In 1993, British toddler Jamie Bulger was enticed away from his mother and led by his abductors on a short journey that would end in his horrific death on the railroad tracks three hours later.
Evidence at the trial indicated that there were points along the way that the two perpetrators could have changed their course of action. Instead, they brutalized, sexually molested, and battered the child to death with bricks and an iron bar before laying his body across the tracks in hopes of hiding evidence of their involvement in his death. The two murderers, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, were ten years old.
Venables and Thompson - Evil and Savage or Victims of Society?
On the one hand, the boys have been depicted as “savages,’ “evil,” and “freaks” of nature. On the other hand, they have been viewed as victims of broad social, economic, and cultural forces that give rise to criminal behavior.
From a determinist point of view, Jon Venables’s and Robert Thompson’s fate was set even before their birth. Born to ill-educated, working class parents, the details of the boys’ lives constitute a catalogue of social ills. Venables’s parents were unstable and depressed and the father eventually abandoned the family. The boy’s siblings were both developmentally challenged and he suffered the brunt of his suicidal mother’s physical and verbal abuse.
Thompson’s environment was even worse. The second to the youngest of seven violent boys, he was, early on, exposed to the criminal habits of his brothers, one an arsonist and another a master thief. Both parents were alcoholics and the father beat the mother regularly.
Exonerated by Family Histories of Abuse
The determinist argument holds that a person’s heredity and environment fix their choices before they are made. By this argument the two boys could be exonerated since they were clearly at a disadvantage by their atrocious environments and their family histories of alcoholism and abuse. One could counter, however, that by this same argument all people raised in similar circumstances should go on to commit crimes and even, given an approximation of conditions, commit murder.
Still, the argument worked well in the boys’ petitions for anonymity when released. As reported by Julie Hyland on the World Socialist Web Site in January of 2001, the official policy that led to the conviction of the boys was seen to be characterized by “intolerance, prejudice and a brutal disregard for the acute social problems that produces {sic} such cases.”
Where There Is Choice, There Is Moral Responsibility
In retracing the trajectory of the boys’ movements on the day of the murder, however, one cannot dismiss the several opportunities the boys had to turn back from the crime, a crime that grew in stages from abduction, to initial physical violence, to extreme battery, and finally to murder. Each stage would seem to present a choice.
While, at 10 years of age, the boys would not possess the control over their impulses that adults would be expected to display, given the extended duration of the abduction and murder, and assuming that cognitively they could be expected to have had some intellectual understanding of right and wrong, it becomes very difficult to argue for a release from all moral responsibility.
Ultimately, the anger and hostility that met the news of the release of Thompson and Venables in 2001 would seem to be an indicator of a persistent and passionate belief in culpability. If it is true that one can be culpable, it follows that one is morally responsible for one’s bad choices. When those choices cause other people to suffer, it is a rare person who does not cry out for justice.
References: Scott, Shirley Lynn. The Death of James Bulger. “Notorious Murders/Young Killers. Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods. Courtroom Television Network. 10 April 2007 http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/young/bulger/1.html
Jeanne Lombardo - Jeanne Lombardo holds a Bachelors in Foreign Languages and a Masters in Humanities.
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