ALL we know is that Jon Venables was returned to prison last week. It is nine years since he was released on licence with a new identity after serving eight years for the murder of Jamie Bulger on Merseyside in 1993.
Bulger’s battered body was found by children playing on a railway line in Liverpool, more than two miles from the Strand shopping centre where the toddler was abducted by his killers.
The two, both 10 at the time of the murder, spent their jail sentences in separate secure units.
The idea was to keep them out of the adult prison system and try to rehabilitate them.
Venables and Thompson were Britain’s big experiment. Furnished with new identities, they were released while still relatively young.
They went into prison boys, they came out men.
No one really knows what happened during the transition.
Before them, children who killed faced decades inside.
Press are banned from revealing the new identities of Venables and Thompson, their locations or any images of them apart from the police photographs released when they were tried for Jamie’s murder.
The uproar surrounding the return of Venables to prison is as predictable as it is embarrassing.
The public seem to think they have a right to know what Venables has done to ensure his return to jail.
Nobody says why. The only reason we all want to know what he has done is because we are nosey.
It is actually no one’s business.
As a country, we deal spectacularly badly with children who commit violent crimes. And the furore over Venables is just more of the same. It does us no favours whatsoever.
The offence he carried out with Robert Thompson, when they were both children, was one of the most horrific this country had ever seen.
But since anything to do with these two boys, now men of 27, relates to their original offence, they should never be named, no matter how horrific the crimes they have committed.
The public trial of these mini killers was utterly inappropriate.
Jon Venables and Robert Thompson had a full adult trial. They did not understand the legal process yet we all sat back and pretended they were adults, in full possession of a moral code, instilled with informed choices on good and evil.
The daily sight of a crowd of irate adults baying for their blood was an unedifying spectacle.
Before the trial even started, the lynch mob were hurling stones at the prison van.
If left to their own devices, they would quite happily have stoned the two children to death.
We point blank refuse to learn any lessons from what happened.
There was a similar case recently, at Edlington, near Doncaster, where two brothers, aged 10 and 11, brutally attacked two other boys of the same age.
While the victims did not die of their injuries, they were said to be so traumatised by what happened that they are now terrified of going out.
Their tormentors will be treated in exactly the same way as Venables and Thompson – scorned until the day they die with no attempt at understanding what happened to make them such violent children.
There is another city, not so very far away, where the approach to child criminals is the exact opposite of ours. It is as successful as ours is useless.
A year after the death of Jamie Bulger, two six-year-old boys in Trondheim, Norway, stripped, stoned and beat unconscious a little girl, five-year-old Silje Raederg.
The child was left to freeze to death in heavy snow. Believe it or not, probably the most violent incident in Norway’s history has been contextualised and resolved.
Instead of turning against the culprits with the sort of loathing we Brits do so well, the people of Trondheim did everything they could to understand the boys’ actions.
Even Silje’s heartbroken mother, Beate, tells people her daughter “was killed by friends, because they were playing too hard”.
The boys had been Silje’s friends. As such, they had been to her house many times and the three had been playing when their game suddenly, inexplicably, turned violent.
And, when Silje lost consciousness, the boys ran away in terror.
Why did they do what they did?
Too many sick videos? A miserable, violent childhood?
The boys were forgiven.
Perceived more as victims than killers, they were allowed to continue living in their own community. And, the people of Trondheim moved on.
The boys were allowed to grow up with support and guidance. In the end, they managed to turn their lives around.
In the UK the lust for vengeance would never allow such a thing to happen.
Because we are utterly unable to come to terms with our disgust at children harming other children and we cannot stomach the thought of anyone involved being allowed a second chance.
For some mysterious reason when a child commits a crime here, grown-ups become far more condemnatory than they ever would be of an adult.
Kids are either children or they are not. Why call them children if we are going to treat them like adults?
When children commit these atrocities – think Mary Bell, we all go berserk, trying to bring the full force of the law down on those responsible. It is madness.
Most children who commit serious crimes have had a brutalising childhood. They have usually been abused and neglected as was the case with Thompson and Venables.
Why do we expect children brought up in such circumstances to turn out normal?
And why do we get so, so angry when they do not?
Nobody can blame the family of little Jamie Bulger for baying for the blood of Venables and Thompson.
But only they have that right. The rest of us do not. It seems that we are keen to protect our children from monsters when what we really need to do is find out what causes some children to end up so monstrous.