AS THE TWIG IS BENT.

My gran had many wise proverbs which she used to quote to me, one of which being: “As the twig is bent so the tree shall grow”. This was what she used to say to me when she needed to discipline me for something or when a public scandal or horrific story, such as that concerning Venables and Thompson and little James Bulger was in the news.

While there can be no doubt that what these children did was horrific, there can also be no doubt in my mind that their parents should bear an equal if not greater responsibility for their crime. Yes it is undeniable that ten-year-old children know the difference between right and wrong but only if they have been socialised. I know the difference between pepper and sault when they are in identical pots, and sugar and salt but only because I’ve been told the names, introduced to the sweetness of sugar and the saltiness of salt. The point I make is that these children’s consciences were not honed or even allowed to form.

I remember from my own childhood how one of my siblings (the older one) was not encouraged to be loving and considerate to me. To be loving and considerate; caring and kind to the blind sibling was considered sissy and not particularly macho. As a result the sibling concerned thought it great fun to laugh at me; to tell me my eyes are ugly; to ridicule me as my mother did and to this day has nothing to do with me. What is puzzling though is that my other sibling, younger and more sensitive than the older surviving one, was caring; looked out for me and was protective and kind and I have fond memories of him though we grew apart; he took to drink and is now dead as a result.

What all this tells me is that each of us has a greater or lesser capacity for good and evil within us. My dead brother defied his upbringing to the extent that for much of his childhood he did not adhere to the practise of ridiculing and shunning the disabled one whereas our older sibling did despite having a supposed increased maturity and what should have been an ability to know better. Had we all come from a less dysfunctional family, doubtless we would have all been close and now the final surviving two of us would have been able to take solace in each other’s company and shared past and support one-another into our future.

Had Venables and Thompson, who have carried their own genetic make-up and nature with them, for good or for ill, from childhood into adulthood, been given the stability they needed then it may be that they wouldn’t now need false identities and a poor little boy wouldn’t be dead, leaving behind forever grieving parents.

All those who are quite rightly angry and outraged that these people are now free to possibly do the same again or commit other crimes of equal magnitude should surely, as I am, be outraged that the adults who gave birth to them are not themselves being made to undergo rehabilitation and are not also being subject to intense scrutiny. If they have had other children what has become of them? Have social workers been involved in keeping an eye on their other children and if not why not? How much have they been asked to financially contribute to their offspring’s upkeep and rehabilitation? Most pertinent of all though is, in my view at any rate, why is everyone not equally disgusted and appalled at what their parents have done in terms of damaging these people so much as to make them capable of doing what they did to little James?

When you have a child who is bad at maths or English, he has to work harder and you have to work harder to make him as good at it as he can be. When my older sibling showed an unkindness greater than the sum of their kindness, harder work needed to go in to minimise and frown upon that unkindness and teach that it was unacceptable. Had that happened to Venables and Thompson at the age they needed it – When the twigs they were started to grow the wrong way, maybe the trees they grew into wouldn’t now be so poisonous. I fear that now at least one of them is far too damaged to ever live outside in ordinary society but I hang onto the hope that Robert’s kinder self, if he has one, proves to be like my brother’s was and he becomes able to overcome his damaged past. What I know for certain is that if these children had been parented properly, James would now be the adult he was born to be and Denise and Ralph, his loving parents wouldn’t be forever mourning his loss as they are now forced to. While our sympathies and thoughts should always be with them, our anger and revulsion should maybe begin with Thompson and Venables but shouldn’t end there but instead should end with the apologies for parents that these children were saddled with.

(The end).