The... Daily Mail, 8 March 2010 Almost every day now, fresh claims are surfacing in the media about why Jon Venables, one of the pair who murdered toddler James Bulger, has broken the terms of his licence and been sent to prison. The latest is that he was involved in some kind of sexual offence, possibly relating to child pornography. There are also reports that he had been meddling with drugs, as well as claims that he and his fellow killer Robert Thompson were given kid-glove treatment while in their secure children’s institutions. But as the pressure mounts upon the Government to reveal what Venables did, I find myself torn about how to respond. Yes, there are crucial considerations of justice. But there are also issues of compassion and proportionality. And I am troubled by what appears to be a lynch-mob mentality fuelling some of this tumult. What struck me so forcibly during the trial of Thompson and Venables in 1993 was that, right from the start, people seemed to be reluctant to acknowledge that they were, in fact, just children. Yes, their crime in abducting, torturing and bludgeoning two-year-old James to death was abominable. Yes, the agony of his mother Denise is, indeed, a life sentence. But Thompson and Venables were ten years old when they murdered James. If they had been a few months younger, they would have been deemed too young to have been dealt with by the criminal justice system at all. Yet they were attacked as if they were grown men with an adult responsibility for their actions. They were labelled as ‘evil’ and ‘monsters’. I remember the mob hammering on the prison van as it transported them to and from court. Few could doubt that, if it had had the chance, that maddened crowd would have torn those children limb from limb. To shudder at such scenes is not to be soft-headed about those who do terrible deeds. It is to recognise that the whole point of a justice system is to rise above such primitive passions and transmute the desire for vengeance into due process of law. Because Thompson and Venables were children whose behaviour was rooted in their catastrophic family backgrounds, it was thought possible effectively to reprogramme them to become socially responsible individuals by looking after them in secure children’s institutions. The point about children is that they are immature and still developing. There is a chance that, with skilled intervention to counter the effects of years of neglect or abuse, they might be diverted from the appalling trajectory of crime and violence which would otherwise be their inevitable fate. It is surely only humane and civilised to make such an attempt. Not to do so is to have the bleakest possible view of human nature, not to mention a brutal approach to children. Equally, however, it may not be possible to rescue some individuals who have been irreparably damaged. Clearly, those who have committed such terrible crimes should not be released until it is certain that this is not the case. But, in the case of Venables, a crucial mistake was made which prevented such an assessment. He was let out of custody too early. If the decision of the then Home Secretary Michael Howard that the pair should spend at least 15 years in custody had not been overturned by the courts as ‘institutionalised vengeance’, they would not have been released until they were 25. As it was, they were released at 18, the age at which, if kept in custody, they would have had to enter an adult prison. And that was something the judges were desperate to avoid. With the settled conviction — now the default position in the higher judiciary — that prison does only harm, it was feared that it would undo all the good work that had been done with Thompson and Venables. This meant that Venables was released before anyone could be sure that his profoundly damaged early childhood had not resulted in a profoundly damaged man. Until the moment he was jailed for breaching his licence, we had no idea that such a mistake had been made because of the secrecy in which he and Thompson had been held. This is because, if the attempt to reprogramme such children is to have any chance of succeeding — not to mention the need to protect their physical safety — they need to be shielded from scrutiny. Which is why they were given new identities. Ministers’ refusal to say why Venables was jailed a week ago — other than that the allegations against him were ‘extremely serious’ — is based on the assertion that to reveal the details might prejudice a future trial for the new offences. But since faced with a 27-year-old defendant charged with these offences a jury would probably put two and two together anyway, that argument seems flawed. More pertinent is the fear that any such details might well blow his cover, exposing him to a serious risk of attack, whether in prison or out. Those who respond ‘So what?’ must acknowledge that they don’t care if Venables is killed. That is the cry of the lynch mob. It is effectively to outsource capital punishment by extra-judicial means. And yet, on the other hand, this secrecy is far from desirable. First, we have every right to know the way in which taxpayers’ money is being spent on the treatment of criminals. More pertinently, such secrecy allows incompetence to flourish. It means we have no way of knowing whether the treatment of young offenders is going wrong; no way of holding childcare or psychiatric professionals — whose record hardly inspires much confidence - to account. Now the authorities are in a mess. The knowledge that Venables has been jailed for breaching his licence means that people in prison are likely to work out his identity. So he needs to be given yet another one. But now we read that Venables is blowing his own cover, blurting out his name in prison because he can no longer cope with the pressure of living a lie. It’s hard to avoid concluding that secrets have an awful tendency to blow up in your face. No good ever comes of a lie; and such secrecy is a lie about identity. And yet, and yet… It is said that Mary Bell, who was convicted in 1968 of the manslaughter of two little boys when she herself was a child, has led a responsible and settled life since her release under a new identity. Again, we have no way of confirming this. But if it is true, then undoubtedly the protection of Bell’s identity has enabled that particular deeply damaged child to be redeemed. Yet it has to be said that her crimes took place in a different era. It’s not that what she did wasn’t seen to be as shocking as the murder of James Bulger 25 years later. But Bell, who was found to have diminished responsibility, was seen as a true aberration by a society in which the brutal killing of a child by a child seemed utterly incomprehensible. It’s hard to avoid the unpalatable conclusion that the extreme demonisation of Thompson and Venables has arisen in large measure because the boundaries of civilised behaviour — particularly in terms of epidemic family disintegration and extreme violence at ever-younger ages — have been fracturing far more widely. The hysteria provoked by the killers of James Bulger is thus all the more extreme because their crimes have held up a terrible mirror to society. While the Venables debacle poses a difficult dilemma about secrecy in the criminal justice system, it is what this whole affair says about our modern age that is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all.
Monday, 8th March 2010
The jihad in Nigeria
5:44pm
Utterly appalling violence by Muslims against Christians in Nigeria where the latest tally after weekend attacks on three mostly Christian villages is some 500 dead. The media have described these events as ‘riots’; I would call this a jihadi pogrom. It is but the latest episode in what the media persist in characterising as inter-ethnic violence, but which is in fact a systematic attempt by Muslims to murder and ethnically cleanse the Christian community. The onslaught is described as ‘retaliation ‘ for violent attacks in Jos last January, in which the majority of the victims were Muslim. But as the Barnabas Fund reports, there is evidence that those January attacks were in fact Christian retaliation against Muslim aggression -- in particular on that occasion an attack on a church -- which has been going on for years.
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