The Case of Mary Bell

It is, of course, impossible for anyone who murders, including Mary Bell and these boys, to “pay” in terms of years of imprisonment, for killing another human being. In that sense, eight or ten years are as irrelevant as 15—or life.

This present case, because of its extreme nature, has demonstrated most forcibly what is wrong. It is wrong to treat children as adults and to demand that they comprehend the language and thought processes of adults. It is wrong to sit children in a dock for weeks on public exhibition.
However talented police interrogators may be, it is wrong that they should question children for days on end about an act, a deed, a crime, without the training or authority for a parallel goal of understanding. It is wrong to use tricks, emotion or a parent to coerce a child, for however necessary and right it may seem in the essentials of the moment, the child will never forget.
Truth must emerge not through the pressure of, or the longing for, love, but out of an inner need. The admission of guilt, and the relief of remorse, are only given to human beings through self-knowledge. And children, just as human, only smaller, have exactly the same needs.

He is a powerful-looking man, but quiet, with warm eyes. The moment we began to talk about those days in February a year ago, they filled with tears. He tried to joke, “Just a reflex”, he said, and added that his wife would tell me there was a softy inside that big man. I didn’t think so. There was a very human being inside that man.

It is difficult to reconcile Sue Venables’s claim that she had never been told about any of Jon’s troubles at school with the teachers’ statements. She doesn’t lie—I cannot say this firmly enough: she is, I think, someone who is and always was over-taxed, by life, by her own feelings, by two children born with problems.
Depression is the consequence of being unhappy with one’s self; the defence against allowing it to continue and overwhelm one is to deny all that is wrong. My feeling is that Sue—who should have had help for many years—has created a falsely gay and happy exterior to hide, primarily from herself, her sadness inside. Neil, who undoubtedly loves her, has, I think, to her detriment and his diminishment, “enabled” her—assisted her—in this self-deceit.
When Jon finally manifested the trouble which had been building up in him for years, she could not face it: she denied its existence.

Children who kill are not produced by a class, but unhappiness. Unhappiness in children is never innate, it is created by the adults they “belong to”: there are adults in all classes of society who are immature, confused, inadequate or sick, and, under given and unfortunate circumstances, their children will reflect, reproduce and often pay for the miseries of the adults they need and love. Children are not evil.

When are we going to learn that no relationship can hold darker dangers than the one between mother and child gone wrong? When are we going to have the courage to discard the tired principle of the absolute sacredness of family and parental ties? When are we going to allow parents to be free of children they for some reason cannot love, and help children to be free of the catastrophic handicap of parents who cannot love them? When indeed will we be mature enough to accept, for ourselves and our children, that there is no obligation to love, there is no guilt in not loving, and that the only valid basis for relationships between parents and children, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives, women and men, women and women, men and men—between any human beings—is love freely given from both sides.

But the problem of psychopathic children requires compassion, not sentimentality. It also requires a realistic assessment of everything the future might hold. In the light of the limitation of present knowledge about psychopathic children this realism must necessarily—if sadly—veer toward extreme caution. For however essential it is to give individual sympathetic consideration to each child, yet such children can no more than any other human being be seen in isolation from the rest of society: that is sentimentality, not compassion. The question in Mary’s case—as in that of many other such children in many other places—cannot be “Should they be locked up or free?” but “What represents the least risk to themselves and to society? What can be done to equip them to live as good, as useful, and as inoffensive lives as possible—whether this be under restraint or freedom?”

“Psychopath” has in fact become almost a cliché—an emotive term used far too readily even by specialists, and far too often by the media.

Sociologists William and Joan McCord of Stanford University, California, supply a very clear description in their book The Psychopath3 which has become an essential textbook for any student of the subject

Somehow Betty and Billy had worked out some kind of “modus vivendi.” Their children until the events in 1968 were never “in care” and, in a haphazard sort of way, the Bells were a family unit—which cannot fail to make us question, once again, the validity of the social work theory which claims that “any family is better than none” and that “keeping the family together at all costs” is the best guard against maladjustment and delinquency in children.