Little Criminals

If the name "Bulger" rings a bell to Americans, it's Whitey Bulger, the notorious Boston crime boss played by Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese's overrated film The Departed. To Brits, however, the name Bulger more likely conjures up a 2-year-old boy who was the victim of one of the most terrible crimes ever committed. On Feb 12, 1993, little James was with his mother in a busy shopping center in Bootle, near Liverpool. His mother lost sight of him for only a moment and he was gone. Two 10-year-old boys, John Venables and Robert Thompson, took him to an isolated spot and beat him to death, using bricks and an iron bar. They then placed his body on railroad tracks and left the area. A short time later a train cut his body in half, but forensics proved the train hadn't been the cause of his lethal injuries. During the search for the boy, CCTV footage revealed one of the boys leading James away by the hand through the shopping center. It was the last time James was seen alive.

The boys were arrested and charged with murder. The trial was conducted - just after the boys turned 11 - under unprecedented scrutiny for the trial of underage defendants. Angry crowds gathered and tried to attack the police van carrying the children to court. But Britain's legal system could do nothing to the two boys except sentence them to juvenile detention until they turned 18. In 2000, under the strictest security, Venables and Thompson were given new identities and returned to society under lifelong parole.

The reason why all these terrible details are being dredged up again is because of a film called Detainment made by Vincent Lambe that uses court documents to re-create the trial of Venables and Thompson. It's been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, which Denise Bulger (now Fergus) is denouncing in the press as "disgusting." Critics of the film are also wondering about the necessity of going over the same awful ground again when, they say, it tells us nothing new.

I brought up the subject eight years ago in a post I called Juvenile Offenders in which I wrote: 'In law, the "age of majority" separates children from adults and is usually (and arbitrarily) the age of 18 (in Japan it's 20). But under criminal law, such a standard is not consistently observed or enforced. In the U.S., individual states can decide, depending on the severity of the crime committed, whether an offender can be tried as a "juvenile" under the Juvenile Justice System, or as an "adult"'.

It's quite surprising that AMPAS, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences should single out this particular short film for praise, since the treatment of the boys would certainly have been radically different in the States. They would most likely have been charged as "adults" for their crime, kept in juvenile detention until the age of 18, at which time they would've been transferred to a federal prison for the rest of their lives. That would probably be the only sentence that would satisfy Americans, some of whom would maybe even have called for the death penalty when the offenders turned 18. What would be the use, they would probably have argued, to incarcerate them (assuming there was no possibility of parole) for perhaps 50 or 60 years?

But the British have a different understanding of these matters, based on a broader - and much longer - experience of a civilized society. The boys' release was made after it was determined they were no longer a threat to society. Despite the fact that, since his release, Jon Venables has been jailed twice for violation of his parole due to child pornography in his possession, the system has been shown to have worked. The new film, however, has renewed the old "punishment versus rehabilitation" criminal justice argument. In two Guardian op-eds I've read (in the British press the Guardian has always been a progressive bastion), the issue is examined in detail. In one article, Gaby Hinsliff wrote about the changing nature of crimes committed by minors: "Children as young as nine have been found carrying knives. Gangs organising so-called 'county lines' operations, running drugs from the inner city deep out into rural towns, have been known to recruit from primary schools."(1) Such information is meant, I suppose, to educate those people who argue that no child should ever be in a prison cell.

Another article, published after Jon Venables was arrested a second time for possession of child pornography, pondered that

"Liberals like to believe in the perfection of the newborn
human as much as Christians do. It’s one of the irritations
of humanism. For them, environment is all. Condemners,
however, tend to be big on moral responsibility. This guy
had a much worse childhood than that guy, they’ll say, and
he did OK. They’re Old Testament. They love the idea of evil
and wickedness, of full human choice and the full human
choice of darkness. Even the word dyslexia, for them, is like
a red rag to a bull."

In my post from 2011, I wrote about a fiction film called Boy A (in their trial, Venables and Thompson were referred to as Boy A and Boy B), that sensitively examined the release of a boy from juvenile detention for a crime similar to the Bulger murder. The boy (played beautifully by Andrew Garfield) was provided with a new identity and a job, but whatever chances be may have had of leading a purposeful life were destroyed by elements of society (the media) that was determined to expose his true identity.

"My initial reaction to seeing the film, after my surprise
that it was made at all, was that such an uninsistent,
scrupulously neutral film could never have been made
in the U.S. - for one thing, since Americans are not nearly
as convinced of the rock-bottom decency of human beings,
they would never assume that anyone who committed a
crime such as the one committed by the two boys in the
film, could be redeemable in a million years. Or that a
minor should be protected by certain rights that make
him immune to prosecution as an adult no matter what
the crime was. Revenge is never very far from an
American's understanding of justice. So when a heinous
crime is committed, someone, no matter if they're children
or mentally incompetent, has to pay."

But something else is going on with the film Detainment that is downright infuriating - far more infuriating than that Vincent Lambe failed to "consult" James Bulger's parents. As Fintan O'Toole has just pointed out in The Irish Times, a petitioning campaign is ongoing at the change.org website demanding that the Oscar nomination be withdrawn and that the British Prime Minister apply pressure (whatever form that might be in) on the Academy, whilst Lambe is being demonized in the British press. This is especially odd because Detainment is an Irish film.

But O'Toole has come to the film's defense, both as an esthetically satisfying achievement and as a powerful moral statement:

"More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman dramatist
Terence, who as a former slave knew exactly what
it is like to be dehumanised, wrote: “I am human
and I consider that nothing human is alien to me.”
It is easy enough to say but very hard to feel. Much
that is human does feel alien – indeed, should and
must feel alien. Humans can do such terrible things
that we find ourselves wishing that there were
another species altogether lurking alongside our
own one. We reach for words that distance us
biologically from this evil genus: beasts, animals,
monsters. And we are both right and wrong to do
this. It is a necessary but falsely comforting fiction
and from time to time we have to be reminded
that this fiction is not real, that the monsters are
all too human.

"The real disturbance of Detainment is that once
you put Venables and Thompson on screen, played
by kids around the same age they were when they
murdered Jamie, you do something genuinely
terrifying: you humanise them. The film is not
sympathetic towards them. It does not excuse them.
It does not sentimentalise them. It merely shows
them: two children, one frightened and weepy,
one defiant and cold. But it shows them in the
flesh precisely as children – not beasts but little
humans.

And we are forced to ask: is this humanity alien to
me? I wish it were and I completely understand why
anyone would want to say that these creatures are
not us. But we know the truth that humans get
damaged early and that damaged humans are
dangerous humans. Lambe’s film is restrained,
serious and to me profoundly moral. He has done
something and it’s true."(3)

Whether the film Detainment wins an Oscar or not, I wonder how people in the country I now live in - the Philippines - would react to the story it retells. Legislation in this country has been proposed that would lower the age of criminal liability to 9. As barbaric as that may sound, it is simply the latest step by an old and ailing president in his murderous war on drugs that has caught the attention of the International Criminal Court. As I try to point out to Filipinos, a great majority of whom approve of the president's tactics, I have to contend with two views of their president - the local one that looks, at best, somewhat bewildered at his questionable use of power, hopeful of a positive outcome, and the view of the international press that is resoundingly disapproving of his avowed contempt for his country's own constitution as well as standards of legality and jurisprudence. Since it has become obvious to him that he can no longer prosecute his war on drugs with impunity, by "slaughtering" every drug offender, he is resorting to legal means, further crowding an already grossly overcrowded and overburdened justice system. But perhaps Filipinos believe that they are exceptional and that standards of civilized society don't apply here. Given their string of presidents in the past 50 years, two of which had to be driven from office through People Power uprisings, I honestly can't blame them.


(1) "Did we really need a film about the James Bulger murder?" by Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian, 25 Jan 2019.
(2) "Society did right by James Bulger's killers" by Deborah Orr, The Guardian, 25 Nov 2017.
(3) "Jamie Bulger film a serious and moral piece of work" by Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times, February 5, 2019.