Songs of Innocence (30 page)

Murder and moral panic

In the late sixties and early seventies, there had been a small rash of films featuring Satanic children. These films left disturbing images etched on to the popular
imagination: the possessed boy, Damien, in
The Omen
, frantically pedalling his red tricycle towards the little table on which his pregnant mother stood, watering plants; Mia Farrow, gently
rocking the cradle of her devil-spawned son in
Rosemary’s Baby
. It seemed that in those years, the public mind was easily caught up with the notion that children could be possessed in
some way by evil; that they could become twisted, violent aberrations in an otherwise sane and humane world. When Mary Bell was convicted of murdering four-year-old Martin Brown and three-year-old
Brian Howe in 1968, the response was that she was evil, a ‘bad seed’.

It is a mark of how fast the world can move on, then, that on Saturday, 13 February 1993, when grainy images began playing on news bulletins of two young boys leading two-year-old James Bulger
by the hand from the Strand shopping centre in Bootle on Merseyside, only a few such comparisons were evoked. The two ten-year-olds, Jon Thompson and Robert Venables, beat James to death and left
his body on a railway line, where it was found two days later. In the
days and months that followed, the public mood would be one of grief, anger, bewilderment even. But the
devil child, the epitome of the notion of original sin, had largely been banished from the public mind. As the details emerged of the crime that Thompson and Venables had committed, there was no
such simple explanation. Even though it was widely reported that the boys had been watching a video called
Child’s Play 3
, in which a doll is possessed by the soul of a serial killer,
it was the social phenomenon of the ‘video nasty’ that was blamed for the crime, rather than the sort of evil spirit it depicted.

Events such as violent deaths can often come to define an age – or rather, to define how that age differs from the previous one; how the world has moved on. Extreme occurrences in which
the entire nation joins in shared and powerful emotion are bound to shake out something fundamental about the way in which a society is operating, and the death of James Bulger was no exception. In
an age characterized by adults’ guilt over their conflicted emotions about children, about child-rearing and about the place of the child in the wider world, the question that was asked was
not really a question about what Thompson and Venables had done. It was: what have
we
done? It was a question asked loudly, repeatedly and with real anguish. The trial of Mary Bell, a
quarter of a century earlier, had passed decorously, accompanied by fairly prominent news reports but very little comment. The Bulger case led to a national orgy of self-examination.

Within four days of James’s murder, the
Daily Mail
had engaged William Golding, author of the classic 1950s novel about savagery,
Lord of the Flies
, to write about it.
‘A Haunting Indictment of the Society in Which Two-Year-Old James Bulger was Murdered’, it was headed. The headline summed up the tone, not just of the
Mail
’s coverage but
of the major reaction to the crime. Published the day before Thompson and Venables were arrested, the piece gave voice
to a fear which lurked in many hearts – that
somehow we were
all
to blame. ‘Where the orders and patterns of society cease to matter, gangs begin to find cohesion merely in the joint fulfilment of their darkest instincts . . . If
parents are absent, if fathers do not provide strength and mothers do not provide love, then children will plumb the depths of their nature.’ Golding acknowledged, as he had in his novel,
that he believed boys had some innate ability to behave in uncivilized ways. But the mood of the time was this: society was to blame. And before the perpetrators had even been identified, the
verdict had been passed: the fabric of civilization was perishing, and children – all children – were the victims.

A host of other prominent writers joined the chorus. Beryl Bainbridge, a Liverpudlian by birth, confessed to an angry reaction on meeting a group of shabby, pale-faced boys during a visit to the
city:
²⁷
‘The shameful thing is, I wanted to verbally abuse them; I wanted to tell them they were scum, that they disgusted me. There was a
woman passing who saw the shock on my face. She said: “There’s more of them than there used to be. They should have been drowned at birth.” I found myself nodding, as though we
were discussing kittens. Seconds later, of course, I felt ashamed . . . they were nothing more than little lost boys damaged beyond repair by ignorant parenting, drugs, video nasties. It was easier
in the past – it always is – to know what was right and what was wrong.’

‘Most of all,’ Bainbridge concluded, ‘we must take on board that this latest manifestation of wickedness is not a sign from an angry God or the work of the Devil but rather
something for which we ourselves must take responsibility.’

Politicians, too, took up this baton. Tony Blair, then shadow Home Secretary, made a speech in which he said the crime had provoked anger and disbelief in equal proportions: ‘These are the
ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name.’
²⁸

It was inevitable, of course, that the family would come under scrutiny – that was happening long before it emerged that both Thompson and Venables had had early
lives punctuated by marital breakdown and violence. In the
Independent
,
²⁹
Gitta Sereny argued that these factors had become the norm:
‘Under modern-day pressures family discord is almost the rule rather than exception. This does not, of course, mean that most are without a sense of right and wrong, but that their moral
priorities have been unbalanced.’ A little while later, the Bishop of Worcester told peers that in 1993 no fewer than 76,000 children under sixteen had witnessed their parents’
divorces:
³⁰
‘It was Richard Baxter, a luminary of my own diocese, who said that when marriage and the family fail, all else
miscarries,’ he said. ‘We are letting down our children and thereby placing a time-bomb under our society. We have tolerated the breakdown of marriage and the family in the name of
self-fulfilment and sexual liberty, and this in a country shaped in the Christian tradition, which values children so highly.’

There was a consensus around the Bulger case in both liberal and conservative media: ‘There’s a major failure of parenting,’ psychologist David Pithers told Melanie Phillips,
who was writing in the
Observer
.
³¹
‘But it’s not the neglectful lack of care that people think it is. Parents are getting to
the point where they just don’t know how to look after their children any more. They have these worldly-wise children who are searching for power in a world that rejects them. Parents are
under pressure as never before. Children’s distress and disorder and violence are rising. Families increasingly cannot cope.’

For several years, there had been a growing sense of crisis surrounding children and childhood, and now it was being voiced and made real. Parents were no longer sure whether the major cause of
the crisis was neglect, or over-attentiveness. There seemed to be no certainty over whether children were the charges of adults, in need of their protection at all times, or whether they were
independent beings with independent human rights. In the year James Bulger was murdered, other major media stories about children included that of a mother, Yasmin Gibson,
who left her eleven-year-old ‘home alone’ while she went on holiday to Spain; a nurse, Beverley Allitt, who received thirteen life sentences for murdering children in her care; and a
fifteen-year-old boy fined £500 for rape. Children were concurrently, it seemed, both the perpetrators of terrible crimes and the vulnerable victims of them. Both these phenomena were
increasingly disturbing.

‘As a baby I was weighed weekly, inspected and injected and pronounced satisfactory,’ wrote Penny Fox in the
Scotsman
.
³²
‘This is what happened to all children born soon after the end of the Second World War. We were a precious commodity, we were considered worth investing in. In this and other ways, children
were “put first” in our social policy. But is this the case now? There is little evidence, I believe, that we are doing more than fiddling while Rome, Edinburgh, any other city, any
other rural area, is burning up our children’s freedom.’

The problem seemed to have many causes, many symptoms. A major one – highlighted by Penny Fox – was fear itself. Adults had begun to feel that fear of abduction, fear that if
children were allowed to stray, some unspeakable fate might befall them, was turning them into a nation of stay-at-homes, with sedentary lives. Yet the dangers to children from strangers who might
abuse or murder them had not changed. Bournemouth University estimated there were around 900 such men in the population at any one time, fewer than 2 per cent of whom would go on to
kill.
³³
The risk to each individual child in any given year was less than one in a million. So, why now? Parents had always had fears about their
children’s safety; and the feeling that children could do evil had long lurked in the depths of the nation’s soul. But, now, in an age of uncertainty and guilt, these terrors seemed
more real than ever. Perhaps William Golding, writing in the week James Bulger was killed, had pointed the way to an
answer: society had lost its grip on the certainties of
life: ‘There are . . . conditions in which cruelty seems to flourish, which is different from saying that it has clear causes. What are these conditions? Chaos is one, fear is another. In
Russia after the First World War, there were, I believe, gangs of children who had lost their parents. Dispossessed, without anywhere to live or anything to live on, they roamed the country
attacking and killing out of sheer cruelty. There was, at that time, social chaos in many countries, and, left to themselves, these children found a kind of elemental cohesion in their
viciousness.’
³⁴
Golding’s point, which was an attempt to explain the causes of extreme cruelty such as that inflicted on James
Bulger, had a wider resonance. Since time immemorial, children had been the receptacles for adult fears about moral decay and decline: now they were becoming the focus of a deeper malaise, an
uncertainty about the very ways in which societies were organized.

Fears about children were soon popping up in every sphere: their education, their health, their leisure – even their means of being conveyed into the world. The new possibility of testing
for genetic conditions or even gender during pregnancy, coupled with the widening availability of IVF, was giving parents greater and greater choice not just about when to have children, but about
which type of children they might choose to have. Gill and Neil Clark confessed – to the
Daily Mail
– that they had paid £650 to a private clinic to ensure that their third
child would be a girl:
³⁵
‘From my point of view it felt unnatural,’ Neil confessed. ‘I didn’t feel as though I was so
much a part of it as I had been with the boys. Gill’s got a T-shirt with the words “It started with a kiss”, and I look at that and I think: “Well, it
didn’t.”’ In the
Mail
’s view, the couple’s action had in some way potentially left humanity vulnerable to some hidden danger – the threat, perhaps, of
biological engineering on a grand scale. They had, it said, ‘led the human race on to a path which, some argue, could upset the natural balance of the sexes for ever’.

Since the war, virtually all adults in the UK had been able to make choices about whether they should become parents, and when. But those choices had been largely
negative ones: thanks to free contraception, one could decide not to do it. But what was happening now smacked of something that was increasingly feared: children were becoming a ‘lifestyle
choice’. The phrase seemed to strike fear into conservative hearts. Lifestyle choices, it seemed, were a bad thing when it came to having children. The reasons for this were unclear, but
seemed to speak to a deep-rooted feeling that childbirth and child-rearing should be closer to nature than they had now become; maybe that they should be not in the hands of mankind, but in those
of the Almighty. In an increasingly secular society, this might have seemed strange, yet the attitudes were strikingly persistent. They spoke to many fears – not only did man seem now to be
meddling with nature – or God’s will – but the developments seemed to place the nuclear family in even greater jeopardy than before. Now, children would not only be at risk of
growing up without the experience of two parents because of separation and divorce – now single parenthood was becoming a positive choice. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, felt
the need to reassure peers, during the passage of a bill which would make it easier for single women to conceive via IVF,
³⁶
that the values of
the nuclear family were still the only socially acceptable values: ‘The sanctity of the family unit should not be lost sight of in the wish to help childless couples have the children they
can so fervently desire, it would clearly be unfortunate if this Bill was seen in any way to be conflicting with the importance we attach to family values.’

In a sense, many of the social diseases that were now felt to ail children were diseases of affluence. Even the rise in divorce, of course, had an economic angle – couples could now afford
to separate, where in the past they might have been forced to stay together. But children were now being sucked into economic activity which was more
overt than it had ever
been before. A selection of headlines from the 1990s underlines the point: ‘The Targeting of Food Ads on Children’s Television Can Do More than Just Harm their Pockets’,
‘Born to Buy.’ At least a part of the fear surrounding childhood now was about the fact that while children were able to exercise less and less freedom of movement, they were exercising
ever more financial muscle.