IN an essay published in the London Review of Books in 1993, Scottish author and essayist, Andrew O'Hagan wrote about the tragedy that is/was the murder of James Bulger by two ten year old boys:
' The abduction and murder of James Bulger, a two-year-old boy from Liverpool, has caused unprecedented grief and anger. Hours before the two ten-year-old boys accused of the crime arrived at South Sefton Magistrates’ Court, a large, baying crowd had formed outside. As a pair of blue vans drew up, the crowd surged forward, bawling and screaming. A number of men tried to reach the vehicles, to get at the youths inside, and scuffles spilled onto the road. Some leapt over crash-barriers and burst through police cordons, lobbing rocks and banging on the sides of the vans. Many in the crowd – sick with condemnation – howled and spat and wept. Kenneth Clarke has promised measures to deal with ‘nasty, persistent juvenile little offenders’. Those two little offenders – if they were the offenders, the childish child-murderers from Walton – were caught on camera twice. First, on the security camera at the shopping precinct in Bootle where they lifted James, and again by the camera of a security firm on Breeze Hill, as they dragged James past – the child clearly in some distress.'
The whole shocking incident was sickening and I will always remember reading about it years ago. When I was in Maidstone in England in 2001, the Headmistress of the school I was teaching at spoke of the horror she felt in regards to the newest details- not that the two young offenders were going to be released into a society somewhere, but that the howls of contempt were rising from the British public again. I saw her condemnation of the latest hysterical hatred and derision as a voice of reason amidst the chaos in the tabloid news, and I thanked her for it.
It was a disgusting and sickening act. But as O'Hagan says, somewhere else in his essay, it was also a crime to release the names of the offenders- Venables and Thompson- because two more lives were destroyed as a result. Add to this Kenneth Clarke's comment quoted above- (promised measures to deal with) 'nasty, persistent juvenile little offenders' and we have enough revulsion for a lifetime.