The Utopian

By Alexander Lee.

In 1993, two ten-year-olds tortured, abused, and killed a toddler. In 2001, they were released from prison. One of the juvenile murderers has now been rearrested on child porn charges. The question is: where does justice lie?

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“For the sort of man who is unwilling to take up the course of well-doing, it is expedient, should he wish to hold what he has, to enter on the path of wrongdoing. Actually, however, most men prefer to steer a middle course, which is very harmful; for they know not how to be wholly good nor yet wholly bad.”

- Niccolo Machiavelli, Discorsi, 1.26.

On 24 November 1993, two males were convicted of abducting, torturing, and killing a two-year-old child. Snatched while his mother was looking the other way in a shopping centre a little more than two weeks earlier, the child had been led through the bustling streets of his home town to a run-down spot near an old railway line. There, he had blue paint thrown in his eyes and batteries shoved into his mouth until he could neither cry nor scream. At some point, he was sexually molested. He was then hit with bricks, stones, and an iron bar until his skull fractured, but there were so many wounds that no-one ever found out which blow killed him in the end. Once it was clear that the game was over, his lifeless body was dragged onto the railway tracks and sliced in half by the next train which hurtled past. It was two days before he was found.

His name was Jamie Bulger.

Jamie was killed by Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. They were ten years old.

The case sent shock waves through Britain. The appalling manner in which the blond-haired, bright-eyed Jamie Bulger was killed horrified everyone. In sentencing Thompson and Venables, Mr. Justice Morland neatly summed up popular opinion in highlighting the “unparalleled evil and barbarity” of their actions. No-one, not even the boys’ parents, dissented.

But, at the same time, the fact that Thompson and Venables were only ten years old seemed to beggar belief. It was almost impossible to accept that two boys — two kids — could do something so callously wicked and so hideously calculated. In their mugshots, standing only a little over four feet tall, they looked more like a couple of scared little boys waiting to be called into the headmaster’s office than savage and brutal murderers being read their rights in a police station. And this divided opinion. Although, in British law, the two ten-year-olds were legally responsible for their actions and could be tried as adults, there was doubt as to how they should be treated. Should they be treated as adults and receive suitably lengthy prison terms? Or should they be regarded as children and receive shorter sentences with the expectation of effective rehabilitation?

This doubt was never fully resolved and no-one really seemed sure where justice actually lay. After more than a quarter of a million signatures were presented to the Home Secretary, Venables and Thompson were eventually given a sentence of fifteen years. Despite suggestions that it reflected “institutionalised vengeance”, it was justified on the grounds of public safety, the same grounds that would be used of adults. But the parole board disagreed, and — no longer thought to represent a threat after eight years of counselling — the two were released on life licence in June 2001.

Jamie Bulger’s murderers were given new lives. Deemed to have been rehabilitated, they were provided with fresh identities, a guarantee of anonymity, appropriate jobs, and comfortable homes. Regardless of the fudging over sentencing, it looked like the boys’ heinous tendencies had been eked out of them.

But then things fell apart. Catastrophically.

Earlier this month, Venables was re-arrested and returned to prison because of “extremely serious allegations” relating to child pornography. The demon had reared its head again.

Outrage has once again surrounded Jamie Bulger’s killer. No-one has doubted, even for an instant, that his return to prison is entirely justified. But a storm of controversy has blown up around his new identity. For the Bulger family and their supporters, it is in the public interest for Venables’ identity to be disclosed: if he is still a threat, the public should know. For the Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, the public interest is served by preserving the secrecy of his new life: the revocation of Venables’ anonymity would prejudice any legal proceedings and would risk substituting mob rule for the rule of law.

Venables’ re-incarceration has raised the question of how justice can best be served in the most extreme circumstances, and debate has rightly focussed on public safety. But in concentrating on Venables’ anonymity, debate is being led down a cul-de-sac, and in being swept along by the sheer horror of his actions, public discourse is omitting to address issues about criminal justice raised by his re-offence, issues which are essential to consider if justice is to be served in similar situations.

The key question is not whether Venables’ anonymity should be lifted as a result of his arrest on child pornography charges, but how his arrest on child pornography charges is connected with his past actions. The issue is not how young offenders should be treated when they are released from custody, but how children whose crimes horrify adults become adults who may abuse children.

It is instinctively tempting to believe that Venables’ actions have a common, underlying cause. The murder of Jamie Bulger and the child porn charges may be different expressions of a single psychological issue, and it is eminently attractive to suggest that Venables’ actions may be manifestations of psychological responses to his own traumatic experiences as a child.

Jon Venables certainly had no idyllic childhood. His family life seems to have been troubled and possibly violent. His parents offered little in the way of either moral guidance or emotional warmth. He was an habitual truant, and his regular absences from school reflect not only the extent to which he was left to raise himself, but the degree to which he was anxious to flee the forbidding influences of the adult world of teachers and parents. That his early life may have set the stage for the horrific tragedy of his later actions would not be surprising.

It is, indeed, not difficult to find examples of adults who have turned to murder or sexual abuse as a result of urges brought on by a severely dysfunctional childhood, and many have begun their path to extreme criminality before reaching maturity. The American serial killer John Wayne Gacy, for example, is thought to have been turned towards his later acts of savage brutality by his childhood experiences. Gacy grew up in a disturbed household, where he was physically abused by his alcoholic father. As an adult, Gacy raped and murdered thirty three young men and boys. Perhaps most tellingly, the British killer Mary Bell strangled four-year-old Martin Brown on the day before her eleventh birthday in 1968 and three-year-old Brian Howe two months later. Mary carved an ‘M’ into Brian Howe’s body with a razor and attempted to mutilate his genitals. Bell had an even more disturbed childhood than Gacy and the links between her upbringing and her crimes are striking. Mary never knew her biological father, and for the greater part of her life believed herself to be the daughter of a violent criminal. Her mother was a prostitute named Betty who forced her to engage in sexual acts with men from the age of four. Betty is thought to have attempted to kill Mary on a number of occasions. Although Jon Venables’ upbringing was not so traumatic, the examples of John Wayne Gacy and Mary Bell suggest that the connection between childhood trauma and later acts of murder and sexual abuse is not implausible.

If Venables’ actions in 1993 and 2010 both stemmed from a single, deeply rooted cause, it seems clear that the public interest would have been best served by the early and accurate identification of his condition. But if the two branches of Venables’ criminal tendencies spring from the same root, then the fact that his condition has carried over from childhood to adulthood despite eight years of professional counselling suggest that the issues with which he struggles are firmly embedded in his psychology. In this case, it would perhaps have been reasonable to have considered confining him to a suitable institution for a much longer — perhaps indefinite period — in the recognition that complete rehabilitation may be impossible.

Such an argument is, however, riddled with problems. Although it is not without precedent, it is nothing if not simplistic. It gives way too easily to a two-dimensional view of human psychology, fails to recognise that Venables’ upbringing was not nearly as traumatic as that of John Wayne Gacy or Mary Bell, and dramatically undervalues the skill and dedication of the teams of trained counsellors and evaluators who have worked with Venables over the years. It seems implausible to believe that if there were a single psychological problem underlying his actions, it would have been missed so completely by the professionals dedicated both to his rehabilitation and to the public safety.

The alternative interpretation of Venables’ actions is that there is a causal connection between the manner in which he was treated after the murder and the alleged child porn offenses. In recent years, psychologists have noted the remarkable frequency with which juvenile criminals reoffend after a period of detention and have explained this phenomenon using what is known as the ‘secondary deviance amplification hypothesis’. This hypothesis suggests that children — unlike adults — are actually enormously difficult to rehabilitate, and that juvenile psychology is more severely affected by the manner in which their crimes are treated than is the psychology of their elders. Where a child is incarcerated for an offense, a negative label is attached not only to the crime itself, but also to the juvenile perpetrator. This necessarily impedes the child’s reintegration into society. The psychological damage increases in proportion to the duration of juvenile detention. Although the form it may assume is obviously variable, it has been demonstrated that incarceration cements a predisposition to future crime. Furthermore, it has been suggested that this effect is particularly pronounced in youths who actually feel bad about their crimes.

The secondary deviance amplification hypothesis seems to provide an attractive explanation for Jon Venables’ alleged involvement in child pornography.

At the trial, Thompson listened to the evidence and heard the sentence impassively. He never even showed a flicker of emotion. Venables, however, broke down. Always the emotionally weaker of the pair, he wept with grief and sorrow when confronted with the suffering that he had inflicted on Jamie Bulger. Unlike Thompson, he seemed aware not only of the difference between right and wrong, but also that the word “wrong” barely came close to describing the totality of his actions. In assessing Venables’ psychological profile for the trial, Dr. Susan Bailey found that while he was unable to talk about the murder, he was tormented by regular flashbacks of blood spewing out of Jamie Bulger’s mouth, and was obsessed with the idea of rescuing children from danger.

While in detention, Venables would have been encouraged to approach this justified sense of self-recrimination in a constructive manner as part of his path to rehabilitation. His sense of sorrow and remorse, built of self-consciousness and empathy, would have been explored in the hope of transforming it into a positive self-conception and an effective moral compass. But Venables would not have been able to stop exploring these emotions himself, or to avoid running over that terrible day by the railway tracks over and over again, wondering perhaps, what Jamie had felt, and all the while, feeling desperately lonely and unloved.

At the same time, the ten-year-old grew into a teenager. He developed physically and mentally. He became — in physiological terms — sexually mature. But this maturation process, so crucial to an individual’s psychological development, occurred not in the home environment, surrounded by friends, and exposed to new experiences at every juncture, but in the hermetically-sealed context of a young offenders’ institution. It is hard to believe that the dominant features of that institution — punishment, recrimination, guilt, loneliness, memory, grief — did not shape the trajectory of the sexual development of one who was already emotionally and psychologically fragile.

In this light, it is not unreasonable to ask if Venables’ transformation from murderer to alleged paedophile is a consequence of secondary deviance amplification. Did incarceration lead him to view his murderous urges so negatively that they eventually mutated into an appalling, horrific preoccupation with the attraction of innocence overlaid with an indelible sense of his own criminality and guilt?

If Venables’ actions in 2010 can be seen as a result of how he came to view his actions in 1993, then we must consider whether a quite different course of action would have protected the public more effectively. If the secondary deviance amplification hypothesis does explain Venables’ development from murder to sexual criminality, the most reasonable solution might have been to minimise his negative view of himself and to have allowed him the opportunity to mature in a more ‘normal’ environment. It is, indeed, almost tempting to question whether — in the interests of public safety — he should have been released much sooner, and rehabilitated in a caring foster family.

The appalling nature of the Bulger murder makes this a deeply unattractive line of reasoning. There is something in us which — quite understandably — wants to “see justice done” through punishment. And when the recent shocking charges are taken into account, the desire for punitive incarceration is hard to resist. The idea that a murderer should be encouraged not to reproach himself too much, and that he should be let out of prison to enjoy a normal life is almost repulsive. But justice is not just about vengeance and punishment. As recent controversy has demonstrated, justice is also about public safety. And if we want to ensure that no child should have to suffer at the hands of sickening criminals, we have to ask ourselves whether we have to put aside our sense of outrage to achieve something positive.

This is, indeed, an approach which has been followed with considerable success in a similar case in Norway. In October 1994, two six-year-old boys attacked, stripped, and stoned five-year-old Silje Raedegard to death in Trondheim. Although the Norwegian public was horrified and outraged by the murder, the boys were treated in a manner which was designed to prevent them from reoffending and questions of ‘blame’ and individual culpability were eschewed. As the child psychologist Trond Andreassen explained a few years after the murder, the objective was “to put the boys in as normal a situation as possible.” While their responsibility for Raedegard’s death was undoubted, they were soon set free, and never prosecuted. In fact, they returned to kindergarten a week after Silje died. Neither has reoffended and the Norwegian authorities are confident that — with continued supervision — the two will be able to live ‘normal’ lives.

In the past, therefore, it might have been possible to have prevented Jon Venables from breaking the law again. In hindsight, the decision to release him after eight years seems to have been a disastrous compromise between vengeance and a liberal faith in rehabilitation. Other options were available. Either Venables could have been incarcerated in an institution capable of dealing with deep-rooted psychiatric problems without setting an end to his sentence, or he could have been freed to develop as normally as possible. It’s an unenviable choice, but if justice is to be served in future, it’s a choice we’re going to have to make.

Alexander Lee, co-founder of The Utopian, is a research fellow at the Universite du Luxembourg and the University of Warwick.