Extreme behaviour in a child's early years is always cause for concern that can set alarm bells ringing about possible trouble in their life or the potential for worse in later years.
There is a belief, still widely held, that a child can be 'taken over' by such harmful and violent behaviour that it appears to come from a force beyond nature. After the tragedy of James Bulger's murder in 1993, a police officer involved in the case said that the two ten-year-olds responsible were different from other badly behaved boys. 'They were evil. I think they would have killed again,' he said.
At one time in history it ws thought that children who killed had been 'moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil'. The prospects for them ever being able to reform or improve were not helped by such a view, nor by religious belief in original sin. If children came into the world with, as many believed, a corrupt and evil nature, then one who had committed murder was beyond earthly redemption. As one judge said to a boy he sent to the gallows, 'In another world you will receive forgiveness which it is my duty to deny you in this.'
Then along came a more hopeful belief, one that held that a human child was born neither good nor evil but a blank slate waiting to receive an adult's mark of wisdom, guidance and tuition. A good education, together with a good teacher, would inevitably result in a good child.
In the 17th century the whole idea of educating a child along a path towards a secular moral development was totally new. But there was a problem. Not only was this education still only a luxury for the rich, it also assumed a child was just a small adult who needed to be trained out of his childish ways and given the ability to reason.
The arrival in Britain of the famous writer on childhood, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was to challenge this apparently simple idea. He said that it failed to understand an important thing about childhood - that it was a period characterised by the 'sleep of reason'.
Rousseau believed that a young child has no morality in its actions. 'He wants to overturn everything he sees. He breaks and smashes everything he can reach; he seizes a bird as he seizes a stone, and strangles it without knowing what he is about.'
Then a killing that took place in 1861 challenged this idea of childhood innocence. The murder bore an uncanny resemblance to the tragic death of James Bulger in 1993. A little boy, George Burgess, was abducted by two eight-year-olds who stripped him naked, beat him with a stick, then weighed his body down with wooden clogs and threw him into a river.
Such a shocking crime showed that children did have a propensity for cruelty, but the surprising conclusion in this case was that it was not necessarily inherent to their nature. The circumstances of the children's upbringing were recognised as playing a big part, and it was the absence of parents, who were working long hours in the cotton mills, that was singled out for blame.
Though these crimes were more than a century apart, one of a number of things they had in common was that each of the perpetrators had shown disturbing behaviour from a young age. Before the Bulger killing, for example, Jon Venables had been abusive to his mother and disruptive at school. He would sometimes be seen rocking backwards and forwards in his chair or banging his head against the furniture.
Those who saw the disturbed behaviour of Jon Venables and his friend Robert Thompson did not know that from the age of five the latter child had witnessed a brutality that was almost lethal. His powerful and loveless father had bullied his wife and children senselessly. Once, when Robert's mother answered back to one of her husband's commands, he dragged her to the kitchen by her hair, filled the sink up with water and held her head down in it. On another occasion, when one of the boys was caught smoking, his father made him eat a packet of cigarettes. 'See the evil in my eyes', was what he would say to scare his children.
Similarly, the early years of Mary Bell's life were marked by deep emotional secrets that no child so young should have had to bear. Yet this little girl appeared like any other until about the age of ten. Even then, no one could have predicted that a year later she would strangle two small boys.
That was in 1968, and we are supposed to have improved since then in recognising the signs of children in trouble. Qualified opinion has an important role to play. After all, extreme behaviour is rare and it may have a medical cause. But it is also the case that scientific studies often confirm the intuitions and observations of those working face to face with young children every day, and their voice must be heard too.
The hope I had in writing my book was to help vulnerable children and the grown-ups who are trying to support them. When a child kills another child, igniting our outrage and our fears, the case histories recounted will help our understanding of, and responses to, such behaviour.
Information
The Devil's Children: A History of Childhood and Murder by Loretta Loach is published by Icon Books (£14.99)
