Author: Loretta Loach
Publisher: Icon Books, 2009
Price: £14.99 (hardback)
Isbn: 9781848310193

The Devil’s Children shows that the idea of charging juvenile offenders as adults reaches back 150 years. In the 19th century, when nearly half of convicted criminals were under 21, anxiet­ies about youth crime were at fever pitch: should children be incarcerated or spared in favour of the moral instruction they were obviously lacking?

The ambivalence is illustrated by the 1881 case of Margaret Mess­enger, who killed her employer’s infant and later confessed to killing the family’s toddler, which had been thought an accident. She was considered emotionally vulnerable but not insane, so it was intended that she spend the rest of her life in prison rather than in an asylum. But when she appealed 10 years later, she was released at the age of 23. The theses about insanity of French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) were much debated, as were the theories about the evolution of human psychology by Charles Darwin (1809–1882).

Consider the 1968 case of Mary Bell. Children aged two and three had been strangled by someone with little strength. During the investigation that included quest­ioning 1,200 children, Mary stood out because of her evasion and inappropriate laughter. She was found guilty of manslaughter with diminished responsibility and was diagnosed as psychopathic, a condition rooted in having been sexually abused by clients of her prostitute mother. She wrote:

I know you think I’m Bad so Bad.
Please mom put my tiny Mind at ease,
Tell judge and jury on your knees.
They will listen to your cry, of pleas.
The guilty one is you not me.

In 1996, Mary collaborated on a book about her life. She told details of her abuse, but also revealed that she had received no psychiatric treatment in the 28 years since the trial. The book was a bestseller, but received an unsympathetic reception. Even though she claimed that she only wanted to understand why she turned out as she did, the public was wary of “recovered memories” of child abuse and uncomfortable that she had been paid for her participation. They judged her as harshly as if she were on trial again.

Loretta Loach writes: “Mary  Bell [..] had been ineligible for childhood right from the moment of her birth. As a murderer, this child had failed to conform to an ideal of childhood innocence, and had therefore forfeited her ident­ity not only as a child, but also as a redeemed adult.”

As Loach explains, the idea of childhood innocence has been – and still is – one of the most cherished in Western culture. In the 1860s, the minds of innocent child­ren were thought to be corrupted through the actions of dangerous adults, whereas in the 1990s, the problem was attributed to lack of adult supervision.

Early reformers believed that children lacked the moral discret­ion of adults and couldn’t be held accountable. Others equated the minds of children to adults of unsound mind. A child’s mind as an entity in its own right received attention only in the work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). It was not until 1935 that it was shown that young children do not understand death and believe it to be reversible. Even so, long past the time when children were looked on as miniature adults, we still place a child who has killed another child beyond the realm of childhood and see him or her as having committed an adult crime with adult intentions deserving of retribution.

While British belief in rehab­ilitation is not as strong as that of Loach’s example of the Norwegians, the methods of correction still differ greatly those practised in the 19th century.

In 1855, two boys who killed their friend with a brick when he accused them of cheating at a game were sent to an adult prison and held in solitary confinement. In 1861, two eight-year-olds who killed a toddler spent a month in prison, then five years at a reformatory school. In 1849, a young teenager who threatened his friend with a knife and then shot him with a pistol was transported to the penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land for six years.

While it took until 1998 to completely abolish capital punishment, that penalty – which had been practised mainly on criminals under 21 in 18th-century London – was last carried out on a child (John Bell, aged 14) in 1831. But that didn’t necessarily end the threat of death. When two infam­ous 10-year-old murderers were released in 1993 after 10 years of institutionalisation, their names were mistakenly made public, making them potential targets of vigilante justice.

This book leaves the reader with few answers, but plenty of examples.