I am just so fed up with what passes for 'reporting' in this country.

Dr Maggie Atkinson, Children's Commissioner was recently interviewed on a number of topical subjects.

She believes that children need to be better protected in the criminal justice system.

On the subject of the boys who killed James Bulger and raising the age of criminal responsibility she said -

"The age of criminal responsibility in this country is ten — that's too low, it should certainly be moved up to 12.
In some European countries it's 14.
People may be offenders but they are also children.
Even the most hardened of youngsters who have committed some very difficult crimes are not beyond being frightened."

She thinks that it was wrong for Jon Venables and Robert Thompson to be tried in an adult court.

"....the fact that a little boy ended up dead is not something that the nation can easily forget.
But they shouldn't have been tried in an adult court because they were still children."

"None of us is born a good person or an evil person.
The backgrounds from which we come, and whether we are nurtured and secure, will shape our character.
The adults who role-model for us — or don't — will change who we become, for better or worse. I'm far more a believer in nurture than nature."

At no point in the interview did she say that no action should have been taken over Venables and Thompson.

What she DID say was -

"In most Western European nations they have a completely different way of intervening with youngsters who've committed crime.
Most of their approaches are more therapeutic, more family and community-based, more about reparation than simply locking somebody up."


And what was the second news item on this mornings BBC radio headlines?

James Bulger's mother Denise Fergus has called for "insensitive" Children's Commissioner for England Maggie Atkinson to be sacked.!


I recently stumbled across an article from Oct 2000 when Lord Woolf had announced that Thompson and Venables were likely to be released the following year and given new names and identities

A year after the killing of James Bulger in Norway two boys kicked a five-year-old girl repeatedly.
They stripped her and stoned her and beat her till she was unconscious.
Then they left Silje Ræderg rd in the snow to freeze to death.

The article compares at the way these two crimes were treated and reported - including an interview with Silje's mother

"No, they were punished enough by what they did. They have to live with that. I think everybody has got to be treated like a human being. The children had to be educated, had to learn how to treat other people so they could get back into society."

full article