Angels with Dirty Faces
An 11-year-old in Jefferson County, Tennessee this week shot dead his 8-year-old neighbour because she wouldn’t let him play with her puppy; the shotgun belonged to his father. Across the Atlantic almost fifteen years earlier, Bristol Crown Court heard a case in which a 12-year-old had stabbed his six-month-old baby brother as he lay in his cot and also cut off his left hand with the same kitchen knife. Both children who committed these gruesome crimes were of an age when an awareness of the difference between right and wrong should have been a given, but some form of psychotic mental illness undoubtedly played its part, certainly in the case of the latter.
Whenever a child murders a child, the equilibrium of universal order seems to be knocked off-kilter a little. Yes, infanticide and patricide are regarded as crimes against human nature, but the notion that a person yet to even reach physical, let alone mental, maturity is capable of ending the life of another never ceases to shock. Every few years, British society undergoes convulsions when a story breaks that the callous killing of a child was carried out not by a fully-grown adult, but by someone belonging to the same generation as the victim. The first such case to receive widespread media attention in the modern era was that of Mary Bell.
It’s become something of a cliché for defence lawyers or the accused themselves to cite a poor upbringing as the root cause of a criminal act, but Mary Bell’s upbringing was hardly ideal preparation for an ordinary life. Born to a prostitute in a rough inner-city Newcastle neighbourhood, Mary believed her father to be a convicted armed-robber her mother married, though it seems more likely she was illegitimate. Mary’s early childhood was the stuff of nightmares. Her mother allegedly plied her young daughter with sleeping tablets, and a fall from a window was suspected of being foul play on her mother’s part. Details of sexual abuse at the hands of Mary’s mother’s clients later emerged.
The murders of two boys aged four and three respectively two months apart from each other in 1968, both found in derelict houses, came just a couple of years after the Moors Murderers were sentenced, and the public feared something similar was poised to be uncovered; when police joined the dots, the nation was shocked to find two little girls being charged with manslaughter. One was Mary – then aged eleven – and the other was a 13-year-old friend. Her friend was acquitted when the trial took place at Newcastle Assizes in December 1968, but Mary was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, following a psychiatric assessment that summarised she was a serious threat to other children.
As Mary Bell began twelve years of incarceration in secure units, her mother exploited the notoriety of her daughter, selling stories to the press and making money off the back of the life she had engineered the ruin of. When Mary was released amidst an anticipated outcry in 1980, the then-23-year-old was given a new identity and attempted to build a new life for herself. She managed to maintain anonymity until 1998, when the press tracked her and her 14-year-old daughter down; up to this point, Bell’s daughter had not been made aware of her mother’s past. The same year, Bell received payment for participating in the publication of a biography called ‘Cries Unheard’, the revelation of which provoked another public outcry. In 2003, a High Court battle resulted in Bell guaranteeing lifetime anonymity for her and her daughter.
By the time Mary Bell secured her secret identity, a decade had passed since an even more infamous child murder, that of two-year-old James Bulger. Abducted, tortured and murdered by two ten-year-olds, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the infant was captured on CCTV being led away from a shopping centre in Bootle, Merseyside by his killers. The chilling, low-resolution image taken from the CCTV – reused in newspapers and on television throughout the hunt for Bulger’s killers and their subsequent trial – seemed to bring an unsettling new dimension to the crime; the precise moment a child’s life took a fatal turn could actually be seen, the toddler’s trusting innocence poised to be his tragic undoing.
Unlike Mary Bell, Thompson and Venables were charged with murder and when found guilty, became the youngest convicted murderers in modern legal history. The saga of their sentences, parole, release and fresh identities would constitute an entire post on its own; the press and public’s incredulity that two ten-year-old boys could be capable of such a repugnant crime has been routinely manifested as baying for the blood of Thompson and Venables, as though the absence of a concise answer as to why they did what they did as children in 1993 can only be resolved by their public execution. But even that wouldn’t bring James Bulger back.
Sixteen years after the Bulger murder, an attempted murder of two brothers aged eleven and nine by two other brothers aged ten and twelve again posed the same questions. Mercifully, the Edlington Attacks that took place in 2009 didn’t result in any deaths, but what were perceived as the uncharacteristically violent actions of children against children once more claimed the headlines and provoked public debate. While the vast majority of children are indeed innocent of acts that left the likes of Mary Bell, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables with immortal infamy, many adults seem to suffer from selective memory loss where children are concerned. It’s understandable they only view children through the benign eyes of the parent, but by doing so they are conveniently forgetting the often unpleasant realities of the child’s world and other children’s place in it.
I’ve never encountered any adult as frightening, horrible and cruel as some of the children I personally knew back in my junior school days. The amount of nasty, sadistic little bastards who made my life (and the lives of many others) hell were legion; and at the time I wouldn’t have put anything past them. I even had moments myself where rage got the better of me and I sometimes wonder how far I would have gone had the opportunity presented itself to me.
Once engaged in a row with the boy who lived next-door as a seven-year-old, I marched into my home and demanded a knife to stab him with. My grandmother had recently holidayed abroad and brought me back a fancy dagger as a present – yes, seems mad now, doesn’t it – and it was this I surmised would be the best means of curtailing the argument. Thankfully, my parents were present and wouldn’t allow me to have it; I don’t recall ever seeing again after that day. But what if my parents had been out and I’d located the weapon? Would I have used it? Would I have killed the boy-next-door? A year or two later, a quarry I used to cut through to and from school was sometimes inhabited by a scrawny bully who wasn’t always welcoming when I encroached upon his territory. There were some quite severe drops in that quarry and I remember fantasising about pushing said runt over the edge as a means of eradicating him from my life for good. If he’d caught me on a bad day, would I have done it? Quite possibly. Children are capable of acts of cruelty, even ones without psychopathic tendencies, and until adults accept this uncomfortable truth, we’ll never be any nearer to understanding why this cruelty can sometimes have terrible consequences.
Petunia Winegum
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October 9, 2015 at 9:18 am -
We tend to assume such acts are the result of our modern way of life but they aren’t. There are plenty of pre-20th century examples, but the public in every age interpret child transgressors as symptoms of the awful degenerate society they live in.
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October 9, 2015 at 9:23 am -
For two years, I was interested to see if I was capable of working with children in some capacity and so I volunteered, firstly in a nursery and secondly in a junior school (working with classes in years 2 and 4). At the end of my time I realised the primary goal of early years schooling is not to teach the little darlings anything but to basically (attempt to) civilise them. Left to their own devices, they are just little animals. William Golding got it about right.
(Favourite story: Finding one 7/8 year old crying in a stairwell, I asked him what was wrong; another boy had called him “gay”. I pointed out that I was called gay all the time. He had never caught me crying about it. He replied: “We call you gay ‘cos you’re weird. He means I sleep with boys.” I told him that he was too young to be sleeping with anyone at his age and I would have a word with his tormentor, because “gay” was not an insult.)
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October 9, 2015 at 10:11 am -
“We call you gay ‘cos you’re weird. He means I sleep with boys.”
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings or as we say in German ‘children and village idiots speak the truth’. Thatlittle gem is going to make me snigger all day.
I worked for a few months with ‘Maladjusted Teenage Boys’. There were a couple of ‘killer kids’ in the unit. One of them almost a stereotype- Blond, blue-eyed and angelic of countenance and could he sing….a voice to make the angels weep. He was one of the kindest sweetest kids I have ever met. Fortunately he also had the intelligence to only attack adults which saved him from the becoming ‘Boy A’ in some faux medieval trial -whatever one may think about V&T, their trial was one of more shaming incidents in British judicial history, most of our European neighbours were horrified.
My short experience working with those kids taught me, the question isn’t ‘why do kids sometimes kill?’ (ask any African War Lord, kiddies are very capable killers) but rather ‘Why do so FEW kids kill?’. Personally, and I am in no way qualified to hold an opinion, it mirrors the whole ‘why doesMr. Fluffy Woofypaws suddenly go postal and devour your toddler?.
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October 9, 2015 at 11:28 am -
Left to their own devices (as the kids listed all were), I’ve no doubt many would kill. As Windsock says, the initial duty of schools is to civilise them.
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October 9, 2015 at 12:29 pm -
Surely it is the parents’ responsibility to civilise their own children? Unfortunately, many arrive at school completely untamed & the teacher has no option but to try and do the work that should take place in the home.
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October 9, 2015 at 1:09 pm -
Joint responsibility of parents and teachers, I think.
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October 9, 2015 at 1:13 pm -
I agree. Funnily enough, I watched a ‘Yes Prime Minister’ this week in which a proposal was aired that prospective parents should attend parenting classes and pass exams to qualify.
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October 9, 2015 at 1:49 pm -
“Yes, Prime Minster” a late 80s BBC sitCom written by Jay & Lynn, co authored by Nostradamus and Mother Shipton.
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October 9, 2015 at 11:25 am -
I think you’re spot on with the ‘civilise them’ point. Many of my junior school tormentors had a Missing Link look about them and their social interaction suggested no prior experience of civilisation.
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October 9, 2015 at 11:29 am -
had a Missing Link look about them
As opposed to my tormentors in a norfolk school who had ‘extra’ links…in their DNA and socks.
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October 9, 2015 at 11:32 am -
Do kids still have misshapen heads? There seemed to be a lot of those around when I was at school. Some of them looked like they’d been born in Hiroshima.
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October 9, 2015 at 3:57 pm -
That could be from forceps deliveries. They will do things differently now.
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October 9, 2015 at 4:47 pm -
October 9, 2015 at 4:59 pm -
I thought the vet simply put on a very long rubber glove?
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October 9, 2015 at 7:38 pm -
walter said , no they dont,My daughter in law had a forceps delivery 5 weeks ago!
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October 9, 2015 at 12:42 pm -
But is ‘civilising’ them anything more than applying a veneer? – Golding put it rather more eloquently in “Lord of the Flies”.
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October 9, 2015 at 1:11 pm -
So long as the veneer is thick enough to inhibit people from murdering each other, it will do.
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October 9, 2015 at 1:15 pm -
I don’t know the maths, but I would surmise children spend more hours a week at school than at home, so one would like to think any lessons learned in the classroom could be brought back from it. Unfortunately, the family home isn’t always conducive to improvement.
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October 9, 2015 at 4:19 pm -
Over a year, the little treasures only spend around 15% of their total available hours at school – parents are ‘responsible’ for the other 85%.
Coincidentally, this is the same percentage as that of the meals they have at school compared to out-of-school fodder, yet Jamie’s school lunches are somehow supposed to redress the 85% balance of their extra-curricular junk.
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October 9, 2015 at 9:26 am -
England-where a child aged 10 is considered to know the difference between good and evil and may be tried for murder (ie killing with malice aforethought) but isn’t considered capable of consenting to sex for another 6 years.
At the risk of sounding like ToC….
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October 9, 2015 at 10:03 am -
That case about the 12 year old stabbing his brother happened in 2001.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1165848.stm -
October 9, 2015 at 10:38 am -
Peeling the tates and carving the Sunday roast must have been tricky in an otherwise knife free home…;)
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October 9, 2015 at 4:21 pm -
Not when you only eat ready-meals and take-aways.
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October 9, 2015 at 12:14 pm -
The one thing I’ve always wondered in the Bulger case is how did they manage to lure a 2 year old away from the mother? I’m sure it’s been discussed at length somewhere (just too lazy to search). Having had kids of my own I certainly would not have lost sight of them at that age whilst in a shopping precinct.
Whilst not condoning the fact they murdered Bulger, some responsibility must fall to the parents too? I think this is one of the problems, and by the sounds of it from the comments above it’s not a recent one. Parents don’t seem to take responsibility for the upbringing of their kids. Why should it fall to a school to civilize them? Surely that’s the parent’s job?
That said we had some psychotic little shits whilst I was at school but natural selection and a little bit of Darwinism has sorted them out. They’re all either dead or in jail.
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October 9, 2015 at 1:04 pm -
The parents of V&T should have been jailed, if you release a trained vicious dog you own into the community and it savages someone its your fault. The odds of those two not being physically abused or otherwise is infinitesimal I suspect.
On the other hand people that damaged are incurable, so whilst medieval looking to lock kids away forever, in practice its not without merit
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October 9, 2015 at 1:54 pm -
The odds of those two not being physically abused or otherwise is infinitesimal I suspect
I don’t know the details but at a guess I would say one of them was ‘damaged’ by abuse (or may have simply just been mentally ill- happens more than you might think). They, V&T, probably formed a ‘acolyte/Master’ type of relationship.
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October 9, 2015 at 1:06 pm -
Things are unfortunately likely to get worse rather than better. With Facebook and similar social websites many of our children seem unable to hold a conversation and interact with real people so it is hard to have any idea of what they are thinking.
The number of people in the news who have had death threats via Twitter simply astounds me. How many of these threats are harmless and just a way of expressing displeasure and how many are serious threats is unclear. However if children see such threats, coming from adults, they are quite likely to think that they are real and that the sender means what has been said. This could lead to them believing that this is a way of life, if someone angers you, the solution is to kill them. Reading the newspapers there certainly seems to be an upsurge in knife crime by youngsters often over trivial things.
I fear that things will get worse, not better.-
October 9, 2015 at 1:28 pm -
I remember the outbreak of post-war juvenile delinquency as portrayed in ‘The Blue Lamp’ was put down to the absence of a father’s guiding hand, what with so many dads otherwise occupied between 1939 and 1945. Funny how all the vicious little bullies we remember from school also tended to have absent fathers (or ones that were utterly unsuitable for the job), something that seems to be a constant theme whenever an act of childhood violence makes the headlines.
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October 9, 2015 at 2:19 pm -
My secondary school took children from two primaries – my own (mostly working-class / semi-detached-houses / stable families) & the one from ‘the council estate’ (where my father had grown up happily but which had slowly accumulated more ‘problem families’; perhaps as the ever-so-slightly more aspirational moved out to be first-generation home-owners, the balance tipped towards the troublemaking layabouts).
There was certainly a noticeable difference between the two groups of kids in terms of academic achievement (despite being balanced almost 50:50 not a single child from the second primary mentioned ever made his or her way into the ‘top set’, relegated to the other 3 or even ‘remedial’, at least in my year) but also in behaviour. Cruelty & stupidity could come from both sides, but those ‘out of control’ were almost unique to what might now be called the ‘sink estate’. Single parents, parents in prison, parents without work & children without guidance…
One of those lads was arguing & lashing out one day, and justified himself by throwing the accusation at me:
“I bet your mum always has food in the fridge!”
It completely floored me. It didn’t have anything to do with what we’d been fighting about (that I could see at the time), and certainly didn’t make me suddenly take a shine to him. But despite the short physical distance separating the two groups I think I suddenly understood that we inhabited distinct worlds; I’d never even considered that a school kid could go hungry – what, like those little black babies Micheal Buerke showed us on the telly?!?I try to keep this in mind when I’m grumbling about some lout – but it’s not always easy!
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October 9, 2015 at 2:55 pm -
October 9, 2015 at 3:52 pm -
I’d never even considered that a school kid could go hungry
It shocked me as well, although my tormentors at school were all far too well fed, judging by the energy they could find to torment me. But later when I started to work with Kids I was so shocked that I actually wrote about it.
“Chris, do you like Spag Bol?”
Working with these kids you learn to approach talking to them the same way you approach them physically, from side on and making sure their hands are empty. Face on is a challenge and you don’t challenge a kid from Pennywell Gardens without a knife or at least a broken bottle in your hand.
His lips stopped their silent incantations and he looked at me, coming out of his autistic trance.
“What’s ‘Spag Bol’?” he asked.
“Spaghetti bolognese -pasta in a tomato meat sauce”.
“Like those pasta shapes in a tin?”, god help me, he actually sounded hopeful.
“Your foster mum ain’t much of a cook is she?” An almost rhetorical question, few of the kid’s parents actually took the time to cook for their kids. Most mothers just about managed to heat through a tin of something before the next john turned up. Children’s BBC, baked beans on toast and mummy getting it 3 ways in the bedroom for just enough smack to fly her out of the estate for an hour or so.
Captain Pugwash and Seaman Staines.
“Nay Chris, tis reel food, ye ken?”
That raised a smile, never ceased to amuse the kids when I tried to speak scots. The Bow Bell Boy Meet Rabbie Burns.-
October 9, 2015 at 4:46 pm -
Pennywell Gardens – don’t know that particular estate, but every city has at least one. Halton Moor in Leeds is the closest to a post-nuclear apocalypse location I’ve ever passed through. Oddly enough, the late great Keith Waterhouse grew up on there.
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October 9, 2015 at 6:38 pm -
A quick google images tells me that for the real ‘Blade Runner’ experience you need to got to Seacroft, Gipton or Little London. Names to conjour with and that mean absolutely nothing to me. http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=308649&page=52
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October 9, 2015 at 7:22 pm -
Of those three, Little London is the grimmest, as is its near-neighbour, Lincoln Green. Spoilt for choice in Leeds, actually!
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October 9, 2015 at 8:18 pm -
You’ve obviously avoided nearby Gipton, a very wise man – it’s the sort of place where you often wipe your feet on the way out.
Many years ago I had the misfortune to be working there, visiting many different houses – the trick was to open the letter-box quietly, take a sniff and, if really rank at that brief sample, slip a “You were out” card through the door and leave briskly, hoping someone else would get the return job.
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October 9, 2015 at 4:01 pm -
“Things are unfortunately likely to get worse rather than better. With Facebook and similar social websites many of our children seem unable to hold a conversation and interact with real people so it is hard to have any idea of what they are thinking.”
This could be the ultimate pensionerish thing to say. I quote Brass Eye: ‘if current trends continue, in twenty years time conversation between mother and daughter will be conducted at gun point’.
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October 9, 2015 at 4:23 pm -
I memorably had house guests once, father and daughter, who communicated via Twitter – over the meal I had just cooked for them…..
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October 9, 2015 at 4:30 pm -
Is it possible that you are a terrible cook, and that they were just being incredibly polite by complaining ‘privately’ to one another?!?
(Runs away as fast as his legs’ll carry him…) -
October 9, 2015 at 4:58 pm -
I memorably had house guests once, father and daughter, who communicated via Twitter – over the meal I had just cooked for them…..
Family diplomacy in the digital age.Your own fault for living somewhere where there was cellphone signal. If you’d lived in Norfolk back then, then it would have still been ‘Ask your mother to pass the salt ‘ and ‘tell your father I said…’.
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October 9, 2015 at 1:14 pm -
When I was in my teens I planned, along with my friends, to despatch one of those missing-link lads. He came from a ‘feared family’, predictably large, and revelled in terrifying people with acts of cruelty which went beyond the normal behaviour of the bully.
In a small copse several miles away from my parents’ home is perhaps still buried the ‘escape kit’: my beloved first tent, tins of baked-beans, waterproof matches & suchlike. Inspired by my favourite childhood book – ‘Brendon Chase’ by B.B. – the plan was to live off the land, which shows how detached from reality the whole idea was!However, the actual killing was a serious idea, given much thought, and on one occasion we – my friends & I – exchanged questioning glances amongst ourselves: the villain had appeared as we had been talking about his future, and from his precarious position he only needed a push to end up dead at the bottom of our hangout (WW 2 lookout tower, or that’s what we thought it was). It never happened, thankfully, but he’ll never know how close he came.
Many, many years later I found myself working with a man who had been at school with me – not a friend – but the topic of the same individual came up (who did NOT attend our school – if he ever attended any! – although other siblings did). It was related that the fearsome boy had more or less carried on in the same vein into adulthood, ‘controlling’ a patch of his estate & leaving people fearful of crossing or ‘grassing on’ him. Despite this, I’m still relieved that I don’t have his death on my conscience.
I can’t pretend I didn’t also cause my own share of mayhem, and I’d hate to be judged now for those things that led me to understand the difference between wrong & right. Sometimes it was in the very moment of an act that its wrongness would become apparent, the lesson learned, never to be forgotten. Children shouldn’t be judged as adults.
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October 9, 2015 at 4:33 pm -
A work-colleague who became a good friend confessed that, as a 5-year-old almost 60 years ago, he had actively tried to murder his baby sister. She had been left in her pram, secured by its brake, on the steeply-sloping road outside their house, a road which led in 50 yards to a very busy major road. Nose put out of joint by the new arrival, he let off the brake and the pram careered down towards the main road, gathering speed. By good luck (or bad luck as he saw it at the time), a passing pedestrian saw the out-of-control pram and managed to stop it inches before the heavy traffic.
When I knew him 40 years later, he was a thoroughly decent guy, a corporate peace-maker if anything, whom you would never have thought capable of such an act, even in his childhood. I often wonder, as he did too, how differently his successful life could have panned out if that pedestrian hadn’t been there and his infantile infanticide plan had succeeded.
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October 9, 2015 at 6:25 pm -
Some 60 years ago, most people, his parents and the policeman would have accepted that the pram’s brakes suddenly failed…whatever misgivings they might have had. Not because they didn’t care, nor turning a blind eye but simply it was felt that it was best for all concerned. Why ruin any more lives? The only chance your mate would have had of growing up normally would be for his parents to have convinced themselves it was but a tragic accident. I accept that in the Bulger case there was a clear and present danger to other children and that V&L needed to be removed from society (as much as for their own safety as that of others) but the Bulger case was extreme for several reasons. What would have been gained if your 6 year old mate had been taken into care or worse still ‘treatment’ (and I shudder to think of the sort of ‘treatments’ he would have been subjected to).
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October 9, 2015 at 8:23 pm -
I’m sure you’re right, but it does indicate that ‘childhood killers’ are not necessarily lifelong threats to humanity and can be completely normal folk, apart from one out-of-character incident in infancy.
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