Society

Bootle Point

The place where our relationship
with children altered

Gordon MacGregor

If I were a first-time voter, born in the early 1990s, I might find myself with a significant axe to grind. The previous 18 years have seen young people patronised, marginalised and vilified in equal measure; the passive-aggressive pampering, the 'fear of' children masquerading as 'fear for' children, ASBOs, the Hamilton Initiative. This government, and its predecessor, have much to answer for. If there is nothing in the election that speaks to young people it is because we know that they have little to look forward to either. Treated with increasing suspicion in public, our plump and pliant dauphins are now safely cosetted indoors with their computers, mobiles and PS3s, the end product of 18 years of progressively vindictive legislation.
     The process began in the early 90s, an era marked by a profound unease around young people. There was a froth over corporal punishment (typically British in that what was left unsaid was more informative than what was explicitly stated). What's more the Tories' electoral base was becoming fearful of partygoers who were refusing to stay within the confines of the dismal inner-cities, opting instead for alfresco fun in the rolling fields of the Home Counties. Joy-riding, ram-raiding, warehouse parties, ecstasy: all were grist to the authoritarian mill.
     Typically, there was one catalysing event which provided the excuse to propel our fears into action. If anything, it was the murder of James Bulger (or 'Jamie' Bulger as he was never called). Many observers have noted that our attitude to children underwent a marked shift in the wake of the killing. There was something in that 'dark constellation' of events which keyed into very British anxieties; a spectre at the feast of our recession-fuelled consumerism which demanded appeasement.
     We may feel that all that could be said about this crime has been said. But crimes often develop a gravity which attracts all manner of wordy accretions, beyond which lies an event-horizon of comprehension. The crime itself becomes reified, only understandable in terms of the surrounding events. Nonetheless there may be something to be learned from revisiting the scene. The guilty always return and we are all culpable. So when I unexpectedly found myself in Bootle on a return journey from Anfield, I was tempted to visit the Ground Zero where our relationship towards children was fundamentally altered.

Bootle is a fairly unremarkable northern town, its neutral motto – Past, Present, Future – suggesting a hope that appears diminished in the wake of Thatcherism. Nevertheless it has tried to keep up appearances in the post-industrial consumer boom, the focus of which falls on its main shopping centre, Bootle Strand. If you've ever set foot in a shopping centre then you've been to Bootle Strand. The predictable illusion of clone-store choice: Superdrug, New Look and Boots. Its only notable features are the mock-Victorian pillars that hark back to a more prosperous commercial age.
     It's not one of those quiet interstices normally associated with childhood. More a focus for petty shoplifting than the starting point for murder. Perhaps that is why the crime seemed to give rise to such an uneasy configuration of factors. It shattered our illusion that the shopping mall – fast becoming our prime supplier of pleasure and leisure – was a happy, safe utopia. Who could forget the grainy footage of the anonymous throng, rendered sinister in the way that only CCTV can. There was also the uncomfortable parallel between the way we were being trained to shop and the way James Bulger was chosen and carried off by Robert Thompson and Jon Venables (Venables: from venabulum, hunting ground; from venari, to hunt).
     As criminologists will helpfully point out, every crime needs a locus: one facilitates the other. A simplistic statement, but the topography of a crime can be revealing. It is noteworthy that James was led gently away from the crowded arcades towards the empty towpath of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, where he was assaulted. The lack of intervention may have lent some further impetus to the boys' nebulous motives. Their victim was then led through a hole in a fence to the disused railway line which backs onto the Ford Roman Catholic cemetery, whose every second headstone is chiselled with infant mortality. A place of dead children.
     The denouement occurred by the abandoned Walton and Anfield station, its demolished platform – a scattering of bricks and iron bars – providing the fabric for the crime's ultimate commission. The past rising up in the present to snuff out the future in a dark perversion of the town's motto. Strange that what was once the lifeblood of the town, allowing it to thrive, had become a place as empty as the children who wandered it. Notable too that the victim was lured from the happy distraction of 90s consumerist Britain back to a dismal, unremembered territory of older narratives. His body lay there, undiscovered for days, until he was eventually found by a dog-walker.
     But that was only the beginning. As details of the crime leaked out that quixotic creature – 'public grief' – reared its head. The results were equally horrifying: the baying mob gathered around the two unfortunates keening for summary justice. However, it's worth bearing in mind that there remained a great anger on Merseyside over the media's attempts to blame them for the Hillsborough disaster three years earlier: indeed some right-thinking Scousers still boycott the Murdoch press.
     We should also bear in mind an oft-forgotten feature of the Bulger killing: the media's initial focus was on the fact that the child – obviously injured – was led through the streets of Bootle with nary a second glance from the busy shoppers. The dozens of witnesses who encountered the boys on their fatal transit were originally held up as being just as culpable as those who witnessed the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese in New York. There was even a nascent attempt in the Sun to label these indifferent Samaritans 'the Liverpool 38'. Was the howl of anger directed against the offending children actually an attempt to forestall wider criticism and to expiate a feeling of collective guilt by relocating it back on the offenders?
     The ripples did not stop there. The lurid suggestion of a sexual assault involving batteries was actually a fiction spread by chain letter (the internet had not yet reached critical mass). Perhaps it germinated in the unremarkable fact that the offenders were spotted in a toy shop stealing batteries, conflating the notion of childlike innocence – seeing the victim as little more than a plaything – with some darkly adult sexual imperative.
     Saddest of all was the spectacle of detectives, judges and politicians queueing up to condemn these two Midwich Cuckoos. Were they really 'beyond evil' (if that means anything)? Of course journalists soaked up every vindictive epithet. There was even an attempt to paint Robert Thompson as the instigator, forcing the story into a familiar folie-a-deux narrative of leader and led astray. It's easier to paint one individual as evil.

Whatever has transpired in the past two decades, I hope that both Robert Thompson and Jon Venables – who are no longer the children that killed James Bulger - are allowed the freedom to rebuild their lives, just as much as I hope that James' family can repair theirs. But the echoes of the crime have already permeated our view of childhood such that we vacillate between wary apprehension and mawkish control. Out of convenience we are slowly turning children into serious little adults, mouthing emotions, hopes and fears that I hope they don't fully understand.
     Our children seem caught in an eddy between concern and distrust: between child killers and child-killers. The rise of the paedophile as our modern folk-devil – and the hysterical concentration on their repellent proclivities – conveniently focuses attention away from the fact that we too destroy childhood innocence. We are more culpable than we like to admit. It is not just about shops selling sexualised clothing but the fact that we have less time for them and less appreciation that theirs is a seperate world which we should protect and – more importantly – refrain from straying into. Especially when it is done for profit or the desire to enjoy our own infantilism. We are more culpable than our children could ever be because – unlike the young Robert and Jon – we understand harm. And if we continue to treat them so indecently then who knows what they will make of us?

Gordon MacGregor is a lawyer