The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (47 page)

Indeed, the usual response to this kind of analysis, repeated over and over in the aftermath of the Bulger case, is that lots of people have difficult childhoods and they don’t all go out and kill someone. Specifically, Jon and Bobby were no worse off than lots of other children and must therefore have been driven by their innate evil.

I can only ask how many of those other children will go on to live out the disturbances of their childhood in one way or another? Delinquency, depression, suicide, domestic violence … I’m sure a definitive list would be much longer. You could not predict that any other boy, given Jon or Bobby’s upbringing, would go out and kill a child. You could, however, predict that those boys would, at some point, be likely to suffer, or cause someone else to suffer, unless help was forthcoming.

It is also possible that Bobby and Jon were worse off than lots of other children, that because we do not know the full facts of their childhoods we do not know just how much they were asked to endure. Quite possibly, for example (though there is no evidence to support this), the sexual assault of James was repeated or acted-out from Jon and/or Bobby’s own experience as the victim(s) of sexual abuse.

To follow my own argument through to its conclusion, almost everything that has happened to Bobby and Jon since they killed James Bulger could be seen in the context of continuing humiliation and abuse of adult power. Their unconscious cries for help have remained unheard, except perhaps at close-quarters, in their secure units among caring staff.

It was not, in this case, just a question of apportioning blame. The guilty parties – two small boys – had to be paraded at a trial and marched through streets of newsprint. It was not, as some people have thought, the boys’ lawyers who put them through this ordeal – it was the judicial process. A process which was rather like a public execution: the crowd was happy to see them drop but went home with a rather sour taste in its mouth.

Justice had to be seen to be done, and rightly so, but, with the boys so young and not yet grown, did it have to be quite so brutal? Wouldn’t an informal hearing, which spent more than 20 minutes examining the boys’ backgrounds and mental condition, have been better?

Was it also necessary to appropriate the boys’ actions as a platform for such a variety of zealous moral crusades? Wicked boys, bad mothers, lone mothers, soft teachers, wet liberals, mollycoddled perpetrators of crime, ignored victims of crime and, most popularly, violent videos…

The closing remarks of the trial judge, voicing his, evidentially unfounded, suspicion that violent videos might have played a part in inciting Bobby and Jon to murder incited, in turn, an enthusiastic debate in the media.
Child’s
Play
3
received more free publicity than it, aesthetically, deserved.

This successfully diverted attention from what might have been a more profitable discussion about child abuse and the pressures on low income families. And even though there was only the slightest evidence that one of the boys – Jon – might have seen a violent video –
Child’s
Play
3
– and even though it was difficult to see what this had to do with James Bulger’s murder, the debate rumbled along, found its way into academia and prompted the publication of a ‘discussion paper’. This too received more publicity than it deserved.

‘Video Violence and the Protection of Children’ was written by Elizabeth Newson from the Child Development Research Unit at Nottingham University, and was endorsed by a bewilderingly large number of ‘psychologists, psychiatrists, paediatricians and others’.

The paper made a direct link with the Bulger case and, in the course of a preamble, stated that we should ‘try to ensure that Jamie (sic) is not just the first of many such victims’.

It went on … ‘However, child abuse, poverty and neglect have been a part of many children’s experience over the years: indeed, although neither Jon nor Robert could be said to have come from happy and nurturant homes, there was little evidence of the extremes of neglect and abuse that could be documented in any Social Service department.

‘What then can be seen as the different factor that has entered the lives of countless children and adolescents in recent years? This has to be recognised as the easy availability to children of gross images of violence on video…

‘… Thus it is not surprising that Mr Justice Morland speculated upon the pan that such videos might have played in creating the degree of desensitisation to compassion that the children in the Bulger case showed – not only during their attack, but in comments like Robert’s (before he admitted the killing): “If I wanted to kill a baby, I would kill my own, wouldn’t I?”’

Maybe it was only a discussion paper, but I found this a particularly depressing document. An ill-considered remark by the trial judge had made a minor sensation in the media and was now being given the credibility of an academic paper.

Elizabeth Newson’s case was founded on the precept that the phenomenon of killings by children had begun with Bobby and Jon, whereas, in fact, it
was at least two hundred and fifty years old. There was the, by now, familiar argument that the two boys’ backgrounds were no worse, even a good deal better, than many others. Another shaky precept. And were ‘gross images of violence on video’ the ‘different factor’ in the recent lives of children? What about poverty, the sinking liferaft of the Welfare State and the consistent underfunding of education?

The argument about corrupting images of sex and violence is as old as cinema itself. It’s a reasonable wish to protect children from the excesses of adult films but it is hard to accept that, without prior disturbance, children will be impelled to act out what they see on the screen.

Couldn’t we find something more pertinent to discuss?

I hope I don’t appear to be engaged on some moral crusade of my own. I’m only trying to offer a humane explanation for an act of apparent inhumanity. It is not outside us, it is within us. Bobby and Jon are human too. Small humans, just like James Bulger.

*

Since their trial the two boys have remained at the same, separate secure units where they were first held after being charged with abduction and murder. Bobby has been visited regularly by Ann and some of his brothers. He has still not had any contact with his father. Jon has had regular contact with Susan and Neil.

Though both boys are, to some extent, isolated in their units by their exceptional youth and the exceptional notoriety of their crime, they have both become part of regimes which are supposed to balance punishment with rehabilitation.

Jon’s parents are said to have had concerns about the strict, disciplined approach of his unit. Early on, the Home Office advised that Jon should only move between his living quarters and the unit’s recreational wing when accompanied by three members of staff. This has meant a restriction of his movements in a bigger institution with a more impersonal, less flexible style.

During the day Bobby can move freely from his room to the classroom and the lounge, which has table tennis and pool tables and a television and video, where older boys are usually sat watching music tapes.

Bobby has been working at carpentry in the woodwork shop and spends time in the communal kitchen, extending the range of dishes he can cook to curries, pizza and lemon meringue pies.

There are no plug sockets in the boys’ rooms and, by day, the corridor of Bobby’s unit is criss-crossed by leads that power various electrical components, including the old computer that Bobby uses for games.

Both boys have begun a therapeutic process that is eventually intended to
allow them to talk openly about the killing and reach an understanding of how and why it happened. The role of therapist has fallen to Dr Susan Bailey, the consultant psychiatrist who appeared for the prosecution at the trial.

Bobby was initially unable to square the fact that someone who had appeared in court ‘against’ him was now going to be working for him. They now meet, together with a colleague of Dr Bailey, on a loose schedule of visits, the idea being that when the boys are ready to talk a therapeutic relationship will be in place for them.

The boys’ sentences are open ended, but the law required the Home Secretary to set the first date at which they could be considered for release: the so-called tariff date, after which they will have ‘satisfied the requirements of retribution and deterrence’.

In all such cases the Home Secretary makes his decision after hearing the recommendations of the trial judge and the Lord Chief Justice and considering submissions from the detainees. There has been criticism, in the past, that a Home Secretary, who has to be re-elected, could allow political expediency to influence his decision. Bobby and Jon seemed vulnerable to this possibility: they were the objects of national loathing, there was a continuing outcry over juvenile crime and the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, was a right-wing Minister in an unpopular Conservative Government, under pressure to be ‘tough on crime’.

There was some relief, among their family and lawyers, when, in January last year, Bobby and Jon received letters from the Home Office which outlined judicial recommendations.

The trial judge had told the Home Secretary that, if the boys had been adults, he would have said the tariff should be set at 18 years. Quoting his own sentencing remarks he said that, taking into account all the appalling circumstances and the age of the defendants eight years was ‘very, very many years’ for a ten or eleven year old. They were now children. In eight years they would be young men.

The Lord Chief Justice agreed with the trial judge that a much lesser sentence should apply than in the case of adults. He thought ten years should be the tariff.

After the trial judge’s severe comments at the close of the trial there was considerable surprise that he had not proposed a longer tariff. I understand that Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, was surprised too – the wind taken out of his sails. He had been considering a tariff of 20 or 25 years and, while he was not obliged to follow the judicial recommendations, it would now be difficult to deviate from them by so great a margin.

The recommendations had been passed from the Home Office to the boys in confidence but they were made public and became news. The family of James Bulger reacted in anger and announced a public campaign to persuade Michael Howard that the boys should never be released.
The
Sun
newspaper took this up with enthusiasm and printed a special coupon which readers could complete and send to Howard.

In mid-June the boys received a second letter from the Home Office explaining that Howard would soon be announcing his tariff decision. The letter went on to itemise all the submissions the Home Office had received:

One petition, from Ralph and Denise Bulger, containing 278,300 signatures urging that the boys should never be released; one petition from the Bulgers’ local MP, George Howarth, containing 5,900 signatures urging that the boys should serve at least 25 years; 21,281 coupons from
The
Sun
newspaper; 1,357 sundry letters and small petitions urging a high tariff date … and 33 letters in support of the trial judge’s recommendation that the tariff date should be set at eight years.

The third, and final, letter came in July, the message inside it delivered in person to Bobby and Jon by an emissary civil servant. Howard, having taken into account ‘public concern’ over the case, among other factors, had decided that the boys should serve a minimum of 15 years as punishment before they could be considered for release.

Appeals, to the English and European Courts, are pending.

Copyright

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© David James Smith, 1994

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ISBN 978–0–571–28271–5