by Abrams, Fran
It is a mark of how fast the world can move on, then, that on Saturday, 13 February 1993, when grainy images began playing on news bulletins of two young boys leading two-year-old James Bulger by the hand from the Strand shopping centre in Bootle on Merseyside, only a few such comparisons were evoked. The two ten-year-olds, Jon Thompson and Robert Venables, beat James to death and left his body on a railway line, where it was found two days later. In the days and months that followed, the public mood would be one of grief, anger, bewilderment even. But the devil child, the epitome of the notion of original sin, had largely been banished from the public mind. As the details emerged of the crime that Thompson and Venables had committed, there was no such simple explanation. Even though it was widely reported that the boys had been watching a video called Child’s Play 3, in which a doll is possessed by the soul of a serial killer, it was the social phenomenon of the ‘video nasty’ that was blamed for the crime, rather than the sort of evil spirit it depicted.
Events such as violent deaths can often come to define an age – or rather, to define how that age differs from the previous one; how the world has moved on. Extreme occurrences in which the entire nation joins in shared and powerful emotion are bound to shake out something fundamental about the way in which a society is operating, and the death of James Bulger was no exception. In an age characterized by adults’ guilt over their conflicted emotions about children, about child-rearing and about the place of the child in the wider world, the question that was asked was not really a question about what Thompson and Venables had done. It was: what have we done? It was a question asked loudly, repeatedly and with real anguish. The trial of Mary Bell, a quarter of a century earlier, had passed decorously, accompanied by fairly prominent news reports but very little comment. The Bulger case led to a national orgy of self-examination.
Within four days of James’s murder, the Daily Mail had engaged William Golding, author of the classic 1950s novel about savagery, Lord of the Flies, to write about it. ‘A Haunting Indictment of the Society in Which Two-Year-Old James Bulger was Murdered’, it was headed. The headline summed up the tone, not just of the Mail’s coverage but of the major reaction to the crime. Published the day before Thompson and Venables were arrested, the piece gave voice to a fear which lurked in many hearts – that somehow we were all to blame. ‘Where the orders and patterns of society cease to matter, gangs begin to find cohesion merely in the joint fulfilment of their darkest instincts . . . If parents are absent, if fathers do not provide strength and mothers do not provide love, then children will plumb the depths of their nature.’ Golding acknowledged, as he had in his novel, that he believed boys had some innate ability to behave in uncivilized ways. But the mood of the time was this: society was to blame. And before the perpetrators had even been identified, the verdict had been passed: the fabric of civilization was perishing, and children – all children – were the victims.
A host of other prominent writers joined the chorus. Beryl Bainbridge, a Liverpudlian by birth, confessed to an angry reaction on meeting a group of shabby, pale-faced boys during a visit to the city:27 ‘The shameful thing is, I wanted to verbally abuse them; I wanted to tell them they were scum, that they disgusted me. There was a woman passing who saw the shock on my face. She said: “There’s more of them than there used to be. They should have been drowned at birth.” I found myself nodding, as though we were discussing kittens. Seconds later, of course, I felt ashamed . . . they were nothing more than little lost boys damaged beyond repair by ignorant parenting, drugs, video nasties. It was easier in the past – it always is – to know what was right and what was wrong.’
‘Most of all,’ Bainbridge concluded, ‘we must take on board that this latest manifestation of wickedness is not a sign from an angry God or the work of the Devil but rather something for which we ourselves must take responsibility.’
Politicians, too, took up this baton. Tony Blair, then shadow Home Secretary, made a speech in which he said the crime had provoked anger and disbelief in equal proportions: ‘These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name.’28
It was inevitable, of course, that the family would come under scrutiny – that was happening long before it emerged that both Thompson and Venables had had early lives punctuated by marital breakdown and violence. In the Independent,29 Gitta Sereny argued that these factors had become the norm: ‘Under modern-day pressures family discord is almost the rule rather than exception. This does not, of course, mean that most are without a sense of right and wrong, but that their moral priorities have been unbalanced.’ A little while later, the Bishop of Worcester told peers that in 1993 no fewer than 76,000 children under sixteen had witnessed their parents’ divorces:30 ‘It was Richard Baxter, a luminary of my own diocese, who said that when marriage and the family fail, all else miscarries,’ he said. ‘We are letting down our children and thereby placing a time-bomb under our society. We have tolerated the breakdown of marriage and the family in the name of self-fulfilment and sexual liberty, and this in a country shaped in the Christian tradition, which values children so highly.’
There was a consensus around the Bulger case in both liberal and conservative media: ‘There’s a major failure of parenting,’ psychologist David Pithers told Melanie Phillips, who was writing in the Observer.31 ‘But it’s not the neglectful lack of care that people think it is. Parents are getting to the point where they just don’t know how to look after their children any more. They have these worldly-wise children who are searching for power in a world that rejects them. Parents are under pressure as never before. Children’s distress and disorder and violence are rising. Families increasingly cannot cope.’
For several years, there had been a growing sense of crisis surrounding children and childhood, and now it was being voiced and made real. Parents were no longer sure whether the major cause of the crisis was neglect, or over-attentiveness. There seemed to be no certainty over whether children were the charges of adults, in need of their protection at all times, or whether they were independent beings with independent human rights. In the year James Bulger was murdered, other major media stories about children included that of a mother, Yasmin Gibson, who left her eleven-year-old ‘home alone’ while she went on holiday to Spain; a nurse, Beverley Allitt, who received thirteen life sentences for murdering children in her care; and a fifteen-year-old boy fined £500 for rape. Children were concurrently, it seemed, both the perpetrators of terrible crimes and the vulnerable victims of them. Both these phenomena were increasingly disturbing.
‘As a baby I was weighed weekly, inspected and injected and pronounced satisfactory,’ wrote Penny Fox in the Scotsman.32 ‘This is what happened to all children born soon after the end of the Second World War. We were a precious commodity, we were considered worth investing in. In this and other ways, children were “put first” in our social policy. But is this the case now? There is little evidence, I believe, that we are doing more than fiddling while Rome, Edinburgh, any other city, any other rural area, is burning up our children’s freedom.’
The problem seemed to have many causes, many symptoms. A major one – highlighted by Penny Fox – was fear itself. Adults had begun to feel that fear of abduction, fear that if children were allowed to stray, some unspeakable fate might befall them, was turning them into a nation of stay-at-homes, with sedentary lives. Yet the dangers to children from strangers who might abuse or murder them had not changed. Bournemouth University estimated there were around 900 such men in the population at any one time, fewer than 2 per cent of whom would go on to kill.33 The risk to each individual child in any given year was less than one in a million. So, why now? Parents had always had fears about their children’s safety; and the feeling that children could do evil had long lurked in the depths of the nation’s soul. But, now, in an age of uncertainty and guilt, these terrors seemed more real than ever. Perhaps William Golding, writing in the week James Bulger was killed, had pointed the way t
o an answer: society had lost its grip on the certainties of life: ‘There are . . . conditions in which cruelty seems to flourish, which is different from saying that it has clear causes. What are these conditions? Chaos is one, fear is another. In Russia after the First World War, there were, I believe, gangs of children who had lost their parents. Dispossessed, without anywhere to live or anything to live on, they roamed the country attacking and killing out of sheer cruelty. There was, at that time, social chaos in many countries, and, left to themselves, these children found a kind of elemental cohesion in their viciousness.’34 Golding’s point, which was an attempt to explain the causes of extreme cruelty such as that inflicted on James Bulger, had a wider resonance. Since time immemorial, children had been the receptacles for adult fears about moral decay and decline: now they were becoming the focus of a deeper malaise, an uncertainty about the very ways in which societies were organized.
Fears about children were soon popping up in every sphere: their education, their health, their leisure – even their means of being conveyed into the world. The new possibility of testing for genetic conditions or even gender during pregnancy, coupled with the widening availability of IVF, was giving parents greater and greater choice not just about when to have children, but about which type of children they might choose to have. Gill and Neil Clark confessed – to the Daily Mail – that they had paid £650 to a private clinic to ensure that their third child would be a girl:35 ‘From my point of view it felt unnatural,’ Neil confessed. ‘I didn’t feel as though I was so much a part of it as I had been with the boys. Gill’s got a T-shirt with the words “It started with a kiss”, and I look at that and I think: “Well, it didn’t.”’ In the Mail’s view, the couple’s action had in some way potentially left humanity vulnerable to some hidden danger – the threat, perhaps, of biological engineering on a grand scale. They had, it said, ‘led the human race on to a path which, some argue, could upset the natural balance of the sexes for ever’.
Since the war, virtually all adults in the UK had been able to make choices about whether they should become parents, and when. But those choices had been largely negative ones: thanks to free contraception, one could decide not to do it. But what was happening now smacked of something that was increasingly feared: children were becoming a ‘lifestyle choice’. The phrase seemed to strike fear into conservative hearts. Lifestyle choices, it seemed, were a bad thing when it came to having children. The reasons for this were unclear, but seemed to speak to a deep-rooted feeling that childbirth and child-rearing should be closer to nature than they had now become; maybe that they should be not in the hands of mankind, but in those of the Almighty. In an increasingly secular society, this might have seemed strange, yet the attitudes were strikingly persistent. They spoke to many fears – not only did man seem now to be meddling with nature – or God’s will – but the developments seemed to place the nuclear family in even greater jeopardy than before. Now, children would not only be at risk of growing up without the experience of two parents because of separation and divorce – now single parenthood was becoming a positive choice. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, felt the need to reassure peers, during the passage of a bill which would make it easier for single women to conceive via IVF,36 that the values of the nuclear family were still the only socially acceptable values: ‘The sanctity of the family unit should not be lost sight of in the wish to help childless couples have the children they can so fervently desire, it would clearly be unfortunate if this Bill was seen in any way to be conflicting with the importance we attach to family values.’
In a sense, many of the social diseases that were now felt to ail children were diseases of affluence. Even the rise in divorce, of course, had an economic angle – couples could now afford to separate, where in the past they might have been forced to stay together. But children were now being sucked into economic activity which was more overt than it had ever been before. A selection of headlines from the 1990s underlines the point: ‘The Targeting of Food Ads on Children’s Television Can Do More than Just Harm their Pockets’, ‘Born to Buy.’ At least a part of the fear surrounding childhood now was about the fact that while children were able to exercise less and less freedom of movement, they were exercising ever more financial muscle.
As children were increasingly seen as a distinct market, they came under increased pressure to consume. One of the biggest fears around children – as ever – was their diet. But now, instead of worrying about the lack of nutritional value in an endless succession of meals consisting of tea and bread, the medical profession was worrying about the pressures on children to eat certain unhealthy foods – or, conversely, to stay thin. And while some children were eating the wrong foods, and some were not eating enough, one adolescent in six was now considered to be obese. It was almost as if affluence itself was eating into the fears around children. Food additives, vitamins, junk food . . . somehow, child consumerism seemed to be running away with itself. There was a feeling that the nation had put a ticking time-bomb under itself, which one day would explode with the after-effects of obesity and other indulgence-related conditions.
Everywhere, children were under pressure. There was pressure to achieve at school, as a new government elected in 1997 set targets for literacy, numeracy and GCSE results. There was pressure to be slim, in order to be able to look good in fashionable clothes. There was pressure to have the right stuff, the right audio equipment. Pressure to have seen the right films, to be able to achieve the right levels in the right computer games. Pressure, maybe, to grow up too soon. Somehow, it all seemed to be one big rush. And parents were feeling a sense of loss.
‘Where did all the innocence go?’ asked one writer in the Scotsman,37 wondering aloud what had happened to the magical sunny days, picnics and sand-pies of the Enid Blyton novel. Fear seemed to be everywhere, the author suggested. She quoted a woman whose eleven-year-old son, needing to take a taxi to ice hockey practice because his mother’s car was off the road and – presumably – because public transport was considered too dangerous, had panicked, fearing the taxi driver might abduct him. His mother, far from telling him to buck up and be grateful that she was forking out for a taxi, as a mother from an earlier age might have done, were she able to fund such a thing, insisted he phone her the minute he arrived.
The answer to her question was that the ‘innocence’ and the magic had been swept away by a new desire abroad in the adult world – the desire to extract added value from children. Having lost their old traditional economic value, children had gone through a phase in which their parents sometimes struggled to work out what they were getting from their relationships with them. Now the future was becoming clearer. The ideal child of the 1960s, like the ideal child of the 1930s, had spent his life – even her life, sometimes – roaming free in the idyllic English countryside, picking blackberries, fishing, occasionally getting into a scrape or two. The ideal child of the 1990s had no time for such japes, even if he or she were allowed to go on them. Because now the child had to earn his or her keep in new and more complex ways. Take sixteen-year-old Zita Lusack, for example, interviewed by the Mail on Sunday in 1994, with her mother looking on proudly, about her ambition to be a top gymnast. Zita weighed seven stone, but was still trying to lose weight in order to achieve the childlike physique demanded by her sport, the newspaper reported: ‘Dinner has become a portion-controlled ready meal she eats in the car during the hour-long ride to her training base at Heathrow. “I work out for four hours every night except Mondays and Thursdays, most of the weekend, and, before competitions, Thursdays, too. Sometimes I think it’s worth the sacrifice, but there are times when I don’t. I’ve been training for ten years now. But when I turn eighteen, it will be all over.”’ Or fifteen-year-old Juanita Rosenior, who in 1999 was working in her spare time as an editor for Children’s Express: ‘My day consists of seven 45-minute lessons. I spend my time swapping career ideas with my friend, Ebony, who encourages me, and we work togeth
er as a mini study group. We do this through phone calls, meetings, shopping and general socialising. Being a child of the technology era, my prized possession at the moment is my new mobile phone which comes in handy at lunch times.’38 Or three-year-old ‘Ella from the West Country’, described in the Observer, winning a Miss Pears competition: ‘The nine other finalists milled around, being brave and confused, the organisers tried to clear the stage, cameramen stood on chairs to get a glimpse of the triumphant winner. She was crying. She didn’t want to be Miss Pears 1997. She didn’t want to be here, in a big hall surrounded by strangers who were calling out her name and asking her to look their way, smile please and look cute. She didn’t want to sit on the plush throne and wear a spiky crown and smile prettily and toss her locks. “Mummy,” she sobbed. The photographer . . . sighed as he clicked. “Beware ambitious parents,” he said, then, “Come on, Ella, smile.” . . . Later she crouched in a corner, knees up in her red dungarees, while her dad answered questions (yes, he was pleased; yes, their prize was a trip to Florida and Disneyland; yes, Ella was only three years old; yes, it was all wonderful) and pushed melting chocolate biscuits into her rosebud mouth.’
The child of the nineties was beginning to realize that achievement – achievement which would require tough, focused, hard, nose-to-the-grindstone labour – was the route to a parent’s heart. This state of grace usually needed to be attained through academic excellence, but it could alternatively be reached through sporting prowess, through beauty or even through stardom. The key to becoming the ideal child of the nineties was to be better – or preferably, best.