I’ve heard a lot of people say that they are disappointed with Justice Secretary Jack Straw’s announcement that details of why Jon Venables is back in prison are to be kept from the public domain. The fact that it’s none of our business is not a good enough reason for us not to know apparently. There is much animosity aimed at Venables and immediately the reaction is to think, “well that’s fair enough, what he did was disgusting.”
Jon Venables and Robert Thompson murdered James Bulger, a two-year-old boy, in 1993. The way in which they murdered him is widely known to be horrific and I won’t go into details here. Venables and Thompson were 1o years old when they committed this murder and there seems to be a widespread consensus in this country that these boys were evil and always will be.
First of all, no one is born evil. As children, for whatever reasons, these people learnt the wrong way to behave and took it to drastic and tragic levels. It is clear that they were a danger to the public and that they needed some serious psychological help. In my view, the most important thing about prison or a youth offenders prison in this case, is the rehabilitation of someone. Knowing that you’ve done wrong and paying for your crime is part of that but it goes deeper. Prison and particularly the imprisonment of children is a very grey area. How can you expect to lock someone up at 10 years of age and then think they will survive in society when they’re released as an adult? The imprisonment helped Venables and Thompson regarding education at least, with both of them achieving A-Levels whilst they were doing their time. But these guys have been labelled as criminals since they were 10.
Their life chances were clearly very small before they went to prison and perhaps now, in Venables case anyway, their life chances have got even smaller. The whole story here is extremely sad. It’s all very well for us to have our views and to point fingers but Venables and Thompson were born into Britain’s underclass where things like this happen far more often that we like to admit or know. This is the scapegoat story that the press got hold of. More recently the Baby P story was another one where it is one, sad, tragic case that we all know about but the truth is that it is one case in hundreds and thousands. People were waiting with baited breath for one of these ‘evil’ people to commit another terrible crime so that they can confirm that they’re indeed ‘evil.’ Well here you go. Jon Venables is your man. We don’t know what he’s done but you can be sure he’s still the evil bastard you always thought he was and that he’s committed his latest crime out of sheer evilness.
March 11, 2010 at 7:07 pm |
I agree Jonny. People look at cases with such tunnel vision in this country sometimes.
What he did was truly evil but I’ve read up about Venables’s upbringing and he was subjected to violence on a daily basis at the hands of his father as well as witnessing it being inflicted on his mother.
He has to live with what he’s done for the rest of his life and I don’t think it’s necessarilly in the public interest to know why he’s gone back to jail.
March 11, 2010 at 7:36 pm |
This is really good Jonny.
March 14, 2010 at 9:28 pm |
i wholeheartedly agree but i also agree it must be hard for some people to take a step back and see it from this point of view. i cannot blame james bulger’s mother for being angry but i think ultimately it was the right decision. good blog as ever, a difficult subject handled well.
March 15, 2010 at 4:23 pm |
I agree with the view expressed in this blog. The murder of James Bulger was an abhorrent act that is hard to comprehend. That the perpetrators were 10 year old children heightens that incomprehension. It is, then, easier to label Venables and Thompson as evil and scapegoat them for the rest of their lives than to seriously examine the actual reasons that create these ‘monsters’. For that to happen society would need to take a good hard look at itself and acknowledge the impact of social, economic and emotional deprivation on the poorest members of society.But, as we have seen, certain sections of the media would not be interested in that and nor, I fear ,would the political class.
March 22, 2010 at 3:26 pm |
All good stuff.
We also need to recognise that the lower end of the media (to put it politely) have a vested interest in murder. Murder sells newspapers and gets viewers (= advertising revenue). The more murders are committed, da bigga da dosh.
And how do they up the murder rate? Simple: demonise law-breakers of all kinds and call for the harshest punishment possible. And greater the vilification and the harsher the penalty, the more likely will the offender be to commit murder in order to escape detection and punishment.
Ker-ching!