WARNING v upsetting: The Doncaster Boys., who were attacked..

[ElenorRigby]

a case from last year...
Here are the details, according a local paper.
Source

Its not pretty

"THE full horror of the terrifying and brutally violent attack on two young boys by a pair of brothers in secluded woodland in Doncaster last April has been revealed to a shocked courtroom.

A hearing at Sheffield Crown Court was yesterday given full and painfully graphic detail of the sadistic 90-minute attack by the then 10 and 11-year-old siblings involving a variety of weapons including branches, barbed wire, lit cigarettes and heavy rocks, which left one of their victims close to death and the other badly injured and deeply traumatised.

Members of the victims' families sobbed as the court was shown haunting video footage taken by the older brother on a stolen mobile phone midway through the attack. It showed his stricken 11-year-old victim shaking and covered in blood as he was prodded and taunted by the younger of the two brothers.

A child psychiatrist who had interviewed the younger brother later described him as "cold and calculating" in his ability to switch between seemingly good behaviour and acts of violence.

Dr Eileen Vizard told the court the boy represented a "high risk" to the public and warned that without prolonged and successful intervention by specialists he may have the potential to develop psychopathy.

The young perpetrators, now aged 11 and 12, were dressed smartly in shirts and ties and sat passively in the dock as their shocking catalogue of violence was laid out before a High Court judge, Mr Justice Keith.

The pair, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, robbery and intentionally causing a child to engage in a sexual act. Charges of attempted murder were dropped.

The court heard how they came across their two young victims at a playground and lured them to a secluded area with the promise of showing them a dead fox.

Once there, the brothers subjected them to a vicious 90-minute attack using branches, sharpened sticks, barbed wire, broken glass, rocks weighing up to two stone, and pieces of metal.

Both victims were repeatedly hit with tree branches and fists as they lay cowering on the ground, the court heard. Their faces were stamped on and heavy rocks dropped on their heads.

At one stage the battered and bloodied victims were forced to attempt to perform sexual acts together.

Later, one was choked with a metal hoop, the older boy putting his foot on his victim's back "for extra leverage", said Nicholas Campbell QC, prosecuting. The younger victim was strangled with a clothes line.

The same victim eventually sustained a deep wound to his arm, which the older brother forced a lit cigarette into. When the terrified nine-year-old said he needed the toilet, he was forced to urinate on his friend's face.

The court heard that as the attack reached its climax, the younger victim was ordered to kill himself. He repeatedly rammed a sharpened stick into his own mouth before slumping against a tree.

His older friend was left for dead after having part of a broken sink dropped on his head. He could not be interviewed by police until 10 days later due to the seriousness of his injuries.

The court also heard details of a strikingly similar attack carried out by the brothers on a choirboy in Edlington a week earlier.

The court was told how he too was lured to the patch of wasteland, this time with the promise of seeing a "massive toad", and how he was beaten and stamped on. The brothers have pleaded guilty to a charge of assault causing actual bodily harm.

On that occasion their 11-year-old victim was apparently saved from an even worse fate by the intervention of a passer-by. The brothers were identified a few days later and were due to attend a police station on the morning of Saturday, April 3.

Instead, they fled their foster home, and within an hour had begun their second savage attack. The pair are due to be sentenced tomorrow.

The hearing continues."

For most parents the details of case of the depravity is beyond belief.

I do believe in rehabilitation. I mean, research has shown that the way our brains are wired as a child can be altered again. I think if a person is surrounded by kind people as an adult, they will become calm and kinder too. BUt most abused children go on to marry abusive spouses and are surrouned by chaos, not having been taught any life skills.
It used to be believed that damage to the brain was irreversable but now we know that the brain can re-create new neuro-pathways, even in adulthood. I suppose that some people are beyond repair, maybe these two boys are, but at least there is hope for lots of other kids and adults.

hbfac
"I think I'm going more along the lines of valuing. This thread is pulling me to a stronger and stronger sense of a gap that exists in thinking about mothering (I'm not going to gender-neutralise it by calling it "parenting" when historically it was created by women, and is still mainly performed by women). We know how important and central it is but, at the same time, we diminish it, rendering is habitual and the norm, and quotidien ...

Can't think of a word ... but it is devalued precisely because, by and large, a lot of women manage to be good-enough mothers. But when something like this happens, you suddenly catch a glimpse of how important and crucial it is.

But, because of the devaluation-because-common", there is a lack of funding and valuing of the institutions set up to step in when it does go wrong .... .

I mean, social work is still largely a female profession, I'm guessing. And caring about stuff like education and social services is still seen as "Soft" (ie female) and not-sufficiently-abstract politics, isn't it? "

I think this is what I was trying to say. Fantastic post.

Sakura - I agree with a lot of what you say; however, I think the difficulty is how we interpret the 'valuing' part, without it just becoming synonymous with 'throwing money at' which I don't believe address the crux of the problem.

In terms of support in modelling good parenting, there is more out there than in previous generations - Sure Start etc - why is this not having the imapct it should in the right areas on the right people?

'Motherhood and parenting is sort of seen as a hobby or a lifestyle choice or something that women do "messing around with babies".'

I'm intrigued by this statement. What exactly do you mean by it? (Genuine question - I don't know whether I agree or not, because I'm not sure what you're getting at).
Most adults become parents, so we're not talking about a minority group here, we're talking about the mainstream of society. Do you mean the traditional model of having the mother staying at home? Because if so, I think that's a worrying direction to take the debate in, because there is absolutely no evidence of any causal relationship there. In fact, in many of the serious cases of dysfunctional parenting relating to crime (Shannon Matthews, Baby Peter) we are talking about a mother who is home all the time.

Maybe I'm interpreting you incorrectly, but you dwell on the 'motherhood' and 'feminist' aspects which suggests you are talking about traditional role models.

If you don't mean this, but something broader, then how exactly does society show that it 'values' parenting? I agree with you 100% on things like laws about smacking - that's a real step in the right direction, but how else is it done without throwing money at people just for being parents, which I honestly believe is not the answer, and in some cases actually causes more harm. (What would the Doncaster family have done with more money? Had a couple more kids? Got drunk more often? Bought more violent dvds?)

Investing more in Social Services - yes. Investing more in parenting classes for families in the very early stages where things are going wrong - yes.

But it's a tough question, how does society value parenting more, and I don't think those things alone will address it.

I haven't read all the posts just some of them.
Basically I believe that we are now too afraid to speak as we find and tell the truth harsh as it may be.

Rather than a social worker/teacher or anyone for that matter to actually say" You know what you are a filthy/crap/disrespectful/bad parent and you shopuld not be doing x or y" we have to be "tolerant" of different parenting styles.
well this is all well and goos up to a point, but when it reaches the stage that these boys were expelled for violence towards their teacher then more straight talking should be done.
When a father shows pornography to a primary school kid then they are without exception a bad parent. There should be no pissing about with political correctness. Likewise the mother fed drugs to the kids, again absolutely wrong but woebitide anyone from actually pointing out tghis fact.

The parents should be held to account and jailed.

Certainly, lots of people in Doncaster must know who these little bastards are. So, maybe somebody should snap photos of them with a telephoto lens, save the photos on a flash chip, and mail the flash chip to someone trustworthy who lives outside of Britain (or outside the EU) who can put the photos with names up on a website.

Of course, the photographer should delete the photos from the camera and computer after saving them onto the flash chip. This and the fact that the photos would not be sent over the network would deprive the candy-ass Brit government of any evidence as to who took the photos.

Honest people have rights, too. Do they not? When a government refuses to give its people even the most basic protections, it's time for the people to protect themselves.

Maybe this isn't a "good" thing, but it's perhaps the best choice out of a set of only bad choices.

But what is good parenting? that concept changes as much as fashion.

In years past it was considerable acceptable to let children cry, now we think that would damage their ability to form attachments.

In the past, like in the 1960s, many children were allowed to express themselves (to say to run wild and grow free as they pleased) and much of the discipline was removed from the agenda. Did that make better people? not necessarily.

Now we are in the age of blaming everything on the circumstances, some way I think that at some point in the future someone will say that doing that created more problems than it solved.

oh yes Justice that's a great idea isn't it - put the other children in the family at risk from vigilantes etc

As myself:

If lots of children who commit criminal acts come from abusive parents, is everyone saying there is not a genetic component to it all, ie, that if the parents are horrible the children may also be. There are loads of children who have been abused and very few of them go on to commit criminal acts of this magnitude, they may be messed up in other ways but fundamentally they know that torturing and abuse are horrible and wrong.

Secondly, why is it that we are trying to be so understanding? What they did was horrible beyond belief and they need to be punished and to understand the difference between right and wrong, as they obviously don't.

This thread really focuses on the children who committed the act and how sad it is for them but what about the poor parents of the victims? Yes, their children are still alive but the emotional scars they bear will be enormous and much worse than those who tried to kill them.

I don't know if these boys were raped, but they were apparently forced to fight by their father. Mary Bell, as mentioned on another thread, was forced by her mother to perform oral sex on her mum's customers from the age of 5. Usually with these children, the abuse they have suffered has been pretty horrendous- and over a lifetime rather than an isolated incident as will be the case with the victims.

"...why is it that we are trying to be so understanding? What they did was horrible beyond belief and they need to be punished and to understand the difference between right and wrong, as they obviously don't. "

I think people on this thread are trying to be understanding about the perpetrators of these crimes i. to find a way to establish how it could happen and ii. as a result, think how it could be prevented in the future.

And if they don't understand the difference between right and wrong, why is that? Why do most people understand and have no urge to attack and abuse? Isn't finding that out important for the future safety of us all? And worth investing in.

I feel so sorry for the kids who were attacked. Their lives are going to be affected forever.

But I also feel sorry for the poor blighters up and down the country whose parents are maltreating them and turning them into potential troublemakers.

Of course not all kids in such negative environments do wicked crimes as these too did but lots do, I'm sure.

I too have no faith in the limited resources available to rehabilitate these two young men and teach them right from wrong. I also have no faith in lots of people to not abuse their children.

Hear, hear, WinkyWinkola