Jim, I don't know if you have children or not. Tell me this though, if your child had been Jamie, what would have been your reaction?

Would you have wanted nothing but kindness for these children?

Would you have felt 'a little bit cross' with them?

Or would you have keeled over in absolute grief that your child had been put through such absolute hell, prior to his horrific death and wanted those who had done it locked away for life?

I don't believe that minds which are not only capable of thinking such thoughts, but actually carrying them out, planning them beforehand, can ever be fully healed.

There are many disturbed children out there now, as I said earlier, because society has remained silent about the violence that is all around.

You talk of the disbelief of how society can want a Hangman, or how that person can carry out such a barbaric act....well, what is going on in society nowadays is also barbaric...because if you truly think that little children being fed a diet of unbelievable violence, of excrutiating vile images, in films, in computer 'games', let alone real life violence they are surrounded with, then you aren't even starting to raise your head above the parapet.

Children are FILMING other children being beaten up, by their mates. I mean WTF is that all about?????? Children now ENJOY violence! Their heads are filled with horrific images and thoughts...

My head was filled with Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Howard Keel, Gene Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Yul Bryner, the Carry On films...I wasn't raised on people being hacked to death, blood spurting out of every orifice, people being raped, murdered, cut into bits...!

There are some very, VERY sick people out there creating films, making 'games'...and children now sit for hours killing and killing and killing, often in the most terrible ways...

We have not progressed from the Horror of the Hangman, merely passed that outlook onto our children, as a species, for the Hangman felt that killing was right, he was unaffected by it, for the most part...that part of his soul cut off, desensitised, perhaps never having been there in the first place...so he was able to carry out his task then go home to bed and sleep. Same with those who torture...

And now, we bring our children up on all of this outlook...all of this killing, all of this hatred..and we wonder why we have the society we do.


I do not hear sympathy for you for Jamie's Mum and I find that deeply disturbing, to be honest.

If Venables or Thompson lived next door to me, I would be panic stricken to be honest, out of my mind, if I had little children.

I think that some crimes are so far removed from all that life is about that the only sentence is natural life, no matter what age the perpertrators are. Some minds are SO damaged they cannot be put back together again, and thus innocent members of society MUST be protected from them, at all costs.

I do not want to see children being hanged, but I really do feel that sometimes, life imprisonment should mean exactly that. I don't think Venables will ever 'turn his life around'...and I don't think he'll stop looking at child pornography either. I shudder at the thought of him being free again in a very short space of time, because I think his mind is severely broken..and whilst I feel sorry for that part of it all, my sympathy can only lie with the mother of little Jamie Bulger.

If these men were truly repentant for what they had done as children, truly understood what they had done, then I think they would have behaved very differently. Most certainly, one would NOT be behind bars, yet again.

And, I think that life inside prison, for Venables at least, would actually be far kinder, if kindess is what you want, Jim. There he is protected, he has a pattern, a routine to his days, to his life. He is surrounded by people who want to help him, who do not judge him and he would know, as society would also, that never again would he have the opportunity to commit another crime, ever again in his natural life. I think it would actually give him the security he may always have longed for, strange as that may appear to some.