Authors: Gitta Sereny
But from here my ideas may differ to those of others. As we know, under the existing system, childhood experiences and possible explanations for the crime are not considered relevant in a trial. But I suggest that the function of this Children’s Criminal Court should be to ascertain not only whether or not the child committed the act, but if so, why. It is fundamental to this understanding that the court should be fully informed of young defendants’ childhood experiences and their entire family dynamics before a trial begins.
I therefore propose that as soon as a child is arrested and charged, the magistrates of this new court would immediately order a thorough investigation by the social services into the child’s background (as is normal procedure in all the European countries I have mentioned) and would recommend the child to be placed for the period of remand into a psychiatrically orientated remand home where he or she can be observed and the reports submitted to the court. Such a provision does not exist at present either in the UK or US because anything except the most cursory psychiatric examination of an accused child is considered to carry a risk of adulterating the evidence. There is the additional fear that young defendants who talk to a psychiatrist for any purpose other than his or her opinion as to their ability to differentiate right from wrong might lose their (in any case much disputed) right to silence; moreover, as psychiatrists and therapists are not protected by confidentiality as lawyers are and might be called as witnesses by the prosecution, children might incriminate themselves before being tried in court.
Although I am aware of these risks, my experience with Mary and other children has convinced me that putting such children into a quasi-punitive facility during many months of remand is prejudicial and that in order to avoid the ignorance of the court, as clearly demonstrated in the preceding pages, it is essential for them to have comprehensive social and psychiatric reports at their disposal before trial.
Contrary, however, to the informality which has generally been adopted by most European juvenile courts, the Children’s Criminal Court I propose should retain a considerable element of formality. I am making a special point of this because I think it is important for children that the appearance of the court underlines the gravity of the occasion. (Experience in France has shown that too much informality risks minimizing the crime and society’s condemnation of it in the child’s mind). There need be no wigs or red robes. The judge could be distinguished by wearing a black robe and the lawyers dark suits, possibly retaining the high white collar and bands of the usual Crown Court attire in order to emphasize the solemnity of the venue.
At the time of the trial, the usual British judicial form would be followed, with a prosecutor to present the case and the accused child defended by a barrister. But the procedure in such a Children’s Criminal Court would be different in two major respects: firstly, the accused child would have the support of a new officer of the court, a Children’s Advocate who, particularly interested in this aspect of working both with the courts and with children, will be recruited either from the social or legal services and trained in child psychology and legal procedure. Providing the child with what one might call a friend in court, he or she would remain in contact with the child throughout the trial, will supply them with explanations and give support when necessary, and may be called upon to speak on the child’s behalf.
Secondly borrowed from the continental inquisitorial system children would not be crossexamined and, making the process both easier and more comprehensible to them, would be addressed and questioned only by the judge. The adversarial system would be maintained by the Prosecutor and the Defence counsel arguing the case between each other and with the judge.
For the rest, witnesses and experts are heard as in any trial; the proceedings (just as proposed in the “Justice’ report) are held in private, with discretionary access for members of the press, who can publish no names which would identify the child. When it comes to sentencing, I again agree with the authors of the ” Justice’ report in the abolition of the mandatory sentence of detention during Her Majesty’s Pleasure for children and adolescents convicted of murder and their proposal that the trial judge should have full discretionary powers to determine the sentence in each case. I also agree with them in principle that when such children are still in detention at the age of sixteen (when at present detainees in special units are moved to young offenders’ institutions or prisons) they should not be automatically transferred to an adult prison.
All I would add is that any special unit such a child is sent to which might combine many of the best qualities of Red Bank must not only be ‘special’ in its provision of security, but also in the training of its staff, its therapeutic orientation, in the ready availability of psychiatric consultation, and, when necessary, treatment for the children. What is also an essential part of any treatment children receive, however, is that their parents are worked with simultaneously.
The denial of the importance of childhood experiences in the management of severely disturbed children (as was officially stated prior to Mary Bell’s arrival at Red Bank) is not only unintelligent but represents an ideological rather than a protective or compassionate attitude. And to leave children who have gone through the trauma of committing serious and often horrific crimes without the opportunity to take issue with what they have done, seems to me synonymous with ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment.
It might seem that in all of this discussion I have forgotten the families of the victims of these crimes. It is not so. As I have said repeatedly throughout the book, they have been constantly on my mind.
I know that their deep wish must have been never to have to relive the memory of those dreadful days, indeed never to hear the name of Mary Bell again. But while I have been writing, I have kept wondering whether somehow, super humanly these families who saw themselves so appallingly robbed of their children could come to understand my purpose and find some crumb of solace in that understanding. I think most of us now accept that Mary Bell was not a ‘murderer’, she was a severely damaged child whom no one helped:
no evil was felt, no evil intended, only a child’s ultimate despair led to this tragedy.
There are three questions which have been much on my mind since Cries Unheard has been published.
One which has been put to me many times is, given that there are many children who have terrible childhoods, what causes a few, very few of them, to commit such extreme crimes at such an early age?
It is not easy to explain the almost inevitable ‘breaking-point’ in human beings who as children have been unloved, rejected and seriously abused, above all by a parent. One has to be careful not to generalize. But while certainly the violence adult people commit such as genocide or other ideological or political murder, crimes passionnels but also sadistic killings can and do originate in tendencies and motivations unrelated to any childhood trauma, most experts in child trauma would agree that, considering it the other way round, no child or adult is ever unaffected by childhood rejection and abuse. The nature and the timing, however, of this ‘breaking-point’ resulting in a violent act or serious crime not necessarily of course of killing, but wanton destruction, arson, robbery, nowadays often with weapons, and even rape-can vary quite radically, can happen quite early in childhood or adolescence, but also much later, when adult.
It can and often does manifest itself first quite early in violence or cruelty to animals, even though the child may love animals. It can and more often than not does turn against family members, but also against strangers, both children and adults. If, however, a child receives no help in childhood, it can and does equally often fester like an open wound, the anger and pain growing with time until it can ruin any chance for the adult to make normal relationships and again only too often turns into a vicious circle of rejection and abuse of the individual’s own children.
The second aspect of the original reactions to the book, which I thought very significant, was the rejection by some commentators of Mary Bell’s memories of having been sexually abused between the ages of four and a half and eight in her mother’s presence by her mother’s clients. The reason why I find this significant is because it has shown once again that there is a small but highly vocal number of experts, and a large number of good and decent people, who simply cannot face the fact of the existence of paedophilia. Given the amount of proof there is of the existence of this terrible perversion, which continues to devastate the lives of thousands of children, this reaction appears to me to be almost as astonishing a phenomenon as paedophilia itself.
Anybody who has worked with sexually abused children knows how difficult it is for them to speak of it. And because there are real risks involved in guessing at abuse within families, and because young children, more often than not brainwashed by the parent perpetrator into thinking that this happens to all kids, essentially do not understand the horror of the horror that happens to them, we are still almost totally at sea how to detect and thus to prevent in time the abuse of small, frightened and inarticulate children before they are often permanently emotionally scarred.
I had considerable problems helping Mary through her despair while, un coached and un coaxed she was telling me about what was done to her.
Later I realized from the reactions of a few critics who brought up the spectre of ‘false memories’ that only by considering what she told us in context with many other events in her story can we see how terribly true Mary’s memories are. There are four points which are reported in the book that need to be linked to Mary’s memories.
First the fact that Mary’s mother, Betty, in one of her moments of despair which she obviously did have, told the Newcastle Children’s Officer, Brian Roycroft, in 1970, that her speciality was ‘whipping’ clients, “But I always hid the whips from the kids,” she added.
The second fact as I report in the book occurred about fifteen years later when Mary, sobbing desperately, told her probation officer, who became deeply involved in helping her, about remembering whippings when she was four or five in the presence of men who she recalled having erect penises.
The third relevant fact is that when Mary, on the only occasion she was taken by the headmaster of her special unit to see a psychiatrist in a mental hospital when she was fourteen, because she had begun injuring, i. e. cutting, herself, the interview happened oddly enough indeed incomprehensibly in the presence of her mother. And when Betty Bell angrily told the woman psychiatrist that Mary was ‘too small to remember anything about the past’ Mary contradicted and one might think even covertly threatened her. She did remember, she told the psychiatrist.
“I remember a man who has three fingers and … whiteness … I remember blindman’sbufi.”
“Blindman’s-buff is what her mother called the sexual acts for which at times she blindfolded her, and the ‘man with three fingers’ and the whiteness of penises, or the ejaculation that emerged from them, kept turning up in Mary’s memories of sexual abuse when she talked to me.
And then, while not proof in itself, there is yet another, and it seems to me remarkable, point which, while not factual evidence, might be considered circumstantially significant. It is the fact that Mary’s much-loved maternal grandmother, and her youngest aunt, told me, also in moments of despair, in 1969, how Betty, Mary’s mother, as a thirteen-year-old had surrounded herself with crucifixes and rosaries, hanging them on the ceiling and the walls of her bedroom in Glasgow.
(“We thought she might become a nun, she was that [devoted],” Betty’s mother said. ) In order to protect the relationship between Betty and her family in 1969, I never quoted this and some other things they had said in my earlier book, and except for a few visits from her ‘dad’ when she was at the Special Unit, and of course later her mother, Mary has had virtually no contact with her family since she was taken away at eleven. There is thus no way she could have known, i. e. been told by anyone, about Betty’s obsession as a child. But (as you can see in the book, page 335) twenty-seven years later, her face white and covered with sweat, Mary told me through racking sobs about her obvious horror when the hanging crucifixes and rosaries touched her when she was being held by her mother on her mother’s bed where the men hurt her.
(‘. and it was so dreadful, with the rosaries you know, bumping into me, you know, I felt so bad, so bad. “) It was not until much later when the book had already been published, that I remembered what Mary did not know at all the identical position in which her mother as a thirteen-year-old had placed these religious objects.
There are those who doubt that the story of the suffering, the crime and the punishment of one child and young person can help us toward reaching any general conclusions, either about other children who commit of fences about changes in society which would protect children at risk before they reach this ‘breaking-point’, or reforms in the administration of justice which would allow children who commit serious crimes to be helped and treated rather than only punished or contained.
These same sceptics doubt the truthfulness of such an account,
basically, I believe, because they cannot get away from the conviction that the one-time child who relates the story and who committed, twice, the worst of crimes was a ‘killer’, i. e. not a child who killed but, with its implication of unforgivable evil, a ‘child murderer’ as all the tabloid headlines trumpeted last spring. Never mind that she was a hurt child of eleven, and never mind too that she has led a blameless life since being released from prison at twenty-three. To them she remained at forty-one what they believed her (wrongly) to have been at eleven: they have not progressed from the medieval conviction of evil birth; they do not believe in traumatized children.