Child murder as entertainment

Hardcore porn v Crying grief-stricken relatives on da teevee. Which is more offensive?

And CJ...do you have a burning stake handy for any witches you may find living near you?

The question is more why this has captivated people this summer. Is it some deep free-floating anxiety about general safety? (I.e. "well I don't see any terrorists around but what if an American took my child!") Or, as Venga implies, are we really just sort of "entertaining" ourselves -- serial-killer-movie style -- with the sordid details of a few incidents, and the resulting spectacles, sort of kind of "getting off" on the unsettling horror element of it? In the US, anyway, I'd like to think it's a bit more of the former, thankfully: cf constant coverage of the dreaded West Nile Virus that has infected a total of like an entire dozen people so far. (Oooo scary)

nitsuh -> its beyond cliched to frame things post 9-11 but mebbe the media figures this sudden wave of scares strikes a particular nerve after the supposed emphasis on 'family' and 'patriotism' over the past 11 months. its unspoken but theres a subtext to all these abduction stories -> "this shouldn't happen, esp. not NOW" and thats what makes it even more saleable/watchable/compelling/whatever

And if other people find their emoting offensive or uncomfortable well that's the least of the parents worries.

Using the description "child murder as entertainment" is blunt and provacative. But as these cases unfold, they do begin to resemble macabre dramas. Newspaper editors and television news producers use this drama to sell newspapers / gain viewers, whilst at the same time purporting to be doing a public service by putting up money rewards.

Certainly, the plight of these poor childrens' parents saddens me. But in terms of lives lost and damaged, the famine in africa and flooding in the europe would appear to be more newsworthy. Perhaps it's a case of this story being easy-access for news producers. Or maybe it's that news producers are looking for stories that will have some personal resonance with their viewers and that they can link into an overarching narrative that will drive their sales/viewing figures (eg. "paedophilia epidemic"). Either way - Chris Morris was right - the media in the UK has a lot to answer for.

There's a big difference between reporting news events -- and, in the case of still-missing persons, constant publicity for the purpose of locating them -- and actively lingering not on the crimes themselves but on the phenomenon as a whole. If child abductions and murders are currently less likely than in previous years, but the public seems to believe there's a current epidemic of them, then some sort of small miscommunication is occurring somewhere along the media line -- which is as much a criticism of how the public "uses" media as of how the media uses the public's current fears as a way to lure them across the aforementioned Everybody Loves Raymond episode.

I mean: do we not recall that last year the country was doing this with sharks??? Shark attacks on the front page that wouldn't even have been reported if there hadn't been a shark attack the weekend before? Shark experts on the front pages pointing out that really sharks don't attack all that many people, and everyone should maybe relax a little because it probably wasn't going to happen to them?

Indeed -- and so hurt were they by 9/11 that they willingly gave up attacks on humans because they felt our pain.

Fuck justice, lets just send a forwarded email around the world with boxes you can check and various ways to punish those responsible, then we'd all feel way better and be moved from our collective grief as a community right?

2. with these kind of cases the coverage given can be wildly different. the milly dowler case (13 yr old missing - still not found) received a lot of coverage. when a body was found, it turned out to be that of another missing girl, one that had previously had no media coverage. the discrepancy was startling. of course, this case is slightly different in that the girls were 10 rather than 13, and there is perhaps a belief by the police that by 13 the possibility of running away is more seriously considered (and the sheer number of children 13+ that go missing - 10 is far less common)

3. i think one problem with the kind of 'bogeyman' type coverage (not really present in this case - more applicable in the sarah payne case) is that by focusing on the minority of abusers that are known to the police (the loner stereoptype) we're ignoring the far more likely chance of abuse being perpetrated by friends/family/authorityfigures. a heightened sense of awareness of one, can have the affect of complacency in the other

And Gareth is absolutely right about the perpetrators of child abductions -- you're infinitely better off keeping an eye on your ex-husband or creepy brother-in-law than worrying about people off the street.

Do you believe this to be a noble aim?

The problem with "Sarah's Law" as a child-protection measure is that it wouldn't have saved Sarah and it wouldn't have saved these two girls either. Let's assume that the people accused turn out to be guilty - they're not known sex offenders and so legislation focussing on known sex offenders wouldn't have found them out. What would have happened instead is that a 'well-meaning' person with access to sex offender details would have released them and the police's time and effort would have been taken up with dealing with vigilantism rather than trying to solve the case.

The problem is that when people find out there's a sex offender living nearby they don't say "Hmm there's a sex offender living nearby, best be a bit more careful then". They say "GET THE NONCE OUT OF OUR TOWN!" and yes that would be my gut reaction too if I had kids. The problem though is that the only schemes with any success in rehabilitating sex offenders end up being forced to close due to local objections.

First was from a woman who was from Dunblane, where I assume a sort of mass murder shooting incident occured in 1996. She tells:

"The media had gone but the orgy of grief continued, so much of it misplaced and inappropriate. Once, a group of elderly English woman disgorged froma bus to view the cards of condolence in a local shop, crying and clutching each other on the pavement a one of the teachers injured in the atrocity tried, unnoticed, to get past."

Which does strike me as showing how these media events well up emotions of anger and sadness for the rest of the nation, which is nice, but then do nothing to actually promote an appropriate response to the situation.

Also Someone wrote into the Comment section saying that the papers that offered the mega-bucks rewards for clues that would lead to the return of the two girls should offer that money to the community as a scholarship fund etc.

Additionally, there was an article about the media and politicians hushing up a trajedy that happened in Chicago 1995 - namely the heat wave that lead to over 700 people, most of them elderly or from the poorer sections of town, dying from heat-related illness. No fuss was made about it then, but in the wake of the hystria about sharks and fires and earthquake deaths, and the reality that more people die in America from heat-waves every year, it does seem a bit ridiculous that there aren't any special news features like, "HEAT: The invisible killer" being broadcasted. As the writer, Eric Klinenberg, says, "If middle-class Americans were similarly affected, there would surely be widespread outrage, followed by hearings and sweeping new policies. No one stirs when the urban poor die alone in summer."

I think it may because in some cases a life sentence does not actually mean a life sentence, and when killers are sentenced to life in prison they are not necessarily "locked up forever".

I'm not in favor of the death penalty, but that's probably why some people do call for it.

Two things I heard on the radio after the bodies of the two girls were found: 'you won't see a child in Soham without a parent after this' and 'this kind of thing is a threat to all families'. I see all these people huddling (literally and ideologically) back into the refuge of the nuclear family and I honestly don't see how that helps anybody.

All state sanctioned killing is the thin end of a pretty scary wedge though, Martin. Of course anyone found guilty of a crime like this should be punished severely but the notion of eradicsting "bad humans" from the planet immediately gives me visions of gas chambers.

Re-introduction of the death penalty would be a disastrous step for this country to take.

Venga, I think what Martin's saying is that this is a moot point because he doesn't support a death penalty anyway, and is just saying on a personal level that the deaths of rapists or murderers wouldn't cause him too many problems.

So the question goes to Martin: if we could gaurantee 100% just convictions in these sorts of crimes, and it was somehow procedurally easy to convict these criminals with absolute certainty, then what would your stance on the death penalty be? Because Venga, with the gas chamber, seems to be saying that if you decide "go ahead with it, then, just for the really bad rapists and murderers," you're giving someone else justification to say "and for the sodomites and junkies and people who park in tow zones, too!"

Now apply this moral system outside of the West. In some Muslim communities, the "honor killing" of a woman for "unchaste" behavior is considered neither cruel nor unusual, and it happens with alarming frequency. By the logic you're defending this is morally okay, it just happens to be really strict policy. What I and I think Venga are sort of saying is that maybe it's better to keep the lives or deaths of people outside of the hands of general public belief and opinion, as that's a power which can be misused and exploited in a lot of really frightening ways.

Ellie: Partly I mean that people have been trying to parse his politics in different ways. I think I put sort of badly what I mostly mean, which is more that people have tried to spin his findings in two different ways: the "liberal" spin ("this is a clear demonstration of how our public services can fail those most in need and we must do more in the future") and the "conservative" spin ("this is a clear demonstration of the horrible things that happen when we allow our traditional family structures to disintegrate, as we've been warning for years and years") (a.k.a. "it was Murphy Brown's fault"). There's also the far-libertarian Social Darwinist position, which seems to go "well it's hot but I guess it just sucks for you if you can't handle it and you die."

Another odd wrench to drawing actual political-spectrum conclusions on the city-services part of it is that Klinenberg blames some of the breakdown of services on the process of privatizing them, a process that's been largely supported by Clintonite New Democrats.

Daily Mail 20 Aug 2002
How evil can still flourish in our midst.
By SIMON HEFFER.
WITHIN the graveyard of Soham's medieval church stand the tombs of my
kinsmen. When my family arrived here from the Netherlands in the mid-16th century, they settled first in the area between Ely and Newmarket: so the little town, now so famous for the most hideous of reasons, has long been known to me.

As with many similar communities in the eastern counties, the worst excesses of the modern world seemed, until now, to have passed Soham by.

East Anglians have a particular temperament - almost dour, dry in humour, hardworking, fundamentally decent. The recent events will have presented a challenge to that character of a sort it has seldom seen.

There will be little sympathy for the school of thought - respectfully
silent so far, but no doubt just awaiting its moment - that says the
murderer or murderers were not responsible for their actions.

When the courts decide who murdered Holly and Jessica, there will, as
always, be those who call for 'treatment' and ' rehabilitation' rather than for punishment: for there are always those who would remove guilt from the obviously guilty, and share it among the rest of us.

Before we have to hear such obscenities, let us state what ought to be
obvious: that the responsibility for these wicked murders lies solely with the murderer or murderers.

There should be no cause for us to hold back the sheer outrage that any normal person feels about this crime. There can be no extenuating
circumstances, no excuses, no allowances made.

That anger should not, though, be turned solely upon the killer or killers.

The crime is of course their fault: but why and how have we come to create a society where such evil is becoming more prevalent?

Why have we tolerated a rise of 50 per cent in child murders between 1990 and 2000, while not even having a debate on whether those who kill children are being punished adequately?

Is the way our rulers now shape our laws contributing to this grotesque cheapening of human life, and putting the most vulnerable in deep danger?

Much lip-service is paid to our detestation of paedophilia.

However, for some it is a laughing matter - remember the indefensible Brass Eye programme on Channel 4 last year - and the ruling liberal elite prefer to consider it a problem of an intellectual nature, rather than one that has practical consequences for them.

Perhaps they should contemplate one of the more startling facts detailed in recent days: that whereas in 1995, Manchester police confiscated 12 images of child pornography, last year they collected 41,000.

True, this is due mainly to the unregulated internet, but four decades of liberalising legislation have left our rulers immune to the notion of consequences.

It was not merely the abolition of the death penalty, attacked so eloquently in yesterday's Mail by Mary Kenny, that helped create a society in which no one has to face up to the ultimate cost of their evil.

We have also witnessed a drive to have all 'alternative' lifestyles regarded as acceptable, to end any passing of judgment on activities that tend to deprave and corrupt, and a determination to say that anything goes.

We saw its results, even more horribly, at Dunblane in 1996, when the crazed pervert Thomas Hamilton murdered 16 children and their teacher.

No one in the police had thought it odd that a firearms licence should be issued to a man who plastered his walls with pictures of half-naked small boys; for to have done so would have been to 'judge' his 'lifestyle'.

We have long heard this about criminals. Whatever evil they commit, there is always a reason - they were abused as children, or subjected to bad influences.

We have created a society in which no one ever has to accept the
consequences of his actions: and where those consequences fall solely upon the victims.

I went, two years ago, to the flagship prison at Grendon Underwood, where violent offenders are rehabilitated.

The prison has a high success rate. Its staff are among the most dedicated in the public service. It houses all sorts of violent criminals, about a third of them sex offenders.

Grendon Underwood is excellent at what it sets out to do: but it exists purely because the institutional view is that even the most horrible of criminals deserves another chance.

That view exists because liberal legislators and officials have long
believed individuals do not make a conscious decision to be wicked: it is something they cannot help.

Therefore, they deserve compassion.

The murders of Holly and Jessica mean compassion for the sort of people who killed them, and will continue to kill children, is in increasingly short supply.

We extend compassion to those who are acceptable: and this sort of evil can never be that.

Whatever prompted the murder of two small girls - a depraved sexual
appetite, drugs, or just killing for kicks - can our rulers really say that the attitudes their policies have fostered have not helped to bring such wickedness within the imaginations of more people?

Equally, though they will sanctimoniously reject the calls for the return of hanging, are our rulers really satisfied that the present penalties are enough?

The public clearly doesn't think so, as the Mail's poll reveals today: more than half the population want the death penalty restored for child killers, while three-quarters say paedophiles are treated too leniently.

One in five thinks paedophiles should be chemically castrated, and 23 per cent want them imprisoned for life.

There are those who shudder at the notion of depriving someone of his
liberty for 20 or 30 years.

But when that person is kept in isolation with other likeminded monsters in prison, and is the centre of attention for countless social workers, bleeding hearts and do-gooders, is it not likely they will end up feeling more valued than they ever were in the outside world?

This Government has done nothing to reverse the trend towards lethal
permissiveness.

It has relaxed laws about censorship and legalised acts of gross indecency with young men and women. It has relaxed the drugs laws.

It has made a virtue of ' alternative lifestyles'. Its permissiveness erodes the respect of individuals for others, cheapens human life, and results in a culture where the pursuit of gratification prevails, without any sense of responsibility for its consequences.

It is one thing to trumpet liberal theories about lifestyles and individual behaviour. It is quite another to have to handle the consequences of these theories being put into practice in an entirely irresponsible way.

This takes us back to the families of Holly and Jessica, to the people of Soham, and indeed to all of us who want our children to grow up happy and unharmed in a world where such wickedness is kept in check. How are they - we - to be protected from this malevolent culture?

By all means hang these monsters, though that is not enough, and it will not happen.

If we wish to revert to a society where this sort of evil is again rare, we have to tackle everything else that is wrong, and which builds up incrementally to atrocities such as this.

These two children were murdered, in part, by a liberal society that breeds so many people who can do such a thing, who lack the inhibition of human decency.

Apart from the unlimited sympathy the girls' families deserve, the only meaningful response to their deaths would be to end the failed experiment of social liberalism without further delay.

the responsibility for these wicked murders lies solely with the murderer or murderers

These two children were murdered, in part, by a liberal society

At least praise the Sun yesterday for publishing a reassurance to his readers that child murders have fallen over the last few decades, not increased (hurrah for social liberalism!). Even if it was next to some exclusive on how Ian Huntley was crap at football at school.

Based on what I've read/heard some walkers found the remains that are assumed to be the girls' next to a forest track not far from Soham. The remains were decomposed and damaged from badgers and other animals. They mustn't have been very buried if they were found by walkers, so why could they not have been buried by animals?

The way things stand, if no-one killed the girls, or if someone other than that Ian guy and his girlfriend killed them, we are never going to know. Even if the ones who've been arrested are found guilty, we'll never really know because, thanks to the media, it's a foregone conviction.

Toraneko I am intrigued to know how you are suggesting they might've died if not killed by someone. They weren't so far from anywhere that they could starve to death and we don't really have human-killing animals in England.

I do believe what I said about there being a foregone conviction though, and that does worry me. Innocent men have been hanged in the past.