care because their parents could not cope with their behaviour," How on earth do you know that? Are you personally connected with the case? or does it say so in the daily mail?

Oh here we go anyone who says anything about this case must be a DM reader of course I forgot if you have an opinion other than well lets scoop them up n give them and hug n shower them with gifts then we should just go and fuck off, man this site annoys me at times.

Did you ever think that there might just be peopel on here who know something about this bloody case, who might just know any of the 4 boys?

As I said I feel for those who actually deserve sympathy. Not the little rats who carried ouyt this fucking attrocity.

agree with wannabe

punish yes, and rehabilitate. help them lead better lives, or do we write them off at this age.

the justice system for adults and children, is not just punitive, but to rehabilitate hopefully too

we do have to ask why at this age, these children were capable of this. i don;t believe they were normal , happy, well balanced children who just woke up and snapped, there are years of neglect and god knows what else preceding this

This just makes me so sad.

I think it's awful, as well, in that it's happened in the week that the head of the NSPCC has suggested that more children should be removed from their homes and care should be an option used more quickly and more frequently.

Wannabe - you're right, we can only speculate as to why the children were in care in the first place and there is a huge question mark against whether we should be speculating.

However, the attack suggests, especially the sexual element, suggests serious abusive behaviour in their backgrounds, though it's anyone's guess where that was encountered.

Given the inadequacy of the care system generally and in Doncaster in particular, we can probably assume the decision to place them in care cannot have been taken lightly.

And then this. There is no way to look at this and not draw the conclusion that the care system has just not worked here, at all. They have not been rehabilitated, they were not properly supervised. And now two other children have been horribly damaged and it sounds as though others were also exposed to harm.

It is just all so awful and wrong.

I did ask if you were personally connected with these people but no, it seems you prefer to swear and get defensive instead.

I am not talking about this anymore I am just getting angrier and angrier with this situation so I am removing myself from it.

Mamadiva - I read your post about your father and it made me think.

My dc went to a primary in one of London's most deprived boroughs.

In my ds' class, I would say at least half the boys (I'm not so sure about the girls - I didn't get to know them so well!) were from homes that I would class as seriously inadequate. Seriously - their parents were publicly abusive, turned up to collect their kids drunk or high, and in one instance there was indeed serious, prolonged, sexual abuse.

all but one of the children displayed behavioural problems, of varying degrees. I always used to wonder about that one child. It seemed, from our experience anyway, that to be seriously, badly affected was the norm.

The question is, then, what do you do to intervene? and when? and how? Because all the children in question in my ds' class were still with their families (though with SS involvement in most cases) and i wouldn't be the one calling for them to be put into care when "care" is the shape it currently is.

so at what point do we concede that there must be adult influences here?

If an 18 year old commits a criminal offence he/she obviously is responsible for his/her actions and needs to be tried and convicted accordingly. Similar a 17/16/probably as low as 14 year old.

But don't the lines become a bit blurred then? The age of criminal responsibility is 10 I think. Meaning that if a ten year old murders someone they are tried as adults, yet if a nine yo eleven month child commits a murder they are not criminally responsible. Yet people would undoubtedly stil brand them scum.

How low would people go in their thinking that children should be held responsible and locked up indefinitely? eight? seven? five? There was recently a case in the states where a five yo had killed his baby sister, would you think he was scum and should be put away for ever with no chance of a life ever again?

wannabe how would you feel if it was your child that was in hospital?
would you still then be so concerned about the children that did it?

mamadiva, i am sorry that your family suffered terribly

i am sure not all the abused become abusers

but for those that do, do we ignore the harm done to them , that has shaped them into the poeople they are? simply judge them, punish them and release them back into society, without the tools to live proper decent lives?

or keep them in prison for ever?

there are no easy answers, but i know the answe is not to dismiss them as rats/vermin and to lock them up and throw away the key

that ignores why they did what they did

Even the daily mail has suspended comments on this case. Rightly so, all this speculation is ridiculous.

They have to suspend comments on anything that is still part on an ongoing enquiry.

2shoes but you cannot possibly compare the opinions of someone reading about this in the news to those of the parents of the injured children.

As a parent your first instinct is of course to your own child, and no-one is suggesting that the parents of these two boys should be reaching out and sympathising with their sons' attackers.

But whether people wish to acknowledge it or not, there is clearly a wider picture.

If these two boys are guilty of this crime, then they absolutely must be held accountable for it. But I don't think it's wrong to suggest that questions need to be raised as to the underlying reasons why these children did what they did. Because eleven year olds are generally not violent criminals. And perhaps if the underlying reasons can be established, they can also be adressed, and these children can be rehabilitated into decent members of society as they reach adulthood.

Setting children free to do what they want is of course not the answer. But neither is locking them up indefinitely, and essentially ending their lives before they have even grown out of childhood.

Children killing children isn't a new thing though sadly. In the late 60's a 10 (maybe 11) year old girl killed two toddlers and even went back to one of the bodies to carve her initials on to the body with a razor blade.

Wannabe is right. If the boys are tried and found guilty of this crime they need to be rehabilitated into society. They are children and somewhere along the line they have been seriously failed by the system.

I hope the boys who were the victims continue to recover and that tehy get the help they need to overcome this awful, awful crime.

Josef Fritzl was terribly abused as a boy, he was degraded and made to feel like a nobody, without love. So in order to have those feelings of power and to be needed he imprisoned his daughter and used her as his sex slave.

I don't hear any sympathy for him.

Most evil bastards who are violent/aggressive/sexual abusers/killers come from that kind of home environment. So wife beaters may have witnessed their mothers being beaten by their fathers. Sexual predators may have been abused as children. At which point do you lose sympathy for them? How old do they have to be before they take responsibility for their own actions?

And yet not every child who has been abused grows up to become an abuser. At some point in your life you do make that choice. I guess it's harder if you are surrounded by violence, but there is a point when you realise that it's not 'normal', when you realise that this kind of behaviour is punishable by society and you choose then which way you want your life to go.

The way these children did this makes me think that they didn't think about the consequences. They probably didn't think that the police would come and put them away. It was just something they did. It makes you wonder what else they did to get to this point. I doubt this was the first time they've been violent or aggressive towards others. There would have been warning signs, incidents at school, with neighbours etc.

There is a chance, at 10, that they can be rehabilitated. It's a scandal that now they've committed this heinous crime, they will receive the treatment and care that they should have received before. It really depends on their awareness. There is so much damage that can be done to a child - when is the cut off point? When would you say that they are beyond treatment?

I've a feeling that the way this society is going, we'll see a lot more of these crimes.

I think the point about these crimes being committed by children, and therefore adults are in come way responsible, is a perfectly reasonable one.

My university tutor covered the Crown Court trial of the two boys who killed James Bulger. He described those two terrified little boys in the dock, having to stand on boxes because they were too small for the witness stand, surrounded by robed adults and the Press.
He said the recordings of the boys' interviews with police were incredibly distressing.
As was the sight of grown adults stoning the vans as the boys were taken to and from the court.

What they did to James Bulger haunts my worst nightmares - but they were children and were made that way by adults.

it saddends me that the media are trying to turn this into another bulger case.
the two boys who did this are clearly in need of a great deal of intervention. no well adapted and secure child behaves like this. there is clearly something, somewhere in their ives that has assisted in screwing up their view of normal behaviour.

being demonised in the press is hardly going to help them is it.

the boys that have been harmed will need an extraordinary amount of counselling in order to succesfully move on from this incident. but thankfully they are alive.

If it is true that these boys are or have been in public care then i think a lot of questions need answering as to how they have become (apparently) so well known to police and why they have not yet had more intensive support with their behaviour.

small orange - i couldn't agree more.

any adult that can call for a child to be killed should be ashamed of themselves.

Here's a hypothetical argument for you, which some might feel is in bad tase. I actually think it's very relevant.

We all remember the horrific case of Baby P. What if he hadn't died, and had carried on living with his mother and step father and suffering the same abuse? What if he grew up to be like one of the kids accused of this crime?

Would you feel the same way or would you be more undertanding?

As I said - not trying to upset or offend anyone just trying to stress a point that abuse as a child often (not always) means the child becomes the abuser.

rhubarb - I'm not sure that a child that age really understands the consequence of their actions. Certainly the law doesn't think they can which is why they aren't subject to the same sentencing as adults. I feel sorry for any child that's been horribly abused and neglected but that doesn't mean I feel anything but utter revulsion for what these boys did. The two things are separate.

I agree with you Nancy66 and think that is a very pertinent point, much as it might upset some people.