Destroying the Baby in Themselves

David Jackson

Description

That blurred, foggy frame of the security video has become engraved on the public conscience. The video shows one of the boys holding James Bulger’s hand as the other boy moves away, a little ahead of them. We know that the two boys are taking James away from his mother and safety. If we are ever going to act in a way that loosens that paralysing grip of guilt and helplessness, we need to understand why the two boys did what they did. We can never know the whole truth, but a critical refocussing on some of the ignored or misunderstood elements of the case is urgently needed, to give us some further ideas about how to prevent child/child killings like this from happening.

Sujets

• Violence
• James Bulger
• Robert Thompson
• Murder of James Bulger
• Jon Venables
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Social Science
• Violence in Society

Informations

• Publié par: Five Leaves Publications
• Date de parution: 23 janvier 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910170151
• Langue: English

Extrait

Destroying The Baby In Themselves:

why did the two boys kill James Bulger?
by David Jackson
Destroying the Baby in Themselves : why did the two boys kill James Bulger?
by David Jackson
First published in 1995 by Mushroom Bookshop.
This ebook version is published in 2015 by
Five Leaves Publications
14a Long Row, Nottingham, NG1 2DH
www.fiveleaves.co.uk
Copyright © David Jackson, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-910170-15-1
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Framework Of Social Regulation And Surveillance
Family
School
The Framework Of Idealised Masculinity
Male Peer Group
Media
The Search To Establish Masculine Identity Through Truanting And Sexual Violence
Truanting
In Search Of Heterosexual Masculinity
Destroying The Baby In Themselves And Playing God With Other People’s Lives
Conclusion
References
Introduction
Destroying the Baby in Themselves was first published in 1995 by Mushroom Bookshop in Nottingham, whose list was moved to Five Leaves in 1996. This short book has been unavailable for some years and is now being made available again as an ebook. The story of what happened to the two boys who killed James Bulger subsequent to this book is well known and, save for some minor editorial amendments, this edition remains the same as when first published.
That blurred, foggy frame of the security video has become engraved on the public conscience. The video shows one of the boys holding James Bulger’s hand as the other boy moves away, a little ahead of them. They seem to be heading for Mothercare. But we know that the two boys are really taking James out of the Strand Shopping Centre at Bootle, Liverpool and are walking him away from his mother and safety.
What hurts about that video frame is the seeming relationship of trust implied by the holding of hands, and the way that trust is savagely undermined by the wider knowledge of the two-and-a-half-miles walk towards the railway line. It’s that contradictory tension at the heart of the security video that creates such a desperate feeling of powerlessness in the onlooker. “If only we could have reached out and intervened at that moment,” the onlooker thinks. It’s probably a similar hopeless yearning that poisons the imaginings of the thirty-eight witnesses who actually saw James with bruises and grazing to his forehead but did nothing. It has certainly troubled me in reading the various accounts of the case.
If we are ever going to act in a way that loosens that paralysing grip of guilt and helplessness, we need to understand why the two boys did what they did. I’m not talking here of the whole truth. We can never know that. And I’m certainly not looking for a single cause. But a critical re-focussing on some of the ignored or misunderstood elements of the case is urgently needed, to give us some further ideas about how to prevent child/child killings like this from happening.
But before we do that we need to clear away some of the confusing rumours, myths and simplistic judgements about the case that have begun to mask the full complexity of what might have happened. First, the James Bulger murder wasn’t an ‘evil freak of nature’ — as the police described it. ( Daily Express , November 25, 1993) It didn’t express ‘unparalleled evil and barbarity’ — as Mr. Justice Morland remarked in his summing-up of the case. ( Guardian , November 25, 1993) Nor is it true, as Lord Denning suggested in the Sun on November 25, 1993, that the killing has to be viewed “as a freak incident for such terrible wickedness to come out in two young lads.”
These suggestions that the killing was a freak happening, an aberration or a dreadful extreme deepens our sense of powerlessness to do anything about what happened. It erodes our personal responsibility for understanding and challenging the individual and social forces that have precipitated such a numbing event. To demonise the two boys removes the causes for what they did from the realm of social action, and leaves us in a greater state of despair.
It’s important to stress that although the boys showed signs of severe emotional disturbance, they “had no abnormality of mind, were of average intelligence, and attended a Church of England primary school where they were taught the difference between right and wrong.” (Thomas, 1993, p266) The psychiatric report on Jon Venables made it clear that “he could understand the concept and permanence of death, and could distinguish between fantasy and reality.” (Smith, 1994, pp176-177) The report on Robert Thompson said that he was “fully oriented in time and space, with no signs of any formal mental illness such as psychosis or a major depressive order.” (Smith, 1994, p188)
My argument is that, although the boys’ killing of James Bulger was exceptional in degree and intensity, they weren’t one-off, devilish, ‘freaks of nature’. They share many of the learned tendencies of aggressive, heterosexual manliness that today’s insecure young boys often desperately strive. Although they represent a heightened, extremely unusual form of these tendencies, both boys exist firmly within the common continuum of male sexual violence. And, as David James Smith has shown, there is a hidden history in Britain of roughly similar killings. Some have been disguised. Some have been hushed up. But the evidence is there that “similar cases have happened in Britain in recent times, in not so recent times, and long, long ago.” (Smith, 1994, p188)
Even as recently as 1988, in Borehamwood, a ‘twelve- year-old boy abducted a two-year-old girl from a playground and walked her just over a mile to a railway embankment where he pushed her face into soft ground until she suffocated. They had been seen by a total of 17 people during the 40-minute walk following the abduction. The boy had no history of violence and no previous convictions.’ (Smith, 1994, p7)
Another similar incident was cited by Elizabeth Newson in her paper, ‘Video Violence and the Protection of Children’: “Two schoolboys were today expected to appear in court accused of torturing a six-year-old on a railway line. The youngsters, aged ten and eleven, allegedly tried to force the boy to electrocute himself on a track in Newcastle-upon-Tyne last week. They are also accused of stabbing him in the arm with a knife. They will appear before Gosforth Youth Court in Newcastle-upon-Tyne charged with making threats to kill and three offences of indecently assaulting the youngster and his two brothers aged seven and ten.” (Newson, 1994)
The populist myths that fogged any possibility of critical understanding from emerging bawled at you from the banner headlines of the tabloid newspapers. They mainly centred on broken homes — “Break-up of Family Leads Kids to Crime,” the Sun screamed. ( Sun , November 25 1993) Then there were the other themes of video nasties, boys running wild (particularly in our inner cities), truancy and single parents.
The two major political parties came up with predictable responses that mystified the case even further. The Labour Party’s approach was that economic recession and social deprivation result in acts of law-breaking and violence. Tony Blair, Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary at that time, commented in a Daily Mirror article that criminals of ten or eleven did not just happen. “Broken homes, bad housing, poor education, no job or training, and a lack of hope or opportunity all affected the way a child developed,” he argued. ( Daily Mirror , February 22 1993)
The New Right’s authoritarian populism (the phrase is from Hall (1988)) combined with their emphasis on traditional family values to scapegoat single parents, especially mothers. Indeed, on the day after the legal sentencing, the tabloid press read like a media trial of the two single mothers. How far had neglect of their sons, or inadequacy as parents, contributed to the killing of James Bulger? On being interviewed, Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Venables sounded justificatory and defensive, intent on absolving themselves from blame rather than explaining anything.
The populist climate of “Hang the bastards” was linked with the familiar rehearsal of New Right law and order themes — the need for stricter family discipline, tougher sentencing, the rising wave of uncontainable lawlessness, particularly in the young, and the threat to civilised society from a few ‘evil freaks of nature’. Peter Lilley, the Social Security secretary in November 1993, explicitly connected the James Bulger case with the increasing disruption of traditional, family values. In the News of the World he wrote that the break-up of families was to blame for the spread of serious crime, like a plague, through Britain’s younger people. He said that in thirty years the number of divorces had risen six-fold while the proportion of children born out of wedlock had grown five-fold.... “This problem was at the heart of the upsurge in criminality.” ( News of the World , March 7 1993)
There was no attempt by either political party to dig deeper into the more contradictory, complex reality of the killing. Instead, they both trotted out their well-worn themes and tried to fit the case into their conventional ways of making sense of serious crime at a generalised level. Nowhere was there any attempt to look more closely into the increasingly brutalised worlds of growing boys in Britain in the 1990s. Nowhere in all this endless media coverage (except for an article in the Guardian by Angela Phillips) was there any attempt to specifically address the actions of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson as the behaviour of ten-year-old boys rather than ‘children’, ‘child criminals’ or ‘young people’.
To dig deeper into why the boys did what they did, we need a fresh way of making sense of their actions. We need to go beyond the limitations of a traditional economic/class analysis that sees violence and crime as a direct result of socio-economic deprivation, while acknowledging that the social circumstance