The car turns into the driveway of the large Edwardian house, but it ignores the front door and sweeps on to the low, new brick-built extension at the side of the house. The windows there are of reflective glass. Outsiders can\u2019t see in. But the occupants can see out.<\/p>\n
As the car approaches, a shutter at the side of the building rises. After the car has entered, it falls. In the control room, where staff survey two banks of close-circuit TV screens \u2013 from 16 external and 16 internal cameras \u2013 the staff press the button to close the shutter. Only when it has clanged back into place are the car doors opened. Two men get out of the back. So does the small boy who has been sitting between them.<\/p>\n
This is not one of the two boys from Edlington, near Doncaster, who will be sentenced this week for a sadistically violent attack committed when they were aged just 10 and 11 on two other boys of similar age. But it is a boy who has committed a crime like that. Only a minority of such cases come to public attention.<\/p>\n
The child is one of the 150 children in Britain today who are so violent, sometimes at an age as young as 10, that they have to be locked up. The building is one of 10 secure children\u2019s homes throughout England \u2013 with innocuous names like Red Bank, Vinney Green, Barton Moss, East Moor, Hillside and Clayfield \u2013 which keep them under lock and key, for the protection of the public and, in many cases, for the good of the children themselves.<\/p>\n
It was in a home like this that the 10-year-old killers of the toddler James Bulger \u2013 Robert Thompson and Jon Venables \u2013 served their eight-year sentences. Venables was held in the same unit that had previously held another child killer, Mary Bell, who was also only aged 11 when she was convicted of killing a three-year-old and a four-year-old in two separate attacks. It is to two separate homes like these that the Edlington brothers, the \u201cdevil boys\u201d as the tabloids called them, will be taken.<\/p>\n
The boy does his best to look composed and confident. But he has lost some of his swagger. He is no longer in control of his own life. That had been brought home to him in the car on the long drive from the courthouse to the secure unit. He had been asked if he would like a McDonald\u2019s, since he had been whisked out of the court with no food, and it had been a long drive. But they had stopped at a drive-through, and the food had been passed through the driver\u2019s window so the boy had no chance to escape. In the secure unit there are locks on every door, and the keys are on a chain from the manager\u2019s belt.<\/p>\n
The boy is escorted from the garage across a corridor along which he can hear the noise of other children in the dining room. He glances nervously towards the sound as he is shepherded into a meeting room with a long, narrow table and works of art on the walls, done by previous inmates. There is a painting from the inside of a cave, looking out to the blue-grey daylight. There is a Banksy-style stencil of a black-and-white rock thrower in mid-hurl, his missile replaced by a bunch of flowers. There is a realist daub of a pot of flowers, withered and dead.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether or not they admit it, no matter how hard they are, they\u2019re scared,\u201d the unit\u2019s manager, a social worker with two decades of experience of detaining these children, tells me when the boy is gone. But before that he does an introductory run through of the unit\u2019s daily regime.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe get up at 7.30,\u201d he begins. The boy looks shocked, as if he thought that 7.30 only happened in the evening. \u201cBreakfast at 8.15. Then chores \u2013 hoovering, dusting \u2013 till 8.50. Then education, with lessons till 12.15, including a short break, and then lunch. Then education again until 3.30, after which there is some individual or group work till tea at 4.45. After that it\u2019s homework for an hour…\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHomework?\u201d says the boy, incredulously. \u201cCan\u2019t I go on the Xbox?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHomework, for one hour, then after that Structured Activities \u2013 craftwork, model- making, gym, badminton, table tennis, volleyball,\u201d says the manager. \u201cThen after that maybe some time on the Xbox, if you\u2019ve earned the privilege. We have supper at 8.30 and then it\u2019s off to bed with everybody, depending on their age, locked in by 9.30.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c9.30? I don\u2019t go to bed at 9.30.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou do now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The manager lays down the other rules and sets out the ethos and the expectations of the unit. \u201cWe don\u2019t tolerate bullying. We don\u2019t accept violence or aggression or behaviour that puts others at risk. There is no smoking or alcohol allowed …\u201d and on he goes, advising the boy not to disclose to the other inmates the reason he has been sentenced. There is a hierarchy of crimes for imprisoned children, as there is for adults, with some seen as glamorous \u2013 a response the unit wants to discourage \u2013 and others provoking bullying.<\/p>\n
At the end, the unit\u2019s manager asks: \u201cHave you got any questions?\u201d When the boy says \u201cNo\u201d, he asks: \u201cWould you like to phone your mum?\u201d<\/p>\n
The sooner a child settles in, the less trouble he will be. Arranging an early visit by a mother \u2013 even a mother whose behaviour has aggravated their child\u2019s delinquency \u2013 is a key part of the initial strategy of normalisation.<\/p>\n
The boy is conducted down the corridor. \u201cThe lights come on automatically, as you pass,\u201d the manager tells him. \u201cAnd cameras film everywhere, except in bedrooms. They record everything \u2013 for my safety, as well as yours.\u201d He points to a flashing light in a fitting in the ceiling. \u201cThat identifies me, and my location, from my pager.\u201d<\/p>\n
They come to another locked door, with a keypad and a fingerprint scanner by it. \u201cEvery resident care worker has his own individual PIN number he must enter. And the scanner only works with a live finger. It wouldn\u2019t work if someone had cut it off,\u201d he says, and laughs. His is a grim humour, but there is a point to his jokes. \u201cAlways tell them everything,\u201d he says later. \u201cSo they know, and they know you know.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is nothing here of the atmosphere of a Victorian gaol. There are no bars, but the windows are thick plastic that can\u2019t be broken. The doors may look wooden, but that is veneer on a heavy steel core. \u201cYoung people are not here to be punished,\u201d the manager says afterwards. \u201cThe punishment is being locked up.\u201d<\/p>\n
He takes the boy into the dining room. \u201cEveryone puts on weight here,\u201d jokes the manager. \u201cThe food is good, with three or four choices including salad, sandwiches and a healthy option. You can get chips, but only on Fridays.\u201d The room is served from a hatch with a grille behind it, to prevent the inmates getting hold of the knives in the kitchen.<\/p>\n
The boy turns to look at the staff behind the grille. But he is not interested in the food. He is avoiding the gaze of the dozen or so other residents, a mix of boys and girls aged between 12 and 15, although vulnerable boys can be allowed to stay until they are 16 before being sent to a Secure Training Centre, which houses 14-16 year olds, or a Young Offender Institution, for 16-18 year olds.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow remember what it was like on your first day,\u201d the manager says to the others, introducing the boy by name. \u201cAnd don\u2019t go bombarding him with questions.\u201d The kids sit three or four to a table, with an adult. There is a gender mix of staff, who wear their own clothes rather than uniforms as staff do in the units for older children. \u201cWe\u2019re after something approximating to a parental relationship,\u201d says the manager afterwards.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe use first names here,\u201d the manager tells the boy. \u201cBecause respect doesn\u2019t come from titles. It has to be earned. And that\u2019s a two-way thing. If you don\u2019t like me, that\u2019s alright, but if you call me a fucking knobhead we\u2019ll deal with that.\u201d It is a warning, but it is matter of fact and contains no menace.<\/p>\n
They leave the others to their meal and walk through the unit. In the lounge the television set is boxed into a wooden bookcase with a huge Perspex screen in front of it. \u201cThey get smashed,\u201d the manager shrugs to me. \u201cYou learn the hard way. After 20 years in the job I\u2019m still learning.\u201d The locked cupboards contain the unit\u2019s DVD collection. \u201cYou can only watch films or play games with the appropriate age certificate; there\u2019s no Grand Theft Auto in here,\u201d he says. \u201cThe other cupboards are mainly filled with books. We\u2019re very keen on books.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next room is a classroom with a whiteboard and five computer terminals. In the corner of the room is a carton full of baby dolls, black, white and Chinese-looking. Each has a programmable box in the back. \u201cWe use them to teach the kids something about looking after a baby. You can programme them so they wake up every two hours through the night and cry. The cry is piercing. If the doll is tossed aside or thumped, the box will register all that. We give them to boys as well as girls.\u201d<\/p>\n
But this is just in passing. He is moving through the unit towards the sleeping quarters. Bedrooms, he calls them, but when he opens the last door and ushers the boy inside with the words \u201cThis is your room\u201d he might as well use the word \u201ccell\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is frighteningly austere and spartan. The heavy plastic bed is built into the walls and floor and is topped with a three-inch mattress. The adjoining bathroom has its door locked open and set flush into the wall, so it offers no ligature points from which an inmate might hang himself. For the same reason there is no shelf below the mirror. There is no shower spout; the rose just emerges from the ceiling. There is no shower tray even, the water falls onto the bare floor. Even the hinges of the door have been fully recessed so there is nothing to which a belt, shoelace, shirt or other means of self-harm might be fixed.<\/p>\n
No that such pieces of clothing are allowed in the cell. All must be left in a locker outside. Nothing is allowed into the cell which has not been risk-assessed. In the early stages not even photographs of home are allowed. Nor even the teddy bears which some 10-year-olds bring in with them \u2013 for these are child-killers who fall asleep sucking their thumbs and often wet the bed, the manager says afterwards. He sees them, though the hatch in the cell door through which a member of staff looks every 20 minutes throughout the night \u2013 having turned on the light to make sure they\u2019re asleep.<\/p>\n
They are not even, at first, allowed a radio, though later they can save for one from the money they can earn for good behaviour. Reinforcing the positive, rather than punishing the negative, is the strategy these units have found, over the years, to be most successful. \u201cWhen they have earned enough privileges they will be loaned a radio belonging to the unit, but they are very basic ones. They have to be because they often get smashed, as an expression of anger, distress or frustration when Mum or Dad doesn\u2019t turn up for a visit, or a phone call with girlfriend outside goes wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
The inmates are given 30 minutes\u2019 worth of phone calls free each day. \u201cIt\u2019s not a privilege,\u201d says the manager later. \u201cWe want to encourage them to talk. It\u2019s the first step to everything. Each has an approved list of people they can phone; they can\u2019t just can\u2019t just ring their Uncle Degsy who turns out to be the bloke they get their drugs from. But even kids who never had time for their mothers outside find they want to talk to their mums once they\u2019re in here. It\u2019s one of the first changes being locked up brings.\u201d<\/p>\n
The walls of the cell are bare. A boy may be allowed to put up posters later, but nothing more. \u201cYou can\u2019t hide much behind a poster,\u201d the manager says. It will not be long before the process of small rewards begins. \u201cWe can have a good idea by the end of the first week how they are going to behave. It\u2019s amazing how quickly residential staff get to know the kids.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inside the boy looks around the stark cell. The door thuds shut with a deep resonating thud behind him. He lies down on his bed and stares at the high white bare ceiling. A ghostly disembodied voice echoes eerily from the intercom by the hatch in the door. \u201cYou alright then?\u201d<\/p>\n
He replies with a single word and turns his head into his pillow and begins to cry. They call it a secure children\u2019s home. But he is in prison. There is no mistaking that.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
No child is born evil. But they are creatures of their parents and of circumstance. Children who commit violent crimes almost always share a similar background. Their parents are poorly educated, unemployed and often suffer from depression or other mental health problems; many are drug abusers or on the fringes of criminality. They often have large families but are also divorced or separated.<\/p>\n
An authoritative survey of the mental health of young offenders published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2006 studied 301 young criminals aged 10 to 18 years. It found that 74 per cent had a family structure which had broken down, with only 36 per cent of their biological parents still married or cohabiting. More than a third of them had been in care \u2013 with many moved frequently from one home or foster home to another. One in three had a borderline learning disability, and one in five had an IQ below 70.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very rare for a child involved with homicide or torture to come from a background with none of these risk factors,\u201d says Dr Eileen Vizard, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who runs the National Clinical Assessment and Treatment Service for the NSPCC, and who gave evidence at the Bulger trial.<\/p>\n
These risk factors expose such children to a range of damaging experiences. They may witness repeated domestic violence or sexual abuse from an early age. They may be exposed to adults having sex in front of them and may routinely view slasher films or pornography left lying around the house.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are brought up with no boundaries, or inappropriate ones,\u201d says Pam Hibbert, who was until recently assistant director of policy at the children\u2019s charity Barnados and before that was a manager at Red Bank secure unit, where Mary Bell and Jon Venables served their sentences. \u201cChildren develop empathy from the way they are treated, not just fed and sheltered, but cuddled and stimulated. But the mothers themselves are often so needy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many were themselves brought up by dysfunctional parents who transmit their inadequacies to a new generation.<\/p>\n
Inconsistency is one of their hallmarks. \u201cOne night they get a crack around the head from their mum because she\u2019s pissed; the next they get a cuddle; they just never know where they are,\u201d says Gareth Jones, one of the country\u2019s senior Youth Offending Team managers \u2013 who are the first members of the justice system to come into contact with such children when they break the law.<\/p>\n
Typically, the inconsistency extends to discipline. These children are often allowed to roam the streets unchecked, but then arbitrarily subjected to harsh punishments.<\/p>\n
The father of the Edlington boys was a violent alcoholic whose idea of instilling discipline was beating his children with golf clubs. He enjoyed forcing his sons \u2013 one of whom has been serving a sentence for mugging a woman of 68 at knife-point \u2013 to fight one another; if they refused, he hit them. He showed them violent and sadistic DVDs. Their mother, who has seven sons by three different fathers, admitted that she gave the boys cannabis to calm them down afterwards. At other times, neighbours reported, the young brothers were left to their own devices and were regularly seen scavenging for food or clothing which they pulled from skips.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuch erratic and inconsistent behaviour, veering from the extremely harsh to the indifferent, cannot be called discipline,\u201d says Pam Hibbert.<\/p>\n
Though the tabloid press routinely uses phrases like \u201cevil\u201d and \u201cmonsters\u201d to describe children who commit horrendous crimes, it is hard to escape the bald conclusion that such kids are victims too. The criminologist Professor Gwyneth Boswell of Boswell Research Fellows and the School of Allied Health Professions, University of East Anglia, researched 200 children convicted of extreme offences throughout the Nineties. She discovered that 91 per cent of killers and violent kids had experienced physical, sexual or emotional abuse or had experienced some form of traumatic loss like the death or disappearance of a parent. More than a third had undergone both abuse and traumatic loss.<\/p>\n
When Mary Bell killed two small children in 1968, the nation was shocked by the details of the murders. She had strangled the boys but in one case she had taken a pair of broken scissors and made light cuts to his genitals after the little child was dead. But what did not come out at the time was that Mary\u2019s mother, a prostitute who had tried to kill Mary on several occasions, had forced the five-year-old girl to perform oral sex acts with her clients.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe public rarely gets to hear about backgrounds like Mary Bell\u2019s amid all the salacious material from the court case,\u201d Professor Boswell says. Even so, a large number of children in Britain today grow up in the heavily disadvantaged circumstances that all these academic studies reveal, yet only a tiny percentage grow into violent criminals. What are the extra factors which tip them into extreme violence?<\/p>\n
Until recently it had become the received wisdom that in the old nature\/nurture debate it was the way a child was brought up which was the key determinant. Violent children perhaps had lacked any positive influence from a significant adult, like a supportive teacher or relative. But more recent research is turning the spotlight also back onto the physiology of the child\u2019s brain, genetic influences and neuropsychological deficits.<\/p>\n
New technologies like brain mapping are providing medical evidence to suggest that behaviour affects the physical development of the brain. \u201cThe way these children have been treated early in life can affect the size and functioning of the brain,\u201d says Dr Vizard. \u201cIt can be altered by neglect. The frontal lobes, which are to do with executive function and empathy, can be physically different; the circuiting in the brain has been affected. So we\u2019re not looking here at risk factors or brain function, but a complex interaction between both.\u201d<\/p>\n
What is exercising Dr Vizard is whether psychiatrists and forensic psychologists might be able to predict that interaction. Her research suggests that there are two types of children who share many of these disadvantaged backgrounds.<\/p>\n
The first group are children whose bad behaviour, though sometimes very extreme, will peak in adolescence \u2013 the time of life when high risk-taking and poor decision-making is normative. But they will then become, by and large, law-abiding citizens, albeit with a criminal record, by the time they are adults.<\/p>\n
But the behaviour of those in the second group will progressively worsen the older they get. They will turn into extremely dangerous adults. Dr Vizard characterises the second group as displaying what she calls Emerging Severe Personality Disorder (ESPD). They are potential psychopaths.<\/p>\n
The two groups share many problems \u2013 childhood abuse, inconsistent parenting, mothers and fathers with mental health problems. And they share many psychological characteristics \u2013 they are all hyperactive, impulsive and physically aggressive. These traits can be detected when the child is as young as three, and they increase through to adolescence. Retrospective statistical analysis shows that the potential psychopaths display all these problems to a far greater extent. Yet it is hard early on for teachers, social workers or other adults to detect the behavioural differences which mark out the ESPD child from those with lesser forms of conduct disorder.<\/p>\n
But Dr Vizard has, in a Home Office research study into 280 children with abusive and violent behaviour, uncovered two significant factors. \u201cThere were two things I wasn\u2019t expecting,\u201d she says. \u201cThe first is a strong association with cruelty to animals.\u201d The borderline between curiosity and cruelty is indistinct in many children, but we are talking here not about kids pulling the legs off spiders but of repeated patterns of cruelty to higher-order animals.<\/p>\n
At its most extreme is the 10-year-old who trapped a cat and killed it by slowly slicing it with a knife, in order to see \u2013 he later told a psychiatrist, with icy logic \u2013 how much he could cut off the animal before it died. But ESPD children, says Dr Vizard, \u201cstamp on small hamsters or mice. They squeeze them or burst them, set fire to their fur. It is gratuitous cruelty for which there can be no justification\u201d. One of the Edlington brothers was seen before his arrest smashing ducklings against a tree in a park to kill them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe other factor was a strong association with inappropriate sexual behaviour in general,\u201d says Dr Vizard. \u201cEverything from putting sticks up people\u2019s bottoms to sex with animals.\u201d Of the sample in her major study, 59 per cent of offenders had sexually abused a child five years younger than them, and 9 per cent had engaged in sexual activity with animals. \u201cOne fifth of these offenders have convictions for sexual offences before they move on to violent offences.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of the distinct characteristics of these potential psychopaths are now clear. They have a grandiose sense of self-worth. They are stimulation seekers. They cannot control their tempers. They lie pathologically. They have shallow affections. They are callous, lack empathy and cannot easily differentiate between people and objects. They manipulate for personal gain. They have poor anger control. They lack remorse or the ability to accept responsibility for their actions. And they have great criminal versatility.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore research is needed on how to identify this sub-group who may develop psychopathy very early on,\u201d says Dr Vizard. \u201cAnd the Government should fund research into new treatment approaches for these disturbed children. It could save the public purse millions by preventing them from ever entering the criminal justice system.\u201d A place in a secure unit can cost as much as \u00a3229,950 a year for each child.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Decisions on how to handle extremely violent children begin to be made even before they are sentenced. Once a child has been found guilty of a serious offence the court will order pre- sentence reports.<\/p>\n
The task of producing that is down to one of Britain\u2019s 159 Youth Offending Teams; in a routine case it takes around three weeks. \u201cWe will talk to the police, the victim, look at previous convictions, visit the kid\u2019s home and parents, talk to their teachers, education psychologists and education case-workers,\u201d says Gareth Jones, the vice-chair of the Association of Youth Offending Team Managers, who has worked 25 years in the criminal justice system. \u201cOnce they have been found guilty, the police give us access to a whole lot more information on the offence.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the skills we need is to be downright nosey, to ask difficult questions for parents: What time does he come in? Do you really know where he\u2019s been? How many partners have you had in the last six months? They often say: \u2018What\u2019s that to do with you?\u2019 but we persist.\u201d<\/p>\n
They work with the offender too. \u201cWe find out what is their thinking, attitude, and sense of culpability. We need to take a view on what is the risk of them reoffending,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In serious cases the court will require a report from a psychiatrist, a forensic psychologist and the secure home where they were on remand.<\/p>\n
The Youth Offending Team report will then recommend a sentence to the court. \u201cWe look at what is an appropriate punishment, what is needed to protect the public, what is needed to make therapy and rehabilitation effective,\u201d Gareth Jones says. \u201cThat means considering what they need in terms of education, drug abuse work, parenting courses etc. And we have to think what is needed for their protection \u2013 33 young people have killed themselves inside in recent years.\u201d And almost one third of suicides occur within the first week of someone arriving in custody.<\/p>\n
A wide range of options are available to the courts. In less serious cases a community supervision order may be all that is deemed necessary. But in cases of extreme violence there are three possibilities, according to Tim Bateman, a visiting research fellow in criminology at the University of Bedfordshire who is also Youth Crime Policy Officer with the crime reduction charity Nacro. \u201cDetention in a mental hospital is one, if there is a diagnosis of schizophrenia, hearing voices or some such,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it is very rare for such diagnoses to be made quite so clearly with people of this age; such a placement would be quite rare.\u201d What is most common is a fixed-term sentence, from which they would be released halfway through, or an indeterminate sentence, with a recommended tariff at the end of which they will only be released, on lifelong licence, with the approval of the Parole Board.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor children who pose a serious risk to the public \u2013 having been convicted of arson, GBH, rape or homicide, or who exhibit a pattern of behaviour which suggests they might do it again \u2013 the indeterminate sentence is often the preferred option,\u201d Tim Bateman says. They will only be released if the Parole Board determines that they no long represent a serious risk to the public, that they have come to an understanding of their offence and exhibit remorse, and that there is evidence of change.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s quite a high threshold. And they are only released on licence and can be called back to jail at any time,\u201d he adds. \u201cThe tariff has to be fixed to strike a balance between the punishment being seen to fit the seriousness of the crime, and the child being able to see light at the end of the tunnel, so we don\u2019t undermine their motivation to change. That\u2019s important for all criminals, but particularly for children who are less culpable, less responsible, and have a more rapid potential for change than adults. Children can change; developmentally that\u2019s what children do.\u201d<\/p>\n
The other key decision is on where to detain the child criminal. Those over 16 who are not considered vulnerable are usually sent to a Young Offender Institution (YOI), which can house up to 360 young people in wings of up to 60 individuals. Those between 14 and 15 are usually sent to a Secure Training Centre (STC). These are smaller and have a higher staff-to-child ratio. But the youngest and more vulnerable offenders are sent to one of the 10 secure children\u2019s homes run by a handful of local authorities.<\/p>\n
\u201cDecisions are largely made on grounds of cost,\u201d says Tim Bateman. \u201cA place in a secure children\u2019s home costs around \u00a3200,000 a year; in an STC it is around \u00a3150,000 and in a YOI it is \u00a350-80,000.\u201d Which is why 85 per cent of kids who are locked up are in a Young Offender Institution \u2013 though it would be cheaper to send them to Eton.<\/p>\n
Care is undoubtedly better in a secure children\u2019s home. Secure homes have residential care-workers with greater training and lower staff turnover. There has never been a child death in a secure home, whereas there have been in both STCs and YOIs. Which is why the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, when he lowered the tariff on the Bulger killers, cited as his reason that transferring Thompson and Venables to the \u201ccorrosive atmosphere\u201d of a Young Offenders Institution could undo the good done by eight years in a secure home.<\/p>\n
Where an offence involves two children, they are almost invariably sent to separate secure units. The Edlington brothers have been kept in secure units more than 50 miles apart. And when they have briefly met at court appearances, social workers monitored their conversations.<\/p>\n
\u201cCo-offenders are kept apart because keeping them together may allow each to reinforce in the other\u2019s mind a joint rationale or self-justification for their offence,\u201d says Tim Bateman. Where psychopaths tend to stand outside the values of the group to which they belong, sociopaths have a sense of right and wrong that is based on the values of their criminal group. \u201cAnd the two offenders may have played different roles in the offence,\u201d Tim Bateman adds. \u201cThere may be a big age difference, one may be 14 and the other 10. One may have had a string of previous offences, and the other none. And they may be released at different times if one has made more progress than the other.\u201d<\/p>\n
But many experts are wary of the suggestion that in a crime one child may be the leader and the other merely a follower.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have two kids who are quite OK when they are on their own but who, when they get together, become a rather nasty unit,\u201d says Gareth Jones. \u201cThe idea that there\u2019s a follower and a leader is a bit reductive,\u201d agrees Pam Hibbert. \u201cYes, kids egg each other on. But they can\u2019t absolve themselves of responsibility by blaming the other.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou might ask one child, \u2018Why did you stick the knife in the old man\u2019s eye?\u201d says Dr Derek Indoe, a clinical and forensic psychologist with the Child and Adolescent Service at the Bristol Hospital for Sick Children. \u201cBut it may well be as revealing to ask the second child, \u2018Why did you pass the knife over to your friend? What did you really think he was going to do with it? Might he not have done it had you not passed it?\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n
If you don\u2019t split them up it may be difficult for them to accept their own responsibility for what happened. \u201cRemoving them from the relationship with their co-offender,\u201d says Pam Hibbert, \u201cmay be a key part of removing them from the chaos in which they have been living.\u201d<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
The general public wants violent criminals to be locked up. When the criminal is a child \u2013 who has perpetrated some cold and sadistic brutality \u2013 many people\u2019s first instinct is to want that evil banished from public gaze for a very long time, if not indefinitely.<\/p>\n
But when our heads over-rule our hearts we want something more. We want children \u2013 like the two young brothers from Edlington, near Doncaster, sentenced this week to x years in custody for shocking acts of gratuitous violence against two young children \u2013 to understand and acknowledge the impact of their actions upon their victims. We want them to demonstrate genuine contrition. We want them to be changed.<\/p>\n
But now that they have been locked up, what will happen to them? How will that process of change begin?<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is always an impatience in the outside world to get onto addressing the crime,\u201d says Dr Sue Bailey, a consultant child and adolescent forensic psychiatrist who has studied more than 250 child murderers in her 30 year career, and was an expert witness at the Bulger trial in which two 10-year-olds, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, tortured and murdered the toddler James Bulger. \u00a0\u201cBut if you do that too soon children like this will close down. And then you will have to begin again more imaginatively.\u201d<\/p>\n
But that is not where mental health experts start when they get such children into custody. \u201cPsychiatry and psychotherapy do not produce a magic bullet inside secure units,\u201d says the criminologist Tim Bateman of the University of Bedford\u00a0 who is also Youth Crime Policy Officer for Nacro. \u201cIt\u2019s much more first of all about providing a structured and nurturing environment to compensate for the normal childhood they never had.\u201d<\/p>\n
The child psychiatrist Dr Eileen Vizard, who also handled the Bulger killers, \u00a0agrees. \u201cOne of the main therapeutic agents is the stability of the place,\u201d she says. \u201cThese children are taken away from disrupted backgrounds, with no boundaries, and dangerous adults, and are put somewhere where they are safe, fed and housed and told No by people who understand how to set limits. It\u2019s tough love. It\u2019s a great skill, creating an experience that approximates to a proper family life.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the professionals who did that at Red Bank secure chiuldren\u2019s unit at Newton-le-Willows when Jon Venables was detained there agrees. \u201cChildren whose lives have been lives in chaos, with no boundaries, feel profoundly unsafe,\u201d Pam Hibbert says. \u201cTheir offence is often a mask for their own vulnerability; if you get in first, they think, you won\u2019t get hurt. So first you make them feel safe. You give them someone they feel is interested in them. For some it\u2019s their first proper relationship with an adults and that milieu is as important as any therapy. And they can shift from being kids who are very difficult to handle to kids who on the whole respond very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is difficult for those of us with more normal upbringings to understand how radical a shift this is for many of these problem children. \u201cYou have to start with socialisation,\u201d says Professor Gwyneth Boswell. \u201cJust getting up at the same time every day and eating regular meals [rather than grazing in front of the television set] is a big change for a lot of them. Some have to be taught how to use a knife and fork. Many have never eaten at a table.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMany have to be taught something as basic as taking turns,\u201d says Professor Bailey, who works with the Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust treating extremely disturbed children. \u201cYou have to do all that, developing various social skills and life skills,\u00a0 before you can get to a point where they can begin to engage.\u201d That can mean spelling out in laborious detail what might be obvious to a normal child. \u201cSometimes they don\u2019t even understand what they have done wrong, within the unit, how they have broken the rules. You have to explain: if you do this then this is what will happen to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
The biggest single factor, outside normalising the young offender\u2019s relationships with the unit\u2019s staff and their fellow inmates, is education. \u201cIt is the tool which opens up a\u00a0 young person\u2019s confidence in themselves and awakens them to the possibility that they can achieve something while they are detained,\u201d says Roy Walker, who ran Sutton Place, the secure unit in Hull, until it was closed by the local council in July \u2013 something which is happening all over the country as councils seek to cut costs. He is the outgoing chair of the units\u2019 umbrella group, the Secure Accommodation Network.<\/p>\n
The quality of the education inside the secure units is high. \u201cWe teach the<\/p>\n
National Curriculum but in very small groups,\u201d he says. \u201cThe kids all have Individual Education Plans based on their perceived needs which are constantly reviewed. We have Ofsted all over us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Units do not just operate to a normal 38-week school year but run continuously apart from two weeks over Christmas and New Year. It is not easy work. \u201cThese kids have a lot of catching up to do,\u201d says the criminologist Tim Bateman. \u201cThey will often also begin with a very negative attitude saying they can\u2019t do schoolwork and won\u2019t try.\u201d But the staff in the units remain relentlessly positive.\u00a0 \u201cOur students have a lot of catching up to do, particularly on literacy and numeracy on which most of these kids are well behind,\u201d Roy Walker\u00a0 says.<\/p>\n
Professionals and researchers have no doubt as to the value of this work. \u201cThese children often begin to respond very quickly to education,\u201d says Prof Boswell. From being the barely literate underdog in a family of seven brothers, where his older siblings picked on him brutally, Robert Thompson passed five GCSEs and several A-levels and developed a strong interest in design and fashion. Jon Venables passed from seven GCSEs and did A-levels too \u2013 a level of attainment than neither had much hope of achieving before their arrest.<\/p>\n
But it is not simply learning for learning\u2019s sake. Nor it is done purely with an eye to equipping the youngsters with the wherewithal to find a job when they are eventually released. Literacy and numeracy skills are central to the therapy which is at the heart of the work of these secure units.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Locking up dangerous delinquents protects the public in the short-term. But if the risk is to be permanently removed that requires child offenders to change. The key to this, says Roy Walker, who has worked for 17 years with such children, is to get them to focus on their offence and the impact it has had on others. \u201cTo help them to ensure that they won\u2019t offend again as soon as they get out,\u201d he says, \u201cthey need to develop a greater awareness.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet therapists cannot start by asking them to think about their victims or the impact their crime has had upon their mother or those who love them. \u201cYou have to start by getting them to focus on what has happened to them and how they feel about it,\u201d says Pam Hibbert, a former co-manager of Red Bank secure home. \u201cYou have to get them to develop an awareness of how they feel about themselves before you can move on to dealing with how they think their victim might have felt. Whatever crime they have committed you always have before you an extremely damaged and vulnerable child and you have to focus on them.\u201d<\/p>\n The psychiatrist Professor Sue Bailey agrees. \u201cYou have to start from where they are,\u201d she says. \u201cWhat they think their life is about. What they think their needs are. What they want out of life. It gives you a common point from which you can gradually introduce other concerns and points of view. But what you must do first is build trust and engagement.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet this must not be a process which indulges the child. \u201cYou set boundaries, you don\u2019t stand for cheek,\u201d says Pam Hibbert. \u201cBut you have to treat them with respect and listen to what they say,\u201d says Roy Walker. \u201cYou have to inculcate in them a confidence that adults are going to deliver for them. But that doesn\u2019t mean agreeing with them.\u201d\u00a0 Rather it means realigning their concepts of fairness and right and wrong with those of the rest of society.<\/p>\n That can take some time and breakthroughs can come unexpectedly. For one 15 year old who had stabbed and killed another boy in the playground it came when he said to his unit manager: \u201cLooking back it all began to really go badly wrong for me when I was about nine. I\u2019d had a row with my mum and said I was leaving home and she said: \u2018OK, bugger off them.\u2019 So I went, and she let me.\u201d Such moments of epiphany can be a turning point.<\/p>\n But there may be a long road to travel before that happens. Part of the difficulty is the huge variation in problems with which kids present. \u201cSome are traumatised by the experience of the courtroom,\u201d says Prof Bailey. \u201cSome have depression which was never diagnosed before. Some get hostile, some go quiet and withdrawn. Some have sensory problems [with hearing or eyesight and have never been able to hear in class or they see the whiteboard]. Some are dealing with their own abuse. Some had been living with inappropriate roles, parenting their siblings or caring for a parent.’<\/p>\n Some are unresponsive to the most basic tool of therapy \u2013 speech. \u201cQuite often for these kids words have become meaningless,\u201d says Sue Bailey. \u201cThey have lived lives where they have been ignored and left to their own devices and now suddenly everyone is talking at them and asking question \u2013 police, social workers, courts, psychiatrists \u2013 are yapping at them. It\u2019s all\u00a0 words, words, words.\u201d Many of them just switch off.<\/p>\n In such cases psychiatrists have to resort to indirect means like art therapy. \u201cIt\u2019s more than seeing what they draw,\u201d Prof Bailey explains. \u201cIt\u2019s much more sophisticated than that. But they can get very worked up doing it. And though you do your best to calm them down at the end you have to negotiate with the secure unit staff so the child doesn\u2019t get over-penalised if there is a spill-over from the session.\u201d<\/p>\n Units operate points-based systems which allow their residents to earn privileges by good behaviour. Staff have to work strike a delicate balance between discipline and incentive. \u201cIt\u2019s a tough job,\u201d the psychiatrist says. \u201cThe degree of damage these kids go in with gives carers a really difficult task. To use a medical analogy, we are not asking staff to monitor these young people\u2019s blood pressure, we are asking them to do heart transplants.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of the work can be done in groups. \u201cGroup work, if it\u2019s done well, is particularly effective for children entering their teens,\u201d says Gwyneth Boswell, \u201cbecause they identify much more with their peers than with any adult. They can learn very powerfully in a group, though it has to be led by a skilled adult to steer the focus away from members expressing negative antisocial views.\u201d<\/p>\n But the approach poses extra risks. The units, which range in size from just a dozen inmates to as many as 36, have a real mix of residents. Some have been sentenced for very serious crimes, others are on remand, others are in there to protect them from themselves \u2013 there has been\u00a0 a big increase in the number of protective welfare orders since the Baby P case.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are not friends; they have been put together,\u201d says the former manager of the Hull centre, Roy Walker. \u201cThey can be here for 24 hours or eight years. And the group dynamic changes every time someone comes in or goes out. These kids are in some respect loners; they may hang around in groups but they are not really socialised.\u201d<\/p>\n Sex offenders are particularly responsive to group therapy. It is heavily used in units like Red Bank which specialises in children who have committed sex offences. Behavioural change programmes make particular use of group dynamics. \u201cThey can deconstruct why things which are not good for other people are also not good for themselves,\u201d says Prof Boswell. \u201cIt encourages them to work that out for themselves rather than just someone else telling them it.\u201d<\/p>\n But for others group work is unsuitable. \u201cMuch depends upon the skills and deficits of the young person,\u201d says Prof Bailey. \u201cSome just wouldn\u2019t understand what was going on. Some would try to manipulate the group. Some may just not be ready educationally and might not understand the nuances \u2013 they\u2019ll just think it\u2019s people talking sex to them.\u201d<\/p>\n Most work is driven by the principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which aims to modify dysfunctional thinking by changing patterns of behaviour and teaching the offender to avoid the early signs of temptation and trouble.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is very good evidence that many children in secure units respond well to vigorous input from trained supervised therapists,\u201d says Dr Eileen Vizard, who is chief psychiatrist for the NSPCC. The range of programmes ranges through anger management, family relationship therapy, drug abuse and diet interventions, occupational therapy, and music, speech and language therapy. Part of the treatment is to change offenders masturbatory fantasies from unhealthy to healthy ones. The strategy operates by rewarding good behaviour, withdrawing privileges for bad behaviour and introducing\u00a0 time-out sanctions which are a more sophisticated version of the naughty step for small children.<\/p>\n But there are some offenders for whom this does not work. They are the children with Emerging Severe Personality Disorder who could grow up to become psychopaths. Dr Vizard estimates that there are between one and two thousand children in this category in the UK. \u201cOne of the characteristics of these children is that they can\u2019t interpret facial expressions,\u201d she says. Research has shown that they over-interpret hostility in other people. They mistakenly rate neutral faces as angry. \u201cThey can\u2019t tell the difference between fear and sadness in another person\u2019s face.\u201d<\/p>\n They can describe what they see but, because they lack empathy, they can\u2019t\u00a0 understand it. One told Dr Vizard about someone he had raped: \u201c \u2018She was crying, yeah, there were tears on her face. Her face was screwed up.\u2019 But he couldn\u2019t work out what was in the mind of the other person. He didn\u2019t know what all that meant, and he didn\u2019t care.\u201d Psychologists theorise that the ability to recognise fear in other people comes from a childhood developmental stage that is critical for learning that other people are sentient feeling organisms. Such children have not developed this \u2018theory of mind\u2019.<\/p>\n There is something else that is critical. Professor Mark Dadds, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales has been investigating this callous unemotional trait in children. He has discovered that most problem children have high emotional states. \u201cThey\u2019ll be anxious, they\u2019ll be emotionally reactive, so things upset them, they react aggressively to frustrating situations,\u201d he says. But the ESPD sub-group do not react emotionally. Rather their aggression is predatory and cold. \u201cNow predatory aggression is different, it\u2019s someone who\u2019s on the lookout for an opportunity to be aggressive in order to further their own ends.\u201d<\/p>\n And such children, being low in emotion, are not very susceptible to the disapproval of others. Parents\u2019 attempts to correct their behaviour are routinely frustrated. They are difficult to discipline. \u201cAttempts to punish them become escalating and quickly move into very extreme levels,\u201d Prof Dadds says. In a study of 56 such boys, aged 4 to 9, he discovered that the more callous and unemotional a boy was, the less likely he was to respond well to punishments for misbehaviour. Rewards and encouragement were far more productive \u2013 which may explain why, to the great disgust of the tabloid press, the Edlington brothers were taken on treats \u2013 to watch a Doncaster Rovers football match and to the seaside \u2013 to encourage an improvement in their behaviour.<\/p>\n Mark Dadds has discovered another technique. He remembered that the ability to recognise fear is also impaired in people with damage to the amygdala \u2013 nuclei deep inside\u00a0 the medial temporal lobes of the brain which play a role in forming and storing memories associated with emotional events. Doctors had discovered that this deficit can be temporarily corrected by simply asking such patients to focus on the eyes of other people.\u00a0 Prof Dadds has pioneered the technique with ESPD children.<\/p>\n \u201cYou just say to them: \u2018Would you mind looking at me while I\u2019m speaking,\u201d says Dr Vizard. \u201cIt is not a reprimand but a request and it seems to work. \u201cThey still might not be able to line up other people\u2019s experiences with their own. But you can use this to appeal to their self-interest to motivate them to take part in treatment. You say: \u2018If you do this then you\u2019ll get a lesser sentence; if you do you will have fewer bad things to tell a future girlfriend about your self\u2019.\u201d Doing the right thing, its advocates insist, will turn into wanting<\/em> to do the right thing.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a chance that, if that continued over many years, their brain might right itself<\/p>\n because they are living in an environment where appropriate responses are encouraged,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a measure of how plastic the child and adolescent brain is.\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n There is more to this than pious hope. Progress on offenders\u2019 treatment is monitored at monthly meetings between the child\u2019s their personal prison officer, education workers, psychiatrist, therapists, substance abuse worker, parents and Youth Offending Team case manager. In difficult cases they meet fortnightly, or even weekly.<\/p>\n Researchers have a number of techniques for assessing whether there has been a change in the attitudes and thinking of these young people. Psychological tests can be used at early, middle and later stages of the child\u2019s detention. They might, for example, be asked whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree with statements such as:<\/p>\n \u201cOf course some children learn how to give the \u2018right\u2019 answers,\u201d says the criminologist Professor Gwyneth Boswell. \u201cBut you also do qualitative in-depth interviews which will reveal any inconsistencies, probe the links in the chain as to the reasons why they offended, how far those reasons\u00a0are being eradicated, and what is the risk of them doing it again in the future\u201d.<\/p>\n The evidence is that change can come and it can be thorough-going. Redemption is<\/p>\n more than a theological construct, especially with the young. \u201cUnder the age of 18 teenagers are still developing rapidly, finding their own personality, and are more open to change,\u201d says Prof Boswell. \u201cEverything we know about psychological development suggests that the younger you are the more malleable.\u201d The adolescent brain is in a state of constant pruning and rewiring and there are concomitant changes in thinking ability and emotional maturity.<\/p>\n Practitioners in secure homes confirm that. \u201cA complete transformation can happen within four years, because of the speed at which children develop,\u201d says Pam Hibbert.<\/p>\n Some sections of society\u00a0 do not want to believe that. The sense of justice on display in the tabloid press is mired in notions of evil and retribution. It is not open to empirical evidence. The notion that reward rather than punishment is more productive is anathema to them \u2013 which is why they pillory approaches which offer incentives to children convicted of horrendous crimes.<\/p>\n When news leaked that the killers of James Bulger had, six years on, been taken to ice hockey games,\u00a0 productions of Shakespeare or on shopping trips to Sheffield and Manchester, the popular press whipped up a storm of protest. More generally the system of reward incentives which social workers called \u201cintermediate treatment\u201d was ridiculed as \u201cfree cruises for villains\u201d.<\/p>\n Yet such outings make sense for those on long sentences \u2013 both as incentives to good behaviour and to prepare them to return to the outside world. As the end of their detention draws near they are allowed a wider range of visitors. They do some supervised home visits. They are allowed out with a care worker so they can get used to the bustle of shops, the noise of a pub or the press of a football crowd. Releasing them unprepared for all that would risk them being overwhelmed and raise the chances of problems.<\/p>\n Those convicted of the most serious offences still have to convince the Parole Board that they have developed an understanding of why they are locked up. They must show they have some understanding of the consequences of their actions and the pain caused to their victims. They must have developed a positive attitude to remorse. Above all they must convince the board that they are no longer a high risk to the rest of society.<\/p>\n Murder has a low recidivism rate anyway and none of those convicted for murder or manslaughter as children have ever gone on to repeat that kind of offence. The worst thing Mary Bell did after her release was commit benefit fraud.<\/p>\n But the child killers do not make up the majority of child prisoners. Most children in secure homes are inside for less than two 2 years. \u201cThe challenge with those on shorter sentences is to do something that will make a real difference,\u201d says Roy Walker. \u201cBut you\u2019ve got to do that in the context of what they\u2019ll go back to when they return home.<\/p>\n \u201cSo you have to have an exit plan from the outset. If they are in for a long term you can aim towards getting them three A levels. But if it\u2019s shorter you have to be realistic and perhaps identify just a couple of priorities you can reasonable hope to achieve.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem is that those on short sentences go back to the chaotic world which spawned them. \u201cThe most violent offenders can come out from long sentences completely changed individuals,\u201d says Nacro\u2019s Tim Bateman. \u201cAnd they are not going back to the circumstances that they left. But those who are in for six months, by contrast, often return to their old life with a predictably high return to drugs and crime.\u201d<\/p>\n Those not in for such long sentences inevitably gravitate back to their families. The psychiatric social workers in the secure homes try to do some work with the families in preparation but with mixed results.<\/p>\n The good done by the education in the secure unit can be threatened too. \u201cThey have great educational opportunities inside,\u201d says Roy Walker, \u201cand then they are sent back to their old school where very few people appreciate the quality of the education they have had inside \u2013 and where people assume that a leopard can\u2019t change its spots and often treat them with suspicion \u2013 to which the kids respond: \u2018Well, fuck me, if they\u2019re not even going to give me a chance then I\u2019m off then\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n The irony is that the longer violent children are detained in secure units the greater the chance they have from benefiting long\u2013term from the place. \u201cIt\u2019s an irony,\u201d laughs Roy Walker, \u201cbut it wouldn\u2019t be very good if we were spending \u00a3200,000 a year on these kids and they didn\u2019t improve\u201d.<\/p>\n The bitterest irony for him is when he sees kids crying on the day their sentence is up. \u201cI\u2019ve often seen them in tears because they do not want to go home\u201d.<\/p>\n It is a graphic reminder of our society\u2019s failure in its duty to break the inter-generational cycle of inadequacy, abuse and depravation which nurtured such children in the first place.<\/p>\n\n