Children who kill

I'v been thinking a lot about James Bulger recently, I suppose because it's the 25th anniversary of his tragic, violent, appalling murder. It is still hard to comprehend that two small boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, only 10 years old, could commit an act of such cruelty and savagery. The latter, of course, has recently been imprisoned again, this time for child pornography offences, and his mind must be a swamp into which I, certainly, would not care to peer.

(Interestingly, the angle taken by the Daily Mail, stereotypically to the point of parody, has been to wonder why it is that Venables, from a "respectable" family, has reoffended, while Thompson, a "feral" child - yes, they used that word - has not, so far as we know. Isn't that a thing?)

I was at sixth form when James Bulger was killed, so I remember the case, and the horror of it, quite well. I was also taking a PSE studies module in law, so it interested me, though not, I hasten to add, in any morbid way. It was more procedural. There was widespread controversy about the way Thompson and Venables were treated, whether it was appropriate that they were tried in an adult court in front of a wigged and robed judge, and they remain, according to Wikipedia, the youngest convicted murderers in "modern English legal history".

At the time, under English law, the maxim of doli incapax applied. A child under the age of seven was taken to be incapable (incapax) of knowing it was doing wrong (doli). Between the ages of seven and 14, a child was presumed to be incapable of knowing right from wrong, but the presumption could be argued against. (Doli incapax was, I gather, abolished in England and Wales in 1998, a few years after the Thompson/Venables trial.)

The verdict of the judge in the trial was that Thompson and Venables should be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure until they were 18, after which they would be released on licence. Venables, as we know, reoffended several times and is back behind bars. But eight years? Really? It seems a pitiful return for a human life. As I have written here several times before, and I reiterate, I am not a lawyer, so I am not sure what options were open to the trial judge. But it seems an awfully low tariff.

The question to which I come back again and again, however, is this: did the two boys know what they were doing? Just as I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a criminologist nor a psychologist, so these are merely layman's observations. But it seems to me overwhelmingly likely that they did. They knew they were doing an unconscionably wicked thing, and the way they placed Bulger's body on a railway line to make it seem as if he had been killed by a train suggests a degree of premeditation. (There has also come to light evidence of sexual abuse, the details of which Bulger's mother, Denise, declined to know at the time, and who can blame her?)

From this stems a wider point. If a child will do this to another child, at such a young age, is there any hope for rehabilitation? Can a mind so warped, so - I don't shy away from the word - evil ever be changed? In Venables's case, his recurrent charge sheet suggests not. Yet, so far as I am aware, Thompson has led a blameless life since his release. Being a North-Easterner by birth, I am also put in mind of Mary Bell, who in 1968 was convicted of the manslaughter of two toddlers. My mother, who used to work in what was then called an approved school, met Mary. She served 12 years in prison, and has since lived under a series of pseudonyms, collaborating with the Austrian writer Gitta Sereny on an account of her upbringing and crimes in 1972. Again, so far as I know, Bell's life since her release has been blameless.

So how do we account for this? How can a child do such a wicked thing, and yet prove not to be himself or herself wicked? After all, we would not release Peter Sutcliffe and think "Well, he probably won't do it again" (and in fact I have read rumours that Sutcliffe may now be implicated in more killings). People often talk of children going through "phases". Can killing be one of them? Does the bloodlust merely go away?

I cannot answer any of these questions, I merely pose them. They are important because they go to the heart of how our criminal justice system treats underage killers, who, while thankfully vanishingly rare, nonetheless exist, and, if history is any guide, always will do. Do we exert the full weight and panoply of the law, because of the gravity of the crimes? Or do we, by moderating it, in some way already start down the street of understanding rather than condemning? I just don't know.