Telegraph: This case was no aberration - it's the system we created

26th May 2010

“Beneath the tragedy inflicted on three young children lies an iceberg of injustice.”

This is the opinion of journalist Mary Riddell, writing in the Telegraph, about the most recent English case to set the tabloids and broadsheets alight, that of two boys aged 10 and 11 who were convicted of raping an eight-year-old girl. Referring back to our most significant cultural marker in this area, Riddell suggests that James Bulger’s murder in 1993 was “the moment when cultural history overlapped with modern justice”, signalling a shift in public attitudes towards juvenile offenders, sparking a revulsion at serious crimes committed by children, and making sure that England and Wales became “the biggest child jailer in Western Europe.”

In March, IPRT's Executive Director, Liam Herrick, wrote a blog on attitudes towards young offenders, something which had come to prominence again due to the re-arrest of Jon Venables. Liam, too, spoke of the “profound social impact” the case had on society, and argued that our willingness to condemn children as ‘evil’ was in opposition to our attempt, as a nation, to redress the previous wrongs committed against children and enable children’s rights.

England has demonstrated something of a punitive response to many children convicted of criminal acts, ranging from the hysterical reactions of 1993, to the more recent case of Edlington and others.

Liam made the point that these are hard cases, cases which test how far our commitment to children’s rights extends when we are confronted with something we cannot understand or accept. So far, Ireland would appear to have avoided the wholesale demonisation of huge swaths of young people, demonstrated perhaps in the very low number of Behaviour Orders in comparison to the broad use of ASBOs in England and Wales. Ireland has its own hard cases however, the teenage boys imprisoned in St. Patrick's are perhaps our most glaring failure towards young people. Such failures, which most often do not stir media interest, represent our own failure to commit to children's rights as fully as we should.

Read more:

• Telegraph: This case was no aberration – it’s the system we created
• Director’s Blog: Testing the strength of our principles