The popular response to the parole board’s decision to release Richard Thompson and Jon Venables who, as children killed James Bulger, has been nothing short of appalling. The gutter press has encouraged a lynch-mob mentality in its readers.
They have ignored all evidence that these young men have accepted responsibility for the murder and feel remorse and sorrow for the event, that they have been thoroughly rehabilitated and are intelligent and well educated young adults and so could, in the best of worlds, reintegrate themselves into the community.
Rejecting the idea of rehabilitation, the press have called for retribution, and delight in calling these young men ‘evil’, arguing that they should be ‘locked up and the key thrown away’.
Unfortunately it was not just the gutter press which responded in this way. James Bulger’s family and supporters have vowed to hunt these young men down, and there is a widespread support for this threat.
In Scandinavia Thompson and Venables would have been treated very differently. The age of criminal responsibility there is much higher than in Britain, and children of their age would not have been tried as they were in an adult court.
Instead, they would have been returned to their community with high levels of support, would have gone back to school and resumed as normal a life as possible.
The facts of their upbringing and background, which were only made public months after their convictions, revealed Thompson and Venables as the children of poverty, with alcohol abuse and sibling violence an integral part of everyday life.
Ironically their incarceration in secure units, with their parents making frequent contact, has given them a more stable upbringing and better education than they could possibly have expected if none of this had happened. But none of these facts are allowed to undermine the call for retribution and punishment.
How is it that such a response is possible in Britain now, when twenty-five years ago it was so different? Why is it different in other countries? What is it about children that raises such extreme and irrational emotions?
To answer these questions we need to look at the family in Britain today, its relation to the state and the place of children in it. In most parts of the world the bourgeois nuclear family is society’s basic unit of organisation.
While in the 1970s in Britain and North America, feminists analysed the family as oppressive to all its members, especially to women and children, today these questions are far less discussed. There is little understanding of those ideas, despite the fact that, in Britain at least, the family is under much greater pressure than it was then.
Socialist feminists in the 1970s exposed what Engels in the late nineteenth century had also understood – that in the nuclear family the man is the bourgeois and the woman the proletarian.
They pointed out that the form of the family under capitalism suited the bourgeoisie, ensuring the husband’s inheritance to his children, but for the working class, then with nothing to pass on to future generations, it was a convenient form of cheap reproduction, daily and generationally, materially and ideologically, as well as a useful form of social control.
Today the nuclear family remains society’s basic unit, but is increasingly in contradiction with people’s material and emotional needs. At the same time an idealised version of it, based on some variant that may have existed for some in the 1950s, remains the aspiration of millions with no alternative available form.
Promoted by governments of both left and right, throughout the century, with Blair’s brood a shining (if vulnerable) example, parents are expected to be responsible and reliable in teaching their innocent children to be model citizens and future workers.
In this scenario, children especially are the subjects of moral panic. Throughout the twentieth century, ‘teenagers’ were seen as a dangerous and unruly group. Nowadays, younger children are the subject of similar moral panics.
Perhaps the deepest of the contradictions associated with the nuclear family is visited on children. They are assumed at the same time to be innocent and empty vessels to be filled with correct behaviour and beliefs; but when this goes wrong the individual concerned can only be described as inherently ‘evil’.
Despite the ideological pressure to marry, live in families and have children, many people know very well that far from being a safe, caring haven from the competition and vagaries of public life, the nuclear family is a violent and uncaring place, where we learn relationships that harm us for the rest of our lives.
These relations of dependence, of competition and rivalry are patterns that we have to spend the rest of our lives trying to unlearn.
Far from some families being ‘dysfunctional’, it is the bourgeois nuclear family that is in itself, dysfunctional. The fact that fewer people than ever are marrying, that divorce is still rising, that we are having fewer children and later in our lives, that more and more people are living alone – all attest to the long, slow break up of the nuclear family.
These changes are not driven by simple experience or individual desire for something better, but are linked to a transformation of the labour market and the workforce.
In Britain today women make up about half the workforce, but with the growth of the flexible labour market, many men and women, as well as young people, work in poorly paid, non-unionised jobs, on short-term contracts and in bad conditions.
Workers in Britain also work the longest and most anti-social hours of any workforce in Europe. The Daycare Trust’s report ‘Shift Parents’, published in September 2000, revealed 25% of the workforce working at some point between 6pm and 6am, as well as 15% at night.
61 per cent of working families have parents away from home during the early morning, evening, nights and weekends.
So even when there are two adults in a family, with both parents working and fewer state provisions for crèches, after-school clubs, etc. children are increasingly left to their own devices, uncared for and having to fend for themselves.
Add to this the awful poverty that has resulted from the deindustrialisation of some inner city areas, schools worrying more about league tables than the education of deprived children, widespread drug use and the criminality associated with it, and it is no wonder that many children are alienated and desensitised.
It is all of this which creates children who are capable of what Thompson and Venables did; or what was done to Damilola Taylor on the North Peckham Estate at the end of last year.
The failure of the state to appreciate or care about what is happening to our children in these situations is nothing short of a disgrace. And the refusal to provide proper safety nets for such children, in the name of privatising as much of the welfare state and public sector provision as possible, is accompanied by an ideological attack on the most vulnerable in society.
The behaviour of children is at one and the same time blamed on ‘evil’ children, ‘poor parenting’, ‘single mothers’ – anything but the real culprits.
The lynch-mob mentality of the gutter press and many ordinary people has been fuelled by government policy and statements.
Calling asylum seekers ‘bogus’ cuts off any humane and just support for people fleeing persecution. Calling those who have committed criminal acts ‘evil’ and refuting the notion of rehabilitation leaves people like Myra Hindley rotting in prison her whole life.
It is not a big step then to seek retribution rather than rehabilitation for the child killers of James Bulger.