| THE
TIMES October
6 1998 Mary
Bell writer attacks Straw's new crime
Act BY
ALEXANDRA FREAN, SOCIAL AFFAIRS
CORRESPONDENT THE
author Gitta Sereny has criticised
the new Crime and Disorder Act for
treating child offenders as young as ten
as if they had the same capacity as
17-year-olds of telling right from wrong.
In an address to social care professionals
last night, Sereny,
biographer of the child-killer Mary Bell,
also blamed parents who were "too
pressured by work . . . to find pleasure
in family life". She attacked them for
condemning their children to "an emotional
void" of loneliness and boredom, which
sometimes led them to commit antisocial
acts. Delivering
the annual lecture organised by the
influential social affairs magazine
Community Care, Sereny argued that
children who committed serious offences
were not born "bad" or "evil", but were
brought to breaking point either by
continuous rejection and abuse, by
traumatic experiences or by living in a
dysfuntional family. Sereny,
whose book Cries Unheard
[published by Macmillan
Ltd]
was serialised
in The Times earlier this
year,
condemned the Crime and Disorder Act,
which came into force last Thursday, for
instilling a fear of children in
professionals who worked with child
offenders. The fact that each of the new
Youth Offending Teams to be set up by all
local authorities across the country was
to include a police officer and a
probation officer would send a "wrong,
threatening or punitive message" to
children and those supposed to care for
them.  "It
seems to me that this possibly indicates a
mistaken analysis of children in potential
trouble, or in distress," she
said.
|
What
young offenders needed, she added, was not
the threat of punishment, but family
cohesion and a home environment that gave
them self-confidence and encouraged them
to seek stimulation instead of
excitement. Children
whose parents paid too little attention to
them, because of pressures of work, saw
too much crime and violence on television.
"Without knowing why, they are angry and
cannot articulate their anger and their
needs except, if no one recognises their
unspoken cries, finally in antisocial
acts," she said. Sereny,
a
prizewinning biographer and investigative
journalist,
said she believed it was wrong that the
new Act abolished one of the few
protections that child offenders had,
namely the presumption of criminal law
that a child aged ten to 14 could be
considered to be doli incapax, or
incapable of committing an
offence. As
of now, all children between ten and 17
are expected and believed to have the same
capacity to know the difference between
right and wrong. Sereny
quoted a leading article from The Times of
August 10, 1861, which commented that two
boys of eight from Stockport, Cheshire,
who were convicted of the manslaughter of
a two-year-old child should not have been
treated as if they had the maturity of
conscience of an adult because they were
too young and too immature. The
two boys, Peter Barratt and James Bradley,
were sentenced to one month in prison and
five years in a reformatory. Bradley was
released six months early from the
reformatory, having made great progress,
but little is known of Barratt's fate. It
is thought he was transported to Australia
or Canada. "I
could wish the legal and social experts
who put together this 1998 Act had read
these words written 137 years ago," Sereny
said.
Copyright
1998 Times Newspapers Ltd.
NOTE:
Prizewinning biographer and
investigative journalist Sereny paid
the child-killer Mary Bell £5000
for her exclusive story. |
write to David Irving