Authors: Gitta Sereny
There, in that small girl, I sensed not evil but some kind of deep and hidden distress. But the ceremonial court, with its red-robed judge and bewigged advocates, was neither equipped, capable nor required to deal with a child who, above all else, had to protect her mother’s awful secrets.
In Britain, we have repeatedly put children through this process of adult courts in the past thirty years. Since the case of Mary Bell, there have been three others of children who killed children (whose names were not made public) and two more where the names were disclosed: the slightly different one of Sharon Carr, who was tried at seventeen in 1997, when she voluntarily confessed to the atrocious murder when she was twelve of eighteen-year-old Katie Rackliff, and then the two ten-year-olds, whose names need not again be mentioned, who killed James Bulger. There was also the appalling recent case of an eleven-year-old and three ten-year-old boys accused of raping a nine-year-old girl in their school lavatory, and were tried (and then acquitted) at the Old Bailey a shaming experience for all who attended whichever way one looks at it.
But although Britain has an ever-increasing number of cases of serious crime committed by children and, as we have seen, is particularly bad at dealing with them, we are not alone in this. Juvenile crime in America, including many cases of rape and murder, has become an epidemic and most American states are much worse at dealing both with children and young people than we are. But western European countries with the most progressive child care systems, such as Holland, Sweden, Norway, Germany and France, are also experiencing an unprecedented number of crimes committed by children, among them a number of young children who have killed children.
There is, of course, a difference between the meteoric rise in Britain, America and the rest of Europe of serious juvenile crimes, such as rape and robbery with force, and the still comparatively rare instances of young children committing murder. There is also a difference between young children who kill and may not know what they are doing, and older teenagers who manifestly do. There is another important difference between the not infrequent act of children killing a sibling, a parent or familiar adult because of anger, jealousy or fear, and those rarest and most baffling cases of a child of any age killing a stranger, worst of all, a younger child.
As I am writing this in 1997 the whole of America is devastated, but more than that, mystified, just as Britain was in 1968, about the massacre in the quiet and prosperous small southern city of Jonesboro, Arkansas, where two boys of eleven and thirteen, carrying a veritable arsenal of weapons, killed four little girls and a teacher and wounded eleven others in a school playground.
Although the association of this case with America’s gun culture means it has characteristics not yet prevalent in Britain, it has some disturbing similarities with that of Mary Bell and with the case of the boys who killed James Bulger. Now, as then, the behaviour of the two American boys became ever more conspicuous over the week preceding the crime and there, just as in Scotswood in 1968, the boys announced their intention loud and clear, even going so far as to write in large letters on the dusty side of a school bus that they were going to kill. America (as my American publisher told me over the phone) is ‘braying for their blood’, exactly as happened both in Scotswood in 1968 and in Liverpool in 1993. And the Arkansas prosecutor, just as aware as the British Home Secretary was in the “Bulger case’ of the possible political consequences for him if he is not seen to be responding to the public furore, has been seeking ways to try at least the older of the two boys as an adult, which would bring about an automatic life sentence.
These cases, as I have said, are rare, and, as Mary’s story so graphically demonstrates, are almost certainly in every instance due to a long build-up of pressures which finally brings the child to a breaking point. But their increased frequency may not be unconnected to developments in society.
The uncertainties of our moral and yes spiritual values have caused a fracture in the bulwark of security with which earlier generations protected children from growing up prematurely. Far too few parents now accept the necessity for children to grow up slowly, nor do they realize their own pivotal importance to the development, which only they can nurture, of the child’s self-image. It is, I think and the story you have read illustrates this clearly the interference with the creation, or worse still, the corruption or destruction of this self-image in the early years of childhood, which plants the seeds of serious troubles.
But there is more for us to ponder: the ruthless competitiveness of our time drives most of us adults to discipline ourselves into ever increasing efforts, but we do not discipline our children. We are afraid of them. Their apparent self-assurance (more often than not only a cover for their needs) baffles us. To compensate for the resultant gap in understanding, we surround them with material advantages, but we cannot give them, and do not have the energy to offer them, much more of ourselves than our occasional half-comatose presence in an armchair in front of the television.
I do not wish to join the chorus of condemnation of television, which for all of us has become a part of life. But what should concern us is that in millions of homes for millions of children it has come to represent not just the only acceptable food for their minds, but also the only occasion for family ‘togetherness’. Much more than the disturbing numbing reaction produced by a surfeit of visual violence, a radical change such as this in family life is bound to affect all children, even if only subconsciously. Arguably, it could even be this isolation from their closest adults that drives so many of the young to seek ideals within groups and gangs, and elation and bravery through drugs.
The expansion in juvenile crime is such that in many American states cases of serious crimes committed by children as young as thirteen are now automatically transferred to adult courts, children are sent to prison at younger and younger ages, and even the most welfare-minded countries in Europe are considering the retrograde step of lowering the age of criminal responsibility. Only the Scandinavian countries have so far held to fifteen as the age at which criminal responsibility begins; in Germany it is fourteen; in France thirteen, and in Holland twelve, though in all these countries children are as yet primarily dealt with by youth authorities and rarely end up in adult courts. In Ontario, where the law is particularly punitive toward juveniles, children become criminally responsible at twelve and are widely dealt with as adults. In the United States the age of criminal responsibility varies (between states) from eleven to fourteen; in some American states juveniles can be and are sentenced to death at sixteen.
This is not an appropriate place to analyse further the causes of this global increase in juvenile crime, but it is appalling to think that other countries are tempted to, adopt the three worst aspects of British justice, which has otherwise been an example to the rest of the world: criminal responsibility in England as of the age of ten (in Scotland as of eight); children who commit serious crimes tried in adult courts; and juveniles, certainly as of sixteen (but lately in some cases of girls, for whom there are no other provisions, at fifteen), sent to prison. What are we to do?
In the administration of justice for children it is in Britain that children have fared worst, and it is Britain that now stands so accused before the European Commission for Human Rights. But Britain is still considered a moral force, both in America and much of Europe.
I would urge the adoption in Britain, Europe and the US of what might be called a new children’s charter. It should begin with the long delayed appointment of a Minister (or Secretary) for Children and the re-establishment in every local authority in the country of departments devoted solely to children: the 1968 Seebohm Report, which recommended the amalgamation of Children’s, Welfare and Mental Health Departments, was probably the most ill-advised reorganization in the history of public services.
But this is of course not enough: funds need to be made available and facilities set up for intensive training or retraining in child psychology and the pathology of parent-child relationships both for social workers wishing to specialize in children and for teachers in infant and junior schools. The government, through this newly appointed Minister for Children, needs to encourage and support increased discipline in schools and find new ways of dealing with truancy. Here again, different approaches have to be used for different age groups. For example, however difficult it is, and whatever measures might be required to enforce it, parents must continue to be held responsible for the regular attendance of their children at junior and secondary schools (as indeed, following European examples, they are already being made responsible if their children commit misdemeanours). But it is unreasonable to hope that juveniles over fifteen who are habitual truants would now suddenly accept parental control. Quite different ways have to be found, not primarily to control, but to provide educational or training alternatives for young people who, perhaps even as of fourteen, simply do not want to be in school.
What it all comes down to is that individual responsibility needs to be imposed on adults and nurtured in the young. The principal way towards this is to give the individual child or young person a say in his or her life; an awareness that we are going to treat children as individuals rather than as thorns in the flesh of teachers and social workers. Instead of presuming that children or young persons who conspicuously misbehave want to be bad, we need first to confront them with the question “Why?” and work with them until it is answered. As we can see in Mary Bell’s story, none of this happened then, nor is indeed happening now: none of these questions are asked, the parents are automatically believed and the child is brushed aside. These measures and many others arising out of them can bring about changes, if not in this generation of older juveniles (a term still being applied to young people between eighteen and twenty-one) or even in the now sixteen to eighteen group, but certainly in the younger ones.
I would suggest, in fact, that in our world now, young men and women between eighteen and twenty-one who can vote and marry, no longer consider themselves emotionally and psychologically as juveniles and nor should we or the courts. So, as you will see, while I will suggest long-overdue changes in the legal system as it addresses serious crime committed by children from ten to fourteen and fourteen to sixteen, I am harder on the older groups: I think that juveniles of seventeen and eighteen and young adults from eighteen to twenty-one, who commit serious crimes at those ages, should be judged and punished as adults. For this purpose, their cases would continue to be heard in adult courts. The young offenders’ institutions there is still a serious deficiency in such provision for girls should be reserved for juveniles between sixteen and eighteen in order to distance them from the influence of older offenders. Anyone above eighteen should go to prison, and anyone below fifteen must be considered, tried, judged and sentenced as a child.
The two cases I have mainly quoted here, Mary Bell and that of the two boys who killed James Bulger, have caused many people in the legal, medical and penal communities to rethink the way our present system deals with children who kill or commit serious crimes. In 1996 a working party of six experts, members of the well-known legal reform group “Justice’,* produced a report entitled ” Children and Homicide’ on procedures for juveniles in murder and manslaughter cases, which included among its recommendations that the age of criminal responsibility should be re-examined with a view to raising it in line with other European countries (possibly to fourteen); that children under the age of fourteen should not be liable to public trial in adult courts; that their cases should’ be heard before a specially convened panel of a judge and two magistrates with relevant experience and training, without a jury; that the mandatory sentence of detention during Her Majesty’s Pleasure for ten-to eighteen-year- olds convicted of murder should be abolished; that children found guilty of homicide should be detained in a secure unit or young offenders’ institution and should not then be automatically moved to an adult prison.
These recommendations very much echo my own views. However, I have additional proposals, some of which the members of this working group will not necessarily agree with as, on the face of it,
* The six were: Dr. Norman Tutt, Executive Director of Social Information Systems and formerly adviser to the Department of Health and Director of Social Services, Leeds; Edward Fitzgerald, QC (a specialist in prison law and human rights), Allan Levy, QC (a specialist in child law). Professor Sir Michael Rutter (child psychiatrist and developmental researcher), Mike Thomas (chair of the National Association for Youth Justice and youth justice manager, Bedfordshire), and Kate Akester (Justice). The report also provides in an Appendix statistics on murders by juveniles in Britain, and brief descriptions of juvenile court procedure in other European countries.
they conflict to some degree with the current principles of British justice.
The juvenile court system was considerably reshaped as a result of the Criminal Justice Act, 1991, which reversed many policies and now provides considerable protection to young defendants: proceedings are not open to the public; defendants’ names cannot be disclosed, and reporting is restricted.
However, youth courts, as they are now called, do not deal with cases of serious crime or homicide. It is with regard to this group whose cases under the present system are judged in adult courts that I propose the setting up, in conjunction with the existing youth courts, of a new kind of Children’s Criminal Court. For the bench of this court (very much like the specially convened panel suggested by the authors of the “Justice’ report) the Lord Chancellor would appoint a senior judge and two to five magistrates with special knowledge and training.