James and Silje

James Bulger was one month off his third birthday when he was lured away from his mother by two ten year old boys in The Strand shopping centre in Bootle, near Liverpool. The names of the two boys — Jon Venables and Robert Thompson — are known to most people in Britain and their police mug shots have been engraved as the archetypal images of the person who is ‘born bad’. The killer child is a rare entity: they appeal to our desire for the ‘media circus’ to deliver us an ever-more macabre and gruesome spectacle, doing so by negating the image of child as paragon of innocence and purity.

Venables and Thompson led Bulger a long way from the shopping centre. Their journey concluded in Walton cemetery where they attacked Bulger, hitting and kicking him, throwing paint in his eyes and bricks at his head, and dropping the fishplate of a train track onto his head, the blow that likely killed him. They hoped this would cause the murder to be mistaken for a train accident, but they were soon identified and arrested.

The media response was turbulent. Children, violence and mystery are buzzwords in the newsroom and mixed together produce a sensationalist storm (look at the coverage of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann the following decade). The public response was an outpouring of primal emotions, mostly retributive rage. Recorded footage of the boys being taken from the jailhouse to court in a police van shows angry crowds outside waiting for them. The crowds rush at the police van, throwing whatever is at hand. The van makes it away but one might take a morbid…