Jamie Bulger chain mail thing

[kjt1981]

i couldnt find an ethics thread, which this would probably be more suited to, so i put it here.

has anyone else recieved the Mail regarding Jamie Bulgers killers? Just wondered what other peoples opinions were on it? Should they be given another chance to start afresh or not? The average human mind isnt fully formed until the persons in their twenties? Is your perception of reality as a child the same as your perception of reality as an adult?

I suppose its easy to be objective when it doesnt directly affect you but d still be Interested to know what others thought...

[Communism]

Well I think that reforming people is very important but what these people did seems to me as if they are beyond reform. I don't think they would be safe in society.

[Hegemonicretribution]

Originally posted by [email protected] 19 2006, 01:10 PM
Well I think that reforming people is very important but what these people did seems to me as if they are beyond reform. I don't think they would be safe in society.
I don't think they are really beyond reform as such, I mean there have been feral children that have been assimilated into society at similar ages to his killers (perhaps a little younger), and this shows that change is possible.

I suppose to judge for sure in this case we would have to know far more, but this is indeed a good question.

On the one hand, I don't think we should romanticise childhood as we do, or deem them as irressponsible for their actions as some have tried to do...but in this case we must realise they grew up in a society that did do this.

We change throughout our lives, and I know I have changed every year of my life for some time, although perhaps less over the last couple of years than previous year as I exit puberty, but is being "underdeveloped" really an excuse? We could always claim to be in that state, and in a way perhaps we are which is why I see rehablitation as possible. Murder has a low reoffending rate, but this case was different as the reasons were not perhaps the same as would be the case in an "adult" murder.

Thankfully these cases are not commonplace, as those that occur I can't see as being being less than impossible to really comprehend. I don't think that there can be a definitive answer in these cases.

[Vanguard1917]

For those that don't know, Jamie Bulger was a toddler who was killed by two 10 year-old boys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ThompsonVenables.jpg) in 1992. They were sentenced to ten years in prison and they served eight.

They should never have been imprisoned.


On the one hand, I don't think we should romanticise childhood as we do, or deem them as irressponsible for their actions as some have tried to do...but in this case we must realise they grew up in a society that did do this.

Children are not rational adults. They are not able to make a rational, adult distiction between 'right and wrong'. That's precisely why they get up to mischief and do stupid things. And that's precisely why we should not subject children to the same laws that we subject adults to.

Jamie Bulger's killing was terrible and tragic. It is not suprising that it shocked the whole of Britain, and it's also not suprising that many people responded emotionally to the incident. In the event that Bulger's killers were adults, they should justly have been sentenced according to the law. In this case, though, the killers were children. It was an act of childhood mischief - just in a very extreme form. That is how it ought to have been treated by the state. But the bourgeois state was incapable of a rational judgement of the 'crime'. Instead, by imprisoning the boys, it decided to respond to widespread emotional sentiment - largely promoted by the mainstream populist media.

[TupacAndChe4Eva]

I am from Liverpool.

As a citizen of this city, I feel I have a greater understanding of the effects this incident had on the people of the place.

They should be locked away, and never released again.

When I, and most normal people, were 10, you had a basic understanding of what was right and wrong. When I was 10, I would not have abducted a 2 year-old to murder him, to stisfy my curiousity.

They took him, beat him with steel pipes, tried to put a battery up his anus, made him drink paint, gouged one of his eyes out, and then ties him to a train track. They knew they had done wrong because they felt if they tied him to a track, it would look like it had been an accident. They even went back to the scene, infamously captured on the BBC News cameras 24 hours later.

There are rumours going around in Liverpool that one of them lives in Carlisle and the other in Devon.

Fuck them, I hope a good Working-Class lad chops them bastards up when they get found.

[Hegemonicretribution]

Vabguard 1917, it seems that you imply that thre is a definite difference between a child and an adult's capability of reason. If so, defiine a child, define what rationality is or when a person becomes ratioanl, and explain how you know the 10 year olds were not in possession of it.

There are some adults less rational than children, and the distinction is often only a guideline, it is not really quantifiable. I am not saying that because of the way society works children are even slower at developing, but rather that just because they are children does not stop them from making decisions.

I have never been able to fully comprehend this case, or draw definite conclusions from it (I suppose it is a rare example of humanity over reason), but I do find the concept of childhod dubious at best.