I think the treatment the McCanns get is unforgivable, but for the record: James Bulger wandered outside the shop while his mother paid. Literally just 20 seconds later, CCTV shows his mother rushing outside to look for him. The shop was at the top of an escalator, and as the two boys were actively seeking a victim (another mother had stopped them taking her child) they had already led him down it. CCTV footage showed them exiting the shopping centre altogether within 4 minutes of James exiting that butcher's shop.
I do agree about grief porn. There's also something incredibly disrespectful to the real victims about clammy-handed sentimentality. Grief Lite. But actually there's also a problem here in that people really don't know enough about this case, despite being convinced that they know everything, because despite all the column inches the full details were just too disturbing to be widely released. The police involved said it was the most sadistic killing most saw in a career, and that was irrepective of the age of the killers. And in a sense yes, it does matter what happened to him, because I do wonder about the comparisons people make to other murders, such as the Norwegian one, and the ready willingness to think that 8 years would be enough to make these boys low risks to the rest of society. Any adult who did as they did would be unlikely to get out within 30 years... if ever. And of course they were children and you can't hold kids to the same level of culpability, but leaving aside punishment, what about public protection? Most adults who do things like this also endured horrific childhoods, and yet they are dangerous. It's legitimate to ask, how and why do they believe that these boys are not?
I think one reason for the polarisation here is that it's impossible to connect the misery endured by two very disturbed, unhappy, betrayed small boys on the one hand, with the extreme savagery of what they did to a tiny child on the other. It seems impossible that anyone you humanise could be capable of this sort of thing. We dehumanise murderers because we can't empathise with what they have done. So it's very hard to hold both those facts in your mind at once - empathy and understanding for the boys, while keeping comprehension of the horror of what they chose to do to the baby. But at the same time, you aren't dealing with the reality of the situation if you gloss over what happened to James. You aren't engaging with the pathology of those boys, nor the very real risk they represented and frankly may always represent. It isn't that they killed someone that is quite so frightening: it's not the case that every child who kills will do it so very, very disturbingly. I agree that some people seem to gloat over the detail, while wilfully ignoring the fact that they were so very young and unformed, but others seem wilfully blind to the implications of releasing them, too.
I wouldn't recommend that anyone try to find out what happened. I learned about it as a student and it gave me nightmares, tbh. I am going to hide these threads now because I can't really stop remembering it at the moment and it's horrible, and unlike his poor parents, that isn't something I have to do. I have the option to stop. But to say that there is no point to a public debate about the way we treat serious young offenders is really rather shocking. You may find some views abhorrent, and I might agree, but that's the point of a debate, surely. To try to think about things while hearing all shades of opinion? You can't say that the criminal justice, sentencing and penal systems in action should be outside public discourse just because some of the public are cretins.