The next generation of white terrorists?
A boy stripped naked, battered and left in a makeshift grave. Two little brothers sexually humiliated and tortured in a two-hour ordeal. And the attackers? Young children like themselves. DAVID JONES explores a chilling modern phenomenon…
The two attacks bore chilling similarities and they were carried out on grim Yorkshire council estates less than 30 miles apart. In both cases the victims were young and vulnerable, and an elaborate story was invented to lure them to a secluded place.
In both cases they were stripped, and saw their clothes ritually burnt before they were tortured and savagely beaten.
Most disturbingly of all, however, when police investigated these protracted and gratuitous acts of violence they discovered that the perpetrators were themselves no more than children, their ages ranging from just ten to 14 years old.
Savage: A scene from the 1963 film of William Golding’s book, Lord Of The Flies, which saw a group of children turn on each other with animalistic savagery
One of the attacks, which took place in Leeds – the other happened in nearby Doncaster – involved four children, who attacked a 15-year-old with a mental age of seven.
Such was the savagery of the assault that Judge Kerry Macgill described it in court as ‘almost like a scene out of Lord Of The Flies, where children are left to their own devices and do simply appalling things to other children’.
After talking to those involved, I have found this reference to William Golding’s disquieting novel, in which a group of schoolboys turn on one another with animalistic savagery after being stranded on a desert island, was no exaggeration.
These two cases come more than 40 years after another North Country child – 11-year-old Mary Bell – was convicted of strangling two little boys aged four and three ’solely for the pleasure and excitement of killing’, as the prosecutor phrased it. At the time, a horrified nation vowed that it must never be allowed to happen again.
The same was said in 1993, when Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, two ten-year-old Merseyside boys, abducted and murdered toddler James Bulger while he was out shopping with his mother.
Aeriel view of the police investigation in the Brick Ponds areas of Edlington in Doncaster last month
Yet barely a week seems to pass without news of a vicious assault by a young person, and those recent atrocities in Doncaster and Leeds – in which, as we will see, the victims were fortunate to escape with their lives – are only the latest reminder that such brutality is happening again, and with alarming regularity.
Inevitably, this raises disturbing questions. Are attacks by children really increasing, and are we correct to suppose the attackers are using ever more extreme and inventive forms of violence? If so, why?
More pressingly, what social factors are spawning this frightening new generation of potential Bells and Thompsons, and is enough being done to identify them and prevent them from developing into psychopaths?
During this investigation I have examined reams of statistics and reports, and spoken to leading experts, including two of Britain’s most eminent adolescent psychiatrists, Professor Susan Bailey and Dr Eileen Vizard, both of whom gave evidence at the Bulger trial.
The picture that emerges is surprising and illuminating. Before we study it, however, we should describe in more detail the two episodes in Yorkshire. For, extreme as they may have been, the background to these incidents appears to form part of an all-too-typical pattern.
‘They threatened to kill him, stripped him naked, made a bonfire of his shoes and coat, urinated on him, stuck lit cigarettes up his nose, punched and kicked him and lashed him with planks and branches’
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As Judge Macgill heard in court last week, the Leeds attack occurred on a sprawling red-brick council estate south of the city, where the four assailants – a girl of 14, two boys aged 11, and another boy of 13 – lived in close proximity to their 15-year-old victim.
Since the attackers all pleaded guilty to attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent, the full story was not told in court. But according to the 14-year-old girl’s mother, the attack was conceived after the victim became infatuated with her.
‘He stalked her for four months and would not leave her alone, spending hours standing outside her house,’ she told me. ‘He was constantly texting and telephoning her.’
She claims the attack happened one Sunday evening after the victim sent the 14-year-old girl – a pretty, popular teenager, who had hoped to become a nursery teacher – a particularly lewd message accompanied by a ‘pornographic’ image of himself.
But even supposing this story to be true – and the victim’s mother strongly disputes it – then it surely cannot excuse the calculating manner in which this mentally disabled boy (who attends a special needs school and cannot even tie his own shoelaces) was ensnared, nor the horrific torture inflicted on him.
According to his mother, a 55-year-old who has seven children by several fathers, he was lured to a stretch of waste ground, hidden from the estate by a ring of trees, after the girl asked him to help her look for a mobile phone she had supposedly lost there.
When he arrived, he was grabbed by the gang. They threatened to kill him, stripped him naked, made a bonfire of his shoes and coat, urinated on him, stuck lit cigarettes up his nose, punched and kicked him and lashed him with planks and branches.
Horrifying: Police pictures of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables who abducted and then murdered two-year-old James Bulger
When the onslaught was over, the boy was dumped in a ditch and covered with pieces of wood. It was described by the prosecutor as ‘perhaps a makeshift grave’.
The waste ground is only a few yards from a bus stop and a busy pub, so why no one heard his screams and came to his aid is anyone’s guess. He eventually crawled on to the road, and local shop assistants covered him with dustbin-liners and called 999.
When his mother arrived, he was being treated by paramedics, and she thought at first that he had been hit by a car. ‘He was unrecognisable,’ she told me. ‘His face was all bruised and swollen and he was covered in cuts and burns, and they had kicked him so hard between the legs that his private parts went black.
‘He was born with his left kidney attached to his bladder, and when they examined him they found that it was bleeding. Nine months later he still has terrible flashbacks and wakes up screaming, and I have to put my arms round him and reassure him that no one will ever get him again.
The front page of the Mail on Sunday on February 14, 1993
‘The children who did this are animals. But it’s happening every day now, isn’t it? There’s just a lack of discipline; they’ve taken all the power away from the parents. You can’t even chastise your own kids when they misbehave anymore, or more than likely it will be you who ends up in trouble.’
Ironically, the attackers’ families said precisely the same thing. ‘They’ve got no respect for anything,’ lamented the tattooed father of the girl, who was described as the ringleader and received the longest sentence – 15 months in detention.
Her grandfather concurred, adding that ‘they’ would benefit from ‘a good smack’. But whether he was referring to his granddaughter – and whether she has ever been smacked or otherwise disciplined – the family declined to say.
Instead, they retreated to a position that has become wearily par for the course in an era when so many parents have abdicated responsibility for their children’s behaviour and blame everyone else if something goes wrong.
Their daughter had only intended the boy to be thumped and warned off… she was a model pupil who had never been in trouble before, and her sentence was grossly unfair… the attack was unwarranted, of course, but the victim had brought it on himself.
For good measure, they pointed out that they had recently moved into a private house away from the roughest part of the estate, and had been trying to better themselves.
A female relative of one of the 11-year-old boys, who were both given two-year supervision orders, similarly defended him. ‘Yes the attack was ferocious – but when you listen to what the victim did, you can understand why it happened. It’s so unfair. They’ve been tarred as savages.’
She said the younger boys did not usually hang around with the 13-yearold boy (whom she claimed to be a habitual trouble-maker), nor with the girl. But they had been drawn into the attack because they happened to have been present when she was describing the lewd text messages.
Devastated: Murdered James Bulger and his mother Denise Fergus, pictured here in 2001
Significantly, perhaps, she said her young relative – who had ‘a bit of attitude’, but was otherwise polite and well-behaved – had been habitually bullied by the other 11-year-old. She depicted this other boy as a tearaway who had been suspended from school.
The clear suggestion was that he had been ‘led on’ and was trying to impress more dominant, aggressive boys.
It will come as no surprise that the 13-year-old’s family were also at pains to exonerate him. Rather belatedly, we might think, his 18-year-old sister reproached herself for teasing him relentlessly, making his life ‘hell’.
His mother, the wife of an unemployed builder, claimed that he had been born six weeks prematurely and suffered from learning difficulties. ‘He’s a victim, too,’ she said. ‘He’s a victim of society. It seems everybody was out to get him.’
As for the attack in neighbouring Doncaster, two brothers aged ten and 11 have been charged with the attempted murder so we can report little about this case.
‘Whereas in the past there was much more of a reason to commit violence, now it often starts over a trivial issue and it’s more likely to result in serious injury… and the culprits are also getting younger’
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Suffice it to say that the victims, one 11 years old and the other nine, were allegedly subjected to an even more sickening ordeal, which included sexual humiliation and other forms of torture, and is said to have lasted about two hours.
No one could possibly pretend that the accused boys were raised in favourable circumstances. Their home was a dilapidated semi shared with several brothers, and the front door bore a sign saying: ‘Beware of the kids.’
By all accounts, when their father left the family, their mother was unable to cope, so they were fostered by a couple in a former pit village in Yorkshire, where the alleged attack took place.
The prosecution claims that they persuaded the victims to accompany them to a secluded stream running through a copse by telling them that they had seen a dead animal there.
They were so badly beaten that the younger boy’s arm was cut to the bone, and the 11-year-old was placed on a life-support machine. The latter’s mother said last week that he is still not ready to return to school, five weeks after the attack.
So much for the depressing details; but are such incidents becoming more prevalent? The simple answer is that it depends on who you ask.
According to the Youth Justice Board, whose statistics are compiled simply by asking young people, in confidence, whether they have committed crimes, violence by under 17-year-olds has varied little year on year since the Bulger murder.
Many academics consider these numbers to be the most reliable because others are derived from court convictions, and only about 3 per cent of cases ever come before the courts.
Horror: A police tent marks the spot where James’s body was found on the embankment of the Edge Hill to Bootle freight line in Liverpool
However, Ministry of Justice figures released a few weeks ago show that the number of ten to 17-year-olds successfully prosecuted for violence has soared by 30 per cent in the decade since New Labour came to power.
Furthermore, according to researchers at the Centre for Social Justice, the independent think-tank set up by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, all the anecdotal evidence points to a significant rise, both in the frequency and seriousness of attacks committed by children.
But this likely rise is being obscured, according to the think-tank’s senior policy adviser Charlotte Pickles, by changes in government methods of recording violent crime.
‘When we look at the type and degree of violence among young people, we would certainly say it’s getting worse – and much more chaotic,’ she says.
‘Whereas in the past there was much more of a reason to commit violence, now it often starts over a trivial issue and it’s more likely to result in serious injury. The culprits are also getting younger, which would fit the pattern in these recent cases in Yorkshire.’
Shocking: Child murderer Mary Bell in a police issued picture in 1977
The CSJ is critical of the Government for failing to do more to identify potential problem children at a very young age, and Mr Duncan Smith believes they must be set on the right path before their third birthday if they are to have a realistic hope of growing into responsible adults.
He is convinced this can be done via voluntary ‘early intervention’ programmes targeted at the worst sink estates, and cites areas in America where they have transformed the outlook for children from unpromising family backgrounds.
Such programmes are expensive, of course, but U. S. research shows them to be 17 times more cost-effective than doing nothing and allowing these children to drift into a life of crime with all its associated costs. When we learn that British taxpayers shell out between £50,000 and £150,000 a year to keep young people in secure accommodation, the benefit becomes clear.
So how do we identify these children? At present the task falls to those who have regular access to the families: hard-pressed health visitors and social workers, for example, or primary school teachers.
But as Professor Bailey, who has studied more than 250 child murderers in her 30-year career, points out, teachers aren’t trained to detect the behavioural differences which mark out the abnormal child.
Professor Bailey says there are a number of factors which might cause children to behave aggressively. They include inconsistent parenting, being raised by a mother who suffers from depression during the child’s early years, and/or an aggressive father figure, and witnessing repeated domestic violence or sexual abuse at an early age. Such experiences can affect the physiology of a child’s brain, ‘programming’ them to act violently.
But, of course, a large number of children are nurtured amid these unfavourable conditions, and only a tiny percentage grow into violent criminals. One thing that may separate them is the absence of a positive influence, such as supportive teacher or relative, so that they do not build ‘resilience’ to their environment.
Professor Bailey is urging the Government to fund more extensive research in these areas, and calls for an end to politically expedient quickfixes, such as ASBOs which, she says, only shift a problem child on to someone else’s doorstep.
Dr Vizard, consultant child psychiatrist for an NSPCC national service for young offenders which was set up 20 years ago, agrees, saying that, given sufficient commitment, much could be done to prevent children becoming violent criminals.
Violent: Barely a week seems to pass without news of a vicious assault by a young person
Her Home Office research study into 280 children with abusive and violent behaviour shows that many potential psychopaths can be spotted by the time they enter primary school, where they can be very hard to handle and are often excluded.
Moreover, if they go on to commit aggressive crimes early in their lives – say between the ages of ten and 13 -they are far more likely to become hardened career criminals than those who don’t get into trouble for the first time until their mid-teens.
Dr Vizard wants the Government to fund research into new treatment approaches for these disturbed children which, she says, could save the public purse millions by keeping them out of the criminal justice system.
When treating this youngest group of offenders, Dr Vizard also tends to uncover more severe psychological disturbances than she finds in slightly older clients. ‘It’s as if they have not been able to develop a moral compass in the way that older adolescents have,’ she says.
From the expert who evaluated Robert Thompson, this is a sobering pronouncement indeed. And, while it is undoubtedly right that everything possible should be done to identify and help these children, there is a far wider problem.
In a society where family breakdown, lack of community, absent or feckless parents and ill-discipline have rapidly become the norm, we have created the very conditions which are more likely to produce the sort of troubled children who indulge in this horrific violence.
How dreadful it will be if one of the legacies of our supposedly ‘enlightened’ age is to create a generation of violent, alienated Lord Of The Flies children.
